Posts Tagged ‘Syria’
Friday, July 5th, 2019
I hope everyone had fun blowing things up on July 4th. Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm
How President Donald Trump is kicking Iran’s ass without war:
Iran’s official press has recently bragged about its military prowess when downing a US drone worth about $130 million, touting it as a nasty black eye for the world’s military superpower.
But a recent Reuters report said Iran’s oil exports are down to a scant 300,000 barrels per day. In April 2018, before Trump exited the Iran deal, which provided the country with sanctions relief in exchange for its commitment to not build nuclear weapons or their key components, Iran was exporting 2.5 million barrels a day.
At today’s rate per barrel, the Trump-induced decline in exports has probably cost Iran $120 million a day from oil alone — almost the cost of the US’s pricey drone.
For the US, losing a drone is costly and destabilizing [?-LP] but not really a big deal for a country with a $718 billion annual defense budget. In Iran, the currency has crashed, and the country has become gripped by protests and strikes. And it has felt a crackdown on the financial freedom for all of its citizens.
Speaking of sanctioning Iran: “British Marines Seize Oil Tanker Headed For Syria.”
Martin Peretz reflects on the two towering achievements brought about by the Oslo Accords since 1993, namely “jack” and “squat”:
For years even after the failure of Oslo and of the 2000 summit at Camp David, D.C. notables and even some prominent Zionists had photos with Arafat displayed on their credenzas.
That sociology stuck in my mind. It testified to the tenaciousness in certain left-liberal circles of an idealizing impulse—one that altered the judgments of normally lucid people, leading them to make heroes of figures like Arafat who didn’t fit the bill. They justified this impulse with the old progressive belief in rational political improvement—a respectable belief when it’s applied in context, a misleading one when the context is altered to fit the wish. Their willed naiveté struck me, and not just on Oslo, as the place where effective progressivism goes to die.
Snip.
The counterpoint to this accommodation of Iran was the marginalization of Israel—the cutting-down-by-proxy of the country to what Obama saw as its physical and psychological size. True, it wasn’t a financial marginalization—as his defenders have said ad nauseam, Obama allowed Israel to buy more weapons than any other president before him. But by centering his policy on compromising with Iran, the one major Mideast power that had yet to reach some détente with Israel, and allowing Israel’s other enemy Assad to murder unimpeded, Obama shifted the strategic ground under Israel’s feet. Rhetorically, he did even more: He used the president’s bully pulpit to dramatically change the terms on which conversations about Israel would be conducted among Democrats and the world.
You can draw a line from his tepid 2009 justification of Israel to the speech he sent his towering shikying’l John Kerry to give to the United Nations in 2016: a refusal to block a U.N. resolution condemning Israel for its support of right-wing settlements in the West Bank. A lot of people—myself included—oppose some of the outlier settlements, without seeing them as a major cause of the current impasse. But Kerry’s speech made them equal—or greater than equal—problems to the Palestinian leadership’s endemic corruption, its weakness in the face of Hamas and refusal to accept peace offers made by four Israeli prime ministers from 1993 to 2009. (Actually, the Palestinians haven’t made a territorial compromise in 52 years—that is long enough for the Israelis to grow impatient.) Kerry’s speech, itself an instance of sacrificing the reality to the ideal through the principle of making Israeli and Palestinian histories equivalent, shifted the terms of the debate.
That rhetorical shift, coupled with Obama’s highly publicized, ultimately corrosive enmity towards Bibi Netanyahu—a partisan leader with a surer grasp of regional realities than the American president had—helped create the Democrats’ current political condition, which is not just counterproductively idealizing but supportive of the party’s most destructive foreign policy impulses. A party that defines itself by the chances it gives to marginalized groups always has, on its edges, radicals pushing in toward the center who define their politics by the principle of marginalization: the boiled-down Marxist dichotomy of oppressor and oppressed. When the center of the party shows weakness, the radicals naturally move in, and that’s what Obama’s rationalists allowed them to do: By shifting the party from its center and creating a rhetoric of false equivalence, they gave the hard leftists an opportunity they were only too happy to take.
“Netanyahu: Israel preparing for wide-scale campaign in Gaza.”
The Trump Administration is treating illegal aliens horribly. And by “horribly,” I mean “demonstrably better than the Obama Administration.”
Eastern Europe doesn’t have an immigration problem, it has an emigration problem.
In essence, the EU’s freedom of movement guarantees an absence of barriers for anyone looking for a job within the 28 countries and makes discrimination based on nationality in work or employment illegal. For many of the EU’s new entrants in the East—including Poland, Hungary and Romania—a future where capital and people could move more freely between themselves and France, the UK, or Germany looked like a fast-track to the top-tier of developed nations. But somewhat ironically, it has only accelerated the departure of those who are crucial to getting there.
In the last century, Eastern Europe has suffered the most dramatic population decline in recent history. According to one study, between 2013 and 2016, approximately 230,000 people left Croatia—a country with a population of only four million—for the 11 “core EU countries” of Western Europe. In the United States, this would be the equivalent of a city the size of Chicago leaving every year. This mass exodus of people is not lost on the country’s politicians; last year the Croatian President called the freedom of movement the “biggest drawback” of the EU. “Mobility is good, as long as people come back. But Croatia is now recording strong negative demographic trends,” she said during a visit to Brussels.
Since Latvia joined the EU, it has lost one-fifth of its population. Romania, a country that according to one organisation is due to see the most drastic population decline, has seen over three million leave the country since it joined the EU in 2007. It lost half of its doctors between 2009 and 2015, the vast majority to better-paid employ in the richer hospitals and surgeries of Western Europe, leaving its health service poorly staffed and on the brink of collapse. High mortality (including infant mortality) and low birthrates are only accelerating the decline.
Large-scale migration of healthcare workers from East to West has been an uncomfortable reality for over a decade, and the young needn’t travel long distances to drastically increase their standard of living. One Estonian doctor who graduated from medical school in 2001 was able to quadruple his salary by moving only 200 kilometres to Finland. In 2018, Denmark enjoyed the EU’s highest average gross annual pay at nine times that of the continent’s lowest in Bulgaria. Who can blame those who head for the greener pastures on the other side?
It’s not just highly skilled labor. When I visited London, it seemed that at least half the workers in restaurants and hotels were from eastern Europe.
Dwight found an amazing story of corruption in the Honolulu DS’s office. (One guess as to which party controls Hawaii.) The list of sleazy crimes Katherine Kealoha engaged in is staggering.
Engineer convicted of smuggling military computer chips to China.
Prosecutors alleged that Shih, alongside co-defendant Kiet Ahn Mai of Pasadena, California, conspired to gain access to a sensitive system belonging to an unnamed US firm which manufactured semiconductor chips and Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuits (MMICs).
The victim company’s PC systems were accessed fraudulently after Mai posed as a potential customer, giving Shih the opportunity to obtain custom processors. While the firm in question believed the chips would only be used in the United States, Shih transferred the products to the Chengdu GaStone Technology Company (CGTC), a Chinese firm building an MMIC manufacturing plant.
Last time I checked, finding electrical engineers with experience designing RF circuits for mixed signal ICs is hard. I bet finding those that can design MMICs is even harder…
Speaking of Chinese espionage, it turns out that Cisco inadvertently embedded Huawei signing certificates deep within some of their switches. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“Amy Coney Barrett Strikes a Blow against Campus Kangaroo Courts:”
Whenever I read a court opinion describing a campus sexual-assault proceeding, I routinely find myself shocked at the staggering unfairness and ridiculous bias of campus kangaroo courts. Driven by the need to find more men guilty — and rationalized by a #BelieveWomen ideology — campus administrators have systematically discarded every fundamental notion of due process in American law.
Across the nation, courts on the right and on the left are saying no. They’re blocking biased sexual-assault adjudications, protecting basic fairness, and restoring a degree of sanity to colleges’ procedures. On Friday it was the turn of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals to protect the Fourteenth Amendment, and an all-woman panel, led by Judge Amy Coney Barrett, established a precedent that could be used against woke college administrators nationwide.
The facts of the case are extraordinary. After a female college student accused her ex-boyfriend of groping her in her sleep, Purdue University conducted an investigation and adjudication so amateurish and biased that it’s frankly difficult to imagine that human adults could believe it was fair or adequate. The plaintiff (John Doe) alleged that he was “not provided with any of the evidence on which decisionmakers relied in determining his guilt and punishment,” his ex-girlfriend didn’t even appear before the hearing committee, he had “no opportunity to cross-examine” his accuser, the committee found his accuser credible even though it did not talk to her in person, the accuser did not even write her own statement or provide a sworn allegation, and the committee did not allow the plaintiff “to present any evidence, including witnesses.”
After that farce of a process, Purdue found the student guilty and suspended him for a year. The suspension meant the automatic loss of the student’s Navy ROTC scholarship and expulsion from the ROTC program. Incredibly, the lower court dismissed the student’s claims. He appealed to the Seventh Circuit, and a unanimous panel resurrected his lawsuit.
The conclusion is that campuses are are blaming men as a class and this is a clear violation of Title IX. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
“I have never met antisemitism in Britain…until now.”
I generally come to Britain from my home in Portugal whenever a new work of mine is released to give talks at bookshops, libraries and literary festivals. My publisher’s attempts to interest event organisers in me aren’t always successful, of course. But this year, for the first time, I have been turned down for being Jewish. A little context. Peter Owen Publishers launched my new novel, The Gospel According to Lazarus, in mid-April. An old friend of mine who is a part-time book publicist began trying to set up events for me three months earlier.
In early March, he called and confessed – in a distressed tone I’d never heard before – that he had just been turned down by two cultural organisations that had previously shown enthusiasm for hosting an event with me. “They asked me if you were Jewish, and the moment I said you were, they lost all interest,” he said. “They even stopped replying to my emails and returning my phone messages.”
Snip.
Has the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement played a role in deepening this atmosphere of fear? That’s what my friends in the UK tell me. They also speak bitterly of the unwillingness of the Labour party to take a firm stand against antisemitic discourse. If cultural organisations are afraid of hosting events for Jewish writers, then Britain has taken a big step backwards.
Let’s not get sidetracked with references to Israel. Although it’s perfectly legitimate for those who oppose Netanyahu’s policies to protest against them, I have no connection with Israel. I have neither investments nor family there. And my most well-known books take place in Portugal and Poland. It’s true my new novel is set in the Holy Land, but it takes place 2,000 years before the foundation of the state of Israel.
Of course, that piece is from that notorious bastion of right-wing belief, The Guardian…
Broward Count Sheriffs office loses accreditation.
On the Betsy Ross Flag:
Guadalajara hit by several inches of golfball-sized global warming.
Mad magazine is shutting down.
Does the Navy have patents for UFO-like craft? Sure looks like it, but I suspect we’re just farking with the Chinese…
Think Progress is a money-losing rathole.
Invasion of the killer alien tick. (Hat tip: Woodpile Report.)
Attention everyone: Mess with our Blue Bell and we are coming for you. Signed, Texas.
Florida man find out the hard way that cocaine and fugu don’t mix. And they’re not great for you separately, either… (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
“Hillary Proposes Reparations To Anyone Who Ever Lost A Presidential Election To Trump.”
Tags:Amy Coney Barrett, anti-semitism, Benjamin Netanyahu, Border Controls, Broward County, Bulgeria, China, Cisco, cocaine, Crime, Croatia, Democrats, Estonia, feminists, Florida, Florida Man, Foreign Policy, Gaza, Global Warming, Hawaii, Hillary Clinton, Huawei, Iran, Israel, Jihad, Katherine Kealoha, Latvia, Mad, Middle East, Military, Navy, Oslo Accords, PLO, Romania, Scott Israel, Semiconductors, Social Justice Warriors, Syria, Texas, The Guardian, UK
Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Jihad, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | No Comments »
Friday, June 14th, 2019
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Border control, Social Justice Warriors, Iran and Geto Boys all feature in today’s roundup…
The idea that we can go back to a “Pre-Trump Normal” is an illusion.
Washington sophisticates, and the DC press corps in particular, are deeply parochial. Trump didn’t create worldwide skepticism about globalism, resentment of sinecured elites, or frustration with an out-of-touch cultural vanguard. He merely rode them to power.
Politicians and pundits can disagree with this populist trend, but it’s electorally suicidal to ignore it. As I note in USA Today, one look around the globe shows that, in many ways, Trump is the new normal.
Iran evidently limpet-mined two tankers in the Gulf of Oman.
One reason Iran is desperate: The Trump Administration’s sanctions are working:
These actions on the part of Iran follow a series of sanctions from the US Treasury Department, which on Wednesday (June 12) imposed sanctions on a financial conduit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force, and last week (June 7) sanctioned Iran’s largest petrochemical holding group.
US officials are also considering sanctions against the Iranian financial body that was established as a trade channel with Europe – a move that would underscore US intolerance to any international workarounds to the Iran sanctions campaign.
You don’t need to read the tea leaves closely to know the administration’s plan for its “maximum pressure” campaign. But one thing the tea leaves don’t show are plans for war. And the reason is simple: the sanctions are working to help achieve President Donald Trump’s priority goal, which is to undermine Iran’s influence and support for terrorism in the Middle East.
The Treasury’s latest steps follow a State Department press briefing, during which its spokesperson, Morgan Ortagus, listed the negative effects Iran sanctions were having on that country’s terrorist proxies and on its other actions in the region. She pointed to the Lebanese group Hezbollah’s “pleas for public donations via billboards, posters and collection cans” and stressed that “Iran is withdrawing Hezbollah fighters from Syria and cutting or canceling their salaries.” This is a big deal.
She also pointed to Hamas’s austerity plan in Gaza and to the IRGC’s budget cuts for Iraq Shia militia groups. She highlighted fuel shortages in Syria due to the cut in Iranian oil supply and noted the IRGC cyber command “is short on cash.”
Others have also picked up on this emerging trend: that Iran sanctions are starving Iran’s proxies of critical funds. The Washington Post reported that US sanctions against Iran have “curtailed” Iran’s finances to Hezbollah, which “has seen a sharp fall in its revenue and is being forced to make draconian cuts to its spending.” A fighter with an Iranian-backed militia in Syria told The New York Times that he lost a third of his salary and other benefits, lamenting, “Iran doesn’t have enough money to give us.”
When he withdrew the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or what is often called the Iran nuclear deal, last year, President Trump made his top goal clear. Before even addressing Iran’s nuclear capabilities or speaking about working toward a new agreement, he emphasised Iran’s support for terrorism and plans for regional influence as among his key concerns and reasons for withdrawing from the deal. Working to undermine that behavior has been the administration’s top priority in its Iran policy.
Sanctions are particularly taking a bite out of Hezbollah. One wonders, yet again, what the Obama Administration thought it was achieving with the insane and costly Iran deal…
Venezuelans reduced to barter.
This essay suggests that defeating Social Justice Warrior madness will be more difficult than we think, because it’s essentially a religious phenomena:
The shock presidential election of 2016 might have prompted partisans on both sides to ask whether the vocabulary on which they relied had become a lifeless hindrance. On the Left, the Clinton political machine suffocated every dissenting voice within the Democratic Party, which denied its members the opportunity to rethink the identity politics death-grip that was strangling them. Then as now, Sanders, more smitten by Marx than the halfway-Nietzscheanism of identity politics, invited his fellow Democrats to step back from the brink. Alas, itself guilty of class privilege, the donor class of the Democratic Party living in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and in the wealthy enclaves surrounding New York City needed a fig leaf to cover its class sins—and, so did not, and will not, allow Sanders to win the Democratic nomination and thereby reveal their unrighteousness.
The Democratic Party will again double down on the rhetoric of identity politics, lose the 2020 presidential election, and conclude—as it did with Russiagate—that some demonic force temporarily bent the arc of history in the wrong direction. The demonic force responsible this next time around? “Hate speech” from the lips of those in the center and on the Right who refuse to rehearse the Red Letter political liturgy identity politics tirelessly repeats—or bow before the false gods that identity politics worships.
Partisans on the Right were given a gift: President Trump. He came into the Republican Party, and the Republican Party understood him not. Many did not want to receive this gift. Having read their Aristotle and Burke, and wishing to remain gentlemen, they withdrew from the political fray—preferring the decorous tyranny of candidate Clinton, the very paragon of identity politics, to the incivility of candidate Trump who, alone among Republican candidates, had the temerity to combat it. “Our tastes, not our ideas, define us”—that is what the 2016 election apparently taught the GOP.
Now forming a Conservative Book Club of sorts, these gentlemen ponder great ideas, entice donors to fund their conferences and think tanks, and all the while enjoin us to believe the vocabulary of the pre-2016 Republican Party continues to be adequate to the troubles we face. It is not.
Today, whether at conservative conferences or in conservative think tanks, the listener even moderately attentive to the conversation will hear of the perils of progressivism and of cultural Marxism, of the need to defend family values, of the importance of being pro-life, of the importance of free markets, and of the threat of multiculturalism. These terms—indeed the constellation these terms form—emerged during the Reagan Presidency, more than three decades ago. If the 2016 Presidential election tells us anything, it is that this verbiage has hardened into nearly lifeless political rhetoric, sustained on life support through institutional buy-in and the assurances of political philosophers sympathetic to conservatism who tirelessly promote the link between the veritable ideas they study and the political vocabulary that has been in place for decades is timeless.
Times have changed, however. Philosophy must gently persuade; that is its privilege and its weakness. Philosophers are concerned with eternal truth. Partisans, by contrast, are concerned with timely rhetoric, opinion, and persuasion. They must engage in comparatively immediate combat. So long as conservatives inattentively conflate philosophizing and partisanship, they will continue to produce partisan vocabularies that masquerade as eternal truth—and partisans unable to respond in a timely manner to shifting times. To win, partisans must know when the weapons of their enemies have changed. Wars—and this is a crucial point to understand—are not won using weapons from earlier engagements. Only armchair soldiers and Conservative Book Club members have the luxury of replaying those battles.
Neither liberals nor conservatives understand the weapon of identity politics, and the immense destruction it can cause. Identity politics does not simply parse different kinds of people. Identity politics is concerned with the relationship of transgression and innocence between different, purportedly monovalent, kinds of people. Identity politics is not just about who we are, it is about a moral stain or purity that defines who we are.
The language of stain and purity, of transgression and innocence, is Christian language. Other religions are concerned with these categories as well, but our long familiarity with Christianity in America means that the invocation of these categories by the practitioners of identity politics derives from Christianity, and from Protestantism in particular. Surveys may indicate that America has lost or is losing its religion; the fever of identity politics that now sweeps the nation suggests these surveys are looking in the wrong place and asking the wrong questions. America has not lost its religion. America has relocated its religion to the realm of politics.
Identity politics transforms politics. It turns politics into a religious venue of sacrificial offering. Ponder for a moment, Christianity. Without the sacrifice of the innocent Lamb of God, there would be no Christianity. Christ, the scapegoat, renders the impure pure—by taking upon Himself “the sins of the world.” By the purging of the scapegoat, those for whom He is the sacrificial offering purify themselves. Identity politics is a political version of this cleansing for groups rather than for individuals. The scapegoat in the case of identity politics is the white heterosexual male who, if purged, supposedly will restore and confirm the cleanliness of all other groups of communities. He is the transgressor; all others—women, blacks, Hispanics, LGBTQs—have their sins covered over by the scapegoat, just as the scapegoated Christ covered over the sins of all the descendants of Adam.
The theological perversity of replacing the Divine Scapegoat of Christianity with the all-too-mortal white heterosexual male scapegoat does not imply that he is innocent. Rather, in identity politics, the white heterosexual male becomes more than who he really is—a member of a scapegoated group who takes away the sins of the world, rather than a mortal, like everyone else, involved in transgression, and searching for redemption. The mystery of transgression and innocence, however, cannot be resolved at the level of groups, because in reality not one of them is univocally pure or stained. But identity politics stands or falls on the claim that groups are such unities of transgressors or innocents. Therein lies its weakness, at which all the armament allied against it must be aimed.
Charles Murray changes his mind. “I want to shut down low-skill immigration for a while.”
“Open borders advocates are panicking after the arrest of Irieno Mujihca, the leader of Pueblo Sin Fronteras, a pro-open borders group funded by globalist financier George Soros that has worked to undermine United States immigration policy and sponsor Central American caravans.”
“Hispanics stick with Trump despite tough border stance.” Despite, or because? (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“Tech reporter Peter Bright has been arrested for soliciting sex with children online. He was employed by Ars Technica until recently. A federal complaint alleges that Bright sought to molest a 7- and 9-year-old and met with an undercover agent for this purpose, at which point he was arrested. It also states that Bright claimed to be in a sexual relationship with an 11-year-old.” Was he a “male feminist” and “anti-#GamerGater”? Of course he was.
Twitter suspends Project Veritas for revealing Pintrest block pro-life website Live Action as porn.
University of Alabama returns donor’s $21.5 million and takes name off law building, partially over Alabama’s abortion law, but partially just because he was kind of a dick.
“Agriculture Dept. Employees Are Really Upset They Might Have to Live Among the Rubes in Flyover Country.”
“The folks running The Bulwark must decide which they value more, being conservative or being anti-Trump. They have, I’d argue, already picked the latter.”
Texas Senator Ted Cruz and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez team up again on a bill to make birth control available over the counter.
“Ocasio-Cortez: ‘Everyone’s Pay Should Be Equal, But My Pay Should Be More Equal Than Others.‘”
New York Times leftist: “Hey Rep. Dan Crenshaw! If you really cared about 9/11 victims, you would have co-sponsored the 9/11 Victims Compensation fund!” Rep. Dan Crenshaw: “I did.” New York Times leftist: “Uhhhhh….” DELETE DELETE DELETE. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
Edinburg Mayor Richard Molina indicted on 12 felony counts of voter fraud.
“President Donald Trump will award the Medal of Honor to former Army Staff Sgt. David Bellavia later this month, the White House announced Monday, making him the first living Iraq War veteran to receive the nation’s highest military decoration.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
We could be heroes, just for one day… (Hat tip: @evangie.)
Woman kills boyfriend over alien reptile cult. “Shriner told NJ.com she believed Rogers was a ‘Vampire Witch Reptilian Super Soldier.'” Plus: liquor and firearms! Going to use the “David Icke” tag even though he’s nowhere mentioned, as that’s how I keep track of all the reptoid news…
Bad Idea Theater: Netflix Roast of Anne Frank. You’re probably thinking to yourself “Must be The Onion or The Babylon Bee.” No, this is an actual thing that people actually did. (Indeed, Jewish comics seemed to be the driving force behind it.) I suspect it’s only the second unfunniest spoof on the Holocaust, behind Heil Honey, I’m Home, which was also a real thing.
I’ve managed not to have any news about Houston rap group Geto Boys in a LinkSwarm ever, and now two pieces drop this week. First, dwarf frontman Bushwack Bill (legal name Richard Shaw) has died at age 52 from pancreatic cancer. Now Scarface, AKA Brad Jordan, is running for Houston City Council. (Hat tip for both: Dwight.)
High School Valedictorian’s speech slams teachers and administrators for their utter incompetence and failure. Oh, did I mention it was in California?
How to assemble a P-47 on the ground with hand tools.
ThinkGeek, RIP.
“House Democrats Draft Legislation That Would Make It A Hate Crime To Eat At Chick-Fil-A.”
“Did Leonard Nimoy Fake His Own Death So He Could Seize Control of the Illuminati?” I’m gonna go with “No” here…
UNMAKE.
“England Forced To Crown Donald Trump As King After Strange Woman Lying In Pond Lobs A Sword At Him.”
A funny, heartwarming story that doesn’t start out that way at all.
I was sad because I had no shoes, but then I met a puppy who had no feet:
Tags:#GamerGate, #NeverTrump, 2020 Presidential Race, 9/11 Attacks, Alabama, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Anne Frank, bureaucrats, California, Charles Murray, Congressional Medal of Honor, Crime, Dan Crenshaw, David Bellavia, David Icke, Democrats, Department of Agriculture, dogs, Edinburg, Foreign Policy, George Soros, Geto Boys, Hamas, Hezbollah, Hidalgo County, Hispanics, Holocaust, Houston, immigration, Iran, Iraq, Irieno Mujihca, Jihad, LinkSwarm, Lucas Silverio, Military, Netflix, New York Times, Operation Iraqi Freedom, pedophilia, Peter Bright, Project Veritas, Pueblo Sin Fronteras, Richard Molina, Syria, Ted Cruz, Texas, Twitter, University of Alabama, Venezuela
Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | No Comments »
Friday, March 22nd, 2019
Hope you’re enjoying the spring weather! This week: Jexodus, Clinton emails (yet again), and a fair amount about aircraft. Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm:
President Donald Trump calls for recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Since Israeli has controlled the Golan Heights for more than half a century, this would not be a radical and surprising move were it not for much of the world’s (and the Democratic Party’s) antipathy to the Jewish state. Expect liberal Jewish Democrats (see below) to fiercely condemn the move…
“How Trump is on track for a 2020 landslide.” Or so says those notorious pro-Trump shills at Politico. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
How dare Chelsea Clinton defend the Jews?
For those of us who consider Chelsea Clinton a cringe-inducing banality, that she could be accused of anything so momentous, never mind a racist slaughter in the Antipodes, was puzzling indeed. And so it was with great curiosity that I read the Buzzfeed piece in which the pair explain their actions. In it, they accuse Clinton of having “stoked hatred against” all Muslims, everywhere, with a single tweet criticizing just a single one, Ilhan Omar. When the Democratic congresswoman complained about lawmakers being forced to pledge “allegiance to a foreign country,” she wasn’t repeating a hoary anti-Semitic trope which has instigated all manner of desecrations and violent attacks and pogroms. No, according to these NYU coeds, exemplars of American higher education as impressive as those Yale students who screamed at a distinguished professor for hours over Halloween costumes, Omar was “speaking the truth about the massive influence of the Israel lobby in this country.”
It is Rep. Omar who is the victim here. “Chelsea hurt our fight against white supremacy when she stood by the petty weaponizers of antisemitism, showing no regard for Rep. Omar and the hatred being directed at her,” Asaf and Dweik declared. English translation: People who are left wing, Muslim or “of color” cannot be anti-Semites, and those who say otherwise will be condemned as handmaidens of Jim Crow. This is especially true if the person in question is, like IIhan Omar, all three.
Reading the many progressive identity-based defenses of Omar, which repeatedly and pointlessly invoke the fact that she is a hijabi-wearing black refugee being criticized by a white native-born American woman, one gets the impression that this particular legislator can pretty much say whatever she wants and expect to be absolved for it: Her canonization as a left-wing hero is necessary, and irrevocable.
Omar can’t be an anti-Semite because members of “marginalized” groups are inherently virtuous. This is the ultimate logic of identity politics. Jussie Smollett just had to be telling the truth; he is black and gay and progressive and his purported assailants were white and straight and wearing MAGA hats. But when Asaf and Dweik insist that she “did nothing wrong except challenge the status quo,” they are taking the side of anti-Semites over Jews. They are normalizing anti-Semitism.
They are not the only ones. For a growing number of progressives, anti-Semitism has become an ideological obligation as central to their political identity as the Universal Basic Income, Green New Deal, a 70-percent marginal tax rate, and free higher education. These progressives, of course, cannot openly say this. Anti-Semitism is bad. Some of their best friends are Jews. The Holocaust happened. So they need to redefine anti-Semitism out of existence, while redistributing the valuable cultural capital of Jewish historical suffering to more deserving groups. Thus, the phenomena of “white Jews.”
However, I think the author misses one obvious reason Democrats pander to Muslims: They’ve decided they need their votes more than they need Jewish votes, therefore Jews are expendable in order to keep the victimhood identity politics coalition together.
More of Jexodus:
The negative Jexodus will be the aftermath of a radicalization that splits the Democrats, as it did Labour in the UK along dividing lines of militant socialism, Islamism, and anti-Semitism. These three ‘isms’ will split Jewish Democrats alone those same lines leaving the radicals on the inside and moderates outside. Those Jews who remain will be required to prove their loyalty by denouncing Jews and Israel. These demands will be put forward in the stridently anti-Semitic tones commonplace on the fringes of the Left.
The 2020 season is just getting started and the Sanders campaign’s deputy press secretary, an illegal alien, already accused Jews of being disloyal, and Elizabeth Warren issued a statement in defense of Rep. Omar accusing Jews of inventing anti-Semitism accusations to silence criticism of Israel. It’s no coincidence that these overt shows of anti-Semitism are coming from the leftiest figures in the race.
And it will only get worse.
Jewish lefties have a high degree of tolerance for anti-Semitism. But ultimately the only Jews who will be able to remain in the Dem ranks will have very thick skins and career ambitions, like Chuck Schumer, harbor a complicated mix of shame and hatred for Jewishness, like Bernie Sanders, or have no connection to anything Jewish beyond their last names, like your average millennial Obama official.
The Democrats have shown no ability to moderate their extremist drift. The movements pushing them leftward are, like the Democratic Socialists of America, openly supportive of anti-Semitism.
That’s the easiest case to make for Jexodus because the Democrats will be the ones to make it.
Jews will exit the Dems voluntarily or they will be forced out.
Snip.
Jewish Democrats have responded to the outbreak of anti-Semitism with the usual nebbish excuses, blaming Israel, Netanyahu, and the ‘politicization of anti-Semitism”. But socialist movements were anti-Semitic before Zionism and Jesse Jackson was slurring Jews as ‘hymies’ long before Netanyahu.
Israel is a convenient excuse for anti-Semitism, not only by anti-Semites, but by their Jewish apologists who are eager to exercise a sense of control over a hatred that cannot be controlled, by taking the blame. And then placing it as far away as possible, on another country thousands of miles away.
The anti-Semites blame the Jews. The Jews blame Israel. And nothing is learned from the experience.
Ukraine opens investigations of attempts to interfere in the U.S. Presidential elections in favor of Hillary Clinton. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Speaking of Clinton, in “newly revealed emails, [she] discussed classified foreign policy matters, secretive ‘private’ comms channel with Israel.” That is to say, emails from her secret, illegal, unsecured server, which means that back-channel might not have been so “private” after all. I might have to restart the Clinton Corruption Watch updates. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
A masterful takedown of Max Boot’s new book by Sohrab Ahmari:
The liberal consensus, then, has emerged as a profoundly illiberal, repressive force—precisely because it grants the autonomous individual such wide berth to define what is good and true. If maximizing individual autonomy is the highest good and, indeed, the very purpose of political community, then for Chelsea Manning to exercise “her” autonomy requires the state to compel the rest of us to say that “she” wasn’t born male. And even absent state compulsion, as already exists in Canada and elsewhere, the institutions charged with upholding the consensus—corporations, big tech, universities, and elite media—can exact a high price for dissent.
Snip.
In Europe and, to a lesser extent, in the U.S., raising a peep about unrestricted mass migration was treated as phobic. Likewise, the guardians of the consensus drummed out of the public square those who questioned the wisdom of replicating the West’s political forms in societies shaped by history, and countless other factors, to favor order, community, and authority over individual autonomy. On the home front, economic growth, interconnectedness, and openness were treated as the only ideals worthy of the name.
Kurt Schilchter says we’re going to lose the coming war with China.
We’re hanging our whole maritime strategy in the Pacific Ocean around a few of these big, super-expensive iron airfields. If a carrier battle group (a carrier rolls with a posse like an old school rapper) gets within aircraft flight range of an enemy, then the enemy will have a bad day. So, what’s the super-obvious counter to our carrier strategy? Well, how about a bunch of relatively cheap missiles with a longer range than the carrier’s aircraft? And – surprise – what are the Chinese doing? Building a bunch of hypersonic and ballistic anti-ship missiles to pummel our flattops long before the F-35s and F-18s can reach the Chinese mainland. We know this because the Chinese are telling us they intend to do it, with the intent of neutering our combat power and breaking our will to fight by causing thousands of casualties in one fell swoop.
The vulnerability of our carriers is no surprise; the Navy has been warned about it for years. There are a number of ideas out there to address the issue, but the Navy resists. One good one is to replace the limited numbers of (again) super-expensive, short-range manned aircraft with a bunch more long range drones. Except that means the Naval aviation community would have to admit the Top Gun era is in the past, and that’s too hard. So they buy a bunch of pricy, shiny manned fighters that can’t get the job done.
Speaking of fighting the last war, the Air Force plans to buy more F-15Xs and less F-35s, supposedly because the non-stealthy F-15X can carry more weapons and work with F35s to deliver more ordinance. The F-35 has its issues, but this is probably the wrong decision. The Air Force still hasn’t figured out an optimal 21st century platform for carrying out close air support, a mission that institutionally has been among the least favored of its priorities.
Offutt Air Force Base sits near Omaha, the home of the Strategic Air Command and several vital aircraft, was affected by the recent flooding.
The compounding issues that led to the Boeing 737Max crashes.
Russia’s navy sucks:
The Russian Navy is in trouble. After years of coasting on the largesse of the Cold War, Russia’s navy is set to tumble in size and relevance over the next two decades. Older ships and equipment produced for the once-mighty Soviet Navy are wearing out and the country can’t afford to replace them.
Snip.
Russia’s economy, flat on its back for more than a decade, started to claw back in the mid-2000s, thanks in large part to spiking oil prices. Today Russia is the fourth largest spender on defense worldwide. In 2017, the earliest year in which comparisons are possible, Russia’s gross domestic product amounted to $1.5 trillion dollars, of which it spent 4.3 percent on defense. That works out to $66.3 billion for Moscow’s war machine, trailing only the United States, China, and Saudi Arabia (yes, Saudi Arabia spends more on defense than Russia).
Snip.
Today, 28 years after the end of the Soviet Union, Russia still relies mostly on Soviet-era ships. The country’s sole aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, has suffered from repeated mechanical problems and should be, but probably won’t be, retired immediately. Russia has built no cruisers since 1991, relying on the five impressive-but-aging Kirov and Slava-class cruisers to act as the country’s major surface combatants. Russia has built only one destroyer since the Cold War, the Admiral Chabanenko. Chabanenko was laid down in 1989 and commissioned into service in 1999.
Likewise, most of Russia’s submarine fleet still consists of Soviet-era submarines, including Delta-class ballistic missile submarines, Oscar-class cruise missile submarines, and Akula, Sierra, Victor, and Kilo-class attack submarines, which have been in service for so long they are still referred to by the code names they were given in Soviet service.
(Hat tip: CDR Salamander via The Other McCain.)
Inside the Russian Collusion Industry:
Key Democratic operatives and private investigators who tried to derail Donald Trump’s campaign by claiming he was a tool of the Kremlin have rebooted their operation since his election with a multimillion-dollar stealth campaign to persuade major media outlets and lawmakers that the president should be impeached.
The effort has successfully placed a series of questionable stories alleging secret back channels and meetings between Trump associates and Russian spies, while influencing related investigations and reports from Congress.
The operation’s nerve center is a Washington-based nonprofit called The Democracy Integrity Project, or TDIP. Among other activities, it pumps out daily “research” briefings to prominent Washington journalists, as well as congressional staffers, to keep the Russia “collusion” narrative alive.
TDIP is led by Daniel J. Jones, a former FBI investigator, Clinton administration volunteer and top staffer to California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein. It employs the key opposition-research figures behind the salacious and unverified dossier: Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson and ex-British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. Its financial backers include the actor/director Rob Reiner and billionaire activist George Soros.
Speaking of Soros, here’s a list of all the left-wing oprganizations Soros funds, over 200 of them. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Brexit slightly delayed. Probably until April 12. At which time Theresa May and the EU will probably find some other excuse to delay it again…
The MSM continues to lie about president Trump’s Charlottesville remarks. Scott Adams has been noting this for a long time:
How Democrats are going to ensure President Trump’s reelection:
Democrats have floated radical proposals designed only to appeal to the far-left progressive wing of the party. Those ideas include stacking the Supreme Court or, at the very least, implementing term limits for justices; pushing for a constitutional amendment to end the electoral college; reducing the voting age to 16; and ending the legislative filibuster.
These do not represent the return to norms and values moderate Americans want.
It’s not fringe Democratic candidates floating such ideas but prominent presidential candidates like Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, Bernie Sanders and Kirsten Gillibrand.
Mind you, that’s in addition to the Democratic support for the Green New Deal, a massive government undertaking that one former Congressional Budget Office director estimated could cost as much as $93 trillion.
Let’s be honest: Democrats wouldn’t have offered up such ideas if Hillary Clinton had won the election in 2016. This is all about Donald Trump and supposedly creating an environment to react to the Trump presidency which can prevent someone like Trump from winning again (via the electoral college).
Vietnam veteran finally wins two decade battle against his homeowner’s association to fly the American flag. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
“Facebook Stored Hundreds of Millions of User Passwords in Plain Text for Years.”
Speaking of Facebook, Joe Bob Briggs notes that the best way to suppress hate speech is not to suppress hate speech.
I’ve seen Klan rallies that are so lame they don’t get noticed. Why don’t they get noticed? Because they chose some town that was wise enough not to care whether they gathered there or not. The Klan has no power until it goes into an area that hates it. Clarence Brandenburg knew this. He could have spoken down in the Appalachian part of Ohio, but he chose sophisticated urban Cincinnati instead. He was arrested, tried, and sentenced to prison. It was a great Klan recruiting year.
More corrupt featherbedding from Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner:
Tomorrow, a Houston taxpayer named Darryl Chapman will ask a judge to stop the new contract with Cigna, calling it an illegal procurement, rigged from the start to make sure they won. The court hearing is scheduled for 1:00 pm in Judge Steven Kirkland’s court.
One of the allegations is that Cigna was given information about medical claims that another company United Healthcare wasn’t given.
But why would city hall ever play favorites? Isn’t it supposed to be what’s in the best interest of taxpayers and of city employees and their families?
It’s hard not to notice that the Mayor’s close friend Cindy Clifford was in the room during the vote. Clifford was the head of Mayor Turner’s Inaugural Committee. She’s been on the winning side of a curious number of big city contracts since then.
City records show she’s the lobbyist for Cigna. The Mayor pushed through the Cigna deal today, even after learning the legal action had been filed.
The end of SXSW plus St. Patrick’s Day equals a police shootout and a dead body in a Masarati. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Shut up and be funny.
Is Qatar staffing up a couple of foreign mercenary tank battalions?
Qatar faces an ongoing and immediate threat of destruction by revolution [by] its population of foreign workers. Qatari citizens make up only 12% of the actual population of Qatar. 88% of the populace are imported labor, and Qatar treats them horribly. It is a case that the UK Independent rightly describes as “modern slavery,” and there are far more slaves being abused than there are citizens abusing them.
For every Qatari citizen — male, female, adult, child, elderly — there are seven working age foreigners walking around who have legitimate reasons to hate them…. [this] explains Qatar’s sudden decision to purchase many new tanks and mobile artillery, allegedly to prepare itself against soccer riots in the 2022 World Cup. You don’t need tanks to stop a soccer riot. However, the Leopard tank variation they are purchasing is optimized for urban warfare; and the mobile artillery can be used to fire canister, while providing the gunners with cover from improvised weapons like Molotov Cocktails, or rifles seized from the police.
“Brazilian Nuclear Fuel Convoy Attacked By Heavily Armed Gangsters.”
Oklahoma sheriff and staff quit rather than return prisoners to unsafe jail. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Here’s a long (too long) essay about how the need for social media positivity is killing honest book reviewing. But it also displays that insular “only high literature talked about by inner circles of New York cognoscente is worth talking about” attitude that’s a contributing factor to most readers tuning out.
The shocking truth about Trump’s America:
The Who lead singer Roger Daltry is not impressed with Remainers having cases of the vapors:
Justice Brett Busby sworn in on the Texas Supreme Court.
Like a Netflix show? Good luck, because Netflix is never going to review it, because long show runs are not part of their business models.
“When the Dominatrix Moved In Next Door.” Neighbors go all NIMBY on a “kink collective.” That’s what you get for moving into such a backward, sex-hating location as [checks notes] Brooklyn. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Is this a great state or what?
And you thought American sports fans were crazy.
Happy National Puppy Day!
Tags:2020 Presidential Race, Air Force, aircraft, aircraft carrier, anti-semitism, Benjamin Netanyahu, Boeing, Boeing 737, Brazil, Brett Busby, Brexit, Brooklyn, Chelsea Clinton, China, Cigna, Crime, Democrats, dominatrix, Elections, EmailGate, EU, F-15, F-35, Facebook, fraud, George Soros, Golan Heights, Hillary Clinton, Houston, Ilhan Omar, Israel, Jews, Jihad, Kurt Schlichter, Max Boot, Media Watch, Navy, Nebraska, Netflix, nuclear weapons, Obama Scandals, Omaha, Qatar, Russia, Saturday Night Live, Scott Adams, Social Justice Warriors, Sohrab Ahmari, Strategic Air Command, Sylvester Turner, Syria, Texas, Texas Supreme Court, Theresa May, Ukraine, victimhood
Posted in Austin, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, Obama Scandals, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Waste and Fraud | 1 Comment »
Saturday, March 2nd, 2019
Remember two weeks ago, when I said that the Islamic State has lost its last remaining territory in the Hajin pocket?
Turns out that pronouncement was premature:
U.S.-backed forces in Syria are closing in on the last patch of Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate in Syria.
Syrian Democratic Force spokesman Mustafa Bali said Saturday three SDF soldiers have been wounded. Militants have been killed, he said, but he could not confirm a number.
“Fighting continues and heavy weapons are being used,” Bali said. “SDF forces have advanced significantly and have moved into Baghuz. Militants are still planting and using IEDs and bombs are exploding as the SDF forces are advancing. There is also heavy street fighting.”
The advance on the terror group’s remaining fighters began late Friday.
The final assault, announced on Twitter by Syrian Democratic Force spokesman Mustafa Bali, began just a day after the lead commander said the northeast Syrian village of Baghuz would be liberated within a week.
Remember that Livemap image that showed no more Islamic State-held territory left in Baghuz?
Well, this is what it looks like now:
Some of the confusion stems from the American media’s apparent complete disinterest in covering the end of the Islamic State, meaning that reporting on the conflict tends to vary between spotty and distant to non-existent. Part of the pause in the final assault was apparently to evacuate remaining civilians.
Hopefully the final final assault is no underway, and the utter destruction of the last of the Hajin/Baghuz pocket is underway.
Some related tweets:
Tags:al-Baghuz Fawqani, Foreign Policy, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Jihad, Military, Syria, Syrian Democratic Forces
Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad, Military | No Comments »
Saturday, February 16th, 2019
The last stronghold of the Islamic State, the former Hajin pocket along the Euphrates, has fallen:
The general commander of the operation by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to eliminate the Islamic State in eastern Syria on Saturday confirmed the fall of the extremist group in the East Euphrates and said victory would be announced in a few days.
“Da’esh [ISIS] has fallen militarily and their militants are under fire from our fighters in a small space of about 600 square meters,” Chiya Firat, the general commander of the operation launched to defeat the Islamic State in the East Euphrates, told reporters at the Omar Field SDF military base in Deir al-Zor governorate.
Livemap shows no Islamic State territory remaining there, with the Syrian Democratic Forces occupying Baghuz and surrounding territory.
Closeup:
This is what the pocket looked like January 6:
This is what it looked like back on December 20:
Hundreds of Islamic State fighters have surrendered, but expect ongoing mop-up operations where jihadists continue to be be pulled from tunnels and spider holes for several days, as was the case in Mosul.
Back when President Donald Trump declared an end to the Islamic State on December 20, I said he was premature, but only by about 4-8 weeks, and the eight week estimate proved right.
There are other areas of Syria and Iraq that Livemap shows as still under Islamic State control, but I get the impression these are largely desolate areas with no significant population that Syrian and Iraqi authorities have simply failed sweep and declare cleared.
The media, which seemed to avoid reporting success after hard-won success in the war against the Islamic State, not only ignored the final destruction of the Hajin pocket, is now writing articles about how the Islamic State continues as a transnational terrorist organization. This is both true and largely irrelevant. There are plenty of Islamist terrorist groups to worry about, but the Islamic State’s primary claim to legitimacy, the thing that drew foreign fighters from around the world, was it’s presumed legitimacy as an Islamic caliphate:
To be the caliph, one must meet conditions outlined in Sunni law—being a Muslim adult man of Quraysh descent; exhibiting moral probity and physical and mental integrity; and having ’amr, or authority. This last criterion, Cerantonio said, is the hardest to fulfill, and requires that the caliph have territory in which he can enforce Islamic law. Baghdadi’s Islamic State achieved that long before June 29, Cerantonio said, and as soon as it did, a Western convert within the group’s ranks—Cerantonio described him as “something of a leader”—began murmuring about the religious obligation to declare a caliphate.
In late 2014, the Islamic State controlled some 40,000 square miles of territory. Now it controls nothing. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is no longer a credible caliph, capable of claiming the allegiance of all Sunnis worldwide, but a loser and a failure, assuming he’s even still alive. Ambitious worldwide jihadists no longer have any incentive to pledge bayʿah to al-Baghdadi, and it’s entirely possible that the ones who previously had will drift away or declare their support to another transnational Islamic terrorist group like al Qaeda.
For this we can thank cost-effective strategy by the U.S.-led coalition to arm and support the Syrian Democratic Forces against the Islamic State, greatly aided by the Trump Administration’s decision to loosen the rules of engagement from what they were under Obama.
The Islamic State wasn’t completely destroyed today, but the last shred of it’s claim to a caliphate was.
Tags:al-Baghdadi, al-Baghuz Fawqani, Foreign Policy, Hajin, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Jihad, Military, Syria, Syrian Democratic Forces
Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad, Military | 1 Comment »
Thursday, January 24th, 2019
It appears that the Syrian Democratic Forces have just about finished crushing the last holdouts in the former Hajin pocket:
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) on Wednesday claimed the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) are getting close to defeating the Islamic State in the countryside of Deir al-Zor.
“The SDF managed to achieve an important and strategic advancement in the area, through advancing into and taking the control of about the half of Al-Baghuz Foqani town, which is the last town left under the control of the “Islamic State” organization in Syria,” the SOHR said.
Ranya Mohammed, a Syrian Kurdish journalist, also tweeted that SDF fighters have reached the town of Baghuz and that many Islamic State families had fled to SDF-held areas.
Currently, the jihadist group holds only about 10 square kilometers in that region. According to some sources, morale among the remaining Islamic State fighters is at an all-time low with many surrendering to the Kurdish-led SDF.
“The rest of ISIS members who are still in an enclave east of the Euphrates refuse to surrender,” as “hundreds” of their members have surrendered to the SDF “in the past 24 hours,” the monitor group asserted.
Here’s what the remnants of the Hajin pocket look like today:
And here’s what it looked like January 6:
In other Islamic State news:
There was a firefight between Filipino government troops and Islamic State-linked Maute gunmen in Lanao Del Sur province on Mindanao.
Here’s photographs of Yazidis trying to rebuild their lives in Iraq following the Islamic State’s campaign of genocide against them.
Three Kenyans living in the United States have been arrested by the FBI for conspiring to provide material support to the Islamic State.
Tags:al-Baghuz Fawqani, FBI, Foreign Policy, Hajin, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Jihad, Maute, Military, Mindanao, Philippines, Syria, Syrian Democratic Forces
Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad, Military | No Comments »
Sunday, January 20th, 2019
The world is filled with dumbasses, and some of them even come from Texas. But it takes a special kind of dumbassery to join the Islamic State:
An American English teacher who joined ISIS says that witnessing people being beheaded never bothered him because ‘they like to execute people in the US too.’
Warren Christopher Clark, 34, who joined the group in spring 2015 before being captured by Kurds earlier this month, spoke out about life in the so-called Islamic State from a prison in northern Syria.
Clark told NBC that during his time in Iraq and Syria ‘I saw some people being executed publicly, I saw some crucifixions… that’s just normal life there.’
Watching your first judicial crucifixion, a man of even average intelligence and/or a functioning moral compass might have said to himself “Huh, maybe I’ve made a mistake.”
Asked how he felt about it, he replied: ‘I’m from the United States, from Texas. They like to execute people, too. So I really don’t see any difference.
‘[Texas] might do it off camera, but it’s the same.’
Clark also admits that he had seen the execution videos before leaving to join the group, and hadn’t been put off.
‘That’s just normal life there,’ he said. ‘This is an Islamic society, an Islamic country, things like this happen.
‘I guess [it didn’t bother me] because I knew what I was coming to see.’
Yeah, not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Or even the sharpest spoon.
Asked why he decided to join the group, which was being bombed by the US at the time, he said: ‘I wanted to go see exactly what the group was about and what they were doing.’
Clark made contact with the group by applying to be an English teacher at the University of Mosul, Iraq, having been a substitute teacher in Sugar Land, Texas.
He even sent a resume with a cover letter to the course director, under the alias of Abu Mohammed al-Ameriki.
Most people researching radical terrorist organizations don’t feel the need to join them.
By the way, my parents lived in Sugar Land for many years. For those unfamiliar with Texas, it’s a suburban city southwest of Houston where I-69 and Highway 6 meet. A hotbed of Islamic radicalism it’s not.
He was accepted, and in June 2015 Clark said he traveled to Turkey before crossing into Syria and making his way to Iraq.
Two weeks ago he was captured in eastern Syria, near the Euphrates river, as Kurdish forces attempt to flush out the last remaining pocket of ISIS resistance.
He was captured alongside two men from Pakistan, another from Ireland, and a fifth from Trinidad and Tobago.
Only five other American ISIS fighter are known to have been captured alive.
Clark claims he only ever worked as a teacher and refused to fight for ISIS, spending several terms in jail for refusing to pick up a weapon.
When interviewed by NBC he was walking on two crutches, but insisted he was injured in a ‘personal fight’.
Yeah, right.
“US officials have yet to reveal what they will do with Clark and another US citizen purportedly arrested by Kurdish-led forces, Zaid Abed al-Hamid.”
Here’s hoping Mr. Clark gets the precise degree of justice he deserves…
Tags:Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Jihad, Sugar Land, Syria, Texas, Warren Christopher Clark
Posted in Jihad, Texas | No Comments »
Sunday, January 6th, 2019
Despite President Donald Trump’s announcement of a pullout of American troops from Syria, the war against the Islamic State contains apace.
Information is scanty, but Syrian Democratic Forces appear to be systematically crushing what remains of the former Hajin pocket. Their offensive has rolled south into Shafa, AKA Al Shaafa, AKA Asi-Sha-Fah, and two British soldiers were wounded in an Islamic State missile attack there.
Here’s what the remnants of the Hajin pocket look like today:
This is what it looked like back on December 20:
There’s at least some evidence that other Arab countries are stepping in to pick up some of the slack:
In the last few days, Egyptian and UAE military officers visited the contested north Syrian town of Manbij. They toured the town and its outskirts, checked out the locations of US and Kurdish YPG militia positions, and took notes on how to deploy their own troops as replacements. On the diplomatic side, the White House is in continuous conversation with the UAE Crown Prince Sheikh Muhammed Bin Ziyad (MbZ) and Egyptian President Abdel-Fatteh El-Sisi. The deal Trump is offering, is that they take over US positions in Manbij, where the Kurds have sought protection against a Turkish invasion, and American air cover will be assured against Russian, Syrian or Turkish attack.
As DEBKAfile has noted, the Egyptian president, during his four years in power, was the only Arab leader to consistently side with Bashar Assad against the insurgency against his regime. Assad may therefore accept the posting of Egyptian forces in Manbij so long as Syrian officers are attached to their units. The Syrian president would likely also favor a UAE military presence. Not only was the emirate the first Arab nation to reopen its embassy in Damascus after long years of Arab boycott, but unlike most of its Arab League colleagues, the UAE can well afford to contribute funding for the colossal reconstruction task needed for getting the war-devastated country on its feet.
Approval of the Egyptian-UAE forces to Manbij would kick off the stationing of mixed Arab forces in other parts of Syria, including the border with Iraq. If the Trump administration’s plans mature, then countries like Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Algeria would send troops to push the Iranian military presence out of key areas where they have taken hold.
That sounds swell. So swell that I’m suspicious that Syrian, Turkish and Russian leaders will actually let it happen. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
National Security Advisor John Bolton stated that U.S. trops would not complete their withdrawal from Syria until the Islamic State is defeated and the safety of the Kurds is guaranteed.
I would take this pronouncement with several grains of salt.
Even after Hajin falls, there are still large tracts of uninhabited land in Syria and Iraq the Islamic State hasn’t been cleared from. Just today, U.S. special forces conducted an operation near Kirkuk, Iraq that killed three Islamic State fighters who had reportedly been attacking the country’s electrical transmission infrastructure.
Also, the Islamic State in West Africa reportedly captured the town of Baga in northeastern Nigeria in late December.
Tags:Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Egypt, Foreign Policy, Hajin, Iraq, Islamic State in West Africa, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Jihad, John Bolton, Kirkuk, Kurds, Manbij, Military, Muhammed Bin Ziyad, Nigeria, Shafa, Syria, Syrian Democratic Forces, UAE
Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad, Military | 1 Comment »
Friday, December 28th, 2018
The week between Christmas and New Years is always odd. Work slows down with so many people on vacation, but there’s always a personal rush to get things done before the end of the year.
Kevin D, Williamson follows the idiots of antifa around the streets of Portland. That is, when they weren’t accidentally following him:
If you want to see what a bunch of half-baked idiots and kettle-corn psalmists in a political march are up to, the easiest thing to do is to march around with them, as I did for a while in Portland. I do not look much like Tucker Carlson, and I remain, for the moment, able to blend in with such groups.
Which I did — and a funny thing happened: As the march began to peter out, a group of Antifa loitered for a bit on a street corner, and I loitered with them for a while, observing. And then I got tired and decided to bring my labors to an end and go on my merry. As I walked off, a contingent, apparently believing that we were once again on the move against fascism, began to follow me, pumping their fists and chanting, until they figured out that I wasn’t leading them anywhere. And thus did a National Review correspondent end up briefly leading an Antifa march through Portland.
Of course they followed me. They’ll follow anything that moves.
The psychological warfare campaign we carried out against Islamic State troops in the field.
National Review‘s Andrew McCarthy on the Syrian pullout:
There has never been any vacuum in Syria (or Iraq). Sharia supremacism fills all voids. In focusing on ISIS, David discounts sharia supremacism as “an idea.” But it is much more than that. It is a cultural distinction — even, as Samuel Huntington argued, a civilizational one. It will always be a forcible enemy of the West. It doesn’t matter what the groups are called. You can kill ISIS, but it is already reforming as something else. In fact, it may no longer even be the strongest jihadist force in Syria: Its forebear-turned-rival al-Qaeda is ascendant — after a few name changes (the latest is Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Levant Liberation Organization) and some infighting with other militant upstarts. There is a better chance that ISIS will reestablish ties with the mothership than fade away.
The fact that al-Qaeda, which triggered the “War on Terror,” does not factor into American clamoring about Syria is telling. The anti-ISIS mission David describes was not always the U.S. objective in Syria. First we were going to pull an Iraq/Libya redux and help the “moderates” overthrow Assad. But the “moderates,” in the main, are Muslim Brotherhood groups that are very content to align with al-Qaeda jihadists — and our fabulous allies in Syria, the Turks and the Saudis, were only too happy to abet al-Qaeda. Syria had thus become such a conundrum that we were effectively aligning with the very enemies who had provoked us into endless regional war.
When ISIS arose and gobbled up territory, beheading some inhabitants and enslaving the rest, Obama began sending in small increments of troops to help our “moderate” allies fend them off. But the moderates are mostly impotent; they need the jihadists, whether they are fighting rival jihadists or Assad. Syria remains a multi-front conflict in which one “axis” of America’s enemies, Assad-Iran-Russia, is pitted against another cabal of America’s enemies, the Brotherhood and al-Qaeda factions; both sides flit between fighting against and attempting to co-opt ISIS, another U.S. enemy. The fighting may go on for years; the prize the winner gets is . . . Syria (if it’s the Russians, they’ll wish they were back in Afghanistan).
Degrading ISIS into irrelevance would not degrade anti-American jihadism in Syria into irrelevance. If sharia didn’t ban alcohol, I’d say the old wine would just appear in new bottles. It was, moreover, absurd for President Trump to declare victory just because ISIS has been stripped of 95 percent of the territory it once held. Caliphate aspirations notwithstanding, ISIS’s mistake was the attempt to be an open and notorious sovereign. It was always more effective as a terrorist underground, and it still has tens of thousands of operatives for that purpose.
If we stayed out of the way, America’s enemies would continue killing each other. That’s fine by me. I am not indifferent to collateral human suffering, but it is a staple of sharia-supremacist societies; we can no more prevent it in Syria than in Burkina Faso. And I am not indifferent to the challenge David rightly identifies: terrorists occupying safe havens from which they can plot against the West. But that is a global challenge, and we handle it elsewhere by vigilant intelligence-gathering and quick-strike capabilities. We should hit terrorist sanctuaries wherever we find them, but it is not necessary to have thousands of American troops on the ground everyplace such sanctuaries might take root.
Kurt Schlichter on the return of Trump the Disrupter:
Trump campaigned on his promise to build a wall. He told Frisco Nancy and Chuck Odd that he would shut down the government if he didn’t get his wall money. The Republican establishment, which does not really want a wall because the GOP corporate donor class doesn’t want to turn off the spigot of cheap foreign peasant labor even though those illegals are all future Democrat voters, led Trump on and on. They put continuing resolution after continuing resolution in front of him, each time promising to really, truly, cross-my-heart-and-hope-you-die fight next time. He gave them a chance. He gave them too many chances. And they expected he’d go along again this time. But conservatives drew the line and Trump realized that he needed to do what he did best to get back inside the ruling class’s decision cycle.
He needed to disrupt, so he kept his promise. He refused to play along with the wall scam anymore. And the gleeful Dem senators singing carols as they expected to get away with another grift ended their serenade with a sad trombone. Now the government is going to shut down, and Trump has zero to lose by holding out.
Then he cranked up the disruption when he announced he was getting out of Syria, and it’s clear that Afghanistan is probably next. The establishment reacted with surprise and horror. It’s hard to understand the “surprise” part, since he campaigned on getting us the hell out of foreign hellholes and has always wanted to. Again, he played along, giving the establishment a chance. And another. And nothing happened. So now he’s done. He’s doing what he promised.
Is this withdrawal a good idea? That depends – we definitely need to provide for the safety of our Kurdish allies, and how that will happen remains unclear at this writing. ISIS is a danger; departing necessarily accepts risk. While the conservative anti-nation building attitude is blind to our successes doing it (like in Kosovo), neither Syria nor Afghanistan seem particularly fertile soil for it. And who is eager to dump more money into them after all the trillions we’ve wasted since 2001?
But beyond the substantive considerations is the fact that the overwrought reaction of the establishment to the idea of actually ending a war supports Trump’s plan. What is our objective anyway? What’s the endstate? In the War College they taught us we should have those things. But the screamers never tell us – instead, it’s always invective about how we love Putin, or how we are stupid or whatever, when we ask, “Okay, how much more in time, money and American lives should we devote to these projects?” We never get a timeline, or a dollar figure, or the number of coffins that they consider whatever their unarticulated objective happens to be is worth.
We keep hearing ISIS might return and we have to stay to stamp out those creeps again, and fine, killing jihadists is cool, but if the goal is to keep Mideastern jerks from being themselves then we will never, ever leave. The elite always denies it wants us to be the world’s policemen, but then it always demands that we keep walking a beat that never ends.
President Trump hasn’t destroyed free trade, he’s split it into two: One set of trading partners for us and our allies, and another set for China:
The status quo with China is crumbling. Businesses have grown disillusioned with China’s restrictions on their activities, forced technology transfer and intellectual-property theft, all aimed at building up domestic competitors at foreign expense. Meanwhile, legislators in both parties are alarmed at increased military assertiveness and domestic repression under President Xi Jinping.
Dan Sullivan, a Republican senator from Alaska, personifies these broader forces reshaping the U.S. approach to the world. Mr. Sullivan has followed the rise of China for decades—as a Marine sent to the Taiwan Strait in 1996 in a response to Chinese provocations; as an official in George W. Bush’s National Security Council and State Department; and for a time as Alaska’s commissioner of natural resources.
When Mr. Xi visited the U.S. in 2015, Mr. Sullivan urged his colleagues to pay more attention to China’s rise. On the Senate floor, he quoted the political scientist Graham Allison: “War between the U.S. and China is more likely than recognized at the moment.”
Last spring, Mr. Sullivan went to China and met officials including Vice President Wang Qishan. They seemed to think tensions with the U.S. will fade after Mr. Trump leaves the scene, Mr. Sullivan recalled.
“I just said, ‘You are completely misreading this.’” The mistrust, he told them, is bipartisan, and will outlast Mr. Trump.
While delivering one message to China, Mr. Sullivan gave a different one to the administration and its trade negotiators: Don’t alienate allies needed to take on China.
“Modernize the agreements but stay within the agreements,” he says he counseled them. “Then we have to turn to the really big geostrategic challenge facing our country and that’s China.”
His was one voice among many urging Mr. Trump to single out China for pressure. Presidents Obama and George W. Bush sought to change China’s behavior through dialogue and engagement. Obama officials had begun to question engagement by the end of the administration. Last year, in its National Security Strategy, the Trump administration declared engagement a failure.
The Trump administration regards economic policy and national security as inseparable when it comes to Beijing, because China’s acquisition of Western technology both strengthens China militarily and weakens the U.S. economically.
“We don’t like it when our allies steal our ideas either, but it’s a much less dangerous situation,” said Derek Scissors, a China expert at the American Enterprise Institute whose views align with the administration’s more hawkish officials. “We’re not worried about the war-fighting capability of Japan and Korea because they’re our friends.”
Snip.
Michael Pillsbury, a Hudson Institute scholar close to the Trump team who has long warned of China’s strategic threat, sees three plausible scenarios. At one extreme is a new cold war with drastically curtailed economic ties. At the other, the U.S. and China resolve their tensions, continue to integrate and run the world together.
Between those extremes, Mr. Pillsbury sees a more likely and desirable middle path—a transactional U.S.-China relationship of the sort that prevailed during the 1980s in which the two decide, case by case, when to do business and when to decouple.
Stray thought: With the U.S. disengagement with various Middle Eastern conflicts, there’s a possibility that the less-Trump Derangement Syndrome-besotted ranks of the neocons might pivot to back Trump against China. After all, there was no end to neocon Jeremiads against China prior to the 2016 election…
(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Paradoxically, U.S.-China trade has exploded recently.
The Wall Street Journal takes down the Washington Post‘s shoddy reporting of President Donald Trump’s visit with the troops:
These reporters can’t even begin a news account of a presidential visit to a military base without working in a compilation of Mr. Trump’s controversies, contradictions, and failings.
The point isn’t to feel sorry for Mr. Trump, whose rhetorical attacks on the press have often been contemptible. The point is that such gratuitously negative reporting undermines the credibility of the press without Mr. Trump having to say a word.
(Hat tip: Brit Hume on Twitter.)
Related:
Sad news: Austin’s own Richard Overton, America’s oldest living vet, died yesterday at age 112.
A roundup of how many anti-#GamerGate “journalists” turned out to be scumbag sexual abusers themselves.
Speaking of scumbag sexual abusers, Kevin Spacey has finally been indicted for sexual assault. The one tiny bright spot is that it was an 18-year old man, so it’s slightly less reprehensible than the statutory rate charges made against him. [Insert innocent until proven guilty disclaimer here.]
“Previously Deported Honduran Child-Sex Offender Arrested in Texas.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Shocking news: Washington Post readers actually blame the illegal alien father who brought his son along as a pawn in his plan to enter the U.S., only to see him die. “Reading these comments, I believe the American culture has changed radically since the fall of 2016, when Trump was painted as a racist for saying the situation at the border had to change. I think, for all the press resistance to Trump’s fight against illegal immigration, minds have changed.”
Mexico Beach, Florida: a tough road to recovery.
Speaking of Brit Hume: Six days after hip replacement surgery and he’s already walking around:
“Man Bravely Abandons Unpopular Christian Belief To Affirm Extremely Popular Cultural Belief.”
Heh:
“Theyyy’rrrree Heeeere…”
Let’s hope Stark gets the nuke back through the portal before it closes…
Tags:Andrew McCarthy, antifa, Austin, Border Controls, China, Crime, Dan Sullivan, Florida, Foreign Policy, Hollywood, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Jihad, Kevin Spacey, LinkSwarm, Media Watch, Military, Obituary, Oregon, Portland, psychological warfare, rape, Richard Overton, Social Justice Warriors, Syria, Texas, trade, Washington Post
Posted in Austin, Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | No Comments »
Thursday, December 20th, 2018
President Donald Trump is evidently pulling combat troops out of Syria, having declared:
This is not correct. While Hajin itself has just been taken, a core of Islamic State fighters still remains in the remainder of the Hajin pocket:
If President Trump actually means it, this withdrawal is probably some 4-8 weeks premature if the goal is to crush the last remnants of the Islamic State and stabilize SDF territory. Maybe we can let Syria crush the remaining Islamic State remnants, and maybe we can’t. Will we be leaving the Kurds enough weapons and supplies to stand up for themselves against an emboldened Syria, Russia and Turkey? It’s unclear that we will.
Note that the phrase “returning United States troops home as we transition to the next phase of this campaign” leaves a lot of wiggle room. There may well remain a small troop contingent to support SDF forces and direct coalition air power based in Iraq, where some 5,000 U.S. troops are still supporting Operation Inherent Resolve. Also, the British governemnt noted: “Much remains to be done and we must not lose sight of the threat they (ISIS) pose…. (but) as the United States has made clear, these developments in Syria do not signal the end of the Global Coalition or its campaign.” The French still have a hand in as well.
This comes two days after the Trump-skeptical David French called Trump’s previous policy in Syria both wise and unconstitutional. “The Trump administration is doing the right thing the wrong way, and that matters. The failure to follow the constitutional process means that American forces are in harm’s way without the necessary congressional debate and the necessary congressional approval.”
Cue Bunk Moreland:
Assuming it is a complete and almost immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Syria, I view President Trump’s move with some skepticism, and suspect that it is slightly premature. Clearly we need to exit Syria at some point, probably sooner rather than later, but I’d prefer Trump to wait just long enough (again, another four weeks) to make sure the Islamic State holds no significant territory upon which to claim the legitimacy of its caliphate. I fear we’re inviting more instability by leaving slightly too early.
I’d love to be proven wrong.
Tags:David French, Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, France, Hajin, Iraq, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Jihad, Kurds, Military, Russia, Syria, Syrian Democratic Forces, Turkey, UK
Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad, Military | 1 Comment »