Bigger than Hillary -- The establishment cesspool of dishonesty and corruption - Newt Gingrich

by Newt Gingrich

Will Americans really vote to send a criminal family to the White House?

The only precedent in American history for the mess we will be in if Secretary Hillary Clinton wins on November 8 is the election, investigation, and resignation of President Richard Nixon.

The parallels struck me when Callista and I visited the Nixon Presidential Library two weeks ago. We were signing our new books (Treason by me and Hail to the Chief by Callista).

The Nixon Library has undergone a remarkable renovation. Touring it is a powerful educational experience. Since my first congressional race was in 1974 as Nixon was forced from office, the Library brought back many memories. (I lost that year in a Republican collapse over the scandal.)

The process of investigating Watergate and within 21 months of his reelection forcing President Nixon to resign (August 9, 1974) is the only precedent for the problem we will face if Secretary Clinton wins.

In some ways this is an unfair comparison.

Unlike Clinton, Nixon had a great foreign policy record. Working with Henry Kissinger as National Security Adviser and Secretary of State, President Nixon opened up our relationship with China and balanced our relationship with the Soviet Union. His diplomacy with Beijing was an astonishing and totally unexpected breakthrough.

Nixon entered office with millions of Americans bitterly opposed to President Lyndon Johnson's handling of the Vietnam War. Nixon and Kissinger developed a policy to free South Vietnam and establish peace in the region. They ensured the return of several American prisoners of war including John McCain.

Domestically, President Nixon worked hard to achieve a sweeping reelection victory in 1972. He learned from 1960, when he lost so narrowly that only vote theft in Illinois and Texas enabled Kennedy to win.  Nixon won very narrowly eight years later in 1968, in a three way race with Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Governor George Wallace.

In 1972, Nixon carried 49 states. That number has only been equaled in modern times by President Ronald Reagan's 1984 reelection. What most Americans don't realize is that President Nixon actually won reelection by a greater margin than Reagan (60.7 percent for Nixon compared to 58.8 percent for Reagan).

After the massive victory in 1972, Nixon might have expected a very successful conclusion to his then 26-year career in public life as a Congressman, Senator, Vice President and President.

Yet the overwhelming victory was not enough to protect him from the mistakes of his team and himself.

Looking back, the Watergate scandal was about a burglary of the Democratic Party headquarters located in the Watergate Building. This was one of the most self-destructive acts in American history. Nixon was going to win by a landslide. There was no point in breaking into the Democratic headquarters.

Nixon should have repudiated the burglary.  If he had allowed the burglars and their immediate bosses to pay for their enthusiastic stupidity everything would have ended. Nixon would have served out his four years and history would have been very different.

However, Nixon's loyalty to his team and his deep paranoia about his political enemies, including the news media, led him to obstruct justice.

America is a hard country in which to sustain dishonesty and corruption because there are simply too many people with consciences that compel them to report illegality and the betrayal of the rule of law. By lying to government officials and plotting to hide the truth, Nixon placed himself at the center of much bigger scandal than the original break in.

Nixon found himself drawn deeper and deeper into a cover up. It was discovered that he had maintained an audio taping system in the Oval Office. Then it was discovered that 18 and a half minutes had been deleted. The tapes are available today at the National Archives (they are public property just like Clinton's emails).

For 18 months the American government was increasingly paralyzed by what Nixon's own former White House counsel, John Dean, called “a cancer on the Presidency.”  It was clear that Nixon would be impeached and he chose to resign rather than face a bitter fight for survival.

Ironically Hillary Clinton knows this history well because as a young lawyer she served on the House Judiciary Committee as it established the groundwork for impeaching President Nixon.

Why did she ignore it? Why has she ignored it for virtually her entire public career going back to Arkansas over 30 years ago?

Lord Acton warned nearly 200 years ago that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

More than two thousand years ago the Greeks warned that hubris preceded Nemesis. Greeks believed hubris occurred when someone was too proud and that the goddess Nemesis would punish them for their arrogance.

From Whitewater to 33,000 deleted emails to the corruption of the Clinton Foundation to all the problems exposed by Wikileaks, the Clintons personify the Greek model of hubris and Lord Acton's warning that power corrupts.

Now Nemesis may be intervening in Hillary Clinton's career.

We now know that the FBI has stumbled on to some 650,000 emails on the Abedin-Weiner computer.

This must be something like the intervention of a Greek goddess. Who else could imagine that former Congressman Anthony Weiner's sexting a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina would lead the FBI to a computer that may have over 650,000 emails from Hillary's closest aide, Huma Abedin (Weiner's wife).

As a novelist, I wouldn't have the nerve to suggest such a wild plot.

Now the FBI has reopened the email case.

The FBI also has five field offices looking into the corruption of the Clinton Foundation. The memo by Bill Clinton’s closest aide, Doug Band (written to convince Chelsea he was making money for her parents), has been described as the Rosetta Stone of the Clinton criminal operation.

Andy McCarthy, the former federal prosecutor who tried the 1993 World Trade Center bombing case, has suggested the Clinton system is a classic RICO crime case. Mayor Rudy Giuliani, himself a very successful federal prosecutor before becoming mayor, has outlined count after count in a variety of federal statutes which he believes would prove criminal behavior by the Clintons.

President Obama sent a clear signal when Josh Earnest, his spokesman, said the President retained great confidence in FBI Director Jim Comey.  This endorsement of Comey directly undercut the Clinton campaign’s effort to undermine and delegitimize him. It may be the first sign that continuing disclosures about the Clintons are forcing Obama to distance himself from a very flawed candidate.

The Nixon precedent is very sobering and relevant.

If carrying 49 states and getting 60.7 percent of the vote couldn't protect Nixon from an 18-month ordeal leading to his resignation, what defense would a narrowly elected Hillary Clinton have?

Compare Nixon's 18 and a half minute tape gap with 33,000 deleted emails.

Remember that for Nixon there were no charges of personal corruption, personal enrichment, or conspiracy to exploit public office for financial gain.

On every level, the Clintons have greater vulnerabilities, greater exposure to investigation, and greater legal liabilities than Nixon.

Will Americans really vote to send a criminal family to the White House?

Will Americans vote to have a presidency drowning in investigations and crippled with constant legal assaults?

How could a President Clinton ever achieve anything with her time and energy focused on legal survival?

Why would the Congress cooperate with someone it thought was a liar and a crook?

Why would the anti-Clinton half of America ever cooperate with a president they believed should be in jail and not in the White House?

These are very serious concerns and this is why voting for Hillary Rodham Clinton is a vote for four years of corruption, investigation, and gridlock.


Newt Gingrich, a Republican, was speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1995 to 1999. He is the author of the new novel "Treason" (Center Street, October 11) and co-author, with his wife Callista Gingrich, of "Rediscovering God in America: Reflections on the Role of Faith in Our Nation's History and Future" (Center Street, May 17, 2016).

Source: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2016/11/04/newt-gingrich-bigger-than-hillary-establishment-cesspool-dishonesty-and-corruption.html

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Dems trying to nudge Comey out at FBI after Clinton probe decision - FoxNews.com

by FoxNews.com

Meanwhile, as Democrats pile on the criticism, a new report in The Guardian seems to indicate many FBI agents are backing Donald Tump.

Top Democrats are ratcheting up their criticism of FBI Director James Comey for going public with a decision to revisit the Hillary Clinton email probe days before the election, with a few even hinting they want him fired -- though President Obama has shown little indication he'd oblige right now. 

Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s chief adviser, reportedly is among those who want Comey gone. 

“Valerie argued that Comey was interfering deliberately in the election process and had to be stopped,” a source told The New York Post. The same source said Obama, though, is “worried about the consequences of taking such an action – the tsunami of outrage that would come his way, and possibly become a major footnote, or worse, in the history of the presidency.” 

The outrage from Democrats in recent days has been matched by applause from Republicans, in a reversal from the summer -- when GOP lawmakers were grumbling about Comey's decision not to pursue charges in the Clinton case and Democrats praised Comey's professionalism. 

House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mike McCaul, R-Texas, called Comey a "hero" and ripped Jarrett. 

“I don’t think Valerie Jarrett has any credibility here,” he told Fox News.  

Comey notified Congress last Friday that during an investigation of Clinton confidant Huma Abedin’s estranged husband Anthony Weiner, FBI agents found indications that a laptop used by the disgraced congressman contained some emails related to the FBI’s earlier probe of Clinton’s private computer server.

The disclosure, coming 11 days before the election, roiled the presidential campaign as top Democrats sprung into damage control.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told CNN, “Maybe he’s not in the right job.”

She added, “I think that we have to just get through this election and just see what the casualties are along the way.”

New York Sen. Chuck Schumer called Comey’s actions “appalling,” adding that he has lost “confidence” in the director.

Schumer’s comments come on the heels of outgoing Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid accusing Comey of possibly violating federal law.

In an Oct. 30 letter to Comey, Reid said Comey may have violated the Hatch Act, which prohibits government officials from using their positon of power to influence an election.

Republicans blasted Reid for the letter. 

Meanwhile, as Democrats pile on the criticism, a new report in The Guardian seems to indicate many FBI agents are backing Donald Tump.

“The FBI is Trumpland,” one agent told the paper.

The unnamed agent said Clinton is “the antichrist personified to a large swath of FBI personnel” and is the reason why so many leaks about the investigation have been anti-Clinton and pro-Trump.

FoxNews.com has not independently verified the claims made by the FBI agent.  


FoxNews.com

Source: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/11/04/dems-trying-to-nudge-comey-out-at-fbi-after-clinton-probe-decision.html

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Calamity Impending for the Clintons - Scott S. Powell

by Scott S. Powell

One should never discount or doubt the hidden hand of Providence at work in human affairs.

As presidential campaigns go, the 2016 election will be remembered as one the filthiest and coarsest ever. Donald Trump’s direct and unrestrained manner of speaking has brought on sharp criticism by the establishment and its surrogates in the media. On the other hand, Hillary Clinton’s judgment and actions as Secretary of State involving national security matters while also working hand-in-glove with Clinton Foundation were breathtakingly reckless -- violating over a dozen laws that would have put anyone else in jail.

When the Clintons left the White House in 2001, pilfering over $190,000 worth of china, flatware, rugs, and furniture as they cleared out, they claimed they were flat broke. Their net worth today is now in excess of $150 million, accumulated not by traditional means of work and investment, but rather by pay-for-play influence peddling through speeches and Clinton Foundation fundraising -- with the tacit understanding that the Clintons would be in a position to return favors to donors after Hillary won the 2016 presidential election. 

The Clintons symbolize the institutionalization of corruption in Washington, which now permeates almost all the government agencies. Even the so-called independent Federal Reserve has been corrupted by politicians whose profligate deficit spending puts pressure on the Fed to maintain a zero-interest policy that artificially masks the real cost and risk of a growing unsustainable level of debt.

For the better part of eight years of the Obama administration, polls have consistently shown that nearly 70% of Americans believe that the United States is headed in the wrong direction. Separately, a recent MSNBC poll shows “liar” is the most common word that comes to mind when voters think of Hillary Clinton. Another recent NBC poll shows that only 11% think of Hillary as honest and trustworthy. Even if one doubts the accuracy of these polls, how is it possible for a majority to think the country can get on a better track by electing as the next U.S. President a liar who embodies the corrupt status quo? 

When Donald Trump raised the issue of federal government corruption in his acceptance speech at the 2016 Republican National Committee convention he was tapping into what most intuitively understand -- that political corruption may be the single-most important factor in causing the decline of the United States.

In his Farewell Address of 1796, George Washington laid out the essentials for the rise and prosperity of America:

Let it simply be asked, where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in Courts of Justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect, that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

What has distinguished America from other nations has been its Christian moral foundation of limited Constitutional government designed to protect the inalienable rights of its citizenry -- a rule of law that provides for both equal opportunity and equal accountability. That foundation, which checked government corruption, catapulted Americans from what was little more than a state of nature with minimal wealth in the 1700s at the time of the nation’s founding to the most prosperous and free people the world had ever seen by the early 20th century. Historically, that is like going from 0 to 60 in three seconds.

Echoing Washington’s views in his survey of the vast scope of the rise and fall of nations, historian Will Durant concludes: “There is no significant example, in history before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.”

It seems increasingly apparent that the dominance of moral relativism and secular progressivism in the Democrat Party is related to the rotting of its core in Washington. To his credit Donald Trump has made government corruption a central campaign issue in this presidential election year, with his opponent being Exhibit A.

This was also confirmed by a bipartisan focus group whose participants watched all the proceedings and speeches of the RNC convention. The needle measuring Republican, Democrat, and Independent audience response to every speaker of the four-day convention went off the chart in all three party affiliation categories when, in his acceptance speech on the last night, Trump specifically spoke about political corruption being the most critical issue in America, asserting that:

When the Secretary of State illegally stores her emails on a private server, and deletes 33,000 of them so the authorities can’t see her crime, puts our country at risk, then lies about it in every different form and faces no consequence, I know that corruption has reached a level like never ever before in our country.

One should never discount or doubt the hidden hand of Providence at work in human affairs. It is perhaps a grand irony that the Hillary Clinton candidacy that had previously skated by the private email server scandal that violated numerous national security laws appears now ensnared at the eleventh hour by a source entrapped by sex-related sins that the Clinton campaign has relied on to smear the Trump campaign.

Within two weeks of election day while working on separate and unrelated investigations, the FBI has uncovered a treasure trove of incriminating evidence residing in the laptop computer shared by top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin and her estranged sex deviate husband, Anthony Weiner. In this time of crisis, Americans need to vote their conscience and also find reassurance in the transcendent insight of Deuteronomy 32:38, wherein God says, “Vengeance is Mine, and retribution, In due time their foot will slip; for the day of their calamity is near, And the impending things are hastening upon them.”

Scott S. Powell is senior fellow at Discovery Institute in Seattle. Reach him at scottp@discovery.org

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/11/calamity_impending_for_the_clintons.html

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Even Islam admits it - Nadav Shragai

by Nadav Shragai

Israel could counter Muslim lies about the Jewish history of Jerusalem by pointing out 10 centuries of Islamic sources that confirm Jewish ties to the Temple Mount, or the Ottoman decrees that guaranteed the Jews the right to worship at the Western Wall.

The name Aref al-Aref means very little, if anything, to the Israeli public at large, but last month's resolution by UNESCO, which adopted the Palestinian tangle of lies about the Jews having no ties to the Temple Mount, Jerusalem, or the Western Wall, could bring the late Palestinian historian -- who briefly served as the mayor of east Jerusalem -- out of obscurity. 

Al-Aref was an Arab journalist, politician, and public official in the time of the British Mandate in Palestine. In the final years of Jordanian rule over east Jerusalem, he also served as director of the Rockefeller Archaeological Museum near Damascus Gate. The museum has been moved and is now located in the Israel Antiquities Authority. The British founded the museum during the Mandate, and when Jordan "inherited" it, the Jordanian commissars used tape to cover up the Hebrew script on some of the artifacts on display. 

In spite of this, Al-Aref, an avowed Palestinian nationalist, adhered to historical truth and scientific research and wrote in his books that the Temple Mount (al-Haram al-Sharif in Arabic) is the same Mount Moriah mentioned in Genesis, the site of the Jebusite threshing floor that King David bought to build the Temple on it, and that David's son, Solomon, built the Temple in the year 1007 BCE. 

According to Al-Aref's writings, remnants of Solomon's Temple are located beneath Al-Aqsa mosque. The place, he wrote, had belonged to Jews for a certain time, and then it returned to Muslim ownership. He even identified the quarry to the right of Damascus Gate as "Solomon's Quarry," although that might be incorrect, and said that David and Solomon took stones from that location to construct the Temple. 

Professor Yitzhak Reiter of the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies Institute and the Academic College of Ashkelon, an internationally renowned expert on Islam, says that Al-Aref wrote these things when the Old City of Jerusalem was still part of the Kingdom of Jordan, and that they have scarcely been mentioned in Arab history books since 1967 or in contemporary discourse. Reiter, author of From Jerusalem to Mecca and Back: The Islamic Consolidation of Jerusalem, investigated and discovered that "the story of the Jewish Temple, details of its construction, its traditions, its existence and even details about the destruction of the First Temple by Nebuchadnezzar, were in the past a deeply entrenched motif in all types of Arab Muslim literature." 

Archaeologist Professor Dan Bahat, an authority on the history of the Temple Mount and Jerusalem, who is currently working on the Muslim chapter in his book about the history of the Mount, points to a series of early Muslim sources which show that the Muslims themselves, who today deny the existence of the Temple on the Mount and any Jewish ties to Jerusalem, used to treat it very differently. 

"In the Quran itself there are sources, such as Surah 2 and Surah 7, which identify the Hutta Gate [called Shaar Haslichot, "Gate of Forgiveness" in Hebrew and the Berkeley Gate in English] as the gate through which 'the children of Israel' would one day enter the Temple Mount. The Berkeley Gate is located under the Mughrabi Bridge, which goes over the women's section of the Western Wall Plaza," Bahat explains. 

Bahat also reveals that Jewish sources, mostly from the Cairo geniza, teach us that elderly Jews were the ones who showed the Muslims the edges of the Foundation Stone, a white stone that was covered by trash and sewage. These were the borders that formed the outlines of the Dome of the Rock building on top of the ancient stone. 

Bahat says that Muslim writer Ibn Abu Rabiah, who wrote about Jerusalem in the year 913, only about 200 years after the Dome of the Rock was built, testified that the Dome of the Chain [a freestanding dome on the Temple Mount] which today is identified as a Muslim element, was called that because of a legend dating back to the time of King Solomon, which said that a chain was suspended there between Heaven and the Earth. If two litigants approached it, only the honest one could grab hold of the chain. The liar or unjust man could not. 

Another revelation from Bahat: The Muslims who knew about the Jewish ties to the Temple Mount and Jerusalem honored the Jews in the first centuries after Al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock were built by assigning them the upkeep: sweeping the floors and rugs of the mosque, filling the lamps with oil and cleaning the ritual baths. 

"There is plenty of evidence of this. One is from Mujir al-Din of the 15th century, whom Muslims consider one of the greatest authorities on the early Islamic history of Jerusalem," Bahat notes. 

Bahat and Reiter reach far back into history, but there is no need to. Until almost 1967, in the 50 years that preceded the war that would change the map of Jerusalem and the region, there were plenty of Palestinian and even Jordanian references that identified the Jewish links to Jerusalem and its holy sites, in complete contrast to what representatives of Jordan, the Palestinians, and the Arab states in international bodies are claiming today. 

"[Israel] has neglected to use this public diplomacy tool in challenging the attacks that challenge Jewish ties to Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. Maybe it's time to use it," an official in the Foreign Ministry said this week. 

Indeed, recent archaeological discoveries -- the ancient Muslim inscription from a mosque near Hebron that says that in the early days of Islam, the Dome of the Rock building was called "Bait al-Maqdess" [an Arabicized version of the Hebrew "Beit Hamikdash"], or the discovery of a First Temple-era papyrus that names Jerusalem in early Hebrew script -- are archaeological ammunition that can be used to break down the Palestinian lies. 

Another public diplomacy path Israel can use is of course the countless quotes from the Bible, the Mishna, the Talmud, the New Testament, and the books of Roman Jewish historian Joseph ben Matityahu, also known as Josephus Flavius, who lived in the first century C.E. and witnessed the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple. 

Even a photocopy of an ancient manuscript by Persian Quran commentator Tafsir Al-Tabari, which was smuggled out of the University of Cairo library a few years ago by Egyptian nuclear scientist and Zionist Noha Hassid, joins the catalogue of evidence in favor of Israel. 

The Al-Tabari document says that "Bait Al-Maqdess [the Temple] was built by Solomon, son of David, and was made of gold, pearls, rubies, and gems -- peridot, paved with silver and gold, and had gold pillars." Israeli public diplomacy has taken advantage of only a small amount of the professional literature by people like Reiter, Bahat, attorney Dr. Shmuel Berkowitz (author of "How Terrible is this Place" and "The Wars Over Holy Places"), or the books by former Foreign Ministry Director General Dr. Dore Gold or this author. All these works lay out documentation that proves that a good liar has to remember to whom he told the truth, and when. 

Take, for example, the UNESCO classification of Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem as a "mosque," and especially the Turkish support for that decision, do not square with the fact that the Ottoman Turks are the ones who, 185 years ago, issued fermans (mandates or decrees by an Islamic sovereign) that confirm the Jewish ties to Rachel's Tomb and forbid "any person to prevent them [Jews] or oppose them from visiting there." 

Jordan's dominant role in the campaign to make decision after decision that cancel and weaken Jewish links to Jerusalem and the Temple Mount is also out of step with the official map Jordan put out in 1965, only two years before the 1967 Six-Day War. The map was drawn by a Jordanian named Abdel Rahman, who worked as an official surveyor, and was approved by the Jordanian government's Tourism Ministry. The map refers to the Temple Mount compound using the standard Muslim name al-Haram al-Sharif, but adds -- significantly -- that it is located "on Mount Moriah." 

The Palestinians and the Muslim Waqf, the body granted authority over all Muslim sites in Jerusalem, will also find it difficult to reconcile their total denial today that the Temple ever existed, calling it "Al-Mazoom" (the pretender, the false), with the content of a brief guidebook about the history of al-Haram al-Sharif-Jerusalem, which the Waqf itself published several editions of in the 1920s and 30s. At that time, the grand mufti of Jerusalem was Hajj Amin al-Husseini, whom many call the father of the Palestinian nationalist movement. He wrote, among other things, that "the identity of the site [the Temple Mount] with the Temple of Solomon is beyond all doubt." 

Redrawing the maps 

The fact that the Palestinians moved from total denial of Jewish ties to the Temple Mount to denying any Jewish ties to the Western Wall is also easily repudiated, not only through archaeology and historical sources, but also by using the writings of Muslims themselves. 

In recent years, the heads of the Waqf and the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement [now outlawed] have put the Western Wall through a process of Islamization and appropriated it for the Muslim faith. The pinnacle was the baseless claim of Mahmoud Al-Habbash, former Religious Affairs Minister in the Palestinian Authority, that "no one other than the Muslims has ever used the Wall as a place of worship at any time in history, until after the unfortunate Balfour Declaration was issued in 1917." 

The results of this trend can be seen in the current Palestinian media. The official PA television station broadcast a documentary program that portrayed Jews praying at the Western Wall as "sinners" and "unclean," and Jewish history as fake. The program made it clear: "We are now drawing up our maps. When the Jews disappear from the picture, like a forgotten chapter from the history of our city, we will rebuild the Mughrabi neighborhood on the Western Wall Plaza." 

Attorney Berkowitz, who researched the Muslim claims about the Western Wall, notes that Muslims never prayed on the Western side of the wall. Berkowitz found that the Western Wall isn't even mentioned as a Muslim holy site in any of the official books and tour guides to al-Haram al-Sharif put out by the Waqf in 1914, 1965, or even 1990. 

The entries for al-Buraq and al-Haram al-Sharif in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, published in 1917, make no mention of the Western Wall as a holy site, and do not identify the site with the place with al-Buraq, the wondrous steed of the Prophet Muhammad, who according to later Islamic tradition was tethered to the Western Wall at the end of his flight from Mecca to Jerusalem. The Western Wall is even referred to as the "Wailing Wall." 

Another book, by our friend Al-Aref, includes the Western Wall in a list of Jewish holy sites and describes it thusly: "The Western Wall is the outer wall of the Temple, which was built by Herod ... and the Jews visit it often, especially at Tisha B'Av, and when they visit they remember the glorious, unforgettable history and begin to weep." 

Evidence from the son of the father of the Hebrew language

But Berkowitz's most exciting discovery raises the suspicion that the relatively late holiness the Muslims assigned to the Western Wall was "wandering sanctity" to serve a political end. It turns out that until the 11th century C.E., Muslim scholars were divided about where Muhammad's winged horse had been tethered, and indicated various locations throughout the Temple Mount compound. Some said the prophet's horse was tethered south of the Golden Gate on the eastern wall. Others argued for the southern wall, but no one in that period said the horse had been tied to the Western Wall. 

In the 11th century, explains Berkowitz, the Muslim residents of Jerusalem and Muslim geographers pointed out a certain place on the outer southern wall as the place where Muhammad's horse was tied, and the double Huldah Gates in the southern wall, now blocked, as the gates through which the Prophet Muhammad entered the compound. Even as late as the 17th century, the spot on the southern wall was still accepted as the place where al-Buraq was tethered. 

The earliest Muslim tradition that identified the "place al-Buraq was tethered" with the Jewish prayer site at the Western Wall is from the mid-19th century, when Jewish began bringing ritual object to the Wall and even trying to purchase the Western Wall and the courtyards that surround it from the Waqf. 

In Berkowitz's opinion, it's almost certain that the Muslims moved the place where Muhammad supposedly entered the Temple Mount compound and the place he tied al-Buraq to the Western Wall as a response to the activity of the Jews. They even started calling it "al-Buraq." They also built Al-Buraq mosque on the eastern side of the Western Wall, on top of the Berkley Gate, where they display an underground room as the spot where the prophet tied up his horse. 

And here is one more important historical tidbit: In the Ottoman Period, the Muslims themselves are the ones who granted Jews fermans that recognized their right to the Western Wall and their right to pray there. The first ruler to do so was Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent in the second half of the 16th century, and after him the Turkish Sultan Abdulmecid [Abdul Majid] I in 1841. Itamar Ben-Avi, son of the reviver of the Hebrew language, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, tells of a ferman that was granted to the Jews in 1868 and transferred to the Council of Jewish Bequests in London, only to disappear mysteriously.

Nadav Shragai

Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=37699

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Europe's New Blasphemy Courts - Douglas Murray

by Douglas Murray

Europe is currently seeing the reintroduction of blasphemy laws through both the front and back doors, initiated in a country which once prided itself on being among the first in the world to throw off clerical intrusion into politics.

• By prosecuting Wilders, the courts in Holland are effectively ruling that there is only one correct answer to the question Wilders asked. They are saying that if someone asks you whether you would like more Moroccans or fewer, people must always answer "more," or he will be committing a crime.
• At no point would it occur to me that anyone saying he did not want an endless flow of, say, British people coming into the Netherlands should be prosecuted. Nor would he be.
• The long-term implications for Dutch democracy of criminalising a majority opinion are catastrophic. But the trial of Wilders is also a nakedly political move.
• The Dutch courts are behaving like a religious court. They are trying to regulate public expression and opinion when it comes to the followers of one religion. In so doing they obviously aspire to keep the peace in the short term, but they cannot possibly realise what trouble they are storing up for our future.

Europe is currently seeing the reintroduction of blasphemy laws through both the front and back doors. In Britain, the gymnast Louis Smith has just been suspended for two months by British Gymnastics. This 27-year old sportsman's career has been put on hold, and potentially ruined, not because of anything to do with athletics but because of something to do with Islam.

Last month a video emerged online of the four-time Olympic medal-winner and a friend getting up to drunken antics after a wedding. The video -- taken on Smith's phone in the early hours of the morning -- showed a friend taking a rug off a wall and doing an imitation of Islamic prayer rituals. When the video from Smith's phone ended up in the hands of a newspaper, there was an immediate investigation, press castigation and public humiliation for the young athlete. Smith -- who is himself of mixed race -- was forced to parade on daytime television in Britain and deny that he is a racist, bigot or xenophobe. Notoriously liberal figures from the UK media queued up to berate him for getting drunk or for even thinking of taking part in any mockery of religion. This in a country in which Monty Python's Life of Brian is regularly voted the nation's favourite comic movie.

After an "investigation," the British sports authority has now deemed Smith's behaviour to warrant a removal of funding and a two-month ban from sport. This is the re-entry of blasphemy laws through the back door, where newspapers, daytime chat-shows and sports authorities decide between them that one religion is worthy of particular protection. They do so because they take the religion of Islam uniquely on its own estimation and believe, as well as fear, the warnings of the Islamic blasphemy-police worldwide.

The front-door reintroduction of blasphemy laws, meantime, is being initiated in a country which once prided itself on being among the first in the world to throw off clerical intrusion into politics. The Dutch politician Geert Wilders has been put on trial before. In 2010 he was tried in the courts for the contents of his film "Fitna" as well as a number of articles. The trial collapsed after one of the expert witnesses -- the late, great Dutch scholar of Islam, Hans Jansen -- revealed that a judge in the case had tried in private to influence him to change his testimony. The trial was transparently rigged and made Dutch justice look like that of a tin-pot dictatorship rather than one of the world's most developed democracies. The trial was rescheduled and, after considerable legal wrangling, Wilders was eventually found "not guilty" of a non-crime in 2011.

But it seems that the Dutch legal system, like the Mounties, is intent on always getting its man. On Monday of this week the latest trial of Geert Wilders got underway in Holland. This time Wilders is being tried because of a statement at a rally in front of his supporters in March 2014. Ahead of municipal elections, and following reports of a disproportionate amount of crimes being committed in Holland by Muslims of Moroccan origin, Wilders asked a crowd, "Do you want more or fewer Moroccans in this city and in the Netherlands?" The audience responded, "Fewer, fewer." To which Wilders responded, "Well, we'll arrange that, then."

By prosecuting Dutch member of parliament Geert Wilders for making "politcially incorrect" statements, Dutch courts are behaving like a religious court. They are trying to regulate public expression and opinion when it comes to the followers of one religion. (Source of Wilders photo: Flickr/Metropolico)

Opinion polls suggest that around half the Dutch public want fewer Moroccans in the Netherlands and many opinion polls going back decades suggest that the Dutch people want less immigration in general. So at the very least Wilders is being put on trial for voicing an opinion which is far from fringe. The long-term implications for Dutch democracy of criminalizing a majority opinion are catastrophic. But the trial of Wilders is also a nakedly political move.

Whether or not one feels any support for Wilders's sentiments is not in fact the point in this case. The point is that by prosecuting someone for saying what he said, the courts in Holland are effectively ruling that there is only one correct answer to the question Wilders asked. They are saying that if someone asks you whether you would like more Moroccans or fewer, people must always answer "more," or they will be committing a crime. What kind of way is that to order a public debate on immigration or anything else? People may say, "He wouldn't be allowed to say that about any other group of people." And Wilders himself may not say that about any group of people, because he has his own political views and his own interpretation of the problems facing his country.

It is worth trying a thought-experiment: If Wilders or any other politician got up and asked a crowd "Do you want more or fewer British people in Holland," I may not -- as a British person -- feel terribly pleased with him for asking the question, or terribly happy with the crowd if they chanted "Fewer." Although if British expats in Holland were responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime and disorder in the country, some mitigating sympathy for the sentiment may be forthcoming. But at no point would it occur to me that anyone saying he did not want an endless flow of British people coming into the Netherlands should be prosecuted. Nor would he be.

Like the behaviour of the British Gymnastics association, the Dutch courts are behaving like a religious court. They are trying to regulate public expression and opinion when it comes to the followers of one religion. In so doing, they obviously aspire to keep the peace in the short term, but they cannot possibly realise what trouble they are storing up for our future.

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Douglas Murray, British author, commentator and public affairs analyst, is based in London, England.

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/9253/europe-blasphemy-courts

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Islam's "Human Rights" - Janet Tavakoli

by Janet Tavakoli 

To the 57 members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, however, all human rights must first be based on Islamic religious law, Sharia: whatever is inside Sharia is a human right, whatever is outside Sharia is not a human right.

• No intelligent government should impair the right of free speech to placate people who falsely claim they are victims when often they are, in fact, aggressors.
• Therefore, slavery or having sex with children or beating one's wife, or calling rapes that do not have four witnesses adultery the punishment for which is death, or a woman officially having half the worth of a man, are all "human rights."
• Soft jihad includes rewriting history as with the UNESCO vote claiming that ancient Biblical monuments such as Rachel's Tomb or the Cave of the Patriarchs are Islamic, when historically Islam did not even exist until the seventh century; migration to widen Islam (hijrah), as we are seeing now in Europe and Turkish threats to flood Germany with migrants; cultural penetration such as promoting Islam in school textbooks or tailoring curricula for "political correctness"; political and educational infiltration, as well as intimidation (soft jihad with the threat of hard jihad just underneath it).
• More regrettable is that these are so often done, as at UNESCO, with the help and complicity of the West.
• Both hard and soft jihad are how Islam historically has been able to overrun Persia, Turkey, Greece, Southern Spain, Portugal, all of North Africa, and all of Eastern Europe. It is up to us not to let this be done to us again.

After witnessing the Islamic Republic of Iran violate human rights, adopt sharia law, persecute other religions, murder dissenters, and compel the judiciary to serve the Ministry of Intelligence, it seems clear that the worst thing that can happen to a free Western country is to allow Islamic fundamentalists to take over a government.

Most of the world's 1.6 billion Muslims pray in Arabic, even if it is not their mother tongue. The problem, however, is not in the translation; it is in the ideology.

Fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were Saudi Arabian; two more were from the United Arab Emirates; one was from Egypt, and one from Lebanon. All were from Arabic-speaking countries.

Muslim scholars did not unite to protest the act of terrorism on 9/11. Instead, many celebrated a victory; the Quran includes passages that permit violence to expand Islam.

Most so-called Muslims are peace-loving, but if there are 164 verses of the Koran prescribing jihad, and many Muslims might feel it would be heretical or disloyal to condemn it.

Arabic-speaking Muslim countries are not alone in supporting terrorism. According to the U.S. Department of State, the Islamic Republic of Iran is still the leading state sponsor of terrorism. Iran also recently announced that it will continue to support terrorism, including the terrorist groups Hizballah ["The Party of Allah"] and Hamas.

Iran still supports the death fatwa issued against a European, the British novelist Salman Rushdie, for The Satanic Verses -- a novel -- issued by the long-dead Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989. Last year the bounty on his head was raised another $600,000 to almost $4 million.

Until his death earlier this year, Ayatollah Vaez-Tabasi, a leading Shia cleric in Iran, who presided over the Imam Reza shrine that draws as many annual visitors as Mecca, called for "perpetual holy war."

Muhammad's Practices Clash with the Humanistic Values of Western Civilization

Fundamentalists view Muhammad as the perfect man. Yet Muhammad led violent followers who raped, enslaved war captives, and murdered unbelievers as part of Islam's program to expand. Today that behavior is emulated by Islamic terrorists in Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Mauritania, Nigeria, to name just a few.

Muhammad had several wives, including a slave given to him as a gift. When he was in his fifties, he asked for a friend's six-year-old daughter and consummated the so-called marriage when the child was nine. Although Muhammad criticized corrupt customs of his Arab contemporaries, he had sex with a girl who was too young to be capable of consent; in the West we call this statutory rape. (Sahih Bukhari volume 5, book 58, number 234)

Referring to Muhammad's life, fundamentalists allow forced marriages of female children in countries including Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, some Gulf States, and Iran.

If fundamentalist Muslim leaders do not understand how flawed this ideology appears to the West, their incomprehension may spring from a fundamentally different view of human rights: To the West, these values are embodied in the Enlightenment -- such as individual freedoms, freedom of thought, disinterested enquiry -- and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – that all people, regardless of race religion or gender, have the right to life, liberty personal security, and freedom from slavery torture, and degrading treatment.
To the 57 members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), however, all human rights must first be based on Islamic religious law, Sharia: whatever is inside Sharia is a human right, whatever is outside Sharia is not a human right.

To the 57 members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, all human rights must first be based on Islamic religious law, Sharia: whatever is inside Sharia is a human right, whatever is outside Sharia is not a human right. Pictured above: The 2016 OIC Summit in Istanbul, Turkey. (Image source: Al Jazeera video screenshot)

Therefore, slavery or having sex with children or beating one's wife, or calling rapes that do not have four witnesses adultery the punishment for which is death, or a woman officially having half the worth of a man, are all "human rights."

In 2005, after the Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard drew a cartoon mildly satirizing Muhammad as an assignment for a newspaper, many Muslim clerics cried blasphemy and called for his death. These included a Pakistani cleric who offered a one million dollar reward to anyone who would murder the Dane. Thousands of Muslims protested. In 2010, an axe-wielding Muslim assailant attacked Westergaard in his home; fortunately, Westergaard was able to escape to a secure room.

Western governments should stand resolute against those who would blackmail us into giving up our freedoms. No intelligent government should impair the right of free speech to placate people who falsely claim they are victims when often they are, in fact, aggressors.

Reformist Muslims and the Credibility Crisis

Most of the world's 1.6 billion Muslims may not countenance violence and human rights violations, but the fact remains that fundamentalists are not a fringe group; they occupy senior positions in the Muslim clerical hierarchy. There are tens of millions (or more) of them, and each seems to believe that his interpretation of Islam is the only correct one. Of this group, it is estimated that hundreds of thousands are jihadis willing to engage in active violence.

Many Reformist Muslims claim they are being unfairly lumped into this extremist crew, but if they are claiming a schism, many they often have not been clear about it.

When Martin Luther, a Catholic priest and a theology professor, repudiated two core teachings of the Catholic Church, he acknowledged that, by definition, he was no longer Catholic. He was part of the Protestant Reformation, and his followers are called Lutherans.

Reformist Muslims still call themselves Muslims, but there can never be a Quran 2.0. Every word in the Quran is believed to be the word of Allah, similar to the Ten Commandments as the direct word of God; no one is able to say that Allah did not mean what Allah reportedly said. Interpretations, however do differ and since 1948 have apparently caused the deaths of 11,000,000 Muslims at the hands of other Muslims.

So one can imagine what might be in store for non-Muslims.

Islam, moreover, seems to have been has been set up to spread it both by violence, "hard jihad," and "soft jihad. " Hard jihad includes terrorism, murder and attempted murder. Soft jihad includes rewriting history as with the UNESCO vote claiming that ancient Biblical monuments such as Rachel's Tomb or the Cave of the Patriarchs are Islamic, when historically Islam did not even exist until the seventh century; migration to widen Islam (hijrah), as we are seeing now in Europe and Turkish threats to flood Germany with migrants; cultural penetration such as promoting Islam in school textbooks or tailoring curricula for "political correctness"; political and educational infiltration, as well as intimidation (soft jihad with the threat of hard jihad just underneath it).

More regrettable is that these are so often done, as at UNESCO, with the help and complicity of the West.

Both hard and soft jihad are how Islam historically has been able to overrun Persia, Turkey, Greece, Southern Spain, Portugal, all of North Africa, and all of Eastern Europe. It is up to us not to let this be done to us again.
 

 

Janet Tavakoli is the author of Unveiled Threat: A Personal Experience of Fundamentalist Islam and the Roots of Terrorism, a newly-released non-fiction book about the current negative implications of Islamic fundamentalism for the United States.

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/9241/islam-human-rights

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The Shiite worm has turned - Dr. Mordechai Kedar

by Dr. Mordechai Kedar

The Shiites are watching their dreams come true, as the Sunnis find themselves caught in a nightmare. This, dear readers, is the way of the Middle East.

The struggle for succession began in the year 632 CE, from the minute the Prophet Mohammed closed his eyes for eternity.  His cousin Ali ibn Abi Talib, who became Mohammed's son in law when he married the prophet's daughter Fatimah, claimed that he deserved to inherit the leadership of Islam since Mohammed had promised it to him

His rivals pushed him to the sidelines, brushing off his story, so that it took 24 years of bitter struggles for Ali to be crowned the fourth Caliph and even then he had no time for resting on his laurels, because the governor of Damascus, Muawiyah ibn Abi Sufian, rebelled against him forthwith. In 661, six years after becoming Caliph, Ali was murdered and Muawiyah became the fifth Caliph. Ali's sons continued to fight, but the new Caliph showed them no mercy: Hussein ibn Ali was beheaded in 680 and his head displayed in Damascus.

Muslims who supported Ali and his claims to the throne are known as Shiites, while those supporting his foes and who eliminated his heirs are the Sunnis. 

This 1384-year-old struggle permeates the history, philosophic thought and political aspirations of the Nation of Mohammed. It is waged on different levels, from holy writings to the wording of prayers, from the system of laws all the way to people's names, but its main arena is the battlefield, one on which millions of Muslims have met their deaths and where massacres have been perpetrated by both sides with depressing frequency.
The 1980-1988 war between Sunni Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Shiite Khomeini's Iran took the lives of over a million people, left millions more wounded  and is still going on with full force in several arenas: Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon, Pakistan, Afghanistan and more. Saudi Arabia leads the Sunni struggle today, while Iran represents the Shiites.

About 85% of the world's Muslims are Sunni, while the remaining 15% are Shiite. This normally gives the Sunnis an advantage, allowing for victory and control on their part, leaving the defeated Sunnis to hope and pray for the situation to change.The sad state of the Shiites led them to call themselves by the Quranic euphemism "Almustdaafin" - the downtrodden of the earth. They continued to hope and pray for the day they would find themselves on the top of the heap with the Sunnis trampled underneath them - and it looks as though their wishes have come true over the past few years, especially since the Iranian revolution led by Khomeini in 1979. The rebellion gave the Shiite clerics a wealthy, large and powerful country, a center from which they could export their revolution to the rest of the world.

The goal of "exporting the revolution" was realized by sending Iranian propagandists, educators, funding and books to every country that has a Shiite population, so as to awaken and revive their anti-Sunni feelings, this to be followed once the time is ripe, by weapons, arms and training with the objective of bringing the Shiites to a position of power in each country.

The world, despite realizing what Iran is doing and what its intentions are, generally ignored the Ayatollahs' hegemonic ambitions, because Iran's gas and petroleum exports were seen as above any other consideration, including national stability and world peace. In front of the world's open and unblinking eyes, Iran developed rockets, tanks, artillery and planes, as well as biological, chemical and even atomic weapons.  There were attempts to stop Iran's rapid empowerment, but thanks to Russia and China, Iran's friends on the Security Council, the Ayatollahs were allowed to progress unimpeded towards their planned takeover of the Islamic world.

The United States toppled the most dangerous and powerful enemy of the Shiites, Saddam Hussein, in 2003. The Ayatollahs saw this as a sign from heaven that they are headed in the right direction. After all, Allah had granted them the helping hand of two global powers, Russia in the Security Council and the United States in Iraq. The Ayatollahs continued their nuclear program and suffered the resulting sanctions, but their steadfastness in the face pf American weakness led to the agreement they signed in 2015. The billions of dollars given to the Ayatollahs as a result of that agreement and invested in the killing fields of the Middle East today, proved to the Shiites that the road to the pinnacle of world power stretches open before them.

Thanks to the West's war with Saddam Hussein, the Shiites managed to rescue Iraq from the Sunni claws, and today, thanks to the Christian Russians they will succeed in extricating Syria from its Sunni majority population. The Shiites, as we have been privileged to see over the last few months in Falluja, Ramadi, Aleppo, and Yemen, have been mercilessly butchering the Sunni civilian population and are now approaching Mosul, the economic capital of Iraq.

Mosul has been ruled by ISIS for the last two years. ISIS terrorists murdered Shiites without a qualm, and now that the city is surrounded by Shiites, one can almost hear the Iraqi Army and Shiite Militias, some under the aegis of Iran, sharpening their knives in order to avenge years of Sunni subjugation and deaths, on the heads of ISIS fighters and the innocent residents of Mosul. 

It is terribly sad to see how the dispute over Mohammed's inheritance almost 1400 years ago, is still an open wound in this part of the world. The struggle is horrifying, because it has no geographic or moral restraints and everything is quite predictable.There will be a bloodbath in Mosul, that is a certainty. The question is not whether or not there will be a massacre, but whether its victims will be counted in hundreds, thousand or tens of thousands. The number of victims is not yet known, but I have no doubts that we are facing a massacre.

Today, we would expect that people who have led a different kind of life might act differently. Iraqis did not live like Europeans, but they had televisions, radios, books and newspapers to read, and they were exposed to the behavior and way of life in places such as Europe and the US.  In addition, most of the people of the Middle East act like locals in whatever countries they immigrate to or visit, once they have become accustomed to their new environment. There are exceptions, first among them what the world saw on New Years Eve in Germany. Still, this is not a genetic problem and they can overcome it and adopt local norms.

The problem is that as soon as they return to their homelands, where violence and eliminating rivals are the local culture, they act according to the behavioral code of the Middle East, where only the strong survive. The weakling? - too bad for him. Here conflicts are not resolved, they are won, and they go on until one side does not exist anymore. Disputes are solved when one side gives in, surrenders or is eliminated.

Israel does not find it easy to survive in this region. On the one hand, Israel is an island of Western culture, a democracy with everything that entails, and cannot act in the immoral fashion with which its enemies treat one another. On the other hand, if Israel attempts to act according to the moral standards Europe has adopted since WWII, the Jews who survived that war will be forced to return to Europe.

This difficult dilemma is raised and argued over constantly in the Israeli public sphere. And the argument will continue for as long as Israel is in the Middle East because of the gap between what we would like to be and what we are forced to do.

Written for Arutz Sheva, translated by Rochel Sylvetsky, Op-ed and Judaism Editor.


Dr. Mordechai Kedarr is a senior lecturer in the Department of Arabic at Bar-Ilan University. He served in IDF Military Intelligence for 25 years, specializing in Arab political discourse, Arab mass media, Islamic groups and the Syrian domestic arena. Thoroughly familiar with Arab media in real time, he is frequently interviewed on the various news programs in Israel.

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/19706

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What?! Some Journalists at MSNBC are taking a sober look at Hillary! - MSNBC

by MSNBC

At long last! A glimmer of journalistic responsibility!

MSNBC

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBLy5S-SWZ8

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ISIS infiltrates German army - Arutz Sheva Staff

by Arutz Sheva Staff 

Germany identifies soldiers as Muslim extremists, takes steps to prevent ISIS infiltration.

Germany has announced investigations of 80 soldiers, after military intelligence discovered these soldiers held radical Islamic beliefs.

20 of the soldiers have been identified as Muslims, while the other 60 are still being investigated. All of them are suspected of joining the army in order to receive military training and experience in the use of weapons.

Military counter-intelligence agency Militärischer Abschirmdienst has reported receiving a number of "individual inquiries from applicants who are interested in the service of the Bundeswehr in a striking manner" and who "express a commitment of only a few months and are expressly interested in intensive weapon and equipment training."

These inquiries strongly recall the flight training attempts of several of the 9/11 terrorists. After 9/11, one of the instructors said the terrorist was "impatient" and "only interested in learning how to control the plane in flight, with no interest in takeoff and landing." 

Another of the instructors went with his gut and reported his student to the authorities, who arrested him for overstaying his visa and forced Al-Qaeda to find a replacement.

The Bundeswehr is the unified armed forces of Germany, as well as their civil administration and procurement authorities.

German law does not currently allow background checks on people who have not yet begun employment. However, the German government is considering legislation that would allow the military to investigate new recruits before accepting them.

A spokesperson for the German Defense Ministry said the government wants to "respond adequately to the changed security situation and prevent the use of the Bundeswehr as a training facility for potential terrorists, extremists, and trafficked persons."


Arutz Sheva Staff

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/219823

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