The absurdity of ethnic cleansing for "peace" - Benjamin Netanyahu

by Benjamin Netanyahu

Benjamin Netanyahu points out the immorality of Abbas' demand that Judea and Samaria should be "cleansed" of its Jews

I'm sure many of you have heard the claim that Jewish communities in Judea
Samaria, the West Bank, are an obstacle to peace.
I've always been perplexed by this notion.
Because no one would seriously claim that the nearly two million Arabs
living inside Israel – that they're an obstacle to peace. That's because
they aren't. On the contrary.
Israel's diversity shows its openness and readiness for peace. Yet the
Palestinian leadership actually demands a Palestinian state with one
pre-condition: No Jews.
There's a phrase for that: It's called ethnic cleansing.
And this demand is outrageous.
It's even more outrageous that the world doesn't find this outrageous. Some
otherwise enlightened countries even promote this outrage.
Ask yourself this: Would you accept ethnic cleansing in your state? A
territory without Jews, without Hispanics, without blacks?
Since when is bigotry a foundation for peace?
At this moment, Jewish schoolchildren in Judea Samaria are playing in
sandboxes with their friends.
Does their presence make peace impossible?
I don’t think so.
I think what makes peace impossible is intolerance of others. Societies that
respect all people are the ones that pursue peace. Societies that demand
ethnic cleansing don't pursue peace.
I envision a Middle East where young Arabs and young Jews learn together,
work together, live together side by side in peace.
Our region needs more tolerance, not less.
So the next time you hear someone say Jews can't live somewhere, let alone
in their ancestral homeland, take a moment to think of the implications.
Ethnic cleansing for peace is absurd.
It's about time somebody said it.
I just did.


Benjamin Netanyahu

Source: https://youtu.be/G8CUFSHB114

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Israeli Victory Is the Only Way to Bring Peace - Gregg Roman

by Gregg Roman

The conventional wisdom that conflicts are best resolved through negotiation and compromise simply isn't true.

 
At his first security briefing, Avigdor Liberman, Israel's Defense Minister, declared that Israel no longer has "the luxury of conducting drawn-out wars of attrition." 100 days into his term, with no sign of the decades-long conflict slowing, it is clear that the time has come to apply that principle to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. In order for there to be peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors, Israel must win and the Palestinians must lose.

For most of human history, military victory ended wars. The Pax Romana, a period of 200 years of relative peace within the Roman Empire, began only when Augustus defeated Marc Antony in the Battle of Actium. When the North ravaged the South in the American Civil War, it caused the seemingly intractable conflict that claimed three quarters of a million lives over four years to fade away. The South, knowing it was defeated, never made trouble again. German and Japanese ill-will toward Western democracies in World War II rapidly dissipated, thanks to the bitter pill of defeat; friendship soon followed.

The conventional wisdom that conflicts are best resolved through negotiation and compromise simply isn't true.

Today's conventional wisdom holds that conflicts are best resolved through negotiation and compromise. But let's look at the facts. After 40 years of negotiations to reunite Cyprus, the island remains divided, and 60 years of standoff over the Korean peninsula have achieved little. In Syria, the killing continues unabated despite five years of talks to reconcile Sunnis and Alawites. And at the same time, years of diplomatic efforts to roll back Iran's nuclear program ended with the West's capitulation to Tehran's demands.

The negotiations fallacy is especially evident in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The crux of the conflict is simple: Israel wants to survive; the Palestinian leadership wants to destroy it. Some Palestinian leaders make no secret of this. Hamas leaders' open incitement to violence spawned the so-called "stabbing intifada," and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas praises the Palestinian "martyrs" and names streets after them. Others talk peace but demand a Palestinian "right of return" to Israel, a requirement that would effectively eviscerate the Jewish state by allowing millions of Arabs of Palestinian descent to resettle permanently within Israel's borders. But no matter their angle, all Palestinian leaders preach hatred towards Israel.

American policy has long been to prevent Israel from achieving a decisive military victory over its adversaries.

American policy has long been to prevent Israel from achieving a decisive military victory over its adversaries. In 1956, President Eisenhower forced Israel to abandon its territorial gains from the Suez Crisis. Similarly, following the 1967 Six Day War, the U.S. helped engineer a U.N. resolution calling on Israel to return unspecified "territories occupied" in the war. The Reagan administration stopped Israel from obliterating Yasser Arafat's PLO forces in Lebanon in 1982, and, most recently, the Obama administration pressured Israel to limit its objectives in its 2014 war with Hamas. These concessions, which are often unilateral and irreversible, include settlement freezes, prisoner releases and forfeiture of territory.

Such policies deliver pernicious results; American "restraint" of Israel encourages its enemies to take risks. Much like government bailouts encourage banks to make high-risk, high-payoff investments by removing the consequences of failure, Israel's adversaries need not fret over irrevocable loss because they know the international community will admonish Israel for any gains it achieves.

Moreover, restraining Israel legitimizes and nourishes Palestinian rejectionism, defined as the refusal to acknowledge Israeli sovereignty and right of Jews to live in their ancestral homeland. Because it knows there will be no consequences for its sophisticated propaganda war, the Palestinian Authority can continue to demonize Israel. "To become a normal people, one whose parents do not encourage their children to become suicide terrorists, Palestinian Arabs need to undergo the crucible of defeat," writes Middle East Forum President Daniel Pipes.

The fear of crushing defeat is a potent weapon in neutralizing Palestinian resistance.

When Israel has licensure, without American opprobrium, to unleash its military might after a Palestinian rocket or terror attack, as when Liberman ordered over 50 airstrikes on Hamas military infrastructure in Gaza in response to one rocket, the Palestinians retreat. The fear of crushing defeat is a potent weapon in neutralizing Palestinian resistance.

America's handling of the Arab-Israeli conflict is preventing the kind of metamorphosis in Palestinian thinking about Israel that peace requires. It's time for Washington to allow Israel to demolish the Palestinian dream of a one-state solution, free of Jews. As Ronald Reagan said regarding the US fight against communism, the only way to "win is if they lose."

This doesn't mean the U.S. should support a winner-take-all settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But we must dispense with the fallacy that Israel is only a concession or two away from an American-brokered diplomatic breakthrough. As Gen. Douglas MacArthur said famously, "there is no substitute for victory."
 

 

Gregg Roman is director of the Middle East Forum.

Source: http://www.meforum.org/6269/israel-win-lose-solution

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Does Hillary Have Parkinson’s Disease? - Jay Michaels

by Jay Michaels

There are those who vociferously deny that Hillary has Parkinson's Disease, but Dr. Noel makes a very persuasive case in this video

Dr. Ted Noel, former Director of the NovaMed Surgery Center in Orlando, has recently released a video replying to critics of his earlier analysis of Hillary’s medical condition.  That video makes a detailed, persuasive case that Parkinson’s disease best explains the neurological and other symptoms Hillary has displayed since 2005.  Those who haven’t seen it should take a look.


 

Jay Michaels

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/09/does_hillary_have_parkinsons_disease.html

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Fifteen Years after 9/11, and America Still Sleeps - Bruce Thornton

by Bruce Thornton

How much worse will the destruction and death have to be to wake us up?

Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center​.

Fifteen years after the carnage of 9/11, American foreign policy is still mired in its fossilized dogmas and dangerous delusions. The consequences are obvious. Iran, the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism and long an avowed enemy of the United States, has filled the vacuum of our ignominious retreat from the Middle East, even as the mullahs move ever closer to possessing nuclear weapons. Russia, Iran’s improbable ally, bombs civilians in Syria, kills the Syrian fighters we have trained, bullies its neighbor Ukraine, consolidates its take-over of the Crimea, and relentlessly pursues its interests with disregard for international law and contempt for our feeble protests. Iraq, for which thousands of Americans bled and died, is now a puppet state of Iran. Afghanistan is poised to be overrun by the Taliban in a few years, and ISIS, al Qaeda 2.0, continues to inspire franchises throughout the world and to murder European and American citizens.

So much for the belief, frequently heard in the months after the attacks of 9/11, that “this changes everything.” The smoking ruins and 3000 dead surely had awoken us from our delusions that the “end of history” and a “new world order” had followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, “a world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice. A world where the strong respect the rights of the weak,” as George H.W. Bush said in 1990.  The following decade seemed to confirm this optimism. Didn’t we quickly slap down the brutal Saddam Hussein and stop his aggression against his neighbors? Didn’t we punish the Serbs for their revanchist depredations in the Balkans? With American military power providing the muscle, the institutions of international cooperation like NATO, the International Court of Justice, and the U.N. Security Council would patrol and protect the network of new democracies that were set to evolve into versions of Western nations and enjoy such boons as individual rights, political freedom, leisure and prosperity, tolerance for minorities, equality for women, and a benign secularism.

The gruesome mayhem of 9/11 should have alerted us to the fact many Muslims didn’t get the memo about history’s demise. Indeed, long before that tragic day in September, we had been serially warned that history still had some unpleasant surprises. Theorists of neo-jihadism like Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb for decades had laid out the case for war against the infidel West and its aggression against Islam. “It is the nature of Islam,” al-Banna wrote, “to dominate not to be dominated, to impose its laws on all nations and extend its power to the entire planet.” So too the leader of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the Ayatollah Khomeini: “Those who study jihad will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world,” which is why “Islam says: Kill all the unbelievers.” The kidnapping of U.S. diplomatic personnel in Tehran by a group called “Muslim Students Following the Line of the Imam [Khomeini]” sent us a message that we were engaged in the religious war the jihadists warned would come. But few of those responsible for our security and interests had ears to hear or eyes to see.

Not even when the words became bloody deeds did we listen. The bombing of the Beirut Marine barracks in 1983, which killed 241 servicemen, was supported by Iran and executed by its proxy terrorist group Hezbollah. Our refusal to respond reflected our failure to take seriously Khomeini’s vow to spread his revolution to the whole world. The humiliating televised abuse of our dead soldiers in Mogadishu in 1993, followed by our withdrawal, was exploited by Osama bin Laden in his sermons as signs that America had “foundations of straw.” That same year came the first World Trade Center attack, which killed six and wounded 1,042, an operation inspired by al Qaeda and traditional jihadist doctrine. In 1995 five Americans were killed by al Qaeda operatives at a training facility in Riyadh. In 1996 a truck bomb exploded in front of a residential complex housing Air Force personnel near Dhahran, killing 19 Americans. In 1998 al Qaeda bombed our embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Twelve Americans died in Nairobi. And the last warning came in October of 2000, when the destroyer Cole was attacked by a fishing boat loaded with explosive. Seventeen sailors died and 39 were wounded.

Yet during these two decades of attacks that proved the jihadists’ words were not just bluster, we did little in response. We interpreted the attacks as crimes, not battles in a war, and reflections of poverty, autocracy, or vague “evil,” rather than as the fulfillment of Allah’s divine commands. Instead, Clinton launched cruise missiles that made a lot of noise but accomplished nothing, limited as those attacks were by timid rules of engagement. His foreign policy was internationalist and idealist, seeing the spread of democracy and the promotion of human rights as paramount in foreign affairs. America’s presence needed to be reduced in the world, and the use of force should be a last resort, and even then carefully calibrated to avoid international condemnation and American casualties. “Dialogue” and “outreach” were preferable, for the jihadists were just defending “traditional values,” as one State Department official said. The wages of that delusion were the burned and dismembered bodies in Manhattan, the Pentagon, and a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

This history is worth reviewing, for all these mistakes, these failures of imagination, these indulgences of naïve idealism, these sacrifices of our security and interests to political advantage, all comprise the “everything” that 9/11 was supposed to “change.” But here we are, fifteen years later, with a similar history of folly. George W. Bush pursued a delusional program of democracy promotion in Iraq and Afghanistan, with scant appreciation for the profound cultural differences between Islam and the West. But he at least left his successor a stabilized Iraq, which Obama quickly abandoned just to fulfill a campaign promise and assert his progressive bona fides. Then Obama blustered that Syria’s “Assad has to go” and laid down “red lines” that were not to be crossed, only to do nothing when they were serially crossed, and to sacrifice this country’s credibility in his pursuit of the disastrous deal with Iran, our inveterate enemy stained with four decades’ worth of American blood. ISIS was allowed to flourish in the vacuum created by our withdrawal, creating a Hobbesian war of all against all, whose beneficiaries so far have been our rival Russia and our sworn enemy Iran.

Perhaps worst of all, Obama has turned jihad denial into a fatal disease. He is not alone in this delusion, for “religion of peace” and “nothing to do with Islam” have been mantras chanted by our foreign policy savants going back to the Iranian Revolution. No matter that al-Banna, Qutb, Khomeini, bin Laden, Ayman al Zawahiri, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and the mullahs in Iran all have grounded their violence and aggression in Islamic scripture and tradition. Our smug Western analysts and apologists dismiss the jihadists’ exegesis as a “hijacking” or “distortion” of the “true” Islam, presuming to understand the Islamic faith better than pious Muslims do. So we half-heartedly fight an enemy whose name we cannot even say, and whose religion of violence we desperately distort into a religion of peace and tolerance. Meanwhile, like Bill Clinton and now Obama, we use bombs and drones as telegenic marketing tools to hide our failure of nerve and short-sighted political calculations.

So fifteen years later, we still sleep. And don’t expect things to change after November. Neither candidate has shown any indication he or she is willing to make the hard decisions required to destroy ISIS and reaffirm American prestige. Trump issues vague threats about “bombing the shit” out of ISIS, while Hillary chatters about “smart power” and “coalitions,” doubling down on Obama’s failing policy. But no one proposes using the mind-concentrating levels of force, including troops as well as bombs, necessary to repair our broken foreign policy in the Middle East. Too many voters are in an isolationist mood, sick of wars and casualties, and concerned more about jobs and the economy.

The attacks on 9/11 supposedly “changed everything.” When it comes to foreign policy, they didn’t. One shudders to think how much worse the destruction and death will have to be to wake us up.

Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, a Research Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, and a Professor of Classics and Humanities at the California State University. He is the author of nine books and numerous essays on classical culture and its influence on Western Civilization. His most recent book, Democracy's Dangers and Discontents (Hoover Institution Press), is now available for purchase.

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/264092/fifteen-years-after-911-and-america-still-sleeps-bruce-thornton

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Reflections on 9/11's Vulnerabilities - Michael Cutler

by Michael Cutler

The failures that proved key factors in the attacks -- and how Obama has exacerbated them.

It is hard to believe that 15 years have passed since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001.
What may be overlooked as the news media discusses the attacks of 9/11 is that in 1993, more than 23 years ago, terrorists from the Middle East also carried out two deadly attacks in the United States.  
On January 25, 1993 a Pakistani citizen, Mir Aimal Kansi stood outside CIA Headquarters with an AK-47 and opened fire on the vehicles of CIA officials reporting for work.  When the smoke cleared, two CIA officer lay dead and three other were seriously wounded.  Kansi fled the United States and was ultimately brought back to stand trial.  He was found guilty and executed for his crimes. He had applied for political asylum.

Kansi's strategy of fleeing the United States after the attack is one often used by alien terrorists and criminals to evade U.S. law enforcement authorities.  These foreign nationals have a sort of “trap door” they can escape through and all too often, this tactic is successful. In the case of Kansi, however, because of the nature of his crimes, our government took the extraordinary measures of tracking him down and capturing him in Pakistan.  He was apprehended by American law enforcement agents who were assisted by Pakistani officials. The New York Times reported on his capture in an article published on June 18, 1997, “U.S. Seizes the Lone Suspect In Killing of 2 C.I.A. Officers.” 

On February 26, 1993, a bomb-laden truck was parked in the garage under the World Trade Center complex and detonated. The blast killed six innocent people and injured more than one thousand and inflicted an estimated one-half billion dollars in damages to that complex of buildings just blocks from Wall Street.

That attack was also carried out by alien terrorists who managed to not only game the visa process in order to enter the United States and get past the inspections process at ports of entry, but game the immigration benefits program as well.  

On May 20, 1997, I participated in my first congressional hearing. That hearing was conducted by the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims and was predicated on those two terror attacks.  The topic of that hearing was “Visa Fraud And Immigration Benefits Application Fraud.”

There were a number of additional hearings conducted by the House of Representatives and the United States Senate about the terror attacks of 1993 and fact that aliens seeking to launch terror attacks had been easily able to gain entry into the United States.

On February 24, 1998, just two days shy of the fifth anniversary of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the U.S. Senate's Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Technology, Terrorism and Government Information conducted a hearing on the topic, “Foreign terrorists in America : five years after the World Trade Center.”

That transcript and the transcript of other hearings have apparently been gathering dust. The hearing made it clear that failures of the immigration system were leaving our nation vulnerable to terrorists from foreign countries and yet, nothing of consequence was done about it.

It is notable that during the hearing Senator Dianne Feinstein hammered failures of the immigration system more than three years before the attacks of September 11, 2001 and included in her testimony this statement:

I am also concerned that we need to strengthen further our immigration laws and procedures to counter foreign terrorist operations. I have grave reservations regarding the practice of issuing visas to terrorist supporting countries and INS' inability to track those who come into the country either using a student visa or using fraudulent documents through the Visa Waiver Pilot Program. 

Now, however, when Donald Trump proposes blocking the entry of aliens from countries that sponsor terrorism, he is roundly accused of being an “extremist” by the media and by the Democrats.  

Yet Senator Diane Feinstein's comments about the wisdom of issuing visas to aliens from such problematic countries raised no such complaints in 1998.

Feinstein went on to state, in part:

The Richmond Times recently reported that the mastermind of Saddam Hussein's germ warfare arsenal, Rihab Taha, studied in England on a student visa. And England is one of the participating countries in the Visa Waiver Pilot Program, which means, if she could have gotten a fraudulent passport, she could have come and gone without a visa in the United States. 

The article also says that Rihab Taha, also known as "Dr. Germ," that her professors at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, speculate that she may have been sent to the West specifically to gain knowledge on biological weaponry. 

What is even more disturbing is that this is happening in our own backyard. 

The Washington Post reported on October 31, 1991, that U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq discovered documents detailing an Iraqi Government strategy to send students to the United States and other countries to specifically study nuclear-related subjects to develop their own program. Samir AJ-Araji was one of the students who received his doctorate in nuclear engineering from Michigan State University, and then returned to Iraq to head its nuclear weapons program. 

The Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy found in September 1997 that many terrorist-supporting states are sending their students to the United States to get training in chemistry, physics, and engineering which could potentially contribute to their home country's missile and nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs. 

If you think these issues have been addressed to protect us, you would be wrong.

On November 20, 2013, ABC News reported, “Exclusive: US May Have Let 'Dozens' of Terrorists Into Country As Refugees.”  This is not a new problem. On July 13, 2011 the Washington Times published a truly disturbing article, “Visas reviewed to find those who overstayed / Aim is to find any would-be terrorists.”

Consider that on September 2, 2014 ABC News reported, “Lost in America: Visa Program Struggles to "Track Missing Foreign Students."
Here is how this report began:

The Department of Homeland Security has lost track of more than 6,000 foreign nationals who entered the United States on student visas, overstayed their welcome, and essentially vanished -- exploiting a security gap that was supposed to be fixed after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks. 

"My greatest concern is that they could be doing anything," said Peter Edge, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement official who oversees investigations into visa violators. "Some of them could be here to do us harm." 

Homeland Security officials disclosed the breadth of the student visa problem in response to ABC News questions submitted as part of an investigation into persistent complaints about the nation’s entry program for students. 

ABC News found that immigration officials have struggled to keep track of the rapidly increasing numbers of foreign students coming to the U.S. -- now in excess of one million each year. The immigration agency’s own figures show that 58,000 students overstayed their visas in the past year. Of those, 6,000 were referred to agents for follow-up because they were determined to be of heightened concern. 

“They just disappear,” said Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla. “They get the visas and they disappear.” 

Coburn said since the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, 26 student visa holders have been arrested in the U.S. on terror-related charges. 

Tightening up the student visa program was one of the major recommendations made by the 9/11 Commission, after it was determined that the hijacker who flew Flight 77 into the Pentagon, Hani Hanjour, had entered the U.S. on a student visa but never showed up for school. 

It was clear to everyone that multiple failures of the immigration system enabled all of those terrorists to enter the United States and launch their deadly attacks in 1993.  Yet while some laws were enacted to address the vulnerabilities of the immigration system, those laws were of scant value because the former INS did not get any additional agents or other enforcement personnel.  In fact, the Clinton administration implemented a program, Citizenship USA (CUSA), which enabled an estimated 1.2 million aliens to acquire U.S. citizenship via the naturalization process.

That process required that the applications be moved so quickly that thousands of aliens were granted citizenship before their fingerprints were run through the system.  Moreover, to make certain that the bureaucratic machinery was able to move at “warp speed,” Doris Meissner, the Commissioner of the INS back then, decided to streamline the process for conferring citizenship to the point that many applications were adjudicated without even a face-to-face interview.

U.S. citizenship provides the “keys to the kingdom” and is a serious matter.  

The failures of the Clinton administration to address the vulnerabilities of the immigration system literally and figuratively left the door wide open for the terror attacks of 9/11.

On December 6, 2014 Fox News published a report, "Saudi-born US naval engineer allegedly gave undercover agent info on how to sink carrier" that focused on how Mostafa Ahmed Awwad was educated in the United States, became a resident alien and then acquired U.S. citizenship, and later agreed to provide an FBI undercover agent with the plans of the Gerald R. Ford, a 13-billion-dollar aircraft carrier that is still under construction and has brand-new unique innovations. Allegedly Awwad even told the undercover agent where the ship would be most vulnerable to being sunk by a missile strike. 

I addressed the significance of the naturalization process in terms of national security in my article, “The Immigration Factor – Naturalized U.S. Citizen Added to FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists List.”
The “War on Terror” grinds on and numerous additional terror attacks were attempted by radical Islamists within our borders and in countries around the world.  Fortunately not all of the attempted attacks were successful and our law enforcement officers were able to identify some terror plots before they could be carried out.  Yet some attacks, such as the Boston Marathon bombing of April 15, 2013 and the attack in San Bernardino on December 2, 2015, caused death, injuries and mayhem.

Once again, immigration failures were behind the ability of the terrorists to carry out these and other attacks.  Yet the administration continues to admit Syrian refugees who cannot be vetted, and so-called “sanctuary cities” go unpunished for harboring and shielding illegal aliens from detection by the federal government, in clear violation of our immigration laws and the findings and recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. 

The 9/11 Commission Staff Report on Terrorist Travel detailed numerous examples of instances where terrorists committed visa and immigration benefit fraud -- including political asylum fraud -- to enter and embed themselves in the United States.

Page 54 of the report contained the following excerpt under the title “3.2 Terrorist Travel Tactics by Plot”:

Although there is evidence that some land and sea border entries (of terrorists) without inspection occurred, these conspirators mainly subverted the legal entry system by entering at airports.

In doing so, they relied on a wide variety of fraudulent documents, on aliases, and on government corruption. Because terrorist operations were not suicide missions in the early to mid-1990s, once in the United States terrorists and their supporters tried to get legal immigration status that would permit them to remain here, primarily by committing serial, or repeated, immigration fraud, by claiming political asylum, and by marrying Americans. Many of these tactics would remain largely unchanged and undetected throughout the 1990s and up to the 9/11 attack.

Thus, abuse of the immigration system and a lack of interior immigration enforcement were unwittingly working together to support terrorist activity. It would remain largely unknown, since no agency of the United States government analyzed terrorist travel patterns until after 9/11. This lack of attention meant that critical opportunities to disrupt terrorist travel and, therefore, deadly terrorist operations were missed.

In my recent commentary, “Hillary Clinton’s Immigration Goals Would Irrevocably Undermine National Security,” I focused on how the fatally flawed adjudications process conducted by USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services), which has provided terrorists with political asylum and even United States citizenship, would require the beleaguered employees of USCIS to provide unknown millions of illegal aliens with lawful status under the aegis of Clinton's amnesty program.

There would be no ability to conduct in-person interviews or field investigations, hence no way to verify their identities, backgrounds or possible affiliation with criminal or terrorist organizations.  There would be no way to determine when, where or how they actually entered the United States.
Ms. Clinton has certainly not learned the lessons of 9/11. 

Michael Cutler is a retired Senior Special Agent of the former INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) whose career spanned some 30 years. He served as an Immigration Inspector, Immigration Adjudications Officer and spent 26 years as an agent who rotated through all of the squads within the Investigations Branch. For half of his career he was assigned to the Drug Task Force. He has testified before well over a dozen congressional hearings, provided testimony to the 9/11 Commission as well as state legislative hearings around the United States and at trials where immigration is at issue. He hosts his radio show, “The Michael Cutler Hour,” on Friday evenings on BlogTalk Radio. His personal website is http://michaelcutler.net/. Read More

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/264107/reflections-911s-vulnerabilities-michael-cutler

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Western Publishers Submit to Islam - Giulio Meotti

by Giulio Meotti

At a time when dozens of novelists, journalists and scholars are facing Islamists' threats, it is unforgivable that Western publishers not only agree to bow down, but are often the first to capitulate.

• For criticizing Islam, Hamed Abdel-Samad lives under police protection in Germany and, as with Rushdie, a fatwa hangs over him. After the fatwa come the insults: being censored by a free publishing house. This is what the Soviets did to destroy writers: destroy their books.
• A Paris court convicted Renaud Camus for "Islamophobia" (a fine of 4,000 euros) for a speech he gave in 2010, in which he spoke of the replacement of the French people under the Trojan horse of multiculturalism. Another writer, Richard Millet, was fired last March by Gallimard publishing house for his ideas on multiculturalism.
• Not only did Rushdie's publishers capitulate; other publishers also decided to break rank and return to do business with Tehran. Oxford University Press decided to take part in the Tehran Book Fair along with two American publishers, McGraw-Hill and John Wiley. Those publishers chose to respond to murderous censorship with surrender.
• It is as if at the time of the Nazis' book-burnings, Western publishers had not only stood silent, but had also invited a German delegation to Paris and New York.

When Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses came out in 1989, Viking Penguin, the British and American publisher of the novel, was subjected to daily Islamist harassment. As Daniel Pipes wrote, the London office resembled "an armed camp," with police protection, metal detectors and escorts for visitors. In Viking's New York offices, dogs sniffed packages and the place was designated a "sensitive location". Many bookshops were attacked and many even refused to sell the book. Viking spent about $3 million on security measures in 1989, the fatal year for Western freedom of expression.

Nonetheless, Viking never flinched. It was a miracle that the novel finally came out. Other publishers, however, faltered. Since then, the situation has only gotten worse. Most Western publishers are now faltering. That is the meaning of the new Hamed Abdel-Samad affair.

The Muslim Brotherhood gave Abdel-Samad all that an Egyptian boy could wish for: spirituality, camaraderie, companionship, a purpose. In Giza, Hamed Samad became part of the Brotherhood. His father had taught him the Koran; the Brotherhood explained him how to translate these teachings into practice.

Abdel-Samad repudiated them after one day in the desert. The Brothers had given all the new militants an orange after they had walked under the sun for hours. They were ordered to peel it. Then the Brotherhood asked them to bury the fruit in the sand, and to eat the peel. The next day, Abdel-Samad left the organization. It was the humiliation needed to turn a human being into a terrorist.

Abdel-Samad today is 46 years old and lives in Munich, Germany, where he married a Danish girl and works for the Institute of Jewish History and Culture at the University of Munich. In his native Egyptian village, his first book caused an uproar. Some Muslims wanted to burn it.

Abdel-Samad's recent book, Der Islamische Faschismus: Eine Analyse, has just been burned at the stake not in Cairo by Islamists, but in France by some of the self-righteous French.

The book is a bestseller in Germany, where it has been published by the well-known publisher, Droemer Knaur. An English translation has been published in the U.S. by Prometheus Books, under the title Islamic Fascism. Two years ago, the French publisher, Piranha, acquired the rights to translate Abdel-Samad's book about "Islamic Fascism" into French. A publication date was even posted on Amazon: September 16. But at the last moment, the publisher stopped its release. Jean-Marc Loubet, head of the publishing house, announced to Abdel-Samad's agent that the publication of his book is now unthinkable in France, not only for security reasons, but also because it would reinforce the "extreme right".

For criticizing Islam, Abdel-Samad lives under police protection in Germany and, as with Rushdie, a fatwa hangs over him. After the fatwa come the insults: being censored by a free publishing house. This is what the Soviets did to destroy writers: destroy his books.

Mr. Abdel-Samad's case is not new. At a time when dozens of novelists, journalists and scholars are facing Islamists' threats, it is unforgivable that Western publishers not only agree to bow down, but are often the first to capitulate.

For criticizing Islam, Hamed Abdel-Samad lives under police protection in Germany and, as with Rushdie, a fatwa hangs over him. After the fatwa come the insults: being censored by a free publishing house.

In France, for criticizing Islam in a column titled "We refuse to change civilization" for the daily newspaper, Le Monde, the famous writer, Renaud Camus, lost his publisher, Fayard.

Before he suddenly became "unpopular" in the Paris's literary establishment, Renaud Camus had been friends with Louis Aragon, the famous Communist poet and founder of surrealism, and was close joining "the immortals" of the French Academy. Roland Barthes, the star of the Collège de France, had written the preface to Renaud Camus' most famous novel, Tricks, the cult-classic book of gay culture.

Then a Paris court convicted Camus for "Islamophobia" (a fine of 4,000 euros), for a speech he gave on December 18, 2010, in which he spoke of "Grand Remplacement", the replacement of the French people under the Trojan horse of multiculturalism. It was then that Camus became persona non grata in France.

The Jewel of Medina, a novel by the American writer Sherry Jones about the life of the third wife of Muhammad, was first purchased and then scrapped by the powerful publisher Random House, which had already paid her an advance and launched an ambitious promotional campaign. Sherry Jones's new publisher, Gibson Square, was then firebombed by Islamists in London.

Then there was Yale University Press, which published a book by Jytte Klausen, "The Cartoons That Shook the World", on the history of the controversial "Mohammad cartoons" that were published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005, and crisis that followed. But Yale University Press published the book without the cartoons, and without any other images of the Muslim prophet Mohammad that were to be included.

"The capitulation of Yale University Press to threats that hadn't even been made yet is the latest and perhaps the worst episode in the steady surrender to religious extremism -- particularly Muslim religious extremism -- that is spreading across our culture," commented the late Christopher Hitchens. Yale was possibly hoping to get in line for the same $20 million donation from Saudi Arabia's Prince Al-Wwaleed bin Talal that he had just bestowed upon George Washington University and Harvard.

In Germany, Gabriele Brinkmann, a popular novelist, was also suddenly left without a publisher. According to her publisher, Droste, the novel Wem Ehre Geburt ("To Whom Honor Gives Birth") could be judged as "insulting to Muslims" and expose the publisher to intimidation. Brinkmann was asked to censor some passages; she refused and lost the publishing house.

This same cowardice and capitulation now pervades the entire publishing industry. Last year, Italy's most prestigious book fair in Turin chose (then shelved) Saudi Arabia as its guest of honor, despite the many writers and bloggers who are imprisoned in the Islamic kingdom. Raif Badawi was sentenced to 1,000 lashes and a 10-year sentence, and a $260,000 fine.

Many Western publishers are now also "rejecting works by Israeli authors", according Time.com, despite their political views.

It was after Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses that many Western publishing houses first bowed to intimidation. Christian Bourgois, a French publishing house, refused to publish The Satanic Verses after having bought the rights, as did the German publisher, Kiepenheuer, who apparently said he regretted having acquired the rights to the book and chose to sell them to a consortium of fifty publishers from Germany, Austria and Switzerland, gathered under the name "UN-Charta Artikel 19."

Not only did Rushdie's publishers capitulate; other publishers also decided to break ranks and return to do business with Tehran. Oxford University Press decided to take part in the Tehran Book Fair, along with two American publishers, McGraw-Hill and John Wiley, despite the request of Rushdie's publisher, Viking Penguin, to boycott the Iranian event. Those publishers chose to respond to murderous censorship with surrender, willing to sacrifice freedom of expression on the altar of business as usual: selling books was more important than solidarity with threatened colleagues.

It is as if at the time of the Nazis' book-burnings, Western publishers had not only stood silent, but had also invited a German delegation to Paris and New York. Is it so unimaginable today?

Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author.

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/8907/islam-publishers-censorship

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Qatari Prof Al-Ansari: Terrorism Is Not A Reaction To Injustice - MEMRI

by MEMRI

Commenting on what he called the "culture of hatred," Prof. Abd Al-Hamid Al-Ansari, former Dean of Islamic Law at Qatar University, called to interpret the Quranic texts "in a progressive, humanistic way"

Commenting on what he called the "culture of hatred," Prof. Abd Al-Hamid Al-Ansari, former Dean of Islamic Law at Qatar University, called to interpret the Quranic texts "in a progressive, humanistic way" in order to shield the youth from ideological fanaticism and to break away from the "discriminating, fanatic, and racist aspects" of our past. Prof. Al-Ansari, speaking on Sky News Arabia on August 5, said that while terrorism is often described as a reaction to political injustices, "this is not true. It's an illusion. Terrorism is an action, not a reaction." 

Following are excerpts:

Click here to view this clip on MEMRI TV 

Abd Al-Hamid Al-Ansari: "The roots of the culture of hatred, or the rhetoric of hatred, go way back, to the days of the kharijites, the first terrorist organization, which rebelled against the best Islamic society, the society of the companions of the Prophet Muhammad. The culture of hatred has numerous roots: erroneous religious notions, like the distorted concept of Jihad prevalent today, the concept of "loyalty and disavowal," which is, in fact, hatred of people who subscribe to other religions."

[…]

Interviewer: "Aren't there prominent religious texts that... You are a professor of shari'a, and former Dean of Islamic Law at Qatar University... Don't we have a problem with some religious texts, which are hostile towards the other?"

Abd Al-Hamid Al-Ansari: "Texts can be interpreted in various ways. You can interpret texts in a progressive, humanistic way, especially the Quranic texts. The Quran is meant to instill values and morals and to prevent injustice. We all know that. But texts are always formed within a specific social reality."

Interviewer: "Or they are exploited for certain political goals..."

Abd Al-Hamid Al-Ansari: "Right.

[…]

"I believe that the arts, especially music, make the soul more humanistic. The arts are a means of shielding our sons against the ideology of extremism, because music makes you love life. All forms of art make you love people, love life. They make you more humane, more tolerant. If you manage to instill this within the minds of the youth, you shield them from ideological fanaticism. you shield them from ideological fanaticism. Fanaticism takes control over people who hate life, whose hearts are empty.

[…]

"Our main obstacle, in my opinion, is our clinging to the past, to our heritage. The Arab individual is programmed to glorify the past. We are unable to break away from our heritage of fanaticism. I am not saying that we must break away from our past - only from its negative and inhumane aspects, its discriminating, fanatic, and racist aspects.

[…]

"Any great scholar or jurisprudent who died 1,000 years ago is glorified, and people cling to his sayings, even though these sayings - his rulings, his fatwas - were solutions to problems of his days. If he banned music or the construction of churches, should I ban them too?

[…]

"The problem of terrorism is a problem of diagnosis. If you do not diagnose a disease correctly, you cannot treat it properly. Most of the people who diagnosed terrorism have described it as a reaction to political injustices. For example, they talk about the torture of Muslim Brotherhood members in prison, in the days of Abdel Nasser. Or they describe terrorism as a reaction to "extreme secularism." Dr. Muhammad Ammarah says in his book that "extreme secularism" gave rise to [Islamic] extremism. He says that the secularists' provocations and their mocking of religious symbols are what gave birth to terrorism. These people talk about the tyranny of Arab regimes..."

Interviewer: "In your view, these are all pretexts?"

[…]

Abd Al-Hamid Al-Ansari: "It is always [a reaction]. They also talk about Western injustices, about Israel. They say: "Look at the annihilation of Muslims. America and the West are annihilating the Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the [Muslims] are wreaking vengeance on the West. [Terrorism] is a reaction." This is not true. It's an illusion. Terrorism is an action, not a reaction. The fanatic ideology has existed among us since the days of the kharijites."

[…]

"Are we supposed to wait for the problem of the Middle East to be resolved, so that the terrorism will come to an end?!"

View The Clip

MEMRI

Source: http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/5649.htm

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What the Alt-Right is Really About - Milo Yiannopoulos

by Milo Yiannopoulos

Conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos appeared on CNBC late last week to offer his take on a variety of controversies, from Twitter to Colin Kaepernick, as well as his interpretation of the dreaded alt-right movement with which he has been associated, although in this clip he states "I've never identified with the alt-right." The CNBC panel was unprepared for the Milo whirlwind that ensued. Check out this entertaining and perhaps even enlightening video.

Milo Yiannopoulos

Source: http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/milo-what-alt-right-really-about

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