05/17/16

Islamist London

By: Andrew McCarthy | Accuracy in Media

I am afraid that grim reality requires choosing the second of David Pryce-Jones’s two ways of looking at London’s election of Sadiq Khan as mayor: By choosing an enabler of Muslim extremism, the British are losing control of their destiny.

In the run-up to the mayoral election, the invaluable Daniel Johnson, editor ofStandpoint, provided the essential backdrop:

Indeed, what has emerged before our eyes in Britain is a kind of Islamist state within a state…. A new survey by ICM with the former head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Trevor Phillips, for Channel Four and the Sunday Times confirms that Salafists are fast becoming the dominant influence on British Islam. Nearly a quarter (23 per cent) of a sample of 1,081 adult Muslims want to see “areas of Britain in which sharia law is introduced instead of British law”. Nearly a third (31 per cent) of them think “it is acceptable for a British Muslim to keep more than one wife”, even though polygamy is in theory punishable by up to five years imprisonment. Wives should “always obey their husbands”, according to 39 per cent; the survey did not ask about the Koran’s injunction to husbands to “chastise” their wives, but Trevor Phillips sees it as “a clear invitation to legitimise domestic violence”. About 5 per cent of British Muslims sympathise with stoning adulterers. That may seem a small percentage, but only 66 per cent completely condemn such executions. This suggests that about a third would go along with such punishments under certain circumstances.

The most striking of all the ICM statistics concern homosexuality. Only 18 per cent of Muslims think it should be legal in Britain, while more than half (52 per cent) would ban it. Up to half of the latter group, it is fair to assume, also support sharia law, which prescribes the death penalty for homosexuality. If most British Muslims hold such hostile attitudes towards same-sex attraction, it is not surprising that – to take one example – a recent gay participant on the TV reality show First Dates explained how he had been beaten up by other Muslims so badly that he was in hospital for months….

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06/10/15

The Clinton Record on Libya

By: Kenneth Timmerman
Accuracy in Media

Exclusive to Accuracy in Media
The emails show more than you might think

On August 21, 2011, a top aide to Hillary Clinton penned a memo lauding his boss for steering U.S. policy in Libya, aimed at convincing the media of her accomplishments as Secretary of State.

“HRC has been a critical voice on Libya in administration deliberations, at NATO, and in contact group meetings—as well as the public face of the U.S. effort in Libya. She was instrumental in securing the authorization, building the coalition, and tightening the noose around Qadhafi and his regime,” Clinton aide Jake Sullivan wrote.

Sullivan’s memo to Mrs. Clinton’s inner circle is, of course, embarrassing today, which is one reason you are not reading about it on the front pages of The New York Times or The Washington Post.

But that’s not the only reason.

The memo, as well as other critical State Department correspondence, was withheld from multiple committees in Congress that have been investigating the September 11, 2012 attacks in Benghazi that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, State Department communications officer Sean Smith, and two former Navy Seals then working on contract to the CIA, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods.

It finally surfaced on May 22, 2015, in response to a subpoena from the Select Committee on Benghazi chaired by South Carolina Republican Congressman Trey Gowdy. That was six months after Gowdy’s initial request to the State Department for all documents relating to Benghazi, and more than two-and-a-half years after a similar request from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which initiated its investigation into Benghazi just days after the attacks.

In Sullivan’s memo, Mrs. Clinton was the driving force in getting the Russians to drop opposition to a UN-imposed no fly zone on Qadhafi’s Libya. She alone got Turkey, Qatar and Jordan to join the coalition military operations and to provide critical support to the anti-Qadhafi forces.

To convince skeptical allies to embrace her policies, Sullivan noted that Mrs. Clinton had traveled to Paris, London, Berlin, Rome, Abu Dhabi, Addis Ababa and Istanbul. She visited with “House Democrats and Senate Republicans to persuade them not to de-fund the Libya operation.”

Sullivan’s memo provided background for media appearances by Secretary Clinton in the ensuing months, including a famous encounter with a TV news reporter in Afghanistan, just three days after Mrs. Clinton’s October 2011 visit to Libya to proclaim victory against the then-still-missing Libyan dictator.

In video outtakes, Clinton aide Huma Abedin hands the Secretary a Blackberry, with information that Colonel Qadhafi has been killed, apparently just hours after Mrs. Clinton’s brief visit to the country.

“We came, we saw, he died,” Mrs. Clinton joked.

In short, without Mrs. Clinton’s vigorous intervention, Qadhafi would still be in power, Libya would still be a country, and the jihadis who now own the place would be toast. And, of course, Chris Stevens, Smith, Doherty and Woods would still be alive.

After the attacks, Mrs. Clinton quickly forgot her leading role on Libya, sending a clueless Susan Rice to the Sunday talk shows to be the “public face” of the Obama administration’s Libya policy.

In her only public appearances to address what happened in Benghazi, she portrayed herself as a disengaged onlooker, called upon to pick up the pieces when the hired help failed to get things right. “[It] was very disappointing to me that the [Accountability Review Board (ARB)] concluded there were inadequacies and problems in the responsiveness of our team here in Washington to the security requests that were made by our team in Libya. And I was not aware of that going on. It was not brought to my attention,” she told the House Foreign Affairs committee in January 2013.

She reminded House and Senate panels in January 2013 that the State Department’s ARB, which she appointed, had determined that the failures in Benghazi were entirely the responsibility of lower level officials, even though Libya was among the top ten most dangerous postings in the world at the time of the attacks. The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler busily helped to reinforce that fiction in a “fact-checking” blog aimed to show that there were simply too many cables going in and out of the State Department for a busy Secretary to see all of them.

Interestingly, in the approximately 300 Clinton emails the State Department has released so far, there is no record of Mrs. Clinton’s original request to her staff to draft a memo lauding her achievements in Libya. Did Sullivan simply dream up the idea and forward it up the chain of command to see if it would please his boss? Or was Mrs. Clinton’s request for these talking points one of the 30,000 “personal” emails the former Secretary of State deleted as irrelevant to her official duties?

Mrs. Clinton’s chief of staff Cheryl Mills forwarded Sullivan’s August 2011 memo to a second private Hillary email address. Remember how she insisted that she had just one private email account? The memo included a note that said, “Here’s the memo.” That sounds an awful lot like, “Here’s the memo you requested.”

Hillary sent it on to her personal assistant with the instruction, “Pls print for me.”

This type of exchange gets repeated many times in the Clinton emails released so far, suggesting that Mrs. Clinton was not given to making substantive comments via email, or that she deleted material that is relevant to the House Select Committee on Benghazi and is therefore guilty of obstructing justice. The other possibility is that the State Department Freedom of Information office is inexplicably dragging its feet in clearing Mrs. Clinton’s correspondence, even though the delay casts Mrs. Clinton in an embarrassing light.

Judicial Watch and other watchdog organizations—including this author—had been trying to get Mrs. Clinton’s emails and other U.S. government documents relevant to the Benghazi attacks for the past two-and-a-half years without success until the subpoena from the Select Committee on Benghazi compelled a response.

Now, thanks to a federal court order in Washington, DC, compelling the State Department to produce additional documents it previously had said did not exist or were properly categorized as classified, we can now put Mrs. Clinton’s emails into a broader context.

As the first reports of the attacks on Benghazi were whizzing through the State Department Operations Center, bouncing off the computers of lower level employees, one is impressed by their professionalism.

For example, the British security firm that had the contract to guard the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi sent several ungrammatical missives through a State Department contact to update him on what was happening during the attacks.

Dylan Davies, one of the contractors working for the security firm, was apparently holed up in his hotel room (not at the scene of the Compound leading a daring rescue attempt, as he told CBS’ 60 Minutes), with no information at 11:55 p.m. local time—by which time, Ambassador Stevens and Sean Smith were dead, the CIA contractors led by Ty Woods had driven the attackers away from the burning diplomatic compound, and evacuated back to the CIA Annex.

A half hour later, Davies sent a second report, claiming there had been “no casualties,” and relaying a hearsay report from his “Benghazi facilitator,” who claimed that sources on the street were telling him the attack was either a September 11^th anniversary attack, or caused by an Internet movie “disrespecting Mohammed.”

In relaying those reports, the State Department’s Command Center cautioned that they should be “taken with a grain of salt as the Employee may not be aware of the extent of the situation.”

And yet, less than four hours later—with no other independent reporting that had been released—Hillary Clinton issued her statement blaming the attacks on an Internet video.

What happened in the meantime? Who pushed the idea of the Internet video?

The short answer is that:we still don’t know. Either Mrs. Clinton destroyed the emails and other documents showing how she latched onto a report her own specialists had rejected as hearsay, or perhaps the Archangel Gabriel whispered in her ear while she had her head in a closet in her 7^th floor office suite.

Several emails released to Judicial Watch show the intense involvement of the Bureau of Public Affairs in scouring the Internet for information on the attacks, but nothing to suggest the Secretary of State was asking the intelligence community what they knew.

At 9:30 p.m,—just 40 minutes before Mrs. Clinton issued her official statement blaming the attacks on a YouTube video—Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Dana Shell Smith sent out a request to her reporting officers to find information “in the aftermath of today’s demonstrations at Embassy Cairo.” For whatever reason, her request failed to mention Benghazi.

Rebecca Brown Thompson, head of a State Department media office called the “Rapid Response Unit” (reminiscent of the Clinton campaign “war room”), responded by sending snippets from Facebook postings gleaned by Arabic language media analysts.

“I see a variety of responses spanning from conspiracy theories (that is what the Americans and Israelis are doing on purpose to hurt Arabs and Muslims, they financed the offensive movie), to those who condemn the attacks as ‘UnIslamic and barbaric,’” one analyst reported.

Two hours after Mrs. Clinton issued the statement blaming the attacks on the “inflammatory material posted on the Internet,” a second Arabic media analyst tasked with justifying that statement found a lone tweet about the film, but also reported that “some Twitter users in Libya and Egypt are spreading reports that the attacks in Libya may not be related to the infamous film but to the killing of Al Qaeda’s second in command, who is Libyan.”

The “infamous” film, which was much less well known in Libya than in Egypt, became the subject of a scurrilous account appearing the very next morning that was penned by Max Blumenthal, son of the infamous Sid “Vicious” Blumenthal who was advising Mrs. Clinton. It was picked up and amplified in a second attack blog posted at 6:56 a.m. the same morning, suggesting that the real blame for the attacks in Cairo and Benghazi fell on Mitt Romney and his “extremist” backers who produced this YouTube video in the first place.

Once information from the professionals rose to the level of Jake Sullivan, Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills in Clinton’s office, it just seemed to disappear, replaced with a weird concoction of politics, public relations and outright fantasy, such as the YouTube video concoction or the Sid Blumenthal “intelligence” reports. (When Mrs. Clinton sent those around to the professional diplomats, the comments she received in response were rarely complimentary.)

The 300 recently released Clinton emails give the impression that the 7^th floor of the State Department was inhabited by a bunch of grad students, pretending to be government officials.

The most tragic example of the apparent ignorance of how the State Department and the federal government actually worked appeared in Mrs. Clinton’s order to not engage the Foreign Emergency Support Team (FEST), an interagency team on 24/7 stand-by alert, that had been created to respond to just such an emergency as the Benghazi attacks.

Counterterrorism Bureau official Mark Thompson, who helped to establish the FEST after the 1998 Africa embassy attacks, testified at length before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee about this on May 8, 2013.

The Judicial Watch emails include a frustrated note he sent to the State Department Operations Center at 9:01 p.m. on the night of the attacks, complaining that Secretary Clinton was trying to get the FBI to send an evidence response team to Libya, when “the State (CT) led Foreign Emergency Support Team (FEST) would include those folks, along with experts from other agencies. We should avoid multiple requests for assistance and rely on the comprehensive FEST approach.”

In his Congressional testimony, Thompson said he had tried to get Mrs. Clinton’s office and the White House to approve activating the FEST as soon as he first learned about the attacks from the State Operations Center, but was told “it was not the right time and it was not the team that needed to go right then.”

The redacted portions of Thompson’s email undoubtedly included a reference to the heavily-armed special operations component of the FEST whose job would be to secure the facility under attack. Had Secretary Clinton not told the FEST to stand down early on, there’s a chance they might have arrived in Benghazi before Woods and Doherty were killed in the 5 a.m. mortar attack the next morning.

At the very least, they would have been able to secure the compounds and gather evidence on the spot, instead of waiting three weeks as the FBI was ultimately forced to do.

Mrs. Clinton’s aversion to any overt U.S. military presence in Libya was well-known at U.S. Africa Command, which had been supplying the ambassador’s security detail up until just weeks before the attacks. “We were not allowed to wear uniforms outside the embassy compound, not even our boots,” the head of Stevens’ U.S. Special Forces security detail told me. “People high up at State resented like Hell us being there and doing what we did.”

And in the end, those same people ordered the Ambassador’s Special Forces security detail to leave Libya—with disastrous consequences.

03/23/15

Overwrought

Arlene from Israel

That’s been the overriding climate here in Israel for several days now – whether it is a mood of anguish or of euphoria, it has all been rather frenetic.

In the days leading up to the election, I observed (and experienced) a mood akin to grief, at the prospect that Buji Herzog might win; this then morphed into jubilation at the subsequent electoral victory of Bibi.

But in some quarters on the right, there was an over-reaction. Bibi was hailed as the leader of the free world (there is a case for this, as he’s the only one who has spoken out on Iran with courage), and it was assumed that he would now have the latitude to move forward in significant ways. There was even an assumption voiced that he would now be able to annex Judea and Samaria.

Because he garnered 30 mandates? He still has to face down the world, and form his coalition. Ain’t gonna happen now, no how, however fervent the desire that it should.

~~~~~~~~~~

What Bibi had said in the course of the last days of the campaign was that there would be no Palestinian state established on his watch as prime minister. The day before the election, in an interview, he declared:

“Anyone who is going to establish a Palestinian state, anyone who is going to evacuate territories today, is simply giving a base for attacks to the radical Islam against Israel. This is the true reality that was created here in the last few years.” (Emphasis added)

Those on the left, who say otherwise, are “sticking their head in the sand, time and time again.”

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/03/16/middleeast/israel-netanyahu-palestinian-state/

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Bibi was only stating an obvious truth that anyone with a minimal grasp of the situation can see. His statement is not radical. It could have (we might have said, should have) gone further: No state, because it’s our land. But he didn’t say this.

~~~~~~~~~~

After the election, the Obama administration came out swinging at Bibi. The American government, it was announced, was going to be re-evaluating its relationship with Israel and might opt to change its policy regarding standing with us in the UN.

Again, enormous anxiety: What if the Security Council voted to demand that we move back to the ‘67 line, or created a full Palestinian state?

My own feeling on this was that there was a certain amount of grandstanding in this statement of “re-evaluation.” It was, quite simply, a threat: You don’t want to move with me in my desire to achieve a two-state solution? (Which solution is impossible anyway, but never mind that.) This is what you have to look forward to.

I believe that Obama will do whatever he can to damage us, that there is an irrational hatred at work with regard to how he responds to us. For example, he has just allowed a forty-year agreement guaranteeing that Israel would be able to purchase oil to lapse. A maliced act:

http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/analysis/j-e-dyer/obama-let-40-year-old-oil-supply-guarantee-to-israel-expire-in-november-2014/2015/03/17/0/

He should never, ever be trusted.

But at the same time, I believe he retains sufficient rationality to do what he perceives as being most prudent or in his own best interest – in terms of achieving his own goals, looking good, etc.

~~~~~~~~~~

My first thought on learning about the “re-evaluation” was that the possible scenarios in the UN that were being projected carried within them their own stumbling blocks: It was very likely not as simple as was being suggested. The UN, according to international law, cannot “create” a state; and to vote for Israel to move back to the ‘67 lines conflicts with Security Council Resolution 242, which said this was not required.

Israel, it seemed to me, had to consult with the finest of international lawyers, military advisors and diplomats and respond offensively. It might be pointed out, for example, that a UN resolution demanding that we move back to the ‘67 lines would render Oslo – which requires negotiations to determine a border – deader than dead. Deader than it already is now. We might let US officials know that if this were the case, there would be absolutely no cooperation with the Palestinian Authority at all from the day the vote was taken. No tax collection, no security provisions, no electricity or water, no cooperation in marketing of produce (all of these things spelled out in Oslo). Obama might think twice about this, and the repercussions that would follow.

~~~~~~~~~~

As it is, Netanyahu took the step of “explaining” what he meant. In an interview early on Thursday, he said:

“I don’t want a one-state solution. I want a sustainable, peaceful two-state solution. But for that, circumstances have to change.”

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4638988,00.html

In other words, don’t point a finger at me – my commitment has stayed the same. It’s the situation that is different.

Bibi was then accused here in Israel of backtracking on his pre-election position of no Palestinian state. But if you look carefully, it’s not quite so – although his emphasis has certainly shifted. Painful as it is to hear him reiterate commitment to a “two state solution,” he did say there would be no Palestinian state because of a changed situation; he never actually said that he had changed his mind on two-states, in principle.

~~~~~~~~~~

My first impulse was Oi! Did he have to say this? He backed off – or gave the appearance of backing off – in the face of Obama’s threats. This can come across as weakness and encourage even more threats.

But I’ve since re-thought the matter. The situation Bibi is facing on several fronts is horrendous. I think it behooves us to cut him a bit of slack here, if he has decided that minimizing the tensions with the US administration is in Israel’s best interest right now.

What must be watched carefully are the decisions he makes once there is a government. He has said that there will be no more releasing of prisoners as a “gesture.” If the PA should demand this, and Obama push for it, we must see that it does not happen. This, or similar other “gestures.”

~~~~~~~~~~

The big question is whether Bibi means it when he speaks of a “two-state solution,” whether he meant it when he gave his Bar Ilan speech. My guessing is that this is not his ideology, but his MO – which involves “playing the game” at some level, rather than being confrontational. If he says he is for two-states, but then refuses to move forward in real terms because of the security risks implicit, he will be holding the line for the short term. (We’ll get to the long term when there is recognition at the highest levels of government that we have legal rights in Judea and Samaria, and all of Jerusalem.)

~~~~~~~~~~

At first, Obama declared himself suspicious of the sincerity of Bibi’s statement. But by later on Thursday, he had called our prime minister to offer congratulations. Reports are that it was a “tough” conversation, but what was made public was that the two leaders had agreed to move forward on ways to find peace (whatever that means).

US Ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro, said today that there was no choice but to examine Netanyahu’s “confusing” statements. But he also indicated that at the moment there are no changes in policy.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/pms-comments-confusing-but-no-changes-yet-says-us-envoy/

~~~~~~~~~~

One of the things that I believe made Obama think twice regarding his attack on Netanyahu has been the response of several members of Congress.

Take the stunning speech by Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdMWbqZsyuM&feature=youtu.be

Or that of Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR), which is even stronger:

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=426721624156045

These distinguished gentleman forthrightly call Obama on his irrational antipathy to Netanyahu.

It is said that this very autocratic/non-democratic president does as he pleases. But this is not quite so. Congress can cut funding for programs that Obama wants to see sustained, and can use its leverage to make things difficult for a president who chooses to make matters difficult for Israel.

Senator Cotton has now said he will support legislation to cut US funding to the UN, if it takes action against Israel.

~~~~~~~~~~

And this morning Senator John McCain (R-AZ) severely criticized Obama on CNN:

Noting that Israel had a “free and fair” democratic election – “the only nation in the region that will have such a thing,” he said it’s time for Obama to “get over it,” if he doesn’t like the results.

“Get over your temper tantrum, Mr. President. It’s time that we work together with our Israeli friends and try to stem this tide of ISIS and Iranian movement throughout the region which is threatening the very fabric of the region. The least of your problems is what Bibi Netanyahu said during a reelection campaign.”

http://dailysignal.com/2015/03/22/mccain-obama-needs-to-get-over-his-temper-tantrum-about-netanyahus-reelection/

~~~~~~~~~~

I would like to briefly comment on one accusation that is being made against Netanyahu: It is being said that he made “racist” remarks against Israeli Arabs during the election, pointing out that they were coming to vote in large numbers, which required the right wing to come out in large numbers as well.

That is not quite accurate. Netanyahu’s concern was with the fact that US money had been utilized to promote the left in the campaign, and it was believed that US money was paying for the buses to bring the Arabs to the polls. This is clearly not as it should be, and he was calling for a strong response against it.

One very interesting news item helps put lie to the accusation that Netanyahu is racist: In one Bedouin village in the north of Israel, over 76% of the votes were cast for Netanyahu and Likud:

http://jewishbusinessnews.com/2015/03/19/bedouin-village-gave-76-of-its-votes-to-netanyahu/

~~~~~~~~~~

As to the election, the early stages of coalition building are in process now. I will write about this when next I post. It is not a pretty picture, not as I write tonight, at any rate.

~~~~~~~~~~

I cannot close without a mention of the vile/hateful/destructive and totally perverse positions of Obama, whatever his motivations (do NOT write to tell me what they are, please – this is rhetorical). Right after the elections here, the PLO moved to increase its connection with Hamas and Islamic Jihad in order to establish a “unity government.” I’ve lost count of how many times they’ve moved towards a unity government. But the point is that there can be no “negotiations” for a “two-state solution” if the PA is in bed with Hamas. And yet, from the Obama administration I’ve seen not a single word of criticism about this being “counterproductive” to peace – never mind threats to re-evaluate the US support for the PA.

~~~~~~~~~~

But then again, what can we expect:

“An annual security report submitted recently to the US Senate by James Clapper, director of National Intelligence, removed both Iran and Hezbollah from the list of terrorism threats to the United States for the first time in years.” (emphasis added)

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/news/americas/17579-us-removes-iran-and-hezbollah-from-list-of-terror-threats

~~~~~~~~~~

Speaking of Iran…

There are officials here in Jerusalem who believe that Obama’s attack on Netanyahu was designed to deflect attention from the nuclear negotiations, which should be coming to a close within days. Obama may be seeking ways to “discourage” Netanyahu from speaking out on what is taking place.

http://www.pressreader.com/israel/jerusalem-post/textview

~~~~~~~~~~

No wonder the climate here is overwrought. The situation to be coped with is insane. Not least is a pogrom that took place in London last night. A terrifying harbinger of things to come?

http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Attackers-yelling-we-will-kill-you-storm-synagogue-in-London-suburb-leave-worshipers-bloody-394684

There is no room for complacency or apathy now. And support for Israel and her rights is essential. What happens to the Jews of the world depends in good part upon the Jewish state.