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Wednesday, November 18, 2015

EXCLUSIVE – ISRAELIS TO FRANCE: STILL WANT US TO SHOW ‘RESTRAINT’ IN FACE OF TERROR?

France’s “massive” retaliation for the Paris attacks has irritated Israelis who feel that when Israel responds to terror it is held to a double standard by the international community.

French President Francois Hollande called the terrorist attacks an act of war and promised that France would take revenge. On Sunday, 12 aircraft – including 10 fighter jets – dropped a total of 20 bombs on Raqqa, ISIS’ de-facto capital.

“It was normal to take the initiative and action and France had the legitimacy to do so. We did it already in the past. We have conducted new airstrikes in Raqqa today,” France’s Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said. “One cannot be attacked harshly, and you know the drama that is happening in Paris, without being present and active.”

Now Israelis are asking themselves how the world would respond had Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made the same remarks following Palestinian terror attacks on Israelis. They have little doubt that Netanyahu would be denigrated for suggesting that it was “normal” and “legitimate” to respond the way France has.

Judith Bergman, an Israeli writer and political analyst, wrote in the Israeli daily Israel Hayom, “Every time the world is hit by mass terrorism, Israel hopes that the world community will finally understand Israel’s predicament. It hoped so after 9/11, the Madrid bombings in 2004, the London bombings in 2005, and even after the Charlie Hebdo massacre last January. However, that understanding is just not forthcoming.

“Israel suffers abuse for daring to defend itself against terrorism. It is subjected to insane scrutiny by a hostile U.N., NGOs, and human rights organizations, with everyone voicing their opinions on how Israel must “show restraint” in its efforts to prevent its citizens from being knifed and shot to death as they go about their daily lives.”

Arsen Ostrovsky, a Middle East analyst and international human rights lawyer, echoed Bergman’s sentiments and asserted that the international community’s response to the Paris Attacks – versus its response to Israeli strikes – is blatantly hypocritical.

“Following the horrific attack on France, the world, rightfully so, immediately united in solidarity with the French people and in outrage and unequivocal condemnation against this barbaric act,” Ostrovsky told Breitbart Jerusalem.

“Yet these same leaders tend to be a little slower and equivocal when terror is perpetrated against the Jewish people. I do not hear anyone calling on France to exercise ‘restraint’ in the wake of President Hollande’s declaration of war against the terrorists, or that their bombardment against ISIS targets is ‘excessive’ and that the French should take ‘greater risks for peace’. Whether it is ISIS, Iran or Palestinian terrorists, the enemy is the same: militant Islam. And if the world united to condemn terror in Europe, they should likewise condemn terror when it strikes the Jewish state.”

In a satirical open letter published in Israel National News the writer, posing as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, suggests a number of tips for avoiding future “incidents and unrest” – a deliberate jab at the international community’s tendency to use euphemisms to describe anti-Israel terrorism. “Netanyahu” wrote, “As your government told us recently, the day following an ‘incident’ in Israel, countries must ‘protect themselves from militants, but show restraint to not further fuel a highly sensitive situation in the region.’

There is no military solution to the problem of terrorism, and this is why you must seek a diplomatic solution.”

“Netanyahu” calls on Hollande to negotiate – even while under attack. In language that parodies the terms used when speaking to Israel, “Netanyahu” insists that the key to peace is to “build a New Europe, one that deals with reality on the ground.” Finally, “Netanyahu” warns Hollande that closing French borders “will only lead to further oppression and anger, so don’t do that.”

Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Obama’s three lynch mob movements

The left-wing lynchers doing the president's bidding in the streets

Barack Obama’s demagogic presidency has unleashed state-sanctioned mob violence to a degree not seen since the Jim Crow era.
Obama-approved lynch mobs have been helping to force the fundamental transformation of America that the radical left-wing community organizer promised on the campaign trail in 2008. Creating little armies of malcontents has long been the way Obama’s fellow Marxist agitators have turned groups in society against each other in order to generate the civil unrest and societal instability needed to effect unwanted change. Sometimes thugs get things done that elections can’t.
Obama’s presidency is a case study in defining deviancy down by attempting to de-stigmatize criminality, including the legitimization of street justice. It has had a Maoist flavor to it as violent mobs in the streets have assisted in carrying out Obama’s political objectives. And those fomenting the chaos, such as the community organizers of the Justice Department’s Community Relations Service (CRS), have often been on the government payroll.

Also underwriting these subversive activities is anti-American hedge fund manager George Soros who publicly likens the U.S. to Nazi Germany and considers this nation to be the greatest threat to peace and order in the world. Like many leftists, Soros praises the brutal totalitarian government of the People’s Republic of China for its supposed vision and efficiency.

This year has seen crazed, largely incoherent student mobs rise up against campus administrations to demand the suppression of free speech and persecution of dissenters. Before that, the virulently racist, cultish, neo-communist movement, Black Lives Matter, founded on false claims of systemic police brutality against black Americans, began taking it to the streets, scapegoating whites for the various pathologies that ravage black communities. And before that there was Occupy Wall Street, a Sixties-style revolutionary movement calling for the overthrow of capitalism and the supposedly unjust American system of governance.
The antisocial activists of these three seemingly distinct protest movements bear more than a passing resemblance to the Red Guards of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the brutal street enforcers of Mao Zedong, history’s most accomplished mass-murdering dictator. They have a fondness for blaming those they victimize, along with class warfare, mass meetings, mock trials, and ritualized denunciations.
These movements are really just three different faces of an insidious Marxist hydra that seeks to bring America to its knees for its supposed sins.

Occupy Wall Street movement

If nothing else, the Occupy Wall Street movement, which was born in the streets of Lower Manhattan in 2011, has helped to advance socialism by forcing the phony political issue of “income inequality” into the national political debate and making it more or less socially acceptable to espouse communist ideas in public.

Before Occupy—the home of rapists, arsonists, destructive squatters, and police car defecators—came along, very few Americans spoke in Marxist terms, pitting the super-rich “one percent” against everyone else. Now just about everybody does it. Even among conservatives who reject the frame, few challenge it.

This national brainwashing through the power of repetition has boosted left-wing causes such as organized labor’s destructive push for a $15 an hour minimum wage. It has helped greens advance their anti-energy, anti-economic growth platform. It has emboldened left-wingers to push for student loan forgiveness and step up their attacks on the First Amendment by pushing a constitutional amendment that would reverse the Citizens United ruling and overturn the ancient legal principle that corporations are “persons” capable of raising funds and suing and being sued. In other words, the Left is waging a full-scale war on both the Bill of Rights and the legal concept of limited liability, the beating heart of free enterprise.

Black Lives Matter

Black Lives Matter grew out of the vicious lie that “white Hispanic” neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman killed his young black attacker, Trayvon Martin, because he was African-American. Mobs in Sanford, Fla., agitated until the state agreed to pursue a doomed prosecution of Zimmerman.

The movement idolizes unrepentant cop killers Mumia abu Jamal and Assata Shakur and maintains that lawless violence and bloody insurrection are necessary to secure so-called social justice.

One of the movement’s leaders, Twitter star Deray Mckesson, is teaching students after being rewarded by the Left with a special appointment at prestigious Yale Divinity School. “Looting for me isn’t violent, it’s an expression of anger,” he lectured last month “The act of looting is political. Another way to dissolve consent. Pressing you to no longer keep me out of this space, by destroying it.”

Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, a black left-winger who is secretary of the Democratic National Committee, apparently agrees. After the riot-sparking death in police custody of black career criminal Freddie Gray earlier this year, the mayor ordered police to let looters and vandals go about their business unhindered.

Humorless, ultra-politically correct university mobs

And finally, there are the humorless, ultra-politically correct mobs that now rule many college and university campuses across America.

At Columbia University, leftist enforcers are intimidating students into joining solidarity protests against the invented racism that activists have been hallucinating at Yale and the University of Missouri.

The New York Post reported on Sunday that

Columbia student activists are pestering peers to attend campus protests and walk-outs in solidarity with college students at Missouri and Yale or risk social isolation, students say. Organizers posted flyers and sent Facebook messages inviting undergraduates to wear black clothing and join two demonstrations last Thursday to support people of color who are “marginalized and threatened.”
But some students worried they would be “ostracized” if they did not participate or dress in sync, one college parent said. “There’s been a campaign of intimidation, where students are going dorm to dorm, floor to floor and asking students to go back to their dorms and put on black if they’re not wearing black,” the parent said.
“My daughter told me people are uneasy and fearful,” she added. “Her personal politics are left-wing and she shares their sympathies, but she doesn’t like to feel that she can’t wear blue if she wants to wear blue.”
A protest leader led an angry mob in a series of chants, including “I love black people,” “I love queer black people,” “I love black criminals,” and “I love black people who steal.”

At Yale and elsewhere, student mobs have been spitting on conservatives and gunning for administrators’ heads.

Campus leftists disrupted a Yale conference on free speech named after alumnus William F. Buckley Jr. a week ago and terrorized attendees as part of a lingering protest against school administrators’ allegedly permissive attitude toward culturally insensitive Halloween costumes.

After Yale’s Intercultural Affairs Committee urged students to steer clear of Halloween costumes that could be perceived as having racial overtones such as “feathered headdresses, turbans, wearing ‘war paint’ or modifying skin tone or wearing black face or red face,” a lower-level administrator countermanded that advice, urging students to lighten up.

Lecturer Erika Christakis, associate master of Yale’s Silliman College and spouse of Silliman College Master Nicholas Christakis, urged students not to worry about whether costumes might offend someone. “If you don’t like a costume someone is wearing, look away, or tell them you are offended,” she wrote in a mass email. “Talk to each other. Free speech and the ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society.”

Of course this led to a tense confrontation with students in which an unhinged young black woman hysterically demanded Mr. Christakis be ousted.

In a profanity-laden tirade captured on a now-viral video, she accused him of creating an “unsafe space” at the university. It was his “job to create a place of comfort and home for the students who live in Silliman,” she said.

“You should step down! If that is what you think of being headmaster, you should step down! It is not about creating an intellectual space! It is not!” she cried out.

At Mizzou, not doing enough about alleged incidents of supposed racism that were likely fabricated or staged by activists, cost university president Tim Wolfe his job.

Wolfe took “full responsibility for this frustration” and said he hoped his resignation would help to “heal” whatever it was he did. Red Guards may as well have put a sign describing his crimes around his neck and paraded him about campus.

The same day, R. Bowen Loftin, the similarly embattled chancellor, said he would resign at year’s end. A month ago Loftin announced mandatory “diversity and inclusion” brainwashing for students, faculty, and staff.

President Obama is fine with all of this mob activity. He offers perfunctory denunciations of violence in a monotone while expressing his sympathy for the mob and whatever its current cause may be. The unspoken message to his fellow rabble-rousers is: bombs away!

Without his blessing, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the newly emboldened iteration of the campus thought police might never have arisen.

And if Obama weren’t president right now, he would be out in the streets orchestrating the violence instead of leaving all the fun to the other community organizers.

Matthew Vadum -- Bio and Archives | Click to view Comments
Matthew Vadum, matthewvadum.blogspot.com/, is an investigative reporter at a watchdog group in Washington, D.C.
His new book Subversion Inc. can be bought at Amazon.com (US), Amazon.ca (Canada), and as an e-book at Kobo (Canada).
Visit the Subversion Inc. Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter.
Matthew can be reached at: letters@canadafreepress.com

Thursday, November 12, 2015

Time for GOP panic? Establishment worried Carson or Trump might win

Less than three months before the kick-off Iowa caucuses, there is growing anxiety bordering on panic among Republican elites about the dominance and durability of Donald Trump and Ben Carson and widespread bewilderment over how to defeat them.

Party leaders and donors fear nominating either man would have negative ramifications for the GOP ticket up and down the ballot, virtually ensuring a Hillary Rodham Clinton presidency and increasing the odds that the Senate falls into Democratic hands.

The party establishment is paralyzed. Big money is still on the sidelines. No consensus alternative to the outsiders has emerged from the pack of governors and senators running, and there is disagreement about how to prosecute the case against them. Recent focus groups of Trump supporters in Iowa and New Hampshire commissioned by rival campaigns revealed no silver bullet.

In normal times, the way forward would be obvious. The wannabes would launch concerted campaigns, including television attack ads, against the front-runners. But even if the other candidates had a sense of what might work this year, it is unclear if it would ultimately accrue to their benefit. Trump’s counter-punches have been withering, while Carson’s appeal to the base is spiritual, not merely political. Even if someone was able to do significant damage to them, there’s no telling who their supporters would turn to, if anyone.

“The rest of the field is still wishing upon a star that Trump and Carson are going to self-destruct,” said Eric Fehrnstrom, a former adviser to 2012 nominee Mitt Romney. But, he said, “they have to be made to self-destruct. . .Nothing has happened at this point to dislodge Trump or Carson.”

Fehrnstrom pointed out that the fourth debate passed this week without any candidate landing a blow against Trump or Carson. “We’re about to step into the holiday time accelerator,” he said. “You have Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, then Iowa and a week later, New Hampshire, and it’s going to be over in the blink of an eye.”

[The Take: Why no one is dropping out of the GOP presidential race]

According to other Republicans, some in the party establishment are so desperate to change the dynamic that they are talking anew about drafting Romney — despite his insistence that he will not run again. Friends have mapped out a strategy for a late entry to pick up delegates and vie for the nomination in a convention fight, according to the Republicans, who were briefed on the talks, though Romney has shown no indication of reviving his interest.

For months now, the GOP professional class assumed Trump and Carson would fade with time. Voters would get serious, the thinking went, after seeing the outsiders share a stage with more experienced politicians at the first debate. Or when summer turned to fall, kids went back to school and parents had time to assess the candidates. Or after the second, third or fourth debates, certainly.

None of that happened, of course, leaving establishment figures disoriented. Consider Thomas H. Kean Sr., a former New Jersey governor who for most of his 80 years has been a pillar of his party. His phone is ringing daily, bringing a stream of exasperation and confusion from fellow GOP power brokers.

“People usually start off in the same way: Pollyanna-ish,” Kean said. “They assure me that Trump and Carson will eventually fade. Then we’ll talk some more and I give them a reality check. I’ll say, ‘The guy in the grocery store likes Trump, so does the guy who cuts my hair. They’re probably going to stick with him. Who knows if this ends?’”

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, herself an outsider who rode the tea party wave into office five years ago, explained the phenomenon.

“You have a lot of people who were told that if we got a majority in the House and a majority in the Senate, then life was gonna be great,” she said in an interview Thursday. “What you’re seeing is that people are angry. Where’s the change? Why aren’t there bills on the president’s desk every day for him to veto? They’re saying, ‘Look, what you said would happen didn’t happen, so we’re going to go with anyone who hasn’t been elected.’”

[Newly minted front-runner Ben Carson faces scrutiny of his life story]

Before Tuesday’s debate in Milwaukee, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker had a private reception at the Pfister Hotel with party leaders, donors and operatives. There was little appetite for putting a political knife in the back of either Trump or Carson, according to one person there. Rather, attendees simply hoped both outsiders would go away.

There are similar concerns about Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who is gaining steam and loathed by party elites, but they are more muted, at least for now.

Charlie Black, who has advised presidential campaigns since the 1970s, said he believes the 2016 contest “will eventually fall into the normal pattern of one outsider and one insider, and historically the insider always wins.”

Black said he was briefed on the findings of two recent private focus groups of Trump supporters in Iowa and New Hampshire that showed these voters knew little about his policy views beyond immigration. “Things like universal health care and other more liberal positions he’s taken in the past will all get out before people vote in New Hampshire,” he said. Black said the focus groups were commissioned by two rival campaigns, but he was not authorized to identify them.

One well-funded outside group, the Club for Growth, has aired ads attacking Trump in Iowa and more recently came out against Carson as well. “Donald Trump and Dr. Ben Carson are in over their heads,” said Club for Growth President David McIntosh, labeling both candidates as “pretenders.”

Still, the party establishment’s greatest weapon — big money — is partly on the shelf. Kenneth G. Langone, a founder of Home Depot and a billionaire supporter of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, said he is troubled that many associates in the New York financial community have so far refused to invest in a campaign due to the race’s volatility.

[Donald Trump plots his second act]

“Some of them are in, but too many are still saying, ‘I’ll wait to see how this all breaks,’” Langone said. “People don’t want to write checks unless they think the candidate has a chance of winning.” He said that his job, as a mega-donor, “is to figure out how we get people on the edge of their chairs so they start to give money.”

Many of Romney’s 2012 National Finance Committee members have sat the race out so far, including Peter A. Wish, a Florida doctor whom several 2016 candidates have courted.

“I’m not a happy camper,” Wish said. “Hopefully somebody will emerge who will be able to do the job,” but, he added, “I’m very worried that the Republican-base voter is more motivated by anger, distrust of D.C. and politicians and will throw away the opportunity to nominate a candidate with proven experience that can win.”

The concern among some party elites goes beyond electability, according to one Republican strategist, who was granted anonymity to speak frankly about the worries.

“We’re potentially careening down this road of nominating somebody who frankly isn’t fit to be president in terms of the basic ability and temperament to do the job,” this strategist said. “It’s not just that it could be somebody Hillary could destroy electorally, but what if Hillary hits a banana peel and this person becomes president?”

Concern about Trump intensified this week after he made two comments that could prove damaging in a general election. First, he explained his opposition to raising the minimum wage by saying “wages are too high.” Second, he said he would create a federal “deportation force” to remove the more than 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States illegally.

“To have a leading candidate propose a new federal police force that is going to flush out illegal immigrants across the nation? That’s very disturbing and concerning to me about where that leads Republicans across the board,” said Dick Wadhams, a former GOP chairman in Colorado, a swing state where Republicans are trying to pick up a Senate seat next year.

Said Austin Barbour, a veteran operative and fundraiser now advising former Florida governor Jeb Bush: “If we don’t have the right [nominee], we could lose the Senate and we could face losses in the House. Those are very, very real concerns. If we’re not careful and we nominate Trump, we’re looking at a race like Barry Goldwater in 1964 or George McGovern in 1972, getting beat up across the board because of our nominee.”

George Voinovich, a retired career politician who rose from county auditor to mayor of Cleveland to governor of Ohio to U.S. senator, said this cycle has been vexing.

“This business has turned into show business,” said Voinovich, who is backing Ohio Gov. John Kasich. “We can’t afford to have somebody sitting in the White House who doesn’t have governing experience and the gravitas to move this country ahead.”

David Weigel in Hilton Head Island, S.C., contributed to this report.