In its short history, Israel has quickly become a world leader in technological development, including military defense. In a recent story in the Jerusalem Post, the co-CEO of a Tel Aviv based robotics company shed light on how technology is shaping modern warfare and the role Israel is playing in its development.
According to Yosi Wolf, an Israeli robotics expert and the co-CEO of Roboteam, the West is significantly ahead of terrorist groups when it comes to the use of robotic technology in combat, and Israel exemplified this technological dominance. “If, one day, ISIS will have robots -- our robots will beat theirs,” Wolf told the Post.
Wolf, a former captain in the Israeli air force, helped found Roboteam in 2009, and the company now serves as a major contractor for both the Israeli and US governments. Roboteam produces a line of semi-autonomous robots that require human operation, but that can significantly reduce the risk to military personnel. The company recently secured a five-year $25 million contract with the US Air Force, which can yield 250 robotic systems.
While Roboteam serves as a prime example of Israel’s success in the tech field, it also highlights the utmost importance of the US-Israel relationship, and the role Israeli expertise plays in strengthening the US military.
This important element of the partnership was highlighted in Update last month as well, in a story featuring US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter’s perspectives on Israel’s contributions. “It’s a two-way relationship,” Carter said at the time. “We really do get things from the Israelis in technology.”
The tiny country's technological contributions constantly amaze us. And this specific development could not come at a more important time as the global fight against ISIS continues.
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2)Geez, perhaps we really need a climate change agreement now. We have a terrible shooting in California at a Christmas Party. A group of Muslims were the shooters. It just has to be the California drought that led them to this. Clearly we have not rebuked terrorism enough and we need a stronger deal that forces everyone to give up their cars and electricity immediately.
This climate change related terrorism is getting out of hand. I mean it can’t be anything else, right? It can’t be an ideology or even work place violence could it be?
Based on President Obama’s statements this week, it really must just be the California drought is now leading yet more Muslims down a path of violence.
I still wonder why climate change doesn’t turn any other religious group into terrorists. Regardless of that answer, surely we must act now. The President demands it.
2a)
How Do You Define Victory Against Islamic Terrorism? You Focus on Climate Change
By Allen West
When President Ronald Reagan was asked how he defined victory in the Cold War he responded simply, “we win, they lose.” Now that, folks, is pretty simple and easily understood by everyone: Americans, allies, and the Soviet Union. And Reagan never relented in defining the enemy as the “evil empire” and by commanding at the Brandenburg Gates, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”
It was a profound statement and rallying cry that fomented an emboldening spirit to those who lived behind that wall under the dark specter of tyranny. That was exceptional American leadership at its best. Quite contrary to someone uttering in a perceived off-mike moment, “after reelection I will have more flexibility.”
And so this week they gathered in Paris, a city that has been rocked with two horrific Islamic terrorist attacks this year. I know many of you have forgotten the Charlie Hebdo and Jewish kosher grocery store mass killings earlier this year. That is just a reflection of our soundbite, reality TV, short-term memory mentality in the west. Yes, world leaders came to Paris, the famed City of Lights to discuss the most critical and greatest threat to our world – climate change.
A week ago, French President Francois Hollande was in Washington D.C. and was certainly reassured by these words from President Obama: “What a powerful rebuke to the terrorists it will be, when the world stands as one and shows that we will not be deterred from building a better future for our children.”Unfortunately President Obama was referring to the climate change conference in Paris, not a NATO Article V conference. And in preparation for the conference, I read that “instead of marching, activists placed thousands of pairs of shoes -- weighing more than four tonnes according to organisers -- on Place de la Republique square. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon left a pair of running shoes, and Pope Francis sent shoes to be placed on his behalf.”
Can I be very blunt here? We have shoes being piled up in Paris, but these western “leaders” fail to recognize the importance of putting combat boots on the ground to defeat the savage and barbaric Islamic terrorist scourge known as ISIS. It appears that some have made themselves believe that the greatest testimony and means to honor the victims of the most recent Paris, Friday the 13th Islamic terrorist attack is a climate change agreement.
Hmm, any moment I expect James Taylor to break out singing “You’ve got a friend.”
This is how we occupy a delusional state of existence, kind of like the ol’ song by the B-52s called “Private Idaho.” We have these global leaders who attempt to see us a policy line that Islamic terrorism is directly a result of climate change – yes, UN Secretary General Ban ki-Moon is the most recent to utter this charge. It is as if they want us to believe a climate change agreement developed this week will end Islamic terrorism. You know, the reason why ISIS is beheading, crucifying, raping, selling girls and women into slavery, and committing genocide against Christians driving them from ancestral homelands is because the earth is warming too much. If we could just slow down the melting glaciers and rising seas, ISIS would be at peace with all of us.
Yes indeed, they are living in their own “Private Idaho.”
So we have policies that promote a belief that, let me be frank, the weather is the greatest threat we face. We ignore the true enemy right before our eyes. To not accept this as definitive fact will only draw the ire and anger of those acolytes worshipping this cause.
Remember that earlier this year President Obama made this statement before the 218 graduating young Ensigns of the US Coast Guard Academy: "'Climate change will impact every country on the planet. No nation is immune," the President told the 218 graduating cadets. Climate change constitutes a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our national security, and, make no mistake, it will impact how our military defends our country. And so we need to act — and we need to act now. Many of our military installations are on the coast, including, of course, our Coast Guard stations. Around Norfolk, high tides and storms increasingly flood parts of our Navy base and an air base. In Alaska, thawing permafrost is damaging military facilities. Out West, deeper droughts and longer wildfires could threaten training areas our troops depend on. You are part of the first generation of officers to begin your service in a world where the effects of climate change are so clearly upon us. Climate change will shape how every one of our services plan, operate, train, equip, and protect their infrastructure, today and for the long-term."
We cannot define victory against Islamic terrorism not just because we do not express it. The problem is that we do not even recognize it as a threat. If our policy decisions are focused on climate change as the preeminent national security threat we are not rebuking the enemy, we are emboldening the enemy.
The 150 global heads of state gathering in Paris should have canceled the topic of climate change, and why could they not do this by Skype or GoToMeeting. They should have instead met either in Paris or NATO headquarters and discussed Article V.
Climate change agreements do not send a rebuke to Islamic terrorists and jihadists. A true coalition of liberty loving people and their military might delivers the only message savage barbarians comprehend – the message of death.
2b)America at Obama’s End
Hope and change was the promise. What happened?
We are near the end of the seventh year of Barack Obama’s presidency, and by any measure the United States is a fractured nation. Its people are more divided politically than any time in recent memory. Personally, many are anxious, angry or just down.
Whatever Mr. Obama promised in that famous first Inaugural Address, any sense of a nation united and raised up is gone. This isn’t normal second-term blues. It’s a sense of bust.
The formal measure of all this appeared last week with the release of the Pew Research poll, whose headline message is that trust in government is kaput. Forget the old joke about the government coming to “help.” There’s a darker version now: We’re the government, and we’re here to screw you.
In a normal presidential transition year, voters would be excited at the mere prospect of new leadership. Instead, the American people are grasping for straw men.
Donald Trump declared for the presidency in June. The New York City prankster travels from state to state opening the nation’s political fire hydrants, and no one seems able to stop the result: years of pent-up political and cultural contempt pouring into the streets.
Nearly one-third of Barack Obama’s Democratic Party has migrated to aging Socialist Bernie Sanders. Sen. Sanders is evoking press comparisons to the presidential candidacy of Eugene Debs. Today there would be campus riots if a professor’s test asked students to identify Eugene Debs, a famous starched-collar Socialist 115 years ago.
Black Americans, who expected better, live in urban neighborhoods with soaring murder rates, angry marchers and confused police who are utterly alienated from the people they are supposed to protect. Young black men have the worst job prospects of any group in the U.S. The New Republic magazine’s cover this week says: “Why Hillary Clinton will do more for black people than Obama.”
Our political vocabulary is now uniformly stark. Presidential candidates in both parties have built campaigns around income gaps, a struggling middle class, immigrant phobia and back again, the war on terror. One of Mr. Obama’s claimed legacies is he prevented an economic depression in 2009. But we’re still in a depression.
Hope and change was the promise. What happened?
Screens on Kindle readers will crack paging through books explaining what Mr. Obama could have, should have and would have done. For now, the short version is enough: America and the world failed because they didn’t do what Barack Obama told them to do. For seven years, he has been instructing everyone on the “right thing to do.” If Mr. Obama seems down these days, it is because so many—from John Boehner to Vladimir Putin to the man in the street—persisted in doing the wrong thing.
Iran’s ayatollahs got the Obama message, though, and that deal is the legacy.
The other half of the non-domestic legacy is supposed to be climate change. His appearance in Paris this week was Mr. Obama’s last turn on the big global stage, barring a national crisis. Anyone watching the angular figure of the American president making nonstop pleas at the Paris climate summit this week had to be struck by a sense of what the French would call tristesse, a melancholy, even pathetic sadness.
He alone in Paris seemed to take seriously the notion that the climate windmills can be reset to less than 2 degrees Celsius above “preindustrial levels.” In the last of many public apologies for the U.S., Mr. Obama confessed that his own nation is a grievous “emitter.”
Liberals think the right is gloating at Mr. Obama’s end-of-term difficulties. No one is gloating. The nation is either furious (the right) or depressed (the left) at eight wasted, wheel-spinning years whose main achievement is ObamaCare—a morass.
Mr. Obama will go off to do something else, but he leaves behind a country littered with public and private institutions in disrepute. Whatever the cumulative causes for this, a president bears responsibility for maintaining some bedrock level of respect for institutions that are the necessary machinery of the nation’s daily life.
Instead, Mr. Obama spent much of his presidency vilifying the private sector—banks, insurers, energy producers and utilities.
The public’s low opinion of Congress is well known, but consider: The Pew study reports the favorable rating for the Department of Justice is just 46%. That not half the country respects something called the Justice Department is a travesty.
Mr. Obama has repeatedly mocked institutions he didn’t control and abused the powers of those he did. Almost always, the ridicule and condescension came in front of cheering audiences. It’s hardly a surprise that Donald Trump is exploiting and expanding the loss of public faith. Mr. Obama spent seven years softening up Mr. Trump’s audiences for him.
We may get a third Obama term after all.
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3)
With the leak of an International Atomic Energy Agency report about Iran’s work on military research to the Associated Press, the last obstacle to implementation of the nuclear deal struck by the West with Tehran has been removed. The good news for the deal’s advocates is that the IAEA says there is no proof that Iran worked on creating a nuclear explosive device after 2009, although it admits its work is inconclusive. There are reasons to doubt that Iran stopped working on nukes at sites that we don’t know about. But even if we accept the notion that they did stop at face value the UN agency’s work gives us plenty of reasons to worry. After a decade of denying that it had ever worked on a nuclear weapon, the IAEA’s conclusions about the pre-2009 period are definitive. There is no longer the slightest doubt that Iran was working to create a nuclear weapon before 2009. In other words, the Iranian government lied. And it continued to lie throughout the negotiations with Obama administration and Western allies. The question the president and others who actually think the nuclear deal is a reasonable solution to the problem of the nuclear threat must answer is if Iran lied for so long, what makes them think the Islamist regime is willing or even capable of telling the truth and abiding by the terms of the pact they’ve signed with it?
There are two big problems with the IAEA report.
One is that we know that the IAEA’s access to the one Iranian site where work on “possible military dimensions” — PMD — of their nuclear program was limited due to the terms of a side deal struck with Iran. As we learned over the summer while the debate over the deal was going on, the IAEA agreed to serious restrictions on its access to the Parchin military site. Even more troubling, when the IAEA did their best under the circumstances to find out what had happened at Parchin, they discovered that there had been new construction had taken place at a place that apologists for the agreement claimed had long been moribund. Just as bad was the fact that during the course of their investigation, the IAEA discovered that some important equipment known to have been at the site was now missing. That makes it more than obvious that Iran was making efforts to sanitize the site and make it difficult if not impossible for the UN to test the site for activity. Yet it doesn’t appear that the new report will solve either of these mysteries. It seems that the nuclear watchdogs have simply thrown up their hands
The other troubling aspect to the impending publication of the IAEA’s findings is that we know that Iran has been pressuring the agency and the Western nations that signed the deal that it would never agree to the implementation of the accord unless the PMD issue was put to rest. Though Iran has a lot more to gain from the deal going forward, President Obama has always acted as if the opposite was true. Though Iran will get what may be up to $100 billion in frozen assets and a further windfall once sanctions are lifted, the president seems to think a deal that, at best, delays an Iranian bomb for a decade, is a better deal for the West.
That means that the onus was on the IAEA not to mess up a deal those Western governments desperately wanted. Moreover, if they returned a negative verdict or highlighted the problems and mysteries about Parchin, they would, in effect, put themselves out of work since that would likely end any inspections. As with the negotiations with Iran, the IAEA may have persuaded itself that it was better to proceed with the deal than to hold it up by insisting on learning everything about their military research.
That sounds pragmatic and maybe even smart. But that couldn’t be farther from the truth.
What happens now is that the deal will go forward, and Iran will get everything it wants including the end of sanctions and vast sums of money that can be spent on aiding its terrorist allies preparing for war against Israel or destabilizing moderate Arab regimes. But it will never have to admit that it lied about its nuclear program or even give the UN or the U.S. information about how much progress it made toward weaponizing its program. Meanwhile, its nuclear research will continue, and it can count on being able to produce a bomb after the easily evaded deal expires.
Even if, for the moment, we leave aside the fact that by keeping the terms of the side deal about Parchin, the administration failed to comply with U.S. law and rendered its adoption illegal, this is deeply troubling.
At the very least, the IAEA report now proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Iranian regime has been lying to the world about its nuclear program. The talk about a fatwa from the Supreme Leader against making nuclear weapons was, of course, a ruse. So, too, are the assurances from Iran’s “moderate” President Hassan Rouhani about its peaceful intentions.
The lack of conclusive information about PMDs also means that Western estimates about Iranian “breakout” time to a nuclear weapon are mere guesses, not reliable calculation. And with the Parchin precedent firmly in place, it now appears that the IAEA hasn’t the will or the desire to upset the apple cart by pressing for truths that might illustrate just how fraudulent any further assurances about military research are. That makes it clear that any Iranian cheating will be treated as a minor detail that isn’t important enough to blow up a process that the West is already heavily invested in.
Though treated as a sidebar to the main arguments about the nuclear question, the investigation of Parchin has turned out to be highly instructive. We now know that the deal isn’t likely to be enforced. Unfortunately, so do the Iranians.
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4) THE DEATH OF EUROPE
(Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center,
is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.)
European leaders talk about two things these days; preserving European
values by taking in Muslim migrants and integrating Muslim migrants into
Europe by getting them to adopt European values.
It does not occur to them that their plan to save European values
depends on killing European values.
The same European values that require Sweden, a country of less than 10
million, to take in 180,000 Muslim migrants in one year also expects the
new Swedes to celebrate tolerance, feminism and gay marriage. Instead
European values have filled the cities of Europe with Shariah patrols,
unemployed angry men waving ISIS flags and the occasional public act of
terror.
European countries that refuse to invest money in border security
instead find themselves forced to invest money into counterterrorism
forces. And those are bad for European values too.
But, as Central European countries are discovering, European values
dont have much to do with the preservation of viable functioning
European states. Instead they are about the sort of static Socialism
that Bernie Sanders admires from abroad. But even a Socialist welfare
state requires people to work for a living. Maines generous welfare
policies began collapsing once Somali Muslims swarmed in to take
advantage of them. Denmark and the Dutch, among other of Bernie Sanders
role models, have been sounding more like Reagan and less like Bernie
Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.
Two years ago, the Dutch King declared that, The classic welfare state
of the second half of the 20th century in these areas in particular
brought forth arrangements that are unsustainable in their current form.
That same year, the Danish Finance Minister called for the modernization
of the welfare state.
But the problem isnt one of modernization, its medievalization.
Critics pointed out in the past that a multicultural America cant
afford the welfare states that European countries have. Now that those
same countries are turning multicultural, they cant afford them either.
Europe invested in the values of its welfare state. The Muslim world
invested in large families. Europe expects the Muslim world to bail out
its shrinking birth rate by working and paying into the system so that
its aging population can retire. The Muslim migrants however expect
Europe to subsidize their large families with its welfare state while
they deal some drugs and chop off some heads on the side.
Once again, European values are in conflict with European survival.
The European values that require Europe to commit suicide are about
ideology, not language, culture or nationhood. But the incoming migrants
dont share that ideology. They have their own Islamic values.
Why should 23-year-old Mohammed work for four decades so that Hans or
Fritz across the way can retire at 61 and lie on a beach in Mallorca?
The idea that Mohammed would ever want to do such a thing out of love
for Europe was a silly fantasy that European governments fed their
worried citizens.
Mohammed doesnt share European values. Nor are they likely to take hold
of him no matter how often the aging teachers, who hope he gets a job
and subsidizes their retirement, try to drill them into his head.
Europeans expect Mohammed to become a Swede or a German as if he were
some child they had adopted from an exotic country and raised as their
own, and work to subsidize their European values.
The Muslim migrants are meant to be the retirement plan for an aging
Europe. Theyre supposed to keep its ramshackle collection of economic
policies, its welfare states and social programs rolling along.
But theyre more like a final solution.
Mohammed is Fritzs retirement plan. But Mohammed has a very different
type of plan. Fritz is counting on Mohammed to work while he relaxes.
Mohammed relaxes and expects Fritz to work. Fritz is not related to him
and therefore Mohammed sees no reason why he should work to support him.
European social democracy reduces society to a giant insurance plan in
which money is pooled together. But insurance is forbidden in Islam
which considers it to be gambling. European social democracy expects him
to bail it out, but to Mohammed, European values are a crime against
Islam.
Mohammeds Imam will tell him to work off the books because paying into
the system is gambling. However taking money out of the system is just
Jizya; the money non-Muslims are obligated to pay to Muslims. Under
Islamic law, its better for Mohammed to sell drugs than to pay taxes.
Thats why drug dealing and petty crime are such popular occupations for
Salafis in Europe. Its preferable to steal from infidels than to
participate in the great gamble of the European welfare state.
Mohammed isnt staking his future on the shaky pensions of European
socialism. He invests in what social scientists call social capital. He
plans his retirement by having a dozen kids. If this lifestyle is
subsidized by infidel social services, so much the better. And when
social services collapse, those of his kids who arent in prison or in
ISIS will be there to look after him in his golden years.
As retirement plans go, its older and better than the European model.
Mohammed doesnt worry much about the future. Even if he doesnt make it
past six kids, by the time hes ready to retire the European country hes
living in will probably be an Islamic State. And he is confident that
whatever its arrangements are, they will be better and more just than
the infidel system.
Sweden will take in 180,000 migrants this year. Germany may take in 1.5
million. Most of them will be young men following the Mohammed
retirement plan.
Europeans are being assured that the Mohammeds will balance out the
demographic disparity of an aging population with too many retirees and
too few younger workers. But instead the Mohammeds will put even more
pressure on the younger workers who not only have to subsidize their
elders, but millions of Mohammeds, their multiple brides and their
fourteen child Islamic retirement plans.
Retirement ages will go further up and social services for the elderly
will be cut. The welfare state will collapse, but it will have to be
kept running because the alternative will be major social unrest.
Among the triggers of the Arab Spring were rising wheat prices and cuts
to food subsidies. Prices went up and governments fell as street riots
turned into civil wars. Imagine a Sweden where 50 percent of the young
male population is Muslim, mostly unemployed, turning into Syria when
the economy collapses and the bill comes due. Imagine European Muslim
street riots where the gangs have heavy artillery and each ghetto Caliph
has his own Imams and Fatwas to back up his claims.
Europe is slowly killing itself in the name of European values. Its
trying to protect its economic setup by bankrupting it. European values
have become a suicide pact. Its politicians deliver speeches explaining
why European values require mass Muslim migration that make as little
sense as a lunatics suicide note.
Islamic values are not compatible with European values. Not only free
speech and religious freedom, but even the European welfare state is
un-Islamic. Muslims have a high birth rate because their approach to the
future is fundamentally different than the European one. Europeans have
chosen to have few children and many government agencies to take care of
them. Muslims choose to have many children and few government agencies.
The European values so admired by American leftists have no future.
Europe is drinking rat poison to cure a cold. Instead of changing its
values, its trying to maintain them by killing itself. The Mohammed
retirement plan wont save European Socialism. It will bury it.
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