No need for comment. The video speaks for itself
and suggests how peaceful Islam is. Prhaps this is
Islam's equivalent of a Baptism?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
+++
This response from a friend and fellow memo reader regarding my memo focusing on Tom Sowell:
"IF THOMAS SOWELL WOULD HAVE BEEN ELECTED OUR FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT WE WOULD HAVE ALL BEEN PROUD AS OUR COUNTRY ADVANCED IN IT’S WORLD LEADERSHIP ROLL AND WE WOULD NOT BE FACED WITH THE ANARCHY AND SOCIAL DISOBEDIENCE WE FACE IN OUR COUNTRY. IF YOU ARE NOT FAMILIAR WITH DR. THOMAS SOWELL I SUGGEST YOU LISTEN TO SOME OF HIS VIDEO INTERVIEWS AVAILABLE ON THE INTERNET.GET INFORMED GO TO THE THIS LINK FOR A START........... B--- R------https://www.bing.com/search?q=thomas+sowell+videos&form=WNSGPH&qs=AS&cvid=75f386a9009041afa01e3fb3ff3ea728&pq=THOMAS%20SOWELL%20VIDEOS&nclid=899F155254A2A0D006E5B5FC4446A404&ts=1466619673249
and
Amen on Thomas Sowell brother Richard! He's who I consider the smartest American. I've recommended to everyone on my mailing list to read his columns by going to tsowell.com and going to current columns!
Two others at the top of the list are Walter Williams and Charles Krauthammer.
+++Trump's Wednesday address reflected a disciplined delivery of a very professional, measured and balanced message that had some good lines and framed the debate by way of a very tough response. Had Romney made such a speech and rebuttal he might not be whining from the sidelines about Trump and could be running for his second term! Trump's speech could reduce his unlike-ability factor.
Like Trump or not, he is willing to stand up and give as much or more than he receives and that should resonate with Americans who respect/expect that from their president and particularly among those who hunger for America being placed first and are sick and tired of having a president who constantly apologizes for our nation and then turns out to be constantly wrong!
Now, Hillary will respond later in the day and I would think we are going to witness one of the nastiest campaigns in recent history and it could be a race to the bottom in terms of personal attacks etc. (See 1 below.)
I listened to most of Hillary's speech and it was a lot of fluff. Apparently Trump hit her hard and she and her advisors chose not to respond and/or defend her position based on his comments.
She attacked Wall Street, talked about her experience and plan to get results but never truly defined the five points she enunciated. It was full of platitudes that touched all the names entitlers love, ie. college deb paid by others, unions, teacher pay raises, minimum wage increases, child care benefits, jobs, reduction of taxes for the hard working families. I kept asking where's the beef and what I got was Spam? I know I am biased but it was just a lot of canned words, all Spam and frankly I would not give Spam to my dog.The programmed audience obviously love Spam and ate it up and clapped on cue. After 30 minutes, I was nauseous because it was soooo Grandma Hillary. Maggie Thatcher would be embarrassed she was a woman.
Will truth get trampled in the process? Stay tuned!
We know the Obama Administration cannot tell the truth. (See 1a below.)
What I find interesting is all of a sudden many Republican Senators and House members have decided they cannot align themselves with Trump. Is it because they fear supporting Trump will impact their own re-election chances, if they are running, and will they be able to face their constituents if Clinton wins or suppose Trump wins without them? Will they lose any leverage and when they run again invite challenges they had not contemplated?
==
Steyn was right according to this analyst who posted: "Blaming guns for the Islamist murder of 49 people in the Orlando gay club is like saying that Zyklon B gas was the cause of the Holocaust and not the Nazis..." (See 2 below.)
====
Obama never had a winning/cohesive Middle East Plan. He always had a defeatist/apologist one. (See 3 below.)
===
Leaving Saturday for week with family at Tybee.
+++
Dick
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1)
SAUDIS FUNDING 20% OF HILLARY CLINTON'S PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN
The U.S. imam Warith Deen Mohammed said in 1999: “In Saudi Arabia it’s the Wahabi school of thought…and they say, ‘We’re gonna give you our money, then we want you to…prefer our school of thought.’ That’s in there whether they say it or not. So there is a problem receiving gifts that seem to have no attachment, no strings attached.”
“Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.” — Hillary Clinton
“The Clinton Foundation…disclosed in 2008 that it had accepted up to US$25 million from the Saudi Kingdom in the same year. Other foreign governments who have donated money to the Clintons' include…Kuwait, Qatar, Brunei, Oman…”
Hillary Clinton is bought and paid for.
“Saudis Fund 20% of Clinton Presidential Campaign: Top Prince,” teleSUR, June 13, 2016:
“Saudis Fund 20% of Clinton Presidential Campaign: Top Prince,” teleSUR, June 13, 2016:
…Saudi Arabia has paid more than 20 percent of the cost of Hillary Clinton’s campaign for presidential elections, Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was quoted as saying Sunday in a news report by the Jordanian Petra News Agency.
According to the Middle East Eye news website, the report was later deleted from the agency’s website. However, a snapshot of the original Arabic version was later republished by the Washington-based Institute for Gulf Affairs.
“Saudi Arabia has always sponsored both Republican and Democratic Parties of America and… the kingdom also provides with full enthusiasm 20 percent of the cost of Hillary Clinton’s campaign in the U.S. presidential elections despite the fact that some influential forces within the country don’t have a positive look toward supporting the candidate because she is a woman,” the agency’s report quoted Prince Mohammed as saying….
The Clinton Foundation, which is chaired by both Hillary and her husband Bill Clinton, disclosed in 2008 that it had accepted up to US$25 million from the Saudi Kingdom in the same year.
Other foreign governments who have donated money to the Clintons' include Norway, Kuwait, Qatar, Brunei, Oman, Italy and Jamaica, which together donated around US$20 million….
1a)Documents reveal Obama administration 'misrepresented' released illegal alien crime stats
Documents obtained by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) show that the Obama administration "misrepresented" the number of serious crimes committed by illegal aliens released by ICE. In fact, the number of crimes is close to 10 times the number that the administration gave Congress.
According to FAIR, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) records the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) obtained via a Freedom of Information Act (FIOA) request on FAIR’s behalf reveal that the 30,558 criminal aliens ICE released in FY 2014 committed 13,288 additional crimes.
The number of subsequent convictions contained in FIOA documents is far higher than the 1,423 additional offenses ICE reported to the House Judiciary Committee last July.
The criminal aliens released in FY 2014 who went on to commit those additional crimes had convictions for offenses like homicide, kidnapping, assault, sexual assault, and drunk driving. The new crimes, according to ICE’s report to Congress, included vehicular homicide, domestic violence, sexual assault, DUI, burglary and assault.
“Rather than end dangerous politically-driven policies that have put a total of 85,000 deportable criminal aliens back onto the streets in the last three years, ICE tried to hide them by providing grossly inaccurate information to Congress and the American people,” Dan Stein, the president of FAIR, said in statement.
In April, ICE revealed that it released an additional 19,723 criminal aliens —who had a total of 64,197 convictions among them including 101 homicide convictions, 216 kidnapping convictions, 320 sexual assault convictions, 1,728 assault convictions, and 12,307 driving under the influence of alcohol convictions — from custody in FY 2015.
In response to the FY 2015 numbers, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte warned that the Obama Administration’s immigration policies are creating “a sanctuary for tens of thousands of criminal aliens.”
“The American public has been misled by the enforcement priorities, deferred action, and executive action policies of this Administration, which categorize only certain so-called ‘serious’ criminal aliens as worthy of detention and then removal,” Goodlatte said in a statement. “Despite its rhetoric, the fact remains that the Obama Administration continues to willingly free dangerous criminal aliens, allowing them to continue to prey upon communities across the United States.”
I'm sure this is just a misunderstanding that the White House will clear up in a jiffy. I mean, it's not as though they deliberately lied or anything, right? In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if this miscalculation was just a joke – a little bit of bureaucratic humor.
If that's what it was, no one is laughing. ICE will come up with an alternate set of stats showing that they didn't lie so much as shade the truth. They simply refused to count most crimes committed by illegal aliens released into an unsuspecting population. The discrepancy is in their definition of "serious crime," I'm sure.
The White House and ICE have serious problems with the truth. Every single statistic given to Congress on immigration should be disbelieved, and ICE should be forced to document its assertions.
Perhaps they think if they minimize the problem enough, things will just take care of themselves.
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2)
Whitewashing Islamist Terror
by Tarek Fatah
Originally published under the title "West Bowing to Radical Islam."
Almost 10 years ago, Maclean'smagazine published an essay by Mark Steyn, titled "The future belongs to Islam." In it, he suggested, "the West is growing old and enfeebled, and lacks the will to rebuff those who would supplant it."
It was an extract from Steyn's then best-selling book America Alone, where he concluded, "It's the end of the world as we've known it." Steyn wrote:
We are witnessing the end of the late 20th-century progressive welfare democracy. The children and grandchildren of those fascists and republicans who waged a bitter civil war for the future of Spain now shrug when a bunch of foreigners blow up their capital. Too sedated even to sue for terms, they capitulate instantly.
There was an outcry among Canada's Islamists, who took Steyn and Maclean's to the Ontario and British Columbia Human Rights Commissions. My fellow Sun columnist, Farzana Hassan, and I wrote a rejoinder in Maclean's titled, "Mark Steyn has a right to be wrong."
Today, I recognize, Steyn was right and I was wrong.
If there were any doubts the West is abdicating its responsibility to stand up for Western values, the amateur attempts by the FBI to cover up the Islamist nature of the Orlando attack removed them.
...
President Barack Obama and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton deflected attention from the obvious Islamic nature of the terrorism to a debate about gun control.
Obama has tried to deflect attention from the Islamist nature of the attack to the issue of gun control.
|
An FBI spokesman did the same when he downplayed the role of Islamism in the attack, editorializing that the killer, "does not represent the religion of Islam, but a perverted view, which based on what we know today, was inspired by extremist killers."
In Toronto, Premier Kathleen Wynne, Canada's first openly gay premier, also refused to address the Islamist nature of the attack, saying, "one cannot fight homophobia with Islamphobia," at a vigil for the Orlando victims.
This is nonsense. Orlando was an act of Islamic terror and of Islamofascism, a doctrine of hatred towards the West and what it stands for, including LGBTQ rights.
It holds secular liberal democracy in contempt, hates non-Muslims, degrades women, and is racist towards non-Arabs, especially black Africans. It is a supremacist death cult that has the end times as its ultimate goal.
Chia Barsen, a 32-year old Canadian Marxist, was 10 when his family fled Islamic Iran, political refugees escaping the murderous rule of its barbaric ayatollahs.
Commenting on the liberal left's reaction to the Orlando massacre, Barsen wrote on his blog:
Blaming guns for the Islamist murder of 49 people in the Orlando gay club is like saying that Zyklon B gas was the cause of the Holocaust and not the Nazis. Gun control is a clear and present issue in the U.S. and there are countless episodes of shootings in the U.S. to justify the removal of all guns (not just automatic weapons), from the streets. However, piggybacking on the gun control debate and not making any mention of the threat of Political Islam and Islamism, is the furthering of a political agenda and not simple ignorance or apathy.
Exactly.
Tarek Fatah, a founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress and columnist at the Toronto Sun, is a Robert J. and Abby B. Levine Fellow at the Middle East Forum.++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
3)
THE UNITED STATES SHOULD ADMIT IT NO LONGER HAS A MIDDLE EAST POLICY
By Stephen Walt
If the current — and future — U.S. administration wants to battle the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), save Syria, stop Iran, and keep ties with Israel, it’s has to ditch the old Cold War playbook.
Do you know what the United States should do in the Middle East? The answer to that question used to be pretty obvious, but not anymore.
For most of the past half-century, U.S. leaders knew who their friends and enemies were and had a fairly clear sense of what they were trying to accomplish. No longer. Today, there is greater uncertainty about U.S. interests in the region, more reason to question the support it gives its traditional partners, and no consensus on how to deal with the dizzying array of actors and forces that are now buffeting the region.
One thing is clear: The playbook we’ve been using since the 1940s isn’t going to cut it anymore. We still seem to think the Middle East can be managed if we curry favor with local autocrats, back Israel to the hilt, constantly reiterate the need for U.S. “leadership,” and when all else fails, blow some stuff up. But this approach is manifestly not working, and principles that informed U.S. policy in the past are no longer helpful.
Things used to be so simple — and no, that’s not just nostalgia talking. During the Cold War, for example, the central elements of U.S. Middle East policy were reasonably well understood. First and foremost, the United States sought to contain and, if possible, reduce Soviet influence in the region. It also wanted to make sure Middle East oil and gas continued to flow to world markets and that Israel survived, although the dysfunctional “special relationship” that now exists did not begin to emerge until the late 1960s.
To achieve these goals, from 1945 to 1990 the United States generally acted as an “offshore balancer.” In sharp contrast to its military deployments in Europe or Asia, Washington didn’t station large ground forces in the Middle East and kept its overall military footprint low, relying instead on a variety of local allies and clients. In particular, the United States backed conservative Arab monarchies in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the Persian Gulf; had a close relationship with Iran until the 1979 revolution; and saw Israel as a strategic asset mostly because it kept defeating the Soviet Union’s various Arab clients. Indeed, a string of defeats and rising economic problems eventually convinced Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to abandon his Soviet patron and realign with Washington. The United States also played a balance-of-power game in the Gulf: Ronald Reagan and Bush 41 tilted toward Iraq during its war with Iran, and then Bush turned against Iraq when it invaded Kuwait in 1990.
When the Cold War ended, one might have expected that U.S. involvement in the region would decline, because there was no longer a significant external threat to contain. Instead, the U.S. role deepened, beginning with the 1991 Gulf War. Instead of its earlier balance-of-power approach, the Clinton administration’s strategy of “dual containment” cast Washington in the role of regional policeman. Unfortunately, this ill-conceived strategy required the United States to keep substantial ground and air forces in Saudi Arabia, infuriating Osama bin Laden and helping to convince him to attack the United States directly on 9/11.
America’s military role increased even more after the 9/11 attacks — after George W. Bush and Dick Cheney drank the neocon Kool-Aid and embarked on their delusional effort at “regional transformation.” The results were disastrous, and Barack Obama was elected on promises to end the Iraq War, rebuild America’s relations with the Muslim world, achieve a two-state solution, and put U.S. relations with Iran on a new footing. Although he eventually reached a nuclear agreement with Iran, the rest of his Middle East policy has been no more successful than that of his inept predecessor. Syria is in ruins; al Qaeda remains an active force; the Islamic State is sowing violence around the world; Libya and Yemen are war-torn failed states; and the peace process is in tatters.
Why is the United States having such trouble? Because it has failed to take account of the dramatic changes that have transformed the Middle East’s strategic landscape.
For starters, there is no great-power rival to organize U.S. strategy. Containing Soviet influence was the overriding goal during the Cold War, and the clarity of that objective made it easier to set priorities and sustain consistent policies. Today, by contrast, there is no single overarching threat to the region and thus no clear organizing principle to guide U.S. policymakers. Some people would like to cast Iran in that role, but as an actor, it’s still far too weak and internally hamstrung to serve as the organizing focus of U.S. strategy. And on some issues — such as the Islamic State — the United States and Iran are largely on the same side. In short, what we are grappling with today is a fiendishly complicated array of actors pursuing a variety of objectives, and who is on our side and who is against us varies from issue to issue.
Second, U.S. relations with all of its traditional Middle East allies are at their lowest point in years. Turkey has drifted back toward authoritarianism under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the AKP, and its policies toward the crisis in Syria and the Islamic State are frequently at odds with U.S. preferences. Israel continues to move to the right, while still rejecting the two-state solution that Washington favors, and actively tried to sabotage the nuclear deal with Iran. Egypt is again in the hands of a thuggish military dictatorship with few redeeming features, and relations with Saudi Arabia have been strained by the partial U.S. détente with Iran, disagreements about the proper approach to the Syrian civil war, and by growing concerns over the Saudi role in promoting a version of Islam that has inspired a generation of anti-Western extremists. The CIA may still have close ties with Saudi intelligence, but I’m not sure if that is a good thing or not.
However, at the same time, relations between Washington and Iran have improved. Not by much, of course, but at least the two governments are talking to each other. The nuclear deal is the most significant evidence of change, but the speedy resolution of the flap over the U.S. sailors who mistakenly entered Iranian territorial waters and the subsequent prisoner exchange show what the benefits of a more businesslike relationship can be. These initial steps may not lead to bigger ones, but it is still a marked shift that raises new questions about what U.S. policy should be.
Third, the stunning collapse of energy prices and the likelihood of a protracted oil glut cast doubt on the strategic rationale that has underpinned U.S. involvement in the region since 1945. The United States no longer imports significant amounts of Middle East oil or gas, and the risk of a significant cutoff is lower now than at any point in recent memory.The United States no longer imports significant amounts of Middle East oil or gas, and the risk of a significant cutoff is lower now than at any point in recent memory. And if the United States is increasingly capable of energy independence (and looking for ways to reduce reliance on fossil fuels over the longer term), it is not clear why it should continue to spend billions defending Middle East energy supplies on behalf of other countries.
Fourth, America’s track record in the region over the past 20-plus years also raises serious questions about its ability to identify realistic goals and then achieve them. Global influence rests in part on an image of competence, and the past three administrations have done little to burnish that image. Indeed, when it comes to the Middle East, the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations have been King Midas in reverse: Everything they touch turns not to gold but to lead or, even worse, into a violent conflagration.
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