+++++++++++++++++
Erick Erickson: Have Democrats and Media lost their collective minds? (See 1 below.)
+++
ISIS versus Egypt. (See 2 below.)
and
Hamas and Obama. (See 2a below.)
+++++
Astute: No English dictionary has been able to adequately explain the difference between these two words.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
"In a recent linguistic competition held in London and attended by, supposedly, the best in the world,
Samdar Balgobin, a Guyanese man, was the clear winner with a standing ovation which lasted over 5 minutesThe final question was: “How do you explain the difference between COMPLETE and FINISHED in a waythat is easy to understand?”
Some people say there is no difference between COMPLETE and FINISHED.
Here is his astute answer: “When you marry the right woman, you are COMPLETE!When you marry the wrong woman, you are FINISHED!!And when the right one catches you with the wrong one, you are COMPLETELY FINISHED!!!”
He won a trip around the world and a case of 25-year-old Scotch!"
Finally, a purposely hidden tape of Obama introducing a controversial Harvard professor, Professor Bell, has now been released by Harvard Professor Ogleltree. Ogletree was fearful that prematurely releasing the tape would hurt Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. (See 3 below.)
++++++
The Trump whom the mass media like to characterize as a demon, in my opinion, will grow into the job, be a good president if the haters allow. (See 4 and 4a below.)
===
Dick
+++++++++++++++
1)
The Press and Democrats Have Lost Their Damn Minds
By Erick Erickson
Do you not hear yourselves? You think Jeff Sessions is an agent of the Russian government or somehow duplicitous in sabotaging the American election? That is insane. Trump Derangement Syndrome has officially set in and is rotting the brains of Democrats inside and outside the American press corps.
Jeff Sessions loyally and patriotically served his country as a United States Attorney where he prosecuted members of the KKK and desegregated Alabama schools. He then ably served in the United States Senate along side Ted Kennedy, who actually did ask the Russians to intervene in the 1984 election and the Democrats were fine with that.
This is a real slur against Sessions.
He was asked, during his confirmation, if he had met with the Russians about the Trump campaign. He said no. During his time on the Senate Armed Services Committee he had met with the Russians on international business. Claire McCaskill, his colleague for part of that time, denied having ever met with the Russian ambassador, but a quick check of her Twitter timeline showed she actually had met with him.
If Claire McCaskill cannot remember, why should Jeff Sessions? More so, it is not even relevant because the context of the questions asked of Jeff Sessions were about the Trump campaign.
Sessions’ Democrat colleagues from the Senate are so desperate to find something to use against Donald Trump, they are willing to ruin the reputation of a man many of them will privately acknowledge is an honorable person. Members of the media, in their desire to fight back against Donald Trump instead of fairly covering him, are willing to engage in character assassination of a good man.
If you think Jeff Sessions worked with a foreign power to undermine American elections, you are a loon. More so, if you have lost your mind over this no one is going to believe you when real problems occur. The imaginary phantoms the left now fights will distract them from the real ones that may come later.
++++++++++++++++++
2)
Islamic State terrorists are most notorious for their brutal conquest of a third of Iraq in 2014 and for their slick and savage propaganda videos which feature masked jihadis beheading captives.
The ISIS Stronghold You Don’t Hear About
Islamic State terrorists are most notorious for their brutal conquest of a third of Iraq in 2014 and for their slick and savage propaganda videos which feature masked jihadis beheading captives.
ISIS is not only confined to Iraq and Syria however.
They have an active province in the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt.
A map of the Sinai Peninsula. (Photo: © Wikimedia Commons)
Here’s what’s been going on:
Timeline
June 25 2012: Ansar Bayt Al-Maqdis (Supporters of the Holy House, ie the Temple of Solomon/Al-Aqsa Mosque), the terrorist group which would later become ISIS in Sinai, announces its formation with a propaganda video claiming responsibility for an attack against a gas pipeline in Egypt.
October 2014: President Sisi declares a state of emergency in Sinai after 33 military personnel are killed by Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis.
November 2014: Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis pledges allegiance to the Islamic State and becomes Wilayat Sinai (Sinai Province).
January 2015: ISIS kills 24 soldiers, six policemen and 14 soldiers (44 people total) in coordinated strikes in the capital of Northern Sinai Governate, El-Arish.
September 2015: The Egyptian army launches a full scale invasion of Sinai aimed at destroying militant groups and restoring order.
August 2016: Egyptian airstrikes kill the commander of Wilayat Sinai, Abu Duaa al-Ansari, along with 45 jihadis.
November 2016: Egyptian parliament extends the state of emergency in Sinai for another three months, the ninth time it has done so.
February 2017: Following a barrage of rockets fired at the southern Israeli city Eilat by ISIS terrorists, Israel kills four jihadis in a drone strike.
March 2017: an estimated 80 Coptic families are now sheltering in Ismailia, having fled El-Arish. ISIS forced them to flee by threatening to kill them. Analysts surmise ISIS has switched its attention to targeting Christians as it is losing the military campaign against the army.
2a) REVEALED: The Obama administration's support for Hamas was not passive
In the next inevitable confrontation with the terror group, the lessons of the Hamas War must not be ignoed
In a bid to undermine Egypt, Obama and Kerry colluded with Hamas’s state sponsors Turkey and Qatar to push Sisi out of the cease-fire discussions. But due to Saudi and UAE support for Sisi and Israel, the administration’s attempts to sideline the Egyptians failed.
The cease-fire terms that were adopted at the end of the war contained none of Hamas’s demands. Israel had won the diplomatic war.
It was a strange victory, however. Netanyahu was never able to let the public know what was happening.
Had he informed the public, the knowledge that the US was backing Hamas would have caused mass demoralization and panic. So Netanyahu had to fight the diplomatic fight of his life secretly.
The war on the ground was greatly influenced by the diplomatic war. But the war on the ground was first and foremost a product of the nature of Hamas and of the nature of Hamas’s relationship with the PLO.
Unfortunately, the Comptroller’s Report indicates that the IDF didn’t understand either. According to the report, in the weeks before the war began, the then-coordinator of government activities in the territories, Maj.-Gen. (res.) Eitan Dangot, told the security cabinet that the humanitarian situation in Gaza was at a crisis point and that hostilities were likely to break out if Israel didn’t allow humanitarian aid into the Strip.
On Wednesday we learned that Dangot’s view continues to prevail in the army. The IDF’s intelligence chief, Maj.-Gen. Herzi Halevi, told the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that Israel must send humanitarian aid to Gaza to avert a war.
There is truth to the IDF’s position. Hamas did in fact go to war against Israel in the summer of 2014 because it was short on supplies.
After Sisi overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt the previous summer, he shut Egypt’s border with Gaza because Gaza was the logistical base of the insurgency against his regime. The closed border cut off Hamas’s supply train of everything from antitank missiles to cigarettes and flour.
The problem with the IDF’s view of Hamas is that providing aid to Gaza means supplying Hamas first and foremost. Every shipment into Gaza strengthens Hamas far more than it serves the needs of Gaza’s civilian population. We got a good look at Hamas’s contempt for the suffering of its people during Protective Edge.
After seeing the vast dimensions of Hamas’s tunnel infrastructure, the then-OC Southern Command, Maj.-Gen. Sami Turgeman, told reporters that Hamas had diverted enough concrete to its tunnel project to build 200 kindergartens, two hospitals, 20 clinics and 20 schools.
Moreover, the civilian institutions that are supposed to be assisted by humanitarian aid all serve Hamas. During the war, three soldiers from the IDF’s Maglan unit were killed in southern Gaza when they were buried in rubble of a booby-trapped UNRWA clinic.
The soldiers were in the clinic to seal off the entry shaft of a tunnel that was located in an exam room.
Hamas had booby trapped the walls of the clinic and detonated it when the soldiers walked through the door.
All of the civilian institutions in Gaza, including those run by the UN, as well as thousands of private homes, are used by Hamas as part of its war machine against Israel.
So any discussion of whether or not to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza is not a humanitarian discussion. It is a discussion about whether or not to strengthen Hamas and reinforce its control over the population of Gaza.
This brings us to the goals of the war in Gaza in 2014. At the time, the government debated two possible endgames.
The first was supported by then-justice minister Tzipi Livni. Livni, and the Left more generally, supported using the war with Hamas as a means of unseating Hamas and restoring the PLO-controlled Palestinian Authority to power in the area.
There were four problems with this notion. First, it would require Israel to reconquer Gaza.
Second, the Obama administration would never have agreed to an Israeli conquest of Gaza.
Third, Israel doesn’t have the forces to deploy to Gaza to retake control of the area without rendering its other borders vulnerable.
The final problem with Livni’s idea is that the PLO is no better than Hamas. From the outset of the war, the PLO gave Hamas unqualified support. Fatah militias in Gaza manned the missile launchers side by side with Hamas fighters. PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas represented Hamas at the cease-fire talks in Cairo. He led the political war against Israel in the West. And he financed Hamas’s war effort. Throughout the war Abbas sent a steady stream of funds to Gaza.
If PLO forces were returned to Gaza, they would behave precisely as they behaved from 2000 until Hamas kicked them out in 2007. That is, they would have acted as Hamas’s full partners in their joint war against Israel.
2a) REVEALED: The Obama administration's support for Hamas was not passive
In the next inevitable confrontation with the terror group, the lessons of the Hamas War must not be ignoed
Israel's State Comptroller’s Report on Operation Protective Edge, the Jewish state’s war with Hamas in the summer of 2014, is exceedingly detailed. The problem is that it addresses the wrong details.
Israel’s problem with Hamas wasn’t its tactics for destroying Hamas’s attack tunnels. Israel faced two challenges in its war with Hamas that summer. The first had to do with the regional and global context of the war. The second had to do with its understanding of its enemy on the ground.
War between Hamas and Israel took place as the Sunni Arab world was steeped a two-pronged existential struggle. On the one hand, Sunni regimes fought jihadist groups that emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood movement. On the other, they fought against Iran and its proxies in a bid to block Iran’s moves toward regional hegemony.
On both fronts, the Sunni regimes, led by Egypt under President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the Saudi regime and the United Arab Emirates, were shocked to discover that the Obama administration was siding with their enemies against them.
If Israel went into the war against Hamas thinking that the Obama administration would treat it differently than it treated the Sunni regimes, it quickly discovered that it was mistaken. From the outset of the battle between Hamas and Israel, the Obama administration supported Hamas against Israel.
America’s support for Hamas was expressed at the earliest stages of the war when then-secretary of state John Kerry demanded that Israel accept an immediate cease-fire based entirely on Hamas’s terms. This demand, in various forms, remained the administration’s position throughout the 50-day war.
Hamas’s terms were impossible for Israel. They included opening the jihadist regime’s land borders with Israel and Egypt, and providing it with open access to the sea. Hamas demanded to be reconnected to the international banking system in order to enable funds to enter Gaza freely from any spot on the globe. Hamas also demanded that Israel release its terrorists from its prisons.
If Israel had accepted any of Hamas’s cease-fire terms, its agreement would have constituted a strategic defeat for Israel and a historic victory for Hamas.
Open borders for Hamas means the free flow of armaments, recruits, trainers and money to Gaza. Were Hamas to be connected to the international banking system, the jihadist regime would have become the banking center of the global jihad.
The Obama administration’s support for Hamas was not passive.
Obama and Kerry threatened to join the Europeans in condemning Israel at the UN. Administration officials continuously railed against IDF operations in Gaza, insinuating that Israel was committing war crimes by insisting that Israel wasn’t doing enough to avoid civilian casualties.
As the war progressed, the administration’s actions against Israel became more aggressive. Washington placed a partial embargo on weapons shipments to Israel.
Then on July 23, 2014, the administration took the almost inconceivable step of having the Federal Aviation Administration ban flights of US carriers to Ben-Gurion Airport for 36 hours. The flight ban was instituted after a Hamas missile fell a mile from the airport.
The FAA did not ban flights to Pakistan or Afghanistan after jihadists on the ground successfully bombed airplanes out of the sky.
It took Sen. Ted Cruz’s threat to place a hold on all State Department appointments, and Canada’s Conservative Party government’s behind-the-scenes diplomatic revolt to get the flight ban rescinded.
The government and the IDF were shocked by the ferocity of the administration’s hostility. But to his great credit, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu surmounted it.
Netanyahu realized that Hamas is part of the Muslim Brotherhood nexus of jihad and also supported by Iran. As a result the Egyptians, Saudis and UAE rightly view it as a major enemy. Indeed, Egypt was in a state of war with Hamas in 2014. Gaza serves as the logistical base of the Salafist forces warring against the Egyptian military.
Netanyahu asked Sisi for help in blunting the American campaign for Hamas. Sisi was quick to agree and brought the Saudis and the UAE into an all-but-declared operational alliance with Israel against Hamas.
Since the Egyptians were hosting the cease-fire talks, Egypt was well-positioned to blunt Obama’s demand that Israel accept Hamas’s cease-fire terms.
Israel’s problem with Hamas wasn’t its tactics for destroying Hamas’s attack tunnels. Israel faced two challenges in its war with Hamas that summer. The first had to do with the regional and global context of the war. The second had to do with its understanding of its enemy on the ground.
War between Hamas and Israel took place as the Sunni Arab world was steeped a two-pronged existential struggle. On the one hand, Sunni regimes fought jihadist groups that emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood movement. On the other, they fought against Iran and its proxies in a bid to block Iran’s moves toward regional hegemony.
On both fronts, the Sunni regimes, led by Egypt under President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the Saudi regime and the United Arab Emirates, were shocked to discover that the Obama administration was siding with their enemies against them.
If Israel went into the war against Hamas thinking that the Obama administration would treat it differently than it treated the Sunni regimes, it quickly discovered that it was mistaken. From the outset of the battle between Hamas and Israel, the Obama administration supported Hamas against Israel.
America’s support for Hamas was expressed at the earliest stages of the war when then-secretary of state John Kerry demanded that Israel accept an immediate cease-fire based entirely on Hamas’s terms. This demand, in various forms, remained the administration’s position throughout the 50-day war.
Hamas’s terms were impossible for Israel. They included opening the jihadist regime’s land borders with Israel and Egypt, and providing it with open access to the sea. Hamas demanded to be reconnected to the international banking system in order to enable funds to enter Gaza freely from any spot on the globe. Hamas also demanded that Israel release its terrorists from its prisons.
If Israel had accepted any of Hamas’s cease-fire terms, its agreement would have constituted a strategic defeat for Israel and a historic victory for Hamas.
Open borders for Hamas means the free flow of armaments, recruits, trainers and money to Gaza. Were Hamas to be connected to the international banking system, the jihadist regime would have become the banking center of the global jihad.
The Obama administration’s support for Hamas was not passive.
Obama and Kerry threatened to join the Europeans in condemning Israel at the UN. Administration officials continuously railed against IDF operations in Gaza, insinuating that Israel was committing war crimes by insisting that Israel wasn’t doing enough to avoid civilian casualties.
As the war progressed, the administration’s actions against Israel became more aggressive. Washington placed a partial embargo on weapons shipments to Israel.
Then on July 23, 2014, the administration took the almost inconceivable step of having the Federal Aviation Administration ban flights of US carriers to Ben-Gurion Airport for 36 hours. The flight ban was instituted after a Hamas missile fell a mile from the airport.
The FAA did not ban flights to Pakistan or Afghanistan after jihadists on the ground successfully bombed airplanes out of the sky.
It took Sen. Ted Cruz’s threat to place a hold on all State Department appointments, and Canada’s Conservative Party government’s behind-the-scenes diplomatic revolt to get the flight ban rescinded.
The government and the IDF were shocked by the ferocity of the administration’s hostility. But to his great credit, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu surmounted it.
Netanyahu realized that Hamas is part of the Muslim Brotherhood nexus of jihad and also supported by Iran. As a result the Egyptians, Saudis and UAE rightly view it as a major enemy. Indeed, Egypt was in a state of war with Hamas in 2014. Gaza serves as the logistical base of the Salafist forces warring against the Egyptian military.
Netanyahu asked Sisi for help in blunting the American campaign for Hamas. Sisi was quick to agree and brought the Saudis and the UAE into an all-but-declared operational alliance with Israel against Hamas.
Since the Egyptians were hosting the cease-fire talks, Egypt was well-positioned to blunt Obama’s demand that Israel accept Hamas’s cease-fire terms.
In a bid to undermine Egypt, Obama and Kerry colluded with Hamas’s state sponsors Turkey and Qatar to push Sisi out of the cease-fire discussions. But due to Saudi and UAE support for Sisi and Israel, the administration’s attempts to sideline the Egyptians failed.
The cease-fire terms that were adopted at the end of the war contained none of Hamas’s demands. Israel had won the diplomatic war.
It was a strange victory, however. Netanyahu was never able to let the public know what was happening.
Had he informed the public, the knowledge that the US was backing Hamas would have caused mass demoralization and panic. So Netanyahu had to fight the diplomatic fight of his life secretly.
The war on the ground was greatly influenced by the diplomatic war. But the war on the ground was first and foremost a product of the nature of Hamas and of the nature of Hamas’s relationship with the PLO.
Unfortunately, the Comptroller’s Report indicates that the IDF didn’t understand either. According to the report, in the weeks before the war began, the then-coordinator of government activities in the territories, Maj.-Gen. (res.) Eitan Dangot, told the security cabinet that the humanitarian situation in Gaza was at a crisis point and that hostilities were likely to break out if Israel didn’t allow humanitarian aid into the Strip.
On Wednesday we learned that Dangot’s view continues to prevail in the army. The IDF’s intelligence chief, Maj.-Gen. Herzi Halevi, told the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that Israel must send humanitarian aid to Gaza to avert a war.
There is truth to the IDF’s position. Hamas did in fact go to war against Israel in the summer of 2014 because it was short on supplies.
After Sisi overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt the previous summer, he shut Egypt’s border with Gaza because Gaza was the logistical base of the insurgency against his regime. The closed border cut off Hamas’s supply train of everything from antitank missiles to cigarettes and flour.
The problem with the IDF’s view of Hamas is that providing aid to Gaza means supplying Hamas first and foremost. Every shipment into Gaza strengthens Hamas far more than it serves the needs of Gaza’s civilian population. We got a good look at Hamas’s contempt for the suffering of its people during Protective Edge.
After seeing the vast dimensions of Hamas’s tunnel infrastructure, the then-OC Southern Command, Maj.-Gen. Sami Turgeman, told reporters that Hamas had diverted enough concrete to its tunnel project to build 200 kindergartens, two hospitals, 20 clinics and 20 schools.
Moreover, the civilian institutions that are supposed to be assisted by humanitarian aid all serve Hamas. During the war, three soldiers from the IDF’s Maglan unit were killed in southern Gaza when they were buried in rubble of a booby-trapped UNRWA clinic.
The soldiers were in the clinic to seal off the entry shaft of a tunnel that was located in an exam room.
Hamas had booby trapped the walls of the clinic and detonated it when the soldiers walked through the door.
All of the civilian institutions in Gaza, including those run by the UN, as well as thousands of private homes, are used by Hamas as part of its war machine against Israel.
So any discussion of whether or not to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza is not a humanitarian discussion. It is a discussion about whether or not to strengthen Hamas and reinforce its control over the population of Gaza.
This brings us to the goals of the war in Gaza in 2014. At the time, the government debated two possible endgames.
The first was supported by then-justice minister Tzipi Livni. Livni, and the Left more generally, supported using the war with Hamas as a means of unseating Hamas and restoring the PLO-controlled Palestinian Authority to power in the area.
There were four problems with this notion. First, it would require Israel to reconquer Gaza.
Second, the Obama administration would never have agreed to an Israeli conquest of Gaza.
Third, Israel doesn’t have the forces to deploy to Gaza to retake control of the area without rendering its other borders vulnerable.
The final problem with Livni’s idea is that the PLO is no better than Hamas. From the outset of the war, the PLO gave Hamas unqualified support. Fatah militias in Gaza manned the missile launchers side by side with Hamas fighters. PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas represented Hamas at the cease-fire talks in Cairo. He led the political war against Israel in the West. And he financed Hamas’s war effort. Throughout the war Abbas sent a steady stream of funds to Gaza.
If PLO forces were returned to Gaza, they would behave precisely as they behaved from 2000 until Hamas kicked them out in 2007. That is, they would have acted as Hamas’s full partners in their joint war against Israel.
Professor Admits Hiding Obama College Video By Todd Starnes
Harvard University Law School professor Charles Ogletree admitted that he hid controversial video footage featuring a college-age President Obama speaking at a campus rally in support of a radical professor.
"I hid this during the 2008 campaign," Ogletree said in the video. "I don't care if they find it now."
The entire video was aired exclusively on Hannity by Breitbart.com editor-in-chief Joel Pollak and contributor Ben Shapiro.
The unedited video shows Obama speaking at a 1991 rally for Professor Derrick Bell.
Bell has been described as the Jeremiah Wright of academia. At one point in the video, Obama embraces Bell.
It's unclear why Ogletree felt the need to protect Obama and hide the video during the 2008 campaign.
So how damaging do you think this video is to President Obama? How will the Mainstream Media react? And will it change anyone's mind?
==========
What’s President Trump Like When The Biased Media Isn’t Watching?
by CH
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