The world when it comes to Islamic Terrorism!
Every time radical Muslims kill people we hear" " the victims are in our thoughts and prayers." I am sick and tired of this trite garbage. When are we going to stop with the words and start returning the fire? When are we going to declare war on these sick minded heathens? When are we going to stop with PC'ism and go back to normal old fashioned contempt?
Europeans seem to have allowed themselves two choices. They can either be stabbed by Muslim fanatics or be drowned by ignoring Climate Change. London's Mayor is Muslim and apparently asserted being killed is just part of the price you pay for living in a big city. Insanity and hysteria seem to reign.
Meanwhile the Trump bashing continues. (See 1 below.)
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Go after the most vulnerable - the kids. (See 2 below.)
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The Radical Left's Linda Sarsour and the First Amendment. Fawning academia sucked in again by the PC vacuum. (See 3 below.)
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Is Trump engaged in a ploy vis a vis Jerusalem and America's re-location of its embassy? (See 4 below.)
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Monarchical rift exposed? Dubious Dubai? (See 5 below.)
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Dick
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1)The Fusion Party
The Democrats are following the lead of the progressive media — together, they now form the anti-Trump brigade.
Is there a Democratic-party alternative to President Trump’s tax plan?
Is there a Democratic congressional proposal to stop the hemorrhaging and impending implosion of Obamacare?
Do Democrats have some sort of comprehensive package to help the economy grow or to deal with the recent doubling of the national debt?
What is the Democratic alternative to Trump’s apparent foreign policy of pragmatic realism or his neglect of entitlement reform?
The answers are all no, because for all practical purposes there is no Democratic party as we have traditionally known it.
It is no longer a liberal (a word now replaced by progressive) political alternative to conservatism as much as a cultural movement fueled by coastal elites, academics, celebrities — and the media. Its interests are not so much political as cultural. True to its new media identity, the Democratic party is against anything Trump rather than being for something. It seeks to shock and entertain in the fashion of a red-carpet celebrity or MSNBC talking head rather than to legislate or formulate policy as a political party.
The result is that in traditional governing terms, the Democratic party has recalibrated itself into near political impotency. Barack Obama ended the centrism of Bill Clinton and with it the prior Democratic comeback (thanks to the third-party candidacies of Ross Perot) from the disastrous McGovern, Carter, Mondale, and Dukakis years.
Indeed, Obama’s celebrity-media/identity-polit
Most Democratic leaders are dynastic and geriatric: Bernie Sanders (75), Hillary Clinton (69), Elizabeth Warren (67), Diane Feinstein (83), Nancy Pelosi (77), Steny Hoyer (77), or Jerry Brown (79). They are hardly spry enough to dance to the party’s new “Pajama Boy” and “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” music.
Yet those not past their mid-sixties appear unstable, such as the potty-mouth DNC head Tom Perez and his assistant, the volatile congressman Keith Ellison. Or they still believe it is 2008 and they can rally yet again around “hope and change” and Vero possumus. That politicos are talking about an amateurish Chelsea Clinton as a serious future candidate reflects the impoverishment of Democratic political talent.
In such a void, a traditionally progressive media, including the entertainment industry, stepped in and fused with what is left of the Democratic party to form the new opposition to the Republican party and in particular to Donald Trump. The aim now is to alter culture through the courts and pressure groups rather than to make laws.
A disinterested observer would have seen that the Democratic antidote to Trumpism was a return to Bill Clinton’s focus on working-class, pocketbook issues — the issues that might win back swing voters in the proverbially blue-wall states. But that won’t happen. The Democratic party is now in the hands of Obama progressives, who in turn follow the lead of the hip, cool, and outraged media that have no responsibility other than to appear hip and cool and outraged. Trump apparently understands that and so focuses most of his invective not against a tired Nancy Pelosi or the shrill Chuck Schumer but at the major networks, mainstream newspapers, and Hollywood celebrities — the heart now of the progressive fusion party.
Trump’s strategy is understandable. A recent study released by the Harvard Kennedy School and Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy reported that in Trump’s first 100 days, 80 percent of major-media news coverage was negative (double the figure during President Obama’s first three months). More important, anti-Trump news constituted 41 percent of all media news coverage, a percentage three times greater than coverage accorded prior presidents. In clinical terms, we might call that an obsession.
If it were not for Fox News’s much caricatured “fair and balanced” coverage (52 percent of its Trump coverage was negative, Harvard reported) to average in with other major print and television media, the anti-Trump bias would have been far greater — given that CNN and NBC ran almost no media coverage that portrayed Trump in a positive light (their coverage was 93 percent negative).
The symptoms of the Media-Democratic party fusion range from the trivial to the profound. The merger is emblematized by the annual White House Correspondents Dinner, which has now fully morphed from a self-congratulatory night for Washington media insiders to a star-studded Petronian banquet of progressive celebrities.
Operationally, the celebrity world and the media have institutionalized political obscenity and street theater.
Operationally, the celebrity world and the media have institutionalized political obscenity and street theater. On Inauguration Day, Madonna dreamed out loud of blowing up the White House; Ashley Judd went on a crude, incoherent rant about Trump. Since then, media fixtures such as Steven Colbert and Bill Maher have melted down, the one suggesting on the air that Trump had committed a sex act on Vladimir Putin, the other that he commits incest with his daughter. Yet both were simply amplifying the prior gross slur from Politico reporter Julia Joffe: “Either Trump is f***ing his daughter, or he’s shirking nepotism laws. Which is worse?”
Democrats in Congress and party functionaries have parroted the media’s obscenity and its pettiness. Sixty-seven representatives boycotted the inauguration. A new Democratic-party T-shirt reads “Democrats Give a S*** About People.” The head of the DNC, Tom Perez, routinely uses “s***” as if he were a stand-up on late-night TV. John Burton finished chairing the California Democratic convention with group chants of “f*** Trump,” with collective outstretched middle fingers.
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D., N.Y.) cried out that if the Democrats could not offer an antidote to Trump, then “we should go the f*** home.” California senator Kamala Harris, supposed icon of the future of the party, rushed in with her own four-letter obscenities.
Celebrity ex-felon Martha Stewart thinks it’s hip to flip the bird to a photo of Donald Trump while simultaneously flipping the V-sign to an image of rapper Snoop Dogg, the violent ex-felon and former pimp who was most recently in the news for shooting an effigy of Donald Trump. Obscenity has become the media tail wagging the Democratic-party dog, even though such vulgarity might shock television audiences rather than win voters.
Role playing, rumor peddling, and virtue signaling, in lieu of winning elections and offices, are the new Democratic agendas.
Note also the media’s idea of the “Resistance” to Trump, as if multimillionaire celebrities attacking Trump while camped out in the scrub of the Hollywood hills were our version of the World War II maquisards who ambushed Waffen SS patrols in rural France. After the media hyped the “Resistance,” even sore-loser Hillary Clinton piled on that she too had enlisted. Role playing, rumor peddling, and virtue signaling, in lieu of winning elections and offices, are for now the new Democratic agendas.
Instead of formulating policy, the fusion party targets its opponents in Whac-A-Mole fashion. After moving on from the smear of First Lady Melania Trump as an illegal alien and call girl, we went to Steve Bannon, the Charles Lindbergh–style fascist; then Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the duplicitous Russian patsy; on to daughter Ivanka Trump, the incestuous peddler of trinkets; then to National Security Council member Sebastian Gorka, the Hungarian Nazi sympathizer; and now presidential adviser Jared Kushner, the Russian collaborator. Each “scandal” got its 15 minutes of cable-news outrage and unhinged tweets from celebrities, before the wolf cries howled on to the next target.
The media brag that they now more or less run the Democratic agenda. Univision’s Jorge Ramos (whose daughter worked for the Hillary Clinton campaign) recently thundered:
Our position, I think, has to be much more aggressive. And we should not expect the Democrats to do that job. It is our job. If we don’t question the president, if we don’t question his lies, if we don’t do it, who is going to do it? It’s an uncomfortable position.
In other words, Ramos confessed that the Democratic party apparently has neither new ideas nor a political agenda that would win over the public, and thus self-appointed journalistic grandees like him would have to step forward and lead the anti-Trump opposition as they shape the news.
Fellow panelist and CNN’s media correspondent Brian Stelter answered Ramos, “You’re almost saying we’re a stand-in for the Democrats.” Thereby, Stelter inadvertently confirmed Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon’s widely criticized but prescient assertion that the media are in fact “the opposition party” — and should be treated as such.
During the 2016 campaign, James Rutenberg of the New York Times reminded journalists that they should feel no need to treat the exceptional Trump candidacy by “normal standards,” a de facto admission that journalistic crusaders would take the political lead in opposing Trump. Christiane Amanpour said nearly the same thing in reference to Trump’s stance on global warming: Journalists are now to be advocates, not disinterested reporters of the news.
In the matter of the Podesta WikiLeaks trove, it was often difficult to determine whether reporters such as Glenn Thrush and Dana Milbank were colluding with the reelection efforts of Hillary Clinton, or whether an inept campaign without ideas had turned to such reporters and columnists to develop its campaign talking points and strategies.
When Thrush was caught massaging his stories with the Clinton campaign and confessed himself to be a hack, he received a career boost: The New York Times hired him. The message seemed to be that more reporters should do what the Democrats could not. The common theme of the Obama-era Journolist, Ben Rhodes’s “echo chamber,” the Washington Beltway power media/politics marriages and sibling connections, and the WikiLeaks revelations was that the media and the Democratic party were more or less indistinguishable.
Clinton modeled her talking points on media-driven agitprop such as Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and global-warming activism.
Most of Hillary Clinton’s agendas and campaign themes were not policy-oriented; nor did they grow from a coherent and detailed political ideology shared by Democratic officials. Instead, Hillary Clinton modeled her talking points on media-driven agitprop such as Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and global-warming activism.
Yet outside Hollywood, New York, and Washington, the issues facing voters are not income redistribution, transgendered bathrooms, the division of Americans by race, or the radical alteration of the economy to supposedly address recent climate change induced by carbon emissions. In a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll in late 2016, the media earned only a 19 percent favorable rating, which raises the question of whether the fusion between Democrats and the media is the old party’s salvation or suicide.
Donald Trump has been given a great gift in that his gaffes are seen by most Americans in the context of an obsessed and unhinged Democratic-media nexus. He is pitted against a new fusion party of media elites and aging political functionaries, who all believe that America should operate on their norms, the norms of Washington, New York, Hollywood, and Malibu — all places that symbolize, to most Americans, exactly how the country has gone wrong.
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2)
One of the three jihadi terrorists responsible for the London attacks Saturday night was actively targeting children – easy prey, whom he hoped to radicalize.
2)
London Terrorist Tried to Radicalize Children
One of the three jihadi terrorists responsible for the London attacks Saturday night was actively targeting children – easy prey, whom he hoped to radicalize.
In fact, a neighbor of the terrorist, Erica Gasparri, an Italian mother with three children, reported him to the police two years ago after realizing he was “brainwashing” her children.
“He was trying to radicalize the children, he would go down to the park and talk to them about Islam. He also came to the houses and gave the kids money and sweets during Ramadan,” Gasparri said, speaking to The Telegraph.Gasparri confronted him after one of her children came home from a local park saying, “Mummy, I want to become a Muslim” after encounters with him.
Children are increasingly becoming targets for radicals. Their tactics range from threats, force and intimidation to more subtle methods of brainwashing through the media and school systems.
Regardless of the methodology used, the end goal is the same: to raise a generation of kids who believe the West is the enemy and must be destroyed.
This radicalization is also happening at home, in the United States. Extremists are using social media to reach a broader audience and lure Western teenagers into joining terrorist organizations. According to the FBI, there are currently ISIS-related investigations in all 50 states, and more than 30% of the Americans charged with ISIS-related activities are under the age of 20.
Get a sneak peek of Clarion’s next film KiDS: Inside the Terror Factory (working title), which documents the exploitation and radicalization of children by Islamist extremists.
Consider:
American Salafist Preacher Ahmad Musa Jibril
Through the internet and social media, Ahmad Jibril spews his extremism. One of the London terrorists was reportedly radicalized by watching Jibril’s videos.When a friend of the terrorist noticed he was becoming radicalized through the videos, he reported him to British authorities, who, unfortunately, did not arrest him.“He used to listen to a lot of Musa Jibril. I have heard some of this stuff and its very radical. I am surprised this stuff is still on YouTube and is easily accessible. I phoned the anti-terror hotline. I spoke to the gentleman. I told him about our conversation and why I think he was radicalized.”Jihadis have become extremely adroit at exploiting the internet, using it as a powerful tool to radicalize and recruit to their cause.The Trojan Horse Scandal
Beginning in 2014, authorities investigated at least a dozen independent Muslim schools in the East London borough of Tower Hamlets because of evidence that Islamic extremists took over the schools.The investigation followed similar inquiries into secular schools in Birmingham that were found to have been infiltrated by Muslim extremists. The investigations were dubbed the Trojan Horse scandal and revealed that attempts to introduce Islamist or Salafist ideology into the UK schools were ongoing for 20 years.In 2015, a Quebec television program exposed schools – some publicly funded — owned by organizations that have a history of supporting terrorism.In America, powerful Islamist Fetullah Gulen, and ex-pat from Turkey, runs the largest charter school network in the country – fully funded by taxpayer money.ISIS
Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) is notorious for its project called the “Caliphate Cubs” to radicalize the next generation to work for the organization and its goal of creating a worldwide caliphate run by sharialaw.One project, which targets young children, is an app, which ostensibly teaches the letters of the Arabic alphabet but places violent imagery and songs to indoctrinate children. Children are rewarded if they say they are prepared to carry out attacks on the West, with targets including the Statue of Liberty, Big Ben and the Eiffel Tower.In its territory, ISIS kidnaps and brainwashes children through its terror training camps. The group releases many videos showing these camps and child executioners.Hamas and the Palestinian Authority
A television show for pre-schoolers, a theater contest at a school, hit songs that encourage the use of “cleavers and knives” – are among mediums used by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas to teach Palestinian children to hate Jews and incite them to punch, stab, shoot and otherwise kill the “enemy.”Palestinian textbooks teach their children that Israel has no right to exist; the Palestinian Authority uses sports events to glorify terrorists, naming tournaments and festivals after the most gruesome killers; Hitler is held up as the ultimate role model in PA schools and on their Facebook pages; and P.A. media teaches children the pleasure and rewards of martyrdom.As if that was not enough, Hamas provides military training and indoctrination for kids through their summer camps in which Palestinian children receive paramilitary training, including how to make a homemade rocket and how to fire guns (training uses live ammunition).Somalia
Al-Shabaab, the brutal Islamist terror organization responsible for the Westgate Mall attack in Nairobi, Kenya, recruits children for use as soldiers. Children are lured to join the group through the use of extremist propaganda and material rewards.Religious events in mosques provide fertile ground for recruitment as well. Mosques in the United States, in areas with heavy Somali immigrant populations, such as Minnesota, have also played roles in recruiting older boys, even those born and raised in the U.S.Al-Shabaab has also proven remarkably sophisticated in its use of the Internet to post recruitment appeals aimed directly at young Somali-Americans that feature glorified battle scenes and personal testimonials from Somali-Americans already among its ranks.
Clarion’s next film KiDS: Inside the Terror Factory (working title) documents the exploitation and radicalization of children by Islamist extremists. KiDS will feature compelling personal stories of children and their families who are being actively influenced by extremists and activists who are working to confront this growing global threat. The film is currently in production.
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3) Linda Sarsour Gets Standing Ovation at
CUNY
Editor’s note: Self-styled Muslim “feminist” and Islamist apologist Linda Sarsour was invited and gave the commencement address to graduates of the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy on June 1. She was given a standing ovation.
In an era when saying the wrong thing, deemed offensive by someone, can end a career, social justice warriors always seem to get a pass. Few have received more than Linda Sarsour, a Muslim self-styled “feminist” who supports a political system that systematically represses women, celebrates child warriors on social media, and once tweeted of two ideological foes, “I wish I could take away their vaginas – they don’t deserve to be women.”
The more Sarsour offends, the more she is celebrated. Barack Obama honored her as a Champion of Change. Today she will give the keynote address at the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Public Health graduation ceremony.
Sarsour’s endorsement of Sharia law and leadership in the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement should have made her an unfit candidate to address graduates of any educational institution even if she weren’t a social media provocateur. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one of the women whose vagina Sarsour wants to confiscate, calls her a “fake feminist.” Brigitte Gabriel, the other woman, calls Sarsour a “master manipulator” successfully swaying “the gullible women’s movement.”
Ariel Behar of IPT News wrote that Sarsour specializes in trying “to shut down those who cite her record of celebrating terrorists and advocating radical positions by calling the critics Islamophobes.” Sarsour is also a conspiracy theorist, endorsing, for instance, the bizarre view that failed “underwear bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was “a CIA agent.”
Sarsour’s defenders claim that her views stem from anger and “should come as no surprise for a Palestinian-American;” after all what she really opposes is “right-wing Zionism.” Sarsour has said that Zionists – including the vast majority of Jews – can’t be feminists. She didn’t say only “right-wing Zionists” can’t be feminists.
Why would the CUNY want to showcase someone who, as Daniel Pipes documents, has such a “long record of incompetence, extremism, vulgarity, and eccentricity”? Dov Hikind, a Brooklyn Democrat in the New York Assembly, says “it’s just nuts. It makes no sense. It’s crazy to have this woman be the person who’s going to speak to the students.”
In an effort to explain, CUNY Chancellor James B. Millikin released an April 26 statement saying that while the views Sarsour “reportedly” has on Israel are “anathema to the values of higher education,” forgoing a commencement speech by Sarsour “would conflict with the First Amendment and the principles of academic freedom.”
Much the same argument was made by five CUNY professors in a spirited but sophomoric defense of Sarsour’s right to speak at the academic blog InsideHigherEd. Two of the five, Meena Alexander and Rosalind Patchesky, are known for their anti-Israel activism.
But these arguments conflate and grossly misunderstand free speech and academic freedom. Which speakers a university, even a public one, invites to deliver commencement speeches is not a First Amendment issue. This is not a matter of deciding whether to allow this or that student demonstration or campus guest lecture to take place; it’s a formal endorsement, not of what the speaker says, but of the speaker’s qualifications and ability to inspire an audience. Of course Sarsour has a First Amendment right to her anti-Zionism and even to her anti-Semitism. But CUNY does not have a First Amendment obligation to honor her or provide a platform for her.
Academic freedom is another thing entirely. Sarsour is not a CUNY faculty member, or even an academic. Even if she were, her academic freedom would only be violated if Millikin tried to influence the content of her teaching.
Those who cite Columbia University’s hosting of a lecture by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a precedent are missing the point entirely. Having a morbid intellectual curiosity perform live for the benefit of scientific observation is one thing. Inviting one to give parting words of advice to your student body is another thing altogether.
If Millikin really found Sarsour’s support for BDS (no need for the qualifier “reportedly”) “anathema to the values of higher education,” as chancellor he could have easily overridden her selection. This is what likely happens all the time in nearly every academic institution when someone suggests a conservative speaker be invited.
The problem, most likely, is that Sarsour received far more faculty support than any conservative who ever made it past the first round of nominations at CUNY.
If university administrators want to wilt under pressure and allow this kind of spectacle to take place, they should at least find the courage not to cite the First Amendment and academic freedom as the reasons.
This article was reprinted with permission from Middle East Forum.
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4) Trump left the door open for a Jerusalem embassy
By Eli Lake
By Eli Lake
But in one important respect, Trump's presidency appears entirely conventional. That is in the Middle East.
Like his recent predecessors, he promised during the presidential campaign to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. And like his predecessors, he violated that promise now that he is in office.
So why did Trump do it? "To maximize the chances of successfully negotiating a deal between Israel and the Palestinians," according to a White House statement issued Thursday on his decision to sign a waiver of the Jerusalem Embassy Act, that would have set in motion the process for the U.S. moving its embassy to Israel's capital.
It doesn't get much more conventional than that. What modern president hasn't tried to maximize the chances of that ever-elusive peace deal?
It would be easy to end the story there. But in this case, Trump has left open the possibility that he will eventually keep his campaign promise: "As he has repeatedly stated his intention to move the embassy, the question is not if that move happens, but only when," the White House statement also said.
With Trump, it's never clear what promises, if any, he intends to keep. This is the same guy who campaigned on resetting ties with Russia, only to reach out to Russia's traditional rival, China, in his first weeks in office. During the transition he signaled he might recognize the sovereignty of Taiwan. Then, of course, he backtracked on that as well.
White House officials tell me that Trump, for now, believes he can use the embassy issue as leverage. Normally this would mean holding out the prospect of moving the embassy as a carrot to the Israelis in exchange for concessions on settlements.
In this case, however, it's a little different: Trump is using the prospect of an embassy move as a stick with Israel's Arab neighbors. It has been reported that Jordan's King Abdullah, whose country enjoys a peace treaty with Israel, warned Trump that an embassy move would mean riots. This is a familiar refrain for anyone who has followed this issue. The vaunted Arab Street will rise up if America deigns to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital.
Let's leave aside for a moment that this provides a heckler's veto on U.S. policy toward the world's only Jewish state. In another sense, it means that Trump is calling a longstanding bluff. If U.S. recognition is so bad for you, then help me help you avoid that, for the time being.
One White House official told me Trump is eyeing current discussions between Israel, Jordan and Egypt in this respect. This would allow Israel to sell natural gas to its neighbors, and pave the way for more agreements to allow Jordanian and Egyptian nationals to work in Israel as well as deals to share water resources.
Most important, though, Trump is banking on Jordan and Egypt to pressure the Palestinians in the peace negotiations his advisers would like to see restarted. So far, there are signs that a new peace process is in the works. The Palestinians are said, for example, to have dropped their preconditions for negotiations with Israel.
That alone is progress.
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5) Four Arab nations sever diplomatic ties with terror-funding country
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - Four Arab nations announced Monday that they were severing diplomatic relations with the Gulf kingdom of Qatar, moving swiftly to isolate the gas-rich country after accusing Qatar's government of supporting terrorist organizations and stoking regional conflicts.
The four countries - Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain - released separate and apparently coordinated statements saying they would cut air, sea and land links with Qatar, which hosts a base for the U.S. military's Air Forces Central Command and will host the 2022 FIFA World Cup.
Qatar's Foreign Ministry called the measures "unjustified" in a statement and said the decision to sever ties was a violation of the country's sovereignty, and "based on claims and allegations that have no basis in fact."
The escalating and unusually public diplomatic rift exposed the ongoing tensions between the monarchies of the Persian Gulf as well as their competition for regional influence. And it came just weeks after President Trump met with Arab and Muslim leaders in Saudi Arabia and called for a unified front against extremism - a visit that analysts said had bolstered the regional assertiveness of Saudi Arabia and its closest allies.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, asked Monday in Australia about the possible ramifications about the Gulf states' rift, said that "what we're witnessing is a growing list of irritants in the region that have been there for some time."
But Tillerson and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, appearing alongside him and their Australian counterparts, said that they did not think the developments would affect the U.S.-led coalition fighting Sunni extremists in the Middle East.
"I say that based on the commitment that each of these nations that you just referred to have made in this fight," Mattis said, referring to the four states that broke relations with Qatar.
The United States uses bases in several of the countries to launch air operations against the Islamic State extremist group, and has its headquarters for the air war at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar.
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5) Four Arab nations sever diplomatic ties with terror-funding country
By Kareem Fahim
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - Four Arab nations announced Monday that they were severing diplomatic relations with the Gulf kingdom of Qatar, moving swiftly to isolate the gas-rich country after accusing Qatar's government of supporting terrorist organizations and stoking regional conflicts.
The four countries - Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain - released separate and apparently coordinated statements saying they would cut air, sea and land links with Qatar, which hosts a base for the U.S. military's Air Forces Central Command and will host the 2022 FIFA World Cup.
Qatar's Foreign Ministry called the measures "unjustified" in a statement and said the decision to sever ties was a violation of the country's sovereignty, and "based on claims and allegations that have no basis in fact."
The escalating and unusually public diplomatic rift exposed the ongoing tensions between the monarchies of the Persian Gulf as well as their competition for regional influence. And it came just weeks after President Trump met with Arab and Muslim leaders in Saudi Arabia and called for a unified front against extremism - a visit that analysts said had bolstered the regional assertiveness of Saudi Arabia and its closest allies.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, asked Monday in Australia about the possible ramifications about the Gulf states' rift, said that "what we're witnessing is a growing list of irritants in the region that have been there for some time."
But Tillerson and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, appearing alongside him and their Australian counterparts, said that they did not think the developments would affect the U.S.-led coalition fighting Sunni extremists in the Middle East.
"I say that based on the commitment that each of these nations that you just referred to have made in this fight," Mattis said, referring to the four states that broke relations with Qatar.
The United States uses bases in several of the countries to launch air operations against the Islamic State extremist group, and has its headquarters for the air war at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar.
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