Wake Up America. The Sneaky French. Salena Sends Articles.

WAKE UP AMERICA BEFORE IT’S TOO 

LATE! Radical Islam never sleeps.
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Always those sneaky French. (See 1 below.)
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Two commentaries from Salena. One her own and another she forwarded to me (See 2 and 2a below.)
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Dick
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1) U.S. blocks U.N. Security Council statement on Israel, Lebanon – report

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF

The US opposed the fact that the statement failed to specifically condemn Hezbollah and that it put Israel's right of self-determination on an equal footing with the terrorist group.

The United States blocked a statement about the recent tensions between Israel and Hezbollah by the United Nations Security Council, the AFP reported on Thursday.

According to the report, the statement drafted by France stated that "members of the security council condemned all violations of the Blue Line, both by air and ground, and strongly calls upon all parties to respect the cessation of hostilities."

Diplomatic sources told the AFP that the US opposed the fact that the statement failed to specifically condemn Hezbollah and that it put Israel's right of self-determination on an equal footing with the terrorist group.

Earlier this week, Hezbollah and Israel exchanged blows along the Lebanese border in a retaliative attempt by the Iranian-backed guerrilla organization to exact a price from Israel for the bombing of a terror cell in Syria late in August.

While no IDF troops were injured, Israel fired over a hundred artillery shells toward targets in south Lebanon in response to the attack.


All UN Security Council statements need to be approved by the entire 15 members council, which include the five permanent members – the US, the UK, France, Russia, and China – and ten non-permanent members elected for two-year terms by the General Assembly.

The latest currently include Belgium, Germany, Poland, Côte d'Ivoire, South Africa, Indonesia, Kuwait, Equatorial Guinea, Dominican Republic and Peru.

Several countries did not agree on the language suggested by the US, according to AFP. The statement was eventually abandoned.

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2) Coming Home

No matter where you lived in America on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, the story often begins with a sapphire sky filled with airy white clouds perfectly contrasted against the expansive blue, a picture-perfect backdrop shattered by the deadliest attack on American soil in the country's history. 

Nineteen men, trained by al Qaeda, boarded four passenger aircraft that morning, seeking to carry out a devastating coordinated attack aimed at symbols of American freedom: the World Trade Center, the Capitol, and the Pentagon. Three hit their target. Flight 93, the plane targeting the Capitol, crashed in an isolated field in Somerset, Pa., thanks to brave passengers who wrested control of the plane from the hijackers. More than 3,000 people lost their lives that day, 400 of whom were New York City’s first responders. 

Sean Parnell, Joni Ernst, Taylor Cleveland, Lloyd Austin, and Victor Lewis are five people whose lives were changed by the terror attacks. They were separated by geography, age, and life experience, but for them, 9/11 proved to be a common call of duty to serve their country.

 Each have faced their own personal battles,  ghosts, successes and traumas since they’ve returned home, I sat down with all five of them to take a look at these American heroes called to the highest service to our country 18 years later.

Click here for the full story

2a)

The Shiite Crescent and Regional Disaster

Shoshana Bryen AMERICAN THINKER

For decades, the concept of a “Shiite Crescent” anchored by the radical Shiite supremacists in Iran and passing through Iraq, Syria, and Hezb’allah to the Mediterranean Sea has been understood. It would provide Iran not only with closer access to Israel, but also spread across the northern borders of two key Sunni adversaries — pro-American Jordan, and its most important enemy, Saudi Arabia, guardian of Mecca and Medina. It would further split off Sunni Turkey (a historic foe) from the other Sunni Middle East states.

The Crescent is, for Iran, a single battlefront and the Islamic Republic has spent decades successfully undermining and wrecking each subsidiary member.

Iraq is hardly a functional country. But as a staging ground for Iranian militias and weapons depots headed west, Iraq is a prize. Syria is largely a dead zone. But as a launching pad for Iranian military bases and attacks on Israel, Syria is a bonanza. Lebanon is a corrupt satrap of Syria and Iran, governed by a terror organization with a foreign legion and an international money/drug/weapons racket. But its very weakness and its border with Israel make Lebanon invaluable.

Each member of this “gang of four” maintains a state of war with Israel and threatens it on a regular basis. Israel’s attacks on weapons centers Lebanon, Syria and Iraq are not an escalation of a fragile situation — they are a defensive response to a  high-tech military buildup orchestrated by Iran across the region.

Israel has the support of the United States for its defensive actions. But until now, U.S. foreign and defense policy have actually made things worse for Israel and others in the region by empowering Iran – and even now, when the administration is aware of its malign nature, and has reimposed economic sanctions on Tehran, it needs a strategy against Iranian gains on the ground.

Concern for Iranian expansion was the reason the United States supported the tyrant Saddam Hussein in the war he instigated against Iran in the 1980s. The 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, however, was a step too far for America. The tide began to turn on Saddam and on the concept of a bulwark against Iranian expansion.

The year 2011 was key. The “Arab Spring” undermined and overthrew — with American support — the anti-jihadist, anti-Muslim-Brotherhood Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, ushering in a year of Brotherhood rule that saw jihadists released from prison and weapons imported across Sinai from Iran. The Egyptian military has spent years — with some assistance from Israel — trying to restore calm to the area.

The anti-jihadist Moammar Qadaffi in Libya was next on the Obama list. Today, the country remains in turmoil with “militias” of every stripe fighting for territory and oil.

Whatever the merits of the U.S. entering Iraq in 2003, leaving in 2011 was an unmitigated disaster for Iraqis and everyone else. ISIS, followed by Iranian-commanded Shiite militias, ravaged the country, killing and enslaving Yazidis and Kurds, and erasing the border with Syria. With the (temporary?) territorial demise of ISIS, the Iranian militias stayed behind to wreak their own form of havoc in the western, Sunni area of Iraq and bulldoze a path for Iranian weapons into Syria for better access to Israel.

American policy on Syria during the Obama administration, included pinkish lines against the use of chemical weapons instead of clear red ones, and on-again-off-again threats of military action. As Syria crumbled and Iran built and commanded militias in support of Assad, the administration poured arms and political support into what it called “secular, anti-Assad militias,” in the hopes of avoiding the deployment of American troops. “Our” militias, however, had their own ideas about their enemies and their friends — and it isn’t altogether wrong to say that the U.S. ended up supporting ISIS and ISIS-related terror groups in Syria one or two steps removed.

It was the Trump administration that forced the definition of friends and enemies and actually wrested ISIS from its primary territorial base. But in a region bereft of stable government, it will appear again in some form.

Israel has regional red lines, which have been discussed with both the United States and Russia. These include ensuring that neither Iran nor Hezb’allah has military bases in southern Syria near the Israeli border; ensuring no use of chemical weapons; not permitting Iran to build weapons factories — particularly nuclear-related or precision missile factories in other countries; and not permitting the movement of certain types of munitions across the Crescent.

Israeli action has certainly set back Iran’s aspirations. But it will need the continued support of the United States — and others, including the EU and the Sunni Arab States — to come to terms with the “gang of four” and the havoc that is not limited to Israel, but has implications far beyond. And it will have to focus on Iran as the lynchpin of regional disaster.

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