How America Armed Terrorists In Syria

Three-term Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, a member of both the Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees, has proposed legislation that would prohibit any U.S. assistance to terrorist organizations in Syria as well as to any organization working directly with them. Equally important, it would prohibit U.S. military sales and other forms of military cooperation with other countries that provide arms or financing to those terrorists and their collaborators.

Gabbard’s “Stop Arming Terrorists Act” challenges for the first time in Congress a U.S. policy toward the conflict in the Syrian civil war that should have set off alarm bells long ago: in 2012-13 the Obama administration helped its Sunni allies Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar provide arms to Syrian and non-Syrian armed groups to force President Bashar al-Assad out of power. And in 2013 the administration began to provide arms to what the CIA judged to be “relatively moderate” anti-Assad groups—meaning they incorporated various degrees of Islamic extremism.

That policy, ostensibly aimed at helping replace the Assad regime with a more democratic alternative, has actually helped build up al Qaeda’s Syrian franchise al Nusra Front into the dominant threat to Assad.

The supporters of this arms-supply policy believe it is necessary as pushback against Iranian influence in Syria. But that argument skirts the real issue raised by the policy’s history. The Obama administration’s Syria policy effectively sold out the U.S. interest that was supposed to be the touchstone of the “Global War on Terrorism”—the eradication of al Qaeda and its terrorist affiliates. The United States has instead subordinated that U.S. interest in counter-terrorism to the interests of its Sunni allies. In doing so it has helped create a new terrorist threat in the heart of the Middle East.

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An Open Letter to President Trump From Sweden

The publication Nya Dagbladet today chooses to publish an open letter addressed directly and personally to US President Donald J. Trump signed by Mother Svea [the Swedish equivalent of Uncle Sam]. The letter published in several media outlets is a cry for help about the serious situation our country here on this side of the Atlantic has been put into.

The open letter:

Dear President Trump,
On behalf of the Swedish peoples’ media, we thank you for speaking the truth in regards to the existential crisis of our country. Though your comments were brief, you, nonetheless, spoke more truthfully than our own establishment leaders have in decades.

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The New Middle East

 A new Syria is emerging. And with it, a new Middle East and world are presenting themselves. Our new world is not a peaceful or stable one. It is a harsh place.

The new Syria is being born in the rubble of Aleppo.

The eastern side of the city, which has been under the control of US-supported rebel groups since 2012, is being bombed into the Stone Age by Russian and Syrian aircraft. All avenues of escape have been blocked. A UN aid convoy was bombed in violation of a fantasy cease-fire. Medical facilities and personnel are being targeted by Russia and Syrian missiles and barrel bombs to make survival impossible.

It is hard to assess how long the siege of eastern Aleppo by Russia, its Iranian and Hezbollah partners and its Syrian regime puppet will last. But what is an all but foregone conclusion now is that eastern Aleppo will fall. And with its fall, the Russian-Iranian-Hezbollah-Assad axis will consolidate its control over all of western Syria.

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Tech experts: Health exchange site needs total overhaul

by Kelly Kennedy

WASHINGTON — The federal health care exchange was built using 10-year-old technology that may require constant fixes and updates for the next six months and the eventual overhaul of the entire system, technology experts told USA TODAY.

The site could be perfect, but if the systems from which it draws data are not up to speed, it doesn't matter, said John Engates, chief technology officer at Rackspace, a cloud computer service provider.
"It is a core problem in the sense of it's fundamental to this thing actually working, but it's not necessarily a problem that the people who wrote HealthCare.gov can get to," Engates said. "Even if they had a perfect system, it still won't work."

Recent changes have made the exchanges easier to use, but they still require clearing the computer's cache several times, stopping a pop-up blocker, talking to people via Web chat who suggest waiting until the server is not busy, opening links in new windows and clicking on every available possibility on a page in the hopes of not receiving an error message. With those changes, it took one hour to navigate the HealthCare.gov enrollment process Wednesday.
Those steps shouldn't be necessary, experts said.

Read more at: USA Today

Waking from the Democratic Dream

Robert W. Merry

June 25, 2012

The time has come for the United States to give up on the notion of democracy in the Middle East. It isn’t going to happen, at least not anytime soon, and the country is starting to look silly with so many of its intellectuals clinging to a notion that has no basis in reality. Just look at Iraq, set upon a course that many Americans thought would lead to democracy, and paid for with the blood of more than four thousand American dead and some thirty-three thousand wounded. What do we see in today’s Iraq? A budding dictatorship moving in the direction of the last one—but with a big difference: this one is dominated by Shiites, a power arrangement that appreciably enhances the regional influence of neighboring Iran, considered by many Americans as their country’s most nettlesome adversary.


Look at Egypt, where the “Arab Spring” set American hearts aflutter with the prospect of democratic pluralism. The lesson there is that it’s impossible to overestimate the willingness of the traditional power blocs to upend any democratic structures or procedures that threaten their position and prerogatives in that venerable land. Consider tiny Kuwait, where the highest court just annulled the duly run parliamentary elections of February, in which opposition forces made serious gains against the country’s status quo forces. And look at Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, where any democratic sentiments are quickly quashed whenever they gain any apparent traction at all.

Read more at: The National Interest

Secretary of Defense Panetta shows how the Obama Administration is Selling Out Israel…and US Interests

by Barry Rubin

Charlie: “You coulda been another Billy Conn, and that skunk we got you for a manager, he brought you along too fast.”

Terry: “It wasn’t him, Charley, it was you. Remember that night in the Garden you came down to my dressing room and you said, `Kid, this ain’t your night. We’re going for the price on Wilson.’….I coulda taken Wilson apart! So what happens? He gets the title shot outdoors on the ballpark and what do I get? A one-way ticket to Palooka-ville! You was my brother, Charley, you shoulda looked out for me a little bit. You shoulda taken care of me just a little bit….”

–Budd Schulberg, On the Waterfront.


In a major address on U S. Middle East policy to the Brookings Institution U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta gave us a clear picture of the Obama Administration’s view of the region. When taken along with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent speech on the same subject, we now know the following regarding Obama’s policy:

It is dangerously and absurdly wrong. This administration totally and completely, dangerously and disastrously for U.S. interests misunderstand the Middle East. They are 180 degrees off course, that is heading in the opposite direction of safety.

Despite the satisfactory state of relations on a purely military level, the Obama Administration is not a friend of Israel, even to the extent that it was arguably so in the first two years of this presidency.

It is now an enemy; it is on the other side. Again, the issue is not mainly bilateral relations but the administration’s help and encouragement to those forces that are Israel’s biggest enemies, that want to rekindle war, and that are 100 percent against a two-state solution. And I don’t mean the Palestinian Authority, I mean the Islamists.

And the Obama Administration is also a strategic enemy of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Morocco, and Jordan. It is also a strategic enemy to the democratic opposition forces in Iran, Syria, Turkey, Tunisia, and Egypt.

Having analyzed and studied the Middle East for almost four decades I say none of this lightly. And these conclusions arise simply from watching what the administration says and does.

Read more at: PJMedia

How North Dakota Became Saudi Arabia

By STEPHEN MOORE

Harold Hamm, discoverer of the Bakken fields of the northern Great Plains, on America's oil future and why OPEC's days are numbered.

Harold Hamm, the Oklahoma-based founder and CEO of Continental Resources, the 14th-largest oil company in America, is a man who thinks big. He came to Washington last month to spread a needed message of economic optimism: With the right set of national energy policies, the United States could be "completely energy independent by the end of the decade. We can be the Saudi Arabia of oil and natural gas in the 21st century."

"President Obama is riding the wrong horse on energy," he adds. We can't come anywhere near the scale of energy production to achieve energy independence by pouring tax dollars into "green energy" sources like wind and solar, he argues. It has to come from oil and gas.

You'd expect an oilman to make the "drill, baby, drill" pitch. But since 2005 America truly has been in the midst of a revolution in oil and natural gas, which is the nation's fastest-growing manufacturing sector. No one is more responsible for that resurgence than Mr. Hamm. He was the original discoverer of the gigantic and prolific Bakken oil fields of Montana and North Dakota that have already helped move the U.S. into third place among world oil producers.

How much oil does Bakken have? The official estimate of the U.S. Geological Survey a few years ago was between four and five billion barrels. Mr. Hamm disagrees: "No way. We estimate that the entire field, fully developed, in Bakken is 24 billion barrels."

Read more at: The Wall Street Journal

Citaat van de week

I accuse President Barack Obama of Destroying Western Interests in the Middle East, Helping Destabilize the Region and Putting Millions of Lives In Jeopardy.

Barry Rubin

in: The Rubin Report

What’s REALLY Happening in the Middle East Today

August 25, 2011 - 11:21 am

By Barry Rubin


A few hours ago I wrote that the Egyptian military government reportedly told Israel that a major Israeli offensive into the Gaza Strip might create an out-of-control situation in Egypt. The Egyptian generals weren’t being threatening or hostile, they were saying that they could either not control a wave of violence that would result or perhaps be unable to resist demands for strong action. For this and other reasons, Israel has not retaliated.

One reason for the generals’ lack of desire to confront Israel now–aside from knowing they would be defeated and lose U.S. aid–is that they may be aware of three things. First, the Egyptian government has acknowledged that three Egyptian citizens participated in the terror attack on Israel. The story is covered here.

Second, as was made clear by his comrades at the funeral, Egyptian soldiers killed an Israeli soldier in an unprovoked shooting as the Israelis were packing up to leave the border area.

Third, the Egyptian government knows that three Egyptian soldiers were not killed by Israel on purpose but were spotted by an Israeli helicopter hunting the terrorists, who were wearing Egyptian army uniforms, and fired two missiles and machine guns at them.

Read more at: PajamasMedia

Dependence Day

January 2011

by Mark Steyn

On the erosion of personal liberty.


If I am pessimistic about the future of liberty, it is because I am pessimistic about the strength of the English-speaking nations, which have, in profound ways, surrendered to forces at odds with their inheritance. “Declinism” is in the air, but some of us apocalyptic types are way beyond that. The United States is facing nothing so amiable and genteel as Continental-style “decline,” but something more like sliding off a cliff.

In the days when I used to write for Fleet Street, a lot of readers and several of my editors accused me of being anti-British. I’m not. I’m extremely pro-British and, for that very reason, the present state of the United Kingdom is bound to cause distress. So, before I get to the bad stuff, let me just lay out the good. Insofar as the world functions at all, it’s due to the Britannic inheritance. Three-sevenths of the G7 economies are nations of British descent. Two-fifths of the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council are—and, by the way, it should be three-fifths: The rap against the Security Council is that it’s the Second World War victory parade preserved in aspic, but, if it were, Canada would have a greater claim to be there than either France or China. The reason Canada isn’t is because a third Anglosphere nation and a second realm of King George VI would have made too obvious a truth usually left unstated—that the Anglosphere was the all but lone defender of civilization and of liberty. In broader geopolitical terms, the key regional powers in almost every corner of the globe are British-derived—from Australia to South Africa to India—and, even among the lesser players, as a general rule you’re better off for having been exposed to British rule than not: Why is Haiti Haiti and Barbados Barbados?

The New Criterion

Colonel Allen West:

The Perfect Iranian Storm on the Horizon

August 25, 2010 - by Michael J. Totten

An interview with Israeli journalist Jonathan Spyer, who went undercover in the "strange dark kingdom" of Iranian-controlled south Lebanon.

Jonathan Spyer is not your typical Israeli journalist and political analyst. He has a PhD in International Relations, he fought in Lebanon during the summer war of 2006, then went back to Lebanon as a civilian on a second passport.

I can’t say I felt particularly brave venturing into Hezbollah’s territory along the Lebanese-Israeli border, but it takes guts for Israelis to go there. If Hezbollah caught him and figured out who he was, he would have been in serious trouble.

No one he met in Lebanon knew where he was from. Everyone thought he was British. And no one in Israel but his friends and colleagues knew he went back to Lebanon on his own. He decided, though, that he may as well “out” himself on my blog. His secret journey will soon be revealed anyway when his book comes out in November called The Transforming Fire: The Rise of the Israel-Islamist Conflict.

We met in Jerusalem this month and discussed his two trips to Lebanon—with and without a passport—and the perfect Iranian storm brewing on the horizon.

Read the interview at: Michael J. Totten

Thanks for the memories, Barack: Or, how to bankrupt a country in three easy steps

July 26, 2010 - by Roger Kimball

“Europe’s prospects brighten as U.S. fades.” Thus a headline in Reuters this morning.

German business confidence is soaring while U.S. consumer sentiment sinks.

Britain’s second-quarter economic growth was almost twice as fast as expected, the strongest in four years.

Meanwhile, economists have steadily marked down forecasts for Friday’s U.S. gross domestic product report.

Thanks a lot, Mr. President. And thanks to you, too, Secretary Geithner. You inherited the richest, most productive country in history. And you have set it firmly on course for economic stagnation.

It’s all part of your effort to “fundamentally transform the Untied States of America,” isn’t it, Mr. President? That’s what you promised in October 2008: to change America fundamentally. Who would have predicted you were really serious? (Well, some of us did, but you know what I mean.)

You’ve made it clear that, deep down, you really don’t like the United States. In that, you are like many of your Ivy confrères, all those Harvard-Yale-Princeton types who find the spectacle of individual freedom playing itself out irredeemably vulgar. You all are beyond allegiance to anything so parochial as an individual nation. And when it comes to what (even now) is the world’s nation of nations, the United States, you are more than embarrassed: you are downright impatient.

Samuel Huntington was right to call you “deconstructionists.” He wasn’t talking about the reader-proof theories of Jacques Derrida but something much more practical. The sort of deconstructionists he had in mind were politicians and academics and policy makers who

promoted programs to enhance that status and influence of subnational racial, ethnic, and cultural groups. They encouraged immigrants to maintain their birth-country cultures, granted them legal privileges denied to native-born Americans, and denounced the idea of Americanization as un-American. They pushed the rewriting of history syllabi and textbooks so as to refer to the “peoples” of the United States in place of the single people of the Constitution. They urged supplementing or substituting for national history the history of subnational groups. They downgraded the centrality of English in American life and pushed bilingual education and linguistic diversity. They advocated legal recognition of group rights and racial preferences over the individual rights central to the American Creed. They justified their actions by theories of multiculturalism and the idea that diversity rather than unity or community should be America’s overriding value. The combined effect of these efforts was to promote the deconstruction of the American identity that had been gradually created over three centuries.

Taken together, Huntington concluded, “these efforts by a nation’s leaders to deconstruct the nation they governed were, quite possibly, without precedent in human history.”

Read the rest at: Roger's Rules

Whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower

Great clip.

As Lori Zigante at Red State points out:

Whether we like it or not. That’s like what Mommies say when telling you to eat your yucky vegetables. Would he prefer that we be vulnerable and weak? Heck of an American Can-Do attitude, Barry!

See: Obama and His Administration Lament America’s Superpower Status

But it gets worse. Then comes the remark regarding peace in the Middle East, i.e. between Israel and the "Palestinians", almost at the end of the clip:

"and when conflicts break out; one way or another, we get drawn into 'em, and that ends up costing us significantly, in terms of both blood and treasure."

For a moment there I was not quite sure whether I was listening to the President of the United States or to Osama Bin Laden. How much American blood has actually been spilled in the conflicts between Israel and the "Palestinians"? Have American troops seen action in Gaza or on the West Bank? Could he be talking about other wars? Apparently, yes, he can. What Barack Hussein Obama is slyly repeating in this clip is the mantra of every jihadi and jihad-sympathizer on earth: the root cause of all Muslim/infidel strife in the world is the conflict between Israel and the "Palestinians".

Yes, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are costing the US significantly, in terms of both blood and treasure. But whether the West wants to acknowledge it or not: those wars are just the latest bloody episodes in the jihad against the unbelievers that was started in the seventh century by Mohammed. The Israel/"Palestinian" conflict is nothing more than a recruiting tool for the Muslim cannon fodder/voting cattle and bleeding-heart Westerners.

Joseph Farah in 2002 at WorldNetDaily.com:

Way back on March 31, 1977, the Dutch newspaper Trouw published an interview with Palestine Liberation Organization executive committee member Zahir Muhsein. Here's what he said:

“The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct "Palestinian people" to oppose Zionism.

“For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.”

and:

In fact, on the same day Arafat signed the Declaration of Principles on the White House lawn in 1993, he explained his actions on Jordan TV. Here's what he said:

"Since we cannot defeat Israel in war, we do this in stages. We take any and every territory that we can of Palestine, and establish a sovereignty there, and we use it as a springboard to take more. When the time comes, we can get the Arab nations to join us for the final blow against Israel."

No matter how many people convince themselves that the aspirations for Palestinian statehood are genuine and the key to peace in the Middle East, they are still deceiving themselves.

I've said it before and I say it again, in the history of the world, Palestine has never existed as a nation. The region known as Palestine was ruled alternately by Rome, by Islamic and Christian Crusaders, by the Ottoman Empire and, briefly, by the British after World War I. The British agreed to restore at least part of the land to the Jewish people as their ancestral homeland. It was never ruled by Arabs.

See: Palestinian People Do Not Exist

So there you have it. The Commander in Chief of the like-it-or-not dominant military power spouting Muslim propaganda. Who thinks we can continue to go on like this and not end up living in a brand-new Caliphate?

Al Liegt Obama Nog Zo Snel, de Waarheid Achterhaalt Hem Wel

Johnny Fincioen on Wed, 2010-01-20 09:22

De Republikein Scott Brown won gisteren in Massachusetts de zetel voor de Federale Senaat in Washington met een meerderheid van 5%! Dit is een swing van meer dan 30% weg van de Democraten, vergeleken met de Presidentsverkiezingen van 2008. Een overwinning die zal zinderen door het gehele politieke landschap van de VS. Stel je voor! Op die zetel zat gedurende 47 jaar, de icoon van de linkse Democratische politiek: Ted Kennedy. Het volk van Massachusetts heeft gesproken. Een staat waar de Democraten tot nu toe heer en meester zijn. Geen enkele van de 50 VS-staten is zo sterk Democratisch als Massachusetts. De Democraten kunnen het nog altijd niet geloven. De zetel van geen enkele Democraat in de gehele VS is nu nog veilig tijdens de komende verkiezingen in November 2010. Als ze nu zelfs niet meer kunnen winnen in Massachusetts!

The Brussels Journal