(rickwells.us) - The segment comes in the aftermath of the release of video showing the Jordanian fighter pilot being burned alive and begins with the information that the would-be suicide bomber that was originally part of a supposed trade deal has been relocated and will be executed before dawn.

     Charles Krauthammer believes that the objective of ISIS in the brutal murder quite likely was to destabilize its neighbors, most particularly, Jordan, who is the only active participant at this point in the limited air campaign other than the United States.

     He cites the vulnerabilities of Jordan to social unrest and upheaval, including a significant Muslim Brotherhood population as well as ISIS sympathizers.  He thinks that the goal was to draw Jordan further into a direct conflict with ISIS; a prospect which he believes does not benefit the United States.

     Krauthammer remarks that only the United States or Turkey has a true capability to fight ISIS, and that the Jordanian involvement is largely symbolic. He says this was a way for ISIS “to stir the cauldron in a country that is stable, was stable, but is easily destabilized, and that’s what ISIS is after.”

     He feels the U.S. needs to somehow get Turkey involved and the fact that they aren’t is indicative of a failure of our diplomacy.  The discussion also moves on to an Authorization for the Use of Military Force by Congress, which all panel members are in agreement on needs to be passed. The nObama regime also claims to want one so it should be a relatively easy thing to do.

http://www.rickwells.us/krauthammer-u-s-make-formal-declaration-war-isis/

     (frontpagemag.com) -Ask the White House and it’ll tell you that Al Qaeda is on the run. But it conveniently neglects specifying which direction it’s running in.

It’s still unclear whether there is any Gitmo terrorist that nObama will not free.

     That would make Hagel the first Secretary of Defense to be fired for failing to undermine national security.

     But considering the rate at which terrorists are being released, the only way to empty Jihad Alcatraz any faster would be by moving the whole base to Pakistan overnight.

     nObama already freed key Al Qaeda figures, including members of precursor ISIS groups. He freed Abdul Bin Mohammed Abis Ourgy, a bombmaker whom authorities suspected may have known about 9/11. He freed Mohammed Zahir, the Secretary General of the Taliban’s Intelligence Directorate, who was caught with nuclear materials to be used to build a bomb. He was also involved in smuggling drugs to the US.

     Each new release explores the outer limits of the type of terror that nObama will reward with amnesty. Now that we know that nObama will release nuclear terrorists, is there any place where he will draw the line? Would he release presidential assassins? As long as their target was President George W. Bush.

     Two of the Gitmo terrorists released by nObama had threatened to assassinate Bush.

     Muhammed Ali Husayn had “addressed letters to the US President and Congress threatening punishment from Allah, stating that it is ‘time to be destroyed, suffer and lose.’ Detainee has also threatened that the US President would ‘taste the death,’ telling him to await ‘the humiliation by the swords of Islam.’

     nObama assumes that Muhammed’s swords of Islam won’t be headed his way. He is the progressive who is closing Gitmo. Muhammed wouldn’t possibly dream of swinging a sword of Islam in his direction.

     Muhammed was sent off to Kazakhstan despite an executive assessment stating that without rehabilitation he would go back to his old pals in Al Qaeda. Or maybe this former Koran teacher will go back to the University of Pakistan to finish that unfinished degree in Islamic Studies. Then he’ll have the proper background for making infidels “taste the death” in the appropriately peaceful Islamic way.

     Considering that Kazakhstan has its own terrorist groups, he can rejoin the Jihad without too much travel time.

     Adel was a senior member of the Global Jihadist Support Network which is exactly what it sounds like. He was a military advisor to Osama bin Laden and had ties to multiple terrorist groups in North Africa. He can counterfeit money, forge passports, command troops and fought us in Afghanistan.

     His Gitmo file rates him as posing a high risk to Americans and having a high intelligence value.

     He is, in short, exactly the sort of terrorist you don’t want to set free, even assuming that you have for some reason decided to release terrorists.

     Adel has joined Muhammed in sunny Kazakhstan. His plans for the future doubtlessly include walks on Kazakhstan’s many moonlit beaches, a graduate degree in the fine arts and a career in standup comedy.

     Or we could just pay attention to what he told interrogators in Guantanamo Bay.

     “Detainee stated if the detainees at JTF-GTMO are released, they are going to exact revenge against the US. Detainee also stated that he would kill President Bush if given the chance.”

     nObama freed a veteran terrorist who had vowed to attack America and kill Bush. Not only has he chosen to disregard American national security and the lives of Americans, but he also chose to disregard the safety of his White House predecessor.

     While nObama’s supporters did tend to fantasize about the assassination of President Bush, they didn’t actually do anything about it. By freeing two terrorists, one of them a trained killer, who had threatened to kill Bush, nObama has actually put the life of a former president in danger.

That’s extreme behavior even by Democratic standards.

     President Clinton had bombed Saddam Hussein over a plot to assassinate George H.W. Bush.

     “The Iraqi attack against President Bush was an attack against our country and against all Americans,” President Clinton told the nation. “We could not, and have not, let such action against our nation go unanswered.”

     nObama clearly has a different opinion. He has reversed Clinton by going so far as to free Al Qaeda terrorists who expressed designs on the life of a president making it clear that he has utter contempt not only for the lives of Americans, but also for the life of a former Republican president. There is no terrorist, whether he plots to detonate a nuclear bomb or to kill a president, whom he will not free.

     Maybe if Adel Al-Hakeemy had threatened to kill nObama, he would still be sitting in Gitmo.

     Even Secretary of State Hanoi John Kerry had winkingly gotten in on the act, joking, “I could have gone to 1600 Pennsylvania and killed the real bird with one stone.”

Now nObama is freeing Islamic terrorists who agree. Is that a coincidence?

     None of the anti-war protesters waving signs calling for Bush’s head ever had the guts to follow through on it. Maybe someone in the White House is hoping that Muhammed and Adel will.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/dgreenfield/is-obama-trying-to-kill-president-bush/?utm_source=FrontPage+Magazine&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=120e879a83-Mailchimp_FrontPageMag&utm_term=0_57e32c1dad-120e879a83-156509103

     (meforum.org) - As the Assad regime is losing its grip over the country, Iran and its proxy, Hezbollah‎, both active defenders of the regime, are gaining greater freedom of action and trying to change the status quo along Israel's northern border. Both are ideologically committed to the destruction of Israel and are trying to establish a new operations stage against Israel on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights -- something that Assad has resisted for years.

     Hezbollah‎ seeks an additional arena from where it can harm Israel, as conducting operations against the Jewish state from Lebanon is problematic due to domestic political constraints (primarily fear of escalation and spillover effects on the Lebanese economy). Iran has a perennial interest in bleeding Israel. Creating a new threat from Syria serves this purpose. A new front in Syria will also to enhance its ability to deter an Israeli attack on its nuclear installations.

     The helicopter attack in Syria on senior commanders of Hezbollah‎ and Iran, just beyond the border with Israel, seems to signal that Jerusalem will not tolerate the opening of a new front. It is not clear that the Israeli-enunciated red line will be effective. Hezbollah‎'s response -- attacking an Israeli military convoy in the border area between the Golan Heights and Lebanon -- was measured, but indicated a tit for tat modus operandi.

     Israel's counter-response was also measured, showing that the government was reluctant to escalate intentionally and preferred to contain the violence. This is also what transpires from Israel's behavior in its war against Hamas during the summer of 2014. While Israel's cautious response is laudable in many respects, the limited Israeli military response to Hezbollah‎'s attack does not enhance deterrence.

     Deterrence can be enhanced, however, if Israel makes preparations for a large-scale operation against Hezbollah‎. This means building the necessary ground forces and training for Lebanese scenarios. Such a build-up process is not clearly evident so far, and Hezbollah‎ might deduce that its huge arsenal (over 100,000 missiles) creates an effective deterrent. As the number of attacks on Israel from southern Lebanon increased in recent months, the long period of quiet since 2006 seems more fragile. Perhaps Hezbollah‎ is less afraid to hit Israeli targets. Deterrence against highly motivated rivals such as Hezbollah‎ is always temporary and wears off with time. Israeli restraint is not conducive to restoration of deterrence. Therefore, the capability to destroy the Hezbollah‎ missile threat is needed for deterring this radical organization, but also in case Israel finds it necessary to address such a threat before it attacks the Iranian nuclear infrastructure.

     The attempts to change the security equation in the north call for a reassessment of Israel's policies toward Assad. If he is no longer able to resist the desire of Iran and Hezbollah‎ to perpetrate terrorist acts against Israel from beyond the Golan Heights, his usefulness for Israel becomes limited. It is true that the civil war in Syria, where bad guys fight bad guys, is a convenient strategic development. Moreover, Israel (among other actors) has very limited influence on the outcome of the bloody struggle, but the survival of the Assad regime should no longer be a factor in Israel's strategic calculations.

     Actually, the fall of the Assad regime is nowadays an Israeli interest. The demise of this regime would be a terrible blow to its regional allies -- Iran and Hezbollah‎. Damascus, an old ally of Tehran, is the linchpin of the Shiite crescent. And Iran is the most dangerous enemy of Israel and the main source for regional instability. The fall of Assad would also weaken Hezbollah‎ considerably. It would reduce Hezbollah‎-Iranian influence in Lebanon and make the Hezbollah‎ military build-up a more complicated enterprise. A Hezbollah‎ without Iranian control of Damascus might spare Israel the need to intervene militarily in Lebanon in order to deal with the missile threat.

     If Assad falls, it is not clear what will happen in Syria, but it is certain that Sunni radical groups will be more influential and the struggle over controlling parts of the country will continue. Yet, substate groups are generally less of a security threat than states. Assad-led Syria still has a chemical weapons arsenal and there are reports that it is trying to revive its nuclear weapon program.

     An Israeli predisposition to discard Assad is also useful in Jerusalem's relations with Saudi Arabia, which loathes the Assad regime and understands that its fall will curtail the growing Iranian influence in the Middle East. It is the Iranian threat that constitutes the strategic glue between the two states.

     Of course, the nObama administration does not grasp the Iranian threat and continues its ill-advised attempts to reach an agreement with Iran, which allows Tehran to keep its option to build nuclear weapons. It tries to strengthen Shiite control of Baghdad, seems to cooperate with Assad against ISIS, which turned out to be a mere strategic distraction, and accepts the Shiite Houthis' takeover of Yemen. Therefore, the Syrian-Lebanese nexus could become another issue of divergence between Jerusalem and Washington. Consequently, the paralysis of Barack nObama's Middle East policy increasingly becomes an Israeli concern as well.

     (city-journal.org) - Steven Emerson, the expert on terrorism, has caused a sigh of relief among the bien pensants of the Western world. By making inaccurate and false claims on Fox News, he has enabled them to pour righteous scorn on him and thereby avoid thinking about uncomfortable social realities.

     Emerson claimed that Birmingham, the second-largest city in Britain, was “totally” Muslim. In the last census, in 2011, 21.8 percent of the city’s inhabitants said that they were Muslim. This percentage is likely to rise because of higher birth rates among Muslims, immigration, and the departure of white Christians. Residents of Birmingham who identified themselves as “white British” declined by 11 percent between 2001 and 2011, while the “white Irish” declined by 33 percent. The proportion of Christians would have decreased further had it not been for the arrival of Eastern Europeans. Meanwhile, the Muslim Pakistani and Bangladeshi populations increased over those ten years by 40 and 50 percent, respectively, and the Arab population rose to 1 percent from zero percent. Whether this matters, whether it fills you with joy or apprehension, or leaves you indifferent, depends upon your political outlook—and perhaps on where you live.

     Since ethnic and religious groups are not scattered evenly throughout Birmingham, moreover, the population in some areas is overwhelmingly Muslim. Emerson referred to some of these areas as “no-go zones.” White women report being verbally abused there, as sluts ex officio as it were, though it would not be true to say that any of the areas are truly “no-go.” One, for example, is notable for its profusion of small, cheap, and good restaurants, patronized by the rest of the population. No part of Birmingham is as cut off from the rest of the city as are some of the banlieues of Paris. Physical (if not social) mixing of populations is evident.

     In Britain, Muslim populations like those in Birmingham have relatively poor educational attainment and high rates of youth unemployment, crime, and imprisonment. This is not likely the result of discrimination, because Hindus and Sikhs, present also in large numbers, have lower rates of youth unemployment than whites and much lower levels of crime than whites. The Sikhs have the second-highest average household wealth when such wealth is broken down by religious affiliation. Sikh households are richer than Christian ones; Muslim households are much poorer. The causes of this disparity are a matter of speculation, and of course, group characteristics don’t apply to every individual.

     Because of their high rates of consanguineous marriage, Muslim children have relatively high rates of serious genetic conditions, about which a kind of omertà has long prevailed, though it is not uniquely medical. In my experience, school inspectors never inquire as to why Muslim girls go missing from school for long periods, though I have known white parents prosecuted because their refractory adolescent child failed to attend school as the law required for only short periods. The same kind of omertà was surely one reason for the shameful disregard shown by the police in Rotherham of the systematic sexual abuse of young white girls by Muslim men there—though whether the police were more afraid of Muslim reaction or accusations of racism in the liberal press is uncertain.

     Forced marriage (very different from arranged marriage) is common among the Muslims, though it is difficult because of social secrecy to estimate just how common. Certainly I was able to recognize a pattern among my young Muslim female patients, down to the withholding of their passports when they returned “home” to Pakistan, aged between 15 and 20, to marry their first cousin in their “home” village. Resignation to their fate merged by degrees into consent; all of them knew of honor killings of young women such as themselves, which exerted the same psychological effect as lynching did on blacks in the American South.

     Supposedly to placate Muslim sentiment, local authorities have sometimes agreed to or imposed measures worthy of an apartheid regime. For example, the Birmingham Central Library provided women-only tables, in practice for the use of Muslim women. I don’t know whether this gesture came in response to a request or was an anticipatory cringe; the argument in its favor would almost certainly have been that without such separate facilities Muslim women would not have been allowed by their males to use the library at all. It is unlikely that such an argument would have succeeded for any other religious or social group, and indeed it would have provoked feminist ire, in this case notably absent, presumably because of fear.

     In France, the problems are both similar and different. France is de jure secular, Britain only de facto. This difference leads to opposing views on such matters as the wearing of the veil. The relative inflexibility of French labor laws virtually guarantees a higher unemployment rate, though not necessarily a lower income, among youth of the lowest social class. The geographical and social origins of most of France’s Muslims are different from those of Britain’s: North African rather than Indian subcontinental. Since the fate of immigrants depends on what they bring with them as well as their reception in their new country, and since Islam, whatever its claims, does not exhaust a people’s cultural characteristics, differences are only to be expected.

     But similarities are also striking: for example, low levels of educational achievement and high rates of youth unemployment and crime (60 percent to 70 percent of French prisoners are Muslim, on some estimates, and this is unlikely to be the result of prejudice alone, even if such prejudice exists). These are not characteristic of other immigrant groups, for example the Vietnamese.

     While some of the banlieues of Paris and other big cities are relatively cut off from their metropolises, as were the townships of South Africa, it would be an exaggeration to call them no-go areas—even if that is what some of the criminal youth would like them to be, so that they can get on with their domination and trafficking with more impunity than they already enjoy. Schools and other state or public institutions remain in these areas. The police and the fire brigade may sometimes be stoned by the grateful recipients of their services, but they are not totally absent. They are therefore not extra-territorial in the most literal sense. Other European countries—Belgium and Sweden, for example—have not dissimilar problems.

     But of course the most worrying aspect of the situation is the attraction of jihadi ideology for young Muslims. It is impossible to gauge exactly the degree or strength of support for it: opinion surveys are all but useless. The least one can say, however, is that jihadism attracts both those with bright and dim futures, and according to official calculations, some 2,200 youthful jihadis from France, Britain, and Belgium alone have gone to Syria. This is a far more than sufficient pool of murderous religious ideologues to cause untold havoc in Europe.

     By his inaccuracy, distortions, and exaggerations, however, Steven Emerson has provided a convenient and enjoyable distraction for his critics, an excuse for them to indulge in displacement activity, like mice that lick their paws when faced by a cat. It is easier to mock him than to suggest the correct way to deal with the threat of Islamism. It is easier and more fun for the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, to sue Fox News (for what, exactly?) than to improve life in the largely Muslim banlieue of Clichy-sous-Bois. Here is a resident’s testimonial to that suburb of Hidalgo’s city: “A piece of advice: come armed! What I like about Clichy-sous-Bois? No need to look for public toilets. They are under the sky, in the buildings. What don’t I like about Clichy-sous-Bois? What can I say . . . No, it would take too long. I’m going to vomit.”

http://www.city-journal.org/2015/eon0122td.html