Not So Isolated, And More Than Extremist
Claudia Rosett, Forbes:
The airline bomber was an al-Qaida-linked terrorist. So why is Obama mincing words?
“Isolated extremist” was the label President Barack Obama initially slapped on the Nigerian Muslim who flew into Detroit on Christmas Day, burning himself in a botched attempt to take down the plane with explosives sewn into his underwear.
If anyone seems isolated here, it is the U.S. president himself. For three days after the terrorist attack, Obama carried on with his Hawaii holiday, “monitoring” the situation while leaving his staff to deal with the public. When Obama finally appeared on Monday to make a statement, he gave a boilerplate nod to the potential terror connections of the “suspect,” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab: “We will not rest until we find all who were involved and hold them accountable.” But in the same statement he went on to say that “This incident, like several that have preceded it, demonstrates that an alert and courageous citizenry are far more resilient than an isolated extremist.”
At what point, in Obama’s scheme of the universe, did Abdulmutallab qualify as “isolated?”
[...]
Terror probes – what you’re not being told
By Doug Hagmann, CFP:
On August 1, 2001, Hollywood actor James Woods witnessed four men of Middle Eastern appearance engaged in suspicious behavior on a transcontinental flight from Boston to Los Angeles. Mr. Woods’ first public recounting of his observations was five months after 9/11 on The O’Reilly Factor. During that February 15, 2002 broadcast, Mr. Woods stated that the suspicious behavior of the four men “would have been blatantly obvious to the most casual observer.”
Investigation ultimately confirmed that the actor witnessed a “practice run” for the 9/11 hijackings. He ultimately learned that all four men he observed aboard his flight were terrorists who took part in the murderous hijackings on 9/11 – and that they were not all on the same plane during the actual hijackings.
Fast forward to Christmas Day 2009, when Islamic terrorist Umar Farouk Abdul-Mutallab carried PETN onto Delta-Northwest flight 253 and attempted to detonate the explosive package using a catalyst in a syringe.
[...]
Church Bomber in Nepal Repents, Admits India Link
CDN:
Disillusioned with Hindu nationalists, the leader of a militant Hindu extremist group told Compass that contact with Christians in prison had led him to repent of bombing a Catholic church here in May 2008.
Ram Prasad Mainali, the 37-year-old chief of the Nepal Defense Army (NDA), was arrested on Sept. 5 for exploding a bomb in the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption, in the Lalitpur area of Kathmandu on May 23. The explosion killed a teenager and a newly-married woman from India’s Bihar state and injured more than a dozen others.
[...]
Winston Ewert, William Dembski, and Robert Marks Publish Mainstream Scientific Paper Exposing Flaws in Avida Evolution Simulation
ENV:
In 2003, evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski, philosopher Robert Pennock and others co-published a Nature paper titled “The evolutionary origin of complex features” reporting results of a computer simulation of evolution dubbed “Avida.” Though publicly arguing that Avida refuted intelligent design by showing the evolution of irreducible complexity, their paper refused cite the work of Michael Behe or any other ID proponent. Now, Winston Ewert, William Dembski, and Robert Marks expose in a paper in Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics why Lenski and Pennock’s “Avida” simulation fails to accurately model Darwinian evolution.
Darwinian evolution has no prior knowledge about the search target, but Avida’s programmers have intelligently designed Avida by smuggling in “active information” to help the program overcome the handicap of Darwinian blindness.
[...]
Surprise …
‘J’lem haredim still harass Christians’
THE JERUSALEM POST:
Incidents of haredim harassing Christian religious leaders and nuns in the capital are still being reported, according to the Polish honorary consul in the capital, Zeev Baran.
“Yeshiva students hurl insults at nuns and spit at them,” Baran told Israel Radio in a report aired Thursday.
He also said four monasteries were recently sprayed with graffiti and that dead cats and garbage were thrown onto the premises.
Baran further claimed that there had been an attempt to torch a monastery.
[...]
How utterly stupid. Talk about alienating potential allies. Do they spit on muslims too? How brave.
Returning Gitmo’s detainees to Yemen defies common sense
WSJ:
President Obama has belatedly declared that the near miss above Detroit constituted “a catastrophic breach of security” and ordered a review of America’s intelligence efforts. We’re glad to hear it, but let’s hope the Commander in Chief also rethinks his own approach to counterterrorism.
Recent events have exposed the shortcomings of treating terror as a law enforcement problem and rushing to close Guantanamo Bay. A new wave of jihadists is coming of age, inspiring last month’s deadly attack at Ft. Hood and nearly bringing down Northwest Flight 253, and next time we may not be so lucky.
Their latest sanctuary lies in unruly Yemen, headquarters for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, which last year pulled off a series of local bombings, including at the U.S. embassy in the capital Sana, killing 13. The al Qaeda chapter in Yemen has re-emerged under the leadership of a former secretary to Osama bin Laden.
[...]
2009 Chickens and Their 2010 Roost
By Victor Davis Hanson:
In the coming year, plenty of our chickens will be coming home to roost.
Take foreign relations. In 2009, the new administration assumed that George W. Bush was largely responsible for global tensions. As a remedy, we loudly reached out to our foes and those with whom we had uneasy relationships.
But so far these leaders — like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Russia’s Vladimir Putin — have only interpreted Barack Obama’s serial goodwill gestures as weaknesses to be exploited. They play the part of the pushy class bully, we the whiny nerd.
[...]
Raw courage — but it must be focused
Melanie Phillips:
Reflecting on the enormous anti-regime demonstrations in Iran following the death of the dissident cleric Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, Stephen Suleyman Schwartz makes an important point:
If, in his death and its aftermath, Montazeri impels the Green Movement to a wider and more powerful challenge to the clique of Ahmadinejad and Khamenei, his life will not have been in vain. But Iran must move beyond debates between clerics and others loyal to the basic order, over the real nature of the Islamic Republic, and find new, younger leaders who do not depend on religious status or past service to the regime for their credibility. Iran needs the emergence and growth of a civil society that will subject the entire historical experience of the Islamic Republic to a rigorous examination, and will find a way to end its experiment in clerical domination.
There is no doubt that among these courageous dissidents are many who long for freedom from all clerical tyranny. But the opposition movement is complicated by intra-clerical feuding which could mean that the Iranians find they once again jump from the frying pan into the fire.
[...]
More Radicalizing of Higher Education Ahead
By Jay Schalin, AT:
In 2008, Congress disbanded the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI) because according to the website Inside Higher Ed, the panel “had become too politicized.”
If the previous committee was “too politicized” to permit its continued existence — its big sin was to press for establishing universal, easily understood, quantifiable academic standards — then what are we to make of way the Obama administration is loading up the newly formed NACIQI with diversity advocates and left-wing activists?
[...]
Flight 253 passenger Kurt Haskell: ‘I was visited by the FBI’
By Aaron Foley, MLive.com:
Following up on a visit from FBI officials about an eyewitness account first described to MLive.com, Michigan attorney Kurt Haskell described the visit in comment sections across MLive on Wednesday.
Haskell and his wife, Lori, were aboard Flight 253 when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly tried to destroy the plane. They say another man tried to help Abdulmutallab board the plane in Amsterdam.
Haskell had two detailed posts in two different stories. Here is Part One, originally posted here:
“Today is the second worst day of my life after 12-25-09. Today is the day that I realized that my own country is lying to me and all of my fellow Americans. Let me explain.
[...]
Obama’s Only Real Accomplishment
By Daniel Greenfield, CFP:
Let’s get it straight, behind all the hubbub and noise, the international trips and summits, the TV specials and constant addresses to the nation and any other nation that would let him in, the huge spending plans and the photoshoots—Barack Hussein Obama has accomplished only one thing in his first year in office.
Obama’s only real accomplishment is that he took hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money, and directed them to his donors on Wall Street, in the unions and the insurance industry. Barry Hussein took in nearly 15 million dollars in donations from securities and investments companies, and his first priority was to pay it back with a massive bailout that has exploded the deficit.
[...]
Wait … postpone that coffin, folks …
No Rise of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Fraction in Past 160 Years, New Research Finds
Why the California Science Center’s Censorship of Pro-Intelligent Design Film is a Big Deal
Posted by John West, ENV:
Darwinist smear tactics notwithstanding, the comparison between what the California Science Center did and the hypothetical case of the Simon Wiesenthal Center completely misses the point. The Simon Wiesenthal Center is a private entity, and so it certainly has the legal right to limit the rental of its facilities to those who support its mission.
But the California Science Center is a government agency, not a private organization. As a part of California state government, the Science Center is required to abide by the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. Unlike private groups or individuals, a government agency is obliged to treat all citizens equally regardless of their religious or political viewpoints. In this case, once the California Science Center decided to rent its auditorium to the public, it couldn’t discriminate against groups whose viewpoints it might not favor. The Science Center didn’t have to rent its facilities to the public, but once it did so, as a government agency, it was required by the First Amendment to treat all citizens equally. Allowing the Science Center to deny citizens equal access to its facilities would be a clear violation of the Constitution.
[...]
If you are a proponent of Darwin’s theory, I’d urge you to think long and hard about how far you are willing to go down the path of trashing the Constitution. Are you really willing to jettison the First Amendment in your obsession to shield Darwinian theory from scrutiny? Are you that insecure? Do you think that the evidence for your theory is so weak that you need to resort to government censorship to prevent anyone from even hearing another point of view?
Glenn Beck Show – December 30, 2009 – Pt 1 of 7
Glenn Beck Show – December 30, 2009 – Pt 2 of 7
Glenn Beck Show – December 30, 2009 – Pt 3 of 7
Glenn Beck Show – December 30, 2009 – Pt 4 of 7
Glenn Beck Show – December 30, 2009 – Pt 5 of 7
Blaming Israel First
by P. David Hornik, FrontPage:
From Van Jones to Valerie Jarrett, the Obama has made a series of politically extreme personnel appointments that it has since come to regret. Its latest hire bids fair to continue the pattern. President Obama has appointed an “anti-Semitism czar,” Hannah Rosenthal, who appears singularly unqualified for the job. Her first target of criticism has not been an anti-Semitic exponent or event. Rather, it is Israel’s Jewish ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren, who has drawn her ire for the offense of disparaging a liberal group with which Rosenthal has been affiliated.
Not surprisingly for a liberal-Democratic administration, Rosenthal has a liberal-Democratic background. She worked for the Department of Health and Human Services during the Clinton administration, and in 1992 and 1996 was a leader of the Wisconsin Clinton-Gore campaigns. From 2000 to 2005 she was executive director of the liberal Jewish Council for Public Affairs. More recently she’s been on the advisory council of the ostensibly “pro-Israel, pro-peace” J Street and JStreetPAC.
Ideally, it shouldn’t matter. Isn’t “to monitor and combat anti-Semitism”—from the “anti-Semitism czar’s” official job title—a bipartisan concern for Jews and a consensus concern for all decent people? Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Some Jews define themselves highly invidiously in opposition to other Jews. Rosenthal appears to be one of them.
[...]
Wikipedia Meets Its Own Climategate
By Tom Bethell, Am. Spectator:
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, had an article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal drawing attention to the rise of “online hostility” and the “degeneration of online civility.” He (and coauthor Andrea Weckerle) suggested ways in which we can “prevent the worst among us from silencing the best among us.”
I agree with just about everything that they say. But there is one problem that Mr. Wales does not go near. That is the use of Wikipedia itself to inflame the political debate by permitting activists to rewrite the contributions of others. All by itself, that surely is a contributor to online incivility.
[...]
A Humpty-Dumpty View of the World
Victor Davis Hanson:
What might explain the inexplicable like the following?A president comes into office facing a $500 billion deficit and grows it to $2 trillion.
A president comes into office facing a threat of radical Islamic terrorism, and at home changes the very name of the struggle from war on terror to a variety of wishy-washy euphemisms.
A president comes into office facing a variety of Middle East thugs, from al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas to Syria and Iran, and employs the ancient kowtow, the postmodern apology, and the Carteresque reach-out to allay the threat?
A president comes into office after record high energy prices have nearly crippled the American economy, and he ignores new drilling and brushes off nuclear power — only to wax about wind and solar that provide less than 5% of our energy needs, and crushing cap and trade taxation to come.
[...]
It is time for the West to learn to say the names of Iran’s democrats
WSJ:
On Sunday bloody street battles in cities across Iran exposed the regime’s brutality for all the world to see. On Monday, the government restarted one of the darker arts it has mastered: grabbing its democrats and stuffing them in a hole.
Among the dissidents arrested was veteran democratic activist Heshmat Tabarzadi. On December 17, Mr. Tabarzadi wrote in an op-ed article on these pages that “If the government continues to opt for violence, there very well may be another revolution in Iran. One side has to step down. And that side is the government—not the people.”
Mr. Tabarzadi’s home in Tehran is under constant surveillance, so he knew the risks he took when he published an article in The Wall Street Journal under his own name. This is a man who appreciates the consequences of calling publicly for democracy: He spent nine years in Iran’s notorious Evin prison, including two in solitary confinement, for his activities as a student leader.
[...]
Stop terrorists, not tweezers
Calgary Herald:
Rather than taking away tweezers and nail-files and patting down grandmothers, the right approach would be to focus attention on those who are actually on watch lists like Nigerian al-Qaeda sympathizer Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, whose attempt to blow up a plane on arrival in Detroit was thwarted by passengers. This is not to suggest or condone racial profiling. For, as the French “blue-eyed emir,” Pierre Robert, proved when jailed in Morocco for recruiting extremists in 2003 for a suicide bombing in Casablanca, international jihadists can come packaged with blond hair. Al-Qaeda 911 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is believed to have used a number of non-Arab Europeans to support a Tunisian synagogue suicide bomber in 2002, and a Latino gang member was recruited in Chicago the same year to do some thwarted al-Qaeda dirty work.
Yet, it is quite evident the vast majority of international jihadists are not moms travelling with babies.
[...]
Lessons from the Israelis in providing secure but efficient airports
Telegraph [UK]:
SIR – You say (report, December 28) that the Israeli government employs special measures that require passengers to stay in their seats when a flight approaches Israeli airspace. Yet, as a regular traveller to Israel, I have never heard anything other than the normal advice to fasten seat belts 20 minutes before landing.
There is, however, much that can be learnt from Israeli airport authorities who combine a high degree of security – based on intelligence-led profiling – with minimal inconvenience to passengers. Queues at Tel Aviv airport are rarely longer than a few minutes.The threat to aircraft is real but it will not be combated by knee-jerk gestures which, through the resulting disruption, play into the hands of terrorists but do nothing to increase safety.
[...]
Report: CIA knew about Abdulmuttalab in August; Update: More details; Update: CIA defends itself
by Allahpundit, HOT AIR:
CBS frames this as a failure to connect the dots, but unless I’m misreading it, they did connect them. The CIA had info on his terrorist links back in August and then they had his name in November, a month before he bought his ticket. And yet … he was still allowed to fly. Why wasn’t the background on him forwarded to State after they got the name so that they could revoke his visa? A State Department official told the Washington Independent this afternoon that the info on Abdulmutallab was “very thin,” but how thin could it have been if the CIA was already picking up chatter about him before they’d even ID’d him?
[...]
The very same CIA that actively sought to undermine Bush in the terror war …
What the CIA is willing to do to hurt the Bush administration
Global-Warming Judicial Activism
The View From 1776:
Congress and the Copenhagen convocation having failed to impose draconian measures to please advocates of man-made global warming, liberal-progressives are reverting to the courts for an end-run around the will of the people.
Liberal-progressives have been thwarted by the world’s growing awareness (1) that the threat of man-made global warming is a fraudulent scam, and (2) that the economic costs of action demanded by secular religious fanatics are staggeringly high and far beyond any reasonable cost-benefit ratio. In a desperate attempt to impose the one-world-government vision of a small band of “scientists,” liberal-progressives are now turning to judicial activism.
[...]
Secondhand Hate
by Noemie Emery, Weekly Standard:
“They have ardent supporters who are nearly hysterical at the very election of President Barack Obama,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse roared about his Republican opponents in the closing hours of the Senate health care debate on December 20. “The birthers, the fanatics, the people running around in right-wing militia and Aryan support groups. It is unbearable to them that President Barack Obama should exist.” Two weeks earlier, Majority Leader Harry Reid likened opponents of his bill to those who opposed the end of slavery. On August 10, met by angry protesters at a town hall meeting, Michigan Democrat John Dingell told journalists, “The last time I had to confront something like this was when I voted for the civil rights bill and my opponent voted against it. At that time, we had a lot of Ku Klux Klan folks and white supremacists and folks in white sheets and other things running around.”
For years now, those on the left have conflated resistance to any item of their agenda–high taxes, extravagant spending, laxity on crime, what have you–with motives of a dark nature: racism, nativism, fear of “the other,” and various species of “hate.”
[...]
Video: Former El Al official explains … common sense
by Ed Morrissey, HOT AIR:
Fox News interviewed Isaac Yeffet, the former head of El Al airlines, explains why Umar Abdulmutallab would never have made it onto one of El Al’s flights. The first reason is the most obvious — when someone’s father rats them out as a potential terrorist, El Al tends to take that more seriously than the American State Department did. But there’s more to the El Al approach than just taking threat information seriously:
[...]
Los Angeles Times Reporting on Lawsuit Against California Science Center for Cancelling Intelligent Design Film
ENV:
Finally, it seems that the filing of two separate lawsuits against the California Science Center for its blatant viewpoint discrimination when it censored Darwin’s Dilemma has caught the attention of the mainstream media. The Los Angeles Times is now reporting on the story.
Strangely, the California Science Center (CSC) claims to have cancelled a contract with the American Freedom Alliance not because of something the AFA did, but rather because they didn’t like the press release put out by Discovery Institute. It might come as a shock to the CSC, but free speech is still protected in this country. The Institute can, and will, say whatever it wants to about the public activities of its scientists and researchers. The CSC has no right to limit our speech, and they have no leverage to bring to bear against the AFA and punish them for something they also have no control over. That is just a ploy to avoid the real issue, theviewpoint discrimination engaged in by a department of the state government.
[...]
Iranians’ Cry for Freedom
by Lisa Daftari, FrontPage:
Iran’s Islamic regime may be in denial about sanctions and anti-nuclear proliferation proposals, but after a long weekend of renewed and intense demonstrations, it cannot deny the thousands of disenchanted and daring Iranians who took to protest despite government threats, beatings and cold-blooded murder.
Up to 9 are reported dead and hundreds wounded as tens of thousands of Iranian protestors clashed with government security forces in what was the bloodiest and most violent demonstrations since the aftermath of President Ahmadinejad’s allegedly fraudulent re-election six months ago.
[...]
Oconomowoc Family Survives Terrorist Attempt
By Jay Sorgi, 620 WTMJ:
“I would just like to know how to get to Ethiopia by boat.”
Patricia “Scotty” Keepman still has a sense of humor after the harrowing experience she, her husband, daughter and two new adopted children from Ethiopia had as a man tried to detonate an explosive device while their plane was getting ready to land in Detroit on Christmas Day.
[...]
H/T: Linda at The Great Pumpkin
Blindness to Islam ties helps terrorists
Ralph Peters, NY Post:
On Christmas Day, an Islamist fanatic tried to blow up an airplane whose passengers were mostly Christians. And we helped.
Our government gets no thanks for preventing a tragedy. Only the bomber’s ineptitude preserved the lives of nearly 300 innocents.
How did we help Umar Abdulmutallab, a wealthy Muslim university graduate who decided that Allah wanted him to slaughter Christians on their most joyous holiday?
By continuing to lie to ourselves. Although willing — at last — to briefly use the word “terror,” yesterday President Obama still refused to make a connection between the action, the date and Islam.
[...]
Washington, not J’lem, needs to issue clarifications
DAN DIKER , THE JERUSALEM POST:
As a rule, the US has not asked Israel for public clarifications on antiterror operations. Clearly, close communications are important. There are multiple security and intelligence channels between Israel and its closest ally that have been and should be used to handle these types of security queries. The Israeli Embassy in Washington, the US Embassy in Tel Aviv, the US consulate in Jerusalem, military attaches and representatives of respective intelligence agencies are appropriate addresses.
But in this extraordinary case, the US demanded a public clarification on behalf of the PA. This clearly represents heightened US sensitivity to Palestinian protests over the IDF’s “unjust” incursion into Area A of Judea and Samaria/the West Bank, where the PA has overall security responsibility, to net the Fatah-associated terror cell that resulted in its elimination.
THIS IS where it seems more appropriate that the US issue clarifications to Israel.
[...]
The lack of climate skeptics on PBS’s ‘Newshour’
Russell Cook, AT:
I stopped watching commercial network news in the ’80s, but still had PBS’ MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and its trademark two-side analysis of major news. Gradually after 2002, the lack of global warming skeptic scientists offering rebuttal to their IPCC guests began bothering me, so I wrote and asked about it, starting in 2007. I also started writing to the Media Research Center this year, asking them to include PBS when they criticized broadcast news outlets’ lack of balance in global warming stories. Long story short, the PBS Ombudsman answered on 12/17 (here, 2/3rds down the page at the headline “Hot About Warming”), and Tim Graham at MRC’s NewsBusters also wrote a nice 12/21 analysis of PBS’ response.
What’s missing from the PBS response is an outright explanation for its lack of skeptic scientist guests, and Ombudsman Getler’s “danger of establishing a false equivalence” observation was a head-snapper for me because it mimics Society of Environmental Journalists board director Robert McClure’s opinion in his October 16th reply to me at his web page here (comment #7).
[...]
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