BRITISH IMAM

Quotes from Anjem Choudary, a "radical" British Imam.  He has led several Muslim protests in London.

"In the Quran it is not allowed for you to feel sorry for non-Muslims. I don't feel sorry for him."

"Eventually the whole world will be governed by Shari'ah & Muslims will have authority over China Russia USA etc This is the promise of Allah."

"Under the Koran the sale of alcohol is prohibited and if one were to also drink alcohol, that would be 40 lashes."

"We [Muslims] take the Jizya, which is ours anyway. The normal situation is to take money from the kuffar [non-Muslim]. They give us the money. You work, give us the money, Allahu Akhbar. We take the money."

OBAMA & INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY

Obama said in an interview that the intelligence community had missed ISIS.

From The Hill: House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) said the intelligence community had warned President Obama about the threat from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria for "over a year."
From Breitbart:

A new Government Accountability Institute (GAI)report reveals that President Barack Obama has attended only 42.1% of his daily intelligence briefings (known officially as the Presidential Daily Brief, or PDB) in the 2,079 days of his presidency through September 29, 2014.

The GAI report also included a breakdown of Obama’s PDB attendance record between terms; he attended 42.4% of his PDBs in his first term and 41.3% in his second.

ISRAELI AND US BOMBING

I was wondering when this issue would surface.  What is the difference between Israel bombing Hamas in Gaza and the US bombing ISIS in Syria and Iraq?

The air attack by American and Arab forces against ISIS and other terrorist targets parallels Israel's air attacks against Hamas terrorist targets in Gaza. According to retired General Wesley Clark, the United States air attacks are designed to degrade and destroy the infrastructure of the terrorist groups, including the electricity grid, the sources of their finance and other mixed military-civilian targets.

Israel was criticized by Washington and others for its missile attack on Hamas even when Hamas was sending missiles into Israel.  But now America seems to be acting like Israel.  Do we have a double standard?  And what will happen when the US and its Arab allies hit ISIS targets where women and children are?  

It has been easy for the international community to apply these rules rigidly and unrealistically when the only country to which it applies them is the nation-state of the Jewish people. But now it will have to apply them across the board, and that will require defining them in a sensible and realistic way that does not give undue advantage to terrorists who refuse to comply with the rule of law.

CLIMATE CHANGE MOVEMENT

There sure are a lot of Socialists and Communists involved when you look at the pictures.  The irony is that the Communists in the old Soviet Union did more to harm the environment than any capitalist country or corporation ever did.

BUSH, OBAMA, AND ISIS

The American Interest:  "The Parallels Between Bush and Obama."

As President Obama begins to bomb Syria (with no UN authorization and with a coalition of the willing), he is still bombing Iraq, Yemen, and Pakistan; he has U.S. forces spread out across Africa; some are heading back into Iraq; and Guantanamo is still open. It’s hard not to wonder whether in a quiet moment President Obama sometimes thinks he was too smug and too callow back when he poured contempt on President Bush. (After all, even the New York Times isslowly coming to grips with the similarities between how certain events have unfolded. Surely President Obama has noticed them in passing as well.)

Reason:  "6 Ways Obama Contradicts Himself in Waging War on ISIS."

Shep Smith on Foxnews to a State Department spokesperson:  "You guys have basically adopted Dick Cheney’s theory of preventive war now, huh?"

SYRIAN AIRSTRIKES

A good summary of Obama's switch in policies from the Independent (UK).

As America and its Arab allies targeted Islamic militants in Syria for the first time, killing at least 120 of them, it is evident that Washington is no longer giving priority to removing President Bashar al-Assad from power. This means the US is shifting away from its policy of the past three years when it insisted that no negotiations were possible except about his removal.

This conclusion is troubling:

Though air strikes will inflict casualties on Isis in Syria and Iraq, they will not be enough to defeat the group and may not even contain it. Much will depend on how far the US is prepared to give tactical support to those fighting Isis on the ground in Syria.

And Obama goes to war with weapons he wanted to scrap.

The president launches attacks on the Islamic State with two weapons systems that were targeted for elimination by the administration years before their usefulness ended or any replacements were ready.

With the decision to launch air and missile strikes against Islamic State targets in Syria, in addition to ongoing strikes in Iraq in what is said to be the start of a long and sustained campaign to "degrade and destroy" the terrorist group, President Obama has stumbled upon a revelation:

The military whose budgets he's slashed and weapons systems he opposed is suddenly quite useful.

WHITE HOUSE CENSORING PRESS REPORTS

From WAPO.  If this is happening to the liberal media, conservative reporters are probably feeling even more restrictions.

Journalists who cover the White House say Obama’s press aides have demanded — and received — changes in press-pool reports before the reports have been disseminated to other journalists. They say the White House has used its unusual role as the distributor of the reports as leverage to steer coverage in a more favorable direction.

While the overwhelming majority of pool reports pass through the White House without delay or amendment, some have been flagged by the administration’s press staff, which has demanded changes as a condition of distributing them.

WHITE HOUSE LIMITS PRESS

While the liberal media portrays Democrats and the Obama administration in a positive light, at the same time the Obama administration has limited the information it allows the media to have.  The AP Washington Bureau Chief describes eight ways the Obama administration has done this.  The administration is even intimidating some reporters.

Politico also covers the censorship.  Intimidation of reporters is occurring.

REVENGE IN WISCONSIN

A Democrat district attorney and the media go after a person who leaked a story that was unfavorable to the Democrat D.A. as he pursued a vendetta against the Republican governor.

We all know that politics isn’t softball, but surely this is crossing a very bright red line. It also exposes the rather dirty nature of liberal Wisconsin politics and the media there who seem to be not only their willing surrogates, but their foot soldiers in the field.

PUTIN THREATENS EASTERN EUROPE

In a discussion with the Ukrainian President Putin said:

"If I wanted, in two days I could have Russian troops not only in Kiev, but also in Riga, Vilnius, Tallinn, Warsaw and Bucharest," Mr Putin allegedly told President Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine, reported Süddeustche Zeitung, a German newspaper.

ISIS & THE WASHINGTON ELITE

Angel Codevilla argues that the Washington crowd is fooling itself in this fight with ISIS.

This indulgence so overwhelms our ruling class’s perception of reality that the recipes put forth by its several wings, little different from one another, are identical in the one essential respect: none of them involve any plans which, if carried out, would destroy the Islamic State, kill large numbers of the cut-throats, and discourage others from following in their footsteps. Hence, like the George W. Bush’s “war on terror” and for the same reasons, this exercise of our ruling class’s wisdom in foreign affairs will decrease respect for us while invigorating our enemies.

The quote by Representative Duncan Hunter (R, CA) is right on:  “We need to crush ISIS and not work on arming more Islamic radicals. Just what would arming these people accomplish?”

Evidently the CIA doesn't think the Obama ISIS policy has a chance.

He added that, as the CIA sees it, the ramped-up backing of rebels is an expansion of a strategy that is already not working. “The CIA also believes that its previous assignment to accomplish this was basically a fool’s errand, and they are well aware of the fact that many of the arms that they provided ended up in the wrong hands,” the congressman said, echoing intelligence sources.

Also troubling is that the ambassador handling ISIS policy, Anne Patterson, was a supporter of Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.  She is not well-liked in Egypt as a result.  Also she was very optimistic about US policy in Libya--Libya is in shambles (not to mention the Benghazi affair).

The country seems to be in the very best of hands.


But the founder of Blackwater says he could take care of the job, but the Obama administration put this controversial private contractor out-of-business. 


“It’s a shame the [Obama] administration crushed my old business, because as a private organization, we could’ve solved the boots-on-the-ground issue, we could have had contracts from people that want to go there as contractors; you don’t have the argument of U.S. active duty going back in there,” Prince said in an on-stage discussion featuring retired four-star Gen. James Conway. “[They could have] gone in there and done it, and be done, and not have a long, protracted political mess that I predict will ensue.”

CONSERVATIVES AND LIBERALS

Megan McArdle discusses the liberals as the new authoritarians.

Jonathan Haidt, one of my favorite social scientists, studies morality by presenting people with scenarios and asking whether what happened was wrong. Conservatives and liberals give strikingly different answers, with extreme liberals claiming to place virtually no value at all on things like group loyalty or sexual purity.

Jeremy Frimer, the author of the piece, noticed that socialists seemed unable to tolerate even mild questioning of Che Guevara’s eminently questionable legacy. Frimer is a researcher at the University of Winnipeg, and he decided to investigate. What he found is that liberals are actually very comfortable with authority and obedience -- as long as the authorities are liberals (“should you obey an environmentalist?”). And that conservatives then became much less willing to go along with “the man in charge.”

OBAMA CREDITS BUSH-CHENEY?

From The Weekly Standard.

President Barack Obama said last night at a Democratic fundraiser in Rhode Island that the terrorism from ISIS "doesn’t immediately threaten the homeland." The reason? The security measures taken by President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, according to Obama.

First the president said the situation in the Middle East is "scary," according to a transcript of the event released by the White House.

"I don’t have to tell you, anybody who has been watching TV this summer, it seems like it is just wave after wave ofupheaval, most of it surrounding the Middle East. You’re seeing a change in the order in the Middle East. But the old order is having a tough time holding together and the new order has yet to be born, and in the interim, it’s scary."

Then he told the Democratic donors not to worry because measures put in place by Bush and Cheney "make us ... pretty safe."

But he obviously doesn't mention Bush or Cheney in his speech.