Archives for October 2015

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Ian Tuttle of National Review are pleased to see Martin O’Malley become the first of Hillary Clinton’s Democratic rivals to take some shots at her.  They also cringe as an employee fired from the House Benghazi Committee claims the panel is bent on destroying Hillary Clinton.  And they fume as Iran’s sham court convicts Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian.

ISIS is behind the refugee crisis currently afflicting Europe, and radical Islam expert Robert Spencer says the surge is part of a five-year plan designed by radicals to trigger their apocalyptic vision.

Spencer is director of Jihad Watch at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.  His latest book is “The Complete Infidel’s Guide to ISIS.”

In recent weeks, hundreds of thousands of alleged Syrian refugees have arrived in Turkey, Greece and eastern European nations like Hungary and Serbia.  Spencer says was no spontaneous human tide.  He says ISIS is right on schedule.

“They threatened last February to send 500,000 refugees into Europe, and they said they were going to have their jihadis among them.  The Lebanese education minister just last week said that of the 1.1 million refugees in his country from Syria, there were at least 20,000 active jihadis,” said Spencer.

The flow of refugees is often labeled as Syrian, but Spencer says the reality is far different.

“Eighty percent of these people are not actually Syrians.  They come under the guise of Syrian refugees but they’ve been discovered to be from all over the Middle East.  Their accents betray them.  Egyptian Arabic and Moroccan Arabic and Algerian Arabic and Lebanese Arabic are all very different.  They show themselves not to be Syrian,” said Spencer.

“They have forged Syrian passports.  They’re coming in under the guise of refugees, but they obviously have a very different agenda,” he added.

Not only does Spencer say the refugees were sent west by ISIS, he believes is part of a nightmarish goal.

“They think they are going to bring down several major nations in the next few years and conquer Rome by 2020, just five years from now, obviously not by conventional warfare but by infiltration and subversion like this refugee crisis.” said Spencer.

He says the radical Sunnis believe the fall of Rome would trigger a massive battle between Muslims and non-Muslims, leading to a Muslim victory and eventually Islamic domination of the earth.

Spencer calls that “apocalyptic fantasy” but says the ISIS threat continues to gather steam because world leaders and President Obama in particular refuse to identify the threat.

“The Obama administration, as Obama underscored again at the UN, refuses to acknowledge the ideology that guides and motivates and helps the Islamic State among Muslims.  Thirty thousand foreign Muslims have now joined it from all over the world,” said Spencer.

He says ISIS has been very clear what drives its actions.

“The Obama administration is saying it has nothing to do with Islam. while the Islamic State is appealing to Muslims on the basis of Islamic texts and teachings.  Until we acknowledge that and devise some way to counter it, they’re going to continue to make recruits among peaceful Muslims in that way but the Obama administration is in complete denial,” said Spencer.

“You cannot defeat an enemy you don’t understand.  You especially can’t defeat an enemy you refuse to understand,” he said.

But is ISIS recruiting through a badly warped interpretation or manipulation if Islam or are they espousing it in its purest form.  To Spencer, the answer is clear.

“Pretty much 100 percent.  Everything ISIS does is very carefully based on the Quran and the teachings of Muhammad in the Hadith.  So they are able to point to chapter and verse and show Muslims, ‘See, we’re the authentic Islamic caliphate because we’re doing what Muhammad did.  We’re doing what the Quran says and other Muslim groups aren’t,” said Spencer.

While other Muslim groups are not joining ISIS, Spencer says he’s noticing what else they’re not doing.

“There are no Muslim groups in the United States today, not a single one, that has any program to teach young Muslims why they should reject the ISIS ideology, even though they all condemn and reject it,” said Spencer.

Spencer says defeating ISIS will take force and a long-term ideological campaign to dissuade young Muslims from embracing radical Islam.  He says ISIS could be defeated militarily in a matter of weeks but the U.S. just isn’t serious about winning.

“The airstrikes that the Obama administration has sponsored have largely been cosmetic.  They haven’t hit the most vulnerable areas.  They haven’t hit the leadership.  They haven’t hit the long convoys that we see in photographs.  When ISIS takes a city and there’s these huge strings of trucks and cars going in and parading around.  They don’t hit these obvious targets.  They haven’t hit the black market oil tankers, nothing like that,” said Spencer.

 

Liberals have succeeded in demonizing ideas and words they disagree with and led our culture into steep decline as a result, but author Jack Cashill says we now have a successful strategy for  pushing back against stifling political correctness.

Cashill is the author of “Scarlet Letters: The Ever-Increasing Intolerance of the Cult of Liberalism Exposed.”  He says the goal of this ongoing effort is clear and horrifying.

“The bottom line of all of these groups, and they all work under the umbrella of anti-hate and anti-racism, is to subvert traditional Judeo-Christian America,” said Cashill.

Referring to the speech police as neo-Puritans, Cashill says the very people stifling expression under the premise of tolerance make the Puritans moderate by comparison.

“At least with Hester Prynne in the novel, ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ they did not disown [Hester].  They just branded her.  They had a little more mercy in their hearts and a little more charity than the people do today.  Today, there’s no atonement once you commit one of these sins,” said Cashill.

In his book, Cashill lists the six ways that he believes liberals label anyone who defies their orthodoxy: racist, denier, sexist, Islamophobe, classist and homophobe.

Cashill says the political left has been dictating our speech and trying to change our thinking on these issues for half a century.

“Largely through the control of academia and through the media, the left has been able to dictate our morality.  It’s a new improvised morality that adds new sins with virtually every passing day,” said Cashill.

He says this summer provided a classic example of the liberal world demanding instant societal compliance with its agenda

“Who would have thought two months ago you could get a scarlet ‘T’ for transphobia for not applauding sufficiently when (Bruce) Jenner won the Arthur Ashe Courage Award?” said Cashill.

He believes the evidence is clear the award from ESPN was a quid pro quo demanded by Jenner and his team.

“Disney owns both ESPN and ABC.  The word is Jenner’s reps went to ABC and said, ‘Listen, you want this interview, this sure-fire blockbuster interview with Diane Sawyer?  Well, we want our guy to win the Arthur Ashe Courage Award.’  And that’s what happened,” said Cashill, who says the liberals immediately castigated anyone questioning whether Jenner deserved the award.

“The day after Jenner wins that award, people are being accused of being haters for not applauding enough or for just calling him Bruce.  If you didn’t immediately switch to Caitlyn, you were a hater.  That’s how much control they have over the flow of the media,” said Cashill.

However, in recent months, Cashill believes we’ve been taught how to fight against these liberal commands upon our culture.  He says we have Donald Trump to thank.

“He set the prototype for how to respond to this.  The first day of his campaign, he’s essentially accused of xenophobia, that is fear of foreigners, in his comments about Mexico.  He doesn’t apologize.  He does just the opposite.  He doubles down.  So when Ben Carson’s accused of being anti-Muslim, he doesn’t apologize either.  People are beginning to see the way out of this,” said Cashill.

Carson took heat for suggesting a strict adherence to Islam, particularly Sharia law, was incompatible with the U.S. Constitution.  But Cashill says the scarlet ‘I’ for Islamophobe runs much deeper and is aimed at anyone who says something critical about Islam.  He admits the heinous actions of some people ought not to brand every adherent to a given religion, but he says there are some clear facts.

“Their religion just happens to be responsible for 99 percent of the terrorism in the world and you’d be a fool not to draw inferences from that.  In fact, you’d be suicidal not to.  And that’s where we are,” said Cashill, who adds that the media and other liberals don’t hesitate to paint Christians with a broad brush, even when the perpetrator is not a Christian.

“When Timothy McVeigh blew up Oklahoma City 20 years ago, there were calls that crusades have to end and Christians were taking over the country.  McVeigh was an atheist who said, ‘Science is my god.’  It didn’t matter.  They’re so willing to put that label on Christians.  And all the things the media don’t like about conservative Christianity, they tolerate in radical Islam.  It makes no sense,” said Cashill.

In addition, Cashill says there is an odd collaboration on this tactic between Muslims and the gay rights movement.

“Islam, even though it would not seem to have much in common with gay activism, they do share one common goal and that is the destruction of western civilization as we know it.  They could be allies in the short term.  Now what happens in the long term if they prevail, when people who believe that gays should be celebrated get together with people who believe gays should be stoned to death, it’s going to be hard to hammer out a multicultural ten commandments,” said Cashill.

‘Racist’ is first on the list.  Cashill says while the civil rights advances are applauded by virtually every segment of our population, accusations of racism now get aimed at anyone who disagrees with the wrong people or the wrong ideas.

“Today, the left hands out the designation of ‘racist’ as woefully as the John Birch Society handed out the designation ‘communist,’ except there was a blowback against the John Birch Society for doing that and they were never as bad,” said Cashill.

Cashill is particularly disturbed by the label of “denier” for anyone who does no subscribe to the contention that human activity is changing the climate and major, urgent action is required to reduce emissions and save the planet for future generations.  He says the connotation implied by the left is chilling.

“That is an ugly term.  It was consciously concocted to link people who question climate change alarmism to people who deny there was a holocaust.  It doesn’t get much uglier than that.  That’s how vengeful these people can be,” said Cashill.

‘Classist’ is the oldest accusation, according to Cashill, pointing to the arguments of Marx and Lenin, but he says it took much longer to catch on in the U.S. because wealthy people were largely respected for their success.  He says the Occupy movement went a long way towards changing the left’s thinking on class.  He says the most egregious example of status being used against the wealthy came at Duke University several years ago, when several lacrosse players were accused of rape.

“They were accused of having white privilege.  Their mistake was to be affluent.  So they were dragged in front of the tribunals, accused of rape even though there was zero evidence.  Actually there was a lot of evidence of their innocence.  They had their lives ruined,” said Cashill.

But Cashill is very bullish on America deciding enough is enough and pushing back on the liberal speech and thought police.

In addition, to Trump and Carson refusing to play by politically correct rules, Cashill says there is also hope for reversing the PC trend as a result of the left overplaying it’s hand.  He says the undercover Planned Parenthood hearings are a perfect example.

“People are beginning to ask themselves, ‘Let’s see, I’m evil if I don’t say Caitlyn Jenner but the people telling me I’m evil are fully capable of dismembering babies and trafficking in baby parts?” he asked.

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review explain why Hillary Clinton is an an increasingly difficult position as more classified emails are released and why her “Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer” defense is politically unwise.  We also rip House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy for suggesting the House Benghazi Committee was about damaging Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers.  And we marvel at the new movie that still claims Dan Rather was telling the truth about the George W. Bush national guard documents that are proven forgeries.