The argument 88
One of the earliest pieces of information we were given about the San Bernardino massacre, was that there had been “an argument” between the man who was later named as the killer and one other. Now we know the name of the other, and what the argument was about.*
Nicholas Thalasinos said to Syed Farook that Islam was not a peaceful religion. Syed Farook insisted that it was.
To win his argument, Farook killed Thalasinos and 13 others. (All the names can be found here.)
We quote from an article at the Jewish Press, by Lori Lowenthal Marcus:
A strongly pro-Israel, anti-Islamic, politically conservative Evangelical Christian* was one of the victims of the mass murder in San Bernardino. Not only that, but the man posted on social media the day before the attack that he had recently received threats, including a death threat.
How do we know this?
Information about the victims is finally being released.
By 3:30 p.m. local time on Thursday, Dec. 3, the families of all fourteen of the deceased victims of Wednesday’s mass shooting in San Bernardino, California had been notified. Once that was completed, the San Bernardino County Coroner then released the names, ages, last residence and date of birth for each victim.
The youngest victim was 26 years old, the oldest was 60.
Once information began to seep out, one was (or at least some of of us were) immediately struck by details about one of the victims, 52 year old Nicholas Thalasinos.
Thalasinos is a member of a messianic church and is strongly pro-Israel. His Facebook page is filled with positive postings about Israel … He was also a strong political conservative. ..
But here’s the kicker: The USA Today report, which buried this detail 31 paragraphs down in a 54 paragraph story about some of the victims, on Tuesday, the day before the massacre, Thalasinos posted on social media that he had received threats in recent days, including one stating he “will die”.
An Associated Press report revealed that a co-worker said that Thalasinos and Farook had argued recently about religion, and Thalasinos complained to her that Farook “doesn’t agree that Islam is not a peaceful religion”. …
Investigation into the attack now reveals that the two who shot to death those 14 people and wounded another 21, Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, 27, had been in contact with suspected terrorists both in the United States and abroad. Thousands of rounds of ammunition and fifteen pipe bombs were recovered by the investigating authorities.
By Thursday afternoon the investigation was turned over to the FBI and was being treated as a counterterrorism investigation.
It could be said that the same argument has, in its essence, prompted 27,375 fatal attacks by Muslim terrorists according to today’s tally by The Religion of Peace, reflected continuously in our margin.
Outside of the San Bernardino context, it is not an argument between Christians and Jews on the one side and Muslims on the other; it is an argument between Muhammad’s ideologues of conquest and everyone else.
* There was, it emerges, no quarrel between Syed Farook and Nicholas Thalasinos on the day of the massacre itself.
** Update on Nicholas Thalasinos. He belonged to a church that believes Jesus was/is the Messiah, so he is describable as both Christian and Jewish. The church is called the Shiloh Messianic Congregation Church of Crestline, California.
The workplace of war 124
The media, including Fox News, and the police, the president, and all Democrats, are having difficulty finding a motive behind the massacre of San Bernardino, carried out yesterday by a Muslim man and a Muslim woman.
Daring commentators go so far as to say that the killing might have been Islamic terrorism, acts of which, they recall, have been carried out from time to time in America and elsewhere; or it might have been workplace violence – which they’d much prefer it to be.
We are happy to come to their aid and resolve the dilemma.
For jihadis, they are the same thing.
Islamic lore has it that the whole non-Muslim world is the Dar-al-Harb, the Place of War. And that whole vast wicked region is their workplace.
So – you see – by killing non-Muslims, Muslims are performing acts of workplace violence in order to terrorize the infidel. And that is not wrong, it is the work they are instructed to do by no less a boss than Allah himself.
We are all aware that workplace violence is an everyday occurrence. It’s as American as apple pie. Why make a fuss about it?
When you should be worrying about global warming.
Actually, no 192
We were delighted to read this today by Scott Johnson at Powerline, as we are in deep sympathy and total agreement with it:
Watching Barack Obama in action at the Paris conference on the phenomenon formerly known as global warming, I have a thought about saving the planet. The planet must be saved from Barack Obama. The man has done enormous damage. We will be living with the consequences for a long time. Living, if we are lucky and if the next president undoes some of the damage he has done. The man is an ideologue as impervious to experience as the worst men who ever lived.
And to add to our pleasure (temporary relief from the gloom we post almost every day), we found these reports of a scientist’s and some mathematicians’ demolition jobs on the man-made-up global warming lie.
This is from CNS News:
A German scientist has accused the National Aeronautics and Space Agency’s (NASA) Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) of altering temperature records between 2010 and 2012 to produce the illusion that the Earth has been warming since 1950.
GISS datasets are used by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to document global warming.
In a presentation at the 2012 EIKE Climate Conference in Germany, Professor Friedrich-Karl Ewert, a retired geologist and data expert from the University of Paderborn, said that he examined publicly available archived temperature records from 1,153 weather stations around the globe going back to 1881 and found evidence of “massive” tampering by GISS between 2010 and 2012.
Ewert noticed that “the temperature data of Reykjavik [Iceland] and Nuuk Nuur [Greenland] had been changed retroactively,” veteran German television journalist Gunter Ederer writes. The 2012 data was higher than the temperatures recorded before 2010. The German scientist then randomly selected 120 weather stations around the world and manually compared the archived data to GISS’ 2012 temperature records.
“He always came to the same conclusion: The temperature supplied from 2012 showed a higher warming than the published [archived data] in 2010,” Ederer writes.
Ewert also found that since 1881, four distinct cooling stages have alternated with three warming phases. He says the Earth is currently in a cooling phase.
And since a stronger warming cycle occurred before carbon dioxide emissions began to rise, Ewert concluded that “an influence of our CO2 emissions [on] temperatures can not be seen.”
“Mankind always knew that constantly there are climate changes,” according to a translation of Ewert’s EIKE article. …
Ewert also claims to have found 10 different statistical methods used by NASA-GISS to change the overall trend from cooling to warming.
“Between the years 2010 and 2012 the data measured since 1881 were altered so that they showed a significant warming, especially after 1950…. A comparison of the data from 2010 with the data of 2012 shows that NASA-GISS had altered its own datasets so that especially after WWII, a clear warming appears – although it never existed,” Ederer writes.
“Using the NASA data from 2010 the surface temperature globally from 1940 until today has fallen by 1.110°C, and since 2000 it has fallen 0.4223°C. … The cooling has hit every continent except for Australia, which warmed by 0.6339°C since 2000. The figures for Europe: From 1940 to 2010, using the data from 2010, there was a cooling of 0.5465°C and a cooling of 0.3739°C since 2000.”
Noting that “an entire industry of air rescuers and the resulting trillions of dollars that are so invested [in deindustrialization] are at stake”, Ederer adds that “the thesis of man-made global warming has taken on a whole new meaning: Yes, it is always made by people when the data are adjusted to fit the theory“.
And this is from another CSN News report:
As the United Nations gear[ed] up for its next international conference on climate change in Paris … a scathing white paper released by a society of French mathematicians calls its fight against global warming “absurd” and “a costly and pointless crusade”.
“You would probably have to go quite a long way back in human history to find [such a] mad obsession,” according to a translated summary of the document released in September by the Paris-based Société de Calcul Mathématique SA.
The mathematicians harshly criticized a “crusade [that] has invaded every area of activity and everyone’s thinking,” noting that “the battle [against] CO2 has become a national priority.
“How have we reached this point in a country that claims to be rational?” they ask, adding that mathematicians “do not believe in crusades. They look at facts, figures, comments and arguments”.
“There is not a single fact, figure … [or] observation that leads us to conclude the world’s climate is in any way ‘disturbed’,” the paper states. “It is variable, as it has always been. … Modern methods are far from being able to accurately measure the planet’s overall temperature even today, so measurements made 50 or 100 years ago are even less reliable.”
Noting that concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) have “always” varied, the French mathematicians also said that after processing the raw data on hurricanes themselves, they verified that “they are no more frequent now than they have been in the past”.
We are being told that a temperature increase of more than 2 degrees C[elsius] by comparison with the beginning of the industrial age would have dramatic consequences and absolutely has to be prevented. When they hear this, people worry. Has there not already been an increase of 1.9 degrees C? Actually, no. The figures for the period 1995-2015 show an upward trend of about 1 degree C every hundred years! Of course, these figures, [which] contradict public policies, are never brought to public attention.
The French mathematicians also said that the UN’s climate models have failed to take into account natural phenomena that affect climate far more than human activity.
Human impact on the climate is “tiny, quite negligible in comparison with natural causes”, they point out. “Human beings can do nothing about solar activity, the state of the oceans, the temperature of the Earth’s magna, or the composition of the atmosphere.”
Furthermore, the work done by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) does not meet the basic standards set by reputable scientific journals because its “conclusions go [contrary] to observed facts; the figures used are deliberately chosen to support its conclusions (with no regard for the most basic scientific honesty); and the variability of natural phenomena is passed over without comment”.
Even if there were such a thing as global warming, “then we should celebrate”, the mathematicians said. “And if it does not exist, then we simply shall have to carry on switching on the central heating.”
“French policy [on] CO2 is particularly stupid, since we are one of the countries with the cleanest industrial sector,” the white paper pointed out, slamming “virtuous” policies that have resulted in a significant loss of industrial activity and the resultant loss of jobs that has left three million French unemployed even as global CO2 emissions continue to rise.
“If we were in France to stop all industrial activity (let’s not talk about our intellectual activity, [which] ceased long ago), if we were to eradicate all traces of animal life, the composition of the atmosphere would not alter in any measurable, noticeable way,” they said.
The authors also lamented the abandonment of “the adversarial principle” that distinguishes democracies from dictatorships:
“People who do not believe in global warming have been told to shut up. No public debate, no contradictory discourse. No articles in scientific journals. They simply have been told that the case is proven and it is time to take action … We are simply required to keep quiet and do what we are told. No second opinion is permitted.”
“It is on the debris of the fundamental principles of the law and of democracy that this white paper has been written.”
Reaching out to ISIS 20
A passionate supporter of Hamas and fierce hater of Israel, Robert Malley, has been appointed by Obama to be his chief adviser on policy towards ISIS.
He is of Syrian descent. His Egyptian-born father, an ardent Stalinist, was expelled from France for nefarious political activity.
J. E. Dyer writes at Liberty Unyielding:
The POTUS-in-Chief is taking it to the “Islamic State” in Paris this week, delivering blow after blow with his climate-summit rhetoric …
Has a bloodthirsty, Islamofascist guerrilla-terrorist movement ever been driven so thoroughly onto the ropes? You decide.
But Obama’s not stopping there. His administration announced today that it’s appointing a new senior advisor to the president on ISIS. …
Rob Malley [was] the foreign affairs activist – formerly a regional director with the International Crisis Group – who was abruptly dropped from the Obama campaign organization in 2008 when his contacts with the terrorist group Hamas were revealed by British media.
Malley is a fan of talking with terrorists …
His father, a founder of the Egyptian Communist Party who had the distinction of being expelled from exile in France for his communist activities in the 1970s, nursed a long association with Yassir Arafat, among other ideological radicals of the time.
Alex Safian put it this way in his CAMERA profile of [Rob] Malley in 2008:
The world in which Robert Malley grew up was one in which Yasir Arafat, Fidel Castro, Leonid Brezhnev and Todor Zhivkov [Communist dictator of Bulgaria 1954-1989] were heroes, any American leader – even Jimmy Carter! – was villainous, and Israeli leaders were veritable demons.
Malley was at Harvard Law School when Obama was, and shares the same worldview. Malley’s ridiculous unsuitability for a major post with a mainline party candidate was obvious in 2008 – which is certainly an interesting point, since his background and views are so in sync with Obama’s.
But a few years later, after the 2012 election, Malley was quietly put on the National Security Council, as senior director for Iran, Iraq, Syria, and the Gulf States. Early in 2015, Malley was moved up to the NSC position of Middle East Coordinator, a promotion that sparked serious concern from many observers.
In his new role at the NSC, Malley put his stamp on the negotiations with Iran in 2015. (In fact, we are advised that he participated in the celebratory toast, with a bottle of fine Madeira donated from Portugal, enjoyed by lead negotiators John Kerry and Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz. Take that, ISIS!)
So, basically, Malley has been closely embedded, at the apex of influence, in the great security policy catastrophes of the Obama administration involving Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Just take a moment and think how that’s been going for us on his watch – including the feature of ISIS’s meteoric rise during this period.
Malley favors talking to terrorists, and has urged the world to do just that with the homicidal baby-killers of Hamas. As a bonus, he made contacts with Hamas himself, something that you would still be under hostile surveillance for by U.S. agencies, if you had done it.
And now he’s going to be Obama’s top advisor on ISIS. Yay!
A correspondent suggested to me earlier today that it would be a waste of time for Malley to persuade Obama to cooperate with Iran and Hamas against ISIS, because we’re already doing that.
But why think small? Mark my words. Robert Malley’s distinctive approach will be cooperating with ISIS. Hey, terrorists have grievances, and what they really need is an invitation to sit down and talk.
It’s the left upper-cut, from out of nowhere. ISIS will never see it coming.
For more about our man with ISIS, this is from Discover the Networks:
Robert Malley was born in 1963 and lived in France from 1969-80. His mother — a native New Yorker — worked for the United Nations delegation of the National Liberation Front, the leftist, anti-American political party that led the independence movement in Algeria in the 1950s and early ’60s. Robert’s father, the late Simon Malley, was a key figure in the Egyptian Communist Party. The elder Malley was bitterly anti-Israel; a confidante of PLO leaderYasser Arafat; an inveterate critic of “Western imperialism”; a supporter of various leftist revolutionary “liberation movements,” particularly the Palestinian cause; a beneficiary of Soviet funding; and a backer of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. …
[He attended] Harvard Law School … at the same time as Barack Obama. And in 1991–92, Malley clerked for Supreme Court Justice Byron White.
After his clerkship, Malley became a Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, where hepublished The Call From Algeria: Third Worldism, Revolution, and the Turn to Islam — a book that charts Algeria’s political evolution beginning from the turn of the 20th century.
Malley subsequently served as the U.S. National Security Council’s Director for Democracy, Human Rights, and Humanitarian Affairs from 1994-96; National Security Advisor Sandy Berger’s executive assistant from 1996-98; and President Bill Clinton’s Special Assistant for Arab-Israeli Affairs from 1998-2001. In July 2000 he was a member of the U.S. peace team that participated in the Camp David Summit between Bill Clinton (who brokered the talks), Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat. The talks ended without an agreement.
Since 2001, Malley has written several controversial articles — some co-authored with Hussein Agha, a former advisor to Arafat — blaming Israel and exonerating Arafat for the failure at Camp David. For instance, in a July 2001 op-ed (titled Fictions About the Failure at Camp David) which was published in the New York Times, Malley alleged that Israeli — not Palestinian — inflexibility had caused the previous year’s peace talks to fail.
In an August 9, 2001 piece, Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors, Malley and Agha again dismissed claims that the Camp David talks had failed when “Ehud Barak’s unprecedented offer” was met with “Yasser Arafat’s uncompromising no”. Rather, they wrote that Barak had taken an unnecessarily hard-line approach in negotiating with Arafat. According to the authors, Arafat believed that Barak was intent on “either forcing him to swallow an unconscionable deal or mobilizing the world to isolate and weaken the Palestinians if they refused to yield”.
Malley’s identification of Israel as the cause of the Camp David failure has been widely embraced by Palestinian and Arab activists around the world, by Holocaust deniers … and by anti-Israel publications …
Malley’s account of the Camp David negotiations is entirely inconsistent with the recollections of the key figures who participated in those talks, most notably then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, U.S. President Bill Clinton, and U.S. Ambassador Dennis Ross (Clinton’s Middle East envoy). According to Ross, the peace efforts failed for one reason only: because Arafat wanted them to fail. “[F]undamentally,” said Ross, “I do not believe he [Arafat] can end the conflict. We had one critical clause in this agreement, and that clause was, this is the end of the conflict. Arafat’s whole life has been governed by struggle and a cause … [F]or him to end the conflict is to end himself…. Barak was able to reposition Israel internationally. Israel was seen as having demonstrated unmistakably it wanted peace, and the reason it [peace] wasn’t … achievable was because Arafat wouldn’t accept.”
Ed Lasky [at American Thinker] enumerates and summarizes some additional Malley op-eds condemning Israel, urging the U.S. to disengage somewhat from the Jewish state, and recommending that America reach out to negotiate with its traditional Arab enemies such as Syria, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Muqtada al-Sadr [leader of the Shi’ite Mahdi Army in Iraq] …
Ten examples are given, all demonstrating ardent support for the Syrian tyrant and the terrorist organizations, and intense hostility to Israel.
In February 2004, Malley testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and recommended that the Arab-Israeli “Road Map for Peace” be abandoned because neither side had confidence that the other was bargaining in good faith. As Ed Lasky writes, “[Malley] advocated that a comprehensive settlement plan be imposed on the parties with the backing of the international community, including Arab and Moslem states. He anticipated that Israel would object with ‘cries of unfair treatment’ but counseled the plan be put in place regardless of such objections; he also suggested that waiting for a ‘reliable Palestinian partner’ was unnecessary.”
In July 2006 Malley criticized the U.S. for allegedly remaining “on the sidelines” and being a “no-show” in the overall effort to bring peace to the nations of the Middle East. Exhorting the Bush administration to change its policy of refusing to engage diplomatically with terrorists and their sponsoring states, Malley stated: “Today the U.S. does not talk to Iran, Syria, Hamas, the elected Palestinian government or Hizballah. … The result has been a policy with all the appeal of a moral principle and all the effectiveness of a tired harangue.”
In 2007, Malley became a foreign policy advisor to Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama.
In January 2008, Ed Lasky observed that Malley’s overarching political objectives included “a radical reshaping of decades of American foreign policy and a shredding of the role of morality in the formulation of American policy.” “These policies,” said Lasky, “would strengthen our enemies, empower dictatorships, and harm our allies.”
That same month, one U.S. security official … stated that Malley “has expressed sympathy to Hamas and Hezbollah and [has] offered accounts of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that don’t jibe with the facts.”
At that time, Malley was the Middle East and North Africa Program Director for theInternational Crisis Group (ICG), which receives funding from the Open Society Institute(whose founder, George Soros, serves on the ICG Board and Executive Committee). …
On May 9, 2008, the Barack Obama presidential campaign was forced to sever its ties with Malley after the latter told the Times of London that he had been in regular contact with Hamas as part of his work for ICG.
But that was what Obama liked about him.
On November 5, 2008, Middle East Newsline reported that Obama “had sent senior foreign-policy advisor Robert Malley to Egypt and Syria over the last few weeks to outline the Democratic candidate’s policy on the Middle East.” The report added that Malley had “relayed a pledge from Obama that the United States would seek to enhance relations with Cairo as well as reconcile with Damascus”.
“The tenor of the messages was that the Obama administration would take into greater account Egyptian and Syrian interests,” said an aide to Malley.
After President Obama’s 2012 re-election, he appointed Malley to serve as his senior advisor for Iraq-Iran-Syria and the Gulf states. Obama pledged, however, that Malley would have no involvement in issues related to Israel and the Palestinians.
On February 18, 2014, it was announced that Malley was formally returning to the White House to serve as a senior director at the National Security Council (NSC), where he would be in charge of managing relations between the United States and its allies in the Persian Gulf. In March 2015, Obama appointed Malley to direct the NSC’s policy in relation to the entire Middle East, including Israel.
With this man carrying out – and no doubt strongly reinforcing – Obama’s will, US policy in the Middle East has resulted in a vast conflagration.
With the same man “fixing” US relations with ISIS, what fresh hell will soon be breaking out?
A disgusting religion 12
An unnamed woman, born into a non-observant Muslim family, pours justified scorn and disgust on Islam and Muhammad.