“Ceterum autem censeo Carthaginem esse delendum” – “Apart from all this, Carthage must be destroyed“.

That was the statement Cato the Elder (234-149 BCE) made at the end of every one of his speeches in the Roman Senate during the Punic Wars (Rome against Carthage), no matter what the rest of the speech had been about.

The statement became a slogan, often shortened to “Carthago delenda est”.

For years we have copied Cato the Elder by writing “The UN must be destroyed” at the end of every post that mentions that evil institution.

Now the need for it to be wiped off the face of the earth, or at the very least expelled from American soil and denied American tax-payers’ money, has been made urgent by the iniquitous action of its “Security Council”, initiated by the perfidious outgoing Obama administration of the US government, against the state of Israel. (See our post Obama’s parting act of extreme vindictiveness, December 23, 2016. For the harm the resolution will do see here.)

Daniel Greenfield writes at Front Page:

The United States pays 22% of the total UN budget. What we get for our $3 billion a year is a corrupt organization whose dysfunctional and hostile agencies are united in opposing us around the world.

The United Nations does only two things consistently and effectively: waste money and bash Israel. Sometimes it manages to do both at the same time.

After an extended, and no doubt costly, visit to the region, the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women blamed Muslim men beating their wives on Israeli settlements.

No wonder the UN Security Council just condemned them. Who wouldn’t rightfully be upset that Jews living in Jerusalem somehow causes poor Mohammed to batter his wife?

The Jewish State is the UN’s scapegoat for anything and everything. The Palestinian Authority blamed Israel at the UN for Global Warming. WHO [the World Health Organization, a UN agency] denounced Israel for violating “health rights”.

Israel is one of the foremost inventors and manufacturers of advanced life-saving medical technology in the world. Extremely effective Israeli teams rush to places where disasters occur to provide medical assistance, always free of charge. Israel even cures its enemies free of charge, and returns them to enemy territory to continue plotting its destruction.

And even when Muslim terrorists stab Israelis, it’s still Israel’s fault.

The latest anti-Israel vote at the UN has led to calls to defund the corrupt organization which, even when it isn’t actively trying to hurt us or our allies, is making the world worse every which way it can.

Just this summer the UN admitted that it had spread cholera that killed tens of thousands in Haiti. Sexual abuse allegations against its staffers were up 25% last year. In the spring, the UN admitted that peacekeepers from three countries had raped over 100 girls in only one African country. …

Here’s what we get for our $3 billion.

UNRWA schools are turning out students who want to fight for ISIS.  The UN’s email system has been used to distribute child pornography. UN staff members have smuggled drugs, attacked each other with knives and pool cues, not to mention a tractor. This month the UN marked Anti-Corruption Day despite refusing to fight its own corruption. The former President of the UN General Assembly was arrested on bribery charges last year. He had also headed UNICEF’s executive board. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is battling accusations of bribery.

Some of this might be defensible if the UN did anything useful. It doesn’t. It’s just a slush fund for redistributing our money to a vast UN bureaucracy and anyone willing to bribe it for benefits.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded to the UN vote by beginning the process of defunding the UN. And there’s every reason in the world for us to also stop tossing money at the United Nations.

It’s something that we and every sane country should have done decades ago. If you give money to the UN, it will end up anywhere and everywhere except where it’s supposed to go. But defunding the UN isn’t enough. There is no reason for us to remain there at all.

The United Nations has never met any of its lofty goals. During the Cold War it became a playground for the Communist powers. The USSR, the second signatory to the UN charter, helped force out the first signatory, Taiwan. Even while the treaty was being signed, it was taking over Poland, the 51^st signatory.

These days, the United Nations is a forum for Islamist powers and the rotting remains of the Communist front to continue its war against the free world while seducing weak-minded nations into going along.

We are not making the world a better place by being members of this anti-American organization which vacillates between being evil and useless.

You can always count on UN peacekeeping troops to run away whenever they might be called on to use force. The head of the peacekeeping mission in South Sudan was fired by the UN for refusing to protect aid workers, including Americans, who were being raped and assaulted. …

The UN was brought into being in the aftermath of the horrors of World War II. Instead of ending “the scourge of war”, the UN has a solid track record of uselessness and complicity in the face of genocide.

Israel was the first to alert the UN to Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia. But Moscow and its Syrian ally conspired to protect the Communist dictatorship. The UN did not condemn the killing. And only a generation later did it convene the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, which has been running for almost twenty years. It took ten years to arrest Brother Number Three, the Foreign Minister of the Communist terror state, whose lies the United Nations chose to believe when the butchery was taking place.

He died six years later while still on trial.

The UN has been apologizing for its non-response to the Rwandan genocide for decades. But apologizing for not doing anything is what the United Nations does best. That and condemn Israel.

Earlier this month, the UN Security Council couldn’t even manage to pass a ceasefire resolution on Syria.

Venezuela, which championed the anti-Israel resolution, took time out from starving its own people to protect Assad. Why in the world would anyone take this vote, or any UN vote, seriously?

The UN’s Human Rights Council members include China, Cuba, Russia, Saudi Arabia and, of course, Venezuela. UN Women, the body dedicated to empowering women, includes China, which forces women to have abortions; Pakistan, where women can be murdered by their male relatives for marrying on their own; and Iran, where it’s practically illegal for a woman to leave the house.

The United Nations does not promote its own ideals. Or ours. Instead, it sanctimoniously violates them. Providing every brutal dictatorship with equal representation hasn’t ushered in an age of human rights. Allowing Islamic terrorists and the radical left to denounce their enemies hasn’t made the world better. And throwing $3 billion a year at the towering UN swamp on Turtle Bay only wastes our time and money. …

The UN doesn’t share our ideals. It’s time to build our closest alliances with the countries that do.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has called the 2030 agenda a “Declaration of Interdependence.” We must declare our independence from the UN’s interdependency of corruption and tyranny.

We should defund and withdraw. Where quarreling diplomats once preened in the tower above Turtle Bay, seagulls will soar and young couples will walk with their children. The billions we waste on the UN will go toward taking care of our people. And once we are free of the UN, we will actually be able to promote real human rights instead of pandering to the dictators and Islamists of the United Nations.

Like the League of Nations, the United Nations is a failed experiment. The only difference is that, despite decades of wars, genocides and terror, we still haven’t pulled the plug.

President Obama has betrayed his own country – the country he has led for eight years – by colluding with the UN against Israel. 

President Trump will have the opportunity to pull out of the UN and drain the swamp in Turtle Bay.

UN delenda est.

Islam’s renewed campaign against our civilization is inspired, directed, and carried out by the Muslim Brotherhood and the groups it has spawned.

Barack Hussein Obama, astoundingly elected President of the United States in 2008, did what he could to empower the Brotherhood, insisting that the organization, banned in Egypt, have pride of place in the audience of his first address abroad as president, in Cairo. He did his utmost to support the Brotherhood when revolution brought it to power in Egypt, and objected furiously when it was overthrown. He went so far as to appoint Muslim Brotherhood personnel as his advisers. The disastrous US policy towards the Middle East, causing war, civil war, displacements of millions, the catastrophic flooding of Europe by Muslim migrants, the death by drowning of thousands in the Mediterranean, the enslavement and mass murder of Christians and Yazidis, is the manifest result of their advice.

What a conjuring act it has been for Obama – to use his power to help the Muslim Brotherhood attain its ends at the same time as having to seem to be the chief guardian of Western civilization and liberty!

The two theorists on whose writings the Muslim Brotherhood was founded were Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb. ISIS, al-Qaeda, their terrorist activities in Europe and America, all spring from the Muslim Brotherhood, the organization that Obama protected, promoted, indulged, and abetted.

Writing in the Guardian, Robert Manne – emeritus professor of politics and vice-chancellor’s fellow at La Trobe University in Melbourne – explains how the Muslim Brotherhood and its  “Qutbism” launched the jihad that is being waged against us. We quote his article in part:

During the period of my research, the Islamic State published in several languages, including English, a quarterly online magazine called Dabiq. …

In Dabiq, no theme was more important than the Islamic State’s desire to destroy those it regarded as its historical and current enemies – especially the Shia Muslims, the Rafida; their Syrian cousins, the Alawites or Nusayris; the fallen apostate peoples, the Yazidis and the Druze; the Christian west, the “Crusaders”; and the eternal enemy of the Muslims, the Jews. Despite its intellectual sophistication, each issue of Dabiq contained eschatological articles, concerning, for example, the nature of the Dajjal (the Rafida equivalent of the Antichrist) or the coming battles at the End of Days, from whose prophesied battleground, the town of Dabiq, the magazine took its name.

The magazine had several regular features. Each issue provided details of the military triumphs of the Islamic State and its affiliates, including both the planned operations and the lone-wolf attacks on its Crusader enemies in the west. (It was, however, conspicuously silent about the setbacks.) Each issue contained gruesome photos of the enemies it had dispatched – the beheaded western or Japanese hostages, the immolated Jordanian pilot, and dozens showing the corpses of the captured enemy troops and of the Shias, Alawites or Yazidis it had slaughtered.

Each issue told the story of the noble mujahideen “martyrs”, under the rubric Among the Believers Are Men. In a regular column called From Our Sisters, questions concerning women were discussed – the benefits of polygyny; the merits of sexual slavery; and the mothers’ indispensable role in providing a suitable education for the “lion cubs” – the next generation of soldiers. One of Dabiq’s preoccupations was the horror of life in the infidel (kuffar) societies of the west and the religious obligation of Muslims around the world to undertake migration to the Islamic State (hijrah) now that the caliphate had been established. …

Dabiq contained a regular feature it called In the Words of the Enemy. Here, special pleasure was taken in the comments of leading US generals, politicians or journalists expressing anxiety about the growing strength of the Islamic State and the danger it posed.

The pages of Dabiq express a remarkably consistent and internally coherent ideology, no less consistent and coherent than the Marxism–Leninism of the Soviet Union during the era of Stalin; more consistent and coherent, in my view, than the ideology of Nazism. As one can assume that Dabiq represents the official world-view of the Islamic State, it is surprising how little it has been analyzed by  specialist scholars. It has been my primary source for an understanding of the mind of the current leadership of the Islamic State. …

The ideology of the Islamic State is founded upon the prison writings of the revolutionary Egyptian Muslim Brother Sayyid Qutb, in particular some sections of his commentary In the Shade of the Qur’an, but most importantly his late visionary work Milestones, published in 1964.

Qutb argued that the entire world, including the supposedly Muslim states, had fallen into a time of pre-Islamic ignorance, jahiliyya, or pagan darkness. He called upon the small number of true Muslims to form a revolutionary vanguard to restore the light of Islam to the world. …

So powerful was Qutb’s vision that several scholars have termed the ideology that provided the foundation of the Islamic State “Qutbism”. …

The first answer to the question about what was to be done by those who hoped to implement Qutb’s vision came a decade and a half after the master’s death, with The Neglected Duty, the underground revolutionary working paper of an Egyptian electrical engineer, Muhammad Abd al-Salam Faraj. Faraj called upon Muslims to fulfil their religious obligation of jihad – which he, like Qutb, interpreted as violent struggle in the service of God – and to lay the foundation of a truly Islamic state. His favoured method was assassination of the most important contemporary enemy of the Muslims, the apostate “Pharaoh”, a clear reference to the president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat.

Faraj regarded the “near enemy”, the Egyptian state, as a more strategically significant target than the “far enemy”, the Crusader Americans and the Zionist Jews. In 1981 Faraj’s group succeeded in their plot to kill Sadat. As a consequence, Faraj’s life, like Qutb’s, ended on the gallows. His pamphlet nonetheless represented the beginning of a 20-year era during which Egyptian jihadi revolutionaries, under the spell of Qutb’s prison writings, conducted a prolonged, bloody and ultimately unsuccessful revolutionary struggle against the “near enemy” – with plots to assassinate the apostate leaders, the taghut; to stage military coups; to incite popular uprisings.

A more influential answer to the question of what was to be done to implement the Qutbist vision was provided shortly after Faraj’s death by the Palestinian Islamic scholar Abdullah Azzam. After the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Azzam moved to Peshawar and established an office for the organisation of Arabs  who had journeyed to Afghanistan to support the local jihadi fighters, the mujahideen.

In remarkably eloquent speeches, in the articles of his magazine, al-Jihad, and especially in two of his short books, Defence of the Muslim Lands and Join the Caravan, Azzam called upon Muslims across the globe to defend their nation, the umma, which was now under direct threat. Azzam insisted that defence of the umma through jihad, in the face of the infidel invader, was not a collective but an individual duty for each Muslim, as obligatory as one of the five pillars of the faith, such as praying and fasting. Azzam was assassinated in 1989, nobody knows for certain by whom. But by the time of his death, he had convinced a generation of revolutionary Muslims that the Afghan and Arab mujahideen had been responsible, through God’s grace and through their glorious martyrs’ deaths, for crippling the military might of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

Moreover, he saw in the triumphant struggles of the mujahideen in Afghanistan a portent of a worldwide Islamic revival – in the jahili Muslim lands of the present; in his homeland, Palestine, and all other Muslim lands that had been conquered by the Crusaders; eventually across the entire globe.

In Afghanistan, Azzam had worked for a time with a wealthy Saudi of Yemeni background, Osama bin Laden. … 

Having absorbed both Qutb’s vision and Azzam’s triumphalism and ambition … in 1988 Bin Laden created in Afghanistan an organisation he called al-Qaeda, which was eventually to become the first global army of jihadis.

In 1996, upon his return to Afghanistan, Bin Laden set his sights on the destruction of the only remaining superpower, the United States. In his view, the US was under the control of the Jews. It had been responsible for inflicting upon the Muslims the cruellest wound, the creation of a Jewish state at the very heart of the umma. It was also the indispensable patron and protector of the taghut regimes throughout the supposedly Muslim world. Perhaps worst of all, since 1990, by invitation from the Saudi royal family after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the US had occupied the land of the two holiest cities of Islam, Mecca and Medina. In 1998 al-Qaeda called upon the mujahideen to kill Americans and Jews.

One of the signatories of Bin Laden’s fatwa was the most influential Egyptian Qutbist revolutionary of the past 20 years, Ayman al-Zawahiri. In mid-2001 Zawahiri led a part of his group, al-Jihad, into al-Qaeda. Their union was consummated with a double conversion. Zawahiri adopted Bin Laden’s concentration on the far enemy. For his part, Bin Laden adopted the tactic that Zawahiri and other Egyptian Islamist revolutionaries had long embraced: suicide bombings, or what the Qutbists now called “martyrdom operations” – a vital tactic in technologically unequal, asymmetrical warfare. The first fruit of their union was 9/11, the attack on the twin towers in New York and the Pentagon.

By this time, Zawahiri was responsible, most comprehensively in his 2001 memoir, Knights under the Prophet’s Banner, for systematising the political ideology founded on the vision of Sayyid Qutb.

The ideology had not yet reached its latest and perhaps final destination. One consequence of 9/11 was the March 2003 US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. As it happened, one leader of the Sunni resistance was a Jordanian revolutionary jihadi, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who had established his own training camp in Afghanistan in 1999 at Herat and then, after the US invasion of Afghanistan and attack on the Taliban, had moved to Iraq via Iran in preparation for the generally anticipated US invasion.

Zarqawi was responsible for adding several new elements to the political ideology inspired by Qutb and systematised by Zawahiri. Zarqawi injected into its heart a sectarian and exterminatory hatred of the Shia.

Drawing upon the strategic theory of Abu Bakr Naji, the author of The Management of Savagery, and the theology of a jihadi scholar, Abu Abdullah al-Muhajir, the author of a work most commonly known as The Jurisprudence of Blood, Zarqawi extended vastly the purpose, the method and the permissible scope of killing. He conducted public beheadings of hostages. He greatly expanded the role of suicide bombings, with increasingly callous theological justifications, targeting not only the occupation forces and their Iraqi allies but also innocent Shia civilians and politically unfriendly Sunnis, earning for himself the well-deserved title of “the sheikh of the slaughterers”.

Before Zarqawi, the creation of an Islamic State, and even more the re-establishment of the caliphate, had been distant dreams of the Qutbists. With Zarqawi they became pressing items of a current political agenda. Before Zarqawi, too, the thought of the Qutbists had been largely unaffected by the eschatological or apocalyptic undercurrents of Sunni Islam. Under Zarqawi these began to rise to the surface. Zarqawi was killed in 2006. Nonetheless, his two successors, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, who was killed in 2010, and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the first caliph of the Islamic State, embraced fully and even extended the anti-Shia sectarianism, the strategic and jurisprudential savagery, the immediate Islamic state-building ambition, and the apocalyptic dimension that Zarqawi had injected into the political ideology that had grown from the vision of Qutb.

A supporter of the Islamic State, thought to be the Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye, captured with admirable precision in a single sentence its ideological genealogy: “The Islamic State was drafted by Sayyid Qutb, taught by Abdullah Azzam, globalised by Osama bin Laden, transferred to reality by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and implemented by al-Baghdadis: Abu Omar and Abu Bakr.”

The good news is that the days when the Muslim Brotherhood could bask in the patronage of an American government are coming to an end. President-elect Trump has said that he will ban it.

As far as Islam is concerned, Barack Obama is a Muslim because his father was a Muslim. We don’t think Obama is religious (though for many years he attended the church of Jeremiah Wright who called for the damnation of America), but we couldn’t help noticing that he is strongly sympathetic to Islam. In addition to helping Iran become a nuclear power, he has given significant help to the Muslim Brotherhood to advance its agenda of world conquest.

Nonie Darwish writes at Gatestone:

The goals of U.S. President Barack Obama in the Middle East ended the rule of most of the “secular” Arab leaders in the area. …

The goals of the Muslim Brotherhood happened to be in tune with Obama’s goals in the Middle East. Obama’s first major presidential speech took place in Cairo before a large number of Islamic sheikhs and members of the Muslim Brotherhood. They were empowered and given legitimacy by Obama. A scorned Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak did not attend; thus, with the blessing of the United States, the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power in Egypt was begun. Today, ordinary Egyptians link the ascendancy of the Muslim Brotherhood directly to the Obama administration. Cairo was about to become the capital of the new Islamic Caliphate if Egyptians had not, after a year, come out in the millions to stop it. …

After Egypt took down the Muslim Brotherhood, the goal of establishing the Islamic Caliphate in Egypt simply moved to Syria, the only Arab nation where a secular Muslim leader had survived the Arab Spring.

Promoting Islam also seems to have been a major factor in Obama’s equation for America. Before Obama started to implement his promise to “change America as we know it”, he first had to change the Middle East as they knew it. Many of the changes over which he presided were in harmony with the goals of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Its motto is:

Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Quran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.

But while the Muslim brotherhood has been made illegal in Egypt, the Obama administration still refuses to label the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization.

Under Obama, Islam became untouchable, not open to any kind of criticism. He even claimed that “Islam has been woven into the fabric of our country since its founding.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton followed suit, and hosted several closed-door conferences in Washington and London on “Defamation of Religion”, to suppress free speech and internationally criminalize any criticism of Islam with fines and prison.

Even in a recent debate, Clinton stated, “Islam was always part of American history — even since the Revolutionary War.”

She would rather blame terrorism on free speech than on the violent tenets of Islam.

Only a person from the Middle East could understand the immense value of such a gift to the goals of Islamic jihadists in America.

It is unfortunate that many Americans apparently still do not know that Islamists rewrite history in order to claim that any land they wish to conquer was originally Islamic or founded by Muslims – even though historically Islam did not exist until the seventh century, hundreds of years after Judaism and Christianity.

Today, Muslims have re-written their history books to claim that Muslims originally built the ancient Jewish Biblical sites, and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has bowed to the wishes of Qatar and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) – a bloc of 56 Islamic nations plus “Palestine” – to back up this fiction. UNESCO recently passed resolutions obscenely declaring ancient Jewish Biblical monuments – such as Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs, Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem and Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, home of the great ancient Jewish Temples – Islamic sites.

Which country will be next?

This escalating subversion should be reason enough for all Western democratic countries permanently to part company with the United Nations. Its history of corruption is neither new nor surprising, or that it is run anti-democratic “club of dictators” whose interests are opposite to ours.

Jihadists today are stating that they also have a claim over Italy, Greece, and Spain — and now America. Obama and Hillary Clinton actually just solidified such claims for future Muslim history books about who actually built America.

Americans have a choice: they can either keep on empowering Islam, and helping extremist Muslims infiltrate into the American system – even as there is a resolution in the House of Representatives to shut down all criticism of Islam – or they can end the gamble of the current administration, which seems bent on changing America forever by allowing the worldwide empowerment of Islam. They can continue the Islamist “Arab Spring” revolution to change “America as we know it” or preserve the freedoms of the American republic.

It has recently become clear through WikiLeaks that the American system is indeed rigged and that Washington DC has turned into a swamp; or more accurately an “Arab Spring” swamp.

Egypt, on a much smaller scale, had to face such a choice in 2012-13, between life under the values of the Muslim Brotherhood or a life under a sliver of hope for a democracy, which Islam, under its laws, can never allow.

Both Egyptians and the West sorely need to understand that Islamic law, sharia, does not permit anything other than an Islamic government under the rule of Islamic law. Consequently, only military force can stand against sharia tyranny. The Muslim Brotherhood had proven once again that the only way out of Islamic theocracies is through military dictatorships.

A head-on collision over the future of America is underway. Many Americans still do not understand the magnitude of what is at stake, but many Islamists do: they are lying in wait, hoping to return to their budding.

If Hillary Clinton were to become president of the US (unbearable thought!), the process of Islamizing the world –  by all and any means including violence – would continue and intensify. Her election would be a triumph for jihadists everywhere, and in particular for the Muslim Brotherhood. Her Middle East policy as US Secretary of State was the Muslim Brotherhood’s policy. That would not change if her power became even greater.

If Donald Trump becomes president, there is a good chance that the process will be slowed, possibly halted. At least for a few years. The Muslim Brothers will be flushed out of the White House. Hillary’s close aide and adviser, Huma Abedin – whose family is a pillar of the Muslim Brotherhood – will exit the political stage with the Clintons. (And ideally go to prison with Hillary.) It is possible that the frightful wars in the Middle East will die down; that Iran will even at this late hour be prevented from making nukes; that ISIS and Boko Haram will be crushed; and Islam’s invasion of the West turned back.

Q: Why do people help and protect the Clintons?

A: Because they are afraid of them.  

They fear for their lives, and with good reason.

Aaron Klein writes at Breitbart:

Dave Schippers, who served as the Chief Investigative Counsel for the House Judiciary Committee’s probe into whether Bill Clinton committed impeachable offenses, stated in an exclusive radio interview that he is “terrified” of Hillary Clinton.

Schippers is one of the few people who personally viewed – indeed he helped to collect – the roomful of evidence in the impeachment probe. He says the evidence included 60,000-plus pages of written documents, video and “hours and hours” of tape recordings, all of which are still under lock and key.

During the interview, which aired on this reporter’s talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio,” Schippers, unprompted, raised questions about the death of Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster. He further claimed, “We know that there were people who disappeared.”

Regarding his stated fear of Hillary, Schippers said:

Today, I am still terrified of Hillary. Absolutely I am terrified. Because if she gets into office. In fact, I’ve told my wife, I said, ‘If Hillary gets elected, look for the FBI or somebody to come and pick me up the next day.’ And I think I’m the only one left. [Former Congressman] Henry Hyde is dead. [Independent Counsel Kenneth] Star didn’t really hurt her. Yeah. I was scared when I was out there …  I’ve been terrified ever since. Because things happen. Things happen.

Hyde, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, had asked Schippers, a Democrat, to lead the House impeachment probe.

During the interview, Schippers raised questions about the death of Foster, whose body was discovered on July 20, 1993 in Virginia’s Fort Marcy Park. An autopsy concluded the cause of death was a “perforating gunshot wound mouth-head.” …

Schippers said he believed that Foster was a “weak link in the chain of evidence”, and that his investigative committee was barred from probing the lawyer’s death.

He stated:

Vince Foster was probably as close to Hillary as anybody on the face of the Earth. He knew all about the (Rose) law firm. He knew all about Whitewater. He knew all about the money she made, the $100,000 she made overnight in the commodities market. He knew everything. And I think he was a weak link. In my opinion, he was a weak link in the chain of evidence. And obviously, we could never have called him as a witness. But I was going into that investigation. I was going to call FBI agents. I was going to call the Park Service. I was going to call the coroner and everybody else. We weren’t allowed to do it. We were stymied. Just stopped dead in our tracks. And I don’t know why.

Five official or governmental investigations concluded that Foster committed suicide. The nature of Foster’s work, as well as the six days it took before Foster’s suicide note was found, led to speculation and conspiracies about his death.

I asked Schippers, “Are you saying, if I am hearing you correctly, that there are legitimate questions that you believe should be asked about the deaths surrounding the Clintons, like Vince Foster and others?”

“Absolutely. Absolutely,” he replied.

Schippers further claimed that “We know that there were people who disappeared.”

He continued:

“When we started our investigation, Henry Hyde said, ‘How wide do you want to go?’ And I said, ‘Get us an open investigation. We have so many things that we want to investigate.’ And we got an open investigation where we were permitted to investigate as far as whatever came up in the impeachment inquiry.

“Immediately after the 1998 election, the leadership in the House put the brakes on.

We had a meeting and Henry Hyde said the House has told us that we’ve got Monica Lewinsky and we can go no further.We are not permitted to do any additional investigation. And I said, ‘My God, we’ve got at least three murders and other things that we are going into.’ And he says, ‘I’m sorry we can’t do it.’”

Schippers described the room at the Ford House Office Building where the evidence was housed during the impeachment probe as having armed guards outside. He said those who were permitted to enter were not allowed to bring anything in or out.

He said he was one of the few people who actually reviewed all of the evidence in the impeachment case. He said that only 65 House members accepted an invitation to review the evidence in the room and that all senators declined before they voted against impeaching Clinton.

Asked about the specifics of the evidence, Schippers said he is barred from answering the question. However, he replied, “Let me say this. Sixty-five Congressmen saw that evidence. And 64 voted to impeach. Take your own conclusion.”

And this is from the Political Insider:

Twenty-three years ago during the Clinton administration, Deputy White House Council Vincent Foster was found dead in his car.

But did he die in his car? Did he own the gun that shot him? Was he shot once or twice? A lot of evidence that pointed to the scene being fixed to look like suicide was suppressed.

This scandal shocked the country, and raised massive questions about just how dangerous the Clintons are.

Foster’s apparent suicide was quite suspicious. Two investigators – Robert Fiske and Kenneth Starr – separately concluded that Foster shot himself and died, due to suicide.

But over time, major questions have been raised about what may have really killed him. Now, recently discovered evidence blows the case wide open!

Discovered in the files of the National Archives and Records Administration, Starr’s lead prosecutor Miguel Rodriguez submitted a 2-page resignation letter and a 31 page memo about the injuries Foster sustained. Rodriguez notes in the letter details about injuries around Foster’s neck which were not reported in official government documents.

At the time, the FBI claimed that Foster’s neck injury photos were underexposed, and therefore useless to them.

Rodriguez claims that after he produced additional damning evidence of a possible Foster murder coverup, he became a target and was investigated internally!

In the letter, he explained 12 ways in which the case has mishandled and compromised. Then, he noted:

“I steadfastly maintained, and continue to maintain, that I, at all times, conducted myself as an experienced and trained prosecutor, with years of federal prosecutorial experience and federal grand jury experience.”

These records indicate Foster didn’t really die from one .38 caliber gunshot … but two gunshots! The other shot was on the right side of his neck, made by a “Small caliber” bullet hole.

This raises serious questions about Foster’s motives for suicide. He was tied to Hillary Clinton’s roles in White House scandals at Whitewater and the White House Travel Office. …

The theory is, as Vince Foster was one of Hillary’s closest friends, he knew too much about these scandals. In fact, he may have had a romantic relationship with the then first-Lady.

Foster had been a long-time friend and companion to Hillary. The two shared a brokerage account called Midlife Partners. When Barbara Walters asked Hillary if she had been having an affair with Vince Foster, Hillary lowered her eyes and told the 20/20 cameras, “He was a very special man.” When he died, Hillary said publicly that Vince Foster was the last person who would have committed suicide. Friends reported she was genuinely shocked and aggrieved.

Why, then, did Hillary lie under oath about the last time she saw Vince Foster?

Testifying before the Office of the Independent Counsel (OIC) in 1994, she claimed that the last time she had spoken to Vince Foster was on the phone “the Friday or Saturday before Father’s Day.” Yet documents from the National Archives, acquired by the New York Megaphone, show that Foster’s assistant, Tom Castleton, reported he “saw Hillary Clinton in Foster’s office approximately four times during the five weeks he was employed.” Castleton didn’t start working for Foster until after Father’s Day, 1993. …

Hillary Clinton asked Vince Foster to help her spy on her libertine husband in 1990. Foster hired Jerry Parks, an Arkansas investigator who later worked as the head of security for the Clinton/Gore campaign. According to Parks’s widow, “Jerry asked Vince why he needed this stuff on Clinton. He said he needed it for Hillary.”

When Vince Foster showed up dead in a Washington-area public park in the summer of 1993, Parks was terrified.

Two months later Parks was shot nine times at close range, at a stoplight, in his SUV, in Little Rock. Parks’s home was then raided by eight Federal agents, including officers from the FBI, IRS, Secret Service, and (unusual for a domestic case) the CIA.

If true, this means Vince Foster was murdered to make sure he didn’t tell the world what he knew about President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary. He was too honest, and therefore couldn’t be trusted anymore.

This is actually worse than transmitting classified documents on a home email server… This is murder!

Not sure about that. Hillary endangered the lives of many Americans with her insecure emailing, all too easily hacked. Her recklessness with her emails probably contributed to the murders of Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans at Benghazi on 9/11/12. The attackers knew in advance where the Ambassador would be that night. How did they know?

And while Vince Foster and Jerry Parks may very well have been murdered on the orders of Hillary, did she not certainly cause the violent deaths of uncountable numbers in Libya, Iraq, Syria, and the Mediterranean sea? 

But to return to the death of Vince Foster: even if he did kill himself, there is a strong case for believing that Hillary drove him to do it:     

This is from the Washington Times:

The FBI found that a week before Foster’s death, Hillary held a meeting at the White House with Foster and other top aides to discuss her proposed health care legislation.

Hillary violently disagreed with a legal objection Foster raised at the meeting and ridiculed him in front of his peers, former FBI agent Coy Copeland and former FBI supervisory agent Jim Clemente told me. Mr. Copeland was Mr. Starr’s senior investigator and read the reports of other agents working for Mr. Starr.

During the White House meeting, Hillary continued to humiliate Foster mercilessly, both former FBI agents say.

“Hillary put him down really, really bad in a pretty good-size meeting,” Mr. Copeland says. “She told him he didn’t get the picture, and he would always be a little hick town lawyer who was obviously not ready for the big time.”

Indeed, Hillary went so far as to blame Foster for all the Clintons’ problems and accuse him of failing them, according to Mr. Clemente, who was also assigned by the FBI to the Starr investigation and who probed the circumstances surrounding Foster’s suicide.

“Foster was profoundly depressed, but Hillary lambasting him was the final straw because she publicly embarrassed him in front of others,” says Mr. Clemente, who, like Mr. Copeland, spoke about the investigation for the first time.

“Hillary blamed him for failed nominations, claimed he had not vetted them properly, and said in front of his White House colleagues, ‘You’re not protecting us’ and ‘You have failed us’,” Mr. Clemente says. “That was the final blow.”

After the meeting, Foster’s behavior changed dramatically, the FBI agents found. Those who knew him said his voice sounded strained, he became withdrawn and preoccupied, and his sense of humor vanished. At times, Foster teared up. He talked of feeling trapped.

On Tuesday, July 13, 1993, while having dinner with his wife Lisa, Foster broke down and began to cry. He said he was considering resigning.

That weekend, Foster and his wife drove to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where they saw their friends, Michael Cardoza and Webster Hubbell, and their wives.

“They played tennis, they swam, and they said he sat in a lawn chair, just kind of sat there in the lawn chair,” Mr. Copeland says. “They said that just was not Vince. He loved to play tennis, and he was always sociable, but he just sat over in the corner by himself and stared off into space, reading a book.”

Two days later, Foster left the White House parking lot at 1:10 p.m. The precise time when he shot himself could not be pinpointed. After Park Police found his body, they notified the U.S. Secret Service at 8:30 p.m.

Based on what “dozens” of others who had contact with Foster after that meeting told the agents, while Foster was already depressed, “The put-down that she gave him in that big meeting just pushed him over the edge,” Mr. Copeland says. “It was the final straw that broke the camel’s back.”

No one can explain a suicide in rational terms. But the FBI investigation concluded that it was Hillary’s vilification of Foster in front of his colleagues, coming on top of his depression, that triggered his suicide about a week later, Mr. Copeland and Mr. Clemente both say.

Mr. Starr issued a 38,000-word report, along with a separate psychologist’s report on the factors that contributed to Foster’s suicide. Yet Mr. Starr never mentioned the meeting with Hillary, leaving out the fact that his own investigation had found that Hillary’s attack had led to her friend’s suicide.

Mr. Starr never told Mr. Copeland or Mr. Clemente why he decided to exclude the findings from his report. But Mr. Clemente says, “Starr didn’t want to offend the conscience of the public by going after the first lady. He said the first lady is an institution.”

Q: How can anyone want Hillary Clinton to be president of the United States? 

A: ?

That is a statement of fact. Russia IS preparing for war with the United States.  

If Putin wants war – and it seems that he does – this is the time for him to start it.

Europe without its own defense, a demoralized NATO, a feckless president of the US to be possibly followed by an incompetent woman, and an American public distracted by the invention of new pronouns – what has he to fear?

We quote from Western Journalism (making use of information from the Daily Mail here):

A new order from Russian leader Vladimir Putin has stirred fears across the globe that Russia is preparing for a massive conflict.

Russia has ordered all government officials to fly home any relatives living abroad, including college students regardless of any impact this has on their studies. “This is all part of the package of measures to prepare elites to some ‘big war’, ” said Russian political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky.

“It’s a fallacy to think that this is like the Cold War. The current times are different and more dangerous,” German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said of the rising tensions between Russia and the West.

According to the Russian-language site Znak.com, administration staff, regional administrators, lawmakers of all levels and employees of public corporations are covered by the order. They are warned that their chances for promotion depend upon their compliance.

The action comes in the context of many troubling developments. Putin recently cancelled a planned Oct. 19 visit to France, which has denounced Russia’s role in the Syrian civil war. Further, the U.S. recently broke off talks with Russia regarding finding a diplomatic solution to the Syrian crisis. Cancelling a visit so close to its date is a “serious step… reminiscent of the Cold War,” said Russian foreign policy analyst Fyodor Lukyanov. “This is part of the broader escalation in the tensions between Russia and the West, and Russia and NATO,” he said.

Recent Russian saber-rattling has included Russia’s action on Saturday to put nuclear-capable missiles in Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave on the Baltic Sea between Poland and Lithuania.  …

Russia recently … held civil defense drills that included 40 million citizens. … [And] bunkers capable of holding all of Moscow’s 12 million residents have been constructed to protect citizens in the event of a nuclear attack.

The Free Thought Project reports:

Amid collapsed diplomatic efforts over Syria and increasing tensions with the United States, the Russian government is beginning emergency response exercises [this week] that will include the participation of thousands of government officials and many millions of citizens who will respond to a mock nuclear attack or other large-scale catastrophe.

The four-day drill will reportedly include 200,000 rescue professionals, tens of thousands of emergency vehicles, and an estimated 40 million civilians from around the country.

“Our priority during the drill is to train evacuation of the civilian population from potentially-risky areas,” Emergencies Minister Vladimir Puchkov, who oversees all civil defense in Russia, told the Interfax news agency. “The main goal of the drill is to practice organization of management during civil defense events and emergency and fire management, to check preparedness of management bodies and forces of civil defense on all levels to respond to natural and man-made disasters and to take civil defense measures.”

The exercise, versions of which have been held in the country since 2012, take place following an announcement by Russia that it will pull out of a long-term plutonium disposal agreement if the U.S. and its NATO allies do not reverse a recent military build-up in eastern Europe and the Baltic countries.

The emergency drills also comes on the heels of the announcement by the U.S. State Department on Monday it was severing diplomatic communications with Russia over the deteriorating situation in Syria following the collapse of a cease-fire agreement and an intensifying assault by Syrian and Russian armed forces against the rebel-held city of Aleppo.

“The United States is suspending its participation in bilateral channels with Russia that were established to sustain the cessation of hostilities,” announced State Department spokesperson John Kirby on Monday. Kirby said it was “not a decision that was taken lightly” as he blamed Russia for failing to “live up to its own commitments” on the joint effort.

As the U.S. and Russian officials traded blame, outside critics of the White House called the suspension of diplomatic channels by the U.S. troubling.

James Carden, writing for The Nation, said the “collapse of talks takes the United States one step closer to an unnecessarily deadly ‘military solution’ to the Syria crisis” as he called it the “most dangerous development in a New Cold War”. Such a development deserves fierce rebuke, Carden indicated, especially when it comes amid growing calls among influential members of the national security apparatus to impose a “no-fly zone” in Syria as a way to counter Russian and Syrian targeting of jihadist rebel forces aligned against the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

“A military solution, and facile promises of easy answers like the imposition of no-fly and/or safe zones (which are neither easy nor answers) is not the way forward,” warned Carden. “Obama and his advisers have made a potentially grave error in cutting off talks with the Russians, and even a cursory glance back through the history of recent American military interventions should steer them back to, not away from, the negotiating table.”

In an analysis published Monday under the title, Do We Really Want Nuclear War with Russia?, veteran journalist Robert Parry openly condemned the Obama administration’s foreign policy position vis-a-vis Russia and Syria.

According to Parry, a “propaganda war against Russia” in the U.S. and western mainstream press “is spinning out of control, rolling ever faster downhill with a dangerous momentum that threatens to drive the world into a nuclear showdown.” Though he acknowledges the Syria-Russia situation is deeply complex, Parry argues that a misinformation campaign is putting the United States on a worrisome, yet familiar, path:

This propaganda apparatus now has so many specialized features that you get supposedly “progressive” and “anti-war” organizations promoting a major U.S. invasion of Syria under the guise of sweet-sounding policies like “no-fly zones” and “safe zones,” the same euphemisms that were used as the gateway to bloody “regime change” wars in Iraq and Libya.

There exists what intelligence veterans call a Mighty Wurlitzer, an organ with so many keys and pedals that it’s hard to know where all the sounds come from that make up the powerful harmony, all building to the same crescendo. But that crescendo may now be war with nuclear-armed Russia, which finds in all this demonizing the prelude to either a destabilization campaign aimed at “regime change” in Moscow or outright war.

Yet, the West can’t seem to muster the sanity or the honesty to begin toning down or even showing skepticism toward the escalating charges aimed at Russia. We saw similar patterns in the run-up to war in Iraq in 2002-2003 and in justifying the ouster, torture and murder of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

Western propaganda also has enveloped the conflict in Syria to such an extent that the American people don’t understand that the U.S. government and its regional “allies” have been supporting and arming jihadist groups fighting under the command of Al Qaeda and even the Islamic State. The propaganda has focused on demonizing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, while downplaying or ignoring the real nature of the “moderate” opposition.

Carden also summoned Iraq and Libya as cautionary tales for the Obama administration, but said the stakes are perhaps even more elevated given the numerous military interests now operating inside Syria. Unlike Iraq and Libya, he explained, “both the Russians and Iranians have personnel on the ground in Syria, while the Russian and the Syrian Arab Air Forces are executing an air campaign over rebel-held (or more accurately, jihadi-held) east Aleppo. The mainstream media continue to gloss over the rather salient fact that civilians who are trying to flee the Russian-Syrian bombardment are often blocked from doing so by US and Gulf State funded ‘rebels’.”

Also raising concerns, a group of veteran officials from the U.S. intelligence community on Monday issued an open memo to President Obama warning him against the continued erosion of U.S.-Russian relations. As opposed to cutting ties, the former intelligence officers called on Obama to increase cooperation by holding direct one-on-one talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin as a way to avert deeper divisions and a more protracted war inside Syria.

“We strongly recommend that you invite President Putin to meet with you in a mutually convenient place,” the memo asserts, “in order to try to sort things out and prevent still worse for the people of Syria.”

It remains unclear as of this writing whether or not Obama received, or has read, the memo’s warning.

It remains unclear whether Obama has any understanding at all of what is happening in the Middle East, or cares.

He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize soon after he became (absurdly!) president of the United States – for no achievement whatsoever. Perhaps he is earning it now by not paying any attention to the loud sound of Russia’s saber-rattling.

Is Putin to be taken seriously?

If so, where is the Western leader who knows it and will act?

To vote for Hillary Clinton and side with the Democratic Party is to side with America’s worst enemy – Islam.

Donald Trump made this clear in the speech he gave yesterday in Ohio.

Frank Gaffney writes at Breitbart:

Yesterday in Youngstown, Ohio, Donald Trump delivered the best speech of his campaign to date. Newt Gingrich rightly called it the most important since Ronald Reagan left office.

In fact, in many ways, it was very Reaganesque. After all, long before he became president, Mr. Reagan warned that every generation faces an existential threat to freedom. Mr. Trump made clear that he recognizes the threat to freedom in our time, which he explicitly characterized as “Radical Islam” and its guiding, supremacist ideology, Sharia.

The GOP nominee also channeled President Reagan by espousing a comprehensive strategy highly reminiscent of the one the Gipper formally adopted in his National Security Decision Directive 75 and employed to defeat freedom’s last existential threat: Soviet communism. Mr. Trump recognizes that now, as then, we must bring decisively to bear all instruments of national power – economic, military, intelligence, information and ideological.

The last element, which was emphasized repeatedly in the Trump speech, reflects an essential understanding that has eluded past administrations of both parties and some of the candidate’s most vociferous critics, Democrats and Republicans alike: Jihadists who seek the destruction of our country, its Constitution, and people employ different tactics – including violence, migration, material support for terrorism, recruitment, indoctrination, conversions and stealthy subversion. But they are all motivated by the same ideology: Sharia. Donald Trump declared yesterday that if you embrace that supremacist doctrine, you must seek to supplant our Constitution and, therefore, you are not welcome here.

Specifically, the speech adopted a basic principle: As a foreign national and would-be immigrant to this country, you must share our values to gain admission. That filter has for too long been absent and has greatly contributed to the ominous demographic trends facing not just Europe, but this country, as well: growing numbers of transplanted and inherently hostile populations, most of whom have no interest in assimilating and, rather, insist that freedom-loving Americans accommodate their demands and, ultimately, submit to Sharia.

Finally, the Republican candidate to be our next Commander-in-Chief spoke of a reality that can no longer safely be ignored: There are “networks” in America that support “radicalization”. In so doing, he recognized another hard lesson from Europe’s experience. Violent jihadists rely upon and exploit the infrastructure (including Islamist mosques, societies, cultural centers, front groups, influence operations, etc.) that has been systematically put into place in the West over the past fifty years by Islamic supremacists, notably those associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. …

Much encouraged by President Obama, who has numerous Muslim Brothers advising his administration – to what ends we have seen in Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Libya …

We have no choice but to identify, designate and roll-up such operations. …

At no point since 9/11, and arguably for thirteen years before, has there been a better articulation of what’s at stake and what needs to be done to secure freedom, namely by seeking and achieving Victory over Jihad. We desperately need more such visionary and collaborative leadership.

The other candidate for the Presidency, Hillary Clinton, wants to import many more Syrians – that is, many more devotees of Sharia – into the US. (According to Politifact, 550% more.) She is being massively helped to achieve her aims with funds by billionaires who do not understand that they, along with all non-Muslims, will be the victims of her pro-Islam policy.

Investor’s Business Daily reports:

A massive hack of socialist billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundations suggests that his various nonprofit organizations are little more than fronts for his many political activities. His growing closeness to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton should be a warning to all.

The hack by a group called DC Leaks, includes 2,576 files from various Soros groups from 2008 to 2016. The DC Leaks website says the attack was “launched by American hacktivists who respect and appreciate freedom of speech, human rights and government of the people.”

Apart from the ease with which the Soros group’s computer system was breached, what we’re learning so far fills in the troubling details of how Soros goes about his business. No doubt, in coming days, more revelations will emerge as researchers comb through the thousands of documents.

But what’s emerged so far is eye-opening. In one of the purloined memos from 2011, titled “Extreme Polarization and Breakdown in Civil Discourse”, a nonprofit Soros group proposes conducting opposition research on a number of highly prominent American critics of radical Islam, including Pamela Geller, Frank Gaffney and Robert Spencer. It also targeted conservative activists and intellectuals David Horowitz, Daniel Pipes, Cliff May and former Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter, Liz Cheney. All of them are strongly pro-Israel and have warned about the threat of radical Islam.

The memo suggests that the research was outsourced to the Center for American Progress (CAP), a leftist think tank that has “received millions of dollars in grants from Soros’s groups”… 

Oh yes, CAP also happens to have been founded by John Podesta, Hillary’ Clinton’s campaign chief. One of many close ties between Soros and Clinton.

Meanwhile, the Jerusalem Post notes that some of the hacked emails show that the Soros Open Society Foundations’ stated goal was “challenging Israel’s racist and anti-democratic policies,” in part by “questioning Israel’s reputation as a democracy”.  This is an old Soros trick: He spends money to delegitimize governments and others with whom he disagrees. It’s not about debate, and certainly not “open”, as his groups’ names all suggest. It’s political subterfuge in service of a far-left agenda.

So remember the next time Hillary postures as a pro-Israel Democrat – her campaign has ties to groups that actively undercut the Jewish state, our only real ally in the Mideast. 

But it goes well beyond just Israel. In yet another revelation from the doc-dump, a memo called the “List of European Elections 2014 Projects” details the elaborate efforts of Soros’ well-funded global network to manipulate election outcomes in Europe. The memo includes over 90 Soros projects in Europe to influence election outcomes. Now, through Hillary, he wants to do the same here. And Soros has the clout. …

Happily, he does not always succeed. He tried to influence the British referendum on withdrawal from the European Union, hoping to keep Britain in that corrupt bureaucratic dictatorship, and he failed. 

Fox News reports that Soros has given an estimated $9 million to Hillary-favoring super PACS in 2015 and 2016, more than anyone else. But he’s not Hillary’s only billionaire. Not by a long shot. “Within the past year,” Fox News reported earlier this month, “a total of 24 billionaires have donated more than $42.5 million to two Clinton campaign arms and three allied super PACs”. 

So while Soros and other billionaires fund Clinton’s campaign and other left-wing causes, the Clinton Family Foundation focuses on extending the Clintons’ political clout both here and abroad by trading political access for cash. The Clintons have together pulled in more than $240 million since leaving the White House “dead broke”, as Hillary once put it. Now the Clinton Foundation reportedly is under federal investigation for its questionable fundraising practices.

“It’s a way, effectively, to get around those campaign laws,” noted Peter Schweizer, author of the extensively documented book Clinton Cash, in a recent interview. “Hillary Clinton running for president in 2008, if you’re a foreign oligarch, you can’t give to her campaign, but you can have Bill Clinton give a 20-minute speech for half a million dollars, or you can make a $5 million donation to the Clinton Foundation, and you’ve got access every bit as much as if you had raised money for their political campaign. That’s really what the Clintons have done.”

As the saying goes, between the fire and the fire engine you cannot be neutral.

The fire is Islam, stoked by Soros, Podesta, the Clintons …

The fire engine is manned by Donald Trump, Pamela Geller, Frank Gaffney, Robert Spencer, David Horowitz, Daniel Pipes, Cliff May, Liz Cheney …

What will the $400 million in cash, paid illegally by Obama to ransom American hostages held by Iran, be used for and by whom?

Dan Calabrese writes at Canada Free Press:

The entity within Iran that will likely use the cash is one Obama would rather you didn’t know about:  There is principally one entity within the Iranian government that has need of untraceable funds. That entity is the Quds Force — the branch of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps focused particularly on furthering the regime’s goals world-wide by supporting and conducting terrorism.

This is the entity, for example, that was tied to the foiled plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, D.C., in 2011, as well as to the successful plot to blow up a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994.

Notably, there is a federal statute that bars the transfer of “monetary instruments” — cash or its equivalent in bearer instruments—with the intent to promote “specified unlawful activity.” That term is defined to include a crime of violence or use of an explosive against a foreign country, a category that would include terrorism.

Proving intent is always difficult, but federal law recognizes that conscious avoidance of knowledge can be enough. So, for example, the person who transfers a firearm to a known bank robber need not be told directly that the weapon will be used in a bank robbery in order to be held responsible when it is—particularly if he took steps to conceal the transfer.

As it happens, though, there is more than one reason why no one in the administration will be prosecuted for consciously avoiding knowledge of how this cash likely will be used, and thereby violating the anti-money-laundering statute — even with proof that the cash was transported in an unmarked plane. For one thing, the law applies only to transfers to or from the territory of the U.S. This transfer occurred entirely abroad.  In addition, there is a legal doctrine that bars the application of criminal statutes to government activity in furtherance of legitimate government business, unless those statutes are clearly meant to apply to such activity. So, for example, the driver of a firetruck cannot be held liable for speeding on his way to a fire.

The cash transfer here was said to have been arranged in furtherance of conducting the foreign relations of the U.S. The conduct of foreign relations is entirely an executive function. Those involved in this transfer would have the benefit of that doctrine.

So delivering a haul of cash to the mad mullahs in an unmarked plane is fine because, while illegal for anyone else to do, it’s just like the fire engine driver speeding to a fire. He has to do it! See how much the one is just like the other? …

No. The fire engine driver is an employee carrying out orders. Obama gives the orders.

The Obama Administration’s entire approach to Iran has been driven by a conceit both Obama and John Kerry share, which is the belief that the U.S. would never have gotten so crosswise with Iran if only truly great, expert diplomats had been on the job. Like, ahem, them. I will never forget Kerry’s haughty declaration about himself during the first debate with President Bush in 2004. Talking about how one deals with foreign leaders, Kerry insisted, “I know how to do this!”

Oh. Does he? All he’s done in dealing with Iran is give them everything they want in exchange for a bad and completely unenforceable deal that everyone can see will turn Iran into a nuclear power.

We’ve had problems with Iran because Iran is a terrorist state that attacks us and our allies, not because our diplomats have been too mean to the mullahs.

And now Obama and Kerry are turning a blind eye to the fact that they just bankrolled more terrorist activity. Because it takes a truly great diplomat, I guess, to understand what a great idea that is.

Yes. It seems to us most probable that Obama was less intent on freeing hostages than on getting cash to Iran. To help Iran! Because sanctions were making it hard for Iran to get hold of foreign currency. Which it needs to fund terrorism abroad.

But is Obama actually keen on getting Islamic terrorism funded? Or is he just endlessly trying to get Iran to love him? And if it is the latter – why?

Are there possible explanations we haven’t thought of?

A rebel group in Syria cut off the head of a poor, emaciated, hungry, sick boy named Abdullah Issa, aged between eleven and thirteen.

They claimed he was a “spy”, but they most likely seized him in order to make their gleeful snuff-film (which you can watch here if you have the stomach for it).

The group has been lavishly supported by Obama.

When questioned about the official reaction to the atrocity, the State Department spokesman expressed indignation that such groups (in that chaotic bloodbath!) were  ”not obeying the laws of armed conflict”.

From the (pacifist) New American, by Alex Newman:

As if Americans needed another reason to rein in the out-of-control government in Washington, D.C., jihadist Syrian “rebels” backed and “vetted” by the Obama administration and neocons in Congress beheaded a 12-year-old boy. The barbaric beheading of the impoverished child was perpetrated on video that surfaced this week, with smiling jihadists funded and armed by the U.S. government shouting “Allahu Akbar” as they sever the child’s head. According to the Obama-backed terror group behind the horror, the boy was suspected of being a “spy” for the government. The group, which received heavy military equipment and funding from Obama, claimed it was “investigating” the gruesome child beheading.

The latest atrocity perpetrated by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Obama’s allegedly “moderate” Syrian rebels, one faction in the globalist-fueled civil war, follows years of similar horrors. … Obama-backed jihadists have engaged in … a seemingly never-ending stream of horrific war crimes. …

The specific group behind the latest beheading of a child, which sparked a global outcry and headlines worldwide, is known as Nour al-Din al-Zenki. … The U.S. government supplied the terror group with American tax dollars and even BGM-71 TOW anti-tank missiles … As many as 1,000 Zenki jihadists were reportedly on the payroll of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency …

The writer points out that the group was approved as “part of the ‘well-vetted’ jihadist alliance” by Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

The terror group also worked closely with the self-styled “Free Syrian Army”, the jihadist umbrella group loudly promoted by Obama  … It was also reportedly a regular ally of al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, known as Jabhat al-Nusra. …

According to the terrorist group, the 12-year-old boy from a poor family was originally arrested near Aleppo for serving as an alleged “spy” for al-Quds, a group that supports the Syrian regime. The accusation led the jihadist group to decapitate the boy using a small knife on the back of a pick-up truck. The video of the murder, which was posted online, has caused a worldwide uproar. It shows the apparently prepubescent boy laying down in the truck surrounded by five adult jihadists with huge smiles on their faces. In the beheading footage, one of the men can be seen severing the boy’s head … [and then] holding the head up in triumph. …

As the beheading of the child and the Obama administration’s links to it became a global scandal, the John Kerry-led State Department was forced to respond. “We strongly condemn this type of barbaric action, no matter what group is responsible,” the State Department was quoted as saying. “We do not comment on which groups are funded by the United States. We do, however, routinely vet the groups we work with and support and their human rights record figures prominently in that. We do not support groups that condone this sort of barbarity, period.”

State Department spokesperson John Kirby noted that “al-Zenki has identified some of its own members as being responsible for this appalling act”. He also said that, according to a statement, the terror group had supposedly arrested those allegedly responsible for the beheading. “We encourage al-Zenki to investigate the incident and expect all parties to comply with their obligations under the law of armed conflict,” Kirby was quoted as saying by the far-left Daily Beast. “Regardless of who may be culpable, we strongly condemn what appears to be the brutal murder of a minor.” Other reports suggested that Obama had recently stopped funding the terror group, reportedly less than a year ago.

As The New American has documented extensively, however, the Obama administration has been lawlessly showering funds and weapons on practically every faction involved in the conflict — including the Shia militias out of Iraq fighting alongside Assad’s forces …  Other factions benefiting from American largess include multiple terror groups officially designated as terrorist organizations by the U.S. State Department. … There appears to be no warring faction that has not at some point been receiving U.S. government aid — a major violation of federal law, which does not provide exceptions for government officials in criminalizing support for terror groups.

A nationwide curfew was imposed as a section of the armed forces claimed to have taken the country over. The coup leaders seized national television and the phone network. Gunfire was heard in Ankara and military jets flew low over Ankara and Istanbul where the bridges over the Bosphorus were blocked. In Istanbul, Turkish Gendarmerie and soldiers blocked entrances to bridges over the Bosphorus while tanks blocked Ataturk airport. A TV announcer read out a statement saying that a “peace committee” had taken over the country against autocratic rule and will write a new constitution restoring democracy, whose institutions have been eroded by autocratic rule, and restore secular law.

It was a great aim, a brave attempt – but it failed.

Now Turkey is less likely to be secular and democratic. 

DebkaFile, which we quoted above, assesses the event and analyses why the attempted coup failed:

The Turkish armed forces’ attempt to overthrow the authoritarian rule of President Tayyip Erdogan was largely extinguished Saturday morning July 16 after less than 24 hours – due to three major miscalculations:

1. They first seized the country’s power centers and state television when their first priority should have been to immobilize Erdogan who was out of the capital on vacation.

2. Although out of control in Ankara and Istanbul, he used his mobile phone to reassert his authority through a private television station and called on the people to take to the streets in protest against the plotters. Civilians responded by surrounding the tanks and tying them down until loyal troops moved in.

3. They relied too heavily on the air force to cow the regime, the jets zooming low over the two main cities while the two main airports were closed.

It was soon evident that control of Turkey’s skies was no guarantee of control of the ground. Indeed, the coup leaders did not prevent him from landing at Ataturk airport and declaring immediately that he was in charge, demonstrating that he was on top of events.

In the clashes that followed, Gen. Umit Dundar, the newly appointed acting chief of the general staff, said more than 190 people died in clashes: 41 police officers, two soldiers, 47 civilians and 104 people described as ‘‘coup plotters”. Dundar said officers from the Air Force, the military police and the armored units were mainly involved in the attempt.

At the same, the attempt by part of the Turkish armed forces to topple Erdogan in the name of democracy and the return of “secular law” was impressive and evidence of social and political malaise under his rule. It was led by at least half a dozen generals, as may be judged the arrest of Gen. Memduh Hakbilen, the chief of staff of Turkey’s command for the important Aegean region, among the more than 1,500 alleged plotters and the suspension of another five generals.

That elements of the air force joined the attempted uprising is unprecedented in Turkey, whose army is NATO’s second largest.

Erdogan will no doubt want to know why his MIT intelligence failed to scent the conspiracy afoot.

He will certainly lose no time in executing a massive purge of Turkey’s armed forces, and especially the air force and intelligence arms, after accusing the coup leaders of treason.

Erdogan has been steadily taking steps to re-create an Islamic state. He wants to reverse the modernizing reforms that Kemal Ataturk effected after Turkey, as an ally of Germany, was defeated in the First World War. He dreams of reviving the Ottoman Empire, perhaps seeing himself as Sultan (who was also titled Caliph). He has built himself a new palace in Ankara, and announced that it will be the center of government.

Predictably, President Obama is on the side of the would-be dictator against the side that reached for democracy. 

Erdogan’s new presidential palace in Ankara

President Erdogan in his new palace

President Erdogan among guards dressed in the uniforms of Ottoman soldiers

Europeans are at last growing angry with their ruling elites and forming groups of resistance.

Feeling themselves and their power seriously threatened, the elites – politicians, academics, media people, all of them on the left even if some of them call themselves conservatives – label the groups “far-right”.

Many voices are prophesying civil war.

We quote from an article at Gatestone by Yves Mamou, titled France: The Coming Civil War:

“We are on the verge of a civil war.”

That quote did not come from a fanatic or a lunatic. No, it came from the head of France’s homeland security, the DGSI (Direction générale de la sécurité intérieure), Patrick Calvar.

He has, in fact, spoken of the risk of a civil war many times. On July 12^th, he warned a commission of members of parliament, in charge of a survey about the terrorist attacks of 2015, about it.

In May 2016, he delivered almost the same message to another commission of members of parliament, this time in charge of national defense. “Europe,” he said, “is in danger. Extremism is on the rise everywhere, and we are now turning our attention to some far-right movements who are preparing a confrontation.”

What kind of confrontation? “Intercommunity confrontations”,  he said – polite for “a war against Muslims”. “One or two more terrorist attacks,” he added, “and we may well see a civil war.”

In February 2016, in front of a senate commission in charge of intelligence information, he said again: ” We are looking now at far-right extremists who are just waiting for more terrorist attacks to engage in violent confrontation”.

No one knows if the truck terrorist, who plowed into the July 14^th Bastille Day crowd in Nice and killed more than 80 people, will be the trigger for a French civil war, but it might help to look at what creates the risk of one in France and other countries, such as Germany or Sweden.

The main reason is the failure of the state.

France is the main target of repeated Islamist attacks; the more important Islamist terrorist bloodbaths took place at the magazine Charlie Hebdo and the Hypercacher supermarket of Vincennes (2015); the Bataclan, its nearby restaurants and the Stade de France stadium, (2015); the failed attack on theThalys train; the beheading of Hervé Cornara (2015); the assassination of two policemen in Magnanville in June (2016), and now the truck-ramming in Nice, on the day commemorating the French Revolution of 1789.

Most of those attacks were committed by French Muslims: citizens on their way back from Syria (the Kouachi brothers at Charlie Hebdo), or by French Islamists (Larossi Abballa who killed a police family in Magnanville last June) who later claimed their allegiance to Islamic State (ISIS). The truck killer in Nice was Tunisian but married with a French woman, three children together, and living quietly in Nice until he decided to murder …

At each of these tragic episodes, the head of state, President François Hollande, refused to name the enemy, refused to name Islamism – and especially refused to name French Islamists – as the enemy of French citizens.

For Hollande, the enemy is an abstraction: “terrorism” or “fanatics”. Even when the president does dare to name “Islamism” the enemy, he refuses to say he will close all Salafist mosques, prohibit the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist organizations in France, or ban veils for women in the street and at university. No, instead, the French president reaffirms his determination for military actions … abroad: “We are going to reinforce our actions in Syria and Iraq,” the president said after the Nice attack.

For France’s head of state, the deployment of soldiers on the national ground is for defensive actions only: a dissuasive policy, not an offensive rearmament of the Republic against an internal enemy.

So confronted with this failure by our elite … how astonishing is it if paramilitary groups are organizing themselves to retaliate? …

The civil war began sixteen years ago, with the second Intifada. When Palestinians invented suicide attacks in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, French Muslims began to terrorize Jews living peacefully in France. For sixteen years, Jews — in France —were slaughtered, attacked, tortured and stabbed by French Muslim citizens supposedly to avenge Palestinian people in the West Bank.

When a group of French citizens who are Muslims declares war on another group of French citizens who are Jews, what do you call it?

For the French establishment, it is not a civil war, just a regrettable misunderstanding between two “ethnic” communities.

Until now, no one has wanted to establish a connection between these attacks and the murderous attack in Nice against people who were not necessarily Jews – and name it as it should be named: a civil war.

For the very politically correct French establishment, the danger of a civil war will begin only if anyone retaliates against French Muslims; if everyone just submits to their demands, everything is all right. Until now, no one thinks that the terrorist attacks against Jews by French Muslims; against Charlie Hebdo’s journalists by French Muslims; against an entrepreneur who was beheaded a year ago by a French Muslim; against young Ilan Halimi by a group of Muslims; against schoolchildren in Toulouse by a French Muslim; against the passengers on the Thalys train by a French Muslim, against the innocent people in Nice by an almost French Muslim were the symptoms of a civil war. These bloodbaths remain, still today something like a climatic catastrophe, a kind of tragic misunderstanding.

In France, who most complains about Muslim immigration? Who most suffers from local Islamism? Who most likes to drink a glass of wine or eat a ham-and-butter sandwich? The poor and the old who live close to Muslim communities, because they do not have the money to move someplace else.

Today, as a result, millions of the poor and the old in France are ready to elect Marine Le Pen, president of the rightist Front National, as the next president of the Republic for the simple reason that the only party that wants to fight illegal immigration is the Front National.

Because, however, these French old and poor want to vote for the Front National, they have become the enemy of the French establishment, right and left. What is the Front National saying to these people? “We are going to restore France as a nation of French people”. And the poor and the old believe it – because they have no choice.

Similarly, the poor and the old in Britain had no choice but to vote for Brexit. They took the first tool given them to express their disappointment at living in a society they did not like anymore. They did not vote to say, “Kill these Muslims who are transforming my country, stealing my job and soaking up my taxes”. They were just protesting a society that a global elite had begun to transform without their consent.

In France, the global elites made a choice. They decided that the “bad” voters in France were unreasonable people too stupid, too racists to see the beauties of a society open to people who often who do not want to assimilate, who want you to assimilate to them, and who threaten to kill you if you do not.

The global elites made another choice: they took the side against their own old and poor because those people did not want to vote for them any longer. The global elites also chose not to fight Islamism, because Muslims vote globally for the global elite. Muslims in Europe also offer a big “carrot” to the global elite: they vote collectively.

In France, 93% of Muslims voted for the current president, François Hollande, in 2012. In Sweden, the Social Democrats reported that 75% of Swedish Muslims voted for them in the general election of 2006; and studies show that the “red-green” bloc gets 80-90% of the Muslim vote.

If the establishment does not want to see that civil war was already declared by extremist Muslims first – if they do not want to see that the enemy is not the Front National in France, the AfD in Germany, or the Sweden Democrats – but Islamism in France, in Belgium, in Great Britain, in Sweden – then a civil war will happen.

France, like Germany and Sweden, has a military and police strong enough to fight against an internal Islamist enemy. But first, they have to name it and take measures against it.

If they do not – if they leave their native citizens in despair, with no other means than to arm themselves and retaliate –  yes, civil war is inevitable.