Q: When is a terrorist organization not a terrorist organization?

A: When Barry Obama says so.

This is from Front Page, by Daniel Greenfield:

You know the country responsible for killing hundreds of marines, which provided sanctuary to Al Qaeda and whose terrorist proxies helped give Al Qaeda the skills to carry out 9/11? They’re no longer terrorists. Sure their terrorist groups currently control parts of Lebanon and Yemen, but they’re not terrorists.

Because if Iran was a state sponsor of terrorism, then Obama letting them have the bomb might look bad. This way it’s fine.

An annual report delivered recently to the US Senate by James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, removed Iran and Hezbollah from its list of terrorism threats, after years in which they featured in similar reports

In describing Iran’s regional role, the report noted the Islamic Republic’s “intentions to dampen sectarianism, build responsive partners, and de-escalate tensions with Saudi Arabia”, but cautioned that “Iranian leaders — particularly within the security services — are pursuing policies with negative secondary consequences for regional stability and potentially for Iran”.

The only time the report mentions Hezbollah is when describing it as a victim of attacks.

Lebanon faces growing threats from terrorist groups, including the al-Nusrah Front and ISIL. Sunni extremists are trying to establish networks in Lebanon and have increased attacks against Lebanese army and Hizballah positions along the Lebanese-Syrian border. Lebanon potentially faces a protracted conflict in northern and eastern parts of the country from extremist groups seeking to seize Lebanese territory, supplies, and hostages.

That clarifies that Obama no longer considers Hezbollah an enemy (not that he ever did). Instead it’s an ally that is classed together with Lebanon, rather than a threat to it.

Here’s what Obama chose to turn his back on.

“The worst part for me is that nobody remembers,” Mark Nevells said last year on the anniversary of the Hezbollah bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut.

A Marine had thrown his body in front of the truck to try and stop the vehicle. And afterwards, for five days, Nevells and other Marines had dug through the rubble for the bodies of the men they had served with.

One of the first Marines on the scene heard voices coming from underneath the rubble. “Get us out. Don’t leave us.”

The Marines lost more people that day than at any time since Iwo Jima and the number of Americans murdered that day by a terrorist group was a record that would stand until September 11.

And more of it still.

The Marines who died in the bombing were lucky. Another Marine did not die as quickly.

Colonel William R. Higgins was captured by Hezbollah, the terrorist group acting as Iran’s hand in Lebanon, and tortured for months until his body was dumped near a mosque.

An autopsy report found that he had been starved and had suffered multiple lethal injuries that could have caused his death. The skin on his face had been partially removed along with his tongue and he had also been castrated.

Fred Hof, a diplomat who had been a friend of the murdered man, said, “I am one of a small handful of Americans who knows the exact manner of Rich’s death. If I were to describe it to you now – which I will not – I can guarantee that a significant number of people in this room would become physically ill.”

Like Higgins, William Francis Buckley, the CIA station chief, was also captured and tortured for months. On video tapes released by his Hezbollah captors, he was incoherent and his mind had been broken by the horrors inflicted on his ravaged body and his soul.

“They had done more than ruin his body,” CIA Director William Casey said. “His eyes made it clear his mind had been played with. It was horrific, medieval and barbarous.”

Robert Stethem, a Navy diver, was brutally murdered when Hezbollah terrorists took over TWA flight 847. The Iranian-backed terrorists, one of whom was Imad Mughniyah, beat and kicked him to death.

“They were jumping in the air and landing full force on his body. He must have had all his ribs broken,” Uli Derickson, the stewardess, described. “I was sitting only 15 feet away. I couldn’t listen to it. I put my fingers in my ears. I will never forget. I could still hear. They put the mike up to his face so his screams could be heard by the outside world.”

Obama wants you to believe that the 47 Senators who stood up to him on Iran are traitors. The truth is he’s the traitor.

And he is a terrorist. To condone acts of terrorism is to co-author them. 

Is that a flight of pigs on the horizon?

Is a crack of light breaking at last into the darkness of Islam?

President Sisi of Egypt, speaking at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, said (translation by Raymond Ibrahim at Front Page):

I am referring here to the religious clerics.   We have to think hard about what we are facing — and I have, in fact, addressed this topic a couple of times before.  It’s inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire umma [Islamic world] to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world.  Impossible!

That thinking — I am not saying “religion” but “thinking” — that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the years, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world.  It’s antagonizing the entire world!

Is it possible that 1.6 billion people [Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants — that is 7 billion — so that they themselves may live? Impossible!

I am saying these words here at Al-Azhar, before this assembly of scholars and ulema — Allah Almighty be witness to your truth on Judgment Day concerning that which I’m talking about now.

All this that I am telling you, you cannot feel it if you remain trapped within this mindset. You need to step outside of yourselves to be able to observe it and reflect on it from a more enlightened perspective.

I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution. You, imams, are responsible before Allah. The entire world, I say it again, the entire world is waiting for your next move … because this umma is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost—and it is being lost by our own hands.

Daniel Greenfield comments (in part):

The implication is that he’s calling for a departure from texts that promote international holy wars. Obviously he isn’t taking issue with the Koran. But it appears he is calling for a religious framework that invalidates freelance Islamic expansionism of the ISIS kind. That would be a somewhat conservative step. …

And Sisi is “telling Al Azhar’s clergy to take an enlightened perspective and look outside themselves. That is dangerously close to secularism.”

Will Egypt, with the consent of Al-Azhar, become a secular state? There is a precedent in the Turkey of Kemal Atatürk and his immediate successors. (Turkey is reverting now to an Islamic theocracy under the presidency of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.)

Is it possible that Egypt will persuade Islam to give up its jihad?

And even perhaps – to hazard an even wilder hope – revise sharia law, set women free, tolerate apostasy … ?

Nah! Pigs may figuratively fly, but never very far.

Quotation from an announcement, in the form of a letter, posted on the website of the US Department of State:

U.S. Plans To Lead in Resettling Syrian Refugees

Remarks

Anne C. Richard
Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration

Geneva, Switzerland

December 9, 2014

… Only a small fraction of those who want to be resettled can be – only about one hundred thousand refugees per year, worldwide. There are more than six times that many Syrian refugees in Jordan alone. …

We applaud the 25 countries that have agreed to resettle Syrian refugees, including some who will be accepting UNHCR refugee referrals for the first time. The United States accepts the majority of all UNHCR referrals from around the world. Last year, we reached our goal of resettling nearly 70,000 refugees from nearly 70 countries. And we plan to lead in resettling Syrians as well. We are reviewing some 9,000 recent UNHCR referrals from Syria. We are receiving roughly a thousand new ones each month, and we expect admissions from Syria to surge in 2015 and beyond.

Like most other refugees resettled in the United States, they will get help from the International Organization for Migration with medical exams and transportation to the United States. Once they arrive, networks of resettlement agencies, charities, churches, civic organizations and local volunteers will welcome them. These groups work in 180 communities across the country and make sure refugees have homes, furniture, clothes, English classes, job training, health care and help enrolling their children in school. They are now preparing key contacts in American communities to welcome Syrians.

I am inspired both by the resilience of refugees we resettle, and the compassion of those who help them. Resettlement cannot replace what refugees have lost or erase what they have endured. But it can renew hope and help restart lives. That can make all the difference.

Thank you.

So thousands of Syrians are about to be brought into the United States. They are likely to be only the first wave of refugees from the mainly Muslim Middle East.

Refugee Resettlement Watch lists the states where nearly 10,000 mostly Muslim refugees were resettled in the first two months of the current fiscal year. 

Once settled here, they can bring their relations to join them.

Under the Obama administration, the Muslim population of America is increasing constantly by immigration. They do not need amnesty. They start receiving “entitlements” immediately on arrival.

But the UN won’t allow Western countries to decide which refugees they’ll accept.

Canada wants to accept Christians and Yazidis, not Muslims with their incompatible law and ideology. But the UN won’t allow Canada to do that.

This is from Front Page by Daniel Greenfield:

The UN’s refugee agenda has an agenda and it’s not refugees, it’s Islamic invasion.

The federal government is seeking to resettle more Syrian refugees, but only from the country’s religious minorities, according to sources close to discussions around Canada’s position on refugees from the war-torn nation.

Sources close to the discussions say Canada is seeking to resettle only refugees from Syria’s religious minorities, something that would likely be difficult for the UN’s refugee agency to accept.

The UNHCR’s policy on refugees says a resettlement state determines the “size and composition” of who and how many refugees it accepts, and “therefore has full control with respect to decisions on individual cases”.

“Nevertheless, UNHCR urges all states to be guided by the agency’s internationally recognized criteria on eligibility, global needs and priorities”, the policy says.

As far as global needs go, the Middle East has plenty of safe refuges for Sunni and Shiite Muslims, it has none for Christians and Yazidis. It only makes sense that the West should fill the need for safe refuges that don’t exist in the Muslim world for non-Muslims, while the Muslim world takes in its own refugees.

Such as the “Palestinians”? The policy of the Arab states has always been NOT to accept refugees for settlement and integration – especially not Arabs from the Palestine region, sentenced by their fellow Arabs to suffer as much as possible as a reproach to the world for allowing Israel to exist.

… to get the perfectly horrible health care law passed.

For the Left, the end always justifies the means.

See how smug Jonathan Gruber, architect of Obamacare, looks as he shares his  joke about the “stupidity” of the American voter.

Here’s what he says, so you can mull it over:

This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. So it was written to do that. In terms of risk related subsidies, if you had a law which made explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people get money it would not have passed. Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to get the thing to pass.

Daniel Greenfield comments at Front Page:

So an Obamacare architect just admitted that the whole thing was built on a tower of lies and that it is indeed a tax.

As the Supreme Court ruled it is.

The passing of the Obamacare law was also a great leap forward on the road to serfdom.

It needs to be repealed.

We wonder which of the 71 genders now recognized, these three belong to. Anyway they’re all feminists. Shouldn’t Pajama Boy be with them? And Barry “Chickenshit” Obama?

Our opinion: They’d all look great in a Burkha! 

*

Here’s the Telegraph’s list of the 71 genders:

The 21 new options for UK Facebook users

Asexual

Female to male trans man

Female to male transgender man

Female to male transsexual man

F2M

Gender neutral

Hermaphrodite

Intersex man

Intersex person

Intersex woman

Male to female trans woman

Male to female transgender woman

Male to female transsexual woman

Man

M2F

Polygender

T man

T woman

Two person

Two-spirit person

Woman

The list of the 50 previous gender options

Agender

Androgyne

Androgynes

Androgynous

Bigender

Cis

Cis Female

Cis Male

Cis Man

Cis Woman

Cisgender

Cisgender Female

Cisgender Male

Cisgender Man

Cisgender Woman

Female to Male

FTM

Gender Fluid

Gender Nonconforming

Gender Questioning

Gender Variant

Genderqueer

Intersex

Male to Female

MTF

Neither

Neutrois

Non-binary

Other

Pangender

Trans

Trans Female

Trans Male

Trans Man

Trans Person

Trans Female

Trans Male

Trans Man

Trans Person

Trans Woman

Transexual

Transexual Female

Transexual Male

Transexual Man

Transexual Person

Transexual Woman

Transgender Female

Transgender Person

Transmasculine

Two-spirit

At least one of these should be easy to recognize: the Bigenders.

There seems to be a certain redundancy in (for instance) Female to Male and also FTM and even still F2M. But I can already hear an exasperated voice – breaking in mid-sentence – crying out impatiently: ‘You’re so dumb! Can’t you get it that there’s all the difference in the world whether you want a full label applied to you or only the initials or a description suitable for a text message?”

What is the difference, we wonder, between the first list of Trans- (female male man person) and the second list of the same which we have italicized? We suspect a printing error occurred there, and if so the total of the tally is wrong. The number needs to be reduced from 71 to 67 max.

The Trans person is a particularly curious category. What can a person trans into? An animal? A plant?

Man and Woman were not among the previous options, and have apparently only just been introduced. Most people were ahead of Facebook there.

Gender Fluid brings to mind the shape-changers of Star Trek. 

Amazing that, with so comprehensive-seeming a list, there is still the category of “Other”. Wouldn’t Male, Female, Other have covered everything?

And most amazing of all is Pangender. There are people going about among us who are all of the listed genders simultaneously? Aren’t some of them mutually exclusive – as, for instance, Neither and Man/Woman? Or Agender and most of the others?

*

(The picture of the three feminists comes from a Front Page article by Daniel Greenfield.)

(Hat-tip to Robert Kantor for the 71 genders.)

… all add to the gaiety of nations.

As the world order disintegrates, its leaders and elites laugh and play merrily. We should all join the greatest party of all time.

If recognizing breakaway countries can stabilize the unstable Middle East, just think of how much stability it can bring to Europe. Now that Sweden has solved the problem of Muslim violence in the Middle East, perhaps a few breakaway republics will solve Muslim violence in Sweden.

Daniel Greenfield writes in the only way this subject – the absurd step Sweden has taken in “recognizing” a non-existent State of Palestine – deserves to be written about: with brilliant sarcasm.

And he puts forward a great plan to reward Sweden for solving the central problem of the world with the pronouncing of one magic formula.

On Thursday, Sweden finally solved all the problems in the Middle East by recognizing the State of Palestine.

For decades all the instability in the region had been blamed on the lack of a PLO state. Foreign policy experts stood in line to tell us all that the only thing that could end terrorism in the Middle East was a terrorist state. …

Our leaders kept the faith. The White House’s Middle East coordinator insisted that Israel’s obstinate refusal to create a Palestinian State, against the wishes of the unelected president of the Palestinian Authority who refuses to negotiate one or to stop the terrorism, was causing instability in the region.

Secretary of State John Kerry had denied that ISIS [the “Islamic State”] was Islamic, but blamed Israel for ISIS recruitment.

The Obama administration, and most other governments, also deny that ISIS is a state. But it has a government, a huge and growing army, it collects taxes and has a thriving economy from the sale of oil, it runs hospitals and schools, collects garbage, and maintains order by a system of instant decapitation for any head that pops up too far. True, it has no fixed borders, but then neither does “Palestine”.

But it wasn’t John Kerry who saved the Middle East from instability. Instead Sweden did it by recognizing a terror state whose leaders stopped bothering with the onerous duty of holding elections once they realized that the Eurocrats and Obama would keep shoveling money at them even if they chose their unelected terrorist leaders by playing Russian Roulette.

Sweden’s new Palestine not only dispensed with elections, routing the business of governance through its core PLO organizations, but also has no economy, instead employing an army of people who are paid not to run a country that doesn’t exist with money sent over by America, Europe and Japan.

Some would call that a scam, but it’s remarkably similar to how the European Union works.

In addition to lacking such luxuries as an elected government and an economy, the State of Palestine also doesn’t control Gaza, which is run by another terrorist group, Hamas. The international community has been ignoring that minor problem because it wouldn’t do for a bankrupt terrorist state which happens to be our last best hope for stability in the Middle East to be disqualified just because it’s actually two quarreling bankrupt terrorist states. …

With Sweden’s bold step, a bright future dawns over the Middle East. ISIS recruitment is bound to start falling as the Canadian and Swedish Jihadis with their Burqaed brides heading to kill as many Yazidis as they can will realize that there’s no more need for them to behave the way that their religion has for over a thousand years.

There’s a Palestinian State now. All their grievances have been met. A million cartoons and a thousand YouTube videos couldn’t outrage them now. Unless they were about Mohammed.

I wouldn’t be surprised if ISIS transformed into a humanitarian agency for gluing back all the Yazidi, Christian and Shiite heads that it cut off back on the bodies it beheaded. Even now, Sunnis and Shiites are hugging each other all over Iraq and only occasionally blowing themselves up in the process.

Sweden should be rewarded in kind:

Sweden has given a great gift to the world. It’s only a question of how to properly repay it and the answer is obvious. If Sweden recognizing a micro-nation inside Israel’s borders will stabilize the region, it’s only right for Israel, and all right-thinking people, to recognize a micro-nation inside Sweden.

Sweden ended the occupation of Norway, but it continues to occupy such embryonic nations as the Royal Republic of Ladonia and the Republic of Jamtland.

A “Royal Republic”?  Hail, Ladonia, land of the brave and free!

While many of us might know Lars Vilks for his Mohammed cartoons, he also founded the Royal Republic of Ladonia after some of his other artwork was censored by Swedish authorities.

The Royal Republic of Ladonia was founded in 1996, three years after the Palestinian Authority, making it only slightly younger and a lot less violent than that micro-nation.

While Ladonia is only around a third of a mile in size, it has a government, a newspaper, a lot of citizens and almost as many nobles.

Queen Carolyn I rules over the constitutional monarchy while President Christopher Matheoss was recently elected by a wide margin over such candidates as Count Wrigley, Antonio Maria De Grandis and Alexander Nevzorov III.

Unlike Palestine, Ladonia holds elections making it a much more legitimate country. And unlike both Palestine and Sweden, Ladonia has freedom of speech and freedom of conscience.

Considering how many newly created countries lack either, the Royal Republic of Ladonia has more of a claim on existence for its mere willingness to extend these freedoms to all.

Israel should recognize the Republic of Ladonia. So should the United States. It’s the only hope for stabilizing Sweden which continues to experience outbursts of Muslim violence in its major cities.

A better case for independence can be made for the Republic of Jamtland, which unlike Palestine, has an ancient history and was an independent peasant republic before the Muslims even invaded Jerusalem.

It declared independence in 1963, a year before the PLO was founded …

Despite generations of Swedish occupation, the Jamtlanders have not turned to violence. At least not in several centuries. Ten of thousands gather for their Freedom Festivals. Their Jamtland Republican Army remains peaceful even when it sets up its own tolls and checkpoints. The only violence there can be seen from the Jamtland Republicans, a local American football team, vigorously playing on the field.

Jamtish, a dialect, is spoken. The flag of the Republic, blue for the sky, green for the forests and white for the snow, is waved. And the European Union and the Swedish government are denounced.

Considering the peacefulness and antiquity of the Republic of Jamtland, its sizable population and unique cultural heritage, recognizing this micro-nation would be the right thing to do. It’s time for Sweden to end the long occupation of Jamtland’s rivers and forests and for this brave republic to take its rightful place among the free and democratic nations of the world.

Sweden chose to recognize two terrorist states inside Israel’s borders. It would only be proper for nations of goodwill to recognize two wholly peaceful republics inside Sweden’s borders. …

Sweden saved the Middle East. Now maybe someone can save Sweden.

We cannot resist quoting this article by Sultan Knish because it made us laugh a lot and we think our readers might enjoy it as much as we did.

What follows is most of it, but for the full pleasure, read the whole thing here.

There are few weapons as deadly as the Israeli house. When its brick and mortar are combined together, the house, whether it is one of those modest one story hilltop affairs or a five floor apartment building complete with hot and cold running water, becomes far more dangerous than anything green and glowing that comes out of the Iranian centrifuges.

Forget the cluster bomb and the mine, the poison gas shell and even tailored viruses. Iran can keep its nuclear bombs. They don’t impress anyone in Europe or in Washington. Genocide is a minor matter when in the presence of the fearsome weapon of terror that is an Israeli family of four moving into a new apartment.

Sudan may have built a small mountain of African corpses, but it can’t expect to command the full and undivided attention of the world until it does something truly outrageous like building a house and filling it with Jews. Since the Sudanese Jews are as gone as the Jews of Egypt, Iraq, Syria and good old Afghanistan, the chances of Bashir the Butcher pulling off that trick are rather slim.

Due to the Muslim world’s shortsightedness in driving out its Jews from Cairo, Aleppo and Baghdad  to Jerusalem, the ultimate weapon in international affairs is entirely controlled by the Jewish State. The Jewish State’s stockpile of Jews should worry the international community far more than its hypothetical stockpiles of nuclear weapons. No one besides Israel, and possibly Saudi Arabia, cares much about the Iranian bomb.

But when Israel builds a house, then the international community tears its clothes, wails, threatens to recall its ambassadors and boycott Israeli peaches.

Angry British men in red Keffiyahs hold up signs about the Holocaust in front of Jewish cosmetics stores in London. Marginalized French youth, by way of Algeria and Tunisia, hurl stones at synagogues. John Kerry interrupts a speech on the dangers of Global Warming as an aide notifies him of an even bigger threat to the world: David just made a down payment on a two bedroom in Gvaot.

You can spit on the White House carpets and steal all the gold in Greece. You can blow up anything you like and threaten anyone you will, but you had better not lift a drill near the hills from which Balaam tried and failed to curse the Jewish people. Where the old Mesopotamian warlock failed, his successors in the United Nations follow in his footsteps by cursing Israel every day of the week.

Some may think that nuclear weapons are the ultimate weapons, but as we see, time and time again, the ultimate weapon is a hammer and a fistful of nails in a Jewish hand. 

Obama has yet to dig up a strategy for ISIS and can’t think of what to do about Putin in the Ukraine, but there’s always a final status solution strategy for Israel which involves destroying as many Jewish houses as possible and driving out the families living inside them.

Everyone has their standards. There are things that we all cannot abide. And for all the Miss America answers about ending war, hunger and people who wear plaid in public, the one thing that everyone will stand up against or sit down in opposition to is the Israeli house.

China announcing that there would be no democracy in Hong Kong, ISIS losing a battle to Iraqi forces and Jihadists occupying the US embassy in Tripoli were all minor stories thoroughly buried by the horrifying report that Israel might “seize” 988 acres of land for housing.

From the amount of media coverage you might have thought that Israel had conquered France or Kuwait instead of allocating some land the size of a farm or a ranch for housing. …

The land being “seized” had belonged to Israel and had no prior claims against it. If Qatar had decided to finance a Muslim construction project on the site, no one would have been opposed. But there are different rules for the Jews. There have always been different rules about where the Jews can live. International law is the new ghetto. Its enforcers are diplomats and BDS.

The State Department has claimed that building houses is “counterproductive” to peace. On the other hand the Palestinian Authority’s funding of terrorists never seems to be counterproductive. …

White House officials have in the past claimed that Netanyahu “humiliated” Obama by authorizing the building of houses. While Russia may threaten nuclear war against the United States, and Iran  may play Obama for a fool, only Israel has managed to achieve official recognition for “humiliating” Obama, without even trying, proving once again that the Jewish race is so talented that it often achieves things that other peoples may only dream of without even realizing that it is doing it.

Now that Netanyahu has gone to the mattresses, literally, by authorizing new housing, the media will begin braying that Israel has humiliated Obama all over again. …

According to the New York Times, which is never wrong, building more houses makes peace impossible. Peace, which is not in any way obstructed by rockets, suicide bombers, unilateral statehood bids and declarations of war, comes up against only one obstacle. The stout unyielding wall of the Israeli house.

You can shell Israeli houses, bomb them and break inside to massacre the people living inside, but then after all that, Israel goes and builds more of those damn things.

Hamas shoots thousands of rockets and Israel builds thousands of houses. But Israeli houses generally stay where they’re built, while Hamas rockets are as likely to kill Gazans as they are to put holes in the roofs of those dastardly houses. And in the arms race between houses and rockets, the Israelis appear to be winning. And that’s not good for peace.

If Israelis get the dangerous idea that they can just keep building houses and outlast all the talented rocketeers who spend their time with the Koran in front of one eye and the Anarchist’s Cookbook in front of the other, what hope is there for peace?

That is why no one cares much about Hamas rockets, which mostly kill Israelis, who most reasonable people in London, Paris and Brussels think have it coming anyway, but get into a foaming lather about an Israeli house.

Killing Israelis has never been any obstacle to peace. Twenty years of killing Israelis has not dissuaded a single Israeli government from sitting down at the table to dicker with the terrorists. But an Israeli family living in a house is holding down territory that it will be harder to then cede to terrorists when the angels have blown their horns, the seas have all gone dry and peace is carried in on a golden platter by 72 virgins accompanied by their flying suicide bomber mates. …

The world, or those portions of it populated entirely by diplomats and the better class of journalists, has been urging Israel to give back the land to an imaginary country to be populated entirely by terrorists.

This peace plan, which has worked as well as fighting fire with gasoline, has not in any way been endangered by two decades of terror, but trembles down to its toes every time an Israeli hammer falls on an Israeli nail. Because that land must go back so that rockets can be shot from it into Israel, so that Israel can invade it and reclaim it, and then sit down for another peace process to return the land from which the rockets will be fired, which will be invaded, which will be given back… for peace.

And Israeli houses endanger this cycle of peace and violence. They endanger it by creating “facts on the ground”, a piquant phrase that only seems to apply to houses with Jews. Muslim houses in no way create facts on the ground, even though they are built out of the same material and filled with people. Or perhaps they create the good kind of facts on the ground. The kind of preemption of negotiations that the professional peacemakers approve of. …

UN Chief Ban Ki-moon has declared Israeli houses to be an “almost fatal blow” to the peace process. It is, of course, only an “almost fatal blow”  because the peace process, like Dracula, cannot be killed. Israeli houses, fearsome as they may be with their balconies and poor heating in winter, are never quite enough to kill it. …

The army of lethal Israeli houses, which may not be built for another five years, if ever, seem formidable in the black newsprint of the New York Times and in the fulminations of Guardian columnists, but their actual potency is limited to housing Jewish families and infuriating international diplomats and their media coathangers.

Europe is furious, Obama is seething, the UN is energized, and somewhere in Iraq, the Caliph of ISIS wipes the grease out of his beard and wonders what he could do to get this much attention. He briefly scribbles down some thoughts on a napkin but then dismisses them as being too implausible.

As much as it might get the world’s attention, there is no way ISIS can build houses for Jews in Israel.

From Wikipedia:

James Wright Foley (October 18, 1973 – c. August 19, 2014) was an American photojournalist who was abducted in northwestern Syria on November 22, 2012, while working for the US-based online news outlet GlobalPost. He was beheaded by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant [ISIL, or ISIS, or IS for the Islamic State] at an unknown desert location in August 2014 …   ISIS posted a video to YouTube depicting Foley reading a prepared statement urging Americans to stop their support for the U.S. government for its bombing campaign against ISIS targets. US intelligence confirmed the authenticity of the video. His family has confirmed that he is dead.

His mother, Diane Foley, said he “gave his life trying to expose the world to the suffering of the Syrian people”.

So a hero and martyr? A deeply moral man who would willingly give his life for a humane cause?

For a different understanding of James Foley and his activities, we quote from a Front Page article by Daniel Greenfield:

James Foley was one of a new breed of activists calling themselves journalists. He didn’t travel to report on a story, but to promote an agenda.

What was Foley’s agenda?

He cheered on the Sunni Muslim terrorists fighting to ethnically cleanse the Christians of Aleppo.

In the conflict between Israel and Hamas, his tweets and retweets were chock full of pro-terrorist propaganda. … Foley was fanatically anti-Israel …

When Austin Tice, an actual freelance journalist was kidnapped by Jihadists, Foley ridiculed the idea that Jihadists had kidnapped him. Surely Syrian Jihadists wouldn’t do that sort of thing.

Except they did.

When Newsweek’s Muslim Rage cover story came out, Foley mocked it too. Raging Muslims. How silly and Islamophobic.

James Foley, from Rochester, New Hampshire, was one of those romantics who step out from a world of safety to flirt with violence, the more extreme the better; imagining that his opinions against his own country and condescendingly sympathetic to its ideological and terrorist enemies, would make him a gift to them, protected and invulnerable.

In the event, the savage Muslim jihadis didn’t give a damn for his opinions. They killed him because he was an American.

A would-be traitor to his country, he was forced to die for it.

Which is an exquisite irony. A collector’s prize piece.

It is widely assumed that Foley’s words as he knelt awaiting his beheading were coerced. But it is quite possible that they were sincerely  meant.

Obama takes offense at criticism – exhibiting the mentality of what we are calling a “dolly”, as we explain in our post immediately below.   

He also seems to believe that to laugh at him is to commit lèse majesté. 

He got his co-conspirator against America, the attorney general, to see if someone who dared laugh at him critically could be charged with a crime.

This is from Front Page, by Daniel Greenfield:

Remember when we all lived in America? That was nice, wasn’t it? You could make fun of the President without the secret police showing up.

The U.S. Department of Justice has sent a member of its Community Relations Service team to investigate a Nebraska parade float that criticized President Obama.

A Fourth of July parade float featured at the annual Independence Day parade in Norfolk sparked criticism when it depicted a zombie-like figure resembling Mr. Obama standing outside an outhouse, which was labeled the “Obama Presidential Library”.

Actually, the figure does not at all resemble Obama, though the paranoid administration feels that it does. The figure is not even black, but that does not stop Democrats saying that the mockery is “racist”. Obama’s gang and its supporters always claim that any criticism of him is motivated by “racism”.

However, the outhouse behind the figure labelled the “Obama Presidential Library”, does refer to the heap of political ordure Obama is piling up to leave behind him when (Oh frabjous day!) he departs from the White House which he so ridiculously occupies.

The Nebraska Democratic Party called the float one of the “worst shows of racism and disrespect for the office of the presidency that Nebraska has ever seen.”

And what has this president ever done to earn respect? It is possible to respect the office of the President without respecting the man who holds it.

The Omaha World-Herald reported Friday that the Department of Justice sent a CRS member who handles discrimination disputes to a Thursday meeting about the issue.

The Community Relations Service was the creepy bunch that first came to prominence during the Trayvon Martin case. A division of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), it was deployed to Sanford, Florida in 2012 to provide assistance for anti-George Zimmerman protests, including a rally headlined by activist Al Sharpton, according to newly released documents. …

That’s Attorney-General Eric Holder’s idea of objective justice.

In person, they have a real secret police vibe. In their Navy blue windbreakers, polo shirts and dark sunglasses, they look like federal agents.

Their caps are embroidered with the Justice Department’s seal. They watch and listen silently. But they say little publicly.

When reporters try to chat them up .. [they say] they cannot talk to the media. …

Dale Remmich of rural Norfolk made the float and has said the mannequin depicted him, not President Barack Obama. Remmich has said he made it to represent his frustration with the president’s management of the Veterans Affairs Department. He did not intend for the float to make a racial statement, he said.

In his mannequin persona, Remmich says, –

“I’ve got my bibs on, my walker, I’m covering my ears and I’m turning a bit green. I intended it to look like a zombie who has had enough,” Remmich said. …

Bottom line Remmich said it’s not about hate or race … He was exercising his First Amendment right.

“This is America. Anyone can have a parade. Anyone can be in a parade and that’s it.”

That used to be America. Under Obama, it’s Obamerica.

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This picture shows that Bush’s presidential library was associated with an outhouse too.

Our reader and commenter leberlenloc drew out attention to it.

To read his interesting article that accompanies the picture, go to RedState here.

As usual, Pat Condell speaks the truth – this time about Sweden.

And this is from the New American, by Selwyn Duke:

You’re free in Sweden to be critical of immigration, those in power, or people identifying as “LBGT” [not lettuce, bacon, gunge and tomato as in a British commercial sandwich, but lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgender – ed] – at least within the confines of your mind. But dare express those views, even on the Internet, and you can now be more easily prosecuted under a new law …

The crime of ‘insult’ will be prosecuted … for giving offense to immigrants, LGBTQ persons or authorities … immigration in particular enjoying sanctified status in Sweden.

As CBN reported earlier this month in a piece entitled “Soviet Sweden? Model Nation Sliding to Third World”:

Sweden’s leftist establishment and media believe a cornerstone of their perfect society is multiculturalism — large-scale immigration from some of the poorest, most backward nations on Earth — and Swedes who disagree with that plan risk being labeled racist, fascist, even Nazi. …

This is despite the fact, say critics, that wide-scale Third World immigration is threatening Sweden’s future.

As CBN also reported:

Sweden’s immigration model is failing miserably … test scores in Swedish schools are plummeting … [and] crime in some areas has skyrocketed. Immigrants burned the Stockholm suburb of Husby for over a week last year.

Many Jews now live in fear of attacks by Muslim immigrants and are leaving. Amun Abdullahi, a journalist for Swedish radio, left last year and returned to her native Somalia after she was attacked in the Swedish media over her news report about radical Muslim immigrants in Sweden. She told Swedish television that Mogadishu was safer than immigrant areas in Stockholm.

Frontpage Mag’s Daniel Greenfield … provides even more perspective:

Sweden’s population grew from 9 million to 9.5 million in the years 2004-2012, mainly due to immigration from ‘countries like Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia.’ 16 percent of all newborns have mothers born in non-Western countries. Employment rate among immigrants: 54 percent. Sweden now has the second highest number of rapes in the world, after South Africa, which at 53.2 per 100,000 is six times higher than the United States.

Note that 77 percent of these rapes are perpetrated by “foreigners”, most of whom are Muslim, while their victims primarily are native Swedes. And these figures may very well be artificially low estimates, as the government would prefer to make the headlines go away.

And Western governments have long aimed to make politically incorrect criticism go away with tyrannical hate-speech laws.

For example, LifeSiteNews.com reports:

Chapter 15, Section 8 of Sweden’s criminal code prohibits the expression of ‘disrespect’ towards favoured minority groups. The law carries a penalty of up to four years of imprisonment. It requires no evidence of incitement to violence and lacks any objective standard for identifying ‘disrespect’.”

 …  Sweden’s new law [is]   designed to target näthatare, which, I understand, translates into “net haters.” Yet … “Sweden’s Free-Speech Charade,” hate is whatever the Swedish thought police say it is — at the particular moment in question. Here’s one example he provides:

In January 2002 … a district court sentenced neo-Nazi Fredrik Sandberg to six months in prison for publishing a Third-Reich-era pamphlet (“The Jewish Question”). But four years later, the official who initiated that case (Swedish Chancellor of Justice Göran Lambertz) discontinued an investigation into the Stockholm Central Mosque regarding its distribution of tapes that encouraged Muslims to kill Jews, described therein as “the brothers of apes and pigs.” His legal justification? “[Such statements] should be judged differently — and therefore be regarded as permissible — because they were used by one side in an ongoing and far-reaching conflict where calls to arms and insults are part of the everyday climate in the rhetoric that surrounds this conflict.”

So what is an aspiring hater to conclude? If you’re going to hate, make sure it’s habitual? Or is it something else? It appears, critics might say, that some haters are more equal than others.