Al-Qaeda top dog urges kidnappings of Americans

Robert Spencer  / Jihad Watch

 

Kidnapping infidels and releasing them for ransom or killing them, as well as exchanging them for Muslim prisoners if that option is deemed most advantageous for the Muslims, is fully sanctioned in Islamic law: “As for the captives, the amir [ruler] has the choice of taking the most beneficial action of four possibilities: the first to put them to death by cutting their necks; the second, to enslave them and apply the laws of slavery regarding their sale and manumission; the third, to ransom them in exchange for goods or prisoners; and fourth, to show favor to them and pardon them. Allah, may he be exalted, says, ‘When you encounter those [infidels] who deny [the Truth=Islam] then strike [their] necks’ (Qur’an sura 47, verse 4)” — Abu’l-Hasan al-Mawardi, al-Ahkam as-Sultaniyyah (The Laws of Islamic Governance), trans. by Dr. Asadullah Yate, (London), Ta-Ha Publishers Ltd., 1996, p. 192.

“Al-Qaeda chief urges kidnappings of Americans,” Channel NewsAsia, April 26, 2014 (thanks to Kenneth):

DUBAI: Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri has called in an interview for militants to kidnap Westerners, especially Americans, to exchange them for jihadist captives.

In the second part of an interview with Al-Qaeda media arm As-Sahab, which the US-based SITE monitoring service said a jihadist posted on Twitter, Zawahiri was asked what Muslims should do to free militant prisoners.

“I advise them to capture Westerners and especially the Americans as much as they can, to exchange them for their captives,” he replied.

In the first part of the interview, released on April 19, the Al-Qaeda chief called for unity amid widening divisions with a rival jihadist organisation rooted in the Syrian civil war.

Zawahiri succeeded the late Osama bin Laden as leader of the global terror network in 2011.

Hey McCain...put the 'D' after your name and be done with it...geeesh...

John McCain to host Hillary Clinton in Sedona, Ariz.

Philip Rucker / The Washington Times

Since leaving the State Department last year, Hillary Rodham Clinton has racked up scores of accolades and appeared on many a big stage. Still, it might come as a surprise that a past Republican presidential nominee -- specifically, the one who is among the loudest critics of Clinton's handling of the Benghazi terrorist attacks -- would invite her to his desert retreat for a lofty conversation about leadership values.

This is precisely what Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has done.

Clinton, a prospective 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, will appear on stage Saturday with McCain at the Sedona Forum, an annual ideas festival hosted by the McCain Institute for International Leadership at Arizona State University. Clinton is among the national and international business leaders, philanthropists and public figures appearing at the gathering, held in Sedona, the tony red-rocks oasis in Arizona's Verde Valley.

In a statement released Thursday, McCain called Clinton "my friend" and praised her public service career.

"From her years of service as first lady, in the U.S. Senate and the State Department, one would be hard-pressed to find a leader with Secretary Clinton's informed perspective on the many challenges facing America across the globe," McCain said.

According to a news release, Clinton is scheduled to "participate in a conversation" with McCain.

This year's forum will focus on "Crisis in the Middle East: Values, Strategy and Options," and will include a session on Russia and Ukraine and on combating human trafficking.

McCain, along with Sens. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), has been a consistent critic of Clinton's handling of the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, when four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens, were killed. 

Clinton repeatedly has taken responsibility for what happened in Benghazi. At an event in Boston on Wednesday, Clinton said of the incident, "It's very painful and it was certainly the biggest regret that I had as secretary of state."

Clinton and McCain forged a friendship in the Senate, when both served on the Armed Services Committee, and they and their spouses have supported each other's philanthropic endeavors.

Last month, McCain appeared on stage with Bill Clinton at the Clinton Global Initiative University conference in Tempe, Ariz., hamming it up like old buddies. And this week, Cindy McCain appeared at an event in Phoenix with business and community leaders and to promote Too Small to Fail, the early childhood education initiative that Hillary Clinton is helping lead. McCain sits on the group's leadership council.

Iran Wins Seat on UN Women’s Rights Commission

Pamela Geller / Atlas Shrugs

Stunning.  Well, maybe not. This is the UN, after all. And the UN has become the global arm for the modern day caliphate — the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the largest world body at the UN, consisting of 56 Muslim countries and the Palestinian Authority. They vote as one.

The idea that a mullahcracy like Iran would even be considered for a seat on a women’s rights commission speaks more to the unequivocal failure of the UN than anything else.

Religious police, punitive punishments for “immoral” dress, systematic rape in prison ….executions.  Sharia Iran sitting on a women’s rights commission would be like naming Nazi Germany to one of the 18 committees of the  World Jewish Congress during WWII.

The same moral inversion is reflected in the notoriously anti-Israel J Street’s current bid for membership in the  Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

It’s an upside down world.

“Iran Wins Seat on UN Women’s Rights Commission,”  By Frances Martel. Breitbart, April 24, 2014

Iran made significant strides in gaining power in the United Nations Economic and Social Council this week, confirming their place on five sub-committees. Most controversial among these is their appointment to the Commission on the Status of Women, which would give the nation influence over global women’s rights.

In a press release announcing a new term for the committees under the Economic and Social Council– whose theme this term will be “the future of humanitarian affairs: towards greater inclusiveness, coordination, interoperability and effectiveness”– the UN announced that Iran will serve on the Commissions on Population and

Development, Science and Technology for Development, the Committee for Programme Coordination and on Non-Governmental Organizations, and the Commission on the Status of Women.

The United States has objected to Iran’s election to these positions. UN Ambassador Samantha Power said in a statement: ”The unopposed candidacy of Iran, where authorities regularly detain human rights defenders, subjecting many to torture, abuse, and violations of due process, is a particularly troubling outcome of today’s election.”

Iran’s history makes it a clearly unworthy steward of international human rights, though two of those appointments are far more distressing than the others: the Committee on Non-Governmental Organizations and the Commission on the Status of Women. Power’s statement preceded a promise to continue supporting NGOs that work to expose human rights violations abroad, many of which have clashed with the Iranian government when attempting to investigate its abuses.

The appointment to that committee reaches the Iranian government at a time when they are attempting to quell uprisings triggered by a massive human rights scandal. The head of the Iranian prison system was removed and appointed to a position of less power this week after relatives of political prisoners at the nation’s notorious Evin prison called for justice for their relatives. Political prisoners at Evin allege that an inspection at the institution resulted in more than one hundred guards savagely beating and abusing dozens of prisoners. Iranian legislators have promised to investigate the situation.

The appointment to the Women’s Rights commission follows statements that some are interpreting as an attempt to limit the abuses of women in Iran by President Hassan Rouhani. Rouhani noted that “there are still so many deficiencies with regards to the vindication of women’s rights,” but that Islamic law provided an equal footing for both men and women: “they both have the same human dignity and none is superior.”

The UN itself has disputed the idea that the Iranian government sees men and women as possessing “the same human dignity.” In a report released last month, the UN chastised the government of Iran for imprisoning women’s rights activists, relegating women to outsider status in politics, and introducing “laws that permit gender discrimination and promote violence against women.” In the latter category, the report cites “the revised Islamic Penal Code, which… values women’s testimony in a court of law as half that of a man’s, and a woman’s life half that of a man’s.”

Women are also subject to a significant number of executions for crimes such as adultery and being the survivors of rape. This month, a UN human rights expert called for Iran to cancel the scheduled execution of Reyhaneh Jabbari, who is alleged to have been raped by a former Iranian intelligence official. Jabbari was sentenced for the murder of her former boss, Morteza Abdolali Sarbandi. According to the UN, Jabbari confessed to the crime, but her conviction is “allegedly based on confessions made under threat possibly equivalent of torture.” Even Sarbandi’s family has expressed some doubts that Jabbari committed the crime.

Jabbari is still scheduled for execution in the near future. Human Rights Watch notes that not only women subject to such crimes are presented to the Iranian legal system– Evin Prison counts at least 14 female inmates, three of which are explicitly political prisoners who Human Rights Watch has advocated to be released.

The post Iran Wins Seat on UN Women’s Rights Commission appeared first on Pamela Geller, Atlas Shrugs.

Bust: Oregon Abandoning Failed $300 Million Obamacare Website

Guy Benson / Townhalln Columnist

 

Of all the Obamacare exchange horror stories -- and there have been plenty -- Oregon takes the cake. After months of abject failure, serious evidence of criminal fraud, and hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars flushed away, the state will announce that it is abandoning its exchange in favor of the federal Healthcare.gov platform. Oregon's website was supposed to be ready for the open enrollment period, starting on October 1, 2013. It never launched, and now it never will. The Washington Post reports:

The Obama administration is poised to take over Oregon’s broken insurance exchange, according to officials familiar with the decision, who say that it reflects federal officials’ conclusion that several state-run marketplaces may be too dysfunctional to fix. In public, the board overseeing Cover Oregon is scheduled to vote Friday whether to join the federal insurance marketplace that already sells health plans in most of the country under the Affordable Care Act. Behind the scenes, the officials say, federal and Oregon officials already have privately agreed that closing down the system is the best path to rescue the state marketplace, the country’s only one to fail so spectacularly that no residents have been able to sign up for coverage online since it opened early last fall. The collapse of Oregon’s insurance marketplace comes as federal health officials are also focusing intensely on faltering exchanges in two other states, including Maryland.

Oregon and Maryland are controlled by pro-Obamacare Democrats. This is an embarrassing sound byte, in retrospect:

“It’s going to be smoother in places like Maryland where governors are working to implement it rather than fight it. (Applause.)” — President Barack Obama, Sept. 26, 2013

Here's a WaPo story from last May explaining why Oregon "may be the White House's favorite health exchange." Oops. But even that's not quite as embarrassing as those hippie-dippy, taxpayer-financed ads promoting a website that would never be functional: http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2014/04/25/new-cancellation-notices-n1828851  You spent millions on that commercial, America. Congrats. Phil Kerpen surveys Cover Oregon's damage to taxpayers:

Elsewhere in the Obamacare "winning streak," the Wall Street Journal reports on how small businesses are wrestling with the new law. One pull quote: Employers “have begun restructuring their businesses, reducing their employees' hours, for example, or trimming their total head counts to fewer than 50 full-time workers.”

We've been writing about the additional bouts of yet-to-come coverage cancellations for months; in addition to impending turmoil within the small group market, Americans on so-called "fixed benefit" plans are also about to experience Democrats' "lie of the year" firsthand. I'll leave you with this:

2. Aetna chief executive Mark Bertolini says premium increases in those 17 states, which encompass 132 rating areas, will be quite literally all over the map in 2015. He said those increases will range from "the very low single digits" to "some that will be over double digits." That depends on the number of members, the demographics of memberships and what limited information the company has about new members, he said. 

3. Bertolini said about half of the company's premium increases, whatever they turn out to be, will be attributable to "on the fly" regulatory changes made by the Obama administration. He cited as an example the administration's policy of allowing old health plans that were supposed to expire in 2014 to be extended another three years if states and insurers wanted to.

By all means -- keep preening, Obamacare supporters. America loves a winner.

5 Lives Wrecked By Obamacare

John Hawkins / Townhall Columnist

Liberals support cruel policies that decimate people's lives; yet they like to think of themselves as compassionate and kind. So, they judge programs based on the good intentions they claim to have had, not the actual results.

Liberals started out by telling everyone that, "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan." They said, "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor." They said it would "save the average family $2,500 on its premiums."
 
It sounds great, right? In fact, if all of the wonderful liberal promises about health care had been true, conservatives would have supported Obamacare.

However, we knew they were liars. Now everyone else knows it, too, even liberals.

How did liberals react to finding out that conservatives were right all along, that they misled the American people and that the policies they advocated are hurting tens of millions of Americans?

Certainly not by admitting they were wrong or calling for the repeal of the law.

Instead, they've claimed that Americans who say Obamacare has hurt them are "lying" while simultaneously saying that it's a good thing that people lost their "crappy" plans because now they're getting "better" plans.

Of course, that's completely contradictory and illogical, but if liberals were logical people, they wouldn't be liberals.

Conservatives take a different view.

We believe Americans should be able to keep their old plans and keep their doctors. We want to put one of the many market-based plans suggested by Republicans in place to give people more choices and lower costs. If we take the White House in 2016, then we should kill Obamacare, grandfather in the people who already have plans and do exactly that.

In the interim though, there are a lot of good Americans suffering because of Obamacare. Here are some of their stories:

1) Brain Surgery Patient Can Only Get Meds With Help From A Congressman Because Of Obamacare: A New York woman suffering from a neurological disease that has required four brain surgeries has been dropped by all of her doctors and denied medications due to her Obamacare plan.

“I’ve been vomiting. I lost 22 pounds. The pain is unbearable,” said Margaret Figueroa, 49, on Wednesday. “My medication helps me function during the day.”

....Figueroa’s congressman, Rep. Michael Grimm (R-NY), intervened to help her obtain some of her vital prescriptions. Grimm says he’s already received calls from at least a dozen Staten Island residents facing the same problem with Obamacare’s “narrow networks” – extreme restrictions to doctor and hospital access imposed by Obamacare.

“Even though the insurance company cashed your check, it doesn’t mean it (the policy) has been implemented,” said Grimm at a Wednesday press conference with Figueroa.

As if that wasn't bad enough, Obamacare has made it even worse for Margaret Figueroa.

A Staten Island woman battling a neurological disease that has required four brain surgeries dropped to 83 pounds after her Obamacare plan denied her three months’ worth of vital medications.

...On Wednesday, Staten Island Advance reporter Tracey Porpora, who originally broke the story, said Figueroa's doctor of several years, Dr. Germaine Rowe, intervened and offered free services. Dr. Rowe says she will continue to offer the pro-bono help until the provider of the Obamacare plan Figueroa purchased sorts out the confusion surrounding why Emblem Health has yet to accept her application. "There are a lot of patients falling through the cracks," Dr. Rowe told the Advance. "This is one of those issues with Obamacare."

2) Pastor Empties His Savings Account And Goes $50,000 Into Debt Because Of Obamacare: A pastor recently diagnosed with cancer, and who is covered under Obamacare, tells a local Iowa reporter that there's "no compassion in the Affordable Care Act."

Back in January, Pastor (Tony) Angran was diagnosed with stage three cancer of the esophagus. He had insurance, but because of a previous heart condition, it did not cover the treatments he needed for his cancer. He found that out just minutes before receiving life-saving chemo," says the local reporter.

The pastor says, "One of the workers came and said let me talk to you. And so I went to talk to her. She says that we found out that your insurance does not include chemo."

"Over the past two months, the Angrans have emptied their savings account and racked up $50,000 in debt. They signed up for the Affordable Care Act," says the local reporter, "but found it to be anything but affordable. It will cost the couple more than $800 per month, money they just don't have."

The reporter adds, "As a pastor, Angran has devoted his life to helping others, to being compassionate. He says, 'There's no compassion in the Affordable Care Act.'"

Op-ed:

Sometimes truth is told in seven minutes

By: Diane Sori

As you all know there are many things about this administration that infuriates me...many many things...but when Obama and his liberal friends try to impose their will on the memory of those lost on 9/11 it actually makes me seethe, for Barack HUSSEIN Obama and his muslim co-horts and supporters have NO right to even have the words 'September 11, 2001' cross their lips.

And now just weeks before it's May 21st public debut (May 15th for survivors and families of the 9/11 victims), The National September 11 Memorial Museum is receiving complaints about a simple seven-minute film...'The Rise of al-Qaeda'... that will be shown at the museum.

Complaining about how the muslim terrorists responsible for the deaths of 3000 Americans are characterized in the film, some members of an interfaith clergy advisory panel have written a letter and appeared on the talk show circuit demanding the museum replace the film, which they say unfairly links islam and terrorism. Asking that the film be re-edited to make it clear that NOT all muslims support the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center, they still do NOT get that muslims and islam are synonymous with terrorism.

With more than 22,835 deadly terror attacks* committed in the name of allah since the day America changed forever...and with about 1,800 deadly terror attacks happening each year translating down to about 150 a month or about five per day...this interfaith clergy group thinks these barbarians are the misunderstood ones...are the ones that need our sympathy...are the ones we should mourn for. Well here is something for these liberal kumbaya do-gooders...this past March alone there have been 216 jihad attacks in 19 countries, killing 1479 men, women, and children...there's your poor misunderstood muslims for you.

These acts of terrorism done in the name of islam...done in the name of allah... shows the world the cold hard truth about islam...for these acts of terrorism reinforce what we all know islam to be...a barbaric, brutal, subjugating, perverted, murderous cult hiding behind the guise of calling itself a religion...a cult that squeezes the very life out of its followers...a cult that orders and commands the death of we infidels. And don't even get me started on so-called 'moderate muslims' for while of course I am NOT saying every muslim is a jihadi, I am saying there is NO such thing as a 'moderate muslim' for their collective silence in speaking out against the jihadis...both in the aftermath of 9/11 and to this day...speaks volumes for if you do NOT condemn you condone.

And what say this group of clergy about the short seven minute film that traces the growth of international terrorist groups in the years leading up to the 2001 attacks...“We continue to posit that the video may very well leave viewers with the impression that all Muslims bear some collective guilt or responsibility for the actions of al-Qaeda, or even misinterpret its content to justify bigotry or even violence toward Muslims or those perceived to be Muslim (e.g., Sikhs),” the clergy members wrote...clergy members that included the Rev. Chloe Breyer, executive director of the Interfaith Center of New York and daughter of liberal muslim sympathizing Supreme Court Associate Justice Stephen G. Breyer (who among other rulings in favor of muslims opined that burning a qur'an is NOT protected free speech and is thus punishable under the law).

Guess the apple doesn't fall from the apple tree now does it.

And added into the mix is Sheikh Mostafa Elazabawy, imam of the Masjid Manhattan mosque, who resigned from the museum’s advisory panel just last month in protest of the film. Saying in a separate letter to the museum’s director that the film “in its present state would greatly offend our local muslim believers as well as any foreign muslim visitor to the museum,” Elazabawy is the perfect example of a muslim covering and making excuses for the 19 muslim killers of 3,000 Americans...a perfect example of a man who by his own words is actually defending the muslim men who slammed planes into our buildings setting our nation on the path to a grief so deep that it still has NOT abated even to this day.

And of course the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee is concerned about the film (rightfully) reinforcing the negative stereotype of muslims as terrorists. Well you know what...too damn bad for the muslims who did the once unthinkable on 9/11 and the muslims who continue to wage jihad on we infidels are indeed terrorists...period.

So to those kumbaya Chislam embracing clergy who care more about the feelings of murderous barbarians than they do about the feelings of those left behind by those they embrace, I say the truth must be told about what happened that day. Leaving out NOTHING the whole dirty assorted truth in its entirety must be told about those who did the unthinkable and changed America forever for truth must always be given its rightful place of honor over the sensitivities and feelings of killers and those who condone their actions.

History is history...it cannot be changed...it cannot and must NOT be modified or codified to twist or bend facts to suit the whims of the very ones out to kill us all...and it's high time to say NO to these bast*rds who care NOTHING for those who died that horrific day nor about those they left behind. It's time 'We the People' NOT be afraid to say that on September 11, 2001 islam an ideology NOT islam the so-called religion declared war on America...declared war on American soil that took the lives of 3000 of our countrymen and women in the name of the false god allah...and it's time to say islam be damned you do NOT belong amongst civilized men.
 
*http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/