Air Strikes Near Kobani Not Stopping Islamic State Takeover of Syrian Town

Pamela Geller / Atlas Shrugs

The pinprick’s pinpricks aren’t working. Knowing Obama as we do, it was all for show, so that Obama’s organ grinder’s monkeys in the media could shape the *cough* great leader and coalition builder narrative.

PHOTO: Kurdish people throw stones at Turkish armored vehicles near the Syrian town known as Kobane by the Kurds, in the southeastern town of Suruc, Sanliurfa province, Turkey, Oct. 7, 2014.

“Air Strikes Near Kobani Not Stopping ISIS Takeover of Syrian Town,” ABC News, October 8, 2014

ISIS continues to make gains at the Turkey-Syrian border despite air strikes by U.S.-led coalition.

Lightly armed Kurdish fighters in the Syrian border town of Kobani have for weeks held off an ISIS onslaught, but...

Read the whole entry »

     

• Email to a friend • Article Search •

State Department endorses handbook calling jihad “noble”

Robert Spencer / Jihad Watch

 

“Do not refer to terrorists as ‘jihadis,’” the manual states. “This only emboldens them and gives them a legitimate status in the eyes of the vulnerable. Terrorism is not jihad. Jihad is a noble concept in Islam.” Here again we see the utterly false assumption that Muslims look to non-Muslims for their legitimacy. There is no truth to that whatsoever, and handbooks like this one only foster ignorance and complacency about the threat we face.

“State Department Endorses Handbook Calling Jihad ‘Noble,’” by Adam Kredo, Washington Free Beacon, October 8, 2014:

The U.S. State Department endorsed on Wednesday a controversial anti-terror handbook published by Canada’s Muslim community that refers to jihad as “noble” and urges law enforcement to avoid using terms such as “Islamic extremism.”

The handbook, published earlier this month by two Canadian Muslim community organizations, was so controversial that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) flatly rejected the manual and ordered its officers not to use it.

Yet the State Department’s official anti-terrorism Twitter feed, called Think Again Turn Away, appeared to endorse the controversial handbook on Twitter and linked to a positive article about it.

The handbook, titled United Against Terrorism, has become a contentious issue for the RCMP since its release. Several sections of the guide instruct Muslim community members not to cooperate with police while others claim jihad “is a noble concept.”

The RCMP ultimately decided to reject the book, citing its “adversarial tone.”

“After a final review of the handbook, the RCMP could not support the adversarial tone set by elements of the booklet and therefore directed RCMP Manitoba not to proceed with this initiative,” the police force said in a statement posted on its website.

The handbook itself recommends that “intelligence and law enforcement officials” should “avoid terms such as ‘Islamist terrorism’, ‘Islamicism’, and ‘Islamic extremism’ in favor of more accurate terms such as ‘al Qaeda inspired extremist,’” according to one section of the handbook, which still bears RCMP’s official logo.

Politicians Mathematically Explained...Gotta Love It!

Mathematics:  This comes from 2 math teachers with a combined total of 70 yrs. experience. It has an indisputable mathematical logic. It also made me Laugh Out Loud. This is a strictly mathematical viewpoint..it goes like this: What Makes 100%? What does it mean to give MORE than 100%? Ever wonder about those people who say they are giving more than 100%? We have all been to those meetings where someone wants you to give over 100%. How about achieving 103%? What makes up 100% in life? Here's a little mathematical formula to help you answer these questions:  If: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z is represented as: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 Then:                                                                                                                                                  H-A-R-D-W-O-R-K 8+1+18+4+23+15+18+11 = 98% And:                                                                                                                                                      K-N-O-W-L-E-D-G-E 11+14+15+23+12+5+4+7+5 = 96% But: A-T-T-I-T-U-D-E 1+20+20+9+20+21+4+5 = 100%  And:                                                                                                                                                       B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T 2+21+12+12+19+8+9+20 = 103%  AND, look how far ass kissing gets you. A-S-S-K-I-S-S-I-N-G 1+19+19+11+9+19+19+9+14+7 = 118% So, one can conclude with mathematical certainty, that while Hard work and Knowledge will get you close, and Attitude  will get you 100%, it’s the Bullshit and Ass Kissing that will put  you over the top. Now you know why, & how our political leaders give the general public more than 100% ....!

Officials say ISIS, Ebola are coming across southern border

by Sam Rolley / Personal Liberty Digest

 

Representative Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) said this week that Islamic State fighters are already making their way into the U.S. across the nation’s poorly defended southern border. The lawmaker said that at least 10 people with ties to the terror group have been apprehended so far.

 

“There’s nobody talking about it,” Hunter said during an interview on Fox. “If you really want to protect Americans from ISIS, you secure the southern border. It’s that simple… They caught them at the border, therefore we know that ISIS is coming across the border. If they catch five or ten of them then you know there’s going to be dozens more that did not get caught by the border patrol.”

The House Armed Services Committee member said that his information on ISIS’s would-be infiltrators comes directly from U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials.

The lawmaker described ISIS terrorists’ attempts to enter the U.S. as a military assault.

“ISIS doesn’t have a navy, they don’t have an air force, they don’t have nuclear weapons. The only way that ISIS is going to harm Americans is by coming through the southern border — which they already have,” he said.

“They aren’t flying B-1 bombers, bombing American cities,” Hunter added. “But they are going to be bombing American cities coming across from Mexico… All you have to do is ask the border patrol.”

Hunter’s isn’t the first lawmaker claim that terrorists are trying to get into the country over the porous southern border. In September, Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) informed Americans that four known terrorists were apprehended at border checkpoints.

Still, the Department of Homeland Security said that Hunter’s claims are untrue.

“The suggestion that individuals who have ties to ISIL have been apprehended at the Southwest border is categorically false, and not supported by any credible intelligence or the facts on the ground,” a DHS spokesman said in a statement Wednesday. “DHS continues to have no credible intelligence to suggest terrorist organizations are actively plotting to cross the southwest border.”

The ISIS threat isn’t the only issue that has some Americans discussing border security amid continued widespread concern over a possible Ebola outbreak in the U.S.

Via ValleyCentral.com:

During the 2013 fiscal year, national statistics from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security website show Border Patrol agents apprehended 112 immigrants from Guinea, 231 from Liberia and 145 immigrants from Sierra Leone, which are the three countries currently experiencing the most cases of Ebola.

But the White House’s Ebola strategy, like its ISIS strategy, is not about containment, as noted by Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday.

Parallel Reconstruction

Judge Andrew Napolitano / Townhall Columnist

 

While the political commentators in the nation's capital are wrapped up in the debate over what to do about ISIS, and as one third of the Senate and nearly all members of the House campaign for re-election, the president's spies continue to capture massive amounts of personal information about hundreds of millions of us and lie about it.

 

The president continues to dispatch his National Security Agency spies as if he were a law unto himself, and Congress -- which is also being spied upon -- has done nothing to protect the right to privacy that the Fourth Amendment was written to ensure. Congress has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, yet it has failed miserably to do so. But the spying is now so entrenched in government that a sinister and largely unnoticed problem lurks beneath the surface.

NSA documents released by Edward Snowden show that the feds seriously deceived Congress and the courts in an effort to spy upon all of us and to use the gathered materials in criminal prosecutions, even though they told federal judges they would not. Among the more nefarious procedures the feds have engaged in is something called "parallel reconstruction." This procedure seeks to hide the true and original source of information about a criminal defendant when it was obtained unlawfully.

For example, if the NSA, while unconstitutionally listening to the conversations of Americans hoping to hear about plots to harm other Americans (it has revealed no such plots from among the trillions of private conversations it has monitored since 2005), comes across evidence of a bank robbery, the NSA will pass that evidence on to the Department of Justice. The NSA routinely does this notwithstanding representations to the FISA court that authorizes its spying that it is not in the business of gathering evidence in criminal cases.

It makes those claims because the George W. Bush and Barack Obama DOJs have argued to the public and to the FISA court that the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits all searches and seizures without a warrant, somehow applies only to criminal investigations and not to domestic spying. No Supreme Court decision has ever stood for that proposition, and the plain language of the Fourth Amendment makes no distinction between intelligence gathering and evidence gathering.

Rather, the language of the amendment is so broad and sweeping ("The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated" except by a search warrant issued by a judge upon probable cause.) that for 230 years it has been held to restrain and regulate all government efforts to gather private information -- no matter their purposes.

Nevertheless, the NSA's agents and lawyers felt it necessary to concoct this groundless, disingenuous and fictional legal distinction in order to persuade the FISA court that it is legally acceptable to permit untethered spying so long as the fruits of that spying are not used in criminal prosecutions.

Curiously and naively, judges of the FISA court bought that argument.

Obama allies getting harder to find these days

AP News via Townhall.com

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is finding himself with few friends in Washington.

His former Pentagon chief is criticizing his foreign policy. Longtime political advisers are questioning his campaign strategy. And Democrats locked in tough midterm campaigns don't want Obama anywhere near them between now and Election Day.

The disenchantment with Obama is in part a reflection of inevitable fatigue with a president entering his final years in office. But some Democrats say it is also a consequence of the president's insular approach to governing and his preference for relying on a small cadre of White House advisers, leaving him with few loyal allies on Capitol Hill or elsewhere.

"This president is supremely independent," said Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist and longtime adviser to President Bill Clinton. "In many ways that is a very good thing. He probably came to the presidency owing less to other people than any president in memory. The risk is that independence can morph into isolation."

While White House officials dispute the notion of an isolated or weakened president, there's little doubt that Obama's standing with the American people and his own party has fallen since his resounding re-election in 2012. Battered by a flurry of crises at home and abroad, the president's approval rating has hovered near record lows for much of the year. His party is at risk of losing the Senate in the November midterms and not one Democrat locked in a close race has chosen to make a campaign appearance alongside the president thus far.

It's against that backdrop that some of Obama's longtime advisers have begun levying unsparing criticism, most notably Leon Panetta, the widely respected former congressman who served as CIA director and defense secretary in Obama's first term. In a new memoir and a series of interviews, Panetta has taken aim at both Obama's foreign policy decision-making and overall leadership skills.

Panetta writes that as Pentagon chief, he feared that Obama's withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq in late 2011 could put that country at risk of becoming "a new haven for terrorists to plot attacks against the U.S." The U.S. is now launching airstrikes against a militant group in Iraq, as well as Syria, that Obama administration officials warn could ultimately pose a threat to the West.

But Panetta's most scathing critique is reserved for Obama's leadership style. Writing about Obama's inability to stop deep budget cuts at the Pentagon, Panetta said the episode reflected the president's "most conspicuous weakness, a frustrating reticence to engage his opponents and rally support for his cause."

Ex-Imam of Oklahoma City Mosque attended by Beheader Alton Nolen ‘Apologize(s)’ to ISIS and al-Qaeda for ‘Demonizing’ them just Two Days after Beheading

By Shoebat Foundation / Shoebat Newsletter

Two days after Alton Nolen followed the examples set by ISIS upon entering his former place of business where he beheaded a co-worker, the former Imam of the mosque Nolen attended issued an apology – to ISIS and al-Qaeda. The Imam, Suhaib Webb, went through his old writings and concluded that he’d been too hard on the terrorists.

I woke up the other day and decided to skim through my body of work over the last few years. Boy was I surprised at some of my posts and talks – the tone and the demonization of others – I compared ISIS to Ebola.

While I don’t agree with ISIS, al-Qāida, certain progressives and others, I‘ve decided to apologize to anyone that I have spoken ill towards or demonized. I ask Allah to forgive me and to guide me to observe better character in the future. I asked myself, “Suhaib did you forget the 49th chapter of the Qur’an, Surah al-Hujurāt?”

Moving forward, I promise myself to address ideas instead of people, to be critical of thoughts instead of personalities and commit to ethics as best I can. That will create a better climate to unpack and examine current trends in our community, but ensure that I recognize other’s humanity and worth. Sometimes, I find myself forgetting humility, blinded by my own shine. Please, Allah, forgive me and raise me by making me humble!

A very common complaint against ‘moderate’ Muslims is that they don’t speak out forcefully enough against terrorist groups. Based on the fact that Webb portrays himself as a ‘moderate’ Muslim leader, what are we to conclude when he not only refuses to condemn ISIS and al-Qaeda but apologizes to them?

Perhaps such an apology is just further evidence that ‘moderate’ Muslim leaders are either a fallacy or comprise such a small minority so as to be rendered inconsequential. In 2008, Webb wrote about a trip he took to the notorious Masjid Al-Taqwa mosque, founded by Siraj Wahhaj, an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. As Shoebat.com has reported, a main reason Wahhaj was implicated in the bombing involved his mosque being visited multiple times by Omar Abdel-Rahman (the “Blind Sheikh”). In subsequent years, Wahhaj has risen in prominence among fundamentalist Muslims, as Shoebat.com has reported.