Barack Obama – praag.org

Obama prophesies climate zombie apocalypse

President Obama – who graduated Columbia University with a degree in political science – became an environmental and ecological expert Monday night in time to decry America’s contributions to global warming and the alleged melting of Arctic ice caps at this year’s GLACIER Conference, predicting a dire future for humanity.

During the GLACIER event, which stands for Global Leadership in the Arctic: Cooperation, Innovation, Engagement and Resilience, Obama blamed the recent rash of wildfires sweeping parts of Washington State on global warming, insisting that “climate is changing faster than our efforts to address it.”

Overall, the speech painted a fairly doom-and-gloom outlook for America and the rest of the world. So if you’re a Doomsday Prepper, here are a few excerpts from the president’s speech explaining the climate-related disasters heading to a town near you: 

Your house might slide off into the ocean…

Reduced sea levels leaves villages unprotected from floods and storm surges. Some are in imminent danger; some will have to relocate entirely.

…or it might be engulfed in flames.

Alaska’s fire season is now more than a month longer than it was in 1950. At one point this summer, more than 300 wildfires were burning at once. Southeast of here, in our Pacific Northwest, even the rainforest is on fire…this is a threat to many communities.

And if it doesn’t, it will definitely get sucked into a sinkhole.

Thawing permafrost destabilizes the earth on which 100,000 Alaskans live, threatening homes, damaging transportation and energy infrastructure, which could cost billions of dollars to fix.

Your city will either look like Atlantis or something out of the zombie apocalypse.

…we will condemn our children to a planet beyond their capacity to repair: Submerged countries. Abandoned cities.

You might run out of fresh salmon en croûte.

Warmer, more acidic oceans and rivers, and the migration of entire species, threatens the livelihoods of indigenous peoples, and local economies dependent on fishing and tourism.

Or just food, in general.

Climate change is already disrupting our agriculture and ecosystems.

You may simultaneously die of thirst and drown, all at the same time.

Entire nations will find themselves under severe, severe problems. More drought; more floods; rising sea level…

You might have to begin training for the Hunger Games.

…more refugees; more scarcity; more conflict.

And if the famine, flood, fire and fighting doesn’t get you, the fumes definitely will.

Consider, as well, that many of the fires burning today are actually burning through the permafrost in the Arctic. So this permafrost stores massive amounts of carbon. When the permafrost is no longer permanent, when it thaws or burns, these gases are released into our atmosphere over time, and that could mean that the Arctic may become a new source of emissions that further accelerates global warming.

After all, we’re running out of time.

 On this issue, of all issues, there is such a thing as being too late. That moment is almost upon us.

Perhaps the president got some of his research from the crew of the Canadian CCGS Amundsen during their four-month global warming expedition — you know, before they had to bail on their mission due to ships getting stuck in ice.

Source: MRC TV

Getting rid of ‘racist Old Dixie’

The Riviera Beach City Council in South Florida, US, will vote this week on the mayor’s proposal to rename the “racist” Old Dixie Highway after President Obama.

“Each member will vote Yay or Nay to rid this city of a street name that still invokes memories of racism and slavery in the Old South” said Mayor Thomas Masters, a local NBC affiliate reported.

The meeting was held in City Hall Chambers in Riviera Beach.

“We’re in the Dr. Martin Luther King celebrations in the city,” Mr. Masters said in January, The Palm Beach Post reported. “What better way to celebrate his legacy than to get rid of what he died for, which was getting rid of old Dixie.”

The mayor noted at the time that Old Dixie Highway intersects Martin Luther King Boulevard in the city, and “this may be one of the few places in America where you have a Barack Obama intersecting with Dr. Martin Luther King Boulevard.”

Source: The Washington Times

Obama urges UK to stay in EU for ‘ world influence’

In a wide-ranging television interview, President Barack Obama has urged Britain to stay in the European Union in order to have influence on the world stage. He also admitted US gun laws were his “biggest frustration.”

Speaking to the UK’s BBC correspondent in Washington, US President Barack Obama said Britain must remain in the European Union to maintain its global influence. In previous interviews Obama has avoided taking a stance on such issues.

“Having the UK in the EU gives us much greater confidence about the strength of the transatlantic union, and is part of the cornerstone of the institutions built after (the second world war) that has made the world safer and more prosperous,” Obama said. “We want to make sure that the United Kingdom continues to have that influence,” he added.

British Prime Minister David Cameron is following up on an election pledge to negotiate with the EU for improved terms for Britain, ad then to hold a referendum on EU membership before the end of 2017.

Obama said that Britain was the US’ “best partner” because of its willingness to project power beyond its “immediate self-interests to make this a more orderly, safer world.”

US gun laws

Obama admitted that failure to pass “common sense gun safety laws” was the greatest frustration of his presidency.

“If you look at the number of Americans killed since 9/11 by terrorism, it’s less than 100. If you look at the number that have been killed by gun violence, it’s in the tens of thousands,” he commented.

“For us not to be able to resolve that issue has been something that is distressing,” Obama said.

While he has pressed for stricter gun control during his presidency, Obama has been unable to make any significant changes to the laws due to opposition in Congress.

Source: Deutsche Welle

Obama’s secret racial database

A key part of President Obama’s legacy will be the fed’s unprecedented collection of sensitive data on Americans by race. The government is prying into our most personal information at the most local levels, all for the purpose of “racial and economic justice.”

Unbeknown to most Americans, Obama’s racial bean counters are furiously mining data on their health, home loans, credit cards, places of work, neighborhoods, even how their kids are disciplined in school — all to document “inequalities” between minorities and whites.

This Orwellian-style stockpile of statistics includes a vast and permanent network of discrimination databases, which Obama already is using to make “disparate impact” cases against: banks that don’t make enough prime loans to minorities; schools that suspend too many blacks; cities that don’t offer enough Section 8 and other low-income housing for minorities; and employers who turn down African-Americans for jobs due to criminal backgrounds.

Big Brother Barack wants the databases operational before he leaves office, and much of the data in them will be posted online.

So civil-rights attorneys and urban activist groups will be able to exploit them to show patterns of “racial disparities” and “segregation,” even if no other evidence of discrimination exists.

The granddaddy of them all is the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing database, which the Department of Housing and Urban Development rolled out earlier this month to racially balance the nation, ZIP code by ZIP code. It will map every US neighborhood by four racial groups — white, Asian, black or African-American, and Hispanic/Latino — and publish “geospatial data” pinpointing racial imbalances.

The agency proposes using nonwhite populations of 50% or higher as the threshold for classifying segregated areas.

CFPB is separately amassing a database to monitor ordinary citizens’ credit-card transactions. It hopes to vacuum up some 900 million credit-card accounts — all sorted by race — representing roughly 85% of the US credit-card market. Why? To sniff out “disparities” in interest rates, charge-offs and collections.

Through its mandatory Civil Rights Data Collection project, the Education Department is gathering information on student suspensions and expulsions, by race, from every public school district in the country. Districts that show disparities in discipline will be targeted for reform.

Those that don’t comply will be punished. Several already have been forced to revise their discipline policies, which has led to violent disruptions in classrooms.

Obama’s educrats want to know how many blacks versus whites are enrolled in gifted-and-talented and advanced placement classes.

Schools that show blacks and Latinos under-enrolled in such curricula, to an undefined “statistically significant degree,” could open themselves up to investigation and lawsuits by the department’s Civil Rights Office.

Count on a flood of private lawsuits to piggyback federal discrimination claims, as civil-rights lawyers use the new federal discipline data in their legal strategies against the supposedly racist US school system.

Even if no one has complained about discrimination, even if there is no other evidence of racism, the numbers themselves will “prove” that things are unfair.

Such databases have never before existed. Obama is presiding over the largest consolidation of personal data in US history. He is creating a diversity police state where government race cops and civil-rights lawyers will micromanage demographic outcomes in virtually every aspect of society.

The first black president, quite brilliantly, has built a quasi-reparations infrastructure perpetually fed by racial data that will outlast his administration.

Source:NY Post

AFFH a lever to racially re-engineer America

HUD Secretary Julian Castro has announced the finalization of the Obama administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule. A front-page article preemptively defending the move appears in today’s Washington Post.

The final rule is 377 pages, vastly longer than the preliminary version of the rule promulgated in 2013. AFFH is easily one of President Obama’s most radical initiatives, on a par with Obamacare in its transformative potential.

In effect, AFFH gives the federal government a lever to re-engineer nearly every American neighborhood — imposing a preferred racial and ethnic composition, densifying housing, transportation, and business development in suburb and city alike, and weakening or casting aside the authority of local governments over core responsibilities, from zoning to transportation to education.

Not only the policy but the political implications are immense — at the presidential, congressional, state, and local levels.

It is a scandal that the mainstream press has largely refused to report on AFFH until the day of its final release. The rule has been out in preliminary form for two years, and well before that the Obama administration’s transformative aims in urban/suburban policy were evident.

Three years ago, when I wrote about Obama’s policy blueprint in Spreading the Wealth: How Obama Is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, the administration’s efforts to keep this issue under the radar were evident.

Only last month, an admission of the stealth relied on by advocates to advance this initiative was caught on video.

Obama has downplayed his policy goals in this area and delayed the finalization of AFFH for years, because he understands how politically explosive this rule is. Once the true implications of AFFH are understood, Americans will rebel.

The only prospect for successful imposition is a frog-boiling strategy of gradual intensification. The last day the frog will be able to jump is Tuesday, November 8, 2016.

Fundamentally, AFFH is an attempt to achieve economic integration. Race and ethnicity are being used as proxies for class, since these are the only hooks for social engineering provided by the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

Like AFFH itself, today’s Washington Post piece blurs the distinction between race and class, conflating the persistence of “concentrated poverty” with housing discrimination by race. Not being able to afford a freestanding house in a bedroom suburb is no proof of racial discrimination.

Erstwhile urbanites have been moving to rustic and spacious suburbs since Cicero built his villa outside Rome. Even in a monoracial and mono-ethnic world, suburbanites would zone to set limits on dense development.

As noted, AFFH is a largely unacknowledged attempt to force economic integration on every neighborhood in America.

Yet in a recent Rasmussen poll, 83 percent of respondents said it was not the government’s job to diversify neighborhoods by income level, while only 8 percent say that this is an appropriate task for government.

Now you know why the Obama administration and a compliant press corps have kept this initiative quiet.

Obama calls for soul searching over Baltimore

United States President Barack Obama has called on the nation to do some soul searching if the underlying tensions between African American communities and the police are to be fundamentally addressed.

Speaking at the White House a day after hundreds rioted on the streets of Baltimore on the East Coast, the President also slammed the ‘thugs’ and ‘criminals’ who infiltrated legitimate protests after the death of a black man while in police custody.

Scenes of chaos, looting and wanton destruction erupted soon after the funeral of a black man who died while in police custody nine days ago. A day later, the National Guard was made to bring order to the streets.

But this is a cycle that the President believes will take more than just sending in the cavalry.

The US has expanded the size of their criminal justice system over four decades to contain ethnic strife.

The American criminal justice system is dominated by racial disparities. Since 2002, the United States has had the highest incarceration rate in the world.

Although prison populations are increasing in some parts of the world, the natural rate of incarceration for countries comparable to the United States tends to stay around 100 prisoners per 100,000 population.

The US incarcerates 716 people for every 100,000 residents, more than any other country. In fact, the rate of incarceration is more than five times higher than most of the countries in the world.

The state of Louisiana is often called out for having the single highest incarceration rate in the world.

African Americans now constitute nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population, at nearly six times the rate of whites.

Together, African American and Hispanics comprised 58% of all prisoners in 2008, even though African Americans and Hispanics make up approximately one quarter of the US population

One in six black men had been incarcerated as of 2001. If current trends continue, one in three black males born today can expect to spend time in prison during his lifetime.

Nationwide, African-Americans represent 26% of juvenile arrests, 44% of youth who are detained, 46% of the youth who are judicially waived to criminal court, and 58% of the youth admitted to state prisons (Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice).

Obama says, “In those environments, if we just think we’re going to send the police to do the dirty work of containing the problems that arise there, without as a nation and as a society saying what can we do to change those communities, to help lift up those communities and give those kids opportunity, then we’re not going to solve this problem and we’ll go through the same cycles of periodic conflicts between the police and communities and the occasional riots in the streets and everybody will feign concern until it goes away and then we go about our business as usual.”

These are Obama’s first remarks after the death of Freddie Gray 10 days ago and he called for a rethink on education, criminal justice and economic development, particularly in poor communities.

The home of the rich, New York, is tied with Rwanda, which has the third highest national incarceration rate. Rwanda incarcerates so many people (492 per 100,000) because thousands are sentenced or awaiting trial in connection with the 1994 genocide.

Next comes the state of Washington, which claims the same incarceration rate as the Russian Federation.

How Imam Obama Apostatizes Against Islam

The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) is not Islamic, announced Barack Obama, during a White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism (with an emphasis on violence inspired by the Judeo-Christian tradition). “They [ISIS] are not religious leaders, they are terrorists,” he asserted—an assertion that begs the question, as it assumes that a terrorist cannot be a religious leader as well.

President Obama further ventured that when we call them “Islamic,” we grant ISIS the “legitimacy” for which they thirst. For they are “desperate to portray themselves as religious leaders, holy warriors in defense of Islam.” Yet another non sequitur: Christening the group Islamic or not is unlikely to change that its members and a good many Muslims across the Ummah regard ISIS as thoroughbred Islamic.

What else did Imam Obama—who professes Christianity—proclaim in the name of the ISIS Islamic eschatology? Obama claimed that ISIS has “perverted the religion [of Islam]” and that it is peddling a “twisted ideology used to incite others to violence.”

“Weighing in on matters of Islamic theological debate,” warns Graeme Wood, editor at The Atlantic, is something Western officials would probably do best to avoid. “When he claim[s] that the Islamic State [is] ‘not Islamic,’” Obama, in fact, has “drifted into takfiri waters,” explains Wood. For “non-Muslims cannot tell Muslims how to practice their religion properly.”

“In Islam, the practice of takfir, or excommunication, is theologically perilous,” cautions Wood, in a seminal exposé on the Islamic State entitled “What ISIS Really Wants.” “‘If a man says to his brother, ‘You are an infidel,’ the Prophet said, ‘then one of them is right.’ If the accuser is wrong, he himself has committed apostasy by making a false accusation. The punishment for apostasy is death.”

<br />

His theologically and existentially perilous practice of takfir, notwithstanding, Obama lies about ISIS being antagonistic to Islam. Wood portrays “the group [that] seized Mosul, Iraq, last June, and already rules an area larger than the United Kingdom,” as Islamic as the Prophet Muhammad of the later, Medina period. He decries as “dishonest” the “campaign to deny the Islamic State’s medieval religious nature” and that it is indeed following “specific traditions and texts of early Islam.” “The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. … the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.”

Virtually every major decision and law promulgated by the Islamic State adheres to what it calls, in its press and pronouncements, and on its billboards, license plates, stationery, and coins, ‘the Prophetic methodology,’ which means following the prophecy and example of Muhammad, in punctilious detail.

“We can gather that [the caliphate state] rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world.”

And he has it on good authority. While Obama was offering up nostrums to the nation, Graeme Wood was speaking to leading authorities, among them “Bernard Haykel, the foremost secular authority on the Islamic State’s ideology.” This Princeton scholar “regards the claim that the Islamic State has distorted the texts of Islam as preposterous, sustainable only through willful ignorance.”

“People want to absolve Islam,” he told Wood. “It’s this ‘Islam is a religion of peace’ mantra. As if there is such a thing as ‘Islam’! It’s what Muslims do, and how they interpret their texts.’ Those texts are shared by all Sunni Muslims, not just the Islamic State. ‘And these guys have just as much legitimacy as anyone else.”

Wood explains:

In Haykel’s estimation, the fighters of the Islamic State are authentic throwbacks to early Islam and are faithfully reproducing its norms of war. This behavior includes a number of practices that modern Muslims tend to prefer not to acknowledge as integral to their sacred texts. ‘Slavery, crucifixion, and beheadings are not something that freakish [jihadists] are cherry-picking from the medieval tradition,’ Haykel said. Islamic State fighters ‘are smack in the middle of the medieval tradition and are bringing it wholesale into the present day.’ … Muslims who call the Islamic State un-Islamic are typically … ‘embarrassed and politically correct, with a cotton-candy view of their own religion’ that neglects ‘what their religion has historically and legally required.’ Many denials of the Islamic State’s religious nature, [says Haykel], are rooted in an “interfaith-Christian-nonsense tradition.”

Widely quoted in Wood’s ISIS exposé, Haykel takes a position not dissimilar to that of “the greatest theologian alive,” my appellation for Pope Benedict XVI. It is this: “The only principled ground that the Islamic State’s opponents could take” to justify their belief that ISIS is un-Islamic “is to say that certain core texts and traditional teachings of Islam are no longer valid. [And] That really would be an act of apostasy.”

Which is precisely what Obama persists in doing.

Until the Islamic reformation is codified, those in the know—know-nothing Obama is not among them—will look upon the Islamic State as a religious, literalist, millenarian, apocalyptic group that is as Islamic as the Prophet and his band of belligerents during the Medina years.

Follow @ilanamercer

Like Ilana Mercer’s Facebook page

Read Ilana in German on Junge Freiheit.

Nobel Peace Prize chairman kicked out

The Nobel Committee’s chairman has been removed from his post for the first time in the award’s 114-year history. He’s been criticized over a number of the panel’s controversial picks, like US president and the EU.

Ousted Chairman Thorbjoern Jagland, a former Norwegian Labor prime minister, had been in charge of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee for six years before he was voted out on Tuesday. He will remain a member of the committee, but the leading role has been passed on to the panel’s deputy chairman, Kaci Kullmann Five, a former conservative party leader.

“There’s a new committee with new people, and new people can always lead to new considerations,” Kullmann Five told journalists. “Jagland has been a good leader for the committee for six years.”

Three out of six prize winners chosen under Thorbjoern Jagland have raised controversy.

Jagland’s first year as chairman in 2009 saw the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to US President Barack Obama, who at that time had only been in office for nine months.

Obama won the prize “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” while the US was engaged in two lengthy wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as heightened US drone strikes on suspected militants in Pakistan and Yemen.

The Nobel Prize Committee’s 2012 choice of the European Union as the winner of the award has also raised quite a few eyebrows. Critics pointed out Jagland’s other role as head of the European Council as a potential conflict of interest. Many argued the prize was undeserved because of the EU’s economic and foreign policy failures.

The Norwegian Nobel committee has redefined and remodeled the prize in a manner that it is not consistent with the law, critics said.

A 2010 award to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo led to Beijing freezing diplomatic relations with Oslo.

Jagland’s removal has led to speculations over how much the prize is influenced by politics with the likes of archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk receiving the prize.

Nobel Committee members are appointed by Norway’s parliament according to the power balance there. Rightwing parties won elections in 2013, which gave them a 3-2 majority over Labor on the Peace Prize panel.

“This can be interpreted as an attempt by the conservative government to exert more political control over the committee than has been customary,” Nobel historian Asle Sveen told AFP.

Mossad contradicts Bibi’s bom

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s 2012 statement at the UN, in which he warned the world of Iran being too close to making a nuclear bomb, allegedly contradicted his country’s intelligence assessments, according to leaked spy documents.

The Mossad shared the information with South Africa’s State Security Agency a few weeks after the prime minister’s UN speech.

Netanyahu famously declared to the United Nations General Assembly in September 2012 that Iran was 70 percent of the way to completing its “plans to build a nuclear weapon,” and drew another “red line” at 90 percent, claiming Tehran’s first bomb would be ready “by next spring, at most by next summer.”

However, leaked Mossad documents suggest the country was much further from such development.

According to Spy Cables – a cache of hundreds of leaked secret intelligence papers from all over the world, published by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit in collaboration with the Guardian newspaper – at the time of Netanyahu’s statement, Israel’s intelligence service concluded that Iran was “not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons,” estimating that Iran had 100 kilograms of uranium enriched to a level of 20 percent.

“Even though Iran has accumulated enough 5 percent enriched uranium for several bombs, and has enriched some of it to 20 percent, it does not appear to be ready to enrich it to higher levels. It is allocating some of it to produce nuclear fuel for the TRR [Tehran Research Reactor], and the amount of 20 percent enriched uranium is therefore not increasing,” said the secret report.

In an article by Press TV, an American foreign policy analyst said that US President Barack Obama is “under pressure” to reach an agreement with Iran over Tehran’s nuclear energy program.

“It’s quite obvious to everyone that Mr. Obama would like to have a deal with Iran,” said James George Jatras, a former US diplomat and adviser to the Senate Republican leadership.

“He’s under a lot of pressure to try to bring negotiations to a conclusion that he can defend domestically,” Jatras said Sunday during a phone interview with Press TV.

“I doubt very much that the United States would walk away from the negotiations because this is such a strong priority for Mr. Obama who otherwise has very little to show in the realm of foreign policy,” he added.

US Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif began a new round of talks in Geneva on Tehran’s nuclear program on Sunday.

Why ISIS exists today

For the neoconservatives, ground zero in the creation of the Islamic State (ISIS) is the departure of the American occupying forces without a Status of Force Agreement (SOFA). At the behest of President Barack Obama, or so the allegation goes, the American military decamped, in December of 2011, without securing an SOFA. A residual American military force in Iraq was to be the thing that would have safeguarded the peace in Iraq. Broadcaster Mark Levin regularly rails about the SOFA amulet. Most Republicans lambaste Obama for failing to secure the elusive SOFA.

So high is Barack Obama’s cringe-factor that conservatives have been emboldened to dust-off an equally awful man and present him, his policies and his dynastic clan to the public for another round.

The man, President George W. Bush, did indeed sign a security pact with his satrap, Nuri al-Maliki, much to the dismay of very many Iraqis. Although the agreement was ratified behind the barricades of the Green Zone, journalist Muntadhar al-Zeidi “spoke” on behalf of his battered Iraqi brothers and sister: He lobbed a loafer at Bush shouting, “This is a farewell… you dog! This is for the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq!”

Saddam Hussein—both dictator and peace maker—had no Status of Force Agreement with the U.S. He did, however, use plenty of force to successfully control his fractious country. Highly attuned to the slightest Islamist rumbling, Saddam squashed these ruthlessly. When the shah of Iran was overthrown by the Khomeini Islamist revolutionaries, the secular Saddam feared the fever of fanaticism would infect Iraq. He thus extinguished any sympathetic Shiite “political activism” and “guerrilla activity” by imprisoning, executing and driving rebels across the border, into Iran. It wasn’t due process, but it wasn’t ISIS. This “principle” was articulated charmingly and ever-so politely to emissaries of another empire, in 1878: “My people will not listen unless they are killed,” explained Zulu King Cetshwayo to the British imperial meddlers, who disapproved of Zulu justice. They nevertheless went ahead and destroyed the mighty Zulu kingdom in the Anglo-Zulu War (1879), exiling its proud king.

Ask any ordinary Iraqi struggling to eke out an existence in what remains of his pulverized homeland, and he’ll tell you: “Keep your Status of Force Agreement. Give us back the Iraq of Saddam Hussein.” True, the Kurds were not in a good place. And Shia madrasahs were regularly shuttered. But some reconstruction was underway. Democratic plans were being drafted (albeit slowly). A “nonaggression pact” and a “cooperation council to promote economic and cultural development” had been established with the Arab neighbors (Kuwait, not so much). Best of all, Iran was on the run.

A 2012 Zogby poll, highlighted by The American Conservative, questioned Iraqis about the impact on their lives of the American invasion. “For the most part, Shia and Sunni Arabs perceive almost every aspect of life to have become worse or not [to have] changed.” And this was in Iraq BI: Before ISIS.

Not long after the “great” American troop surge of 2007, Global Policy Forum questioned Iraqis, too. (This was more than Bush had done when he ordered that BLU-82Bs be dropped on their neighborhoods.) What do you know? With the surge and without an SOFA, Iraq was oh-so violent. By September, Iraqis were still citing a “lack of security and safety in general” as one of their most pressing existential concerns.

The answer to the question, “Who do you blame the most for the violence that is occurring in the country?” placed the U.S. up there with al Qaeda and foreign Jihadis as the root of all evil. Harmony being what it was in Iraq during the halcyon Bush years—Shia blamed Sunni and Sunni blamed Shia for their respective woes.

<br />

Guess who, in 1994, had advised against an invasion he went on to orchestrate, in 2003.

… if we had gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone. There wouldn’t have been anybody else with us. It would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq. Once you got to Iraq and took it over and took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place? That’s a very volatile part of the world. And if you take down the central government in Iraq, you could easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off. Part of it the Syrians would like to have, the west. Part of eastern Iraq the Iranians would like to claim. Fought over for eight years. In the north, you’ve got the Kurds. And if the Kurds spin loose and join with Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey. It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.

This astute, if utilitarian, analysis was that of Bush’s Vice president, Dick Cheney. The architect of the invasion of 2003 had counseled against it in 1994. The man’s predictions have come to pass.

The Bush SOFA specified a complete withdrawal of U.S. forces by Dec. 31, 2011. Despite negotiations thereafter, Iraqis rejected any further infringements on their sovereignty.

In short, it was not the departure from Iraq that guaranteed the rise of ISIS aka ISIL (in Yiddish) alias Daesh (if you want to sound as cool as John Kerry); but the invasion of Iraq.

Follow @ilanamercer

Like Ilana Mercer’s Facebook page

Read Ilana in German on Junge Freiheit.

2014: The year of living racially

My man Richard Sherman said something that kicked off the 2014, year-round, banal, racial back-and-forth that parades as debate in the U.S.

Other than that the Seattle Seahawks are my team, on account that they’re from my neck of the woods; what I know about American football is dangerous. So naturally, I was rooting for, if not watching, the Hawks, when, following their victory over the San Francisco 49ers, Sherman said That Thing. And from their citadels of stupidity, U.S. mainstream media—conservatives, liberals and libertarians—went into full St. Vitus mode

“I’m the best corner in the game. When you try me with a sorry receiver like [Michael] Crabtree, that’s the result you gonna get. Don’t you ever talk about me!”

Sherman sounded good to me. Still does. The man was pumped, as men ought to be in a testosterone-infused game. The Seahawks’ cornerback was correct to point out that his “outburst,” following the “defensive play that sealed his team’s trip to the Super Bowl,” was an extension of “his game-time competitiveness.”

“Let’s not make thug the new N-word,” pleaded John McWhorter, a scholar of color, whose intellectual and moral authority in the culture stems primarily from the concentration of melanin in his skin cells, not from the force of his argument.

Come again?

As in January of last year, I still don’t get the reason for the fuss over what Sherman said. His boisterous bit of theatre set in motion some racial, national free-association, which no man or woman with a brain cell to rub between them can follow.

Speaking of mindlessness, in February, the president of black America launched his “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative. Barack Obama claimed “this initiative” as his “lifelong goal,” “even after he leaves office.”

If to go by Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” “rising inequality and declining mobility,” as well as “widespread decay in moral fiber”—these are as serious and widespread among “white, lower-status, less well-educated Americans,” as they are among the black and Hispanic communities. It was against this backdrop that Obama signaled his intention to deploy his signature initiative to keep at least $200 million belonging to “leading foundations and businesses,” for “programs aimed at minority youth of color.”

“Winning” means “spinning.” In April, the media-run, Barack Hussein Obama witness-protection program got a boost: a secretly recorded, racially charged private conversation between one Donald Sterling, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, and his mistress du jour, a dark-haired Jenna Jamison look-alike. Joy! Here was another cover for a “news” media that had refused to cover the many outrages and scandals of the Obama presidency.

CNN took a break from its non-stop, no-news vigil for missing Malaysian Airline Flight 370 to ride the Sterling racism ass. Hard. And from abroad, the president who promised to see to it that ebony and ivory would live together in perfect harmony told the world that the U.S. “continues to wrestle with the legacy of race, slavery and segregation,” a lie he would repeat throughout the year.

August saw the start of Trayvon Martin round two. The shooting death, in Ferguson, Missouri, of Michael Brown (black) by police officer Darren Wilson (white), sparked country wide unrest among the perpetually restive, when the officer was vindicated by the grand jury. It transpired that prior to being gunned down; Brown had robbed a convenience store and tackled the cop.

In their shared hatred for white America, Attorney General Eric Holder and Mr. Obama were like two pimps in a pod. Both rushed to racialize what was strictly a law-and-order incident. “I am the attorney general of the United States, but I am also a black man,” declared the AG to his black constituents.

Hitherto, the president of black Americans had been mum about cops, soldiers or white kids coming under black attack. But he just couldn’t put a sock in it when it came to his personal affinity for Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. True to type, Obama saddled a “deeply rooted” racism plaguing the U.S. for the mishaps between cops and the communities of color they police.

One among many pig-ignorant panels on CNN—this one comprising Marc Lamont Hill and two interchangeable females—magically coalesced around a consensus parroted widely in pixels and print across the country: There was absolutely nothing racial whatsoever about the latest attack upon whites by blacks, this time of a store keeper in Memphis, Tennessee. Only a week back, the same sort of empaneled fools were intoning in unison about the ostensible racism behind the Ferguson killing ad nauseum.

Well, of course.

Read Ilana Mercer’s book, Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa:

<br />

Memorable to a majority marginalized was Martha MacCallum’s plainspoken, Fox News column about Brendan Tevlin. The blond, blue-eyed anchor’s words reached deeper than the convoluted fare of most: “A 19-year-old, suburban boy. Strawberry blond, athletic, bright and smiley. … When I look at this picture of Brendan Tevlin, I think, he could have been my son.” Brendan Tevlin of New Jersey was murdered by Ali Muhammad Brown, an African-American. A precious boy’s death at the hands of the detritus of humanity did not rate a mention by Big Media and its protégé.

Alas, white commentators—liberals, conservatives, even libertarians—and their fans converge on matters racial. All are constitutionally primed to convulse hysterically over race.

Take Judge Andrew Napolitano. A left-leaning, highly principled libertarian, the judge wrote a hot mess of a column, asserting that in Ferguson we saw “the error and perversion of the grand jury,” not to mention a “toxic mixture of a black underclass and a white power structure and the corrupt advantages people on the make and people on the take can exploit from it.” That’s left-libertarianism for you: In-thrall to postmodern constructs like “power structure,” “white privilege,” the left-libertarian’s tinny, rigid adherence to bogus theory is often foisted on facts that don’t fit. Thus did John Stossel mar a perfectly reasonable column on Ferguson,” with a nod to the endemic racism meme.

As far as promoting the demonstrably false racism meme—what speech is racist, which feelings are bigoted; the kind of humor that is off-color; the fears of The Other that are forbidden—conservatives too are indistinguishable from liberals. Consider the witty email exchange between a Sony executive and a producer concerning Obama and his racial proclivities. Leaked as it was by hackers, these emails were ruled by Megyn Kelly of Fox News to be wrong, racist and racially insensitive: all the dumb things liberals say about risqué expression.

Lesson no. 1: When they rabbit on about race, America’s chattering classes—blacks, whites, Democrats, Republicans and libertarians alike—exhibit an unthinking habit of mind. These are individuals (for they are not individualists) who’ve been trained by their political and intellectual masters to respond in certain, politically pleasing ways.

Don’t listen to them! Americans are not racist.

Despite the mindless racial merry-go-round manufactured by American media and cognoscenti, I suspect even liberals may have internalized another important lesson of survival: Never elect a black liberal president again.

That’s lesson no. 2.

Follow @ilanamercer

Like Ilana Mercer’s Facebook page

Read Ilana in German on Junge Freiheit.

Will John Brennan sink the Obama?

Just hours before he publicly responded last week to the Senate Intelligence Committee report accusing the Central Intelligence Agency of torture and deceit, John O. Brennan, the CIA’s director, stopped by the White House to meet with President Obama.

Ostensibly, he was there for an intelligence briefing. But the messages delivered later that day by the White House and Brennan were synchronized, even down to similar wording, and the larger import of the well-timed visit was hardly a classified secret: After six years of partnership, the president was standing by the embattled spy chief even as fellow Democrats called for his resignation.

Brennan, 59, who spent much of his career as an Arabic-speaking CIA officer, has been a central figure in Mr. Obama’s world since the beginning of his presidency.

Irritated advisers to Obama believe Brennan made a bad situation worse by battling Democrats on the committee over the torture report during the past year. Some who considered Brennan the president’s heat shield against the agency when he worked in the White House now worry that since being appointed director, he has “gone native,” as they put it.

Several Obama advisers said privately that Brennan made a mistake by letting the situation grow so toxic.

But in the 67 years since the CIA was founded, few presidents have had as close a bond with their intelligence chiefs as Obama has forged with Brennan. It is a relationship that has shaped the policy and politics of the debate over the nation’s war with terrorist organizations, as well as the agency’s own struggle to balance security and liberty.

And the result is a president who denounces torture but not the people accused of inflicting it.

“He was a pretty good analyst. He was a bright guy,” said a former CIA officer of Brennan. “But he always had a reputation of sucking up to power and moving in the direction of power and not being able to exercise any independence.”

Brennan managed “kill lists” for drone strikes and could order air attacks in Yemen without getting further approval from the president. “Brennan’s control over his area was as complete as anyone’s control over anything in the White House,” another former senior official said.

He came to be identified with the escalation of America’s secret war in Yemen and the successful raid that killed Osama bin Laden, but he was also an ally of those resisting more hawkish policies in Afghanistan and Libya, and advocated freeing wrongly held detainees at Guantánamo.

Last week Brennan became the agency’s prime defender, much to the chagrin of some of the president’s allies.

Source: NYT

Torture: CIA officials will walk free

From Russian roulette to power drills, shackling and other painful and humiliating “enhanced interrogation techniques”, the CIA crossed all lines. Yet despite evidence incriminating the officials, it is highly likely that the perpetrators will walk free.

Although a scandalizing U.S. Senate report over CIA practices has sparked calls for prosecution from human rights groups, chances of affiliated officials being brought to justice seem little as President Barack Obama stated that it is ‘time to move on’.

After the U.S. Senate released a detailed intelligence report criminalizing the Central Intelligence Agency, the UN and several human rights groups called for the prosecution of U.S. officials involved in torture practices.

However, with a black president and the justice department saying it will not press charges, the agents responsible for the violence are likely to go unpunished.

Obama’s top officials, as WikiLeaks cables revealed, secretly worked with GOP operatives to coerce other countries, such as Spain and Germany, to quash their investigations into the US torture of their citizens, and issued extraordinary threats to prevent British courts from disclosing any of what was done.

The Obama administration aggressively shielded Bush officials even from being held accountable in civil cases brought by torture victims, by invoking radical secrecy powers and immunity doctrines to prevent courts even from hearing those claims.

Attorney General Eric Holder announced the closing without charges of the only two cases under investigation relating to the US torture program in 2012.

This decision, the New York Times noted “eliminat[es] the last possibility that any criminal charges will be brought as a result of the brutal interrogations carried out by the CIA”.

White House spokesperson Josh Earnest announced on Wednesday that US President Barack Obama shares the US Department of Justice decision that no prosecutable crime had been committed by the CIA officers.

“The president [Obama] has confidence both in this [US] justice system and in the way it was deployed in this particular situation [CIA officers investigation],” Earnest said when asked if Obama accepts DOJ conclusion that there are no prosecutable crimes committed by the CIA.

Don’t get ‘Grubered’ by W’s groupies

On Fox News’ “The Five,” one female host energetically involved in genuflecting to George Bush turned to another, a former prosecutor and lingerie model, to solicit her “constitutional take” – those are shudder quotes – on President Barack Obama’s impending executive amnesty. A better constitutional authority on presidential powers than Kimberly G-string is Jonathan Turley, professor of law at George Washington University.

For some time, now, Turley, a liberal, has been warning of “the expansion of executive power,” even testifying – to no avail – on Capitol Hill, numerous times, to the rise of an “über-presidency,” in the person of Obama.

In what was a further twist of the screw for Democrats, the talented Turley was selected by House Speaker John Boehner “to represent [the House of Representative] in a lawsuit against the Obama administration.” While the “suit challenges changes the administration made to Obamacare without congressional authorization,” as reported by the Powerline blog, it must, by logical extension, delve into the “shift toward the concentration of executive power” and the consolidation of the “imperial presidency.”

Still, the powerhouse conservatives at Powerline are already grumbling that Turley – “a hero of the left” during the equally violative George-Bush era – is too much of an extremist when it comes to “restricting presidential power.” Turley, you see, is nothing if not consistent. He has applied to Obama’s predecessor the same constitutional principles he is applying to Obama and has made clear that the “imperial presidency” didn’t launch with President Obama. In particular, Turley has contended that Bush’s “counter-terrorism efforts were lawless and unconstitutional” and that Bush committed war crimes.

At the time, the professor had fretted a lot over the cruelty of dunking Abu Zubaydah or placing bugs in the bug-phobic prison cell of this al-Qaida operations chief – hardly a violation of the natural law. Indeed, in Turley, the GOP has a stickler for the letter of the law, not the higher moral law. If anything, Turley’s torture tempest provided a cover for complicit journalists, jurists, politicians and pointy heads, who all skirted the real issue: the imperative to prosecute Bush, Cheney, Clinton and Kerry for invading Iraq and vanquishing an innocent people.

Tapping Turley to prosecute Obama’s overreach is a clever strategic move on the part of the Republicans. Powerline conservatives need not worry excessively about the liberal professor’s case against Bush’s enhanced interrogation methods. Torturing the torture issue served to throw the country off-scent, to the great advantage of the puppet master himself; it concealed an unjust war, waged by Bush with Democratic assent. Of this war crime, most Democrats were as guilty as Republicans.

Barack Obama’s cringe-factor has crescendoed – so much so that conservatives feel comfortable about dusting off an equally awful dictator, Bush 43, and presenting him and his dynasty to the public for another round. However, when James Madison spoke of “war as the true nurse of executive aggrandizement,” he was speaking not only of Obama.

“Speak softly but carry a big stick – the stick being executive power,” preached another Republican tyrant, Teddy Roosevelt. While Turley will be tackling the constitutional quagmire posed by Obamacare, immigration is the latest legislative stick with which Americans are being stuck.

Greg Gutfeld, the one and only neoconservative on that current-affairs show mentioned who entertains and occasionally edifies, is correct about the “broken” inchoate verbiage: “Our immigration system is broken” is a euphemism for the refusal to enforce immigration law (against certain ethno-racial groups). It is statist semantics; Orwellian Newspeak; a linguistic trick to lead Americans to believe urgent action is required.

The structure of the Obama argument for this Brownian legislative motion around immigration is that: 1) Congress has failed to do anything, ergo, he must do something. 2) Matters can’t be left as is, “broken.”

The premiss for each is wrong:

On No. 1: From the fact Congress has not passed an immigration bill – it doesn’t follow that one has to be passed.

On No. 2: That some sectional interests in the U.S. have bought or acquired special privileges and favors doesn’t mean that all Americans need an immigration bill. (The New York Times has some ideas about the politics of immigration reform, which it did – surprise, surprise! – voice in “The Big Money Behind the Push for an Immigration Overhaul.”)

Back on “The Five,” Georgie-Porgie groupie Dana Perino was waxing fat about “W’s” socialist-realism style paintings. W’s art is not quite “murderabilia” – “collectibles related to murders, murderers or other violent crimes” – but it is certainly the “artwork” of a mass murderer (ask ordinary, innocent Iraqis). No wonder the art of Bush Jr. has the same solipsistic, barren quality present in the paintings of John Wayne Gacy Jr. (See for yourself.)

So: Don’t get “Grubered” by immigration illogic.

And don’t get “Grubered” by GOPers who’re trying to rehabilitate their preferred tyrant.

Follow @ilanamercer

Like Ilana Mercer’s Facebook page

Read Ilana in German on Junge Freiheit.