How Will the U.S. Decide Which Syrian Rebels to Arm?

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Photo Credit: Win McNamee / Getty Congress is expected to vote this week on giving the Obama administration the authority to combat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria by providing arms and training—to someone. But whom?

Even assuming President Obama gets the authority he wants, experts say deciding who exactly should get American aid is an exceedingly difficult task. There are vast differences among Syrian rebel fighters—a conglomerate of varying ideologies, social backgrounds, and loyalties. And the questions of who exactly is a Syrian moderate, and whether these weapons will fall into the wrong hands, loom large on Capitol Hill.

“As you know, in the Middle East, it’s very difficult to predict what’s going to happen,” Rep. Jack Kingston of Georgia said after emerging from a closed-door House GOP conference meeting Thursday. “And that’s why everybody wants to be very careful about this because we do have concerns about that.”

There isn’t a formal definition of a Syrian moderate, said Leila Hilal of the New America Foundation. But implicit in the word, she says, are a few criteria: a Syrian who is a nationalist and is fighting for a secular, democratic, and inclusive state.

That definition leaves a lot of room, Hilal said, and there are ample rebel fighters on the ground. Previously, the Syrian National Coalition could have used its Supreme Military Council to help determine who is a moderate, she said. But that group has essentially been disbanded, and now determining who exactly fits the “moderate” bill is done on an ad hoc basis.

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Top General says Half of Iraqi Army Incapable of Working with US Against ISIS

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Photo Credit: TownHallThe U.S. military’s top officer said Wednesday that almost half of Iraq’s army is incapable of working against the Islamic State militant group, while the other half needs to be rebuilt with the help of U.S. advisers and military equipment.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey made the remarks to reporters while traveling to Paris to meet with his French counterpart to discuss the situation in Iraq and Syria. The general said that U.S. assessors who had spent the summer observing Iraq’s security forces concluded that 26 of the army’s 50 brigades would be capable of confronting the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. Dempsey described those brigades as well-led, capable, and endowed with a nationalist instinct, as opposed to a sectarian instinct.

However, Dempsey said that the other 24 brigades were too heavily populated with Shiites to be part of a credible force against the Sunni ISIS.

Sectarianism has been a major problem for the Iraqi security forces for years and is in part a reflection of resentments that built up during the decades of rule under Saddam Hussein, who repressed the majority Shiite population, and the unleashing of reprisals against Sunnis after U.S. forces toppled him in April 2003. Sunni resistance led to the relatively brief rise of an extremist group called Al Qaeda in Iraq, led by the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. That group withered but re-emerged as the Islamic State organization, which capitalized on Sunni disenchantment with the Shiite government in Baghdad.

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Armored Vehicle, Grenade Launchers At Disposal Of LA Public School Police Force

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Los Angeles Unified School District police officials are considering whether they need the armored vehicle and grenade launchers they received from the U.S. military.

The military hardware at the disposal of LAUSD police officers includes a 20-foot-long, 14-ton armored transport vehicles, much like the ones used to move Marines in Iraq combat zones. The armored vehicle is worth $733,000, and the school district’s police force got it from the government for free.

How would LAUSD use such a vehicle?

“For us? That vehicle would be used for extraordinary circumstances,” LAUSD police Chief Steve Zipperman said.

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WATCH: Iowa Dem Says She Wouldn't Revoke Passports of Americans Fighting With ISIS

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During a televised debate, last week, candidate for U.S. Congress Staci Appel (D-IA) opposed the idea of revoking passports of Americans who have admitted to joining and fighting with terrorist organizations.

Appel said, “I would not be urging taking away their passports. I think we need to make sure that we work through the system and look through it on a very diligent basis.” Her comment came after Republican candidate David Young said that if he were elected to Congress, he would call on the State Department to revoke the passports of admitted terrorists. Young, who previously served as U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley’s chief of staff said, “our State Department has that authority. Right now, they’re not doing it. They’re guising it under the gauge of religious freedom — that’s absurd to me.”

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Welfare Sign-ups Beat Job Creation 2-to-1 in Illinois

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For every job created in the state of Illinois, two people sign-up for food stamps—not exactly an encouraging statistic. The state ranked ‘dead last’ across America for job growth in 2014, according to the Illinois Policy.

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ISIS Wants to Assassinate the Pope

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Photo Credit: APBy Nick Squires.

Pope Francis is at risk of an assassination attempt by the Islamic extremists of Isil, the Vatican has been warned, ahead of his first visit to a Muslim-majority country this weekend.

As the 77-year-old pontiff prepares to travel to Albania on Sunday for a one-day visit, Iraq’s ambassador to the Holy See said there were credible threats against the pontiff’s life.

The leader of the Roman Catholic Church could also be vulnerable when he travels to Turkey in November, the ambassador said.

Jihadists from Isil have in recent weeks boasted of wanting to extend their caliphate to Rome, the heart of Western Christendom, and have talked of planting the jihadist black flag on top of St Peter’s Basilica.

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Islamic State shoots down Syrian war plane

By Reuters.

Islamic State fighters shot down a Syrian war plane using anti-aircraft guns on Tuesday, the first time the group has downed a military jet since declaring its cross-border caliphate in June, a group monitoring the civil war said.

The plane came down outside Islamic State’s stronghold of Raqqa city, 400 km (250 miles) northeast of Damascus, during air strikes on territory controlled by the group, a resident said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group which gathers information from a network of activists on the ground, reported five air raids on Raqqa on Tuesday. Rami Abdulrahman, who runs the organization, cited sources close to Islamic State as saying the plane had been shot down.

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Want To Murder Someone? Pennsylvania’s About To Make It Easier

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Photo Credit: State of Pa.Pennsylvania legislators are poised to pass into law an organ-transplant-donation bill that will make it easier for murderers to avoid detection and prosecution.

Two bills, almost identical, Senate Bill 850 (SB 850) and House Bill 30 (HB 30), according to its many bipartisan sponsors, will greatly increase the number of organ donors. There are currently 121,000 people on the national waitlist for organ transplants, and laws to increase the organ supply are perennially popular in many states. Those opposing such laws are commonly accused of condemning to death people on the waitlist.

Law enforcement officials, however, are taking exception to one section of HB 30 (and likewise SB 850) that would complicate the work of coroners and medical examiners, and can make it difficult to convict or even bring murderers to trial.

HB 30 gives ownership of the bodies of organ donors directly to the two organ procurement organizations (OPOs) that are promoting the bill: CORE, the Center for Organ Recovery & Education, and GOL, Gift of Life. The bill allows CORE and GOL to bypass coroners and medical examiners to place first dibs on the bodies of organ donors. SB 850 is simultaneously making its way through the Pennsylvania senate.

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Top Obama Bundlers Funded LGBT Attack on Archbishop Who Supported Traditional Marriage

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Photo Credit: APA leftist group funded by top gay activist bundlers for Obama’s 2012 campaign coordinated both a “well planned and financed” attack against San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone for his decision to speak during the March for Marriage in Washington, D.C. in June, says Catholic San Francisco.

Faithful America is an organization that claims to be “the largest and fastest growing online community of Christians putting faith into action for social justice.”

According to Valerie Schmalz writing at Catholic San Francisco, there is “abundant evidence” that the attack on Cordileone, who is chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Subcommittee for the Promotion and Defense of Marriage, was coordinated by Faithful America and supported by politically powerful and wealthy individuals and foundations that have dedicated millions to promoting the LGBT agenda.

Catholic San Francisco reports that Faithful America, whose website claims over 300,000 members and states it is “dedicated to reclaiming Christianity from the religious right,” has received funding from the nation’s two top gay political philanthropists—Tim Gill of Colorado, founder of software publisher Quark Inc., and billionaire Jon Stryker, heir of Stryker medical technology company—as well as billionaire George Soros and the Evelyn & Walter Haas Jr. Fund.

Both the Gill Foundation and Stryker’s Arcus Foundation were created primarily to promote the LGBT political agenda, and both were top bundlers for Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign.

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Egypt: Don’t Limit Action to ISIS; Islamists Elsewhere Share its Ideology

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Photo Credit: Interdependent By Patrick Goodenough.

During Secretary of State John Kerry’s weekend visit to Cairo, his Egyptian counterpart pushed for the new international focus on countering terrorism to go beyond Syria and Iraq, arguing that the same ideology espoused by the jihadists there is driving other Islamist extremists, including those in Egypt’s neighboring territories.

During his current travels in the Middle East and Europe, Kerry is seeking support for a coalition to tackle the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS/ISIL), and he said Sunday he has received offers from some countries to take part in the military element of that campaign.

But while the administration’s focus has been largely centered on ISIS, Cairo sees the problem as a far broader one.

A spokesman for President Abdul Fattah el-Sisi said that in talks with Kerry the president had “stressed that any international coalition against terrorism must be a comprehensive alliance that is not limited to confront a certain organization or to curb a single terrorist hotbed but must expand to include all the terrorist hotbeds across the Middle East and Africa.”

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US launches first offensive strikes against ISIS in Iraq

By Fox News.

The U.S. military launched airstrikes against the Islamic State militants in Iraq Monday in its first move in the newly broadened mission authorized by President Obama to go on the offensive against the terror group.
The U.S. Central Command said in a press release that the strikes were conducted to provide support for Iraqi security forces fighting the militants southwest of Baghdad.

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Attorney: University Broke Law by Banning Crosses on Football Helmets

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Photo Credit: Todd Starnes / Arkansas
Arkansas State University violated the law when they ordered football players to either remove or modify crosses they had affixed to their helmets, a prominent religious liberty law firm alleges.

The cross decals were meant to memorialize former player Markel Owens who was killed in January and former equipment manager Barry Weyer, who was killed in a June car crash.

“ASU’s actions in defacing the students’ memorial stickers to remove their religious viewpoint is illegal viewpoint discrimination against the students’ free speech,” said Hiram Sasser, director of litigation for Liberty Institute.

Sasser, who is representing an unnamed student, gave the university until Wednesday to “cease your censorship and publicly acknowledge, in writing, the right of ASU’s students to engage in private speech, including speech in the form of a cross-shaped helmet sticker memorial to their former colleagues.”

The memorial drew the ire of a Jonesboro, Arkansas attorney along with the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a Wisconsin-based group of perpetually offended atheists.

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