After the horrible terrorist attack in Nice, France, millions of Americans, Frenchmen, and others around the world are probably asking themselves what can be done to stop the seemingly unending wave of deadly Islamist terrorist attacks from Dhaka, Bangladesh to San Bernardino, California.
These attacks have been conducted using explosives, guns, and now an ordinary vehicle. Here in the U.S., Islamist terrorists have plotted or attacked the U.S. 25 times since the start of 2015, by far the most active period of terrorist activity since 9/11.
Now is not the time for a knee-jerk response, but it is time to take a serious appraisal of the threat and what we can do to stop it here at home.
The U.S. has faced 89 Islamist terror plots or attacks against the homeland since 9/11, with over a quarter of those occurring in the past 18 months.
Seventy-eight of these plots involved a homegrown, U.S.-born terrorist. Eleven plots have been successful, leaving 91 Americans dead while wounding and terrorizing countless more. Five of these successful plots have been in the past 12 months and have killed 68 Americans. Of course, if it were not for the work of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies, other plots would have succeeded, likely killing thousands more.
It is this reality of both success and failure that should drive our future efforts. Our greatest successes have been hard-fought victories achieved through difficult police work and the vigilance of our intelligence community. Undercover agents, wiretaps, examination of computer data, and many other tools have been essential to stopping Islamist terrorists. When we have failed to stop an attack, we often ask why our police and intelligence agencies failed to recognize and stop the threat.
Our greatest asset in preventing terrorism has been, and must continue to be, our law enforcement and intelligence communities armed with the tools and resources they need. Since 9/11, the U.S. has taken important steps in this direction, but we must continue to improve and refine these tools.
This does not mean our government can ignore our rights under the Constitution. Every program and law must meet constitutional scrutiny. But this does mean that within the bounds of the Constitution, strong and proactive investigatory tools should be given to our security forces with careful oversight from all branches of government.
In so doing we can maximize both our security and our liberty, rather than trading one for the other.
Aided by efforts in community outreach, counter radicalization, improved sharing between the FBI and local law enforcement, and other preventative approaches to terrorism, the U.S. can stop more terrorism before its strikes. (For more from the author of “These Are the Tools We Need to Win the Long War Against Islamist Terrorism” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/MosqueinAbuja-1.jpg23043072Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-07-17 22:00:342016-07-17 22:00:34These Are the Tools We Need to Win the Long War Against Islamist Terrorism
Donald Trump met with Indiana Gov. Mike Pence Wednesday in consideration of selecting him as a vice presidential running mate. But many beyond the state of Indiana don’t know much about Pence.
Here are 10 things you should know about him:
1. Pence was born in 1959 in Columbus, Indiana. He has been a lifelong Indiana resident. He attended Hanover College and the Indiana University School of Law.
2. Pence was a Democrat in college. He was the youth coordinator for the Bartholomew County Democrats and voted for Jimmy Carter in 1980. Pence claims his senior thesis changed his views, due to a heavy emphasis on studying the American founding fathers. He left Hanover as a conservative Christian, according to Indianapolis Monthly.
3. Pence ran a conservative Indiana think-tank called the Indiana Policy Review Foundation from 1991 to 1994.
4. In 1994, he started a radio show that grew into a five-day-a-week show on local radio. He left his radio show to run for Congress in 2000. It was his second attempt having lost in 1990. He won the 2000 race.
5. As a congressman, Pence was more conservative than the average Republican. He frequently scored perfect on the American Conservative Union scorecard. Earlier in his career, he also scored well on the Club for Growth scorecard, but scored worse as time went on.
6. Pence is soft on illegal immigration. In 2006, he pushed George Bush on immigration reform. In 2013, Governor Pence signed into law a bill that lessened the restrictions on illegal immigrants being ineligible for in-state tuition rates at Indiana state colleges and public universities.
7. In 2015, Pence made a stand for religious liberty with the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) … only to cave soon after following uproar from the Left and the media. In the remarkable volte-face Pence let lawmakers “clarify” (gut) the law.
8. Under Pence, Indiana became one of the first states to opt-out of Common Core. However, Pence’s replacement plan was essentially a rebranding of Common Core standards. Many conservatives argued his plan was even more overbearing.
9. Despite his conservative promise as a congressman, Pence proved to govern as a progressive technocrat not a conservative. Much like John Kasich in Ohio, Pence has shifted to government centric policies on education, health care, and the economy.
10. Pence is widely known for giving one of the most tepid, hesitant endorsements in the history of presidential politics when he announced his support for Ted Cruz before the Indiana primary earlier this year. While endorsing Cruz he also spoke very highly of Trump. Perhaps a move that move could be paying off now.
(For more from the author of “10 Things You Should Know About Mike Pence” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/Mike_Pence_by_Gage_Skidmore.jpg36405460Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-07-15 18:12:522016-07-17 01:29:4510 Things You Should Know About Mike Pence
Our political class, which includes both parties, spent an entire month debating gun control and turning a blind eye to the combatants behind those guns and how we have willfully allowed them into our country and have promoted their Muslim Brotherhood lobbyists at the highest levels of government. This past week, in Nice, France, a Tunisian-Muslim immigrant murdered 84 people in a Jihad attack that mainly involved a truck. He also reportedly got out of the car, shouted “Allah Akbar,” and began shooting into the crowd with a firearm he took from the truck, which was loaded with grenades and firearms. France has stricter gun laws than even what Democrats [publicly] want implemented in our country, yet they are suffering even more at the hands of Islamic jihad. What will it take to end the willful blindness on the part of political elites?
The willful blindness of sharia-based Islam – the glue that binds together all jihadists – is endemic of both political parties. Here is the preamble of the “counter-terrorism” legislation Republicans wanted to pass before conservatives rebelled against the effort:
The preeminent terrorist threats to the United States are radical Islamist terrorist networks such as al Qaeda, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, and their allies and affiliate networks, as well as lone-wolf supporters and sympathizers in the United States and around the world.
This is beyond tone-deaf. It’s willful blindness. The Islamic State was created in 2013, long after the modern era of Islamic jihad. We are not at war with networks or tactics; there is a clash of civilization and it is rooted in Sharia-Islam and the dictates of the Hadith, as practiced by millions of Muslims and rooted in a number of nation-states from Iran to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and even the government we established in Afghanistan. It is that motivation that has inspired so many Muslims living in the West to either support jihad or, worse, actually pursue it.
Western leaders have always sought to isolate and decompartmentalize the problem. The jihadists in the Caucuses were “Chechnyians,” the savages in Israel were “Palestinians.” The West sought to legitimize and validate their grievances as rooted in geographical political disputes. In fact, they were all rooted in Jihad as dictated by the Hadith. The West blamed Israel for suffering from suicide bombings and vehicular attacks for years. Tragically, we now see that those tactics have made their way to the West – tactics employed by the same enemy with the same ideology.
This willful blindness of focusing myopically on ISIS and Al Qaeda while downright promoting the Islamic supremacist ideology behind it affects our immigration, homeland security, and national security/military policies. For if we are unwilling to acknowledge the enemy and its threatening doctrine, we will pursue dyslexic policies in those three realms.
It is this willful blindness that has led CIA Director John Brennan to conclude this week that “Saudi Arabia is among our closest counterterrorism partners.”
It is this willful blindness that has allowed our military leadership to throw our soldiers into Islamic civil wars to fight one sharia-adherent group of Muslims on behalf of other sharia-adherent Muslims, while shunning true reformist leaders in places like Egypt and Libya who would actually fight Islamic supremacism.
It is this willful blindness that has allowed Islamic supremacist groups with ties to Hamas to become the leaders of American Muslims, obtain security clearances and meet with Congress 325 times in one year.
It is this willful blindness that has allowed countries like France to bring in hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the Middle East who subscribe to the underlying ideology shared by Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the Nice terrorist. And it is this appalling willful blindness that has caused our political leaders to learn nothing from the mistakes of Europe and instead, follow blindly in their footsteps.
What paves the road for endless numbers of Muslims in the West who make the ultimate decision to engage in violent Jihad is the climate of civilization jihad that is rooted in the mosques, schools, and political organizations, mainly run by Muslim Brotherhood groups. The notion that we would allow more individuals into our country who subscribe to this ideology is maniacal and suicidal. There are certainly no constitutional mandates on prospectively bringing in any group of immigrants, and as I explore in two chapters of Stolen Sovereignty, our Founders and early political leaders up until just two generations ago all agreed to only admit those who completely shared our political values. This was the essence of Teddy Roosevelt’s message right before he passed away:
But this is predicated upon the man’s becoming in very fact an American and nothing but an American. If he tries to keep segregated with men of his own origin and separated from the rest of America, then he isn’t doing his part as an American. There can be no divided allegiance here. . . .We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding-house; and we have room for but one soul loyalty, and that is loyalty to the American people
The guiding principle of our immigration policy was to only admit those who unquestionably adhered to our values system. Our contemporary guiding principle is to admit anyone and everyone – in large numbers over short periods of time – from cultures that clash with ours unless they have a card identifying them up front as a member of a known terror group. When our early political leaders in both parties promoted policies that weeded out those immigrants who didn’t share our values, they were dealing with Europeans from Western Civilization. They could have never imagined an ideology that is the complete antithesis of constitutional republicanism being invited in and championed by the political elites on such a large scale. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who was the famed Nuremberg prosecutor, best encapsulated the incompatibility of Sharia with western civilization in a statement published in 1955:
In any broad sense, Islamic Law offers the American lawyer a study in dramatic contrasts. Even casual acquaintance and superficial knowledge — all that most of us at bench or bar will be able to acquire — reveal that its striking features relative to our law are not likenesses but inconsistencies, not similarities but contrarieties. In its source, its scope and its sanctions, the law [i.e., Islamic Law, Sharia] of the Middle East is the antithesis of Western Law…Islamic law, on the contrary, finds its chief source in the will of Allah as revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. It contemplates one community of the faithful, though they may be of various tribes and in widely separated locations. Religion, not nationalism or geography, is the proper cohesive force. The state itself is subordinate to the Qur’an, which leaves little room for additional legislation, none for criticism or dissent. This world is viewed as but the vestibule to another and a better one for the faithful, and the Qur’an lays down rules of behavior towards others and toward society to assure a safe transition. It is not possible to separate political or juristic theories from the teachings of the Prophet, which establish rules of conduct concerning religious, domestic, social, and political life. This results in a law of duties, rather than rights…
In the irony of all ironies, this very statement from Justice Jackson has been purged from our counterterrorism training for federal law enforcement, at the behest of the Muslim Brotherhood’s CVE agenda.
As it states in the Bible, the truth is not in the heaven or in a far off land; it “is very close to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can fulfill it [Deuteronomy 30:14]. We don’t need to conjure up unconstitutional or novel ideas or focus on trucks, guns, and tactics in order to secure this nation. We need to simply recognize the incontrovertible truth and employ basic common sense and stop self-immolating. (For more from the author of “Time for Political Elites to Stand up to Sharia” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/A_public_demonstration_calling_for_Sharia_Islamic_Law_in_Maldives_2014.jpg37445616Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-07-15 17:51:332016-07-17 02:29:33Time for Political Elites to Stand up to Sharia
We have reached the point where moral equivalence has become a moral atrocity. The smart set in the West has insisted, for over a generation, that Israel and the Palestinians are morally equal. There are extremists, on both sides, they say. Both sides are responsible for the absence of peace.
The first serious outcry against this lie came immediately after the Palestinians began there terror war against Israel in September 2000.
That war, incited, directed, funded, commanded and celebrated by Yassir Arafat and his henchmen, including his successor Mahmoud Abbas, began two months after Arafat overturned the table at Camp David in response to then prime minister Ehud Barak’s offer to withdraw from 95 percent of Judea and Samaria, all of Gaza and half of Jerusalem to enable the establishment of an independent state of Palestine in the areas.
The areas in question, Barak said, would be handed over to the PLO Jew free. The hundreds of thousands of Jews living in the areas set to become Palestine, would be forcefully evicted from their homes to ensure that the delicate, sensitive Palestinians, wouldn’t be troubled by the Jews with their “dirty feet,” in the words of Abbas.
That, of course, wasn’t enough for Arafat. And it was insufficient not because Barak failed to give him what he demanded. It was insufficient because his demands were insatiable. Arafat was never interested in peace. As his deputy Faisal Husseini said at the time, the peace process was a “Trojan Horse.”
Its purpose was to get the PLO bases of operation inside of Israeli territory in order to expand its ability to destroy the Jewish state. This is the reason that despite the fact that the international community has given them more financial assistance than any other people in the history of humanity, the Palestinians have not built a society. They have received tens of billions of dollars in development aid and failed to develop an operating economy.
This failure isn’t due to incompetence or corruption. It is simply that the Palestinians don’t want those things. They chose not to develop independent institutions. They do not want to build a state.
They have spent the money to transform Palestinian society into the most anti-Semitic society in the world where the vast majority of its people want to kill Jews and destroy Israel.
They have transformed Palestinian society into a place where Jews have no right to live – not because of some sort of occupation, but because they are Jews, and Jews, they have been indoctrinated to believe, are an abomination.
Anyone with eyes in his head can see this. It has been obvious for 16 years.
The smart set’s failure to note reality back in September 2000 marked the beginning of its descent into moral oblivion.
Its first step down that road was when its members coined the pernicious term, “cycle of violence.”
“Cycle of violence,” means that there is no moral distinction between a murderer and a policeman, between a society geared toward annihilating its victim and its victim’s actions to prevent that from happening.
The latest consequence of this moral depravity came on Friday with the publication of the so-called Middle East Quartet’s much awaited report that is supposed to show us the way to peace. That report – like its predecessors insisted that a Jewish “settler,” is the moral equivalence of a Palestinian murderer.
The day before the report was released, we saw – yet again – the evil empowering nature of that claim.
Thursday morning, a hate-drenched, demonic Palestinian murderer took a knife and stole into Kiryat Arba – a “settlement.”
He broke into the Ariel family’s home. He walked into their children’s bedroom. He found 13 year old Hallel Yaffa asleep in her bed.
He stabbed her, repeatedly. When there was no place left to stab her in her face and chest, he turned her over and continued stabbing her in the back.
The murderer set off the sensors in Kiryat Arba’s security fence when he traversed it. It took but three of minutes for the community’s security team to get to the house. They shot and killed the Palestinian assailant and so prevented him from moving to the adjacent high school and transforming his slaughter into a massacre.
But Hallel was already gone.
The next day, the Mark family was driving along Highway 60. A Palestinian car carrying murderers drove up beside them and opened fire on Michael Mark, his wife Chavi and their children. Mark was murdered, his wife and daughter seriously hurt and his son was wounded as the car flipped over and over, after Mark lost control of the wheel.
On cue, the Palestinians began celebrating the murders and the murderers. The PLO governor of Hebron paid a condolence call at the home of Hallel’s killer. The Palestinian media celebrated their crimes. And a new high quality animated film was released on Facebook directing viewers to murder MK Yehuda Glick. The film included driving directions to Otniel, and images of terrorists burrowing under the security fence to enter the community and avoid detection.
Amidst all of this, the Quartet released its report. And although the report struck the tone of neutrality – both sides need to do this and both sides need to do that, the fact is that after 16 years of Palestinian atrocities against Israelis, the Quartet’s determination that they are the same is a moral atrocity.
The Quartet recommends that both sides “de-escalate tensions.” But of course, only the Palestinians are escalating tensions.
Both sides, the wise men tell us, “should take all necessary steps to prevent violence and protect the lives and property of all civilians.”
But only one side is fomenting violence and deliberately targeting civilians.
Both sides, the Quartet says, should “exercise[e] restraint and refrain from provocative actions and rhetoric.”
But only one side is engaging in provocative actions and rhetoric, unless the Quartet says that Israel responding angrily to the slaughter of its children and families is acting provocatively – which of course is what they are implying here.
And it gets worse. The report includes an empty call for the Palestinians “to act decisively and take all steps within its capacity to cease incitement to violence and strengthen ongoing efforts to combat terrorism, including by clearly condemning all acts of terrorism.”
The Palestinians of course, will do no such thing. Abbas is the engine of the incitement and the violence. He always has been. And the fact that he’s been able to get away with this since taking over from Arafat 12 years ago shows that the moral miasma of the West has become a danger to world peace.
After pretending that the people who transformed Palestinian society into the hate-filled, murder applauding mob it has become are interested in doing the opposite, the Quartet turned its guns on Israel.
Israel needs to deny Jewish property rights. Israel needs to expand the powers of the Palestinian death cult into Area C – where all the Israeli communities are located and but two percent of the Palestinians live.
Israel needs to expand its security cooperation with Abbas’s US-trained militias that have been marinated in the same Jew hatred as the rest of the Palestinians, and have often propagated.
Sunday afternoon, hundreds of people stood silently outside the Ariel home in Kiryat Arba, waiting to enter the modest home to console the family. The landscape outside is pastoral.
The Ariels live off of their vineyard and the wine they produce.
Surrounded by the vines, and the hills, the Ariel’s homestead looks like the sort of place where nothing bad can happen. A quiet family of profound faith, the Ariels were just going about their quiet lives, raising their daughters, tending to their vines when the evil beyond their gate entered their home and struck.
That is the difference between the two sides. One wishes to tend his vineyard. The other wishes to destroy it.
It is black and white. It is a clear distinction.
The international community’s pernicious refusal to recognize this basic fact, after so many years, is a major reason that there is no peace, and there is so much bloodshed. (For more from the author of “The Atrocity Known as Moral Equivalence” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/Netanya_Israeli_flag_@_Blue_Bay_Hotel_0511_563170507.jpg7101212Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-07-13 21:59:272016-07-13 21:59:28The Atrocity Known as Moral Equivalence
One year after the negotiation of the nuclear agreement, Iran continues to pursue the hostile policies that make it dangerous to the United States and its allies.
Iran persists in its attempts to: cheat on its nuclear nonproliferation obligations, export terrorism, threaten U.S. allies, provoke confrontations with U.S. naval vessels in the Persian Gulf, flout United Nations Security Council resolutions by staging provocative missile tests, and trumpet its contemptuous hostility to the United States.
Yet, President Barack Obama’s administration, hoping to lock in a nuclear deal that it sees as a positive legacy, is bending over backward to accommodate Tehran’s demands for greater economic rewards through sanctions relief over and above that required by the nuclear agreement.
Iran’s long record of nuclear cheating, current hostile behavior, and continued truculence make it increasingly clear that this administration’s legacy is likely to be a nuclear-armed Iran.
Last week, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency revealed that Iran has continued its clandestine efforts to procure illicit nuclear and ballistic missile technology and equipment from German companies “at what is, even by international standards, a quantitatively high level.”
To make matters worse, another German intelligence report indicated that the Iranians not only were continuing their efforts to acquire nuclear technology after the agreement was signed, but they also sought items that could be used to make illegal chemical and biological weapons.
The intelligence report from the state of Rhineland-Palatinate’s intelligence agency, the equivalent of an FBI field office, stated that Iran aggressively targeted German companies whose equipment could be used “for atomic, biological, and chemical weapons in a war.”
Two German intelligence officials subsequently confirmed to The Wall Street Journal that the Iranian procurement efforts continued this year and involved front companies operating from the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and China, and to a lesser extent from Turkmenistan and Iraq.
The independent Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security reported last week that many Iranian entities previously sanctioned for acquiring illicit nuclear technologies are now actively obtaining goods in China:
This uptick in activity in China corresponds to a reduced emphasis on enforcement in the United States over alleged illegal Iranian procurement activities. During the last two years, the Obama administration has inhibited federal investigations and prosecutions of alleged Iranian illegal procurement efforts. The stated reason has been concern over the impact on the Iran nuclear deal.
In other words, the administration has prioritized preserving the nuclear deal over enforcing it. Iran, therefore, sees little risk in continued nuclear smuggling efforts and may be emboldened in other areas as well.
David Albright and Andrea Stricker of the Institute for Science and International Security also reported on July 7 that Iran tried to buy tons of carbon fiber, which is a controlled material needed for building advanced centrifuges for uranium enrichment, from an undisclosed country. They warned that this attempt, which came after the implementation of the nuclear agreement in January, raises concerns over whether Iran intends to abide by its nuclear commitments.
This disturbing news comes after the revelation that International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors found man-made uranium particles at the Parchin military complex, where Iran is suspected to have conducted nuclear weapons-related tests.
Meanwhile, Iran’s theocratic dictatorship has made it clear that the nuclear agreement will not alter its hostility to the United States or ease its malign policies toward its neighbors.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which controls Tehran’s nuclear program and ballistic missile force, has repeatedly challenged U.S. naval forces in the Persian Gulf since the nuclear agreement was reached last year.
IRGC vessels launched rockets within 1,500 yards of the carrier Harry S. Truman near the Strait of Hormuz in late December, flew drones over U.S. warships, and detained and humiliated 10 American sailors in January.
On Monday, IRGC gunboats swarmed dangerously close to a U.S. Navy ship in the Strait of Hormuz that was carrying Gen. Joseph Votel, the commander of the U.S. Central Command. The Wall Street Journal reported that there were about 300 such naval incidents orchestrated by Iran against U.S. ships in 2015.
The IRGC launched a series of ballistic missiles in March, including two that were inscribed with the message “Israel must be wiped out” in Hebrew.
On July 1, the IRGC’s deputy commander stated that more than 100,000 missiles were ready to be launched at Israel from Lebanon and that Israel’s annihilation was imminent.
Tehran continues to issue threats against other U.S. allies, including Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. The regime continues to orchestrate chants of “Death to America!”
But these threats are continuously ignored by the Obama administration, which prefers to focus on promises of Iranian compliance with its nuclear commitments, which Tehran repeatedly has broken in the past.
Proof that Iran’s regime has not changed is the fact that it is still in the hostage-taking business. When the nuclear agreement came into effect on “implementation day,” Jan. 16, Iran recovered seven Iranians charged with sanctions violations in return for four innocent American captives held as bargaining chips. A fifth American, a student jailed for unknown reasons, also was released.
The hostage deal, which the administration maintains was negotiated separately from the nuclear deal, involved the release of Iranians justifiably imprisoned or charged with sanctions violations. This swap of prisoners for hostages rewarded Iran’s dictatorship for hostage-taking and is sure to encourage it to seize more captives.
In addition to furnishing leverage over the U.S. and other countries, the Tehran regime has arrested Iranians with dual citizenship and held them hostage on flimsy charges in order to intimidate political opponents and stifle reform efforts. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, has constantly warned against the threat of political and cultural “infiltration” by the U.S. and its allies after the nuclear deal, spurring a wave of arrests and persecution of dual nationals.
A Great Deal for Iran
The administration’s diplomatic engagement without preconditions has enabled Iran’s dictatorship to have its cake and eat it too. Iran remains the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism, but has been rewarded on the nuclear front for what could be temporary and easily reversible concessions.
In addition to allowing Tehran to recover roughly $100 billion in sanctions relief, the Obama White House has encouraged European allies to increase trade and investment in Iran, cleared the path for the sale of Boeing aircraft to Iran—which could be used for military purposes—and has pressed the Financial Action Task Force, an international body that enforces money laundering standards, to ease restrictions on Iran.
The administration has gone so far as to buy 32 tons of heavy water from Iran for $8.6 million, thereby subsidizing Iran’s nuclear program. The material was meant to be used in the Arak heavy water reactor for the production of plutonium, but that reactor is being redesigned.
Under the terms of the nuclear agreement, Iran is required to reduce its supply of heavy water, but Washington is not required to purchase it. By buying the heavy water, the United States risks legitimizing Iran as a nuclear supplier and rewarding it for past violations of its nuclear obligations. Iran instead could blend the heavy water down to regular water.
But the administration, now held hostage by its desperate need to salvage a “legacy,” has downplayed the risks involved in its heavy water subsidy, just as it has downplayed all the risks inherent in the nuclear deal from the very beginning.
The White House has succumbed to a form of diplomatic “Stockholm syndrome” in which the preservation of the nuclear deal with Iran is its top priority.
Even worse, U.S. officials have said that the administration is seeking to encourage Western trade with Iran to make it more difficult for future presidents to walk away from the agreement.
U.S. allies are increasingly skeptical of Washington’s ability and willingness to strictly enforce the agreement. As a British diplomat reportedly complained, “The United States is no longer feared by its enemies or respected by its friends.”
Hope for Change: An Unrealistic Strategy for Iran
The Iran nuclear agreement, which frontloads sanctions relief for Iran and removes key restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program after 10 to 15 years, makes no sense unless the Obama administration believes that Iran’s tyrannical regime will be transformed in the immediate future.
Unfortunately, Obama sees himself as a transformative figure and presumes that his engagement with Iran and the nuclear agreement are transformative, rather than purely transactional, operations.
The administration has argued that the agreement will help Iranian “moderates” in a supposed power struggle with hard-liners. But the power struggle in Iran today pits hardliners against ultra hard-liners.
The genuine moderates that the administration should have engaged were purged by the regime in 2009 after massive public protests against Iran’s fraudulent elections. The Obama administration watched from the sidelines during that crisis, intent on unconditionally engaging the hard-liners who brutally suppressed the opposition green movement. As a result, there is a lot less hope for change in Iran today.
The nuclear deal that the administration negotiated with these hardliners is unlikely to last any longer than the nuclear agreement that the Clinton administration negotiated with North Korea in 1994.
It will be up to the next administration to clean up the disastrous Iranian nuclear legacy that it inherits from this one. (For more from the author of “Obama’s Legacy Is Likely to Be Nuclear-Armed Iran” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/16047251189_606aec0bec_b-4.jpg6831024Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-07-13 21:36:332016-07-13 21:36:33Obama’s Legacy Is Likely to Be Nuclear-Armed Iran
America is coming apart – not just the United States, the sovereign nation, but our Constitution, our culture, our traditions, all of what “America” has come to mean.
It is not by accident.
What we are witnessing is the product of eight years of Barack Obama and his divisive rhetoric and destructive policies.
Obama’s “transformation” is a euphemism for the crippling and humbling of a great nation he considers racist, oppressive, venal and dysfunctional.
He warned us.
“We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” – Barack Obama, October 30, 2008.
But Michelle Obama said it best.
“We are going to have to change our conversation; we’re going to have to change our traditions, our history; we’re going to have to move into a different place as a nation.” – Michelle Obama, May 14, 2008.
And that different place as a nation is fragmentation and collapse.
It is not a conspiracy.
There is, in fact, a deliberate, coordinated and ongoing effort to subvert the United States as a capitalist, Judeo-Christian based republic and replace it with alien political ideologies and cultures incompatible to personal liberty.
None of what is happening is “home-grown.”
There is an alliance between the global political left and radical Islam, two totalitarian philosophies that cannot dominate the world without first destroying capitalist, Judeo-Christian-based democracy, the United States being both the foremost proponent and primary target.
Just as Islamists attempt to impose their religion on the world in a totalitarian fashion requiring unwavering obedience, so do radical leftists strive to create an omnipotent socialist state that will control every aspect of daily life and will enforce a universal brand of “social justice” on all mankind.
I will not mince words.
The Democrat Party now represents, at least philosophically if not operationally, the American subsidiary of that alliance.
The Republican Party is dominated by globalists, obsessed with the acquisition of personal power and profit, and uninterested and willingly impotent in defending the rights, liberties and well-being of American citizens. The GOP leadership has solidified its choice to no longer represent what had been its constituency, but to adopt the identity of junior partners in the ruling class.
To summarize, the crises we are currently experiencing are the direct consequence of the policies pursued by Barack Obama, a coffeehouse communist and Islamic groupie, who leads a lawless cabal of fellow-travelers, financed by domestic anti-American and foreign sources, supported by professional agitators, facilitated by a supine Republican political opposition and cheered-on by a predominately left-wing media.
Societal division and social unrest are tactics used to destabilize and demoralize, to further fundamentally transform the country, which has already been undermined economically, educationally and culturally from within.
It has always been the dilemma of social revolutionaries, whether communist or Islamic, that as long as individuals embraced liberty and had the belief that his or her Divine spark of reason could solve the problems facing society, then that society would never reach the state of hopelessness and alienation recognized as the necessary prerequisite for totalitarianism.
Political correctness is part of that effort. Its aim is to narrow the range of thought in order to make independent thinking literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express those thoughts. It is accomplished through the systematic destruction of words and phrases as “microaggressions” or simply making statements that are patently untrue.
For example, despite exhaustive efforts by the Mainstream Media to paint Black Lives Matter (BLM) as a movement dedicated to “racial equality” or “social justice” and engaging in “peaceful protests;” it is, in reality, a violent, racist, and dangerous domestic terror group funded by rich white men (links to Ben and Jerry’s Foundation and George Soros) devoted to destabilizing American socio-cultural infrastructure, legitimized by Obama with a presidential invitation to the White House, and endorsed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim Brotherhood front group and the unindicted co-conspirator in the prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation for providing support to the terrorist group Hamas.
That is a pattern of connected dots, which our hopelessly corrupt political-media establishment, as acts of self-preservation and complicity-avoidance, tries tirelessly to disconnect.
Most of the social chaos and extremism we are currently witnessing in our country is the product of a well-funded and well-organized anti-American, predominately foreign, radical Islamo-leftist agenda – and an administration that enables rather than opposes the aims of our enemies.
It is time for patriots to take America back. (For more from the author of “Obama and the Most Successful National Subversion in World History” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/3405488059_875f19a6a4_b.jpg10131024Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-07-12 03:45:242016-07-17 01:19:53Obama and the Most Successful National Subversion in World History
To: Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, Speaker Paul Ryan
From: Rachel Bovard, former policy director, U.S. Senate Steering Committee
Subject: Conservatives are right, eliminate the lame duck
Dear Leader McConnell & Speaker Ryan,
Do you ever feel like you’re having the same conversation over and over again when it comes to Congressional spending? It’s because you are.
Here we are, again, talking about the need to pass a Continuing Resolution (CR).
Despite all the lip service paid to “regular order,” “passing individual spending bills” and “getting back to work,” you and Senator McConnell, R-Ky. (F, 44%) have not been able to send a single appropriations bill to the President’s desk.
With one week to go before a two-month election year recess, moving forward with appropriations bills is not only futile, it’s actually wasting time that could be spent on other Republican priorities – like protecting religious liberty, instituting regulatory reform, combating the zika virus or, I don’t know, repealing Obamacare?
As always, the issue comes down to one of timing and of length. How long should the CR be extended? To the end of the year? Or into the new one?
Conservatives like Congressmen Dave Brat, R-Va. (A, 100%) and Mark Meadows, R-N.C. (A, 93%) are focused on extending this year’s spending levels into the March or April of next year, saving the spending decisions for the new Congress, and the new president. Such an extension also protects the CR from becoming an end-of-the-year grab bag of parochial projects, various extensions of unauthorized programs and higher spending.
It also effectively eliminates the “lame duck” session of Congress – the period of time after the election, when a bunch of members who have been defeated or decided to retire – can come back and make all kinds of spending decisions over which they’ll never face any accountability, all the while encouraged by a president who is also on his way out the door.
However, the House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers, R-Ky. (F, 34%) prefers a CR that extends to December, and loves lame duck sessions. Lame ducks provide Rogers and his appropriator colleagues maximum leverage to extract concessions out of their membership, and the opportunity to squeeze conservatives who demand lower spending levels or other policy changes. You may recall this as the annual December dance in Congress – members want to go home, and so do the staff, and because of that, they’ll pretty much vote for anything and bully anyone who stands between them and Christmas dinner. (Remember, there’s a reason that Obamacare was passed on Christmas Eve.)
The conservatives are right on this issue. The CR should be passed into the middle of next year, or beyond. This isn’t simply a matter of avoiding further spending increases, it’s a matter of good governance. It’s removing the ability of Members of Congress (and the president) who are leaving the Congress from making significant decisions over the nation’s fiscal future – one in which they will no longer play a part.
You wouldn’t let your ex come in and manage your bank account, right?
Then why would you let a Member of Congress who has just lost an election come back and extract all he can from the taxpayers till?
Stop trying to pass pointless appropriations bills, and instead direct your committee chairs to start crafting a CR that goes well into the new year. Even better, have it lower spending.
Doing so will make you the first House Speaker in a very long while who doesn’t cave to special interests, to the desire of departing Members to line their pockets, and who finally stands up for the taxpayer by effectively eliminating the lame duck session of Congress.
(For more from the author of “INSIDER MEMO: Ex-Hill Staffer Takes on Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/5437433261_b5ea7ec2e3_b-1.jpg6831024Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-07-12 00:48:052016-07-12 00:48:05INSIDER MEMO: Ex-Hill Staffer Takes on Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell
(Editor’s disclaimer: the editorial board of Restoring Liberty disagrees with the #NeverTrump approach, believing that it will only serve to elect Hillary Clinton) Now that Donald Trump’s black hole of presidential suckitude has led to the strange cocktail of anti-Semitism mixed with tunes from the “Frozen” soundtrack, not to mention the painting of Saddam Hussein as some sort of Davy Crockett, it is once again time to go over some #NeverTrump math.
Because when it comes to the possibility of a delegate uprising in Cleveland in less than two weeks, all signs point to ‘Make it so.’
The man in charge of Trump’s very own delegate-whipping team told the Wall Street Journal that the Republican immolation-in-chief, I mean prospective presidential nominee, is still almost 350 committed delegates short of securing a victory.
So let’s be clear to those who would like to paint the 2016 election cycle as some sort of fate accompli: Not only isn’t this close to being over, but the momentum in no uncertain terms favors the will and the wisdom of delegates who are free to vote their conscience.
Trump isn’t on the goal line about to punch the ball in. He isn’t even in the red zone with his offense humming along and looking like an inevitable force of nature. He’s at the 50-yard line at best, and the only reason he got that far is because the other side is nominating a hackneyed crime syndicate named Hillary Clinton.
She is laying in a pool of her own legal and ethical bile after the beat down FBI director James Comey took this week in front of the House Oversight Committee. Comey labeled Hillary as “unintentionally criminally negligent” (whatever the Sam Hill that means) and said she likely wasn’t “sophisticated” enough to recognize classified email markings. Because nothing says “forward” and “progress” like the get-off-my-lawn grandmother who just found out they have the inter-webs on computers now.
But Trump can’t close the sale on defeating such a disgrace when her dumb act is mellowed by his drunken Yosemite Sam routine.
Trump was even confronted in a recent interview with the rumor that he might not elect to serve as president if he ultimately won the election. His response, according to the New York Times, and mind you this is coming from a man who is down in almost all of the polls taken in the last two months:
“I’ll let you know how I feel about it after it happens.”
This is the asinine threshold at which the delegates stand. The delegates are being lectured about the supposed improprieties of voting their conscience, while Trump giggles through a question about whether this is all a big game to him or not.
They are being threatened with legal claims that they should face possible civil and criminal penalties if they choose to vote for a candidate other than Trump. Meanwhile, we learned that Hillary’s FBI testimony – during which she should have been asked about e-mails directing her staff to strip identifying markers on classified information and send it non-secure — was not taken under oath nor was it recorded.
Yet Trump, for reasons only Allah knows (and he obviously hates us) barely attempted to capitalize on her corruption, or the ineptness of the system that has let her slip through the cracks yet again. Spending far more time waxing poetic on Chuck Todd’s sleepy eyes, his disdain for mosquitoes, and the efficient virtues of Saddam Hussein’s authoritarianism.
Our allies in this barely surviving Republican form of government grow thin. This is why it is up to the delegates to take the paddles in their hands and shock our nation back to life.
Yes, it is understandable that crossing such a threshold is filled with some degree of uncertainty and trepidation about how the future will unfold and how honestly it will be reported. But none of that should delude the increasingly obvious fact of how clear the path actually is for the delegates to do what posterity demands.
According to the Wall Street Journal, there are already 20 members of the RNC Rules Committee willing to change the rules to unbound the delegates, and it only takes 28 to bring such a rule change to the floor for a vote of the entire delegation. So Trump requires 1,237 to secure the nomination yet his 890 supporters are surrounded by a ring of fire that includes 681 confessed anti-Trump delegates, and roughly 900 uncommitted delegates. Who are no doubt silently praying for anyone or anything to rescue us from the bizarre and horrid sweet meteor of death that is Trillary 2016.
When the undecideds are the largest contingent in a delegation that is less than two weeks away from making a decision about who should be President of the United States, then that delegation really isn’t undecided. No, it is empowered.
The delegates must not make this opportunity more complicated than it is. #NeverTrump is in fact the easiest call to political arms in modern history. The numbers reflect that. It is simply time for the delegates to seize the day and trust, as so many heroes of mankind have done before them, that there is never a wrong time to do the right thing. (For more from the author of “Trump Is Daring the Delegates to Act — They Should Accept the Dare” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/17008539407_ebdbab4eae_b-1.jpg6831024Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-07-11 00:11:422016-07-11 02:40:58Trump Is Daring the Delegates to Act — They Should Accept the Dare
On Friday’s radio program, Conservative Review Editor-in-Chief Mark Levin addressed the assassination of police officers in Dallas Thursday evening.
“I think the police in this country are under attack,” Levin said.
Levin talked about President Obama, the “little man with a massive ego,” noting that the United States is more divided today than when Obama assumed office eight years ago, calling him the “anti-Lincoln.”
He described how the Left in this country thrives on dividing the American people and using our divisions to maintain power. “Our country is dying,” Levin said. “Our country is dying because the politicians and the government are killing it.”
“The lies that are told by this president to promote racism, and to anger people and yes this is inciting … well what is it? If it’s not to incite violence, then why say it?” (For more from the author of “MARK LEVIN: Obama Is The “Anti-Lincoln” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/25509700281_a9a25e7ba2_b.jpg6831024Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-07-09 00:27:512016-07-09 00:27:51MARK LEVIN: Obama Is The “Anti-Lincoln”
In the aftermath of Orlando, many in Congress are rightly looking for ways to deal with the problem of homegrown Islamist terrorists in the U.S. After all, of the 86 Islamist terrorist attacks and plots aimed at the U.S. homeland since 9/11, 75 involved individuals who radicalized while in the U.S.
The Senate held a hearing last week on the topic of Islamist terrorism, the Obama administration’s refusal to state the nature of the threat, and the focus of countering violent extremism (CVE) efforts. While CVE is a term that started as a way to avoid using the term Islamist terrorism, it is now part of the regular lexicon of the U.S. government and others around the world.
On the whole, CVE programs face significant challenges and have so far failed to achieve their objectives. To revamp counter radicalization efforts, there are several things we should not do.
Do Not Allow Counter Radicalization Efforts to Be Captured by Ulterior Motivations. There are well-organized Islamist groups trying to enter the system in order to shut down conversation about the ideological and theological roots of terrorism and make it all about grievances, root causes, and U.S. foreign policy. This was the case in the U.K., with such groups—even Muslim Brotherhood front groups—being funded by the state. There are many self-appointed “community leaders” desperate for government contracts and patronage who, in reality, represent no one but themselves, accurately labeled “pretenders” by one study. Furthermore, measuring the effectiveness of counter radicalization initiatives is extremely difficult. So if any kind of counter radicalization initiative is to be attempted, then advisers must be carefully vetted. That does not mean that any adviser or partner has to be a government stooge or cheerleader for U.S. foreign policy, it just means there has to be a basic adherence to American principles and a belief in democracy, equality, tolerance, freedom of speech, and the rule of law.
Do Not Avoid Hard Truths. Furthermore, what we do not need is a counter radicalization program full of garbled and obfuscatory language defining the nature of our ideological adversary. This obsession with whitewashing the theological aspects of Islamist terrorism—as one of us recently wrote in National Review—is counter-productive. Claiming that religion has no role in Islamist terrorism may be less offensive to some Muslim sensibilities, but that is by no means the case across the board. For example, the Quilliam Foundation’s Maajid Nawaz recently wrote the following:
Many on the liberal left…took to limiting the problem to “violent extremism” only, using nauseating and insipid phrases such as “al-Qaeda-inspired extremism” to refer to what was clearly an ideology. No, it was not al-Qaeda that “inspired extremism”; it was extremism that inspired al-Qaeda.
Vague platitudes that this has nothing to do with Islam are as unhelpful as saying that this is what Islam is all about. Extremism certainly has something to do with Islam.… The task ahead of us is to name this ideology, isolate it and then discredit it while supporting those who seek to reform Islam today.
This administration’s insistence that Islam has nothing to do with Islamist terrorism makes it seem deluded at best and dishonest at worst.
Do Not Lose Focus of the Main Threat. There will be a temptation for the government—in the pursuit of equality—to say that we can only deal with Islamism if we deal with the threat of the far-right and other terrorist groups. This presents a false choice. Of course there are other terrorist threats that must be vigorously addressed, but there is not a one-size-fits-all approach to every ideology, and the greatest threat posed to national security is from Islamist terrorists. Indeed, despite sloppy rhetoric, it is apparent from the placement of CVE programs in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Boston, Houston, and other cities that primacy of the Islamist threat is at least somewhat understood in practice. So what could be useful is a counter radicalization strategy with limited scope that recognizes (among other factors) the ideological and theological aspects of this conflict and defines the adversary as being Islamist in nature.
For this to work the U.S. must focus on the real threat from Islamist terrorism. Generic counter radicalization programs make no sense. Islamist terrorism is the only form of terrorist threat today that rises to the level of a national security threat. Any program, if truly needed, should be limited to Islamist-related terrorist activity and focused on diminishing the threat of terrorist activity as defined by statute (as opposed to any other form of public activity or expression). Such programs should be focused to deal with particular threats as opposed to a general information campaign with appropriate review and sunset provisions to ensure the programs are used only as long as they effectively support law enforcement activity and are needed.
A limited and focused strategy to open up lines of dialogue between local Muslim communities, local government, and the police, or offers pathways for those heading down a violent path—especially the young—to speak to those who may be able to dissuade them could be effective and certainly worth the effort. Unfortunately, CVE in its current form is not that approach.
At present, the administration has not devoted sufficient attention to such issues. It should begin immediately. (For more from the author of “How to Turn Countering Violent Extremism Into Combating Islamist Terrorism” please click HERE)
