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Diana West |
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Friday, October 12, 2007 10:04 PM |
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By Diana West on
Saturday, April 28, 2012 12:36 PM

This week's syndicated column:
To keep former Army 1st Lt. Michael Behenna behind bars until 2024 for the "unpremeditated murder" of an insurgent during the war in Iraq, U.S. military prosecutors have resorted to strange and disturbing twists of law, logic and morality. They were all on display again this week in Behenna's final plea before the military's highest court of appeals in Washington, D.C. It was enough to make the gold eagle on top of the American flag in the courtroom shake and then hang its head.
Or so I imagined while listening intently as questions from the five civilian judges began to drill into a central argument advanced by the military prosecutor: that Lt. Behenna had "lost his right to self-defense" in the war zone when he embarked on an unauthorized interrogation of Ali Mansur, a suspected al-Qaida cell leader.
Lost his right to self-defense? What does that mean to our soldiers at war, where extenuating circumstances are facts of life?...
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By Diana West on
Thursday, April 26, 2012 3:44 PM
While Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey is busy, busy, busy ensuring that jihad, the enemy threat doctrine, as elucidated by Maj. Stephen Coughlin (USAR) among others, does not blow Islamispeace's reputation by entering the pure (ignorant) minds of our senior staff officers, that which Dempsey unconscionably calls "additional risk" marches on.
Never mind that a working knowledge of jihad, which is what Coughlin expertly imparts, would blow COIN sky high, making possible the strategy review necessary to save these American and NATO lives from Dempsey's "additional risk."
From the AP:
KABUL,...
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By Diana West on
Thursday, April 26, 2012 8:19 AM

Nazis disposing of "objectionable material" that undermined Big Lies of the Third Reich
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It's probably fair to call Spencer Ackerman of Wired.com the king of the see-no-Islam beat. Whenever the government -- first, the FBI, now, "the entire US military" -- decides to purge training materials about Islam that undermine the Big Lie that "Islam is a religion of peace," Ackerman seems to be the one to break the story. Something to be proud of in the coming caliphate -- probably good for a pasha-ship, at least.
The latest from the Voice of Submission:
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Tuesday ordered the entire U.S. military to scour its training material to ensure it doesn’t contain anti-Islamic content, Danger Room has learned. The order came after the Pentagon suspended a course for senior officers that was found to contain derogatory material about Islam.
...
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By Diana West on
Tuesday, April 24, 2012 2:06 PM

On Wednesday evening, I will be on live with Glenn Beck to discuss "Rumors of War III," a new documentary Glenn's documentary unit, Mercury Radio Arts, has produced, and which I had the pleasure of appearing on along with such luminaries as my Team B II colleagues Gen. William G. "Jerry" Boykin, Andrew C. McCarthy, John Guandolo, Frank Gaffney, and also CBN's esteemed Erick Stackelbeck. Gen Boykin, Andy and I will all be be on the post-documentary show, along with Buck Sexton, National Security Editor of The Blaze.
The show starts at 7pm EST.
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By Diana West on
Tuesday, April 24, 2012 1:33 AM
If, as the Obama administration is saying, the "war on terror" -- counter-jihad -- "is over," then why are we civilians still manning the front lines?
Image 1) Barricades 2012, pre-assault:
Image 2) Barricades 1916, pre-assault:

It's another Big Lie. Trust your eyes and the evidence; not the spin (lies) and image-making of "authority."
As noted here, Frank Gaffney, and Gens. Boykin and Soyster will today be at the National Press Club at 9:30am, live-streaming at www.MuslimBrotherhoodinAmerica.com, to discuss not that we have won the "war on terror," as the Obama administration absurdly claims, but rather why we are losing.
...
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By Diana West on
Monday, April 23, 2012 9:28 AM

Look, Ma -- no birth certificate!
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I am not a lawyer but I hereby solicit free legal opinions as to whether, in the folllowing bit of courtroom back and forth that I have unofficially jotted down from video of this month's New Jersey ballot challenge, Admininstrative Law Judge Jeff Masin led President Obama's counsel, Alexandra Hill, into stating her case more strongly before actually cutting her off at the moment the young lawyer introduced the national release of the online Obama birth certificate into the court record. It seems to me that despite Judge Masin's blunt intercession, Hill's introduction of the nationally (internationally) accessible online birth certificate provided the objectors, represented by attorney Mario Apuzzo, with a rationale for calling an expert witness to testify about the evidence of forgery in the online image....
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By Diana West on
Monday, April 23, 2012 9:11 AM
Frank Gaffney, LTG William G. "Jerry" Boykin (USA ret.) and LTG Harry Edward Soyster (USA ret.)
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The Center for Security Policy announces:
On Tuesday, April 24th, Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney and two former top leaders of the U.S. intelligence community will hold a press conference to address a question millions of Americans have pondered:
Why, despite more than ten years of efforts – involving, among other things, the loss of thousands of lives in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, well-over a trillion dollars spent, countless man-years wasted waiting in airport security lines and endless efforts to ensure that no offense is given to seemingly permanently aggrieved Islamist activists – are we no closer to victory in the so-called “war on terror” than we were on 9/11?
In fact, such a prospect is becoming more remote by the day--and no one seems able to explain the reason why.
The missing answer will be revealed tomorrow at the National Press Club at 9:30...
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By Diana West on
Sunday, April 22, 2012 4:58 PM
Burqa-ready: the new Afghan ambassador to the United States?
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Outrage upon outrage: Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) has been denied entry into Afghanistan. Worse, SecState Hillary Clinton served as conduit to Rorhabacher of Karzai's decision to designate Rorhabacher persona non grata. In other words, instead of Hillary telling Client Karzai some variant of "Nuts!" on hearing the Tinpot Corruptocrat Taliban Stooge's outrageous plan to prevent an elected American official from visiting Afghanistan, Hillary simply conveyed the Pashtun pasha's wishes to the Congressman. His wishes, apparently, are her command.
The Guardian has the story:
Relations between the US and Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, came under renewed strain after a senior Congressman highly critical of the Kabul government was barred from entering Afghanistan.
Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, Republican chairman of the House foreign affairs subcommittee on oversight and investigation, has been an outspoken opponent of Karzai. Rohrabacher has engaged with other Afghan leaders about a more decentralised form of government for Afghanistan and called for a US investigation into alleged government corruption.
...
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By Diana West on
Sunday, April 22, 2012 4:31 PM

America texts while the world burns
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Today's dots start here:
1) Egypt terminates gas deal with Israel.
2)100.000 girls are genitally mutliated in Britain.
3) And we text, saying, hearing nothing, incessantly. Sherry Turkle, the author of today's trenchant New York Times article about the texting habit, part emotional wasteland, part nervous tick. describes what the article's title describes as "the flight from conversation." The syndrome is also and above a manifestation of the flight from reality.
They all connect.
...
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By Diana West on
Friday, April 20, 2012 2:03 PM
Good news.
Gates of Vienna reports:
The Danish historian and journalist Lars Hedegaard was acquitted today in the Danish Supreme Court. Seven justices voted to overturn, and none voted to uphold the earlier verdict.
The vote, led by Chief Justice Børge Dahl, acquitted the defendant of intended racism and hate speech.
“Denmark is still a free society,” said Mr. Hedegaard.
More details are expected later.
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By Diana West on
Friday, April 20, 2012 5:58 AM

Below is this week's syndicated column: "Is Obama Disowning His Online Birth Certificate?" It takes in the shifting strategy of the Obama defense team in fending off challenges to Obama's eligibility to appear on presidential primary ballots. Obama's eligibility is a signal concern for the nation which should be the subject of informed, serious debate on the front pages, on news shows, and also, most important, in the Congress. Such debate is non-existent. Such concern is non-existent, too. It doesn't seem to matter to the citizenry that a fraudster may be completing one term in the White House while seeking another.
I recently had the occasion to discuss the matter with a very famous American conversative.
Famouse Conservative...
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By Diana West on
Thursday, April 19, 2012 2:19 PM

Illustration by Pat Crowley
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Today, I am posting a contribution from a longtime email correspondent, George W. Ford, who opens with a simple, vital question:
Will we ever read in the media -- even in the conservative media -- that President Obama is a fraud?
Will we ever read an article that opens, for example: "In 2008, we elected a man who turned out to be a fraud. Barack Obama deliberately misled the country about his origins, implying that he was eligible to hold the office of the Presidency."
The Webster's definitions of fraud include: intentional deception to cause a person to give up ... some lawful right; something said or done to deceive; or, colloquially, a person who deceives or is not what he pretends to be.
President Obama is a fraud, not "may be" a fraud. But media, elected officials, and, worst of all, conservatives avoid drawing this...
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By Diana West on
Thursday, April 19, 2012 7:35 AM

"Which way to Mecca, Jack?"
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When I read that a new UK website had come out billing itself as the "largest and most comprehensive survey of anti-Muslim and Islamophobic organisations to date [featuring] over 300 organizations and key individuals," my first thought was: if I don't make the cut, I'll buy a prayer rug. That is, if literally hundreds of weekly columns and a book devoted to chronicling the disconnect between facts about Islam and the blanker recesses of the Western mind, the first US newspaper interview with Geert Wilders, raclette with Oskar Freysinger in the Alps, extensive writings on Bat Ye'or's historical research, Filip Dewinter's political fights, and Lars Hedegaard's legal woes, a signed Kurt Westergard Motoon, a blurb on Fjordman's book, and Elisabeth Sabadistch-Wolff's wienerschnitzel recipe don't count among the...
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By Diana West on
Monday, April 16, 2012 5:20 AM
US service members preparing to deploy to the Afghanistan war zone learn proper tree pruning techniques.
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Welcome to "Agricultural Development for Afghanistan Pre-Deployment Training" (or ADAPT -- cute!), Uncle $ucker's latest stupid, totally wasteful, life-and-limb-risking idea for taming the Afghan beast via agricultural improvement. We already tried that, embarking on a massive, thirty-plus-year effort to modernize the Helmand Valley, to create "an America in Asia," between 1946 and 1979. It was a total failure.
Naturally, we continue to repeat the policy blunder -- only this time while fighting a war.
From the Sac Bee:
When Sgt. 1st Class Darrell Rowe's Army bosses told him they were sending him for...
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By Diana West on
Monday, April 16, 2012 4:55 AM
The differences are greater than any similarities, but there is nontheless some overlap between the topsy-turviness of this story -- Britain's first Muslim life peer, Lord Ahmed, has placed a L10,000,000 bounty on the heads of both Presidents Obama and Bush due to the US placing a similar bounty on the head of Hafiz Saeed, founder of L-e-T -- and the the topsy-turviness of the Sharpton-Holder nexus.
Let me see if I can get it across. In the world ordered by gravity, parliamentary democracy and Greenwich Mean Time, British peers do not align themselves with Mumbai jihadists against the United States.
But now there...
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By Diana West on
Friday, April 13, 2012 3:08 AM

Karl Marx's birth certificate
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This week's syndicated column:
Now that Election 2012 is shaping up as a contest between President Obama and Mitt Romney, an observation and a prediction.
Our nation heads into a presidential campaign with an incumbent whose online birth certificate and Selective Service registration card are almost certainly forgeries, and this is a nonissue. (Don’t ask about the subpoena from a Georgia court that Obama ignored. Everyone else did, too.)
That’s the observation. The prediction is that unless voters come to view Barack Obama as a “socialist” – even a “democratic socialist” – and, as such, an existential threat to our (in theory) constitutional republic, President Obama, funny papers and all, will be re-elected in November.
The two stories are related. Both turn on the relative power of “evidence” vs....
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By Diana West on
Thursday, April 12, 2012 6:15 AM
As you may have heard ... John Derbyshire is out at National Review for committing an offending act opinion writing at Taki's Magazine.
I am not preparing to embark on a dissection and division of the piece into points I might admire or points I might disagree with as a means of determining whether John Derbyshire is fit to be associated with National Review and there's a reason. Parsing the piece in such a way reminds me of what ideological commissars do, what Thought Police do. Indeed, in the hot-frothing wake of the serial, overlapping, looping and repeating two-minute hates against the accomplished writer that went viral recently, this very exercise was conducted time and time again by an army of such commissars, from established media to small blogs. It was done time and again, not to engage with or even refute the arguments Derbyshire set down with frankness and cogent purpose, but to pass judgment on whether he as a lifelong contributor to public discourse should be banished from what passes for polite journalistic company. It was an odious exercise.
...
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By Diana West on
Thursday, April 12, 2012 4:38 AM
Who would bet the farm -- or even a sawbuck -- that George Zimmerman will get justice in a Florida courtroom that is sure to be ringed by a baying, panting media cum lynch mob that now includes not just the New Black Panther Party, Al Sharpton, NBC, ABC, the President and the Attorney General, but also the United Nations High Commisioner for Human Rights (so-called)? About the case, the UN official Navi Pillay recently said: I will be awaiting an investigation and prosecution and trial and of course reparations for the victims concerned.
"I"???? Guess what, Mr. and Mrs. America. Your US Justice system is now expected to answer to the UN.
Discussing the charges brought this week against Zimmerman, an astutely pessimistic commenter at View from the Right brought up a similiar case that took place in New York in 1996. He wrote:
Some of the commenters on your blog seem to think the likelihood is that Zimmerman will be acquitted. I would not be so confident of that. To begin...
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By Diana West on
Thursday, April 12, 2012 3:47 AM

Roger Kimball writes (via Ruthfully):
This morning, a friend sent me this image of a painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme. Some say that it depicts Napoleon III and Eugenie receiving the Siamese embassy. Recent historical research, however, suggests that it actually depicts the liberal media at an Obama press conference. (Chris Matthews may be third from the front.)
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By Diana West on
Wednesday, April 11, 2012 3:17 AM
It's 2012 and the PrObamedia are back, not that they ever left, of course. But now, as Mitt Romney emerges as the main obstacle between the PrObamedia and their collectivist heart's desire -- Obama, Term II -- their work gets serious. I hereby initiate an occasional feature, the PrObamedia Sweepstakes, to recognize the hard work and dedication it takes to get the bottom of the tank.
Yesterday, was "Buffet Rule" Day for Obama in Florida, where, as the non-prObamedia Washington Times led off, the President wedged a campaign-style presidential speech in between two $10,000/plate campaign fundraisers, where, funny thing, he neglected to mention the millionaire-taxing Buffet Rule, at least at the first fund-raiser (no word on No. 2). Meanwhile, thanks for the campaign ride on Air Force One, taxpayers. The New York Times, on the other hand, very obediently colored inside the lines, highlighting the Obama Message of the Day, the "Buffet Rule" as Obama delivered it in a "rousing speech"...
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By Diana West on
Monday, April 09, 2012 6:20 AM
Pastor Terry Jones continues to fight for free speech against sharia in America, taking his battle back to one of the most Islamic enclaves in America -- Dearborn, Michigan. There. in Dearborn's latest sharia-complying outrage, the city actually asked Jones to sign a legal agreement to forfeit his legal rights regarding any harm that might befall him during his latest lawful protest. Jones filed suit, and a Detroit federal judge ruled last week in his favor.
What is notable about the Detroit Free Press account (below) of what happened when Jones recently returned to Dearborn is the way the story is constructed. It's not so much that pieces are missing, but rather that pieces appear out of order. In the newspaper report, 1) Jones warns about Islamic domination and sharia; 2) the mosque is on "lockdown" surrounded by 30 police cars and traffic into the area is halted; and 3) a sign at the Islamic Center reads "Happy Easter."
How's that for topsy-turvy? Then, finally, a partial...
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By Diana West on
Sunday, April 08, 2012 5:12 PM
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By Diana West on
Thursday, April 05, 2012 4:59 AM
AP photo: Wounded American soldiers, dazed, hurt, unassisted, moments after a suicide bomber detonated in a park in Maimanah, Faryab Province, April 4, 2012.
American soldiers should not be dying for COIN's parks and bazaars in Afghanistan.
On January 18, 2012, a suicide bomber blew himself up around a bridge in Kajaki Sofla bazaar. There were, as expected, many terrible casualties, but what was especially disturbing about this incident was that the military failed to acknowledge any US military casualties. Local US media outlets, quoting family members, reported that Marine Cpl. Philip McGeath, 25, was killed in the Kajaki Sofla explosion. Marine Cpl. Chrisopher Bordoni, 21, was also grievously injured. Uncle Sam stayed mum. This was something I paid particular attention to, given an alarming report on January 17, 2012 in USA Today on...
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By Diana West on
Wednesday, April 04, 2012 12:30 PM
On January 18, 2012, Marine Cpl. Christopher Bordoni was grievously injured in a suicide bombing in Kajaki Sofla bazaar.
On April 3, 2012, the 21-year-old died of his wounds in a military hospital.
Not two weeks earlier, Marine Cpl. Christopher Bordon's mother Carol posted the following account of her 21-year-old son's medical condition. It is, among other things, an example of clear and affecting expository writing that Americans should read to understand what the nation has asked and continues to ask of our military, too often without heed and care for the cost.
March 22, 2012
We have been in San Antonio for 60 days now. We realize that since the moment of the "incident", there have been amazing people every step of the way that brought Chris home to us, and have since kept him here with us. We don’t ever ask why this happened to him, for that would be a wasted use of our energy and distract us from our focus of getting Christopher through this. We believe in...
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By Diana West on
Tuesday, April 03, 2012 11:51 AM

I don't know if this is what Kipling had in mind but ...
From the New York Daily News, February 14, 2012:
A harrowing 911 call captured a terror suspect with ties to Al Qaeda screaming a final prayer to Allah during a 100 mph suicide run across the Whitestone Expressway.
“There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger!” defendant Adis Medunjanin howls in Arabic during the 33-second recording from January 2010.
The unrattled police operator replies, “Hello? Do you need the police, fire department or the ambulance?”
He bolted from his Queens home in his Nissan Ultima within an hour after an NYPD detective detailed Medunjanin’s alleged ties to Al Qaeda and the bomb...
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By Diana West on
Tuesday, April 03, 2012 4:56 AM
Would this man lie?
No -- better question: How will we feel if/when we find out we wasted all that blood and treasure standing up a Hezb-i-Islami government in Afghanistan?
From The Wall Street Journal :
American officials are pressing the Afghan government to prosecute a former governor for what U.S. investigators say is involvement in the killings of an American lieutenant colonel and a U.S. servicewoman, as well as other alleged crimes.
President Hamid Karzai's administration has rejected requests to prosecute Ghulam Qawis Abu Bakr (photo above) for the killings and for alleged corruption, saying evidence is lacking.
That seems to be because, as reported later in the story, wiretaps are illegal in Afghanistan! (Meanwhile, a trusted military source tells me that in his experience, lie detectors are not used in Afghanistan due to Afghans' proven capacity to lie convincingly.)
Mr. Abu Bakr, who remains a power broker in his province of Kapisa just north of Kabul,...
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By Diana West on
Tuesday, April 03, 2012 4:04 AM
French Army Captain Christophe Schnetterle, 45, died on March 27 from injuries sustained on January 20, 2012, when he and other French soldiers came under attack on their base in Kapisa, Afghanistan by one of their "partners," an Afghan Army member. The attack initially drove French soldiers to surround their base and refuse to permit Afghans to enter. Later, French Prime Minister Sarkosy announced that France would withdraw earlier than scheduled from Afghanistan -- at the end of 2013, not the end of 2014. According to a February 12 BBC account, the French left Kapisa province altogether...
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By Diana West on
Friday, March 30, 2012 3:39 AM

On page 330 of the 2002 book Islam and Dhimmitude, the great historian Bat Ye'or writes:
It was in the early 1970s, with the outbreak of Arab Palestinian terrorism worldwide that dhimmitude erupted on European soil through violence and death deliberately inflicted on one category: the Jews, who were singled out as in the Nazi period by their religion. Security precutions and instructions posted on synagogues and Jewish community buildings implied that being Jewish and practicing the Jewish religion in Europe might again incur the risk of death, and that the freedom of religion and freedom of thought had been restricted.
For me, reading this was an epiphany. Let me borrow from my book to explain:
So that's how it started. When I first read that passage a few months after 9/11, something clicked. I remembered a visit to Brussels in December 1990, during which I saw armed guards posted outside a city synagogue. Such security precautions in Europe, as Bat Ye'or writes, were by then routine, but it was the first time I had witnessed them. And it was only after 9/11 that I realized what they really meant: It wasn't that government authorities were preparing to target a specific, limited threat of violence to battle and eliminate it; on the contrary, the authorities were responding to an ongoing threat that reflected the permanent fact that Jewish citizens in Belgium (and elsewhere) were no longer able to exercise their religion freely. And why weren't they able to exercise their religion freely? As in the 1970s, the reason in 1990 was Arab Palestinian terrorists. In retrospect -- namely, post- 9/11 -- it seems odd that these terrorists have always been called "Arab terrorists," or "Arab Palestinian terrorists," and have never been labeled according to the animating inspiration of their religion as "Muslim" terrorists. Such coyness has buried a relevant part of the story: the Islamic context. Just as a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, it was Muslim terrorism that had come to Europe, and, as a result, Jews were worshipping, if they dared, at their own fearsome risk.
...
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By Diana West on
Friday, March 30, 2012 1:45 AM
This week's syndicated column:
Is there any interest in discovering the facts about the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman? Facts, after all, can undermine ideology. They have the power to dispel fantasy. They can put the brakes on error. They lead, sometimes, to logical conclusions. All of which means, in this particular case, that when the facts come out, they might well undermine "the cause."
We simply don't know all of the facts yet. We can say with certainty, however, that the cause is not justice, no matter what the protesters, agitators and officials say. The cause is not truth, either. The cause is social strife, division, leverage, power and -- you never know -- violence and revolution, all of it drawn and driven by an outrage-stoked engine of racial grievance.
Even if the facts of this case were to prove that Zimmerman acted in self-defense when he killed Martin -- a scenario supported by a police report obtained by the Orlando Sentinel that says Zimmerman had a bloody or broken nose and a head wound, and that an eyewitness "unequivocally" identified Zimmerman as having been under assault by Martin -- that wouldn't change the cause.
...
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By Diana West on
Thursday, March 29, 2012 5:57 AM

Jerome Corsi has all the details on the latest twist on the Obama-eligibility-turned-forgery story at WND.com, the uniquely indefatigable news site advancing this amazingly, shockingly, unconscionably non-covered story. WND.com, of course, also runs my syndicated column, and thank goodness since some undetermined number of my regular outlets declined to print (spiked) last week's entry, "Silence of the Lapdogs." Stalwarts newspapers who have bucked the self-censoring trend so far range from the Galesburg, Il. Register-Mail to the Pottstown, PA Mercury (Pottstown was the hometown of John O'Hara, a favorite of mine) to the folklorically named Black Hills Pioneer and Weekly Prospecter in Spearfish, SD.
Actually, those three are the only first newspapers to show up with last week's column in the Google news search. Then again, that search engine never indicates more than a few of the roughly 100 newspapers that run the column weekly. If any readers come across the Arpaio Posse column in their local papers, I'd be interested in hearing about it (email me at: deathofthegrownup@verizon.net).
...
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By Diana West on
Wednesday, March 28, 2012 4:34 PM

US Army Sgt. William R. Wilson III with his mother Kim. Sgt. Wilson was gunned down on Monday, March 26, 2012, by a member of the Afghan police force. Wilson and his family have paid the ultimate price for what JCC Gen. Dempsey is now calling "the additional risk" of"partnering" with Afghan Muslims subject to jihad's call.
RIP.
Two British troops were also killed by Afghan security forces on Monday. Since I last updated my quite unofficial figures on January 20 with the murders of four French troops, seven more Americans and two Albanians were murdered by Afghan security forces. The Albanian incident, which took place on February 20, occurred as Albanian troops were accompanying a USAID team for a meeting about opening two schools and a health center, when 11 Afghan policemen opened fire. They were all arrested. ...
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By Diana West on
Tuesday, March 27, 2012 5:22 AM

Hilton Kramer, whose life work was an inspiration for seekers of light and truth, has died at age 84.
Roger Kimball writes:
It is with great sadness that I report the death of my dear friend and longtime colleague Hilton Kramer, who died early this morning, age 84 (his birthday was just two days ago).
I will have more to say at The New Criterion — the magazine Hilton co-founded with the pianist Samuel Lipman in 1982 — soon. But here let me record my deep personal and professional debt to a man who not only employed me at The New Criterion — I began writing for the magazine in 1983, joined the staff in 1989 — but who also was for me a model of everything a critic should be: independent, forthright, well-informed, and above all incorruptible. Hilton always told it exactly as he saw it, and he generally saw it with...
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By Diana West on
Tuesday, March 27, 2012 3:58 AM

"We in America know the benevolence that is at the heart of Islam." Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice said in 2005 at the United States State Department's annual Ramadan dinner. (I don't know why I still bother with italics as though they actually underscore something out of the ordinary, but I do.)
"Really?" I asked in The Death of the Grown-Up. "Is that what we know? Is that what history tells us? Is that what current events tell us? Rice's speechifying ... made a wicked contrast to real live Ramadan '05 headlines," which included a Muslim suicide bombing in Hadera that killed six Israelis, Ahmadinejad's promise that "the stain of disgrace" -- meaning Israel-- would be "purged from the center of the Islamic world," weeks of Muslim rioting in Paris, "and the news that...
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By Diana West on
Tuesday, March 27, 2012 1:55 AM
The late Nancy Strait and her husband of 65 years Bob Strait. RIP. Tyrone Woodfork, 19, is their accused tormentor.
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In the hysterical main, there is no interest in the facts surrounding the murder of Trayvon Martin allegedly by George Zimmerman. There is interest only in seizing the bloody hoodie, waving it as a banner of "white racism," and igniting, if possible, the surging waves of collective guilt and collective vengeance to a point of crisis, real crisis, the kind of crisis Rahm Emanuel once announced he wouldn't want to waste back in 2009, echoing the classic revolutionary call of Marxists, Communists and assorted revolutionaries that came long before he and and his dictatorial boss Obama and their assorted revolutionary-front-groups donned democratic camouflage. The only kindling missing in today's combustible combination of...
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By Diana West on
Thursday, March 22, 2012 6:05 PM

MSM at work "covering" Sheriff Arpaio's forgery and fraud presser
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This week's syndicated column:
Warning: This column contains news of evidence of possible forgery and fraud in the long-form birth certificate of the president of the United States and – bonus – his Selective Service registration card.
I figure the warning is necessary to prevent Americans, particularly Americans who work in news media and politics, from hurting themselves on any hard, sharp facts that might poke through my discussion of what is surely the biggest scandal to emerge around the seemingly dodgy docs Barack Obama is using to verify his identity.
I refer to the logic- and history-defying news and political blackout of the March 1 press conference called in Maricopa County, Ariz., by Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Cold Case Posse.
...
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By Diana West on
Thursday, March 22, 2012 3:09 AM
When the BBC recently reported on the staggering fact that at least 2,823 mainly very young women were brutalized in Britain last year by their own families in so-called honor crimes, the news organizations didn't mention these crimes were perpetrated overwhelmingly if not totally by Muslims.
So noted Robin Shepherd of The Commentator (via Gates of Vienna), pointing out also that neither did Sky News mention "the religion of peace" in its account; and nor did the Right-leaning Telegraph.
Sure, this is just another iteration of the by-now old story of critical omission of Islam made under ideological pressures, fear and self-censorship, but it's so important to sit up and take notice again. There is a very dangerous tendency to say, What else is new? and let it go. But such boredom or complacency marks the dead man. Gotta keep bucking and kicking and making noise: What? The parliament/Congress hasn't put a halt to Islamic immigration yet? Hasn't started drilling for oil? Are you crazy? Do you want us all living under sharia by popular (democratic) demand?
...
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By Diana West on
Wednesday, March 21, 2012 5:37 AM
I am still taking in the revelations from Sheriff Arpaio's Cold Case Posse investigation, which has presented evidence indicating that not only is the Obama birth certificate a computer-generated forgery, but also that Obama's Selective Service Registration Card is a forgery, too -- and not just a forgery, but a bad forgery.
Watch this:
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By Diana West on
Wednesday, March 21, 2012 3:03 AM
Panetta addressing disarmed troops at Camp Bastion in Afghanistan last week
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Writing at Big Peace, Paul Hair adds a crucial point about the incident last week in Afghanistan where DefSec Panetta addressed an audience of disarmed Afghan and US troops. I initially seized on the command's desire not to offend our "Afghan allies," as conveyed in this excerpt from the New York Times:
Marine Major General Charles “Mark” Gurganus, the new NATO International Security and Assistance Force commander for the area that covers Helmand Province, said he ordered the American and other coalition soldiers to turn in their weapons to avoid signaling that their Afghan allies can’t be trusted.
“Somebody had said we were going to have the Afghans leave their weapons outside,” said Gurganus. “I wanted the Marines to look just like our Afghan partners.”
Paul Hair, however, followed the logic of the act of disarming Afghans in the presence of an "important" American further...
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By Diana West on
Monday, March 19, 2012 4:09 AM
In a quite interesting piece at American Thinker built around Bill Ayers' father's mailman (who believes he long ago met Barack Obama outside the Ayers' home, where, the mailman maintains in more than one interview and in a sworn affadavit, young Obama introduced himself as a "foreign student" who was, well, going to be president), the always compelling Jack Cashill reminds us some of the gaping holes the media, the voters, just gaped at and then moved on from in the last election cycle, and what just might fill in some of the gaps.
Such informed speculation denotes a healthy curiosity and bona fide concern for country; meanwhile, the media continue to flat-line on these are other ridiculously crucial questions.
Cashill writes:
As it happens, I stumbled into my own discovery of Ayers's involvement in the writing of Obama's 1995 memoir, Dreams from...
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By Diana West on
Sunday, March 18, 2012 10:46 AM
British "Equalities Minister" Lynne Featherstone
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From the Daily Mail (via WND.com):
Reforms to allow same-sex marriage will see the words husband and wife removed from official forms, it was revealed last night.
Tax and benefits guidance and immigration documents must be rewritten so they no longer assume a married couple is a man and a woman.
And private companies will be told to overhaul paperwork and computer databases containing the words.
Marriage certificates could even be affected by the Coalition proposals, with rules possibly axing terms such as bride and bridegroom.
The reforms – promised by Prime Minister David Cameron last autumn and set out in a consultation paper launched yesterday – intend to open civil marriage to gay and lesbian couples for the first time.
A different category – religious marriage – will be reserved for male and female couples.
The proposals have triggered a furious row, with the Church of England...
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By Diana West on
Saturday, March 17, 2012 5:56 AM
Naturally, I heartily concur with my brother-in-pens Andy McCarthy's Get Out of Afghanistan Yesterday piece today, and would like see that motto flying on a new flag by Betsy Ross.
Meanwhile, for what it's worth:
The next time Corruptocrat-and-Misogynist-in-Chief Hamid "Karzai [lashes] out again at the United States, saying he was at “the end of the rope” over the deaths of Afghan civilians at the hands of NATO forces," as the New York Times reports today, could Barack Obama throw back hard data?
According to the latest ISAF figures on the past four months, 93 percent of civilian casualties...
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By Diana West on
Friday, March 16, 2012 7:58 AM
The AP gets to wear a white hat today for seeing through a Pentagon deception that hid another Afghan-force-murdered American soldier -- a 22-year-old Marine, LCPL Edward J. Dycus, who was shot in the back of the head on February 1.
However, the Jackson Clarion Ledger reported this as an Afghan forces murder back in early February, which I posted here.
Still, better late than never. It's important. From the AP:
WASHINGTON (AP) — An Afghan soldier shot to death a 22-year-old Marine at an outpost in southwestern Afghanistan last month in a previously undisclosed case of apparent Afghan treachery that marked at least the seventh killing of an American military member by his supposed ally in the past six weeks, Marine officials said.
Lance Cpl. Edward J. Dycus of Greenville, Miss., was shot in the back of the head on Feb. 1 while standing guard at an Afghan-U.S. base in the Marja district of Helmand province. The exact circumstances have not been disclosed, but the Dycus...
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By Diana West on
Friday, March 16, 2012 4:29 AM
Received a press release yesterday from the American Islamic Leadership Coalition (AILC) condemning the murders of 16 Afghan civilians by a US Army Staff Seregeant.
Nothing earthshaking there. But in distinguishing between the systemic use of unrelenting violence against innocents by "Islamists," and the actions of the US military to "punish" the aberrant crime of an apparently battle-broken soldier, the group, which is significant for staking out a claim to a moderate Islam (unsupported by authoritative mainstream Islamic texts), ventures into might disturbing mental territory.
Yet despite this vivid distinction between Islamist extremists and the U.S. military—which seeks to minimize and prevent civilian casualties in a war zone—we should not lose sight of the possibility that the brutal murders committed in the village of Balandai may represent another manifestation of the “Breivik syndrome,” in which an individual commits a horrific act of violence motivated by intensely anti-Islamic and anti-Muslim...
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By Diana West on
Thursday, March 15, 2012 5:45 PM
From CBN via Vlad.
If you watch this video, be sure the razor blades are locked away. It's that bad. Of course, with or without razor blades the West is committing suicide. Must it? Must we? Is there no choice but the ruin, the loss, the extinction of indigenous European cultures amid the demographic onslaught of totalitarian Islam? Submit and die seems to be the postmodern prognosis. Survival itself has become an offense, an affront, a dirty word. Hence the failure of Western societies even to attempt to control their borders and halt all further Islamic immigration as a minimal safeguard of democratically protected liberty. But such an Islam-prohibitve immigration policy ia a must. So, too, is energy independence -- another achievable goal fecklessly ignored by every US president since Nixon. So, too, is outlawing sharia as a source of Western law. So, too, is rejecting petro-dollars and sharia-compliant financial practices.... The list of measures to take to prevent the Islamization of...
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By Diana West on
Thursday, March 15, 2012 9:19 AM

Lawyer James Culp with his client Pfc. David Lawrence, May 25, 2011
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I got to know James Culp, a lawyer who specializes in military defense cases, a little bit around the time he was defending Sgt. Evan Vela, whom I have written about many times. After news broke about an Army Staff Sergeant who allegedly walked off base in Afghanistan and murdered 16 Afghans last weekend, I thought of Jim partly because the Army Staff Sergeant, on his first deployment in Afghanistan after three deployments in Iraq, was said to have suffered a traumatic brain injury in Iraq, which may or may not have had anything to do with his alleged action. The last case of Culp's I followed concerned Pfc. David Lawrence, a young soldier suffering from mental problems (PTSD and schizophrenia), who was nonetheless prosecuted for murder of a Taliban commmander in US custody -- even though he had sought help from...
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By Diana West on
Wednesday, March 14, 2012 6:32 AM
From the New York Times:
In a sign of the nervousness surrounding Mr. Panetta’s trip, the Marines and other troops who were waiting in a tent for the defense secretary to speak were abruptly asked by their commander to get up, place their weapons — M-16 and M-4 automatic rifles and 9-mm pistols — outside the tent and then return unarmed. The commander, Sgt. Maj. Brandon Hall, told reporters he was acting on orders from superiors.
“All I know is, I was told to get the weapons out,” he said. Asked why, he replied, “Somebody got itchy, that’s all I’ve got to say. Somebody got itchy; we just adjust.”
Normally, American forces in Afghanistan keep their weapons with them when the defense secretary visits and speaks to them. The Afghans in the tent waiting for Mr. Panetta were not armed to begin with, as is typical.
Later, American officials said that the top commander in Helmand, Maj. Gen. Mark Gurganus, had decided on Tuesday that no one would be armed while Mr. Panetta spoke to them, but the word did not reach those in charge in the tent until shortly before Mr. Panetta was due to arrive.
...
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By Diana West on
Wednesday, March 14, 2012 5:41 AM

Illustration by Pat Crowley
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...Pravda, historically the organ of the USSR Communist Party, now an online paper of the same, sinister-storied name, can comment on the stunning lack of media oxygen given to further evidence, as marshaled by Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his Cold Case Posse, that President Obama is an identity thief.
From, yes, Pravda:
A singularly remarkable event has taken place in the United States of America. This event occurred in Arizona on March 1st and was an earth shattering revelation.
A long awaited press conference was given by Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a five time elected Sheriff, which should have made national and international headlines....
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By Diana West on
Tuesday, March 13, 2012 11:41 AM

I first posted this heart-warming April 1945 photograph of Canadian-liberated Zwolle, Netherlands last year. I'm posting it again because the point I raised then is at least as relevant today, particularly in light of the tragic and completely aberrational incident in which an Army Staff Sergeant apparently walked off base and shot and killed t6 Afghan civilians.
Last year, I wrote:
Between 1940 and 1945, 128 known air raids were carried out by Allied forces on German-occupied Rotterdam in the Netherlands, killing 884 civilians and wounding 631. I mention this wondering whether Admiral Mullen ever ponders just why it was that Allied Forces in Europe were greeted as liberators in a war that caused millions of civilian casualties.
...
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By Diana West on
Monday, March 12, 2012 5:11 AM
Monarchical Qataris taking measure of Buckingham Palace for future tent, or so it seems from the Daily Mail report: How Qatar bought Britain.
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By Diana West on
Saturday, March 10, 2012 5:11 AM
The media are dead. Walter Jones, a long-serving Republican Congressman from North Carolina, introduces the following resolution on March 7, 2012, putting the President of the United States on notice that military action in Syria without "prior and clear authorization" from Congress constitutes an impeachable high crime and misdemeanor, and the media don't mention it.
The Bill Text follows:
H.CON.RES.107 -- Expressing the sense of Congress that the use of offensive military force by a President without prior and clear authorization of an Act of Congress constitutes an impeachable high... (Introduced in House - IH)
HCON 107 IH
112th CONGRESS
2d Session
H. CON. RES. 107
Expressing the sense of Congress that the use of offensive military force by a President without prior and clear authorization of an Act of Congress constitutes an impeachable high crime and misdemeanor under article II, section 4 of the Constitution.
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
March 7, 2012
Mr....
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