March 4, 2019
The ISIS women are known for their savage treatment of their peers.
Female ISIS militants published a manifesto recently hoping to draw more girls and women to the Caliphate. The manifesto says it’s acceptable for girls to marry at nine years-old but that 15 and 16 was preferable – when they are “still young and active.”
Women in the World reported, via Religion of Peace.
As ISIS makes its last stand in the Syrian village of Baghouz, thousands of women and children have been pouring into the al-Hawl refugee camp in the northern part of the country. Among the refugees are wives of ISIS fighters who, according to the Guardian, have taken it upon themselves to enforce strict caliphate rules.
“In recent days, many woman said they only left because the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, ordered them to do so to make it easier for the men to fight,” the Guardian reports, adding that “senior-ranked wives” have been stealing from and beating other women who take off their niqabs. When a leaking gas canister sparked a fire, rumors began to spread that an ISIS sleeper cell had deliberately set the fire in order to free the refugees.
Though some women in the camp continue to express allegiance to the militant group, others are eager to leave that world behind. Shamima Begum, a British teenager who infamously ran away to marry Islamic State fighter and has since expressed a desire to return home, was among the ISIS wives in al-Hawl. She was recently forced to move with her newborn after being threatened, reportedly because she had not been properly veiled and had been showing her face in TV interviews.
March 3, 2019
As reported earlier this took place at Donald Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
According to a press release from the activist group Indecline, over two-dozen “men and women of color and members of the LGBT community” placed leashes and custom made dog collars on white men in red M.A.G.A. hats and walked them on all fours up and down Hollywood Boulevard on Sunday.
The group says that their “performance” was based on Cardi B’s recent Twitter battle with Tomi Lahren, in which the crass rapper told the right-wing pundit, “Leave me alone, or I’ll dog walk you.”
“The project, entitled ‘Hate Breed’, speaks to race relations in America, specifically the patience exhibited by those most affected by racism and bigotry and their willingness, despite having the greatest right to anger, to walk their attackers down a path to empathy,” the press release states.
The men wore dog collars with tags that each had the name of a “racist white man.”
Hollywood Blvd is a popular destination for tourists and families, whom the artists clearly did not consider when staging their inappropriate stunt.
This “art” comes at a time when assaults on Trump supporters appears to be on the rise.
Last month, a Massachusetts woman was charged with assault and battery after hitting a ‘Make America Great Again’ hat off of a stranger’s head at a Mexican restaurant.
Later in the month a Turning Point USA activist was attacked by a deranged leftist at UC Berkeley. Earlier that week, conservative activist Scott Presler reported that he was hit with projectiles and had gay slurs shouted at him while out holding a pro-Trump sign and advocating for the president’s policies. The same morning, a woman locked her Twitter account after posting a video of herself harassing an elderly man in a thrift store over his Make America Great Again hat.
A couple also had a gun pulled on them while shopping at Sam’s Club because they were wearing MAGA hats.
None of these incidents have received mainstream media coverage.
By Greg Jaffe and Jenna Johnson
First came former U.S. attorney Joseph diGenova, a Fox News regular and ally of President Trump. “We are in a civil war,” he said. “The suggestion that there’s ever going to be civil discourse in this country for the foreseeable future is over. . . . It’s going to be total war.”
The next day, Nicolle Wallace, a former Republican operative turned MSNBC commentator and Trump critic, played a clip of diGenova’s commentary on her show and agreed with him – although she placed the blame squarely on the president.
Trump, she said, “greenlit a war in this country around race. And if you think about the most dangerous thing he’s done, that might be it.”
With the report by special counsel Robert Mueller reportedly nearly complete, impeachment talk in the air and the 2020 presidential election ramping up, fears that once existed only in fiction or the fevered dreams of conspiracy theorists have become a regular part of the political debate. These days, there’s talk of violence, mayhem and, increasingly, civil war.
A tumultuous couple of weeks in American politics seem to have raised the rhetorical flourishes to a new level and also brought a troubling question to the surface: At what point does all the alarmist talk of civil war actually increase the prospect of violence, riots or domestic terrorism?
Speaking to conservative pundit Laura Ingraham, diGenova summed up his best advice to friends: “I vote, and I buy guns. And that’s what you should do.”
He was a bit more measured a few days later in an interview with The Washington Post, saying that the United States is in a “civil war of discourse . . . a civil war of conduct,” triggered mostly by liberals and the media’s coverage of the Trump presidency. The former U.S. attorney said he owns guns mostly to make a statement, and not because he fears political insurrection at the hands of his fellow Americans.
The rampant talk of civil war may be hyperbolic, but it does have origins in a real crumbling confidence in the country’s democratic institutions and its paralyzed federal government. With Congress largely deadlocked, governance on the most controversial issues has been left to the Supreme Court or has come through executive or emergency actions, such as Trump’s border wall effort.
Then there’s the persistent worry about the 202o elections. “Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 that there will never be a peaceful transition of power,” Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer and personal lawyer, told a congressional committee Wednesday.
On that score, Cohen’s not the only one who is concerned. As far back as 2016, Trump declined to say whether he would concede if he lost to Hillary Clinton, prompting former president Barack Obama to warn that Trump was undermining American democracy. “That is dangerous,” Obama said.
The moment was top of mind for Joshua Geltzer, a former senior Obama administration Justice Department official, when he wrote a recent editorial for CNN urging the country to prepare for the possibility that Trump might not “leave the Oval Office peacefully” if he loses in 2020.
“If he even hints at contesting the election result in 2020 . . . he’d be doing so not as an outsider but as a leader with the vast resources of the U.S. government potentially at his disposal,” Geltzer, now a professor at Georgetown Law School, wrote in his piece in late February.
Geltzer urged both major parties to require their electoral college voters to pledge to respect the outcome of the election, and suggested that it might be necessary to ask the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to reaffirm their loyalty to the Constitution over Trump.
“These are dire thoughts,” Geltzer wrote, “but we live in uncertain and worrying times.”
His speculation drew immediate reaction from the right. Former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin tweeted a link to an article that called Geltzer’s warnings “rampant crazy.” News Punch, a far-right site that traffics in conspiracy theories, blared: “Obama Official Urges Civil War Against Trump Administration.”
Said Geltzer: “I don’t think I was being paranoid, but, boy, did I inspire paranoia on the other side.”
The concerns about a civil war, though, extend beyond the pundit class to a sizable segment of the population. An October 2017 poll from the company that makes the game Cards Against Humanity found that 31 percent of Americans believed a civil war was “likely” in the next decade.
More than 40 percent of Democrats described such a conflict as “likely,” compared with about 25 percent of Republicans. The company partnered with Survey Sampling International to conduct the nationally representative poll.
Some historians have sounded a similar alarm. “How, when, and why has the United States now arrived at the brink of a veritable civil war?” Victor Davis Hanson, a historian with Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, asked last summer in an essay in National Review. Hanson prophesied that the United States “was nearing a point comparable to 1860,” about a year before the first shots were fired on Fort Sumter, South Carolina.
Around the same time Hanson was writing, Robert Reich, a former secretary of labor who is now a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, imagined his own new American civil war, in which demands for Trump’s impeachment lead to calls from Fox News commentators for “every honest patriot to take to the streets.”
“The way Mr. Trump and his defenders are behaving, it’s not absurd to imagine serious social unrest,” Reich wrote in the Baltimore Sun. “That’s how low he’s taken us.”
Reich got some unlikely support last week from Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist. “I think that 2019 is going to be the most vitriolic year in American politics since the Civil War, and I include Vietnam in that,” Bannon said in an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
All the doom, gloom and divisiveness have caught the attention of experts who evaluate the strength of governments around the world. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, a measure widely cited by political scientists, demoted the United States from “full democracy” to “flawed democracy” in January 2017, citing a big drop in Americans’ trust for their political institutions.
Similarly, Freedom House, which monitors freedom and democracy around the world, warned in 2018 that the past year has “brought further, faster erosion of American’s own democratic standards than at any other time in memory.”
Those warnings about the state of America’s democratic institutions concern political scientists who study civil wars, which usually take root in countries with high levels of corruption, low trust in institutions and poor governance.
Barbara Walter, a professor of political science at the University of California at San Diego, said her first instinct was to dismiss any talk of civil war in the United States. “But the U.S. is starting to show that it is moving in that direction,” she said. “Countries with bad governance are the ones that experience these wars.”
James Fearon, who researches political violence at Stanford University, called the pundits’ warnings “basically absurd.” But he noted that political polarization and the possibility of a potentially serious constitutional crisis in the near future does “marginally increase the still very low odds” of a stalemate that might require “some kind of action by the military leadership.”
“I can’t believe I’m saying this,” he added, “but I guess it’s not entirely out of the question.”
Less clear in the near term is what kind of effect the inflammatory civil war rhetoric has on a democracy that’s already on edge. There’s some evidence that such heated words could cause people to become more moderate. A 2014 study found that when hard-line Israeli Jews were shown extreme videos promoting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as essential to Israeli pride, a strong army or national unity, they took a more dovish position.
“Extreme rhetoric can lead some people to pull back from the brink,” said Boaz Hameiri, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author on the study. But that only happens when people already believe a “more moderate version of the extreme views” and find the more extreme message shocking, he said.
In such cases, people recognize the absurdity of their position, worry it reflects badly on them and reconsider it, he said.
If the extreme messages become a normal part of the political debate, the moderating effect goes away, the study found.
Violence is most likely to occur, Hameiri added, when political leaders use “dehumanizing language” to describe their opponents.
Most experts worried that the talk of conflict here, armed or otherwise, was serving to raise the prospects of unrest and diminish trust in America’s already beleaguered institutions.
The latest warnings of civil war from diGenova drew an exasperated response from VoteVets, a liberal veterans advocacy group whose members have fought in actual civil wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Amazing we have to say this but: 1. We are NOT in civil war. 2. Do NOT buy guns (or any weapons) to use against your fellow Americans,” Jon Soltz, the group’s chairman, tweeted in response to diGenova. “Trust us, we have seen war.”
By Nan and Byron McKeeby
It has now been 4 years since #Chicago last logged a day w/ out a shooting and/or a homicide. Since 2/28/15: 2,588 killed, 11,649 wounded.
Pathetic. On the bright side, taxes are high and the debt bomb is about to explode!
By Sloan Rachmuth
The Duke campus has been the target of numerous anti-Semitic incidents in just the past few months, including destruction of Jewish property, genocidal expression, demonizing Jews and delegitimizing the Jewish state’s right to exist, according to the anti-Semitism watchdog group AMCHA Initiative.
A recent editorial in the student newspaper, The Chronicle, describes Israel as a “murderous” country with “genocidal policies.” Titled, “AIPAC And The Blockade On Critiquing Israel,” the piece, authored by the editorial board, defends the “ill-conceived wording” of Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar‘s recent tweet invoking the old anti-Semitic canards of Jewish power and money.
“The defense of and expansion on Omar’s overt and classic anti-Semitic trope…and calls for Duke students to engage in activism to economically cripple Israel…are reprehensible,” said AMCHA Initiative director Tammi Rossman-Benjamin. “The fact that this editorial was written by the entire editorial board of the official student paper, not an individual or a known anti-Zionist group like Students for Justice in Palestine or Jewish Voice for Peace, indicates that these anti-Semitic tropes have become completely normalized on that campus. That’s really frightening.”
Joining Rossman-Benjamin in condemning The Chronicle’s editorial board was David Brog, executive director of the anti-Semitism education group Maccabee Task Force:
How sad that students at such a prestigious university have such a simplistic view of so complex an issue. They condemn Israel’s self-defense in Gaza without ever mentioning the Hamas aggression that necessitates it. They label Israel a settler-colonial state without ever acknowledging the fact that Jews are indigenous to this land. And they double down on the anti-Semitic theory that Jewish lobbyists manipulate politicians into supporting Israel while ignoring the widespread support for Israel among their constituents. I hope that one day the authors of this article have the opportunity to study this issue more deeply and supplement their stereotypes with some facts.
Several Jewish students on the Durham, North Carolina campus have told the Haym Salomon Center that the op-ed created a negative atmosphere for Jews on campus. Junior Max Cherman and freshman Ezra Loeb responded to the editorial with a piece, “The Chronicle’s Editorial Board Embodies 21st Century Anti-Semitism.”
Cherman and Loeb received support from many students and alumni who also found the editorial disturbing. But it’s the response from other Duke students, who seem to regard the editorial as a license to hate, that has some students questioning whether to remain at Duke.
Anti-Semitism at Duke is not a recent phenomenon, but it has spiked over the past few months. University president Vincent E. Price issued a statement right before Thanksgiving, which reads in part:
I write you this morning with a deep sense of frustration and sorrow: last night, a tribute on the East Campus Bridge to the victims of the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre was defaced by a large, red swastika. That such a craven and cowardly act of vandalism — a desecration of a memorial to individuals who were killed because they were Jewish and practicing their faith — should happen anywhere is extremely distressing. That it should occur in such a visible, public location at Duke should be a matter of grave concern to us all.
Posts on The Chronicle’s Facebook page reveal that intimidation and anti-Semitism are alive and thriving on the Durham campus.
A member of the far-left anti-Israel group Students for Justice in Palestine posted a meme mocking Jewish Duke students who were made to feel uncomfortable by The Chronicle’s article. “Let’s also not forget Israel’s habit of forcibly sterilizing African/black+brown immigrants,” posted another student.
The current hostile climate on campus toward Jewish students wasn’t initiated by The Chronicle’s editorial board. Back in October, just two weeks after swastikas were found in the language arts building, Duke seniors Sanjidah Ahmed and Hadeel Abdelhy lambasted the university’s efforts to build dialogue as “both ludicrous and shameful,” claiming Israel engages in “the annihilation of Palestinian people.”
This past May, anti-Semitic posters were found in Durham and on Duke’s east campus.
“I was deeply disturbed and, to be honest, frightened,” explained professor Gavin Yamey. “I’m Jewish, and these vile anti-Semitic threats, including the image of a gun pointed at a Jew, really rattled me.”
“I lost family to pogroms and in the Holocaust,” he added. “Seeing incitements to shoot Jews in my hometown is not something I ever imagined.”
Request for comment from The Chronicle editorial board went unanswered.
Sloan Rachmuth is director of research and special projects for the news and public policy group Haym Salomon Center. @salomoncenter.
Wednesday, February 27, 2019
Four of the attacks took place between 1:50pm and 9pm on Tuesday, the Daily Mail reports.
In east London, Alwi Jamal, 20, was found deceased outside Ilford train station.
Witnesses say Jamal was “slashed in the face” outside a betting shop and subsequently hunted down and killed.
“They chased after him, two people with knives – zombie knives, black with a silver blade,” one witness said. “They stabbed him in his chest. There was two of them. I’ve also seen the Snapchat video. It was a fight over money and drugs.”
In west London, a young man was discovered at South Ruislip station suffering from a stab wound to the stomach.
“I saw a school boy in uniform stabbed in the side and he didn’t look in a good way,” a witness said. “He was face down on the pavement and was shaking. Think he was in shock.”
The victim was rushed to a nearby hospital and doctors say his injuries are not life-threatening.
In Enfield, police responding to calls regarding an altercation found a man in his 30s with a stab wound to his thigh.
He was taken to hospital and later released.
Also in Enfield, three male suspects in their 20s were arrested under suspicion of attempted murder of a man who was critically injured in a stabbing attack.
In Romford, an 18-year-old man was treated for “serious” stab wounds by the London Ambulance Service.
London experienced its most deadly year in a decade in 2018 with 135 homicides, 76 of which were stabbings.
London also recently surpassed New York City’s murder rate for the first time ever.
By
With the U.S. House expected to vote Wednesday on universal gun registration bill H.R. 8, four CEOs signed a letter urging Congress to spearhead this legislation.
Blake Mycoskie, the founder of TOMS’s shoes, has joined the anti-gun frenzy. At first, TOMS’s board of directors debated whether the CEO should be involved with political issues as controversial as gun control.
Mycoskie said “everyone was very concerned about us doing something like this” and was somewhat hesitant to take on this fight.
Trending: Twitter Tells Michelle Malkin to Lawyer Up for Breaking SHARIA LAW
However, the board eventually embraced the gun control hysteria, as Mycoskie noted:
“But ultimately we recognized that this is an opportunity for us to really be a leader in business and to show our customers that we are engaged in the issues that matter most to them.”
Mycoskie joined the CEOs of Levi Strauss, Dick’s Sporting Goods, and RXT Realty in signing this letter calling for the U.S. to pass H.R. 8, legislation that would put the U.S. one step closer towards gun registration.
Instead of being upfront about the legislation’s true intentions, the CEOs wrote:
“… we are writing to you because we have a responsibility and obligation to stand up for the safety of our employees, customers and all Americans in the communities we serve across the country….
Mycoskie recognizes that roughly 12 percent of his customer base won’t buy his company’s shoes due to his anti-gun stances. Nevertheless, Mycoskie remains firm in his anti-gun ways stating that his company “lost some customers by doing this, but I think we also strengthened our relationship in a way that was far greater than whatever we lost.”
Scott Rechler, the CEO of RXR Realty, has also become a gun control advocate and believes that it is “important for CEOs to take a greater level of social responsibility.”
It remains to be seen if these statements will hurt Mycoskie and Rechler’s companies, but if Dick’s Sporting Goods’s experience is any indicator, it may not turn out so well for these gun control-supporting companies. When Dick’s decided to stop selling AR-15s and banned individuals under 21 from buying firearms, sales plummeted.
Ever since the Las Vegas and Parkland shootings, gun controllers nationwide have come out in force trying to pass gun control legislation in state legislatures across the country. From 2016 to 2018, Democrats were completely shut out of power at the federal level, so they turned to state legislatures and the corporate boardroom to undermine gun rights.
Corporations are continuing this gun control crusade by cutting ties with firearms vendors and gun-related organizations. This recent announcement shows that corporate interests won’t relent.
It’s time that gun owners fight back by hitting corporations where it hurts them most—their pocketbooks.
Both candidates, Cook County board president Toni Preckwinkle and former Police Oversight Board chairwoman Lori Lightfoot, are considered “outside” candidates, with few attachments to Chicago’s fabled Democratic machine, but with deep ties to the city’s far left, progressive elements.
The fourteen-way race was in a dead heat until nearly the end, with polls predicting varied outcomes, none of which played out Tuesday night. Lightfoot, a relative unknown and newcomer to Chicago elections — though not to Chicago politics — was the city’s top vote-getter, commanding around 17% of the vote. Preckwinkle, a more well-known commodity, often maligned for instituting the city’s disasterous (and now repealed) “sugary drinks tax,” came in second with 16%, according to the Chicago Tribune’s official election results.
Most surprising, though, was the result for former President Barack Obama’s chief of staff Bill Daley, whose last name is on nearly every building and public park in the city. Bill Daley is a relative of long-serving mayors Richard J. and Richard M. Daley, and was expected to do well in the mayoral race.
After last night’s votes were counted, Daley didn’t even pick up traditional Democratic (and Daley) strongholds, leaving him in third, with only 15% of the vote. Those went to Jerry Joyce, who barely finished with 7%.
Both Preckwinkle and Lightfood are progressives, even by Chicago standards, and ran far to the left of current mayor Rahm Emanuel. Both had platforms that embraced an elected school board — something most mayors hesitate to do, lest the city’s education system fall fully into union control — civilian oversight of the police department, and a tax scheme designed to correct “wealth inequality” within the city.
But they both also represent a landmark achievement in diversity for the city; come April 2nd, no matter who wins the final mayoral election, Chicago will have its first African-American female mayor. Only one woman, Jane Byrne, has served in the office previously.
The vote also crossed racial lines, in one of America’s most segregated city. Both Preckwinkle and Lightfoot won big on the city’s wealthier north side, particularly among leftists who live along the lakefront in some of the city’s established middle class and upper-middle class neighborhoods.
There were no Republican contenders in the (technically) non-partisan race. Only about 10% of Chicago’s population considers itself Republican, and even those estimates are probably high.
Among Tuesday night’s victories, though, one, in particular, stood out: that of powerful 14th ward alderman Ed Burke, who commanded more than 50% of the vote despite being under active indictment by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. In January, Burke was indicted on a Federal extortion charge, and Federal agents have warned that more charges may be coming.
The south side alderman’s constituents gave him four more years to add to his nearly half-century rule, even though he is facing a potential prison sentence of 20 years or more. When asked by a Sun-Times reporter whether he’d be able to fulfill his entire term in office, Burke refused to answer.
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