[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] Libya has effectively been a failed state mired in an intractable civil war since the Libyan people have risen up against Muammar Qadaffy ...who single-handedly turned a moderately prosperous kingdom into a dictator's fantasyland and was then murdered by his indignant subjects 42 years later... in 2011. Whatever else we may wish to say about Qadaffy, he was a unifying force in a country deeply fractured along ethnic, tribal and ideological lines. A brutal and malign unifying force, but a unifying force nonetheless.
The more one delves into the detail of the ongoing conflict in the country, the easier it is to lose hope that a stable and prosperous Libya might be possible at all. There are multiple power centers distributed all over the country, each with their own private militias, there are imported muscle associated with ISIS and al-Qaeda still roaming the land, despite years of Western-backed efforts to stamp them out, there are at least two separate, semi-viable state apparatuses running in parallel and claiming authority over the entire territory, complete with their own central banks and currency ‐ and, of course, there is international proxy power play, with Russia and the West backing different sides, while Arab states back different proxies on the ground. None of this suggests that anything other than endless conflict is possible.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
10/14/2018 00:00 ||
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[AmericanThinker] It seems to me the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi, last seen in Istanbul, is Erdogan-brand Turkish taffy, a confection of sugary lies made to inflame Americans against the Saudis and aid the far more dangerous to our well-being mullahs of Iran. (a) Khashoggi was a Muslim Bro
...In the 1970s he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, which exists to rid the Islamic world of western influence. He was a political Islamist until the end, recently praising the Muslim Brotherhood in the Washington Post. He championed the ’moderate’ Islamist opposition in Syria, whose crimes against humanity are a matter of record. Khashoggi frequently sugarcoated his Islamist beliefs with constant references to freedom and democracy. But he never hid that he was in favour of a Muslim Brotherhood arc throughout the Middle East. (b) The whole case stinks
...like Turkey’s case against the just released American hostage Pastor Andrew Brunson -- is an Erdogan confection of adulterated ingredients. The purported eyewitnesses seem to be liars who, like Khashoggi himself, have ties to the anti-U.S. Moslem Brotherhood and Iran.
...The Turkish police reports keep shifting as the story falls apart. On Twitter, Turkish academic and columnist Emre Uslu contends that in the 650 meters distance between the hotel (where the claimed assassins stayed) and the consulate there are seven security cameras, but for some reason, the police haven't shown any of that camera footage to prove that they actually went to the consulate.
...Not only are the sources of the Khashoggi tale suspect, but also the information they peddle is bizarre. First accounts were that the Turkish government had video and audio proof that Khashoggi was killed and dismembered in the consulate but wouldn’t release them because that would reveal where the cameras and recorders were hidden. Think: Surely if that were the case the Saudis would know from the claim itself where the cameras and recorders had been placed. Later accounts say Khashoggi recorded the proof on his Apple wristwatch synced to a phone outside the building. Whatever "proofs" of this bizarre tale the Turks and Iranian stooges are promoting, we haven’t seen it.
Posted by: g(r)omgoru ||
10/14/2018 13:55 ||
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#1
The Turks and Saidi's have appointed a joint commission to investigate and bury.
If the US left wing wants to protest, let them go to the U.N. But little will stop them from the "Trump supports authoritarian regimes!" meme, coming soon to a media outlet near you.
#2
The whole story is just dumb. He could've just been offed during a "robbery" and it still would've suited the Saudis' purposes if killing the mook and sending a message was the point
Posted by: Frank G ||
10/14/2018 15:14 Comments ||
Top||
Warning there is a really scary video at the top of the link
Commenting on the irrational female rage unleashed by the Kavanaugh confirmation circus, Stephen Green remarks: "The Democrats have worked hard to lock down the Trigglypuff vote, but at what cost of even slightly more moderate voters?" But do such voters really exist?
We are more than 25 years into a cycle of increasing polarization that arguably began with Bill Clinton’s election as president. Clinton’s radicalism ‐ remember the so-called "assault weapons" ban? ‐ sparked a backlash that cost Democrats the control of the House that they’d held for 40 years. Everything thereafter increased the partisan divide: The budget standoff that led to the government shutdown, the Lewinsky scandal and the impeachment crisis, the Florida recount in 2000, the Iraq War, the recapture of Congress by Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats, Obama’s election in 2008, the Tea Party movement, on and on.
It is not the case that America’s politics have become more divisive because the Republican Party has moved further right. Liberal pundits, commenting from within their ideological cocoons, habitually apply labels ‐ "far right," "extremist," "white nationalist," etc. ‐ to depict the GOP as beholden to a dangerous fringe, but this is just paranoid propaganda. The typical Republican voter in 2018 is actually no more "extreme" than his father was in 1988. Nor is the policy agenda of the GOP now any more "far right" than it was in the presidency of Ronald Reagan. The cause of the increased partisan divide is not that the Republicans have moved right, but that Democrats have moved left.
What happened, when did it happen and why did it happen?
h/t Instapundit
The screams from the U.S. Senate gallery during the ayes and noes on Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation were the Democratic party’s cries for help. Voters should arrange the major intervention that Democrats sorely need, so they might regain their mental health.
What should have been a solemn occasion last Saturday afternoon ‐ the then-nominee’s supporters and opponents quietly and gracefully waiting to see if he had enough votes to reach the nation’s highest court ‐ instead sounded like chilling shrieks from a psychiatric hospital. If it were only the protesters and not prominent Democrats
..."You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for," Hillary Clinton told CNN Tuesday. "That’s why I believe, if we are fortunate enough to win back the House and or the Senate, that’s when civility can start again. But until then, the only thing that the Republicans seem to recognize and respect is strength."
...President Trump surveyed these dangers and told voters in Council Bluffs, Iowa, Tuesday: "You don’t hand matches to an arsonist, and you don’t give power to an angry left-wing mob. And that’s what the Democrats are becoming."
...Only a massive, crushing defeat on November 6 finally might make the Left heel.
If Democrats win either house, they will go berserk. Impeachment of President Trump, Kavanaugh, and even Vice President Pence (as some leftists demand) will top their To Do list. Medicare for All, scrapping ICE, and Democratic Socialism soon will follow.
To these leftist words, Antifa will add the music of mob rule: riots, property destruction, physical intimidation, street violence, death threats, and possibly even more severe mayhem ‐ all in the name of Resistance.
If Democrats barely lose (say, the GOP keeps a three-seat House majority), they will blame Russia, voter suppression, patriarchy, white-nationalist lead poisoning, global warming, sexism, Islamophobia, homophobia, high gas prices, income inequality, and racism, racism, racism.
However, if Republicans romp, boost their Senate majority by three to eight seats (ideally securing a filibuster-proof, 60-seat majority) and score an additional dozen-plus House districts, vanquished Democrats might cry together on November 7 and conclude:
#3
The "Left of Center" candidate McGovern was crushed at the polls by Nixon. The response was for the Far Left Wing to work harder to purge any moderate members of the Democratic Party. Carter and Clinton may have won but they still persisted and today we see the results.
[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] There is a sentence that has been repeated while welcoming Barham Salih as the President of Iraq and Adel Abdul-Mahdi as prime minister-designate and which is "he has studied in Western universities".
The same refrain was made when Omar Razzaz was tasked with forming the current government in Jordan. This sentence works like a double edged sword, as it comes in the backdrop of various revolutionary upheavals and coups over the decades, and implicitly refers to a time of "renaissance" when "education" was described as the pre-requisite for development.
As for the reference in the sentence to the "West", it is part and parcel of the idea of "renaissance". Didn’t the whole renaissance saga began when Rifa’a al-Tahtawi and Ahmad Faris Shidyaq, among others travelled to the West? Their approach implied a tendency that was fought for many decades ‐ the tendency of dealing with the West as a source of knowledge and enlightenment, and not as a source of aggression and colonialism.
In this regard, studying in some of the best Western universities carries with it the tag of having good morals that are regarded as guarantees against corruption and towards protecting public money. The refrain also comes with an air of nostalgia for the times few of us lived in and most of us have only heard or read about. The other face of nostalgia is a protest over a time when the officer, security figure, preacher and suspicious millionaire replaced the graduates of Western universities.
The resumes of Salih, Abdul-Mahdi and Razzaz raise optimism, without serving the theory of optimism in the principle of studying in the West. First, there are still doubts about the real capabilities of these sincere graduates who have become politicians as long as issues of political authority and sharing it is not yet settled in any Arab country. We are aware that many Arab regimes have exaggerated the term "technocrat", where it means holding the capabilities of power but without having any real power. Salam Fayyad ...Fayyad's political agenda holds that neither violence nor peaceful negotiations have brought the Paleostinians any closer to an independent state. The alternative to both, violent negotiations, doesn't seem to be working too well, either... ’s experience in Ramallah is probably the best example in this regard.
This optimism which has its reasons points to the naivety of many. Just as a reminder, we belong to societies where rulers believe that they own and inherit the nation. Our half-baked identities stilt our progress and foment civil wars. Battles tear us apart ‐ with their savagery, dissipation of wealth and medieval ideas. Such challenges cannot be confronted just by a bunch of educated and honest people whom optimism pictures as alternatives to much needed popular movements and broad intellectual changes. What is more dangerous is that being sanguine about "education" as the agent for "improving conditions" might end up with having people who are merely optimistic about "working" to reconstruct what "wars have destroyed," similar to what is being said about the "reconstruction" of Syria. We should not forget that Bashir al-Assad almost became the graduate of a Western university.
Posted by: Fred ||
10/14/2018 00:00 ||
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#1
>‘They studied in Western universities’
Won't hold THAT against you. I'm sure there's other stuff we will do.
n what some have dubbed "Kanye Derangement Syndrome," we see the death throes of the divide-and-conquer identity politics that has long been the source of Democrat power and residual political success. Democrats' mantra was that black conservatives could not possibly exist in the natural world. They had to be some kind of genetically modified organism to which, when someone wandered off the plantation, they would apply that scientific term "Uncle Tom."
The problem for Democrats is that blacks are leaving their political plantation in increasing droves. In a bit of irony, they are pouring across ideologically open borders. Heeding candidate Trump's call of "what the hell do you have to lose," they have found they had nothing to lose by embracing the rising job opportunities, declining unemployment, and reduced crime those racist Republicans were offering compared to life in the gerrymandered inner-city Bantustans where liberal Democrats have held sway for decades.
Kanye West represents that increasing stampede, but he is a symptom, not the cause.
[Townhall] There are few things that get liberals riled up like exposing them for exactly who and what they are. They hate it, almost as much as they hate people who don’t fall in lockstep with their every demand. So when President Trump started talking about the "mob" liberals have become, "journalists" leapt to their defense, naturally. But there is no defense from the truth; no matter how earnestly a CNN or MSNBC personality insists the Sun rises in the west, that doesn’t make it so. The Democratic Party is the party of the mob.
...The spirit of the mob in inherent in the left, what they want requires something from others ‐ either their money or obedience, and often times both. But the realities of life tended to keep this instinct in check outside the ballot box. Then millennials entered the scene.
A generation raised on unearned self-esteem has spent their college years destroying the governor that most people solidify in childhood controlling their worst impulses. Temper tantrums in the quad and shouting down speakers who might say something they don’t like were rewarded with success for four years, it’s only natural they’d maintain that mentality in adulthood. Add in funding ‐ both in salaries and bail money ‐ and you have an army of social justice warriors with an inflated sense of entitlement and a willingness to shoulder aside accepted norms.
...Expect the mob to continue to rage, well-funded and emboldened by the passive encouragement from their leaders. But a word of warning, if you are vocal with your politics you should keep your head on a swivel. Any child lacking discipline will inevitably test boundaries and cross lines, but a child is one person and will eventually tire. A mob feeds off itself, off its members, and people in a group will go much further than any of them would alone. In other words, no matter how insistent the likes of Don Lemon Brooke Baldwin are that they don’t exist, the mob is here for the foreseeable future. And it’s only going to get worse.
#1
The Founders worked hard to make mob rule difficult to impossible. It still is difficult to impossible. That just means the mobsters push harder. So we have to push back harder, but in a non mob way...
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
10/14/2018 8:38 Comments ||
Top||
h/t Instapundit
[TheNewNeo] The Democrats thought Brett Kavanaugh was a safe target. Accusing a white prepster named "Brett" would be a great way to achieve several goals: stopping him from changing the balance of SCOTUS in favor of conservatives, and showing solidarity with women and with #MeToo. Who on earth would identify with Kavanaugh except other white preppy guys on the right, and they weren’t going to vote for Democrats anyway, so no great loss.
Well, it turns out that some women are concerned about the men in their lives, too. False accusations can ruin nearly anyone (women included, although I’m not sure how many women consider that aspect).
However, another obvious group that might look at the Kavanaugh hearings and become concerned about what was happening to him is black men. If that sounds counter-intuitive to some people, it certainly doesn’t sound counter-intuitive to me. It occurred to me, while watching the proceedings, that black men might not take too kindly to this little exercise in Believing Women No Matter What.
...Why didn’t it occur to Democrats that their approach to Kavanaugh might bother black men as well as white ones? My theory is that Democrats now think so completely along racial lines that it probably wouldn’t occur to them that a black man could identify with something happening to a white man, and a preppy white man at that.
#1
The "selective logic" is baffling, no? Double Plus Bad: Racial Profiling, Stop and Frisk and the like... Double Plus Good: 'Believe the Women', 'No Need For Due Process' and the like...
The Man in Black in The Princess Bride(1987) said it best: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect!"
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
