90 Miles From Tyranny

Monday, July 23, 2018

1,400 Years of Jihad: Robert Spencer's The History of Jihad

Robert Spencer has written a great many essential books alerting the world to the truth about the jihad threat, but now he has delivered his magnum opus. The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS is the first book to provide an overview of the entire history of jihad, against Europe, against India, against Africa, against Israel, against the United States of America, and more. If more of our policymakers knew this history, they would be formulating more realistic and more effective policies, both domestic and foreign, to deal with the jihad threat.

The History of Jihad makes it clear that most of what people in the U.S. think they know about Muhammad, Islam in general, and Islam’s bloody record throughout history, is wrong. The most shocking portions of this book detail the centuries-long and astonishingly bloody jihad against India. The Muslim invaders did not consider the Hindus of India to be “People of the Book” (the Quran’s designation for Jews, Christians, and several other groups), and so they treated them with appalling harshness and laid waste across the Indian subcontinent, destroying Hindu temples and building triumphal mosques wherever they could. Even when the Hindus were granted honorary “People of the Book” status, because there were simply too many of them to kill, the Muslims continued to behave toward them with exceptional brutality.

Spencer is one of the first in the Western world to tell this story, and he does so in the words of people who were there. The History of Jihad is full of the accounts of Muslim chroniclers who watched the jihadis slake their lust for blood and recorded their deeds for posterity, gleefully recounting their brutality as if it were heroism and martial glory. This reliance on eyewitness and contemporary accounts gives this book a shocking vividness -- you’re hearing about what happened from people who were there. There is none of the excuse-making and sugar-coating of modern-day historians, who, when they deign to take notice of the 1,400-year jihad at all, minimize its human toll and turn a blind eye to the innumerable lives and entire peoples that it has destroyed.

Even more important is how Spencer pulls all the various strands of the global jihad together, so that for the first time we can see...

ALL THE PRESIDENT’S HACKS: MEDIA FAKE NEWS FUELED OBAMA’S WATERGATE

FISA application shows how the media allowed Obama to eavesdrop on Republicans.

When Hillary Clinton cites the “intelligence community assessment” to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the presidential election, she’s really repeating her own lie, that her campaign created, rolled through the media and the government, which used it to spy on the Trump campaign, and then finally became an “assessment” under orders from Obama carried out by political allies like Clapper and Brennan.

The media, which once boasted of exposing Watergate, had played a key role in Obama’s Watergate.

The release of a redacted FISA warrant application exposes the fact that the spying on Carter Page, a figure associated with the Trump campaign, relied on no sources other than Democrats and media allies.

In 2016, an arm of the Clinton campaign began assembling a dossier claiming that the Trump campaign was seeking damaging information about it from the Russians. The dossier actually represented an effort by the Clinton campaign to seek damaging information from the Russians about the Trump campaign.

The man tasked with that job, a former British intelligence agent named Christopher Steele, then went on to accuse figures involved with the Trump campaign, of doing the very thing he had been hired to do.

One of those men was Carter Page.

The Steele dossier claimed that Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was using Carter Page as an intermediary to work with the Russians against Hillary Clinton. But it was Steele who had actually been hired by the Clinton campaign to get information from the Russians to use against Donald Trump.

The FISA application to eavesdrop on Page is based on Steele’s work and the media echo chamber created around it. The intelligence assessment, which former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper admitted had been carried out under Obama’s orders, has the same tainted origins.

A Democrat smear was used by a Democrat administration to undermine a Republican’s victory.

The FISA application bets everything on Steele, while trying to hedge its bets by citing news stories, because Steele’s allegations against Page are a much of a dog’s breakfast are the rest of the dossier.

Page is variously described as “generally non-committal”, as confirming that sanctions on Russia will be lifted, and as not stating explicitly that the sanctions will be lifted, but implying that they will be lifted.

(Trump actually imposed more sanctions on Russia than Obama.)

But despite Steele’s sloppiness, he was useful because his past with the Russians and the FBI meant that his claims could be used as the basis for a government investigation of the Trump campaign.

The Steele dossier claimed that the Russians had “agents/facilitators within the Democratic Party structure itself”. The existence of Russian spies within the DNC should have been a far more urgent matter for...

President Trump Hits Highest Approval Rating Ever In WSJ/NBC Poll

President Donald Trump has hit his highest approval rating ever in Wall Street Journal and NBC News' latest poll, despite unprecedented negative media coverage.

In the same week Trump was widely accused of "treason" by hysterical media pundits, deep state operatives and Democrat hacks for daring to question the same intelligence agencies which lied about WMDs in Iraq, Trump's overall approval rating moved up 1 point to 45 and those saying they "strongly approve" of the job he's doing jumped 3 points.

"The more Trump gets criticized by the media, the more his base seems to rally behind him," one Democratic pollster told NBC News.

This is what getting BTFO'd looks like:

Trump hasn't even begun to fight back. He told Tucker Carlson last week he's open to declassifying evidence of the deep state's crimes in the coming months (the president can declassify anything for any reason without...

Newly released documents confirm House and Senate investigators' claims that the Department of Justice and FBI used materially false and misleading information to secure wiretaps on Carter Page.

Newly released documents confirm House and Senate investigators’ claims that the Department of Justice and FBI used materially false and misleading information to secure wiretaps on Carter Page, a former volunteer foreign policy advisor to President Trump. The highly redacted documents released in response to Freedom of Information Act requests show how the FBI was able to convince the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to surveil the Naval Academy graduate and energy consultant for a year of his life.

The wiretap was applied for and granted in October 2016, shortly before the end of the presidential campaign. Approved applications last for 90 days. The Department of Justice requested and received three renewals, for a total of one year of surveillance. Despite claiming to the court in 2016 that “the FBI believes that Page has been collaborating and conspiring with the Russian Government,” the government has yet to charge Page with breaking any of the serious laws it alleges he knowingly transgressed.

Here is what the highly redacted FISA applications show us thus far:

The Dossier Provided an Essential Part Of Application

As members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and Senate Judiciary Committee previously reported, a salacious and unverified dossier was essential to the government’s case for spying on Page. The information from the dossier is presented to the court as if it’s believable.

For instance, the application states, “the FBI has learned that Page met with at least two Russian officials during this trip.” The only way it learned that was through the dossier. Steele’s claim that Page had a “secret meeting with Igor Sechin, who is the President of Rosneft [a Russian energy company] and a close associate to Russian President Putin” to lift sanctions is included.

Another secret meeting with Igor Nikolayevich Divyekin to discuss releasing dirt on “Candidate #2” to “Candidate #1’s campaign” is mentioned. Also, while Page had left the campaign by the time the wiretap was sought, it is clear that the FBI believed its wiretap would find information on the Trump campaign, stating that the “Russian government’s efforts are being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated” with the Trump campaign.

The Dossier Was Not Verified

As House and Senate members reported, there is no evidence the dossier was verified before being used in the applications. For instance, there is no evidence as of July 2018 that either of the two meetings above that Steele claimed happened ever occurred. There was obviously no verification of these claims in 2016, or even an indication that the FBI desired verification. Page has repeatedly denied that he met with...