Caroline Glick weighs in:
Yet, for all its flaws and leaks, the damage caused to the nonproliferation system by American weakness toward Pakistan and North Korea is small potatoes in comparison to the destruction that Tuesday’s deal with Iran has wrought.
That deal doesn’t merely show that the US is unwilling to exact a price from states that illicitly develop nuclear weapons. The US and its allies just concluded a deal that requires them to facilitate Iran’s nuclear efforts.
Not only will the US and its allies remove the sanctions imposed on Iran over the past decade and so start the flow of some $150 billion to the ayatollahs’ treasury. They will help Iran develop advanced centrifuges.
They even committed themselves to protecting Iran’s nuclear facilities from attack and sabotage.
Under the deal, in five years, Iran will have unlimited access to the international conventional arms market. In eight years, Iran will be able to purchase and develop whatever missile systems it desires.
Because the deal permits Iran to develop advanced centrifuges, when the agreement ends in 10 years, Iran will be positioned to develop nuclear weapons immediately.
In other words, if Iran abides by the agreement, or isn’t punished for cheating on it, in 10 years, the greatest state sponsor of terrorism in the world will be rich, in possession of a modernized military, a ballistic missile arsenal capable of carrying nuclear warheads to any spot on earth, and the nuclear warheads themselves.
Facing this new nuclear reality, the states of the region, including Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and perhaps the emirates, will likely begin to develop nuclear arsenals. ISIS will likely use the remnants of the Iraqi and Syrian programs to build its own nuclear program.
Under one scenario, if Congress rejects the deal, Iran will walk away from it and intensify its nuclear activities in order to become a nuclear threshold state as quickly as possible. Since the deal has destroyed any potential international coalition against Iran’s illegal program, no one will bat a lash.
As a consequence, regardless of congressional action, Iran knows that it has a free hand to develop nuclear weapons at least until the next president is inaugurated on January 20, 2017.
Given that under all scenarios, Tuesday’s deal ensures that Iran will become a threshold nuclear power, it must be assumed that Iran’s neighbors will now seek their own nuclear options.
Amman and Cairo are under unprecedented threat.
In theory they can be toppled at any moment by jihadist forces, from the Muslim Brotherhood to ISIS. It’s already happened once in Egypt.
The same considerations apply to Saudi Arabia.
Given Israel’s limited military options, we will soon find ourselves living under constant nuclear threat. Under these new circumstances, Israel must invest every possible effort in developing and deploying active nuclear defenses.
One key aspect to this is missile defense systems, which Israel is already developing. But nuclear bombs can be launched in any number of ways. Old fashioned bombs dropped from airplanes are one option. Artillery is another. Even suicide trucks are good for the job.
Israel needs to develop the means to defend itself against all of these delivery mechanisms. At the same time, we will need to operate in hostile countries such as Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere to destroy deliveries of nuclear materiel whether transferred by air, sea or land.
Here is the place to mention that Israel still may have the ability to attack Iran’s nuclear sites. If it does, then it should attack them as quickly and effectively as possible.
No, a successful Israeli attack cannot turn back the clock. Israel cannot replace the US as a regional superpower, dictating policy to our neighbors. But a successful attack on Iran’s nuclear program along with the adoption of a vigilantly upheld strategy of active nuclear defense can form the basis of a successful Israeli nuclear defense system.
And no, Israel shouldn’t be overly concerned with how Obama will respond to such actions.
How will he punish Israel for defying him? By signing a nuclear deal with Iran that destroys 70 years of US nonproliferation strategy, allows the Iranian regime to grow rich on sanctions relief, become a regional hegemon while expanding its support for terrorism and develop nuclear weapons? Years from now, perhaps historians will point out the irony that Obama, who loudly proclaims his goal of making the world free of nuclear weapons, has ushered in an era of mass nuclear proliferation and chaos.
Israel can ill afford the luxury of pondering irony.
One day the nuclear Furies Obama has unleashed may find their way to New York City.
But their path to America runs through Israel. We need to ready ourselves to destroy them before they cross our border.
The last week has provided a sad but worthwhile opportunity to assess the global elite, the heads of state and government, the bankers and journalists and celebrities, as they worked overtime to preserve a veneer of progress and stability. From Athens to Beijing, D.C. to Vienna, the desire has been to avoid tough decisions, to prolong deliberation, to pretend as though dangerous emerging trends do not exist. To take action, to provoke, to choose, to commit, to fight, to admit reality would be far too disruptive, would cost too much, and would endanger the social positions our best and brightest have worked so mightily to attain. Better for them to wait things out.
The Iran deal is a fabulous artifice, an intricately woven shawl that masks its real intent: the avoidance of military confrontation with Iran and the rise of Persian regional hegemony.
The Iran deal isn’t an accomplishment. It required no sacrifice. Both sides wanted a deal: Iran to receive sanctions relief and assert its national pride, Obama to forestall having to take action, to prove diplomacy can work, to entertain the possibility of true détente with a longtime adversary. And both sides got what they wanted: Iran its money, weapons, missiles, and nuclear infrastructure intact, Obama a “legacy” item that allows him to smear Republicans and Israelis as warmongers. Obama says he’s aware of the nature of the Iranian regime, but he chooses to ignore that nature if it wins him plaudits from the international Left and breathing room before an Iranian bomb. The deal is a finely wrought escape pod for Obama and Kerry: get out of town in 2017 on your high horse, your sanctimony and idealism unblemished.
Willfully optimistic about Iranian intentions, knowingly blind to Iranian malfeasance, to Iran’s murder of our soldiers, its imprisonment of our citizens, the deal is a rather stunning example of the lengths to which our elites will go in order to preserve the fiction of common interests, of the “international community,” of the power of engagement to liberalize autocracies.
Iran’s proxies are sowing chaos, its missile program is active, its adversarial posture toward Israel and America and the West is unbroken, and, as Jim Webb put it, “After a period of ten years they are going to be able to say that they can move forward with a nuclear weapons policy with our acceptance.”
What we have in the Iran deal is another instance of the ruling caste distorting reality to suit its ideological preferences.
So much elite discourse resembles the game “let’s pretend” that it’s become difficult to restate what is true and what is false.
Let’s act as if Iran negotiates in good faith, as if Greece can remain in the Euro, as if the Chinese have their economic situation under control, as if immigration policy had nothing to do with the murder of Kate Steinle, as if the Islamic State can be destroyed without major American involvement, as if you can promote racial antagonism and animosity toward police without an increase in crime and disorder, as if Hillary Clinton excites the Democratic party, as if the Confederate flag was responsible for an act of racial terrorism in Charleston, as if we shouldn’t apply moral standards to Planned Parenthood’s traffic in fetal tissue, as if Caitlyn Jenner, peace be upon her, is more courageous than Lauren Hill or Noah Galloway. And let’s do all of this without considering the tradeoffs and missed opportunities, the externalities and sunk costs, of maintaining a culture grounded in wish fulfillment and infantilization.
There is, after all, only so much self-delusion a society can take before it loses its mind.
We are rapidly approaching that limit.
Mitchelle Blair, not knowing what to do with the bodies of two of her children, whom she had murdered, stuffed them in her freezer. She’d tortured them for months first — strangling them, suffocating them with plastic bags until they passed out, starving them, burning them with boiling water.
She said she killed her son by accident; she’d intended to torture him further. Her daughter she killed on purpose.
"If I had the chance to do it again, I would,” the mother said. Pleading guilty, she asked the court to impose the death penalty on her. Prosecutors regretfully informed her that Michigan has no death penalty.
Of course the children had different fathers. Of course this was in Detroit. Of course they all resided in a beyond-dismal housing project called the Martin Luther King Homes, a pit of despair that those of us whose faith is less than unshakeable might in our weakness suspect has been abandoned by the One of Whom the Reverend King was a minister.
Dr. Deborah Nucatola has had a different sort of life. She doesn’t live in low-income housing in Detroit; she practices medicine in Los Angeles. She works as the director of medical services for Planned Parenthood and also is employed by another firm founded by a former White House staffer in the Obama administration who, naturally, became a federal contractor.
Nucatola also is responsible for putting some children in the freezer — not two, but millions.
In a now-infamous video, Nucatola discusses — over lunch in a Los Angeles restaurant — how Planned Parenthood facilitates trafficking in fetal organs and tissue. She discusses prices and confesses that Planned Parenthood’s doctors are happy to alter care in order to further the organization’s organ harvesting, for example using ultrasound where they ordinarily wouldn’t, in order to prevent damage to valuable organs. In her own words:
So then you’re just kind of cognizant of where you put your graspers, you try to intentionally go above and below the thorax, so that, you know, we’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I’m not gonna crush that part, I’m going to basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact. And with the calvarium, in general, some people will actually try to change the presentation so that it’s not vertex, because when it’s vertex presentation, you never have enough dilation at the beginning of the case, unless you have real, huge amount of dilation to deliver an intact calvarium.
“Calvarium” is the sterile way of saying “head.” “Vertex presentation” means head-first delivery, i.e. the normal presentation. What she’s talking about here is repositioning the baby in the womb to enable more effective organ harvesting.
Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards is the daughter of the late Texas governor Ann Richards, whose dedication to the cause of dismembering unborn children was absolute. Richards says that Planned Parenthood regrets the “tone” of Nucatola’s lunch-table conversation. But that blasé tone is not alien to the organization: A former Planned Parenthood clinic director tells of being mystified that in her clinic various keypads and passwords were set to 2229 — “Spells out ‘baby,’” a staffer helpfully informed her. The garbage truck that hauled away the clinic’s “products of conception” — human scraps — was mockingly referred to by staffers as “the nursery.”
It is possible for human life to be reduced to a very, very low level. Survivors of famines and totalitarian prison camps tell of doing things and seeing things done that they would never have imagined civilized people, themselves included, capable of. “If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God), you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin,” T. S. Eliot wrote. Horrible things happen to people — no, that isn’t quite right: Horrible things are done to people. Detroit is not the Jiabiangou Labor Camp, and lunch in sunny Los Angeles is not the Arduous March. These are free people in the most prosperous and peaceful nation this world has ever known, and these butchers might have chosen anything.
This is what they chose.
Human beings are not lumps of labor. They are not capital, consumer goods, taxpayers, commodities — or meat. The philosophy of Planned Parenthood (and Eros is a jealous god) is the philosophy of men-as-meat, and that philosophy is not long compatible with liberty and human dignity. When Erich Fromm wrote his famous book on the dream of religion without deity, he titled it “You Shall Be as Gods.” The truth is that without an understanding of the uniqueness of human beings and the consequent value of every human life, you will not be as gods — you will be as meat.
And meat gets butchered, packaged, and sold. It gets stuffed in the freezer.
Islamic State have established a stronghold in mainland Europe, a Sunday Mirror investigation reveals.
Terrorists are secretly buying land in an isolated village, surrounded by deep woodland.
Security services think the area in Bosnia is used for ISIS training camps and could be a base for devastating terror attacks on the West.
Crucially, the location gives IS a key strategic position due to its proximity to the Mediterranean which is used by extremists from Syria, Iraq and North Africa.
At least 12 ISIS fighters trained in the village of Osve have left for Syria in recent months and five are reported to be dead.
Terror expert Dzevad Galijasevic said: “From this village a large number of people went to Syria and are going constantly.
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