“Enough talking about being tough on terrorism,” he snapped. “Actually be tough on terrorism and stop making it as easy as possible for terrorists to buy assault weapons.”
.. He said that U.S. Special Forces fighting on the ground in Iraq and Syria know full well who the enemy is, as do the intelligence and law-enforcement officials who spend “countless hours disrupting plots and protecting all Americans, including politicians who tweet”—here, he paused for effect—“and appear on cable-news shows.” There was, he added, “no magic to the phrase ‘radical Islam.’ It’s a political talking point; it’s not a strategy.”
.. Obama insisted that for him to resort to this sort of language would validate claims by groups like isis and Al Qaeda that America is at war with Islam. “That’s their propaganda; that’s how they recruit,” he said. “And if we fall into the trap of painting all Muslims with a broad brush and imply that we are at war with an entire religion, then we are doing the terrorists’ work for them.”
.. The shooters in the attacks in Orlando and Fort Hood, and one of the killers in San Bernardino, were all U.S. citizens, Obama noted. “Are we going to start treating all Muslim Americans differently? Are we going to start subjecting them to special surveillance? Are we going to start discriminating against them because of their faith? We’ve heard these suggestions during the course of this campaign. Do Republican officials actually agree with this?”
.. It was a Commander-in-Chief—flanked by a four-star general, Joseph Dunford, who is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and by James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence—making the case that Trump, and Trump’s approach to fighting terrorism, represent every bit as big a threat to the United States as the terrorists themselves do.
.. “We don’t have religious tests here. Our founders, our Constitution, our Bill of Rights are clear about that. And, if we ever abandon those values, we would not only make it a lot easier to radicalize people here and around the world but we would have betrayed the very things we were trying to protect: the pluralism and the openness, our rule of law, our civil liberties. The very things that make this country great. The very things that make us exceptional. And then the terrorists would have won. And we cannot let that happen. I will not let that happen.”
2016 Trump’s Qadhafi boast raises questions about charity claim Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/donald-trump-qadhafi-224203#ixzz4BKKo2nRD Follow us: @politico on Twitter | Politico on Facebook
The episode is one of a series of unverified claims of charitable giving.
Trump’s past pledges that the proceeds of his ill-fated vodka line, Trump Vodka, and of his 2015 campaign book, “Crippled America,” would go to charity are now also coming under scrutiny because of a lack of evidence that he followed through on them.
The Gray Swan Theory of Trump
If this theory is right, then in the fall campaign Trump would benefit more from economic jitters — stock market hiccups, a spike in gas prices — than he would from a sudden recession. He would benefit more from another spate of Islamic State beheadings than he would from a terrorist attack that required a major military response, and more from a continuing sense of immigration-driven instability in Europe than from, say, a real confrontation with Vladimir Putin over the Baltics.
.. He would want to campaign amid a persistent mood of instability, anxiety and dislocation, but one that didn’t make people so anxious that they started worrying about all the obvious ways that he might make things worse.
The Submission of America’s Elites
Alexis de Tocqueville, who a century and a half ago observed that nobles of the ancien régime “possessed annoying privileges, enjoyed rights that people found irksome but they safeguarded the public order, dispensed justice, had the law upheld, came to the help of the weak and directed public business.” But when “the nobility ceased to conduct these affairs, the weight of its privileges seemed more burdensome and its very existence was, in the end, no longer understandable.”
.. It is likely that other forces will intervene to preclude the wholesale transfer of France’s government and elite institutions to the Gulf States. Yet the Gulf State influence in Submission is not some dystopic future to be arrived at absent a course correction; it is very much part of the West’s present reality.
.. “Kuwait’s banking system and its money changers have long been a huge problem because they are a major conduit for money to extremist groups in Syria and now Iraq.” The money flowing into extremist groups and human rights violations have been documented copiously, with little change in U.S. policy.
.. Some experts estimate as much as $7 trillion from the U.S. alone to the Middle East in the last four decades.
.. Gulf Arab petro-nobility donate tens of millions to elite American universities and leading think tanks. The think tanks, of course, are well positioned to directly shape U.S. policy. “It is particularly egregious because with a law firm or lobbying firm, you expect them to be an advocate,” Joseph Sandler, an attorney and expert on foreign influence, told the New York Times’ Eric Lipton. “Think tanks have this patina of academic neutrality and objectivity, and that is being compromised.”