Sun News Trolls Feminist Campaigners, Brings Back 'Page 3'

Hey, this is great!

On Twitter.

And at Telegraph UK, "The Sun brings back page 3":

The tabloid prints a picture of a topless model on page three under the headline 'clarifications and corrections'.

The Sun has printed a topless model on Page 3, ending days of speculation that the feature was dead.

The newspaper has tweeted out a picture of Thursday’s Page 3 which features a topless woman, with a notice underneath saying: “Further to recent reports in all other media outlets, we would like to clarify that this is Page 3 and this is a picture of Nicole, 22, from Bournemouth.

“We would like to apologise on behalf of the print and broadcast journalists who have spent the last two days talking and writing about us.”

The campaign group No More Page 3, which began in 2012 and attracted 217,000 signatures to a petition calling for a ban, acknowledged that "the fight might be back on".

Topless women have been a fixture on Page 3 of the Sun for more than four decades.

However it was understood that executives at the tabloid had decided to quietly shelve the tradition after a growing army of critics branded it sexist.

Rather than bare breasts, it was thought that the pictures would now show scantily-clad women wearing bras and pants.

Over the past three days, there have been no topless models on Page 3, fuelling speculation the feature was on its way out. This appeared to be confirmed by a report in The Times, a fellow News UK paper, on Tusday.

In Monday's issue of The Sun, the model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley was shown wearing Marks & Spencer underwear.

Tuesday’s first edition had a photograph of two bikini-wearing actresses running on a beach, which was later replaced by four pages on Anne Kirkbride, the Coronation Street actress who had died the previous evening.

Pages 2 and 3 of Wednesday's paper were taken up by a Sainsbury’s advert, but Page 5 ran a comparison of cosmetic surgery undertaken by two Celebrity Big Brother contestants, featuring Katie Price and Alicia Douvall wearing garments which left little to the imagination.

Topless models were first introduced by the Sun in 1970, less than a year after Rupert Murdoch bought the title.

In recent years, the paper has faced growing criticism from campaigners who said the feature was out of date in the modern world.

Note that it's not just topless women.

The "no on page 3" campaign wants to ban all women from appearing in the paper. They're freakin' totalitarians!

UPDATE: Linked at Instapundit! Thanks!

VIDEO: Palestinian Man Stabs Israelis in Tel Aviv Attack (GRAPHIC)

Elise Labott has the report at CNN below. At the clip, the attacker sinks his knife into a woman quite deep. He has to yank on it to get it to pull back out. Sickening.

And see the New York Times, via Memeorandum, "Palestinian Man Stabs Israelis on Bus in Tel Aviv, Police Say."

And see the Times of Israel, "Hamas leaders praise Tel Aviv stabbing as ‘heroic’":

Cartoon depicting bloodied knife colored as the Palestinian flag zooms around the Internet.

Hamas leaders on Wednesday took to social media to praise a stabbing attack in Tel Aviv that morning, expressing hopes that similar attacks will follow.

Three weeks after an instructional video on stabbing attributed to Hamas emerged online, movement members gleefully extolled the bus assault, heralding it as a sign of things to come.

“A morning of resistance, a morning for the nation,” wrote Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum on his Facebook page, above a photo of a black-handled combat knife lying on the pavement encircled by police tape.

Gaza-based Hamas official Husam Badran praised the act on Facebook as “extraordinary” and called for more “acts of resistance” either by individuals or groups.

Izzat al-Rishq, a member of Hamas’s political bureau based in Qatar, called the attack “heroic and brave,” adding that it is “the natural response to the crimes of the occupation and its terror against our people.”

Spoken like true "peace partners."

Also, "Tel Aviv stabber wanted to ‘reach paradise’." Of course. It's was a jihad martyrdom attack.

Plus, bloody video of the jihadist, "Tel Aviv Terrorist After his Arrest."

We Don't Need to Pay More Gas Taxes

From the editors, at the O.C. Register:

Some members of Congress – apparently intent on ensuring that no positive development in American life goes unpunished – have had a surprising reaction to the steep decline in gas prices that has taken place in recent months: It’s time to make fueling your car more expensive.

That’s the message coming from many Democrats and a handful of Senate Republicans – foremost amongst them Tennessee’s Bob Corker, who joined with Connecticut Democrat Chris Murphy to propose increasing the levy by 12 cents over two years and indexing it to inflation. Other members of the GOP – Sen. John Thune of South Dakota and Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, for instance – have refused to rule out such a proposal.

We’re not unsympathetic to the underlying concern in this case. The federal gas tax – currently 18.4 cents per gallon – hasn’t been raised since 1993. That’s salient because the revenue from the tax goes to finance the Highway Trust Fund, the mechanism by which the feds fund transportation infrastructure projects. Without a doubt, these kinds of expenditures represent a legitimate use of public money.

Equally unquestionable is that there are serious problems besetting the fund. Current estimates have it facing a shortfall of $160 billion over the next decade. Moreover, much of the country’s infrastructure is in dire need of a facelift.

However, this is more than a question of simple economics. It’s a question as to how best to organize public finance. We believe that federal money ought only to be spent for truly federal purposes. On that front, the Highway Trust Fund falls short.

Originally organized to finance the Interstate Highway System – a genuinely federal project if ever there was one – the fund now suffers from severe mission creep. About a quarter of its revenues aren’t even spent on highway projects, going, instead, to decidedly local concerns like mass transit or bicycle paths. According to congressional testimony from the Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards, that spending adds up to about $9 billion a year.

As John Marshall observed, “the power to tax is the power to destroy.” That’s why we regard any proposal for higher levies with caution. We believe that tax increases are only ever justified when the federal government can prove three things: 1) That it is only spending public money on legitimate public purposes; 2) that it is not spending public money on tasks better left to state and local governments; and 3) that it is spending public money efficiently. The Highway Trust Fund fails on all three counts...

Raising gas taxes precisely as Americans get a break is particularly sleazy as well.

Still more.

Santa Barbara News-Press Won't Back Down on 'Illegals'

Good.

At LAT, "Amid outcry, News-Press is adamant on provocative term for immigrants":

A few decades ago, it wasn't unusual for American newspapers to refer to people living in the United States without legal permission as "illegal aliens," or even "illegals."

Those terms were criticized as offensive and eventually gave way to "illegal immigrant," a label that itself was jettisoned by most outlets two years ago, when the Associated Press banned the term from its stylebook in favor of language that more precisely describes a person's immigration status.

That approach — adopted by The Times in 2013 — seemed to have taken root and defused the criticism in most places. But the local newspaper's decision to call such immigrants "illegals" has turned idyllic Santa Barbara into an unlikely flashpoint in the nation's immigration battles.

The News-Press ran the headline "Illegals Line Up for Driver's Licenses" on Jan. 3, prompting protests and a message painted in red on the wall of the newspaper's offices. The paper used the term again last Friday in another front page story: "Driving Legal Opens Door to Illegals' Past."

News-Press officials have stuck by their choice of language, saying that describing someone living in the country illegally as an "illegal" is accurate, and compared the vandalism on their offices to the deadly attack on the Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris.

"We will not give in to the thugs who are attempting to use political correctness as a tool of censorship and a weapon to shut down this newspaper," News-Press co-publisher Arthur von Wiesenberger wrote on the website of the Minuteman Project, which opposes illegal immigration.

But community groups have denounced the newspaper, calling for an advertising boycott.

"They have a racist perspective and they don't seem very apologetic about it," said Savanah Maya, a Santa Barbara City College student and member of People Organizing for the Defense and Equal Rights of Santa Barbara Youth.

The dispute erupted anew Monday, when protesters for and against the newspaper staged dueling rallies in a downtown plaza.

Using the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday as a backdrop for their positions framed as human rights and freedom of speech issues, one side argued that the headline was racist and the other argued that it was an accurate description of immigrants applying for driver's licenses without having to prove citizenship. The licenses became available under a state law that took effect Jan. 1.

The two sides had limited interaction during the peaceful rallies, which attracted several hundred people. Police put up a temporary fence to separate the groups.

"I respect their right to free speech," said City Councilwoman Cathy Murillo, who attended the pro-immigrant rally, "but they don't have to be hateful. It's like the 'N-word' for blacks."

The rally in support of the News-Press was staged by We the People Rising, a Claremont-based group that favors tough enforcement of laws against illegal immigration.

"They should be allowed to decide the type of language they want to use," said Robin Hvidston, executive director of We the People Rising. "They have a right to use that word. Where do you stop?"

The News-Press, which began in 1855, has experienced diminished goodwill in the community since 2006, when reporters and editors began departing en masse, citing editorial meddling from billionaire owner and publisher Wendy McCaw.

Don Katich, director of news operations for the News-Press, said Monday that the newspaper has used the word "illegals" for a decade to describe immigrants in the United States without permission, and does not plan on changing its policy despite criticism or financial pressure.

He said that the federal government uses the word online and on official documents, and that a vast majority of people agree that it's an appropriate term.

"It accurately describes the 800-pound gorilla in this whole story," Katich said. "People are in this country illegally.… I think that's why this has tapped a national nerve."...

More.

Video here: "Santa Barbara News-Press Protested by Open Border Extremists."

BONUS: At Michelle Malkin's, "Attack of the Open-Borders Mau-Mau-ers":

News-Press publisher Wendy McCaw told me this week that the free speech-stifling thugs “have threatened to return on January 19 to deliver a petition and stage another protest against us if we do not offer a retraction by 3 p.m. that day.” McCaw vows she will not bend to the ultimatum or any other — and she has a track record to prove her toughness.

McCaw has defied the progressive forces of political correctness for years in previous First Amendment battles over whom she should hire and how she should run her newspaper. Radical elements in her community and industry have long held a grudge against her and her paper for resisting union pressure and refusing to conform to left-wing orthodoxy.
And boy, do these people know how to hold grudges.

In addition to the paint bombs, unhinged mau-mau-ers spray-painted a radical Reconquista slogan on the News-Press building: “The border is illegal, not the people who cross it.”

Yes, they’re still trying to re-fight the Mexican-American War of 1848 and re-litigate the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. No surprise. Santa Barbara has been a longstanding hotbed of tribal grievance politics. In the late 1960s, liberal Latinos at the University of California at Santa Barbara unveiled El Plan de Aztlan, which states:

“We do not recognize capricious frontiers on the bronze continent. Brotherhood unites us, and love for our brothers makes us a people whose time has come and who struggles against the foreigner ‘gabacho’ who exploits our riches and destroys our culture. With our heart in our hands and our hands in the soil, we declare the independence of our mestizo nation. We are a bronze people with a bronze culture.”

The Aztlan plan birthed Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (MEChA) — an identity politics indoctrination machine on publicly subsidized college and high school campuses nationwide whose members have rioted in Los Angeles and editorialized that federal immigration “pigs should be killed, every single one” in San Diego.

As I’ve reported previously, the MEChA Constitution calls on members to “promote Chicanismo within the community, politicizing our Raza (race) with an emphasis on indigenous consciousness to continue the struggle for the self-determination of the Chicano people for the purpose of liberating Aztlan.” “Aztlan” is the group’s term for the vast southwestern U.S. expanse, from parts of Washington and Oregon down to California and Arizona and over to Texas, which MEChA claims to be a mythical homeland and seeks to reconquer for Mexico.

MEChA’s symbol is an eagle clutching a dynamite stick and a machete-like weapon in its claws; its motto is “Por La Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada.” Translation: For the Race, everything. For those outside the Race, nothing.”

Tell me who the racists are again.

PREVIOUSLY: "Leftist Open-Borders Vigilantes Attack Santa-Barbara News-Press for Accurately Identifying Illegal Aliens."

Joni Ernst's Camouflage Pumps

From Jennifer Jacobs, on Twitter: "Check out the shoes Iowa U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst is wearing tonight for her State of the Union rebuttal."

Plus, "Reaction on Joni Ernst's camo heels is mixed."

Packing Time for France's Jews

From Bret Stephens, at WSJ:

Should French Jews move out? Does it make sense for a community that, in this century, has lost roughly 10 people to jihad in France, to pack up and go to Israel—where jihadis have claimed more than 1,000 Jewish lives? Haven’t the leaders of the Fifth Republic demonstrated in word and deed that they are committed to the protection of Jewish property and life?

The answer to that last question is yes, they have. The problem isn’t the Fifth Republic, in which French Jews have, on the whole, thrived. The problem is the arrival, sooner or later, of the Sixth. Which is why French Jews need to leave sooner rather than later, despite the disruption and risk, while the exits are not blocked and the way is still open.

Perhaps inadvertently, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls made the basic point last week when he told his Parliament that “history has taught us that the awakening of anti-Semitism is a symptom of a crisis for democracy and of a crisis for the Republic.” Very true, but if anti-Semitism is the symptom of the crisis, then ringing Jewish schools, synagogues, groceries and neighborhoods with gendarmes is not its cure. Necessity is proof of insufficiency.

So what is the crisis of France’s democracy and Republic?

Partly it’s political: Every Fifth Republic presidency (with the arguable exception of François Mitterrand’s) has ended in failure. Partly it’s economic: Since 1978, French economic growth has clocked in at an average rate of 0.45%; unemployment hasn’t fallen below 7% in over 30 years. Partly it’s ideological: Égalité begat egalitarianism, and egalitarianism is what animates the politics of envy. Partly it’s cultural: Too many French Muslims don’t want to conform to the norms of modern society, and too many French don’t want to conform to the realities of a globalized world. When National Front leader Marine Le Pen says “the multinational interests that impose their own ways are not good for France,” she is attempting to stuff the French body politic into an economic burqa.

Above all, it’s cumulative. Similar-size countries like Germany or Britain have had their highs and lows in recent decades, periods of growth or recession, feelings of confidence or malaise. French decline has been constant, unrelieved, embittering. “In one of my finance seminars, every single French student intends to go abroad,” Sorbonne economics Prof. Jacques Régniez told the Daily Telegraph in 2013. It isn’t just the Jews who want out.

But it’s especially the Jews who need out.

They need out because they are threatened from too many corners. A current French best seller, “Le Suicide Français,” by journalist Éric Zemmour, makes the case that the collaborationist Vichy regime gets a bad rap. France’s most notorious comedian, Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, took to Facebook after last week’s solidarity marches to say “I feel like Charlie Coulibaly, ” conflating “Je Suis Charlie” with Amedy Coulibaly, the kosher-supermarket killer. The French Parliament reacted to Hamas’s summer war on Israel by voting last month to recognize, albeit symbolically, a Palestinian state.

“Anti-Semitism still crops up in casual conversation in a way that would be rare in England or America,” observes Jonathan Fenby in the updated edition of his 1999 book, “France on the Brink.” One example Mr. Fenby offers is especially notable.

“In 2013 a comedian introduced a Jewish actor on a popular television show with the words ‘You never plunged into [Jewish] communitarianism. . . . You could have posted yourself in the street selling jeans and diamonds from the back of a minivan saying, “Israel is always right, f— Palestinians.” You show it is possible to be of the Jewish faith without being completely disgusting.’ ” This was supposed to be a compliment.

All this takes place while the Fifth Republic remains essentially intact. Some comparisons have been made between this month’s attacks in Paris and the attacks of 9/11, but that’s wildly overblown. The Eiffel Tower did not fall. Seventeen dead is not 3,000.

But what happens when the real crisis hits—not necessarily in the form of a mass-casualty attack on a Jewish target, but perhaps an election that brings Ms. Le Pen to power, or a systemic banking crisis that discovers a Jewish villain, or an economic crisis that inspires a more confiscatory tax policy? French history is a tale of stagnation punctured by crisis: 1789, 1830, 1848, 1871, 1940, 1958, 1968. Another crisis is overdue.

What such a crisis might bring in its wake is anyone’s guess, but French Jews should not stick around to find out. In the 20th century, Jewish fate was split between those who got out in time and those who didn’t. There’s no reason why that won’t be the case in this century as well...

Stephens is hardly the only one making this argument, that the Jews should get out. He is the only one arguing the French Fifth Republic is doomed. And there I expect he's onto something, big time.

Keep reading.

Obama Declares End to Economic Crisis — #SOTU

O phoned it in. Yawn.

At WSJ, "In State of the Union, Obama Makes Middle-Class Pitch: President Lays Out Steps to Aid Moderate-Income Americans to a Skeptical Congress":

WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama on Tuesday night declared an end to the U.S. economic crisis as he made the case to Americans, and a skeptical Congress, that now is time to shift focus to resolving the most stubborn impediment to a full-fledged recovery: lagging progress among the middle class.

In his annual State of the Union address, Mr. Obama outlined a broad vision for his remaining two years in office, emphasizing what he described as “middle-class economics” and making a personal plea for lawmakers of both parties to “commit ourselves to an economy that generates rising incomes and chances for everyone who makes the effort.”

“The shadow of crisis has passed,” Mr. Obama said. “At this moment—with a growing economy, shrinking deficits, bustling industry, and booming energy production—we have risen from recession freer to write our own future than any other nation on Earth.”

The president’s vision, however, faced a deeply uncertain path in a Congress that for the first time in his presidency is fully controlled by Republicans, as it hinges on raising taxes on high-income Americans to fund initiatives to benefit those at lower income levels.

Mr. Obama also declared that U.S. leadership and military intervention “is stopping” the advance of Islamic State militants and call on Congress to pass a resolution authorizing force against the group. And Mr. Obama called on Congress to pass legislation to toughen cybersecurity.

Republicans and Democrats alike cite a stagnant middle class as the most vexing economic problem facing the country, but GOP lawmakers have long opposed Mr. Obama’s call for tax increases on wealthier Americans to fund programs that benefit those further down the income scale. Still, the two parties’ shared interest in speaking more directly to economic anxiety and wage stagnation has the potential to push them to find common ground. Mr. Obama’s plan also extends the discussion beyond corporate taxation to include individual taxes, as Republicans want.

New Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) said Mr. Obama’s expected proposal to raise taxes on high-income Americans—$320 billion over 10 years—damped hopes for making progress on an overhaul of the tax code. But underscoring the prospects for deal-making, remote as they may be, Mr. McConnell didn’t rule out an eventual compromise on taxes. He also cited trade pacts and cybersecurity legislation as potential areas of agreement with the president.

“The American people aren’t demanding talking-point proposals designed to excite the base but not designed to pass” in Congress, Mr. McConnell said. “What they said they’re hungry for is substance and accomplishment. They want Washington to get back to work and focus on a serious jobs and reform agenda.”

The coming months will tell how far Mr. Obama and GOP leaders might go in pushing their parties’ core supporters to compromise for the sake of agreement on taxes and other matters. Mr. Obama has primarily shown interest in pushing his party only on one issue recently—to allow easier passage of trade deals that he and most Republicans support.

Only a handful of Democrats have come forward to support the renewal of legislation for trade-promotion authority, known as fast track, which would ease the passage of a trade pact with Japan and 10 other Pacific nations, as well as a trade deal with the European Union...

More.

And at USA Today, "Analysis: A better economy, a more hostile Congress."

#MSNBC Hosts Lead Chorus of Vile Misogynist Tweets Against Republican Joni Ernst

Predictable.

At Sooper Mexican.

Argentine Prosecutor Alberto Nisman Found Dead

I had this story linked at the sidebar News Item Finder, "Argentine Prosecutor Found Dead Just Before Releasing Report on Cover Up of 1994 Bombing."

I'm pulling this over to the front page because it's so interesting.

See David Horovitz, at the Times of Israel, "Alberto Nisman committed suicide? Let’s kill that lie":

When I sat down Monday to write about the appalling death of the courageous Buenos Aires prosecutor who exposed the Iranian and Hezbollah orchestration of the 1994 AMIA bombing, I didn’t even mention the Argentinian authorities’ initial contention that Alberto Nisman had committed suicide, so insulting and ridiculous was the notion.

A day later, however, and the preposterous idea that Nisman took his own life has become the Argentinian authorities’ dominant assertion. Let’s kill that lie stone dead. Alberto Nisman was no suicide.

(That he was forced to put a gun to his own head, a possibility left open by the Argentinian investigating prosecutor, is quite plausible, however. But that’s not suicide; that’s murder.)

I’ve just come back from a conversation with the Argentinian-born Israeli author Gustavo Perednik, who wrote a book last year about the AMIA case — “To Kill Without A Trace” — and was a good friend of Nisman’s. “It’s rubbish. It’s lies,” Perednik says briskly of the despicable suicide claim.

Perednik, who was in constant contact with Nisman and last met with him in Buenos Aires a month ago, notes that both Nisman’s personality and the timing of his death render the suicide notion beyond risible.

Nisman the man was a tennis-playing optimist who loved and enjoyed life, who spoke of his separation from his long-term partner a year ago as a “liberation,” and who was utterly dedicated to his work, notes Perednik. He was a man who firmly shrugged off death threats, was balanced, and focused, and decent, and fine.

As for the timing, Perednik despairs at the naivete of anyone prepared to countenance that a prosecutor who has spent a decade heading a 30-strong team investigating the worst terror attack ever committed in Argentina; who has identified the Iranian leaders who ordered it and had them placed on Interpol watch lists; who has traced and named the Hezbollah terrorists who carried out the bombing; who has exposed Iran’s still-active terror networks in South America; and who was about to detail the alleged efforts of Argentinian President Cristina Fernández and Foreign Minister Hector Timerman to whitewash Iran’s role — that this man would choose to take his own life just a few hours before giving his testimony to a Congressional hearing.

But Nisman was found dead by “self-inflicted” bullet wound in a locked apartment with no sign of forced entry, the Argentinian authorities say? Perednik is succinct and withering about both motivation and capability: Does anyone doubt that a government capable of whitewashing Iran is capable of producing a dead prosecutor in a locked apartment? he asks. “In our last conversation, Nisman told me that his evidence would either force [those top Argentinian leaders] to flee or send them to jail. He told me, ‘I’m going to put them in jail.'” Sunday was their last chance to stop him...

Keep reading.

Also, "Who will obtain justice for Alberto Nisman?"

'This is a man who wants to punish the rich regardless of its effect on the economy...'

From the inimitable Charles Krauthammer:



Hat Tip: Legal Insurrection.

'Page 3' Models Lead Backlash Against 'Comfy Shoe-Wearing, No Bra-Wearing, Man-Haters...'

And Ms. Rhian Sugden is leading the "Page 3" models. I RT'd her early this morning.

At Telegraph UK:

It's only a matter of time before everything we do will be dictated by comfy shoe wearing... No bra wearing... man haters #page3

— Rhian Sugden (@Rhianmarie) January 20, 2015

Page 3 girls have led the backlash against The Sun's decision to end its topless tradition, claiming the move has been "dictated by comfy shoe-wearing, no bra-wearing, man-haters".

Model Rhian Sugden, 28, criticised at the move, suggesting it was "only a matter of time" before everything they did was dictated by such people.

Former glamour model Jodie Marsh insisted that "telling girls they shouldn't do Page 3 is not being a feminist".
She said she "loved" posing for Page 3 and that it made her feel powerful and earned her good money.
"Women should empower and encourage other women," she wrote on Twitter. "For that is the only way to truly be 'equal' and have rights..."

She said campaigners should focus on more important issues that affect women, such as female genital mutilation.

Former glamour model Nicola McLean said she did not think Page 3 was a "sexual equality" issue.

She told ITV's Good Morning Britain: "It has been going for many years, which is one of the reasons I feel so sad that it has seemingly come to an end.

"I don't think it is outdated. I think the girls still look fantastic on the page, they still clearly enjoy what they are doing, people still want to see it.

"Everybody still wants Page 3, apart from the feminists who are fighting an argument I just don't agree with.

"If you meet any Page 3 girl who has gone on to pose for the Sun, we are all very strong-minded women that have made our own choice and feel very happy with what we are doing.

"We certainly don't feel like we have been victimised."

More.

Plus, from yesterday, "Britain's Sun News Cancels 'Page 3' Topless Girls."

No Myth: The Urgent Reality of Dangerous French 'No-Go Zones' (VIDEO)

Seems to me that left and right could come together on the problem of the French "no-go zones."

Frankly, the fact that French Arab and North African Muslims often reside in dangerous ethnic enclaves would challenge treasured leftist ideals of assimilation and upward mobility. And it's not like the problem of Muslim segregation in France is anything new. Anyone remotely familiar with French politics would have long recognized the banlieues as distinct demographic areas notorious for crime and unrest. Indeed, the day after the Paris attacks, Donald Morrison commented on the banlieues as "no-go zones" at the left-wing New Republic:

Visitors to Paris—and there are plenty in this, the world’s most beautiful city (I’m biased; I’ve lived here a decade)—sometimes stumble across the neighborhood where Charlie Hebdo’s offices are located. It’s an agreeable part of town, not far from the Place de la Bastille, with a Brooklyn-y mix of workers and hipsters, traditional shops and trendy bistros. Like the rest of central Paris, it is mostly white and prosperous.

It's also vastly unlike what you might call the real Paris, the tourist-free area where 80 percent of Parisians live: that doughnut of banlieues, on the other side of the Périphérique ring road. The word banlieue ("suburb") now connotes a no-go zone of high-rise slums, drug-fueled crime, failing schools and poor, largely Muslim immigrants and their angry offspring. The banlieues erupted in 1981 and in 2005, when rioters burned hundreds of cars and President Nicolas Sarkozy threatened to clean out the area with a high-pressure hose. He did not mention that the vast majority of its residents are French citizens, speak perfect French and, unlike his father, were born in France.

It is there, and in the banlieues that blight other French cities, that attention is likely to focus once the shock of this week’s attack subsides. Early reports have pointed to two men as suspects-at-large: brothers Chérif Kouachi, 32, and Said Kouachi, 34. That they were born in Paris will spare them no scorn. The incident comes as France is tearing itself apart over questions of immigration and identity. The United States and much of Europe are having similar debates; in France, the fight is intensified by a toxic mix of politics and history, idealism and ideology...

Keep reading, but you get the picture.

Shoot, the French government established official "sensitive urban zones" as distinct demographic zones in 1996. These are discussed in official French sources, for example, at the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies, "Sensitive urban zone / ZUS." And at the SIG du Secrétariat Général du Comité Interministériel, "Atlas des Zones urbaines sensibles (Zus)."

And see the Christian Broadcasting Network report from almost a year ago, "Native French Under Attack in Muslim Areas":

PARIS -- Violent crime can happen anywhere and to anyone and for many reasons, but in Muslim-controlled parts of France, it has become especially dangerous to be white.

Surveillance camera video shows white French being beaten up by predominantly Muslim immigrant gangs in the Metro and on the street.

Islamic immigrants consider it their territory and whites enter at their own risk. The French call them "sensitive urban zones" -- no-go zones where the police don't enter or don't enforce the law.

Some call them little Muslim caliphates inside the borders of France.

"And it's like that because these parts of the country are in the hands of drug traffickers, gangs and imams [Islamic leaders]," French commentator Guy Milliere explained.

A French report says almost 1 in 5 French have been victims of racist insults or worse. A few cases have even gone to trial.

"Some of those who launch racist attacks on whites use Islam as the reason they do it. They may not even speak Arabic, but they still use Islam as a 'flag,'" Tarik Yildiz, a French sociologist, said.

Yildiz, author of the book, Anti-White Racism, is not native French but is the son of Turkish immigrants.

"My book is viewed as politically incorrect and breaks a taboo: the idea that immigrants could oppress whites," Yildez said.

And still more, from Soren Kern, at the Gatestone Institute, "European 'No-Go' Zones: Fact or Fiction? Part 1: France."

But of course none of this will suffice for the radical, terror-enabling leftists now demonizing Fox News for speaking the truth to the no-go zones. It turns out French television mocked Fox, and now the Mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo says she will sue the network for defamation. See Politico, "City of Paris to sue Fox News," and CNN, via Memeorandum, "Paris mayor: We intend to sue Fox News."

Where you stand on this depends on where you sit ideologically. Leftists don't believe in hard factual reality. Anything that exposes their socialist shibboleths has to be destroyed, and hence Fox News is demonized and the reality of violent hardscrabble Muslim enclaves must be flushed in a postmodern avalanche of lies. Robert Spencer comments, "Paris Mayor says she will sue Fox News over No-Go Zones coverage":

Anne Hidalgo sounds here very much like the Islamic supremacists who regularly barbecue cars on Paris streets: Paris has been insulted. Its honor has been impugned. Therefore she wants to take Fox News to court. That would be a very interesting lawsuit: in its defense, Fox could call David Ignatius, who wrote in the New York Times in April 2002: “Arab gangs regularly vandalize synagogues here, the North African suburbs have become no-go zones at night, and the French continue to shrug their shoulders.” Fox could also call Newsweek, which reported in November 2005 that “according to research conducted by the government’s domestic intelligence network, the Renseignements Generaux, French police would not venture without major reinforcements into some 150 ‘no-go zones’ around the country–and that was before the recent wave of riots began on Oct. 27.” The New Republic could also testify in support of Fox, as it wrote just last week: “The word banlieue (‘suburb’) now connotes a no-go zone of high-rise slums, drug-fueled crime, failing schools and poor, largely Muslim immigrants and their angry offspring.”

But now the mainstream media, and Anne Hidalgo, have decided that Fox made up the whole idea of No-Go Zones in France, and Fox is going to have to take the fall. That Fox already took the fall, with its ill-considered apology, makes this legal threat even more absurd. But if the suit does go forward, Fox should request a change of venue — to a banlieue, and invite Mayor Hidalgo to take a walk through it with hair uncovered, at night.

More.

Islamic State Demands $200 Million Ransom for Japanese Hostages

Holly Williams reports, for CBS This Morning:

Watching the World Fall Apart

From David Solway, at Pajamas Media:

In her valediction to a decade and a half of syndicated journalism, Diana West expresses her disappointment that there has been little or no progress over the years in advancing the debate about Islam and the specter of national decline. In some respects, the situation has deteriorated dramatically. “Indeed, now the U.S. faces the world without a defended border, with increasingly cheapened citizenship and no lawful immigration policy.” The same is true to varying degrees of other western nations as well. Her summation hits home for many of us: “It is hard to watch the world falling apart.”

The name of the game today is denial of the undeniable all across the spectrum of the major issues that afflict us. Denial that temperatures have been stable for the last eighteen years and that the diminution of sunspot activity heralds an age of global cooling rather than warming, as John Casey, president of the Space and Science Research Corporation, has decisively established in his recently published Dark Winter. Denial that Israel is the only democratic, morally legitimate state in the Middle East and that the Palestinian narrative of historical and cadastral residence is demonstrably false. Denial that Islam is a totalitarian entity and a religion of war that has set its sights on the ruination of western societies; and denial of the fact that Judeo-Hellenic-Christian civilization, for all its flaws, marks the high point of human political, social, cultural and scientific development.

Those who hold to such canting and spurious convictions and attitudes are the real “deniers” among us. And a people that lives in a collective state of denial of the obvious, or of what with a little study and dispassionate research would soon become obvious, is a people without a sustainable future. As SF writer Philip K. Dick said, in a speech aptly titled “How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart in Two Days,” later published in his masterful I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

Similarly, writes beleaguered Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who is currently being prosecuted once again for telling unpleasant truths about unrestricted Muslim immigration into the Netherlands and across many European countries, “Festering political problems do not go away simply because they are kept in a dark corner.” In a sane society, the messenger who brings irrefutable truths — judgments buttressed by solid evidence and logical reasoning — would not be shot or shot down, mocked or slandered. Such bearers of crucial tidings would be attended to and honoured. But we clearly do not live in a compos mentis society. Indeed, even those who have grasped the essential issues at stake increasingly believe that telling the truth is a tactical blunder and merely alienates the constituency they wish to persuade. And yet all they manage to accomplish is to weaken the strength of their argument, lose once-committed followers, and bring their own integrity and courage into question.

I used to think that only a monstrous catastrophe could save us, could provoke people to think again and to see the world as it really is, and could convince us to rise at last to our own defense — I mean something really enormous, that would make 9/11 look like a mere skirmish. Now I’m not so sure. We would probably find some way of temporizing, of refusing to examine or even recognize the causes of our misfortune, evincing, as Flemming Rose aphoristically put it in The Tyranny of Silence, “the infamous ability of humans to adapt.”

And how they — we — do adapt to the absurd, the false and the shameful in every walk of political and cultural life, of whatever magnitude! When the multi-billion dollar swindle that is “global warming” devastates the economy and temperatures begin to decline, leading to reduced crop growth and a crisis of hunger in various parts of the world, people will still insist that “the science is settled.” As it becomes increasingly evident that the media constitute a tribe of liars and fabricators operating as a fifth column, people will continue to read the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, Salon and the Huffington Post, and get their news from the BBC, CNN, and MSNBC, forming their opinions therefrom. Although it is by now indisputable that our elite universities have become latrines of left-wing dogma, anti-Zionist propaganda and a subversive pedagogy, we continue to subsidize their existence via donations and attendance rather than seek and support responsible academic alternatives. The more that questions arise regarding President Obama’s still-sealed academic records and mysterious documentary discrepancies, the more people will say “nothing to see here” and move on. As a Palestinian enclave without a legal government and no viable historical claim to the territory it covets resorts to anti-Semitic indoctrination of its denizens and unleashes episodes of outright terrorism, governments around the world will persist, in plain violation of international law, in recognizing it as a state. As Iran marches toward a nuclear bomb and perfects ballistic technology, western governments will declare that it is a rational actor supplementing its electrical grid. Should one of our cities be rendered uninhabitable for 60 years following a dirty bomb strike or half its population succumb to water poisoning, Islam would still emerge as the religion of peace and federal officers would be stationed around mosques to prevent a “backlash.” All such reactions are practically foreordained — until reality forecloses on its mortgage and a subprime debacle of existential proportions ensues, when it may be too late to reclaim what we have sacrificed to fear, lassitude and craven imbecility.

Keep reading.

Solway concludes with the the most hilarious joke, heh.

VIDEO: Jesse Watters at the 'Stand with the Prophet' Summit

At Atlas Shrugs, "VIDEO Jesse Watters at the 'Stand with the Prophet' Summit: 'Why are stonings and beheadings tolerated?' 'Because that's what we believe, it says in the Qur'an'":

Earlier today I posted that "English-sounding" and "Jewish" names were purged from "Stand With the Prophet" the attendance rolls. Media was banned - but enemedia errand boys who called the anti-free speech conference a "peace conference" were allowed in for 20 minutes. One of these reporters whose press credentials were refused. He bought tickets as well but entry was denied. Watch this video with Muslims outside the conference.

I love the Muslima who claims they have "lots of anti-jihad conferences". Really? She must be mixing that up with my conferences.

Great report.

Watch it at the link.

Poll Shows Majority of Blacks View King's Dream as Unrealized

We needed a poll on unhappy blacks? They're sitting right where the Democrat Party wants them to be: slave voters shackled to leftist stagnation and decay.

But see the Wall Street Journal, "Black and White Americans Disagree on Equality, Opportunity and Racism in the U.S.":

White and black Americans disagree about equality, opportunity and racism in the U.S., more than 46 years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released Monday.

More than a quarter of white adults asked last week strongly agreed with the statement, “America is a nation where people are not judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Yet only 16% of African-Americans polled said the same, a number that has fallen one percentage point since President Barack Obama was first elected in 2008.

Of those polled, a majority of African-American adults—52%—said they strongly disagreed with the statement, while 16% of white adults said they did.

The poll of 800 Americans, conducted between Jan. 14 and 17, has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.46 percentage points, with larger margin for subgroups. It surveyed Americans on a broad swath of political questions including those regarding race.

The question about equality uses a direct quote from Dr. King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech given during the 1963 March on Washington. In the speech, the civil rights leader also said he dreamed that “one day this nation will rise up and live up to its creed, ‘We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal.’”

After Mr. Obama’s 2008 election, African-American sentiments about equality and opportunity rose steadily, if gradually, according to previous NBC News/Wall Street Journal polls, until this most recent survey, which indicated a major reversal in sentiment.

Surprise, but the piece cites the left's lies surrounding the death of Michael Brown as a cause of declining belief in equality. That is, polling numbers are being driven by myths and lies.

Race relations are indeed bad, but not for the reasons the left wants Americans to believe. Race relations, and equal opportunity, have not improved because the left not only doesn't want them to improve, but they actively work to make them worse, dividing the country along lines of identity and hatred. That's going to be Obama's ignominious legacy.

Jihad in France: It's Just Beginning

From Guy Millière, at Gatestone:

The demonstration gathered nearly four million people, but seeing in it a mobilization against terrorism, jihad and anti-Semitism would be a mistake.

The Ambassador of Saudi Arabia attended, shortly after his nation had just finished flogging the young blogger Raif Badawi with the first 50 lashes of his 1000 lash sentence. Badawi is being flayed alive -- "very severely," the lashing order said. He has 950 lashes to go.

Mahmoud Abbas, the President of Palestinian unity government, which includes Hamas and supports jihadist terrorism as well as genocide, was at the forefront -- smiling. Israel's Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, was originally not invited. He came anyhow. He was told not to speak. He spoke anyhow. As a sign of disapproval, French officials left before his speech.

Although six Jews were among the seventeen victims, the anti-Semitic dimension of the attacks was barely spoken about.

The words "Islam" and "jihadist" were not mentioned. President François Hollande said, against all evidence, "Those who committed these acts have nothing to do with Islam."

Few Muslims came. They stated their only concern: "Avoid stigmatization of the Muslim community!"

Anyone who watches television and sees what is happening in many Muslim countries has to be doubting that Islam is peaceful.

Several polls show that more than 70% of the French think Islam is incompatible with democracy and Western civilization. Those polls predate the attacks...

Well, it's not technically the "beginning," although it's certainly not the end.

That's the conclusion of Time's David Von Drehle, at this week's cover story (behind the paywall), "The European Front."

Britain's Sun News Cancels 'Page 3' Topless Girls

Almost two years ago I doubted that the totalitarian feminists would be successful in shutting down "Page 3." How wrong I was.

At the New York Daily News, "London Sun appears to have abandoned risque Page 3 nudies":

The Guardian reports that completely unclothed women are out. But the tabloid says it reserves the right to bring back full frontal nudity.

Also at ABC News, "No More Page 3? Report Says UK's Sun Drops Topless Models."

The Guardian newspaper reported The Sun management had made a "landmark decision" to drop the bare breasts.

The Sun's Irish edition stopped using topless models in 2013. Last year Murdoch said he found Page 3 "old-fashioned, but readers seem to disagree."

And at the Spectator UK, "Now that the Sun has axed Page 3 girls, will Britain ever be the same?"

Plus, flashback at the Other McCain, "British Left’s War on ‘Page Three Girls’."

Here's Marine Le Pen's Op-Ed at the New York Times

No need for a big quotation or anything, considering I just posted WSJ's story on Ms. LePen this morning and there's little that's new.

It's just extremely newsworthy that the Times would publish a commentary piece from the "far-right" leader of the French National Front. I'd hazard to say that Ms. Le Pen's sentiments fall quite a ways outside the views of the median New York Times reader, and that's probably putting it mildly. (I'm sure the comments are a riot, and the letters section tomorrow will only be slightly less vituperative.)

Here: "France Was Attacked by Islamic Fundamentalism."

#BlackLivesMatter Movement Looking to Hijack Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.

This so-called "Black Lives Matter" movement is so sickening they've gotten to the point of denying people access to emergency medical services and to attacking San Francisco gays and lesbians as "privileged white males."

But then, the left long ago abandoned any semblance of MLK's message of decency, human love, and civil disobedience. It's a movement of hate that's dividing the country along racist lines, while threatening to literally kill those who stand in its way.

And from Oprah Winfrey to historian David J. Garrow, these racist demons are being repudiated as leaderless and hateful. Sadly, they've still got the support of the Maddow-worshiping fever swamp leftists. They're all a bunch of communists, either way.

At the New York Times, "Protesters Out to Reclaim King’s Legacy, but in Era That Defies Comparison":

Castro street's patrons are overwhelming white, male and apathetic. We interrupted business as usual at two bars. #ShutDownCastro

— BrownBlaze (@brownblaze) January 18, 2015

On the eve of Martin Luther King’s Birthday, protesters mobilized by the shooting deaths of young blacks and outraged about racial inequality are evoking his work, denouncing what they say is an attempt to sanitize his message and using the hashtag #ReclaimMLK hoping to rekindle a new movement for social change.

The website Ferguson Action, for instance, which has been a focal point for information on protests and activism in the aftermath of the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., says Dr. King’s “radical, principled and uncompromising” vision should be a model for protest and disruption for our time.

The iconic images of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. come from an era when he was confronting legalized discrimination, and communication tools included mimeographed fliers and the holy grail of a network television report. Protesters today cite myriad ills embedded in the economy and culture and spread their messages instantly through websites, Twitter hashtags and text messages.

Several dozen people shut down a major highway into Boston by attaching themselves to 1,200-pound drums filled with concrete. Credit Jean Lang/The Boston Globe, via Associated Press

And at a time of widespread social unrest over race and inequality, the King holiday on Monday is highlighting both the power of Dr. King’s vision, brought to the public again in the film “Selma,” and the enormous difficulties of forging a new movement along similar lines.

Nonetheless, today’s protesters are embracing Dr. King’s spirit and the tactics of his era with a sense of commitment that has not existed, perhaps, for decades.

“We’re in the business of disrupting white supremacy,” said Wazi Davis, 23, a student at San Francisco State University, who has helped organize protests in the Bay Area. “We look toward historical tactics. The Montgomery bus boycott, the sit-ins — those tactics were all about disruption.”

What is far less clear is whether today’s protesters have the ability, or even the intention, to build an organized movement capable of creating social change.

David J. Garrow, a historian and the author of “Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,” said the impromptu protests that had erupted in recent months were not comparable to the strategies used by civil rights groups of the 1960s, which had clear goals such as winning the right to vote or the right to eat at a segregated lunch counter.

“You could call it rebellious, or you could call it irrational,” Mr. Garrow said of the new waves of protests. “There has not been a rational analysis in how does A and B advance your policy change X and Y?”

Mr. Garrow compared the protesters to those of Occupy Wall Street. “Occupy had a staying power of, what, six months?” Mr. Garrow said. “Three years later, is there any remaining footprint from Occupy? Not that I’m aware of.”

After the deaths of Mr. Brown in Ferguson, Eric Garner in Staten Island and others, protests have included angry marches and mass “die-ins” in streets and public buildings. They have grown to include actions like “Black Brunch,” in which protesters have confronted white diners in upscale restaurants. On Thursday, several dozen people shut down a major highway carrying suburbanites into Boston by attaching themselves to 1,200-pound drums filled with concrete and standing in the middle of Interstate 93.

Mayor Martin J. Walsh of Boston and other officials called the protests dangerous and counterproductive, and asked protesters to reconsider their methods. And many, even those who are sympathetic, say today’s protesters run the risk of alienating people rather than persuading them through their tactics.

But the protesters say civil disobedience and disruption were also at the heart of Dr. King’s vision.

“We really feel that Dr. King’s legacy has been clouded by efforts to soften and sanitize that legacy,” said Mervyn Marcano, a spokesman for Ferguson Action.

MLK never prevented afflicted individuals from getting needed medical services. But hey, if you're able to go the doctor you've got "white privilege," or something.

The Answer to French Anti-Semitism

I was looking for a response from Caroline Glick after the January 7th attack, but it turns out she must have been taking some time off from her commentaries at the Jerusalem Post.

So, here she comes now with a piece up from Friday, at her blog:

January 16 is the nine-year anniversary of the beginning of the Ilan Halimi disaster.

On January 16, 2006, Sorour Arbabzadeh, the seductress from the Muslim anti-Jewish kidnapping gang led by Youssouf Fofana, entered the cellphone store where Halimi worked and set the honey trap.

Four days later, Halimi met Arbabzadeh for a drink at a working class bar and agreed to walk her home. She walked him straight into an ambush. Her comrades beat him, bound him and threw him into the trunk of their car.

They brought Halimi to a slum apartment and tortured him for 24 days and 24 nights before dumping him, handcuffed, naked, stabbed and suffering from third degree burns over two-thirds of his body, at a railway siding in Paris.

He died a few hours later in the hospital.

In an impassioned address to the French parliament on Tuesday, Prime Minister Manuel Valls gave a stirring denunciation of anti-Semitism, and demanded that his people stop treating it as someone else’s problem.

In his words, “Since Ilan Halimi in 2006… anti-Semitic acts in France have grown to an intolerable degree. The words, the insults, the gestures, the shameful attacks… did not produce the national outrage that our Jewish compatriots expected.”

Valls insisted that France needs to protect its Jewish community, lest France itself be destroyed.

“Without its Jews France would not be France, this is the message we have to communicate loud and clear. We haven’t done so. We haven’t shown enough outrage. How can we accept that in certain schools and colleges the Holocaust can’t be taught? How can we accept that when a child is asked, ‘Who is your enemy?’ the response is ‘The Jew?’ When the Jews of France are attacked France is attacked, the conscience of humanity is attacked. Let us never forget it.”

Valls words were uplifting. But it is hard to see how they change the basic reality that the Jews of France face.

When all is said and done, it is their necks on the line while humanity’s conscience is merely troubled.

Ilan Halimi’s case is more or less a textbook case of the impossible reality French Jewry faces. And, as Valls noted, the situation has only gotten worse in the intervening nine years. Much worse.

But back when things were much better, Ilan Halimi was kidnapped, tortured for 24 days and murdered. As Tablet online magazine’s Marc Weitzmann reported last September in an in-depth summary of ordeal, the gang that perpetrated the atrocity had been hunting for Jewish victims for several weeks before Arbabzadeh set her trap for Halimi. All their previous attempts had failed. Their previous marks included Jewish doctors, lawyers, television directors and human rights activists, as well as Jews of no particular distinction aside from the fact that they were Jews.

The anti-Jewish nature of the gang was clear from its chosen victims. The anti-Semitic nature of their atrocious crime against Halimi was obvious from the first time they contacted his mother, Ruth Halimi, demanding ransom for his release. They made anti-Jewish slurs in all their communications with her.  And as she heard her sons tortured cries in the background, Ruth was subjected to his torturers’ recitation of Koranic verses.

And yet, throughout the period of his captivity, French authorities refused to consider the anti-Jewish nature of the crime, and as a result, refused to treat the case as life threatening or urgent.

The same attitude continued well after Halimi was found. As Weitzmann noted, the investigative magistrate insisted “There isn’t a single element to allow one to attach this murder to an anti-Semitic purpose or an anti-Semitic act.”

The denial went on through the 2009 trials of the 29 kidnappers and their accomplices. Anti-Semitism was listed as an aggravating circumstance of the crime – and as such, a cause for harsher sentencing – only for the gang leader Fofana. And in the end, even for him, the judges did not take it into account at sentencing.

As for those 29 kidnappers and accomplices, as Weitzmann notes, each one of them had a circle of friends and family. As a consequence, by a one reporters’ conservative estimate, at least 50 people were aware of the crime and where Halimi was being held, while he was being held. And not one of them called the police. Not one of them felt moved to make a call that could save the life of a Jew.

After the fact, the media in France were happy to publish articles by the torturers’ defense lawyers insisting, “Only people motivated by ‘political reasons’ would try to sell the opinion that anti-Semitism is eating away at French society.”

When the Halimi family lawyer boasted of close ties to the government and announced he would appeal the sentences of the perpetrators if he didn’t think their punishments were sufficient, the French media eagerly shifted the conversation from the torture and murder of a Parisian who just happened to be a Jew by a band of sadists who just happened to be Muslims, to the more comfortable narrative of the Jewish lobby and Jewish power.

So, too, when Halimi, and six years later when the three children and the rabbi massacred at Otzar Hatorah Jewish day school in Toulouse, were brought to Israel for burial, the media reported their families’ decision in a negative way hinting that it was evidence of the basic disloyalty, or otherness of the Jews of France.

In other words, what Halimi’s murder exposed is that anti-Semitism in France is systemic...

Still more.

You can guess her answer to French anti-Semitism.

New Edward Snowden Files Reveal Scope of NSA Plans for Cyberwarfare

At Der Spiegel, "The Digital Arms Race: NSA Preps America for Future Battle":

The NSA's mass surveillance is just the beginning. Documents from Edward Snowden show that the intelligence agency is arming America for future digital wars -- a struggle for control of the Internet that is already well underway.

Normally, internship applicants need to have polished resumes, with volunteer work on social projects considered a plus. But at Politerain, the job posting calls for candidates with significantly different skill sets. We are, the ad says, "looking for interns who want to break things."

Politerain is not a project associated with a conventional company. It is run by a US government intelligence organization, the National Security Agency (NSA). More precisely, it's operated by the NSA's digital snipers with Tailored Access Operations (TAO), the department responsible for breaking into computers.

Potential interns are also told that research into third party computers might include plans to "remotely degrade or destroy opponent computers, routers, servers and network enabled devices by attacking the hardware." Using a program called Passionatepolka, for example, they may be asked to "remotely brick network cards." With programs like Berserkr they would implant "persistent backdoors" and "parasitic drivers". Using another piece of software called Barnfire, they would "erase the BIOS on a brand of servers that act as a backbone to many rival governments."

An intern's tasks might also include remotely destroying the functionality of hard drives. Ultimately, the goal of the internship program was "developing an attacker's mindset."

The internship listing is eight years old, but the attacker's mindset has since become a kind of doctrine for the NSA's data spies. And the intelligence service isn't just trying to achieve mass surveillance of Internet communication, either. The digital spies of the Five Eyes alliance -- comprised of the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand -- want more.

The Birth of D Weapons

According to top secret documents from the archive of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden seen exclusively by SPIEGEL, they are planning for wars of the future in which the Internet will play a critical role, with the aim of being able to use the net to paralyze computer networks and, by doing so, potentially all the infrastructure they control, including power and water supplies, factories, airports or the flow of money.

During the 20th century, scientists developed so-called ABC weapons -- atomic, biological and chemical. It took decades before their deployment could be regulated and, at least partly, outlawed. New digital weapons have now been developed for the war on the Internet. But there are almost no international conventions or supervisory authorities for these D weapons, and the only law that applies is the survival of the fittest.

Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan foresaw these developments decades ago. In 1970, he wrote, "World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation." That's precisely the reality that spies are preparing for today.

The US Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force have already established their own cyber forces, but it is the NSA, also officially a military agency, that is taking the lead. It's no coincidence that the director of the NSA also serves as the head of the US Cyber Command. The country's leading data spy, Admiral Michael Rogers, is also its chief cyber warrior and his close to 40,000 employees are responsible for both digital spying and destructive network attacks.

Surveillance only 'Phase 0'

From a military perspective, surveillance of the Internet is merely "Phase 0" in the US digital war strategy. Internal NSA documents indicate that it is the prerequisite for everything that follows. They show that the aim of the surveillance is to detect vulnerabilities in enemy systems. Once "stealthy implants" have been placed to infiltrate enemy systems, thus allowing "permanent accesses," then Phase Three has been achieved -- a phase headed by the word "dominate" in the documents. This enables them to "control/destroy critical systems & networks at will through pre-positioned accesses (laid in Phase 0)." Critical infrastructure is considered by the agency to be anything that is important in keeping a society running: energy, communications and transportation. The internal documents state that the ultimate goal is "real time controlled escalation".

One NSA presentation proclaims that "the next major conflict will start in cyberspace." To that end, the US government is currently undertaking a massive effort to digitally arm itself for network warfare. For the 2013 secret intelligence budget, the NSA projected it would need around $1 billion in order to increase the strength of its computer network attack operations. The budget included an increase of some $32 million for "unconventional solutions" alone.

In recent years, malware has emerged that experts have attributed to the NSA and its Five Eyes alliance based on a number of indicators. They include programs like Stuxnet, used to attack the Iranian nuclear program. Or Regin, a powerful spyware trojan that created a furor in Germany after it infected the USB stick of a high-ranking staffer to Chancellor Angela Merkel. Agents also used Regin in attacks against the European Commission, the EU's executive, and Belgian telecoms company Belgacom in 2011.
Given that spies can routinely break through just about any security software, virtually all Internet users are at risk of a data attack.

The new documents shed some new light on other revelations as well. Although an attack called Quantuminsert has been widely reported by SPIEGEL and others, documentation shows that in reality it has a low success rate and it has likely been replaced by more reliable attacks such as Quantumdirk, which injects malicious content into chat services provided by websites such as Facebook and Yahoo. And computers infected with Straitbizarre can be turned into disposable and non-attributable "shooter" nodes. These nodes can then receive messages from the NSA's Quantum network, which is used for "command and control for very large scale active exploitation and attack." The secret agents were also able to breach mobile phones by exploiting a vulnerability in the Safari browser in order to obtain sensitive data and remotely implant malicious code.

In this guerilla war over data, little differentiation is made between soldiers and civilians, the Snowden documents show. Any Internet user could suffer damage to his or her data or computer. It also has the potential to create perils in the offline world as well. If, for example, a D weapon like Barnfire were to destroy or "brick" the control center of a hospital as a result of a programming error, people who don't even own a mobile phone could be affected.

Intelligence agencies have adopted "plausible deniability" as their guiding principle for Internet operations. To ensure their ability to do so, they seek to make it impossible to trace the author of the attack.

It's a stunning approach with which the digital spies deliberately undermine the very foundations of the rule of law around the globe. This approach threatens to transform the Internet into a lawless zone in which superpowers and their secret services operate according to their own whims with very few ways to hold them accountable for their actions.

Interesting.

And there's a whole lot more at the link.

The Champion of French Anxiety

From Sohrab Ahmari, at WSJ, "The National Front leader says ‘we are the only ones to solve the problem’ of the country’s Islamist threat":

Following last week’s terror attacks in Paris on journalists at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and on a kosher supermarket, many Western leaders have been reluctant to say the motive was at all religious. French President François Hollande said Charlie Hebdo had been targeted by “obscurantism,” whatever that is. And White House spokesman Josh Earnest on Tuesday spent a painful five minutes explaining the Obama administration’s aversion to using the term “radical Islam.”

That’s not a problem for Marine Le Pen, who is never obscure.

“It’s clear Islamic fundamentalism,” says the leader of the National Front, France’s far-right political party that has been gaining in the polls. “Now all the eyes are open,” she adds, referring to a general French awakening to the Islamist threat. And “we are the only ones to solve the problem,” by which she means the National Front.

Once a political outlier, Ms. Le Pen has been gaining prominence as France’s problems—a moribund economy and its un-assimilated Muslim-immigrant population—have become more acute and seemingly beyond cure by the traditional political class. Now, in the aftermath of the home-grown Islamist slaughter in Paris, Ms. Le Pen is betting that she is the French politician most likely to benefit from her countrymen’s shock and disbelief over the threat in their midst.

So it seems a good moment to visit with Ms. Le Pen, whom I met Friday at the National Front’s headquarters in Nanterre, a northwestern suburb of Paris. National Front posters with the slogan “Oui, la France” depict a fierce woman with steely eyes, and that she is: a tall, commanding presence who speaks rapidly in a husky rumble of a voice. But the 46-year-old Ms. Le Pen, alternately smiling or reserved as the moment requires, is also unquestionably charming. There’s a smile covering the steel.

When discussing the terror attacks, or many of France’s other problems, Ms. Le Pen steers the conversation to immigration. “The first problem is that the borders are open, and practically anyone can go freely all around,” she says. “There is no responsible country that would accept such a situation.” It should have been “obvious,” Ms. Le Pen adds, that “massive immigration would just allow the fundamentalists to increase their numbers.”

Seated with three large French flags on the wall nearby, she adds: “There are obvious signs that among the people coming so easily into our country, the hormones of unrest will rise. The French Republic needs to offer to its forces, police, security and army, the proper means to protect our country.”

Yet Ms. Le Pen balks at the prospect of heightening government surveillance to prevent future attacks: “We are totally for individual freedom. The freedom for all is important. In order to catch some, we should not block everybody.”

At the same time she rejects as too weak the tough new counterterror measures announced by Prime Minister Manuel Valls on Friday—including isolation of jihadists in prison, increased staffing at intelligence agencies and granting security services broader power to monitor online communications. “Valls’s speech,” she says, “it was just a speech.” Beyond restricting immigration, her main counterterror proposal is the construction of new prisons and additional funding for the penitentiary administration.

In a country already made wobbly by years of economic anemia—with unemployment hovering intractably above 10%, roughly one in four young people unemployed, and negligible to nonexistent growth—and now quaking after the eruption of Islamist terrorism, Ms. Le Pen’s blunt-force prescriptions have made the National Front more plausible as a political force than it has ever been. Where the party had been an alarming but relatively marginal player under the leadership of her father, the rhetorical bomb-thrower Jean-Marie Le Pen, the more media-savvy Ms. Le Pen has been better at selling the nationalist line since taking over from him in 2011.

Her fixes for France’s troubles are simple: Exit the European Union and end the reign of “globalist” economics—the free movement of goods, capital and labor—that she blames for the fact that France is “dying.” Above all: “Stop immigration,” not just to discourage the potential Islamist threat, but for the overall health of the country. “There are 200,000 legal immigrants coming to France every year,” Ms. Le Pen says. “They just add to the problems.”

Ms. Le Pen doesn’t directly answer my question about what she proposes to do about the millions of Muslim immigrants whose only nationality is French. Instead, she turns her attention to immigrants with dual citizenship. “Do you know that there are 700,000 voters, Algerian and French, who voted in the recent Algerian elections?” she asks. “These people can and should decide one way or the other. We have nothing against being a foreigner in France, but they have to decide.” The message: Choose France or get out. Also: Those with dual citizenship who commit crimes in France should “be sent back.”

It’s tempting to dismiss these views as unrealistic and against the tide of history—the French political and media establishments routinely do. As Ms. Le Pen says: “Many political parties in France and many in the media, the first question they ask about anything is: ‘Will this be advantageous for the National Front?’ ” A notable example was the decision by the organizers of last weekend’s unity march in Paris not to invite Ms. Le Pen and her supporters.

But merely to dismiss or ignore Ms. Le Pen and the National Front doesn’t deter her political project. She represents a real and substantial constituency of people who, as one Paris-based journalist told me, “don’t recognize the French republic they used to know anymore.” These are working-class voters, mostly white, who once answered the old left’s call of class solidarity but who now feel left behind as manufacturers and job-creators flee the country under the press of France’s rigid labor laws, protectionist rules and high taxes...

Right.

They either ignore the National Front or attack them as "far-right extremists." Sadly, the extremists are the Muslims who're backed by the leftists, and they're literally waging terrorist jihad on France, and in particular the Jews.

Still more.

'I think we're going to see a Paris-style attack here...'

From former CIA Director Mike Morell, at CBS Face the Nation:

'I think our government is quite late in dealing with this problem...'

The problem is Islam, of course.

But apparently not everyone feels this way.

Watch, at Telegraph UK: "Europeans divided over increased security following terror raids."

Muslims and Free Speech

From Professor Michael Curtis, at American Thinker.

After a review of the free speech debate following the Charlie Hebdo attack, there's this:

The mainstream media with its stance of political correctness argues that the greatest danger now is that “more Europeans will come to the conclusion that all Muslim immigrants are carriers of a great and mortal threat.”  It is unlikely that anyone has ever formulated such a conclusion, but realistic commentators have pointed out that a real threat exists.  Indeed, in her combative book The Rage and the Pride, published soon after 9/11/2001 in New York, Oriana Fallaci warned that Muslim extremists with their swelling hatred for the West would launch another  attack.

One can agree that the two murderous Kouachi brothers and  Amedy Couibaly, who killed 17 people, are not the true representatives of the 1.6 billion Muslims in the world.  But it is equally true that the CH satirical pieces and cartoons, some of which are infantile and obscene, are not the real instigators of the threat to the West.  The threat is Islamic extremism or Islamism, not any result of Western foreign policy in the Middle East.

Nor did violence in France result from the policies of President François Hollande, or from the high rate of unemployment or poverty or because children of Muslim immigrants are said to be caught between two cultures.  Nor is the German group Pegida (Patriotic Europeans against Islamization of the West), which demonstrates against immigration, the cause of violence.  Rather, its members argue, its existence and activity are an attempt to prevent violence.  German security authorities suggest that about 250 of the 4 million Muslims in the country are jihadists, and more than 2,000 are potentially dangerous.

Irrespective of the political views of those making the argument, criticism of Islamists and of certain parts of Muslim behavior – inferior status of women, absence of free expression on political and religious issues, the interconnection between religious and political power – is not correctly described as “Islamophobia.”...

Well, don't go making too much sense, Professor.

Holly Fisher, Army Wife and Conservative Hottie, Busted for Infidelity

This is at Charles C. Johnson's Got News, "BREAKING, EXCLUSIVE: Tea Party Photo Military Wife Caught Cheating On Combat Vet Hubbie."

There's no question this story's legit. Ms. Fisher has a post up at Facebook about how she was all famous and hot to trot once her Twitter fame exploded. She didn't handle it well and now has gotten back to God and family:

I’ve been married since I was barely 20, most of that marriage was in the army life. With deployment, kids, career changes, etc. we’ve had our ups and downs, like most couples. In the overwhelming mess of the political spotlight and trying to find myself and where I belong, I actually completely lost myself. I lost my faith in my marriage, I lost my faith in this life that not only I’ve chosen for myself, but a life that I promote. Happy military wife with kids and church and happy, happy, happy. False. My life crumbled. My marriage crumbled. I lost my faith in God. I didn’t know where I was going to go next or what I was going to do. For a very short period in the middle of that, I actually believed my marriage was over and found someone else.

Day after day, actually week after week, throughout the late fall, I found myself just trying to figure out what I needed to do to make myself happy and to get my life back on track.

I have suffered from depression and anxiety most of my life, only recently telling my family about it, but after being at my lowest, my darkest, and literally about to end it all, my daughter started laughing. My sweet, angelic baby girl toddled into the room while I was sitting on the edge of my bed, and she was squealing with delight.

Right then and there I knew I needed to get off my butt and get on my knees. My daughter, along with God, saved my life. I regained my ability to pray after a few long nights of my husband squeezing me tight and helping me realize that we are a team, we are best friends, we are partners, and no matter how lost we’ve been in the past, we can survive anything...

Well, it's certainly news.

I'll say though, for someone who went viral mocking the hell out of hate-addled leftists, she's fallen pretty hard. But then, we're all fallen. We're human. Owning up to it is the start of getting things back together. Hopefully her husband's going to be forgiving. I'd hate for them to divorce. Their baby would get the worst of it. She's still just a little thing.

@HollyRFisher I am with you always. We crossed this bridge and will walk together now with our heads high. I love you. Matthew 6:14-15
— David Fisher (@DavidIFisher) January 19, 2015

Added: At London's Daily Mail, "Gun-toting Christian mother-of-three who made 'liberal heads explode' admits cheating on her military vet husband with Tea Party member."

L.A. Times: Saïd and Chérif Kouachi 'Craved Belonging', Which is Why They Murdered #CharlieHebdo, or Something

So stupid.

Being orphaned, feeling marginalized, and "craving belonging" are not explanations for the French terrorist massacre. Islamic jihad is the only reason these two Islamic terrorists murdered the innocents. All the rest is psycho-babble.

Occam's razor, folks. Just go with it.

At the Los Angeles Times, "French terrorists were primed for trouble from the start, analysts say":

The gunmen behind France's worst terrorist attack in decades appear to have been easy prey for recruiters to violent jihad.

The children of immigrants, with seemingly chaotic family lives, they were frustrated by injustices they perceived around them and had been trying to make their way with few means, according to court records and experts who study terrorism networks.

"These were people who were marginalized, who broke with society. They went to prison, and they became radicalized because they needed to be heroes," said Christophe Crepin, spokesman for a French police union. "In the end, they're just barbarous assassins."

Their path to radicalization began in the seething immigrant neighborhoods on the edges of Paris.

Said Kouachi, 34, and his brother Cherif, 32, were born to a family of Algerian descent in Paris' 10th arrondissement. Their father appears to have been largely absent, and their mother struggled to raise the family's five children, Crepin said.

The brothers were placed at a young age in a center for orphaned and troubled children outside the capital. Their mother died soon after.

The pair returned to Paris around 2000 and moved into an apartment in the 19th arrondissement, an area heavily populated by migrants from France's former colonies in North Africa. They survived on odd jobs. Cherif Kouachi delivered pizzas for a time and later worked at a supermarket fish counter, according to French news reports.

Long before the brothers stormed the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on Jan. 7, killing 12 people, they fell under the influence of a self-proclaimed Islamist preacher they met at a local mosque.

Still in his 20s and working as a janitor, Farid Benyettou became the mentor and spiritual leader of a group of young Muslims who were angered by images of American abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison and wanted to go fight U.S. soldiers in Iraq. French authorities called them the Buttes-Chaumont network, after the picturesque park with its picnickers and hilltop views where they would go jogging.

Benyettou was just a year older than the younger Kouachi, but the brothers looked up to him because he claimed to have studied Islam and had a brother-in-law who was part of an Algerian militant group, said Jean-Charles Brisard, chairman of the Paris-based Center for the Analysis of Terrorism. They attended lessons at Benyettou's apartment, where they discussed the religious arguments for waging holy war.

Even then, Cherif Kouachi would talk about wanting to stage an attack in France, a friend told investigators. But their mentor told them the fight was elsewhere.

Some members of the Buttes-Chaumont group would later be killed in Iraq or return badly maimed, but the Kouachi brothers never made it to the war. Cherif Kouachi was arrested in a 2005 crackdown on the network that was funneling fighters. He had a plane ticket for Syria, then the gateway for fighters hoping to do battle against the U.S. in Iraq. His brother's role in the network, if any, is unclear.

At the time, the younger Kouachi told investigators he was relieved to be caught. He described himself as a "ghetto Muslim," according to the French newspaper Le Monde, a clean-shaven hipster who liked to rap and smoke marijuana with friends. He didn't want to die in Iraq, he said, but was afraid he would be called a coward if he didn't go.

Prosecutors thought he had been manipulated by a cult-like ideology and didn't consider him a serious threat. When the case wrapped up in 2008, he was sentenced to time served.

But the radicalization that had begun on the streets of Paris intensified in prison, experts say. Remanded after his arrest to Fleury-Merogis Prison south of Paris, the nation's largest, he found himself in the company of hardened extremists.

There he met the Algerian-born Djamel Beghal, regarded as one of Al Qaeda's top recruiters in Europe, and convicted in a 2001 plot to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Paris. With them was the Kouachi brothers' future accomplice, Amedy Coulibaly, serving time for one of a string of robberies.

Coulibaly, the same age as Cherif Kouachi, was born in France to parents of West African descent. The only boy in a family of 10 children, he grew up on a housing estate in Grigny, south of Paris, that is notorious for gangs, drugs and violence.

"These guys are looking for something to join, they're looking for something to identify with," said Andrew Liepman, a senior policy analyst at Rand Corp. and former principal deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center. "It could be a bridge club, the Boy Scouts or Al Qaeda — and there aren't a lot of bridge clubs in prison."...

More.

Note: "Craving belonging" is how the hard-copy edition of the story described the Kouachis.

Miss Lebanon Saly Greige Denies Taking Selfie with Miss Israel Doron Matalon

It's come to this.

The international politics of selfies.

At the New York Post, "Uproar after Miss Israel's selfie with Miss Lebanon."

More at JPost, "Miss Lebanon denies taking photo with Miss Israel, says she 'photo-bombed' her," and Time, "Miss Lebanon Criticized After Being Caught in Miss Israel’s Selfie."

Actually, no. That's not a photobomb. She's posing for a selfie, straight up. It's indeed sad that two young women can't enjoy a moment of innocence at beauty contest. Sheesh.

Notice, however, that's it's the Lebanese who're unforgiving here. That tells you something.

VIDEO: #CharlieHebdo to NBC's Chuck Todd: When You Blur Our Cover, 'You Blur Out Democracy'

Watch it here.

And at Bloomberg, "Charlie Hebdo Editor Says Some Media ‘Blur Out Democracy’."

It's Gerard Biard, the new editor at Charlie Hebdo, who should be headlining Memeorandum right now, but is not, predictably.