If we want to get to a world where terrorism isn’t such a regular tragedy, governments need to start recognizing the fact that the so-called “War on Terror” is a self-fulfilling prophecy destined to foment one thing and one thing only: more terrorism. The Big Picture: The problem arising in the wake of the recent mass-murder event in Paris and the subsequent French bombing of the Islamic State (also a mass-murder event) is that the two acts (and hundreds like them) serve as justification for...

We have been discussing the rapid erosion of free speech on our campuses. That trend started a long time ago in our high schools where officials have steadily attacked the exercise of free speech by teenagers. Few however have reached the level of censorship and content-based punishment as Revere High School in Massachusetts.Cheerleader Caley Godino has been banned from her team because she tweeted political comments that her teachers did not like about illegal immigration. The day after the...

Early last month, Green Berets battling to beat back a Taliban advance in Kunduz, Afghanistan, apparently decided that in order to rid an MSF hospital of some “insurgents” who were apparently hanging out inside, they needed to call in an AC-130 gunship. The aircraft made five passes on the way to engaging the building for an hour, eventually killing dozens as tends to happen when advanced air assault technology squares off against unarmed people lying on gurneys. Subsequent reports would...

“Hold on, my friends, to the Constitution and to the Republic for which it stands. Miracles do not cluster, and what has happened once in 6000 years, may not happen again. Hold on to the Constitution, for if the American Constitution should fail, there will be anarchy throughout the world.” —Daniel Webster Thanksgiving is not what it once was. Then again, America is not what she once was. Americans have become so enthralled by the “bread and circuses” of our age—tables groaning under the...

The standard mainstream narrative of the war in Syria is that President Bashar al-Assad’s opponents only took up arms after his regime cracked down brutally on peaceful protesters in March 2011. The New York Times, for example, in a piece this week on ISIS reminds that “after a brutal crackdown by government forces, Syrian protest groups morphed into fighters”. The problem with this narrative is that it is false. Here’s what the Times is referring to: On March 25, 2011, it described how tens...

Last week the US House dealt a blow to President Obama’s plan to resettle 10,000 Syrians fleeing their war-torn homeland. On a vote of 289-137, including 47 Democrats, the House voted to require the FBI to closely vet any applicant from Syria and to guarantee that none of them pose a threat to the US. Effectively this will shut down the program. The House legislation was brought to the Floor after last week’s attacks in Paris that left more than 120 people dead, and for which ISIS claimed...

The panic in the western world, since the attack in Paris, where approx. 130 were killed is quite over the top. Walking home Friday evening, at the corner of Montgomery and Second St., in San Francisco, I witnessed train passengers rushing out of the underground train station. Police were rushing in. Someone had heard a "pop." It was nothing. The panic has spread to small towns: "Suspicious" briefcase in one-horse town creates major traffic jam & school shut-down https://t.co/jc0V5kWBAN...

Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Osama bin Laden Unit Chief Michael Scheuer, interviewed by CNN’s Michael Smerconish regarding the path to take after the recent Paris Killings, advises that the current “half-way approach” that rejects both non-intervention and all-out war “leads directly to fascism in this country.” Fourteen years into the US government’s Global War on Terrorism, Scheuer reminds us that the Founders observed that, “the longer a war goes on, the more power accrues to...

In the wake of the ISIS terrorist attack on Paris, President Barack Obama declared that his administration has the right strategy on ISIS and will “see it through”. But the administration is already shifting its policy to cooperate more closely with the Russians on Syria, and an influential former senior intelligence official has suggested that the administration needs to give more weight to the Assad government and army as the main barrier to ISIS and other jihadist forces in Syria. Obama’s...

Hillary Clinton promised us a speech on what she’d do to destroy ISIS, but what she gave us was a speech detailing how she would destroy Syria – and drag the US down the road to another unwinnable war. What she essentially proposes is that we fight a three-sided battle – against ISIS, on the one hand, and against Bashar al-Assad, Russia, and Iran on the other. She elaborated on her “no-fly zone” scheme, saying she wanted to set it up only in the north. This means not only that the US air force...

The United States recently unveiled a new approach in Iraq and Syria it insists is not new at all: Special Forces will be sent into direct combat. “The fact is that our strategy… hasn’t changed,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said. “This is an intensification of a strategy that the president announced more than a year ago.” The press secretary is right if you take him at his exact words: the deployment of Special Forces does not change America’s grand strategy, it only changes...