WARNING: Reporting is somewhat sketchy.  However, early reports indicates one or two men adorned in Christmas or Santa outfits, and armed with rifles, entered a nightclub in Istanbul Turkey and opened fire on the crowd.  According to current reporting there were as many as 500-800 people in the club when the shooting began.
UPDATE 1100pm EST: At least 35 people have been confirmed killed, with approximately 40 more wounded.  UPDATE 1:00am EST Unfortunately the death toll has now climbed to 39 people killed and 69 people wounded.  There are many foreign nationals missing.  The gunman/gunmen are still at large.
CNN REPORT: Istanbul (CNN) – At least 39 people were killed and at least 69 wounded in an attack in a nightclub early Sunday as they were celebrating the new year, Turkey’s Interior Minister said.
“We are face to face with a terror attack,” Interior minister Suleyman Soylu told reporters. Twenty-one of the dead have been identified, he said. Of those, 16 were foreign nationals and five were Turkish”.
US officials also called it a terrorist attack, making it the first of 2017. Soylu also said that “the efforts to locate the terrorist are ongoing. Security forces have begun the necessary operations. God willing soon (the attacker) will be apprehended.” (read more)
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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded earlier today to the hour long speech by Secretary John Kerry and the clarified stance of the U.S. position toward Israel as outlined in the past several days.

At 05:30 of the Netanyahu remarks he specifically calls Secretary Kerry and President Obama to task for manipulating the United Nations:

(05:30) […]  We have it on absolute uncontestable evidence that the United States organized, advanced and brought this resolution to the United Nations Security Council.  We will share that information with the incoming administration; some of it is sensitive, it’s all true; you saw some of it in the protocol released in the Egyptian paper – there’s plenty more, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

There are numerous reports where the current events surrounding President Obama’s push to paint Israel into a corner are specifically outlined and addressed with specificity.  However, if you really want to understand what’s going on, you must reference the longer game as it has been domestically constructed and ignored by most media.
Those who have followed domestic U.S. pro-Palestinian activism over the past several years will be able to more easily understand current events against the larger backdrop.
First, it is critical to remember, the antagonistic left fully anticipated Secretary Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Therefore all of the current U.S. political maneuvers, as recently evidenced, must be viewed as increasingly desperate now that their long-term objectives have been cut off by the insurgent win of Donald Trump.
In short, the longer-term approach from the politically professional left, in conjunction with the political activism of the social justice warriors, has been to undermine Israel, and yet do so without visibility toward undermining Israel.  (more…)

Call me cynical, but this announced speech by Secretary John Kerry only inspires thoughts of the Obama administration laying dangerous ideological land mines the incoming Trump administration will have to navigate.
(CNN) Secretary of State John Kerry will deliver a speech Wednesday on the Obama administration’s vision for Middle East peace, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said.
The speech at the State Department comes as the relationship between the US and Israel frays following the Obama administration’s controversial decision to abstain on Friday from a UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Kerry said at the time that, “In the coming days, I will speak further to the vote in the Security Council today and share more detailed thoughts, drawn from the experience of the last several years, on the way ahead.” (more…)

“Whoa”, is the initial word which comes to mind seeing a Reuters article describing Christians in Aleppo celebrating peace and hope for the first time in five years in Syria.
I can genuinely say I never expected to see Reuters present a factually truthful article, which, at its very core and central reality, simultaneously shows how almost all Western media reporting was based on falsehoods, lies and political ideology.

The previously promoted narrative surrounding the “Syrian Rebels” is stunningly incompatible against the outlined reality.  The article doesn’t go as far as explaining that the “rebels” were the Islamic extremists; however, it is logically impossible for the content of the article to be accurate unless the reader accepts the now exiled radical citizenry were, and are, supporters of the Islamic State (ISIS) and other Sunni Muslim insurgent groups.
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After a shameful political move against Israel at the U.N. yesterday, the scope of this hypocrisy is stunning:

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The feedback people are sending to Secretary of State Kerry’s tweet are exactly what you would think it would be.  Unreal, he would send this out.

The FBI and Department of Homeland Security have issued an advisory bulletin warning of possible Islamic Terror attacks against Churches and Christmas events. Simultaneous to this warning, Arizona federal officials arrest a Phoenix man who was plotting a Jihadist attack in support of ISIS.

Heavily armed police now guard the Nativity in Europe

First the warning:

WASHINGTON – Federal authorities warned Friday that ISIS sympathizers “continue aspirational calls for attacks on holiday gatherings, including targeting churches.” The bulletin was issued by the FBI and Department of Homeland Security and issued to law enforcement agencies and private security companies around the US.

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Anis Amri, the Berlin terrorist, was shot dead in Milan Italy after shooting at police officers during a routine ID check. The terrorist pulled a gun from his backpack and screamed ‘Allahu Akbar’ while he shot one of the officers.
The 24-year-old ISIS terrorist was stopped by two officers after he arrived in the suburb of Sesto San Giovanni in the northern Italian city of Milan at approximately 3am local time.
According to the Daily Mail – Two officers asked him for ID documents, at which point Amri ‘immediately’ pulled a gun from his backpack and shouted ‘police b******s’ as he shot one in the shoulder. (more…)

There’s a visible twisting of history taking place that’s increasingly obvious within the last few days.  Against all intellectual honesty, an entirely different version of historical reality is being seeded by the media.  Here’s the basic outline:

In general terms it goes like this – Vladimir Putin, the global villain and Machiavellian nemesis of freedom, wanted to undermine NATO and find a way to take control of the world, starting with Europe.  As such he schemed to seed the origin of ISIS in Syria so that he could begin killing them and driving a mass exodus of Syrian Muslims into Europe.  According to the conspiracy, Putin knew if he forced enough Muslims into the EU it would disrupt society and create the chaos he needs to undermine NATO.   That’s the current version of the Media story.

However, what the insufferable leftist narrative avoids, is something called reality.

The reality is: President Obama went to Cairo Egypt in 2009 and told the Muslim world that America’s political approach for the past decade was wrong.  Obama apologized for our meddling efforts.  President Obama then told the entire Middle East audience the U.S. would no longer protect Arab dictators, thereby seeding the ‘Islamist Spring’ uprisings which followed.  

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A picture tells a thousand words.

Facing the new normal.  There are over 2,500 Christmas Markets throughout Germany, including 60 in Berlin.

 […] “We cannot go on denying there is a link between Merkel’s migration policy and these attacks, or we will prepare that ground for more of these attacks.”  (link)