Standing in the ashes of what was once her home, an Alabama woman is thanking God for saving her family from a devastating house fire.
Sherri Rosas, from Steele, Alabama, lost everything in a house fire caused by faulty wiring in the attic the day after Christmas.
Rosas has been weary, she told WBMA-TV, heartsick since the death of her father in 2019.
But Rosas believes that God is with her and her family through the hardship, crediting God with warning her 13-year-old son about the deadly flames so they could escape.
Twenty-three-year-old Ashlee Pham, Rosas’ daughter, told WBMA that a loud knocking noise in her mother’s home prompted her little brother to investigate.
“My 13-year-old brother heard a knock on the door and it was actually the ceiling had collapsed in the laundry room,” Pham said. “So him and my mom got the animals and got out.”
“[T]hat knock was God knocking on the door to let them know to get out of the house because the house was burning. If they wouldn’t have gotten out when he heard that knocking, they would have probably been in that back room and they wouldn’t have been able to get out where they were at,” Pham said.
Through tears, Rosas thanked God for being with her and her son during the fire.
“I believe in God. God was definitely here that day,” Rosas said.
She pointed out that two Bibles were some of the only salvageable items from her home, with one Bible continuously opening to a particularly meaningful passage to Rosas.
The verse was found in Proverbs 30:1, reading, “I am weary, God, but I can prevail.”
The words were fitting for Rosas, who admitted she had been weary for months on end after the death of her father. She is gaining strength from the support and friendship of those in her community.
“It’s just God’s way of letting me know that I’ll be alright,” Rosas said.
Pham initiated a GoFundMe campaign to help Rosas purchase a new home, writing that her mother would give the shirt off her back “to help anyone.”
Meanwhile, community members have been donating clothing to Rosas and her son.
“It’s just a miracle when you have people that care about people,” Rosas said. “Especially in this world nowadays, people don’t care about people. It just means a whole lot.”
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Criminals Get Handed Blank Check as Atlanta Police Chief Enacts Zero-Chase Policy
Adwo / ShutterstockStock image of a police chase. (Adwo / Shutterstock)
Criminals in a major American city are likely rejoicing at news that police will no longer pursue them.
Atlanta Police Chief Erika Shields made the shocking announcement in a department-wide email on Jan. 3.
“I am acutely aware than an overwhelming number of crimes are committed where a vehicle is involved in some capacity,” Shields wrote, “and that some of the most significant arrests we have made as an agency have been as a result of zeroing in on a specific vehicle.”
“In reviewing the department’s current pursuit policy, I must weigh these critical successes against several factors.”
Shields identified officers’ pursuit-training level, casualties from chases and the judicial system’s apparent inability to hold criminals accountable as her reasoning for instituting the change.
This shocking change comes one month after a deadly December chase.
According to WSB-TV, police were pursuing an armed carjacking suspect before the alleged criminal blew through an intersection, ramming another car and killing its occupants.
That incident drew criticism from the public over the need to chase suspects. Police claimed the suspect’s alleged use of a firearm made him a potentially dangerous person, which warranted a pursuit.
It’s not hard to see where this is headed.
Atlanta already struggles with a crime problem. Now, criminals are safe in the knowledge that Atlanta police will not chase them for the time being.
This new policy may not outright allow people to commit crimes, but it certainly lets them run from the consequences. In essence, criminals in the city now have a blank check to act how they want.
According to USA Today, many departments already have restrictive pursuit policies, only allowing chases under certain circumstances.
While it’s clear that unrestricted high-speed pursuits do sometimes result in the deaths of innocent bystanders, a blanket ban on all chases does not seem to be the answer.
Only time will tell if this policy will help Atlanta — or just its criminals.
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Presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) said Wednesday that her administration would mandate that any new buildings built from 2028 onwards must be carbon neutral.
"What scares me is every time you go back to the scientists, they tell you two things. It’s worse than we thought and we have less time," Warren said during an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. "That means we’ve got to be willing to do things, for example, like regulation. By 2028, no new buildings, no new houses, without a zero carbon footprint."
Warren also backed regulation that would make light-duty trucks and cars carbon neutral by 2030, and all electricity production carbon neutral by 2035. Additionally, Warren said she would prohibit any new drilling either on federal lands or offshore, and promised to make "environmental justice" a major focus of her fight against climate change.
"We also need to make environmental justice really at the heart of our climate plan," Warren said. "A central part of the plan for me is I want to put a trillion dollars into cleaning up the places that collectively we have destroyed as a nation and bringing them back."
During a climate town hall in September, Warren said she would end license renewals of existing nuclear plants and stop the building of new ones.
In politics, language is central—the words we use, what they mean, and what we want them to mean. As our guest today, The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles explains how the left is a master of language manipulation. Liberals often win political victories by redefining words and rewiring our brains.
“The lie of the left that they’re pushing is that the truth is somehow cruel and harmful and that delusion will make us happy and free,” says Knowles. “That has never been true anywhere in history. “
Read a lightly edited transcript of the interview, posted below, or listen on the podcast:
Rachel del Guidice: We are joined today on The Daily Signal Podcast by Michael Knowles. He is the host of “The Michael Knowles Show” at The Daily Wire. He’s also the No. 1 bestselling author of the book “Reasons to Vote for Democrats: A Comprehensive Guide,” which, incidentally, President Donald Trump called “A great book for your reading enjoyment.” Michael, thank you so much for being with us today.
Michael Knowles: Thank you for having me. Thank you for promoting that sort of scholarship and my magnum opus.
del Guidice: So before we get started, I’m just curious, what inspired you to write the book? It has actually a very low word count, for those who have read, so I don’t want to spoil it for people necessarily, but what was the inspiration behind it?
Knowles: Well, I wrote the book in about 15 seconds, but I researched the book for about 27 years, so I had … been sort of observing politics for that long. There’s an extensive bibliography at the back of the book and I was able to write the definitive apology for the Democratic Party, and I was able to list every single reason that there is to vote for Democrats. “Reasons to Vote for Democrats” is available now on Amazon, wherever fine blank books are sold.
del Guidice: Oh, y’all have to check it out. It’s a treat. So just pointing that out for ya’ll. So were you always a conservative? Tell us about your journey to working in media, where you are today at The Daily Wire. What was that journey like? Where did you start and how did you end up where you’re at?
Knowles: I pretty much came out of the womb smoking cigars and talking about Edmund Burke more or less. I was always sort of conservative in my first-grade classroom. I campaigned for Bob Dole. I was the only person in the country, as far as I can tell, who was excited about Bob Dole for president, including Bob Dole.
I insisted that my mother, who wanted to vote for [Bill] Clinton, … vote for Dole because all I knew about them was that Dole was a good war hero and Clinton was a draft dodger and an all-around derelict, though, I guess I didn’t know the specifics of it quite yet.
I had a little liberal period. I mean, I played around in a liberal period from, I don’t know, like 13 to 14 or 15. … It wasn’t that long and I was an atheist from age 13 to about age 23. As I got into college, my freshman year roommate convinced me that God exists with the ontological argument for God.
I noticed that everyone at Yale was pretty smart. … Many, many [were] much smarter than me. … They were pretty much atheist, but the very smartest people were Christian or Orthodox Jews. The smartest among them I noticed were kind of trending toward Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy, which seemed to me like the kookiest version of religion, with all the smells and bells.
So I was interested in that and I became more conservative over my time in college. I felt more deeply about politics. It wasn’t just like I read a blog post by Ayn Rand in high school. I started to read Edmund Burke. I started to read Russell Kirk and these kind of great political thinkers of the modern era. [I] started to read on the religious side. C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton really deepened my conviction that God exists.
And then ultimately around 23, I reverted to Christianity, aided in large part by Father George Rutler in New York who happened to be William Buckley Jr.’s priest. So there’s a sort of interesting coincidence in all of that here.
Then I was working as an actor and I was working in politics. That was my debt, basically. When I was doing plays and films in New York and LA, my waiting tables job was that I worked on Republican political campaigns because when you’re a Republican in New York, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. So that was my day job and now I’ve combined the two.
Obviously, I work in political show business or the show business of politics and I work less in mainstream show business because when you write a blank book about how Democrats are no good, you don’t work as much in Hollywood, but it’s been a real treat. I think I’m the only guy in history who got his own show for not writing a book.
del Guidice: Thank you so much for sharing your story. So, as someone who writes and talks about American politics and American society all the time, what would you say is the biggest challenge we’re facing right now in American society? If you were to pinpoint, “Hey, this is a big issue we need to work on,” what would you say that is?
Knowles: The issue is the language. The issue is the way that we speak to one another and the words that we encourage us to use and the words that we’re not using.
This takes many forms. This takes the form of political correctness, which has been a scourge for a very long time. President George H. W. Bush actually mentioned this while he was president. He said that the scourge of PC is really threatening the United States and it’s grown worse over time.
In 2016, [Donald] Trump was elected in large part running against political correctness because political correctness isn’t just some kind of stupid jargon that we all hear.
Julian Castro, at one of the presidential debates, … said he doesn’t support just reproductive freedom, he supports reproductive justice—and not just for women, but for trans women, which he’s just saying words that don’t make sense. He didn’t realize that trans women refers to men who don’t have uteruses, who can’t have abortions.
That’s obviously hilarious. We can all laugh about that, but you know, speech is politics. Politics is speech. When the left shuts down our speech, they are precluding us from politics. When the left equates speech with violence, they are ending our experiment in self-government and they’re replacing the persuasion of our fellow citizens with mere brute force, insisting that we can force our will onto others without even making a reasonable argument for that.
They changed the language insomuch as we’re now no longer allowed to refer to men who now believe that they’re women as “he” or “she.” Well, look, if you refer to them as “she,” then you’re accepting the premise that men can become women. If you refer to him as “he,” you’re rejecting that premise. It’s the same thing that happened with same-sex marriage.
The way the left won the same-sex marriage battle beyond Justice [Anthony] Kennedy writing romantic poetry from the bench, is that the left convinced us that same-sex marriage was about rights. Who has the right to get married? But of course that was never the debate. The debate was always, what is marriage?
Everywhere at all times, throughout all of history, sexual difference has had something to do with the meaning of marriage. It’s been at the center of it. Marriage is the union between husbands and wives. Now they’ve redefined that and said that marriage is any monogamous union regardless of sexual difference.
But I’ve got good buddies. That’s a monogamous union. Are we married? I don’t think so. I’ve got a relationship to my butcher. … Are we married? No. That’s a different kind of relationship.
But they won the battle because they redefined the term before it even took place. Conservatives are letting it happen because we think that it’s a trivial matter. Who cares? Let’s move on to something that matters, like lowering taxes, but you ain’t going to be able to lower taxes anymore if we give away the language, which is the stuff of our consciousness and the material of our politics.
del Guidice: So how can conservatives communicate more winsomely? You mentioned how Democrats on the left are so good at communicating well, or at least changing the course of a debate. How can conservatives be better and communicate more when winsomely?
Knowles: Well, that’s a wonderful word to use. Winsome. … And another “W” word that I would use is whimsy. I think you should be a little whimsical about it. I don’t think you need to be scolding or moralizing or boring.
I think it’s perfectly fine to say, “Look, Caitlyn Jenner is a man. He won the decathlon for goodness sake.” He’s definitely a man and that’s fine. I don’t dislike the guy. I harbor no ill will toward him, but he’s not a woman. Just as you can say, “Look, I have plenty of gay friends, but marriage still involves sexual difference.” Those two things can be true.
I think what the left succeeds at is telling us that we need to use their ridiculous jargon that all of us kind of mock. But they say we have to use that jargon because the jargon is compassionate. If you don’t use the jargon, you’re a mean, old, cruel bigot, and we’re not. We enjoy the truth. The truth is a good thing.
The lie of the left that they’re pushing is that the truth is somehow cruel and harmful and that delusion will make us happy and free. That has never been true anywhere in history.
One way we can help that argument is not by getting all angry and pulling our hair out and having steam come out of our ears.
Obviously, Caitlyn Jenner is not a woman. That’s fine. He can do whatever he likes. But you know, don’t force me to say that two plus two equals five. We’re not yet living in the big brother dystopia of “1984,” though the left seems to be dragging us pretty quickly down that path.
del Guidice: Not yet at least.
So one of my favorite pieces of yours was one that you wrote in June and it was titled “The Problem with Pride.” And in this piece you talk about pride and how those on the left are equating it with sexual tolerance and acceptance and also how pride has become essentially a virtue in our culture. How has this happened?
Knowles: It has become the virtue in our culture. We have a secular liturgical calendar. Some people like to pretend that there’s no established religion in the United States. There certainly is.
I mean, we have whole months. We have Black History Month, which is not really about black history, it’s about a leftist vision of black history. We have Women’s History Month, same thing, not really about women’s history but about a leftist ideological vision of it.
Then we have Pride Month. It used to be a Pride Parade then it was Pride Week. Now it’s [a whole] Pride Month, and that’s not even about homosexuality anymore.
Now homosexuality is celebrated in October. That’s the new month for LGBTQ history. We’re now actually celebrating pride, which is the deadliest of the seven deadly sins.
The place I think this comes from is pretty deep. I actually don’t only mean to make fun of the left for celebrating pride, which is not a great PR move.
I think it comes from viewing politics primarily through a lens of rights. As in, this can go all the way back to our view of natural rights, even to say, “I enter into politics as my own individual floating in free space and I am entitled to certain rights. Give me, give me, give me. Protect me, protect me, protect me.”
And that’s just not the most effective way to look at politics. It won’t make you happy. Obviously, rates of happiness, insomuch as they can be measured, have declined precipitously in recent decades as these ideologies have taken off. The proper way to look at politics is not primarily through a lens of rights, but through a lens and duty of obligation.
Edmund Burke talks about this a lot. We come into this world not as free floating atoms in the sky with no bonds to anybody. We come in as the babies of our parents and we’re in that family and then we have a local community and then we’ve got voluntary associations and then we’ve got our state. Then we’ve got our church, then we’ve got our federal government. We have our national identity. We have all of these bonds of loyalty, one to another.
JFK put it well, which is a rare thing for him, but he put it well. He said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, [ask] what you can do for your country.”
I think that if we approached politics in that way, we’d have a much better society if we approached it not from an angle of pride and celebrating pride as though it were the greatest virtue, but from an angle of humility, fear of the Lord, the beginning of all wisdom—that would be a prerequisite for the other virtues. Then the other prerequisite for the other virtues is courage and, unfortunately, both courage and humility are sorely lacking these days.
del Guidice: Very short supply. It’s very sad to say.
Well, another virtue you talk about in this piece about the problem with pride is selflessness. You wrote, “We have a culture that values the self above all other things.” So in a good culture, you have selflessness—you have people doing acts of charity for each other and you have people sacrificing each other for their children, for future generations. But in our culture, we don’t have selflessness. We never talk about selflessness. …
That’s why I love this piece so much. I’m like, … selfless people are the most amazing people. I think they are the people that have the biggest impact because they’re not doing it for them. They’re basically living their life for others. That’s such an amazing quality.
So how can society be more selfless?
Knowles: You’ve got to let go. You have got to let go of the belief that you own your life, that you’ve somehow invented your life and you can do whatever you want. You have no obligations to your creator.
You’ve got to let go of the idea that you can take it with you, that you can bring your material goods into the hereafter. Many people have tried, as far as I can tell, only one has ever succeeded, and half the country now doesn’t even believe in that guy. You’ve got to lose this fiction, this belief.
We have this belief that by defining our own reality—as the romantic poet Justice Kennedy said in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, he invented the constitutional right to define reality, OK? We believe that by defining our own reality, by pursuing only our interest, by acquiring all of the material goods we can possibly amass and hoarding them to ourselves, that it will make us happy. And I get why.
I understand why people think that would make them happy, but it’s a funny little trick of the world that it doesn’t. It actually makes you miserable. The way that you can feel fully human, that you can feel dignified, that you can feel joy is actually by not talking about yourself. It’s actually by giving away to others, giving to charity. It’s a wonderful thing to do that.
You know, Chesterton said, “The angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.” The other little aphorism here is that a man wrapped up in himself makes a small package indeed. So, you’ve got to always recognize that temptation for what it is. It’s a temptation [where] you’ll have the illusion of joy and happiness in front of you, but inexorably will lead you to misery.
del Guidice: “A man wrapped up in himself makes a small package.” That’s my new favorite quote.
Knowles: How great is that quote?
del Guidice: That’s incredible.
Knowles: I’d like to take credit for it, but I can’t, I’ll give that credit away to someone else, selflessly.
del Guidice: So working in media, it’s no secret to those of us who do [that] it can be exhausting and even discouraging, depending on the day. So given that, how do you stay encouraged? How do you stay grounded?
Knowles: How do you mean? Because, obviously, you get a lot of mean tweets and threats.
del Guidice: Exactly. Well, Twitter is kind of like a wasteland, honestly.
Knowles: It is just a cesspool, hellscape. There’s no question.
del Guidice: So how do you rise above that and also just remember what you’re fighting for … ?
Knowles: Well, I’ll actually say something nice about the hellscape of Twitter, which is increasingly difficult, which is that it really does keep you grounded.
I mean, I don’t mute people and I don’t block people. I’ve never blocked any person on Twitter. I get all sort of media matters, bots and all of these far-left accounts that, you know, were just opened up and have zero followers and they’re obviously being astroturfed by a political organization. They will say horrific things. I mean, things that should make people with a conscience feel deep, deep shame.
But I think it’s actually good that I see those because the internet is very honest and you really want to stay grounded. If you’re in the media, if you go on camera, if you give speeches, it’s very easy to get a swell head. So, actually getting criticism, having people insult you, is one good way of grounding yourself a little bit.
And then, ultimately, what you have to do is recognize that your life is not ultimately your own. Any sort of puffing up of yourself you’re going to do is going to end in disaster because no one here gets out alive. We’re all headed to the same place. That is a pretty grounding lesson to learn.
I think I have it a little easier in this regard because I got my show by not writing a book. Any professional blessing I got in this perfect embodiment of the unearned grace of God, which is a blank book. So that to me is illustrative of this greater example, which is that everything we have is a blessing, our very life is a blessing. We didn’t do it ultimately ourselves, so we should be grateful for that. We should even be grateful for suffering, which offers an opportunity to grow spiritually.
del Guidice: Thank you so much for sharing that.
So, as we start a new year, it’s no secret that we’re going to continue to see attacks on so many of the values we hold dear. Some of those include traditional marriage. You mentioned how the ball was dropped. A lot of conservatives dropped the ball in the marriage debate. We’re going to see continued attacks on the unborn, religious liberty, the list goes on. We all know it.
If you could say one thing to those who are listening and encourage them to not give up, to stay fighting, what would that be?
Knowles: Oh, we’re winning. People forget, President Trump won in 2016. I know that the media haven’t granted that yet. I know the House is still trying to overturn the election unsuccessfully, but we won and we’re winning on abortion and we’re winning on open borders and we’re winning on this whole crazy gender ideology and we’re just winning.
It might not look that way because the really serious-looking people in suits and ties on television tell us that everything’s going to hell in a hand basket and the American people hate everything that we stand for. But it just isn’t true. It’s not borne out by the facts.
And when the left is really going after you, when they’re calling half the country deplorable and irredeemable and saying the world is going to end in 10 years if we don’t give ourselves over to some sort of socialistic, collectivist, atheist hellscape—the minute that they’re coming after you with that kind of hyperbole, that’s I think the best evidence of all that we’re threatening what they’re trying to do and we’re coming out ahead.
del Guidice: So, final question. We all hear feminists talk about toxic masculinity and I think we all can see, or at least I can see, even as a young journalist working in D.C., the effects of that where men feel like they can’t lead, they feel like they should step aside and just kind of like acquiesce themselves to women. What would you say as a healthy view for men to embrace and to not basically fall prey to that ideology?
Knowles: Well, you should ground it in religion. Like Andrew Breitbart famously said, “Politics is downstream of culture,” and culture, as Russell Kirk pointed out, is downstream of religion. What the culture worships will define that culture. So you don’t want to be in the position of being a reactionary.
When the left uses the issue of race—the left are just total race hustlers, right? They constantly divide people on race and they demonize white people and they do this as a matter of course.
Now, the way to fight that, I guess you could become a reactionary and become some kind of identitarian and accept their premises, or you can fight that by rejecting their premise.
I think the same is true on sex. So the left says, “Woman good, man bad, other than man who dresses like woman,” and then that one’s good again or something. I don’t know. It changes every day. They’ll probably change by the time this podcast comes out.
So you can either become a reactionary and say, “No, women bad, men good, except for the men who do … ” I don’t know, I’m losing my train of thought. You can say the sexes each have dignity.
Eve was taken from Adam’s rib, not from his head and not from his feet. She’s not above him, she’s not below him, but she’s right from the center of his body. Men and women are complimentary, meaning they have aspects that perfect the other one. Men are a little bit more this way, women are a little bit more that way. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and that’s a beautiful thing.
If we could push that message and not be tricked into going down the leftist path, which, ultimately, they’re going to win because they’re better at leftism than we are, I think it would help us on the marriage debate. I think it would help us on abortion. I think it would help us on love of our nation and national solidarity. I think it would help us on the question of race.
We’ve got to be very tricky. We are walking a tight rope here and you’ve got the left screaming and you’ve got a monopoly and the mainstream media and you’ve got the whole federal bureaucracy against you. So, it’s a tough battle, but what an honor that we’ve been chosen to live during this time. What an honor that we get to fight this fight. We were put here for a purpose and we ought to do it.
del Guidice: Amen. Michael, thank you so much for joining us on The Daily Signal Podcast.
KYIV, Ukraine—A Ukrainian International Airlines Boeing 737-800 crashed Wednesday morning only minutes after takeoff from Tehran and only hours after Iran launched a barrage of ballistic missiles at U.S. forces based in neighboring Iraq.
Data from Flightradar24, a website that tracks aircraft, indicates the Ukrainian airliner crashed roughly two minutes after taking off from Imam Khomeini International Airport bound for Kyiv just after 6 a.m. local time. The plane reached about 8,000 feet in altitude.
All 176 passengers and crew on board the Ukrainian airliner died, Iranian officials say.
Among the dead are 82 Iranians, 63 Canadians, and 11 Ukrainians, and 10 Swedes, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko tweeted early Wednesday. Also dead are four Afghans, three Germans, and three British nationals.
About four hours earlier, Iran launched 15 ballistic missiles against bases housing U.S. troops in Iraq.
According to Iraq’s military, the missiles landed between 1:45 and 2:15 a.m. local time. No Americans have been reported injured or killed in that attack, U.S. officials say.
The Ukrainian Embassy in Tehran initially said in a statement on its website that the crash of the Ukrainian airliner probably was not caused by a terrorist attack or a missile.
However, the embassy subsequently retracted that statement and now says it isn’t clear what caused the crash.
Ukrainian International Airlines announced it was suspending all flights to Tehran “until further notice.” The Ukrainian Aviation Administration banned all flights in Iranian airspace.
Iranian officials immediately said the crash was caused by a mechanical malfunction, specifying that one of the airliner’s two turbofan engines caught fire shortly after takeoff.
Aviation experts note, however, that it typically takes weeks or months of investigations to determine the cause of an aircraft crash.
Iranian personnel reportedly have found the downed plane’s two black boxes, but they so far refuse to hand them over to Boeing, according to news reports.
John Venable, senior research fellow for defense policy at The Heritage Foundation, cautioned that it’s too early to tell what brought down the Ukrainian airliner down.
However, Venable, a former U.S. Air Force F-16 pilot with 3,000 hours of fighter time, also told The Daily Signal that he was alarmed by the continuation of civilian air traffic in Iran throughout Wednesday morning.
“The extreme political tensions of the evening made the risk of air defense systems on either side misidentifying and inadvertently shooting down an airliner filled with innocents very real,” Venable said.
The Boeing 737-800 aircraft that went down was delivered direct to Ukraine International Airlines from the manufacturer in 2016. The aircraft had no known mechanical faults and had passed an inspection Jan. 6, Ukrainian officials said.
The single-aisle Boeing 737-800 is an earlier model of the 737-MAX aircraft, which was grounded after two fatal crashes last year. The 737-800 does not carry the flawed anti-stall software deemed responsible for the MAX crashes.
Ukrainian International Airlines representatives also downplayed the possibility of human error, saying the crew onboard the downed aircraft was highly experienced and had received the proper amount of rest prior to the flight.
An investigation will determine the cause of the crash, Ukrainian officials said.
Some U.S. aviation experts initially were skeptical about the possibility that Iranian air defenses may have brought down the Ukrainian airliner, mistaking it for an American warplane.
However, the timing of the Ukrainian airliner’s crash just hours after the Iranian missile strike into neighboring Iraq has raised questions about why civilian aircraft were still flying from Tehran’s international airport Wednesday morning, given that Iran’s air defense network was certainly on high alert for U.S. retaliatory airstrikes.
Before Wednesday, some airlines already had canceled flights into both Iranian and Iraqi airspace due to escalated military tensions between Washington and Tehran. According to Ukrainian news reports, though, other airlines such as Turkish Airlines, Pegasus, AtlasGlobal, and Qatar Airlines all had continued flights into Tehran after Iran launched the missiles.
By allowing commercial air traffic to go on unabated Wednesday, Iran may have been looking for an American misstep, Heritage’s Venable said.
“Iran’s decision to let airline operations go unfettered could have been mere incompetency,” Venable said, adding:
Or, it could have been on the hope that an American miscalculation would bring down an airliner and deliver a public affairs nightmare for the United States, giving Iran a political victory where they stood no chance of gaining one from their military. Either way, the world should take note.
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration issued a prohibition on Wednesday banning U.S. aircraft from operating in Iraq, Iran, the Persian Gulf, and Gulf of Oman, citing “heightened military activities and increased political tensions in the Middle East, which present an inadvertent risk to U.S. civil aviation operations due to the potential for miscalculation or misidentification.”
Most U.S. carriers already avoided the region, according to Keith Mackey, an aviation safety consultant who has more than 30,000 hours of pilot flight time in aircraft such as the Boeing 747 and Airbus A-300.
“When you fly over a war zone, you’re at risk,” Mackey told The Daily Signal in a telephone interview.
Mackey noted that, based on available flight data, the crashed Ukrainian airliner had a normal climbout, which did not indicate a mechanical problem from the flight’s outset.
“Something took place in a very short length of distance and time to cause the plane to go down,” Mackey said.
He added that, in his opinion, commercial flights should not have continued at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport following the missile launches.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who was in Oman on an official visit, departed for Kyiv on Wednesday after learning about the crash.
Zelenskyy wrote on Facebook:
Scary news from the Middle East. This morning, after taking off from Imam Khomeini International Airport (Tehran), the passenger aircraft of Ukraine International Airlines crashed—crashed near the airport. According to preliminary reports, all passengers and crew were killed. Our embassy clarifies information about the circumstances of the tragedy and the death toll.
In Ukraine, the crash conjured memories of the July 2014 shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 by Russian forces over the eastern Ukrainian warzone.
According to multiple independent investigations, a Russian BUK surface-to-air missile, operated by a Russian military crew, shot down the Boeing 777 airliner, killing all 298 passengers and crew onboard. That incident increased worldwide restrictions on civilian airliners flying near active combat areas.
Iran’s missile attack marked the latest escalation of a monthslong, tit-for-tat military standoff between Iran and the U.S.
On Dec. 27, Iran’s proxy militants in Iraq attacked a U.S. military base in the country, killing an American contractor. Following a retaliatory U.S. airstrike, Iran-backed protesters stormed the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.
Responding to those acts of Iranian aggression, President Donald Trump authorized a targeted drone airstrike Jan. 3 that killed Qassim Suleimani, commander since 1998 of Iran’s Quds Force, the unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that conducts military and spy operations outside Iran.
Suleimani was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of U.S. troops during the Iraq War, U.S. officials say. And, according to the Pentagon, the Iranian major general had plans for more attacks against U.S. diplomats, service members, and other American interests, both in Iraq and elsewhere throughout the Middle East.
Trump on Wednesday called Suleimani “a ruthless terrorist.”
This week, President Donald Trump launched a global round of teeth gnashing when he ordered the killing of the greatest terrorist leader in the modern Middle East, Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani.
Suleimani was unquestionably responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans in Iraq and thousands of others throughout the Middle East — mostly Muslim. His global terror network ran from South America to Europe to Africa to Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iraq. Suleimani was an unparalleled organizer and a pitiless murderer. His death was richly earned.
But for many in the media and on the domestic and international left, Trump’s action was precipitously “provocative.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Suleimani ‘s killing — which came directly after a Suleimani -approved terror assault on America’s embassy in Baghdad and amidst reported further plans for escalated terror against American targets — “disproportionate.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., suggested that Trump, not the Iranians, had “escalated” the situation. Former Vice President Joe Biden said that Trump had “just tossed a stick of dynamite into a tinderbox.”
This reaction has been magnified by the media, many of whom have been speculating about the possibility of all-out war between the United States and Iran. Think pieces have been written about whether the United States will reactivate the draft (spoiler alert: No, we won’t). Musings have filled the newspapers about the supposed conflagration prompted not by Iranian evil but by Trumpian reactivity.
All of this smacks less of legitimate concern about what comes next than it does of sheer panic that Trump has overturned a decade of American and European appeasement of the Iranian regime.
Ben Rhodes, former President Obama’s deputy national security adviser, architect of the Iran deal and an overt liar who told the American public that Iran was on its way to moderation if only the United States would loosen economic restrictions on the terror state, has placed blame for volatility squarely before Trump.
Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser during the Iran deal and another overt liar who told the American public that Islamic terror against our Benghazi embassy was rooted in anger over a YouTube video, soberly informed Americans that “Americans would be wise to brace for war.” Biden suggested that in throwing out the Iran deal, Trump had paved the way for war — and, oh, by the way, the Iran deal was “airtight.”
This is a deliberate misreading of history designed to absolve the Obama administration of its Iran policy debacle.
The administration pursued a policy of strengthening Iran economically — and did so while openly acknowledging that Iran would use that newly gained economic strength to pursue terrorism and ballistic missile testing. In speaking of the sanctions relief given to Iran, then-Secretary of State John Kerry explained in January 2016, “I think that some of it will end up in the hands of the IRGC or other entities, some of which are labeled terrorists.”
That’s precisely what happened. In March 2016, then-U.S. Central Command nominee Army Gen. Joseph Votel said that Iran had become “more aggressive” since the advent of the nuclear deal. Indeed, Iran has built up Hezbollah in Lebanon, propped up Bashar Assad in Syria, increased its presence in Iraq and bolstered its war in Yemen. In the past few months, Iran and its proxies have attacked shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, Saudi oil facilities, an American drone and an American embassy, among other targets. All of this occurred while the Trump administration did little or nothing in response.
Then Trump ordered the killing of Suleimani. Suddenly, we have been informed by dishonest Democrats and their media allies, Iran has gone rogue.
Nonsense. Iran has been rogue for decades. The Iran deal was simply an attempt to whistle past the graveyard with the terror regime — to pay it off long enough so that President Barack Obama could declare the problem handled. This was, after all, the Obama strategy in Crimea and Syria: Declare a red line; run away from it; pretend that pusillanimous inaction is bravery and deterrence provocation.
Trump thought differently. Now Iran has come face to face with the prospect that actions have consequences — and those consequences don’t involve pallets of cash being shipped over to fund terror organizations that span the globe.
Pelosi Responds to Iran Attack by Blaming US for ‘Needless Provocations’
(Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty ImagesSpeaker of the House Nancy Pelosi holds a media conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 19, 2019. (Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images)
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday responded to Iran’s missile attacks on military bases in Iraq housing U.S. troops by blaming the Trump administration.
Even as U.S. officials were uncertain of the damage done by the roughly 15 missiles that slammed into two bases housing U.S. personnel, Pelosi was tweeting her criticism of President Donald Trump.
“Closely monitoring the situation following bombings targeting U.S. troops in Iraq,” she tweeted. “We must ensure the safety of our servicemembers, including ending needless provocations from the Administration and demanding that Iran cease its violence. America & world cannot afford war.”
Closely monitoring the situation following bombings targeting U.S. troops in Iraq. We must ensure the safety of our servicemembers, including ending needless provocations from the Administration and demanding that Iran cease its violence. America & world cannot afford war.
“You know, at the time when Americans are having missiles raining down on them, we should actually rally around the flag. There is plenty of time for politics. We have a whole year until the election,” Kinzinger said.
“But, during that, for the speaker to basically — in essence — accuse the president for these missiles coming down on the American soldiers is something I think they are going to regret,” he said.
Kinzinger then addressed the widespread condemnation from Democrats of the drone strike that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force.
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“They are going to regret their — basically — opposition to this strike. They are going to regret all this stuff when it comes to November,” he said.
Anyone blaming America for Iran’s escalation of tensions does not understand the region’s history, the Illinois Republican said.
“This is what’s amazing to me,” he said, “You know, this idea that this was America’s fault. That it wasn’t our mistake in leaving Iraq that actually led to this in the first place.”
Kinzinger said he was disappointed that politics overshadowed patriotism in the partisan response to the drone strike that killed Soleimani.
“I supported Obama when he took big actions that we needed to. They don’t think that way,” he said. “And, that is why it’s important for us to stand together and also not to leave Iraq. To stand with the Iraqi people who really do want us there and not their puppet government that exists to this day.”
Depending upon what damage was done, the U.S. may have the chance to “kind of walk back from this cliff that Iran has brought us to,” he said.
“So, now is the moment where I think the president — whatever he does — he will have the information. He’ll make the right decision. Hopefully, we are walking back from Iran’s escalation, but we can finish any fight,” Kinzinger said.
House Armed Services Committee member Rep. Michael Waltz, a Florida Republican, told reporters that assessing the damage and Iran’ s intent will guide America’s response.
“What I’m watching for as these missiles fall as we speak are, are they hitting infrastructure or are they specifically trying to target Americans and kill Americans,” Waltz said, as Fox reported. “If they’re hitting infrastructure, that could be a signal that while they had to respond they did so in a way that would lead to future de-escalation. But Trump has [said] if you kill Americans like Iran has done since 1979, there will be serious consequences and he’ll hold Iran responsible, not the proxies.”
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Tuesday during an appearance on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-AZ) discussed the surface-to-surface missile attack by Iran on a U.S. military base in Iraq.
Cruz maintained Trump was justified in ordering the airstrike on Iranian general Qasam Soleimani. He added that Democrats and the media speculating about World War III was a product of their hysteria and anti-Trump fervor.
The Texas Republican went on to suggest those missiles that struck the U.S. base were financed by money delivered to Iran as a result of the nuclear deal brokered during the previous Obama administration.
“If you look at Iran policy, I think you’ve seen a dramatic shift,” he said. “Under Barack Obama, as you noted, the policy was appeasement. The policy under the disastrous Iran nuclear deal under Obama was to give over $100 billion to Iran. They literally flew $1.7 billion in cash, in unmarked bills on pallettes in the dead of night into Iran. In a very real sense, the missiles that we saw fired on U.S. servicemen and women tonight were paid for by the billions the Obama administration flooded the Ayatollah with. If history teaches anything, it’s don’t give billions of dollars to people who hate you and want to kill you.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi demands to be in control all the time. In fact, after the House voted to approve two articles of impeachment against President Trump, she refused to hand them over to the Senate, demanding to play a role even after the House’s job was completely done.
So Vice President Mike Pence called Pelosi, the third-ranking member of government, on Tuesday night to inform her that Iran was launching missiles on U.S. forces in Iraq.
“Tell him I’ll call him back,” Pelosi said, according to a Politico reporter.
“In meeting tonight Speaker Pelosi was handed a note telling her VP Pence was on the phone,” Heather Caygle wrote on Twitter. “‘Tell him I’ll call him back,’ she said according to sources in room, noting she had to go open the House for new session.
“Two minutes later, she was handed note about air base bombing,” Caygle wrote.
In meeting tonight Speaker Pelosi was handed a note telling her VP Pence was on the phone.
“Tell him I’ll call him back,” she said according to sources in room, noting she had to go open the House for new session.
Two minutes later, she was handed note about air base bombing.
After President Trump ordered the U.S. military to take out Iran’s secretive Quds Force commander, Qassim Suleimani, Pelosi said he should have first asked Congress for permission.
“We cannot put the lives of American servicemembers, diplomats and others further at risk by engaging in provocative and disproportionate actions,” Pelosi said on Thursday night. “Tonight’s airstrike risks provoking further dangerous escalation of violence. America –- and the world -– cannot afford to have tensions escalate to the point of no return.”
“The Administration has conducted tonight’s strikes in Iraq targeting high-level Iranian military officials and killing Iranian Quds Force Commander Qasem Soleimani without an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against Iran. Further, this action was taken without the consultation of the Congress.”
Washington Examiner writer Byron York noted the disconnect after Pelosi refused Pence’s call.
“Speaker Pelosi doesn’t like it when the administration doesn’t give her foreign policy updates. So VP Pence calls with word of Iran missile attack. ‘Tell him I’ll call him back,’ Pelosi says,” he wrote on Twitter.
Speaker Pelosi doesn’t like it when the administration doesn’t give her foreign policy updates. So VP Pence calls with word of Iran missile attack. ‘Tell him I’ll call him back,’ Pelosi says. From @danielchaitin7https://t.co/OpXQ88xIeg
Later on Tuesday, Pelosi wrote on Twitter: “Closely monitoring the situation following bombings targeting U.S. troops in Iraq. We must ensure the safety of our servicemembers, including ending needless provocations from the Administration and demanding that Iran cease its violence. America & world cannot afford war.”
Shortly before her tweet was posted, it was reported Pelosi was busy at a restaurant opening.
