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2016

Obama: See No Evil, See No Enemies by Elliott Abrams

Two almost simultaneous events in recent days have shed even more light on the Obama administration’s treatment of America’s enemies.

In Cuba, a Marxist, pro-Russian, anti-American tyranny, the administration pressed hard to abandon decades of policy in exchange for nothing. Human rights conditions there are awful, but the United States did not bargain to end the embargo in exchange for improvements. And since Obama’s announcement of a new policy, which was a simple free gift to the Castros, human rights conditions have deteriorated further.

The most recent event was the first commercial flight to Cuba in decades, from Fort Lauderdale to Santa Clara. Santa Clara is the residence of Guillermo Farinas.

Who is he, and why does he matter? He is one of Cuba’s bravest human rights advocates, a recipient of the Sakharov Prize from the European Parliament in 2010.

The citation says among other things this:

A Cuban doctor of psychology, independent journalist and political dissident, Guillermo Fariñas has over the years conducted 23 hunger strikes with the aim of achieving peaceful political change and freedom of expression in Cuba….For his activism, Fariñas has in recent years been threatened with death and confinement in a psychiatric hospital, beaten and hospitalised, and repeatedly arrested and detained, including at the funeral of Oswaldo Payá, another Sakharov Prize laureate and Cuban dissident.

Farinas is in the 48th day of hunger strike right now and was hospitalized on September 5. I write of all this because last week when that Jet Blue flight landed, the Obama administration celebrated it– but has not said one word about Farinas nor has any American diplomat sought to visit him. (And by the way, that flight was chock full of journalists, as the web siteCapitol Hill Cubans points out, and not a single one of them or of the foreign correspondents from Havana who went to Santa Clara sought to visit and speak with him. They were too busy celebrating, it seems. Capitol Hill Cubans quotes Martin Luther King: “in the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”)

Meanwhile, half a world away the Iranian Navy is making a laughingstock of the U.S. Navy, taunting it with small boat actions that endanger our ships, get within about 100 yards of them, and have forced them to take evasive action to avoid collisions. Reuters reported that

A U.S. Navy coastal patrol ship changed course after a fast-attack craft from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps came within 100 yards (91 meters) of it in the central Gulf on Sunday, U.S. Defense Department officials said on Tuesday. It was at least the fourth such incident in less than a month. U.S. officials are concerned that these actions by Iran could lead to mistakes.

Mahmoud Abbas and other Soviet Ghosts Caroline Glick

Channel 1’s report Wednesday that in 1983, current Palestinian Authority Chairman and PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas served as a KGB agent is hardly the story of the year, but it does remind us of certain half-forgotten facts about the Cold War that are becoming ever more relevant today.

The PLO’s close and servile relationship with the KGB was first exposed in a systematic way in 1987, with the publication of Red Horizons: Chronicles of a Communist Spy Chief, the exposé of Soviet and Romanian Cold War operations written by former Romanian intelligence chief Lt.-Gen. Ion Pacepa. Pacepa, who defected to the US in 1978 after serving as the head of the DIE – Romania’s KGB – was the highest ranking intelligence officer from the Soviet bloc to ever defect.

In his book, Pacepa revealed that “the PLO was dreamt up by the KGB.”

Pacepa explained how Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, at the direction of Moscow, convinced Yasser Arafat to employ political warfare, centered on phony protestations that he had abandoned terrorism, to weaken the West’s resolve to defend itself and to cause Israel to doubt its own legitimacy.

Wednesday’s Channel 1 report on Abbas was based on new revelations from the Mitrokhin Archive. Vasili Mitrokhin was a senior archivist in the KGB who surreptitiously copied KGB documents for many years and hid his copies in his home. In 1991 Mitrokhin defected to Britain and took his archive of 25,000 copies of documents with him.

In 2004, the second volume of his edited archive was published. The volume, titled, The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World, focused on the KGB’s efforts to use the Third World as a strategic weapon in its battle against the West. The volume devotes two chapters to the KGB’s campaign against Israel.

End the occupation by declaring sovereignty rather than by withdrawal By Moshe Feiglin

Former Head of Central Command General Gadi Shamni said last week that Israel is the most occupying force in the world and is on its way to becoming a pariah state. “Israel must achieve separation from the Palestinians,” Shamni added.

We can assume that Shamni’s words reflect his worldview. In the IDF 2016, it is impossible to be a General or even a Lieutenant Colonel if you believe in a diplomatic solution to Israel’s conflict with the Arabs other than what is dictated by the Left. The Oslo Peace Industry cloned the entire Israeli elite – built from all those who toed the Oslo line and who run the State today – in its own image.

First and foremost, it cloned the military elite. Every officer from Major and up must undergo a (re)education series, taught by the left-leaning Harman and Binah institutes. (Both are supported by the New Israel Fund). The only commanding officer who testified in favor of Elor Azariah, the soldier accused of killing a terrorist, was a low-ranking officer who left the army after the Azariah incident. The rest of the IDF command does not want to be accused of Nazism, as Deputy Chief of Staff General Golan intimated. So all of them think the same way and talk the same way. And in any future war, they will all be defeated in the same way, just as they were defeated in all the recent rounds of fighting. (That is fine, though. The media will praise them as great victors and only the bereaved families will bear their grief in silence.)

Back to General Shamni. Regardless of the worldview from which his words emanated, Shamni is simply right. The ‘Occupation’ in Judea and Samaria cannot go on forever and it must be ended.

Our Zehut party printed t-shirts that say, ‘End the Occupation’. Of course, this is where any agreement with General Shamni ends. While he advocates another glorious Israel retreat that will bring not only missiles to Tel Aviv, but mortar fire to Kfar Saba, as well, Zehut advocates the end of the Occupation by the declaration of Israeli sovereignty on every grain of sand under the control of the IDF. In other words, the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Zehut also has a detailed plan to achieve this goal. The plan also provides a solution for the Arabs living in Israel, for dealing with international pressure, the implications of the move in terms of international law, safeguarding human rights and more.

The idea of ending the Occupation by running away (Oslo/Disengagement) has already exploded in our faces. Even the Left has despaired of it.

20 Weeks of Living Dangerously — Obama’s Weakness Will Tempt Foreign Leaders Russia, China, and Iran are poised to pounce while they can. By Arthur Herman

President Obama has just returned from a disastrous G-20 summit — humiliated by his Chinese hosts, stared down by Russian president Vladimir Putin, traduced by Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte — and yesterday Iranian patrol boats were once again playing deadly games of chicken with U.S. naval vessels in the Persian Gulf.

Expect more of the same in the next 20 weeks: That’s how long Obama will still be in office. During that time Russia, China, and Iran will be watching the clock and will be tempted to make their most aggressive moves yet, knowing that his successor, whoever it is, is bound to be more forceful in protecting U.S. interests than Obama has been.

Indeed, virtually any president, including Jimmy Carter, would have been more assertive these past seven years. Obama, however, has been single-mindedly relinquishing or even undermining our position around the globe, as well as the position of our allies, including Israel and Great Britain. (Who else handed over secret data regarding Britain’s nuclear arsenal to the Russians?) At the same time, he’s given Russia, China, and Iran almost as much leeway as they could possibly want to advance their own agendas.

On January 20, however, that window of opportunity will start to close.

The temptation for the Moscow-Beijing-Tehran axis will be to establish on the ground a series of faits accomplis that Obama’s successor will be reluctant to try to reverse, especially if military force or the threat of military force would be needed to dislodge or displace their gains. America’s antagonists will also be counting on the fact that during these twenty-odd weeks Obama won’t want to wreck his legacy by precipitating a major international crisis, particularly one that puts Hillary’s electoral chances in danger.

So what can we expect?

First of all, both Russia and Iran already have started their moves toward the finish line. We’ve seen Putin pick a fresh fight with Ukraine, one that sets the stage for further possible incursions into Ukrainian territory, and we’ve seen Russian planes using Iranian air bases to launch strikes in Syria — an unprecedented step in Moscow–Tehran cooperation.

Meanwhile, China has stepped up its provocative moves in the East China Sea as well as South China Seas, while its catspaw North Korea has successfully launched its first ballistic missile from a submarine.

But things could get even uglier. The next three months could bring a fresh Russian incursion into Ukraine, perhaps, or even into the Baltic states. Asian experts are waiting for a unilateral Chinese declaration of an air-defense identification zone, or ADIZ, in the South China Sea similar to the one it’s imposed in the East China Sea. That would sharply restrict the air space around the highly contested Spratly Islands. Beijing knows that move would lead the Obama administration to post a public protest and to repeat its calls for peace and calm in the region but to do little else.

As for Iran, its next move could be sending Hezbollah or Hamas sophisticated missile systems with which to threaten Israel; it could step up its support for anti-Saudi guerrillas operating in Yemen. The worst-case scenario would be an Iran-sponsored terrorist attack on Saudi oil fields, in the hopes that a shutdown of Saudi oil production would drive up prices of crude oil so that Iran got a better premium on the oil it would be pumping as Western sanctions ended.

What Did Clinton’s Lawyers Say to Her Tech Guy a Few Days Before He Destroyed Her E-Mails? The very curious timeline of Clinton’s document deletions: subpoena issued → her lawyers talk to Clinton’s IT team → e-mails destroyed By Andrew C. McCarthy

Imagine a mafia don who wants to have some evidence destroyed, maybe even have a witness “disappear.” Does he have a sit-down with his trusted capos, who will then give the job to a reliable button-man? Not if he’s taken the Clinton Family course in advanced criminology — known around the campus as “(C).” If the don is a graduate, he knows the new way to get away with murder is to have all your orders communicated by your lawyers.

At the Washington Examiner Wednesday, Byron York had a very interesting report about the destruction of thousands of Clinton e-mails after Congress had issued a subpoena for them. (Obstruction of a congressional investigation is a felony under federal law.) The report is based on the FBI’s heavily redacted summary report of its Clinton e-mails investigation.

The e-mails were destroyed by a technician at Platte River Network (PRN), which had been retained by Clinton to handle her server. The tech is clearly a man (referred to as “he” several times), but his name is redacted from the FBI report. Evidence strongly suggests that this PRN technician initially lied to the FBI, then changed his story and clammed up about any instructions he might have been given.

A bit of background: In December 2014, Cheryl Mills instructed the PRN tech to implement a change in Clinton’s e-mail-retention policy: Any e-mails older than 60 days (translation: any remaining e-mails from Clinton’s time as secretary of state) were to be purged from the server. Purging in this context did not just mean deletion, it meant destruction: The Clinton team was using the BleachBit program to ensure that the purged e-mails could never be retrieved or reassembled. This was a conscious scorched-earth operation, headed up by Mills, the Clinton Family’s Tom Hayden — longtime consigliere and Clinton’s chief-of-staff at the State Department.

But there’s a Fredo in every good crime story, right? In this case, it is the PRN tech, who apparently did not follow instructions. According to his original story to the FBI, about three months went by when, out of the blue, in what he described as an “Oh sh**!” moment, he remembered that he had forgotten to purge the e-mails. So . . . he of course took it on himself to do it.

You’ll be shocked to learn, though, that that’s not quite how it happened.

RELATED: Even if You Believe the Left’s Excuses, Hillary Clinton Still Violated Criminal Law

On March 3, 2015, the New York Times broke the story that, while secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton had systematically used an unauthorized homebrew server system for all her e-mail communications, including the tens of thousands related to government business. This finally roused the House Benghazi Committee from its slumbers. (As I noted at the time, the Benghazi Committee had curiously failed to issue a subpoena for Clinton’s private e-mails, despite knowing of her use of private e-mail addresses for government business even before the Times report revealed them publicly.) The same day the Times report was published, the committee zipped a letter to David Kendall, Clinton’s lawyer at the prestigious Williams & Connolly in Washington, D.C. (Clinton has a legion of lawyers, but W&C’s Kendall is her main outside-the-government attorney.) The committee’s letter demanded that the e-mails be preserved and produced. The next day, March 4, the committee issued a subpoena directing Clinton to produce e-mails from her private e-mail addresses.

Obstruction of Justice Haunts Hillary’s Future Camp Clinton deleted e-mails and erased servers they knew were under congressional subpoena. By Deroy Murdock —

Like a trio of famished buzzards, three ugly words have started to circle over Hillary Clinton: obstruction of justice.

After reviewing the FBI’s recently released E-mailgate files, House Government Oversight Committee chairman Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah) on Tuesday wrote U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Channing Phillips.

“The Committee identified a sequence of events that may amount to obstruction of justice and destruction of evidence by Secretary Clinton and her employees and contractors, including her attorneys, employees of Platte River Networks,” and others, Chaffetz explained. He then asked Phillips to investigate Clinton and company for possibly violating 18 U.S. Code § 1001, 1505, or 1519. Making false statements in or obstructing federal proceedings can trigger prison sentences of up to five years. Destroying records in federal probes can cost up to 20 years behind bars.

Hillary now will campaign for president as the chant, “Lock her up!” rings in her ears — and correctly so. As the Washington Examiner’s Byron York detailed, this case’s timeline demands prosecution.

On September 20, 2012, just nine days after the deadly Islamic-terrorist attack on the U.S. facility in Benghazi, the House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security sent then–secretary of state Clinton a request for any records relevant to the assault, its precursors, and its aftermath.

Clinton received additional document requests in August 2013 and May 2014.

On March 2, 2015, news erupted about the existence of Clinton’s secret, unsecured, do-it-yourself private server. The next day, the House Select Committee on Benghazi sent now–former secretary Clinton’s attorney, David Kendall, a letter requesting that he and Clinton “Preserve all e-mail, electronic documents, and data (‘electronic records’) created since January 1, 2009” and in Clinton’s control.

As if foreshadowing Team Clinton’s actions, the letter asked Kendall to “prevent the partial or full destruction, alteration, testing, deletion, shredding, incineration, wiping, relocation, migration, theft, or mutation of electronic records.”

On March 4, 2015, the Benghazi Committee sent Clinton a subpoena for “all records in unredacted form” related to Benghazi for all of 2011 and 2012.

Cyberdisaster: How the Government Compromised Our Security A new report details how serious the OPM hack really was. By Ian Tuttle

Last year, John McCain told National Review that “the most disturbing briefing that I have ever received” had to do with cyberwar, adding: “We better start doing a helluva lot better job” addressing cybersecurity threats.

Given the current presidential prospects, the chances of that are slim. Donald Trump has made noises about “cyber” (it’s “becoming so big”), but has not outlined any plan. Meanwhile, it’s become undeniably clear that Hillary Clinton’s effort to avoid transparency requirements as secretary of state by setting up a private e-mail server endangered national security, including human-intelligence assets abroad, and that, unable to find more-plausible-sounding excuses, Clinton has opted to plead incompetence: She recently explained that she never realized the “(C)” in certain e-mails she forwarded indicated classified material.

This situation is particularly alarming in the wake of a new report. On Wednesday, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released the results of its year-long investigation into the unprecedented hack of the Office of Personnel Management. The 241-page document is unsubtly titled “The OPM Data Breach: How the Government Jeopardized Our National Security for More than a Generation.”

In March 2014, the Department of Homeland Security alerted OPM that its security had been breached and data stolen. Over the next two months, OPM monitored the hacker’s activity inside its system, developing with DHS a plan to expel him. So narrowly focused was OPM on its target that it did not notice that a separate hacker had gained access to the system in early May, posing as an employee of an OPM contractor. For almost a year, this second hacker operated at leisure in OPM’s system, stealing security-clearance background-investigation files, personnel records, and fingerprint data.

The two attacks, which the Oversight committee says were almost certainly coordinated, constitute the worst cybersecurity breach in American history: “Attackers exfiltrated personnel files of 4.2 million former and current government employees and security-clearance background-investigation information on 21.5 million individuals,” dating back to the Reagan administration. That background-investigation information, the Standard Form 86 or SF-86, which is required of anyone applying for a security clearance, demands an extraordinary range of personal information, as James Comey explained to the Washington Times last year: “My SF-86 lists every place I’ve ever lived since I was 18, every foreign travel I’ve ever taken, all of my family, their addresses. So it’s not just my identity that’s affected. I’ve got siblings. I’ve got five kids. All of that is in there.” (Comey’s was among the data taken.) The hack has been described as “Cyber Pearl Harbor.” Joel Brenner, senior counsel at the National Security Agency, called the stolen information “crown jewels material . . . a gold mine for a foreign intelligence service.” John Schindler, a former analyst at the National Security Agency, has written: “Whoever now holds OPM’s records possesses something like the Holy Grail from a [counterintelligence] perspective.”

The Fragile State of the Palestinian Authority Under Mahmoud Abbas, the West Bank could now be one protest away from a full-blown crisis. By Jonathan Schanzer and Grant Rumley see note please

Oh Puleez! Abbas, like his predecessor vermin is a thug put in place and maintained by successive American administrations in their never ending quest to process peace by demanding impossible security risks from Israel….. The only thing that can stop a full blown crisis and protect Jordan is heightened Israeli control over Judea and Samaria….rsk
A Palestinian court on Thursday postponed municipal elections scheduled for Oct. 8 because Palestine’s two largest political factions, Fatah and Hamas, couldn’t agree on terms. The stalemate has been in place since 2006, the last time Palestinians voted, and even led to an internecine war the following year. The Palestinians, split between two separate governments ruling the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, have never recovered.

For Fatah, which rules the West Bank, things are going from bad to worse. The canceled elections come on the heels of a large protest held last weekend in Nablus. An estimated 12,000 Palestinians took to the streets after the West Bank government’s security forces reportedly beat to death Ahmad Halawa, a commander from the al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade, a splinter of Fatah. Halawa’s funeral quickly gave way to angry protests against the provisional government of President Mahmoud Abbas.

All of this should serve as a warning to the 81-year-old Mr. Abbas. The Nablus protest, in particular, conjures images of the First Intifada, which broke out after a funeral in 1987, gave way to massive protests against Israel, and in the end lasted for a half decade.

There was a time when Mr. Abbas would have tried to leverage public discontent. Today, a protest of nearly any size is too dangerous to harness for the aging Mr. Abbas, who has every reason to fear that any angry public gathering could quickly turn against him.

The Palestinian Authority, like any other autocratic Arab regime, has never welcomed spontaneous protests. But now Palestinian opinion polls show a majority of voters want Mr. Abbas to resign. What’s more, since 2006, the only forms of democratic expression under the Abbas government has been a local election or student-council vote; and in each of those, Mr. Abbas’s Fatah party has lost. As Mr. Abbas enters the 12th year of his four-year presidency, even minor elections are increasingly seen as referendums on his rule.

Exacerbating this instability is the uncertainty of who will succeed Mr. Abbas. The leader himself refuses to name a successor, which has inspired a heated debate among the Palestinian elite but also sporadic factional violence across the West Bank. Armed gangs regularly skirmish with Palestinian Authority forces, while Mr. Abbas’s rivals, such as the exiled Palestinian leader Mohammad Dahlan, continue to foment opposition. CONTINUE AT SITE

An Inherited Culture of Hate by Tharwa Boulifi

“I hate Christians and Jews. I don’t know why. I don’t have any apparent reason to hate them but I always hear my mom talking badly about them. She hates them too, and this is why I hate them, I guess. Mom has always told me that Muslims are Allah’s favorite people,” — F., a 15-year-old Tunisian girl.

“They said that non-Muslims deserve to die; we should have no pity for them. They will burn in hell, anyway.” — M., a 16-year-old Tunisian boy.

People who do not read tend to fear things they do not know, and this fear can turn into suspicion, aggression and hate. These people need to fill the void, to remove the discomfort, so they turn to terrorism to create a goal in their lives: defending Islam.

As most Tunisians do not read, they watch TV a lot. “After watching ‘The Sultan’s Harem,’ I wanted to be one of the Sultan’s concubines, to live in the Ottoman Empire era; I wanted to be like them,” said S., a 14-year-old Tunisian girl.

A Pew Research Center report, published in 2013, entitled, “The World’s Muslims, Religion, Politics and Society,” explored attitudes and opinions of Muslims around the world regarding religion and its impact on politics, ethics and science.

A sample of 1450 Tunisian Muslims from all the 24 governorates of Tunisia were interviewed between November and December 2011. According to the study, 50% of Tunisians consider themselves living a conflict between their religion and the modern world. According to the report, 32% of Tunisians consider divorce unethical — the highest rate in the Arab and Muslim world — compared to 8% in Egypt, 6% in Lebanon and 3% in Jordan. Although 46% respondents said that religion is compatible with the modern world, the study indicated that the Tunisian population is more prone to advocate individual choice — with 89% favoring — in wearing the niqab (face-veil).

Similarly, based on the United Nations report and research from the Quilliam Foundation in 2014, Tunisian terrorists represent the highest number (3,800) of foreign terrorists in Syria and Iraq. Syrian authorities also confirmed that the number of Tunisian terrorists is more than 10,000, out of a total of 48,000 terrorists in Syrian territory.

What are the main reasons for Tunisia’s high rate of terrorism?

The Middle East: The Other Main Sources of Law by Burak Bekdil

Apparently what Saudi Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal understands of democracy is totally different than what the term means in more civilized parts of the world.

If Prince Al-Waleed so passionately defends democracy, he should spend less of his office time in showing solidarity with undemocratic leaders, and more in giving at least a bit of democratic breathing space to his own people.

In the Saudi Kingdom, the primary source of law is the Islamic sharia, based on the principles of a school of jurisprudence (Hanbali) found in pre-modern texts. Ultra-puritanical judges and lawyers form part of the country’s Islamic scholars.

But there is another main source of law: royal decrees. Simple death penalty along with beheading, stoning to death, amputation, crucifixion and lashing are common legal punishments. In the three years to 2010, there were 345 beheadings. But the legal system is usually too lenient for cases of rape and domestic violence.

The common punishment for offenses against religion and public morality such as drinking alcohol and neglect of prayer is usually lashings. Retaliatory punishments are also part of the legal system, such as, literally, an eye for an eye. Saudis can also grant clemency, in return for money, to someone who has unlawfully killed their relatives.

It is not surprising to anyone that Saudi Arabia is widely accused of having one of the worst human rights records in the world — the Kingdom is one of the few countries in the world not to accept the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There is capital punishment for homosexuality. Women are not allowed in public places to be in the presence of someone outside the kinship. They are not allowed to drive.