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2016

Turkey: Child Rape Widespread, Media Blackout by Robert Jones

The journalist who reported the rape for the newspaper Birgun, said that that he and the newspaper received countless death threats on social media for reporting the case.

Turkey’s constitutional court in July annulled a criminal code provision punishing all sexual acts involving children under the age of 15 as “sexual abuse”, giving a six-month period for parliament to draw up a new law.

The facts on the ground indicate that the sexual abuse of children in Turkey is extremely widespread and the Turkish state authorities are not acting responsibly.

When Syrian babies and other children, as well as women, are being raped and treated horribly in Turkey, and their abusers go free; when journalists covering these abuses are threatened; when publication bans are imposed on the crimes committed against Syrians, and when criminals are given “good conduct abatement” by courts, Turkey seems to be one of the last countries on earth to have the moral right to demand visa-free travel in Europe or anywhere else.

Turkey has once again threatened to tear up a controversial migrant deal and send hundreds of thousands of asylum-seekers to Europe if its citizens are not granted visa-free travel to the European Union within months.

Mevlut Cavusoglu, the Turkish foreign minister, demanded the EU drop visa requirements for Turkish citizens by October.

Meanwhile, Syrian children are being raped and abused inside and outside of refugee camps in Turkey.

The Clinton Foundation: Cashing in on the Theater of Charity Without the Actual Results By Andrew C. McCarthy

The Left wins many arguments by setting the framework of the debate, often by indignant brushback pitches establishing that certain topics are strictly out of bounds – on pain of banishment from polite media society. Generally, those topics are the ones they know can hurt them. As Nathan J. Robinson illustrates in a striking profile of the Clinton Foundation in Current Affairs, Camp Clinton is striving to set a firm rule for discussions of the “charity” now at center stage in the presidential campaign: Don’t you dare question the good work done by the Foundation. Robinson notes, for example, James Carville’s admonition that “somebody is going to hell” for questioning the Foundation’s fundraising practices in light of all the wonderful things we are to believe it does.

As has reliably been the case over the years, establishment Republicans and other Clinton critics feel compelled to salute Bill and Hill’s heroic dedication to “public service” – their unimpeachable intentions and sincere efforts – before zeroing in on the shenanigans by which the pair has managed to cash in to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Recall the praise heaped on the Clintons by the Bush family and Senator John McCain.

Things are no different when it comes to the Clinton Foundation: Public etiquette requires genuflection to the Clintons’ selflessness before one may marvel at how they grab with all four hands.

It is a good strategy. The Clintons’ grubbiness is surely extraordinary, but only by degree – albeit big degree. Putting the State Department or the White House up for sale is huge, but it is not different in principle from what other shady pols do on the smaller scale available to them. Since the public tends to think of politics as an inherently shady business, the Clintons are apt to be given immunity, even for their monumental corruption, if it is stipulated from the start that it is all for the greater good of charity on a grand global scale.

But of course, it’s not. Indeed, it is not charity at all. As acknowledged (in Robinson’s piece) by longtime Clinton confidant Ira Magaziner, head of the Clinton Health Access Initiative, “the whole thing is bankable…. It’s a commercial proposition. This is not charity.” Robinson continues:

Instead of aid, the Clinton Foundation spends much of its effort “creating new markets,” finding lucrative investment opportunities in the developing world for Western private capital. These have included everything from “using business methods to streamline fertilizer markets in Africa” to “working with credit card companies to expand the volume of low-cost loans offered to poor inner city residents.” (Note that typically, enticing poor people into taking on large amounts of credit card debt is not among the activities of a charitable foundation.) Bill Clinton is open about the fact that in this work, he is trying to help corporations profit from the developing world. He attempts to “reinvent philanthropy” as a lucrative enterprise for his partners because, in his words, “I think it’s wrong to ask anyone to lose money.”

It’s hard to keep track of all the “commercial propositions” the Foundation is engaged in, because it operates in a highly unusual fashion. Ordinarily, charitable foundations make grants to outside organizations. But only 15% of the Clinton Foundation’s spending is on charitable grants. Instead, it spends most of its money on its in-house programs, whose efficacy can be far more difficult to track. The task is made even more difficult thanks to the Foundation’s ongoing allergy to transparency.

Partly because of that, Charity Navigator, a watchdog group, at one point added the Clinton Foundation to its watch list of problematic charities, and still does not rate the organization because its “atypical business model. . . doesn’t meet our criteria.” The Clinton Health Access Initiative has refused to allow the charity evaluation organization GiveWell to analyze its outcomes, and the Better Business Bureau has listed the Clinton Foundation as failing to meet the basic standards for reporting the effectiveness of its programs. Bill Allison of the pro-transparency Sunlight Foundation has gone much further, and said that the organization operates as a “slush fund for the Clintons.”

Hillary Clinton’s Mind-Boggling FBI Interview – What Was Cheryl Mills Doing There? Andrew McCarthy

The FBI-302 report of the interview of Hillary Clinton, along with the other notes of investigation released today, make for mind boggling reading. Most bracing is the fact that Mrs. Clinton had her server wiped clean sometime between March 25 and 31, 2015, only three weeks after the New York Times on March 3 broke the story of the server system’s existence. David notes that, at the same time the Democrats’ Janus-faced presidential nominee was outwardly taking the position that she “want[ed] the public to see my email,” she was having her minions frantically purge her emails behind the scenes. I’d add that this was five months before she feigned ignorance when Fox News’s Ed Henry pressed her on whether she’d “tried to wipe the entire server … so there could be no email – no personal, no official.” Henry finally asked, “Did you wipe the server?”

Famously, Clinton scoffed, “Like with a cloth or something?” But we now know, as the FBI notes recount, she had the server purged with a sophisticated software program, BleachBit, which eventually made it extraordinarily difficult for the FBI to recover her emails, several thousand of which were successfully destroyed. And remember: We’ve just learned that 30 emails related to Benghazi were on the server Clinton purged – emails that she never turned over to the State Department despite claiming repeatedly that she’d surrendered all of her government-related emails. I would thus note that the March 2015 purge right after public revelation of the server’s existence occurred long after Mrs. Clinton was well aware of several official government investigations of the Benghazi massacre – one by the State Department, several by Congress, and a judicial proceeding involving the one defendant who has been indicted for the terrorist attack.

There were also, quite obviously, several relevant Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigations. From what I’ve been able to glean so far, it is not clear from the FBI’s notes (and it was certainly not clear from Director James Comey’s press conference and House testimony) whether any consideration was given to indicting Mrs. Clinton for obstruction of justice and of government investigations – and if not, why not. Among the most eye-popping claims Clinton made to the FBI was that she was unfamiliar with the markings on classified documents. Yes, you read that correctly: one of the highest ranking national security officials in the United States government – an official whose day-to-day responsibilities extensively involved classified information; who had secure facilities installed in her two homes (in addition to her office) so she could review classified information in them; and who acknowledged to the FBI that, as secretary of state, she was designated by the president as “an Original Classification Authority,” meaning she had the power to determine what information should be classified and at what level – had the audacity to tell the interviewing agents that she did not know what the different classification symbols in classified documents signified. For example, when asked about an email chain containing the symbol “(C)” – meaning “confidential,” a designation ubiquitous in classified documents – Clinton claimed not to know what it meant and, according to the notes, “could only speculate it was referencing paragraphs marked in alphabetical order.”

Israeli football teams ready to take on the world — part 2 :Steve Leibowitz

After arriving in Marco Polo Airport in Venice, Italy, Yonah Mishaan and I went to get our rented 9-seater Fiat van, which the coach calls our Mercava tank. We proceeded to drive to the host city of Lignano Sabbiadoro, located about an hour’s drive away. Thanks to the Israeli-invented Waze GPS, our journey was easy. Before arriving at our hotel, I spotted a soccer stadium and we soon realized that this was “Stadio G. Teghil” where our football games would be played in the coming days. Italian football officials were on the field, placing all the markings for the gridiron. We were greeted warmly by our Italian friends who we had gotten to know at previous football events organized by the International Federation of American football. They graciously showed us the Israeli team locker room that had already been inspected by our Israeli security personnel.

Upon reaching Hotel Falcon, Yonah and I met the Israeli cooks who arrived a day earlier to prepare kosher food for our team. Feeding 45 football players and 18 support staff is a daunting task, when all of the food is kosher. Only about a third of our team are observant, but our entire team, including non-Jewish players and coaches, will eat kosher in Italy. We have many observant players and the Israel American Football Federation is the only sports federation in the country that will not play on Shabbat, and observes Jewish dietary laws.

In the evening, Yonah and I visited the beautiful coastal town of Lignano Sabbiadoro, which is not usually on the tourist agenda of most Israeli visitors.

Thursday morning, we headed to meet the rest of the team, back at the Venice airport, where a bus was waiting to bring the full contingent to the hotel. Loading up the players, each carrying their football gear, reminded me of mobilizing a reserve IDF platoon. Each player carried a duffle bag, with his helmet, shoulder pads, cleats and uniform. They looked grim and determined for the battle ahead.

CAROLINE GLICK ON OBAMA AND IRAN DEAL

On August 4, during the course of a press conference, Obama gave his interim assessment of his nuclear agreement with Iran. “It worked,” he insisted.The time for complaining about President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran has passed. The time has come to overcome the damage enormous damage his signature foreign policy accomplishment has caused.

To understand why this is the case, it is important to understand the breadth and depth of Obama’s failure.

A year after the deal was signed, Obama argued, events have proven that he was right and the deal’s critics were wrong.

“You’ll recall that there were all these horror stories about how Iran was going to cheat and this wasn’t going to work and Iran was going to get $150 billion to finance terrorism and all these kinds of scenarios, and none of them have come to pass,” he proclaimed.

Obama then snidely swiped at the deal’s opponents saying that it would be “impressive” if the people who criticized the deal would own up to their mistakes and admit that it worked.

As it works out, everything that Obama said about the deal with Iran during his press conference was a lie.

Some of his lies became apparent within hours.

For instance, Obama falsely claimed that Israel now “acknowledges this has been a game changer and Iran has abided by the deal and they no longer have the sort of short-term breakout capacity that would allow them to develop nuclear weapons.”

Hillary’s World

“The United States is an exceptional nation,” she said. “I believe we are still Lincoln’s last, best hope of Earth . . . And part of what makes America an exceptional nation, is that we are also an indispensable nation. In fact, we are the indispensable nation. People all over the world look to us and follow our lead.” She asserted that “we recognize America’s unique and unparalleled ability to be a force for peace and progress, a champion for freedom and opportunity” and that “our power comes with a responsibility to lead, humbly, thoughtfully, and with a fierce commitment to our values”:

Because, when America fails to lead, we leave a vacuum that either causes chaos or other countries or networks rush in to fill the void. So no matter how hard it gets, no matter how great the challenge, America must lead . . . [O]ur network of allies is part of what makes us exceptional. No other country in the world has alliances like ours. Russia and China have nothing close . . . At our best the United States is the global force for freedom, justice and human dignity.

Hillary Clinton’s global vision reflects the fundamentally flawed post-Cold War consensus, to which both ends of the Beltway Duopoly—neoconservatives and neoliberals—subscribe with equal zeal. Its key tenet is that our unchallengeable military might is essential to the maintenance of a global order in which the U.S. Government treats each and every spot on the globe as an area of vital American interest, fiercely resists any change of regional power balances, and actively promotes regime changes. The resulting military interventions in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya (and, if Hillary wins, there will be one in Syria) have been validated by the rhetoric of . . . well, she reminded us: “peace and progress,” “freedom and opportunity,” “justice and human dignity,” and by the invocation of American exceptionalism and indispensability (M. Albright). In world affairs America is supposedly motivated by “a fierce commitment to our values,” rather than mere interests.

ANTI-SEMITISM AT SWARTHMORE COLLEGE

A Response to Yesterday’s Anti-Semitic Hate CrimeBy William Meyer – From the Swarthmore College Newspaper

By now you’ve probably already heard that on Tuesday night students discovered swastikas graffitied in McCabe. I’m not sure what’s worse: the fact that this incident happened or the fact that I wasn’t all that surprised.

You’d think that I’d be shocked to learn that the symbol of the regime that brutally murdered dozens of my own family members, including my great-grandfather and his brothers, was drawn in my campus library. Instead, I find myself feeling depressingly unfazed, almost numb.

Maybe seeing Nazi imagery across Europe when I was there last January desensitized me. Maybe reading about anti-Semitic incidents at colleges across the country has prepared me. Maybe constantly seeing images of anti-Semitic graffiti in the news shared by frightened Jews, like the image accompanying this article, has numbed me to the horror of what such graffiti represents.

Drawing swastikas, the symbol of Nazi Germany, has long been a method of intimidating and spreading terror amongst those groups targeted by the Nazis, particularly Jews. Yet, the growing global and national tide of anti-Semitism made this all too predictable.

Despoiling the Environment to Save the Climate Bill McKibben’s plan would mean bird carnage and whole regions paved with wind turbines. By Robert Bryce

Bill McKibben loves the climate. Unfortunately, he hates the environment.

For proof of that, consider McKibben’s recent cover story in The New Republic, where he asserts that the U.S. must mobilize to fight climate change with the same fervor the Allies used to defeat Hitler during World War II. After citing a few examples of recent weather events, which, in his view, prove that global warming is happening now, McKibben writes, “If Nazis were the ones threatening destruction on such a global scale today, America and its allies would already be mobilizing for a full-scale war.”

While Nazi analogies can be fun, the climate cure that McKibben, the founder of 350.org, and his friends are pushing would result in the despoliation of vast swaths of the American landscape. Indeed, it would require that an area the size of Texas and Louisiana combined be covered with hundreds of thousands of wind turbines.

The strategist behind McKibben’s climate crusade is Stanford professor Mark Jacobson, who has published papers arguing that the U.S. doesn’t need oil, coal, natural gas, or nuclear energy. According to Jacobson, the U.S. can rely solely on energy derived from wind, water, and the sun.

Jacobson has an entire claque of admirers. During his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Bernie Sanders, (I., Vt.) adopted Jacobson’s all-renewable scheme whole cloth and made it his energy plan. That move immediately won praise from the leaders of both the Sierra Club and Greenpeace USA. In addition, the recent Democratic-party platform claims that the U.S. should be running entirely on “clean” energy by 2050. Jacobson’s all-renewable dystopia is also being promoted by actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo as well as by anti-fracking activist Josh Fox. In addition, Jacobson has formed a group call the Solutions Project, which is avidly promoting his 100 percent–renewables plan.

In his essay, McKibben adheres to the liberal-left orthodoxy by completely ignoring nuclear energy’s pivotal role in cutting greenhouse-gas emissions. Instead, he praises Jacobson’s work, claiming that it “demonstrates conclusively” that the U.S. could be running solely on renewables by 2050. Achieving that, says McKibben, would need about 6,448 gigawatts of renewable generation capacity.

As usual, the devil is in the details. Jacobson’s 50-state scenario, which is available on a Stanford University website, needs about 2,500 gigawatts of wind-energy capacity and another 3,200 gigawatts or so of solar capacity. Those are staggering quantities, particularly when you consider that current U.S. generation capacity — from nuclear to geothermal — totals about 1,000 gigawatts.

Trump immigration speech: A president was born on Wednesday: Wayne Allyn Root

Trump immigration speech: A president was born on Wednesday

America, we were introduced to our next president on Wednesday night. He’s not a politician. He is one of a kind. He is an American. Welcome President Donald J. Trump.

I’m a cynical Jewish Ivy Leaguer from New York. Nothing gets me too excited. I don’t believe politicians. Nor do I believe in politicians. I don’t fall for theatrical political productions. I don’t believe rhetoric or propaganda. And I’ve never teared up over a political speech in my life.

Until now. . .

Wednesday night I found myself fist-pumping. I found myself chanting along with the crowd “USA, USA, USA.” And as the procession of mothers and fathers came up to the podium to state the name of their child — who was murdered by illegal immigrants — and then say “I’m voting for Trump” or “Trump is our last chance to save America” I found myself tearing up. And the amazing thing is… I couldn’t stop. The tears rolled down my face.

A Tough but Sensible Immigration Policy By The Editors

After two weeks spent waffling on immigration, and making noises on the subject largely indistinguishable from those of Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, Donald Trump has settled on a hawkish position — and a practical one. Trump’s crowd-pleasing antics aside, in his immigration speech in Phoenix, Ariz., on Wednesday he laid out a sensible, realistic path forward on genuine immigration reform.

Trump’s plan, even in its most primitive iterations, always has been based on the entirely commonsensical principle that America’s immigration policy should serve American interests. Taking this as a starting point, Trump laid out a ten-point policy that emphasizes securing the border, enforcing immigration laws, prioritizing the removal of criminal aliens, and creating the legal and economic disincentives necessary to reduce illegal immigration in the long term.

These are the right priorities. On border security, Trump renewed his commitment to a “physical” wall on the southern border (as well as, alas, his absurd promise that Mexico would pay for it), pledged to swell the ranks of the understaffed Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agencies, and vowed to deploy technology, such as below-ground sensors, to aid them. He also promised an end to the catch-and-release policies that have defined the Obama-era commitment (or lack thereof) to border security and to defund sanctuary cities (an initiative that would, of course, have to come out of Congress). And as Trump noted, about half of America’s illegal-immigrant population overstayed legally gotten visas, meaning that a comprehensive visa-overstay tracking system of the sort he is proposing is also crucial part of any real enforcement agenda.

Trump would add to this an expanded use of E-Verify, which would help prevent employers from exploiting illegal labor and so make it more difficult for illegal immigrants to find work. “Turning off the jobs and benefits magnet,” to use Trump’s words, would make the prospect of entering and residing in the country less enticing for foreigners. If immigration trends at the height of the Great Recession are any indication, a sizable number of illegal immigrants are likely to return home when jobs are not readily available.