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2016

‘Who Did This to Us?’ Donald Trump asks that question. So do Putin, Erdogan and Black Lives Matter. Bret Stephens see note please

This is a good column with a cogent “tour d’horizon” of foreign and national events. Too bad it ends with a “tour de hatred” of Trump. The question “who did this to us?”- our domestic and policy failures- could swiftly be answered by ” President Obama and the corrupt candidate Hillary Clinton that you endorsed.” rsk

Bernard Lewis once made the point that there are two basic ways in which people and nations respond to adversity and decline. The first, the great historian wrote in 2002, is to ask “Who did this to us?” The second is, “What did we do wrong?” One question leads to self-pity; the other to self-help. One disavows personal responsibility and moral agency; the other commands them. One is a recipe for economic failure and political squalor; the other for success.

Mr. Lewis, who recently turned 100, was writing about the Islamic world’s destructive habit of blaming its ills on imperialism, Jews and other assorted bogeymen. But his test also applies to other regimes and regions, not to mention political parties and movements, from Vladimir Putin to Black Lives Matter. So let’s take a tour of the world.

Begin with Turkey. The government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan is again at war with the Kurds, thanks to Ankara’s violent crackdown on Kurdish protesters in 2014. It has a terrorism problem courtesy of Mr. Erdogan’s previous willingness to turn his country into a jihadist entrepôt. And it recently had a coup attempt, the result of Mr. Erdogan’s suppression of his erstwhile fellow travelers in the Gulenist movement.

But don’t expect Mr. Erdogan to offer up any mea culpas. He’s conducting the greatest political purge of the 21st century, and has released 38,000 convicts from his prisons to make room for his political enemies. Ankara’s incursion into northern Syria—supposedly to fight ISIS—has become an opportunity to expand the war against the Kurds. The Turkish media is abuzz with “reports” that assorted American military men were behind the coup.

Mr. Erdogan is a “Who did this to us?” man, and it shows in Turkey’s fast descent from beacon of Muslim secularism and democracy to another paranoid Middle Eastern regime. It’s the same story in Iran and Russia, which was to be expected, but also increasingly in China, which wasn’t.

Hillary Clinton’s KKK Smear The Democratic Party has for years painted the GOP as one giant hate group. By William McGurn

Let’s get this straight. Calling Hillary Clinton a “bigot” has reporters asking every Republican in sight if Donald Trump has gone too far. But the Clinton campaign releases a video saying Mr. Trump is the candidate of the Ku Klux Klan and it’s all okey-dokey?

Then again, Mr. Trump has already been likened to Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin. Small wonder there’s a collective ho-hum when Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine says Mr. Trump is peddling “KKK values.”

This is what Democrats do.

It didn’t start with Mr. Trump, either. For years Democrats have portrayed the GOP as one giant hate group. Each presidential election, the drill goes like this: After Republicans nominate someone, he immediately finds himself having to prove he’s not a hater—of African-Americans, of women, of gays, etc.

This year Democrats added a twist. Mr. Trump, they claim, represents a break with all those decent and lovable Republicans such as Mitt Romney, John McCain and George W. Bush. Of course, this isn’t what they were saying back when these men were running for president.

• In 2000, for example, an NAACP ad recreated the gruesome murder of James Byrd to imply that then-Gov. Bush was sympathetic to lynching black men. Over footage of a chain being dragged by a pickup truck, Mr. Byrd’s daughter says, “So when Gov. George W. Bush refused to support hate-crimes legislation, it was like my father was killed all over again.”

• When John McCain ran in 2008, Barack Obama warned that Republicans would scare people by saying, “You know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills.” The McCain campaign fired back, accusing Mr. Obama of playing the race card from the “bottom of the deck.” Funny thing: All those reporters always hearing “dog whistles” from Republicans somehow didn’t hear this one.

• In 2012, when Mitt Romney went to the NAACP and told them face-to-face about his opposition to ObamaCare, the stories were all about how he was really just trolling for the racist vote. Vice President Joe Biden put it more explicitly, telling a largely African-American audience that if Mr. Romney were to win, he’d “put ya’ll back in chains.”

The only difference today is that Republicans now have a nominee giving as good as he gets. It’s often clumsy; it comes late in the day; and his case hasn’t been helped by, say, his belabored moaning that a federal judge’s Mexican heritage meant he couldn’t be unbiased in litigation involving Trump University. CONTINUE AT SITE

Black Lives Matter to Donald Trump The Republican says every child—in Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore—should be able to walk to school safely. For that, he’s called racist. By Heather Mac Donald

Hillary Clinton tried to tar Donald Trump as a racist last week by associating him with the “alt-right.” Yet it is Mr. Trump who has decried the loss of black life to violent crime—and has promptly been declared biased for doing so. Whether intentionally or not, Mr. Trump has exposed the hypocrisy of the Black Lives Matter movement and its allies.

Speaking in West Bend, Wis., on Aug. 16, only days after the recent riots in Milwaukee, Mr. Trump observed that during “the last 72 hours . . . another nine were killed in Chicago and another 46 were wounded.” The victims, as in other cities with rising crime, were overwhelmingly black.

Bringing safety to inner-city residents should be a top presidential priority, Mr. Trump said: “Our job is to make life more comfortable for the African-American parent who wants their kids to be able to safely walk the streets and walk to school. Or the senior citizen waiting for a bus. Or the young child walking home from school.” Mr. Trump promised to restore law and order “for the sake of all, but most especially for the sake of those living in the affected communities.”

The reaction was swift. The progressive website Crooks and Liars deemed Mr. Trump’s speech a “mashup of Hitler and George Wallace.”On CNN the activist and former Obama adviser Van Jones called it “despicable” and “shocking in its divisiveness.” Historian Josh Zeitz told USA Today that “the term law and order in modern American politics is, ipso facto, a racially tinged term.”

Mr. Trump’s acceptance speech in July at the Republican National Convention provoked similar dismay. “Young Americans in Baltimore, in Chicago, in Detroit, in Ferguson,” he said, have “the same right to live out their dreams as any other child in America.”

This defense of black children was too much for Alicia Garza, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement. “The terrifying vision that Donald J. Trump is putting forward casts him alongside some of the worst fascists in history,” Ms. Garza said. The executive director of the Advancement Project, Judith Browne Dianis, complained that “the speech lends itself to be interpreted as isolating and scapegoating of communities of color.” Political commentator Sally Kohn wrote in Time that Mr. Trump “has basically recycled Richard Nixon’s version of dog whistle racism by insisting he is the ‘law and order candidate’—implicitly protecting White America.”

Why this frenzied effort to demonize Mr. Trump for addressing the heightened violence in inner cities? Because the Republican nominee has also correctly identified its cause: the false “narrative of cops as a racist force in our society,” as he put it in Wisconsin.

Ongoing Middle East Scenarios By Herbert London

With the ongoing love fest between Turkey and Russia, there are several interesting and dangerous scenarios emerging for the United States. For years Incirlik Air Base has been the centerpiece of NATO forces on the southern tier of this alliance. This air base is also home to the U.S. nuclear force which serves as a deterrent to possible Russian adventurism.

Although it is a long arduous way for the Russians to gain access to this base, official requests have been made as a launch pad for Russian air strikes against Syrian rebels. Imagine, for the moment, a situation in which NATO permits this Russian access. Fifty U.S.-B61 nuclear warheads would be vulnerable to Russian intervention; a key U.S. deterrent would be rendered nugatory.

Moreover, there is the additional fear that these weapons of mass destruction are only 65 miles from the Syrian border and ISIS forces. Unaided by Turkish troops, it might be difficult for a small contingent of U.S. forces to prevent a breach in the present security arrangement.

Igor Morozov, a Russian official, said, “It just remains to come to an agreement with Erdogan that we get the NATO base Incirlik as [our] primary airbase.” Assuming the plausibility of this claim, Russian aircraft would be flying out of Iran and Turkey, a truly unprecedented situation.

Not only would this gesture add to Russian ascendency in the region, it would unequivocally demonstrate the diminished status of the United States. Russia has emerged as the Middle East “strong horse,” despite an economy rocked by failure and entirely dependent on the price of oil.

What has surprised U.S. State Department officials is the rapidity of this change. Part of the explanation lies with President Erdogan who believes the U.S. was at least partially responsible for the recent coup against his government by harboring Mr. Gulen – the man Erdogan believes planned and executed the plot against him.

What Clinton’s Mental Health Plan Won’t Do for Seriously Mentally Ill: D.J. Jaffe

DJ Jaffe is Executive Director of Mental Illness Policy Org., and the author of Insane Consequences: How the Mental Health Industry Fails the Mentally Ill (Prometheus Books, April 2017, 340pp.)

There are two problems with Hillary Clinton’s mental health plan: What’s in it and what’s not. The plan mainly continues the practice of moving mental health funds away from helping the most seriously mentally ill, and instead allocates the funds to helping people without serious mental illness and programs that lack any independent evidence they work.
We need an all-hands-on-deck approach aimed at helping reduce homelessness, arrest, incarceration, suicide and violence among the seriously mentally ill. While there are bills in Congress that do that, this plan doesn’t. It focuses on where serious mental illness isn’t, rather than where it is.
What’s in the Hillary Clinton mental health plan.

The plan for early diagnosis and intervention, focuses spending on kids younger than eighteen in spite of the fact that serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder begin in late teens and early twenties, not grade school. While some serious mental illness strikes early, most of the illness that affects kids, like ADHD, is mild and transient.
The plan diverts resources to fund programs that are proven not to work including Positive Parenting and Mental Health First Aid.
The national initiative for suicide prevention, will focus on spending dollars on high-school and college students the two groups least likely to commit suicide. In 2014, there were 43,000 completed suicides of which 5,500 involved people under the age of twenty-four. Congressional mandates already target $54 million in suicide prevention funds to that age group and only $2 million to address the 37,500 completed suicides by people over twenty-four. The plan proposes to make the disparity worse.
The plan focuses on requiring private insurers to provide parity coverage for mental illness, but is silent on the federal government’s own discrimination within Medicaid (IMD Exclusion) that prevents the most seriously ill from getting treatment.
The plan does nothing to increase hospital beds and instead trains police on how to handle those who will become their responsibility as a result of the lack of beds.
The initiative funds peer support, in spite of the fact there is no independent evidence it works and plenty that it doesn’t.
It provides additional funding to the Protection and Advocacy Program. These are federally funded lawyers who go to court to oppose parents who want to help seriously ill children get care, oppose states that want to provide hospital care, and oppose localities that want to fund Assisted Outpatient Treatment as an alternative to incarceration or involuntary commitment.

DISPATCHES FROM TOM GROSS

“THE ARABS DO NOT SEEM BENT ON STARTING HOSTILITIES”

[Note by Tom Gross]

(This dispatch may be of interest to historians on this list.)

I attach two articles, both by Amir Oren, defense correspondent for the Israeli paper Haaretz.

The first piece, published today, reports on newly released CIA documents that detail how the agency got their predictions about the Yom Kippur War spectacularly wrong.

The CIA wrote in a briefing for the president on October 6, 1973 (the day that Israel was attacked):

“Tension along Israel’s borders with Egypt and Syria has been heightened by a Soviet airlift that is in its second day… but neither side seems bent on starting hostilities… A military initiative at this time would make little sense for either Cairo or Damascus.”

Within hours (maybe minutes, considering the time gap between Washington and Jerusalem) of that report being delivered, the Egyptian and Syrian armies attacked Israel in a massive offensive from both north and south.

As Haaretz notes: “The CIA’s big secret was that it didn’t have a secret. It knew very little from covert sources. Many of the clauses that appeared in the PDB [President’s Daily Brief] were taken from ambassadors’ telegrams, leaders’ speeches and newspaper articles.”

(Tom Gross adds: The CIA has on many other occasion, both in the Middle East and elsewhere, made ill-judged predictions and assessments.)

The second piece below concerns a rare interview given in October 2013, on the fortieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, by Henry Kissinger for an Israeli television documentary called “The Avoidable War”.

Kissinger attempts to persuade Israelis that the U.S. helped save their country during the 1973 war, although many Israelis doubt this and indeed argue that Kissinger actually helped the Egyptian forces prepare for the war by, among other things, pressuring Israel not to destroy the anti-aircraft rocket launching pads which the Egyptians and Soviets set up in the Suez Canal a few days before the Egyptians invaded, and which were not supposed to be there according to the Rogers ceasefire.

By the time the war broke out, the rocket launching pads were armed and it was too late for Israel safely to do anything about it.

Aiding and Abedin The Clinton family favor factory.Stephen F. Hayes

As Bill Clinton entered the final year of his presidency, his aides put together a legacy-building trip to South Asia—the first visit to the region by a U.S. president since Jimmy Carter’s in 1978. Early drafts of the itinerary featured a notable exclusion: The president would visit India, an emerging ally, but had no plans to stop in neighboring Pakistan.

There were good reasons for this. Pervez Musharraf had seized power there in a military coup six months earlier. His regime was regarded as tolerant of Islamic radicals, perhaps even complicit in their attacks, and unhelpful on nuclear talks with India. Whatever the potential benefits to regional stability, a visit would be seen as legitimizing a troublemaker. Clinton had the support of many in the foreign policy establishment and his decision was popular among liberals in his party. In an editorial published February 18, 2000, the New York Times noted, “Pakistan has been lobbying hard in Washington”; the paper urged Clinton to stand firm, absent a return to civilian rule in the country and “concrete progress” on nukes and terror.

Four days later, Hillary Clinton weighed in. At a gathering in a private home on Staten Island, Clinton said she hoped her husband would be able to find time to visit Pakistan on his trip. That she spoke up on a matter of public controversy was interesting; where she did it was noteworthy.

Clinton was the guest of honor at a $1,000-per-plate fundraiser hosted by a group of prominent Pakistani doctors in New York, who acknowledged holding the dinner as part of that lobbying effort. The immediate beneficiary? Hillary Clinton, candidate for U.S. Senate. Organizers were told they’d need to raise at least $50,000 for her to show up. They did. The secondary beneficiary? Pakistan. Two weeks after Clinton told her hosts that she hoped her husband would do what they wanted him to do, the White House announced that Bill Clinton would, indeed, include Pakistan on his trip to South Asia.

Win, win, and win.

The White House naturally insisted that Hillary Clinton’s views had no bearing on her husband’s decision to change his itinerary. And a subsequent New York Times article about the curious sequence of events found “no evidence” she had prevailed upon the president to alter his plans. But that same article, published under the headline “Donating to the First Lady, Hoping the President Notices,” noted the “unique aspect” of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy: “While her husband still occupies the White House, people may seek to influence his policies by making donations to her Senate campaign.”

Deal with the Devil By Lee Smith

In an interview last week for his new book The Iran Wars, Jay Solomon of the Wall Street Journal told Andrea Mitchell that Iran in 2013 had threatened to pull out of nuclear talks if the United States hit Bashar al-Assad’s forces over the Syrian dictator’s use of chemical weapons. The Obama administration quickly denied this. “Not true,” tweeted White House aide Ned Price.

Of course it’s true. And if it weren’t, Barack Obama would have a lot of explaining to do. Why else did he allow Assad to violate Obama’s own “red line” with impunity? Why did he jeopardize American interests and endanger allies throughout the Middle East? Why else did he allow a refugee crisis to destabilize Europe? Why has he done nothing to stop the slaughter of nearly half a million Syrians?

Obama himself publicly acknowledged that he won’t interfere with Iranian interests in Syria. In a December 2015 White House press conference, the president spoke of respecting Iranian “equities” in the Levant. That means preservation of the Assad regime, a vital Iranian interest since it serves as a supply line for Iranian weapons earmarked for Hezbollah in Lebanon. The White House was so serious about respecting this particular “equity” that it repeatedly leaked details of Israeli strikes on Iranian arms convoys. Obama wanted to show the Iranians his bona fides as a negotiating partner.

A nuclear deal with Iran has been Obama’s foreign policy priority since he first sat in the Oval Office. The agreement would pave the way for a broader realignment in the Middle East – downgrading traditional American allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia and upgrading Iran – and thus allow the United States to minimize its footprint in the region. With so much at stake, including his hunger for a personal legacy, Obama didn’t dare risk alienating Iran by targeting Assad.

The real deal that Obama made with the mullahs has been clear for some time now: They got to keep their client in Syria, and Obama got his “historic” achievement. So why not just spin the press and claim that laying off Assad was part of the price America paid for Obama’s stunning diplomatic triumph? Indeed, last we heard from Ned Price, the White House aide was bragging to the New York Times Magazine about manipulating the media. “The easiest way for the White House to shape the news,” Price explained,
is from the briefing podiums, each of which has its own dedicated press corps. “But then there are sort of these force multipliers,” he said, adding, “We have our compadres, I will reach out to a couple people, and you know I wouldn’t want to name them – “ …“And the next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the dot-com publishing space, and have huge Twitter followings, and they’ll be putting this message out on their own.”

ENGLAND’S COMMONSENSE SOLUTION TO MUSLIM EXTREMIST PRISONERS By: BENJAMIN WEINGARTEN

This author has argued that Europe’s Islamization — aided, abetted and enabled by the continent’s multiculturalist ideology — should serve as a warning and a lesson for America.

But when a European state does the right thing, we should take notice of that, too.

In the wake of the conviction of Britain-based Islamic supremacist preacher Anjem Choudary, an advocate for imposing Sharia law on Great Britain and supporter of global jihadism, British authorities are doing something that every Western nation ought to replicate.

Recognizing the problem of the spread of Islamic supremacism among prison populations, Secretary of State for Justice Liz Truss announced that the government would be establishing separate prison units for holding “a small number of very subversive individuals.”

Truss said prisons cannot continue to allow extremists to “peddle poisonous ideology across the mainstream prison population.” As the BBC notes, UK officials visited prisons in Netherlands for a close look at the program, as a similar “jail within a jail” program has been implemented by the Dutch.

Britain is right to acknowledge the spread of Islamist ideology in its criminal justice system and undertake a plan to remove the cancer.

Germany: Amidst refugee influx, child brides as young as thirteen BY Lisa Daftari

Lawmakers in Germany are under increased pressure to tackle the country’s growing trend of child marriages, renewing the debate over whether to allow Islamic Sharia law to supersede the country’s legal system when applied to its refugee population.

With the wave of more than 1.2 million migrants, mostly of the Islamic faith, coming in from Iraq and Syria, German courts are being forced to consider the legality of Muslim marriages that include girls sometimes as young as 13, Britain’s Sunday Times reported.

According to estimates, the number of refugee child marriages is currently at 1,000, although activists believe the figure is much higher.

In one case, authorities ruled in favor of Fatima, a pregnant 15-year-old Syrian refugee, allowing her husband, a fellow Syrian refugee more than double her age, to be accommodated in the same town so they could be near each other. Fatima told reporters that after her family escaped Syria for Turkey, she pleaded with them to marry her off to “the next man who is willing” so she could escape to Europe.

In Bavaria, there are over 700 refugee brides under the age of 18, including 160 under 16. Typically, German law does not permit marriage under 18, although with parental consent, the court can recognize the marriage of a 16-year-old.

In addition, the U.N. estimates that 51 percent of brides in Syrian refugee camps are underage, compared with just 13 percent at the start of the civil war.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has come under a barrage of criticism from European leaders holding her open-door policy on refugees responsible for the recent wave of critical terror attacks in Germany and throughout the continent.

Last month, within one week, there were four terror attacks in Germany.

When a court in Bamberg, Bavaria ruled in June to accept the validity of a marriage between a 21-year-old Syrian man and his 14-year-old cousin, the issue of child marriage was again brought to focus, along with the debate over the extent of Islamic law and customs that will be allowed by Western countries.