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2016

Trump lacks experience but his detractors lack common sense by David Goldman

Last year I arrived early for a lunch address by Gen. Michael Hayden, who ran the National Security Agency and later the Central Intelligence Agency in the George W. Bush administration. Hayden was already there, and glad to chat. The conversation turned to Egypt, and I asked Hayden why the Republican mainstream had embraced the Muslim Brotherhood rather than the military government of President al-Sisi, an American-trained soldier who espoused a reformed Islam that would repudiate terrorism. “We were sorry that [Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed] Morsi was overthrown” in July 2013, Hayden explained. “We wanted to see what would happen when the Muslim Brotherhood had to take responsibility for picking up the garbage.”

“General,” I remonstrated, “when Morsi was overthrown, Egypt had three weeks of wheat supplies on hand. The country was on the brink of starvation!”

“I guess that experiment would have been tough on the ordinary Egyptian,” Hayden replied, without a hint of irony. As Tommy Lee Jones said in “Men in Black,” Gen. Hayden has no sense of humor that he’s aware of. He repeated the same point verbatim a few minutes later in his speech: It was a shame that the Muslim Brotherhood government of Egypt was overthrown, by acclaim of the majority of Egypt’s adult population, which had taken to the streets as the country careened towards ruin. Hayden, like Sen. John McCain, the Weekly Standard, and the majority of the Republican foreign policy establishment, believes that America should try to foster a democratic version of political Islam. It lionized Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood in Washington, nurtured Turkey’s dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and armed “moderate Islamists” in Syria as a supposed democratic alternative to the Assad regime. Hayden’s specialty was signal intelligence, and by all accounts he was good at his job. He is clueless about foreign policy.

Gen. Hayden was perhaps the most prominent signator of a letter from fifty former national security officials who served in Republican administrations, declaring that Donald Trump “lacks the character, values and experience” required of a president and, if elected, “would put at risk our country’s national security and well-being.”

Trump responded, “The names on this letter are the ones the American people should look to for answers on why the world is a mess, and we thank them for coming forward so everyone in the country knows who deserves the blame for making the world such a dangerous place.” That is exactly correct. He might have added that they are incapable of learning from their mistakes and doomed to repeat them if given the opportunity.

The Republican Establishment believed with fervor in the Arab Spring. Weekly Standard founder Bill Kristol went as far as to compare the abortive rebellions fo the American founding. It backed the overthrow and assassination of Libya’s dictator Muamar Qaddafi, which turned a nasty but stable country into a Petri dish for terrorism. It believed that majority rule in Iraq would lead to a stable, pro-American government in that Frankenstein monster of a country patched together with body parts taken from the corpse of the American empire. Instead, it got a sectarian Shi’ite regime aligned to Iran and a Sunni rebellion stretching from Mesopotamia to the Lebanon led by ISIS and al-Qaeda.

Exposing the myth of an Apartheid Israel Dr. Alex Grobman

On a trip to the U.S, the Rev. Dr. Kenneth Meshoe, a member of the South African Parliament, president of the African Christian Democratic Party and chairman of the South African Israel Allies Caucus, expressed his profound concern about the ad campaign on San Francisco’s Muni transportation system, urging for an end to U.S. support for Israel. A group of Christian, Jewish and Muslims has funded the ad campaign since 2010. [1]
Having lived as a black South African under apartheid and having visited Israel numerous times, he said there is no basis for those accusing Israel of being an apartheid state. Apartheid is a legal system of segregation based on color, with a white majority in control of the government. Under apartheid, people of color could not vote, hold office or travel freely in their own country.
Only segregated schools and sports arenas were available to them and they had to use segregated public restrooms and public transportation. Whites and blacks were prohibited to marry or have sexual relations. Different residential areas were built to ensure a forced physical separation between the races. Their hospitals, medical care and education were always inferior to those of the whites. Any white physicians willing to treat a black patient had to conduct the examination in private. [2]
Richard J. Goldstone, a former justice of the South African Constitutional Court, who led the United Nations fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict of 2008-2009, added that attacking Israel “is an unfair and inaccurate slander … calculated to retard rather than advance peace negotiations…. In Israel, there is no apartheid. Nothing there comes close to the definition of apartheid under the 1998 Rome Statute.” [3]
He remembered “all too well the cruelty of South Africa’s abhorrent apartheid system …where blacks critically injured in car accidents were left to bleed to death if there was no black’ ambulance to rush them to a black hospital. ‘White’ hospitals were prohibited from saving their lives.”[4]

Europe’s Dark Hour By:Srdja Trifkovic

It is not Europe’s darkest hour yet—not quite on par with the peak of the Black Death 1346-53, or the impasse of the Western Front 1915-18, but on current form it is approaching fast. What is likely to happen in the next two to three decades is the darkest nightmare imaginable: a massive barbarian (overwhelmingly Islamic) conquista, facilitated by an implacably suicidal ruling class forcing its subjects to imbibe the multiculti brand of People’s Temple brew.

The Spenglerian prediction of a slow, gradual Untergang is out. The monsters in Berlin (Merkel & Co.), Paris (Hollande & Co.), Brussels (Juncker & Co.) etc. are engaged in an outright joint criminal conspiracy to facilitate Islamic conquest by normalizing Islamic terrorism, which is being de-jihadized in a grotesque manner. The tools of their trade are transparent: continuing importation of millions of Muslims—thousands of actual, and tens of thousands of potential terrorists included—and fanatically surreal denial of the true nature of what is happening.

Jens Spahn, Germany’s deputy finance minister and a senior member of Merkel’s CDU, thus told daily Die Welt, “My impression is that we all underestimated a year ago what would come upon us with this big refugee and migration movement.” “We all”? Herr Spahn does not elaborate on who are the “we,” but it is clear by implication that the term does not not include those of us who had been predicting with mathematical precision “what would come upon us,” years before the deluge of 2015 actually happened. For him such people do not exist, having excluded themselves from the realm of acceptable discourse by not subscribing to Merkel’s/Spahn’s Weltanschauung.

The Fog of Forever War In a world where a weapon can be a roadside bomb or a computer virus, confusion reigns. Do the laws of war or peacetime apply? By Gabriel Schoenfeld

Was the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the United States a crime or an act of war? In 2009, Rosa Brooks, a professor of law at Georgetown, was brought into Barack Obama’s Pentagon to ponder that question and others like it. Her conclusion about the 9/11 attack: Its legal status is “effectively indeterminate.”

That is a lawyerly finding and not one that is especially useful to policy makers. But such maddening ambiguity is precisely the problem we now face, argues Ms. Brooks in “How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything.” Many of the categories with which we think about national security, she says, have become obsolete.

In a world where our enemies do not belong to armies or wear uniforms—where a weapon can be a roadside bomb or a computer virus—confusion reigns. Do the laws of war apply, allowing for the liberal use of force? Or must we adhere to the laws of peacetime, which constrict the application of force within a web of legal procedures? “We don’t know,” Ms. Brooks writes, “if drone strikes are lawful wartime acts, or murders.” We don’t know “when it is acceptable for the U.S. government to lock someone up indefinitely, without charge or trial.” We don’t know “if mass government surveillance is reasonable or unjustifiable.”
ENLARGE
Photo: wsj
How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything

By Rosa Brooks
Simon & Schuster, 438 pages, $29.95

Thanks to the haziness of our present situation, Ms. Brooks concludes, we are losing “our collective ability to place meaningful restraints on power and violence.” Decisions taken first by George W. Bush and then by Barack Obama, she writes, “have allowed the rules and habits of wartime to pervade ordinary life.” She cites “the militarization of U.S. police forces,” evident in the proliferation of SWAT teams armed with equipment intended for war zones; the blanket of secrecy thrown over court proceedings; and intensified surveillance that can have “chilling effects” on the exercise of constitutional rights.

Such domestic troubles are matched by what Ms. Brooks sees as a disastrous record abroad. Our invasion of Iraq in 2003 brought chaos, she says; our departure in 2011 brought more. In Afghanistan, “we caused untold suffering for the very population we so earnestly tried to help.” The more we try to fix things around the world, she laments, “the more we end up shattering them into jagged little pieces.”CONTINUE AT SITE

Chevron Shakedown Rout Steven Donziger suffers another legal humiliation.

One of the most egregious legal frauds in history may finally be over. On Monday a unanimous three-judge panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that an Ecuadorian judgment against Chevron was the product of fraud, coercion and bribery and couldn’t be enforced.

In a 127-page opinion, Judge Amalya Kearse said the court “found no basis for dismissal or reversal” of a lower court’s decision and called lawyer Steven Donziger’s conduct in pursuit of Chevron “corrupt” and a fiasco of legal terrorism and ransom at the highest level. “Donziger hoped for an astronomic estimate that would have an in terrorem effect,” the court wrote, “impelling Chevron to agree to a settlement.”

That’s an understatement. Readers will recall the parade of malfeasance perpetrated by Mr. Donziger as he pursued a $113 billion case for what he claimed were oil pits left by Texaco (now merged with Chevron) in the 1970s. Texaco’s pits had long been cleaned up and the company had been released from liability by Ecuador’s government, but Mr. Donziger lined up environmentalists and even actress Daryl Hannah to create a media circus that would force the company to settle. CONTINUE AT SITE

Integration vs. Assimilation-Does integration prevent radicalization? Edward Cline

If we are speaking of Muslims, I would say no. Muslims would need to repudiate Islam or leave it as apostates. Because Islam is a totalitarian ideology melded to the “religion” of Islam, such an action would require intellectual honesty, a fealty to reality, and a dollop of courage in the face of death threats prescribed in the Koran or leave it as apostates. Because Islam is a totalitarian ideology melded to the “religion” of Islam, such an action would require intellectual honesty, a fealty to reality, and a dollop of courage in the face of death threats prescribed in the Koran for leavers of the “faith.” I also base my conclusion on the record of crimes by jihadists who are first- or second-generation Muslims, a record compiled and documented by Clarion and numerous other sites that report on the rapes, murders, knifings, and suicide-bombings committed by Muslims who have resided in the West for any measurable time. The more barbarous the origins of these Muslims (Somalia comes to mind, and there is also a racist element in Somalian crimes against Westerners), repeatedly commit the most heinous crimes and plead ignorance of Western mores and standards of behavior. The authorities and the MSM jump on a “mental illness” explanation before a victim is taken away in an ambulance.

Islam does not prepare average Muslims for any degree of intellectual enquiry on any subject, especially when it comes to the multitude of contradictions and fallacies inherent in the “faith” which would leave Socrates or Aristotle massaging their heads. Islam is anti-mind to the core, and does not much tolerate Muslims who “want to know.” Islam is a mortal enemy of free minds. This will help to explain why Muslim populations in Western countries represent a “silent majority” reluctant to or will not condemn jihadist outrages, and this silence is to my mind tacit approval of the crimes, even when Muslims are collateral victims of terrorist attacks (as there were on 9/11, e.g.). This tacit sanctioning may be based on fear of reprisals or on an inbred indifference to the death and suffering caused by terrorism. Islam is, among other charges one may level against it, profoundly anti-life and anti-individual, and so I shall always remain “Islamophobic.”

The College Formerly Known as Yale Any renaming push on the Ivy campus should start at the top—with Elihu Yale, slave trader extraordinaire. By Roger Kimball

The English novelist Kingsley Amis once observed that much that was wrong with the 20th century could be summed up in the word “workshop.” On American campuses today, I suspect that the operative word is “committee.”

On Aug. 1, Yale University president Peter Salovey announced that he is creating a Committee to Establish Principles on Renaming. There has been a craze for renaming things on college campuses the last couple of years—a common passion in unsettled times.

In the French Revolution, leaders restarted the calendar at zero and renamed the months of the year. The Soviets renamed cities, erased the names of political enemies from the historical record, and banned scientific theories that conflicted with Marxist doctrine.

At Princeton, Stanford, Georgetown, Harvard and elsewhere, students have demanded that buildings, programs and legacies be renamed to accommodate modern sensitivities. Amherst College has dropped Lord Jeffrey Amherst as its mascot because the colonial administrator was unkind to Indians. Students at the University of Missouri have petitioned to remove a statue of the “racist rapist” Thomas Jefferson. This is part of a larger effort, on and off campuses, to stamp out dissenting attitudes and rewrite history to comport with contemporary prejudices.

But isn’t the whole raison d’être of universities to break the myopia of the present and pursue the truth? Isn’t that one important reason they enjoy such lavish public support and tax breaks?

A point of contention at Yale has been the residential college named for John C. Calhoun, a congressman, senator, secretary of war and vice president. Alas, Calhoun was also an avid supporter of slavery.

Mr. Salovey is also perhaps still reeling from the Halloween Horror, the uproar last year over whether Ivy League students can be trusted to pick their own holiday costumes, which made Yale’s crybullies a national laughing stock. In the wake of that he earmarked $50 million for such initiatives as the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration.

He then announced that Calhoun College would not change its name. Apparently, he has reconsidered. After the Committee on Renaming has done its work to develop “clearly delineated principles,” he wrote, “we will be able to hold requests for the removal of a historical name—including that of John C. Calhoun—up to them.”

I have unhappy news for Mr. Salovey. In the great racism sweepstakes, John Calhoun was an amateur. Far more egregious was Elihu Yale, the philanthropist whose benefactions helped found the university. As an administrator in India, he was deeply involved in the slave trade. He always made sure that ships leaving his jurisdiction for Europe carried at least 10 slaves. I propose that the committee on renaming table the issue of Calhoun College and concentrate on the far more flagrant name “Yale.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Review: Uri Bar-Joseph, ‘The Angel: The Egyptian Spy Who Saved Israel’ David Isaac

‘The Angel: The Egyptian Spy Who Saved Israel’ by Uri Bar-Joseph is a book that should be required reading—as a terrible warning—for everyone involved in intelligence. It is the tale of how an intelligence agency, despite having the best information imaginable, can still get it wrong. Bar-Joseph recounts how, prior to the Yom Kippur War of 1973 when Israel suffered a near-fatal blow, Israel had been given detailed knowledge of Egypt’s plans thanks “to an exceptionally rare situation in the history of espionage: the direct assistant to the leader of a country preparing to launch an attack on its enemy was a secret agent on behalf of that enemy.”

That secret agent was Ashraf Marwan, the son-in-law of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and a trusted confidante of his successor, Anwar Sadat. Bar-Joseph, a professor of political science at the University of Haifa, himself a veteran of the war, has the ideal background to write this book. His earlier effort, The Watchman Fell Asleep, took a broad view of the intelligence failures leading up to the Yom Kippur War; it is considered the most important study on the subject and won the Israeli Political Science Association Best Book Award in 2002. In The Angel, ably translated by David Hazony, Bar-Joseph focuses exclusively on the story of the spy central to the drama and the ossified thinking that prevented Israel from taking advantage of the secrets he provided.

In the summer of 1970, Marwan simply consulted the phone book and called the Israeli Embassy from a London telephone booth to offer his services. It took a second phone call five months later for Mossad agents to wake up to the fact that they were being offered what a former Mossad chief would call “the greatest source we have ever had.”

What was Marwan’s motivation? Bar-Joseph hazards some conjectures. Nasser, unusually for an Arab leader, was immune to financial corruption and had no intention of allowing his ambitious son-in-law to use his new family connections to enrich himself. He disliked Marwan and, when his daughter refused his order to divorce him, put him in a job with little pay or scope. But while the desire to get back at Nasser and improve his finances might explain his initial decision, as Bar-Joseph notes, it does not explain why Marwan spied for Israel after Nasser’s death. Marwan’s situation radically improved after he backed Sadat in the face of an attempted palace coup d’état; from then on he enjoyed a key role in Sadat’s inner circle. Bar-Joseph suggests instead that Marwan had a need to live dangerously and seek out risk, almost like an adrenaline junkie. Whatever his motives, writes Bar-Joseph, the cornucopia of information that poured forth from him, the most important concerning the Egyptian military, “went far beyond anything [the Israelis] had known. It was unprecedented in its quality.”

SYRIAN REFUGEES IN AMERICA? BY ED ZIEGLER

The world has a serious problem, that of the massive number of refugees fleeing middle eastern war torn countries. The vast majority of these refugees are Syrian and Iraqi Muslims while non-Muslims constitute less than three percent.

Some countries refuse to admit refugees. Lebanon and Jordan shut their borders to Syrians in 2014. Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, United-Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Oman will not take a single refugee because of the crime and violence threat to their safety, as Jihadist terrorists hide among those fleeing.

After the Paris attacks, Poland said, ” Forget about taking in refugees.” Turkey has ended its open door policy of admitting Syrian refugees. Last autumn, Hungarian soldiers sealed her border with barbed wire. By refusing to issue visas, Egypt effectively closed its borders to Syrian refugees. Switzerland’s pertaining to Muslims is ” If you reject our customs, we will reject your application.” On the other hand Slovakia is OK taking in Syrians – as long as they’re not Muslim.

The massive migration is due to warring Islamic factions with ISIS as the main aggressor. ISIS has declared that it is restoring the Islamic Caliphate naming Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as Caliph and designated him as political leader. ISIS is attempting to establish itself, by force if needed, as the leader of one Islamic world, worldwide Muslim movement with no national boundaries.

EU Migrant Situation Creating Multiple Flashpoints Across the Continent Amidst Growing Domestic Terror Insurgency By Patrick Poole

The passivity that European governments showed last year as hundreds of thousands of migrants flooded the continent appears to be bearing dire consequences as a long catalogue of incidents occurred over the past week.

Most notably, an American was stabbed to death on the streets of London and several more injured by a Somali man with a Norwegian passport who had been living in the UK since 2002.

And in Belgium, an Algerian man, whom the Islamic State credited as one of its “soldiers,” attacked and wounded two female police officers with a machete earlier today in Charleroi, screaming “Allahu Akbar.” And an entire neighborhood has been evacuated today in Liege after a Turkish man was spotted roaming the streets with a machete.

Since January 2015, there have been 17 terrorist attacks across Europe, killing 258 people and injuring hundreds more. Less than a month ago in Nice, France, on July 14, a Tunisian man, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, ran over and killed 85 and injured 208 more during a Bastille Day celebration.

In April, the House Homeland Security Committee released its European Terror Threat Snapshot showing that there have been 35 attempted terror attacks by ISIS in Europe since 2014, with 22 of them in 2015 — an average of 2 per month.