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2016

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Senate investigation finds ‘systemic’ failures at VA watchdog: Donovan Slack ….See note

By on May 31st, 2016

In spite of all the posturing on Memorial Day, this scandal continues unabated…..rsk

WASHINGTON — A Senate investigation of poor health care at a Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Tomah, Wis., found systemic failures in a VA inspector general’s review of the facility that raise questions about the internal watchdog’s ability to ensure adequate health care for veterans nationwide.

The probe by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee found the inspector general’s office, which is charged with independently investigating VA complaints, discounted key evidence and witness testimony, needlessly narrowed its inquiry and has no standard for determining wrongdoing.

One of the biggest failures identified by Senate investigators was the inspector general’s decision not to release its investigation report, which concluded two providers at the facility had been prescribing alarming levels of narcotics. The facility’s chief of staff at the time was David Houlihan, a physician veterans had nick-named “candy man” because he doled out so many pills.

Releasing the report would have forced VA officials to publicly address the issue and ensured follow up by the inspector general to make sure the VA took action. Instead, the inspector general’s office briefed local VA officials and closed the case.

A 35-year-old Marine Corps veteran, Jason Simcakoski, died five months later from “mixed drug toxicity” at Tomah days after Houlihan signed off on adding another opiate to the 14 drugs he was already prescribed.

The 350-page Senate committee report obtained by USA TODAY also chronicles instances where other agencies could have done more to fix problems at the Tomah VA Medical Center, including the local police, the FBI, DEA, and the VA itself, but it singles out the inspector general.

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Jewish “Pilgrims” flock to one of the Arab world’s last Jewish communities Kristen McTighe

By on May 31st, 2016

DHIMMIWITS
An annual Jewish pilgrimage to Africa’s oldest synagogue got under way in Tunisia where security forces were deployed heavily to ward off potential jihadist attacks.
“….About 850,000 Jews lived throughout the Arab world before the state of Israel was created in 1948. That number has dwindled to fewer than 4,500.
Jewish communities have virtually disappeared across North Africa and the Middle East, including Libya, Algeria, Egypt and Yemen….”
No cause given for the “dwindling” or “virtual disappearance”….a rather glaring omission of the actual history, though not an unusual one?

DJERBA, Tunisia — Despite warnings from Israel to avoid traveling to one of the Arab world’s last Jewish communities, thousands came to the ancient El Ghriba synagogue this week to celebrate the Jewish festival of Lag b’Omer.

Jews from Tunisia, Europe and elsewhere made the annual two-day pilgrimage that began Wednesday under tight security to mark the holiday with prayers, candles and wishes written on eggs.

Organizers estimated 2,000 people made the trip here despite a severe warning by Israel’s National Security Council Counter-Terrorism Bureau that recommended all travel to Tunisia be avoided.

“Terrorism is everywhere, it’s in Paris, it’s in Bardo. The problem is worldwide,” Lior Elia said in his family jewelry shop in Houmt Souk, the main city on the island of Djerbaoff the Tunisian coast. “We are protected here, the police work for us and for everyone, and we are also protected, thanks to God.”

“We protect each other always,” said Madji Barouni, a Muslim college student who stopped by the shop to visit his friend Elia.

There have been plenty of security concerns. In an assault in March, militants affiliated with the Islamic State stormed the Tunisian border town of Ben Gardane, leaving more than 50 dead. Access to Djerba was immediately cut off.

Two high-profile attacks last year in Tunisia — at the Bardo National Museum in Tunis and in the beach resort of Sousse — stoked fears that the Jewish community could become a target of extremists.

DJERBA, Tunisia — Despite warnings from Israel to avoid traveling to one of the Arab world’s last Jewish communities, thousands came to the ancient El Ghriba synagogue this week to celebrate the Jewish festival of Lag b’Omer.

Jews from Tunisia, Europe and elsewhere made the annual two-day pilgrimage that began Wednesday under tight security to mark the holiday with prayers, candles and wishes written on eggs.

Organizers estimated 2,000 people made the trip here despite a severe warning by Israel’s National Security Council Counter-Terrorism Bureau that recommended all travel to Tunisia be avoided.

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The Old Generals’ Old Plan The fantasy of peace with the Palestinians. Caroline Glick

By on May 31st, 2016

There is no Palestinian constituency for peace with Israel. The more Israel offers the Palestinians, the less interested they are in settling.
The Israeli Left is a one trick pony. As it sees things, all of Israel’s problems – with the Palestinians, with the Arab world, with Europe and with the American Left – can be solved by giving up Judea and Samaria and half of Jerusalem (along with Gaza which we gave up already).

Once Israel does this, the Left insists, then the Palestinians, the Arab world, Europe and Bernie Sanders voters will love us as they’ve never loved us before.

The events of the past quarter century have shown the Left’s position to be entirely wrong. Every time Israel has given the Palestinians land, it has become less secure. The Arabs have become more hostile.

The West has become more hostile. The Palestinians have expanded their demands.

Because of their negative experience with the Left’s policy, most Israelis reject it. This is why the Right keeps winning elections.

Given the failure of its plan, the Left could have been expected to abandon it and strike out on a different course. But it didn’t. Instead it has tried to hide its continued allegiance to its failed withdrawal strategy by pretending it is something else.

A central component of the Left’s concealment strategy is its use of former generals.

Over the past quarter century, and particularly since the Palestinians began demonstrating in 2000 that they have no interest in a state living side by side with Israel, the Left has carted out retired generals at regular intervals to proclaim that continued allegiance to the Left’s failed policy of withdrawal is not irrational.

Every couple of years, a new initiative of former generals – often funded by the EU – is published.

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Iran’s Holocaust Cartoon Contest Goes International “Artists” from around the world join in mocking the attempted genocide of the Jewish people. Joseph Klein

By on May 31st, 2016

Iran’s international cartoon exhibition and contest mocking Jews and the Holocaust has just concluded. It provided a prominent hate-filled platform to those who deny or make fun of the genocide inflicted on Jews by the Nazis and who seek to compare Israel today to Nazi Germany. One hundred fifty “cartoonists” from 50 countries submitted entries. The exhibition provided a perfect bookend to the message emblazoned by the Iranian regime on missiles it test fired last March, “Israel must be wiped out.”

Western-educated Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif played the free speech card to defend the right of the organizers to put on their show, while denying that his government had anything to do with it.

During an April 2016 interview with the New Yorker, Zarif said the exhibition was organized by a non-governmental organization “that is not controlled by the Iranian government.” Zarif claimed, “Don’t consider Iran a monolith. The Iranian government does not support, nor does it organize, any cartoon festival of the nature that you’re talking about.”

A well-known exiled Iranian cartoonist, Nikahang Kowsar, laid bare Zarif’s Big Lie in a blog post published by the Times of Israel:

“The claim that the Iranian government doesn’t control this platform for spewing hate and denying the Holocaust is a pure lie, coming from a pathological liar whose previous absurd claim, exactly a year before this one, was ‘we do not jail people for their opinions.’

The director of the Iranian Cartoon House, a former member of the Revolutionary Guards, runs the contest by the rules set by the Culture and Arts Center of Tehran’s Municipality. Cartoon House is not allowed to hold International competitions and contests without permission from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance.”

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Geert Wilders: If Britain Leaves the EU, the Netherlands Will Follow Suit-By Michael van der Galien

By on May 31st, 2016

The European Union has had a bad couple of years. There were the major crises in southern European states, especially in Greece; support for the EU has eroded; and the Dutch voted against an EU treaty with Ukraine last month.

That’s bad enough for the federalists in Brussels, but it may get even worse in the month ahead. In June, British voters will decide whether their country remains in the EU or will cease to be a member state. Although most recent polls show the Remain camp in the lead, they realize they can’t afford to make any unforced errors. Besides, who knows which voters will actually show up? Anti-EU voters may be more passionate than those who wish to remain. If that’s the case, it could be closer on voting day than polls suggest.

This is why Eurosceptics from Britain and other EU countries haven’t given up hope just yet. In fact, Dutch populist Geert Wilders is already promising a similar exit referendum in the Netherlands:

Mr Wilders says that if Brexit happens, he will “immediately” propose a referendum on Dutch exit from the EU.

Sitting in front of a portrait of Winston Churchill, Britain’s wartime leader, in his office, he told the FT: “When after Brexit it turns out that the lights don’t go out and war doesn’t come, that could be an enormous stimulus not just for the Netherlands but for several countries to think of leaving.”

Like many other sceptics of the grand European project, Wilders looks at Switzerland as an example to be followed. Switzerland is a strong and prosperous European nation, but has always refused to become part of the EU. Unlike what Europhiles would like Brits to believe, that hasn’t hurt the Swiss in the least. In fact, it has enabled them to do business with whomever they want and on their terms, which is something EU member states can only dream of. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Excluded Middles By David Solway

By on May 31st, 2016

Aristotle’s third law of thought, the law of the excluded middle, has enjoyed a long and to some degree controversial history. Briefly, it posits that a statement must be either true or false, excluding any middle ground, which on the face of it makes perfectly good sense. Extrapolating from the domain of logic to the social world, however, the excluded middle takes on a different and indeed opposite connotation, for its absence spells not propositional rigor but cultural disaster.

Consider, for example, the operation of the law in the realm of everyday economic activity. Much has been written about the withering of the middle class in our over-regulated, tax-unfriendly times. See, for example, Vahab Aghai’s America’s Shrinking Middle Class, where we learn that “between 2000 and 2012, the United States lost 10 percent of its middle class jobs.” Meanwhile, low income jobs have grown commensurably.

The fiscal policy of holding interest rates below the rate of inflation wipes out the value of middle class savings. The glut of government regulations garrotes economic initiative while indirect taxes eat up a substantial chunk of the scraps direct taxation has left. Modest businesses cannot compete with large corporations, state-controlled industries and intrusive government bodies, sending many small entrepreneurs onto the welfare rolls. Craftsmen and trades people depend on the black market to avoid the department of revenue and its crushing value-added cash grab. Start-up innovators find themselves snagged in the Byzantine warrens of the patent office. Ranchers and cattle breeders have been targeted by the EPA and BLM (and similar agencies in other countries), whose bureaucrats have run amok in invasive and confiscatory practices with tacit administrative approval. And the rot is spreading. The old adage that the rich and the poor will always be with us skips over the fact that the middle may not.

It is a precept of economic wisdom that when the middle class is put out of business, as it were, economic stagnation and social decay inevitably ensue, and national unity is beset by civil unrest, unsustainable levels of poverty and cultural decline. According to reputable historians, this was one of the major causes of the implosion of Imperial Rome in the fourth and fifth centuries. When the tax burden grew so onerous that remittances began to dry up, “taxes no longer flowed to the seven hills,” writes James O’Donnell in The Ruin of the Roman Empire, “nor did the food supplies sent in lieu of taxes.” The crushing weight of taxation destroyed the farming sector—essentially the middle class of the empire—which formed the backbone of Roman society, and the social apparatus gradually collapsed with it. Famine and revolt were principal factors in facilitating the onslaught of the barbarian hordes, which completed the debacle.

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The Violent Extremism that Dare Not Speak Its Name by Elliott Abrams

By on May 31st, 2016

The Department of State and USAID have just issued a report entitled the “Joint Strategy on Countering Violent Extremism.”

There are some ideas in this “strategy” for what is now called CVE, but at bottom it is hopeless. If this is really the United States’s strategy, we are in even bigger trouble than we thought.

Here’s just one fact that will show you why: The word ‘Islam’ does not once appear in the US government’s CVE document. Neither does ‘Islamism’, ‘Islamist’, ‘radical-Islam’, ‘radical-Islamist’ or any other such formulation.

That phrase comes from the assessment of the Henry Jackson Society in London, an NGO named after the late Senator Henry M. Jackson (for whom I had the honor to work in the 1970s). Here is their full text:

The US government has released a new CVE (Countering Violent Extremism) strategy consisting of a 12-page document, with a foreword by Secretary of State John Kerry. Although the release has been little commented upon either in the US or the UK, both countries should take an urgent interest in the document.

Firstly because the whole framing of the strategy is an import from the UK. It was the UK government that first came up with the presentation of its counter-extremism strategy as ‘countering violent extremism’. Many UK government experts extolled the virtues of the British strategy to the US. In fact through this process Britain has exported some of our worst habits to America.

For the glaring problem with the strategy is that it lacks any apparent desire to deal with the problem, or even to identify it. The new strategy is a follow-on document from last year’s White House convened conference on the same subject. The resulting document, like the conference, is notable for its attempt to avoid pin-pointing the problem. For although there are multiple domestic and foreign security threats to the US as there are to the UK, there is no point in setting up strategies to counter them unless you are willing to say which ones you are talking about.

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Where are the journalists with courage?

By on May 31st, 2016

In today’s environment, it’s easy for the coverage of the inquest into the Lindt Café terrorist attack to be lost in all the other ho-hum reporting of blown up airliners, massacred Syrian Christians and the odd mob that refuses to stand up for a judge after being arrested towing a tinnie to Indonesia.

In other words, in the time it’s taken for the last census to be filed in the national archives and the next one to come around, terrorism has been normalised across Australia and the world.

That’s not a bad effort in just five years.

Unfortunately, the evidence that continues to flow from the Lindt Café inquest shows just how unprepared our military, security and intelligence agencies are for this new version of normality.

Three days ago it was revealed that the lead negotiator at the Lindt Café had only received training in ‘Islam 101’.

This was a nice headline and a quick soundbite. Then this important issue disappeared off the news webpages to be replaced by stories about Johnny Depp.

I guess that also shows the media is entirely unprepared to play its supposedly important role holding the government to account and strengthening our democracy.

Helloooooo? Journalists? Where are you?

There’s a Walkley Award waiting here for someone with the courage to start asking the right people the right questions.

Like this: what exactly makes up the ‘Islam 101’ package presented to military, law enforcement and intelligence officers?

And this: who teaches ‘Islam 101’ to these officers?

Maybe this: do these officers ever get to study ‘Islam 201’?

Or this: are any of the instructors of the ‘Islam 101’ package not pro-Islamic?

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1948 Arab refugees: concocted circumstances and numbers Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

By on May 31st, 2016

The truth about the circumstances and numbers of the 1948 Arab refugees has been sacrificed – by the UN, Arab regimes, the “elite” Western media and most Western Foreign Offices – on the altar of Arab-appeasement and Israel-bashing.

For instance, the Palestinian Arab leadership collaborated with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, seeking Nazi support to settle “the Jewish problem” in British Mandate Palestine in accordance with the practice used in Europe. Thus, the top Palestinian Arab leader, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, incited his people in a March 1, 1944 Arabic broadcast on the Nazi Berlin Radio – consistent with anti-Jewish Arab terrorism during the 1920s and 1930s – “Kill the Jews wherever you find them. It would please God, history and religion.”

On January 9, 2013, Mahmoud Abbas honored the Nazi collaborator: “We pledge to continue on the path of the martyrs [suicide bombers]…. We must remember the Grand Mufti of Palestine, Haj Amin Al-Husseini….” In 2016, Hitler’s Mein Kemp and the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion feature prominently in Mahmoud Abbas’ hate-education and incitement systems.

On October 11, 1947, Abdul Rahman Azzam Pasha, the first Secretary General of the Arab League told the Egyptian daily Akhbar al Yom: “…This will be a war of extermination and momentous massacre, which will be spoken of like the Tartar massacres, or the Crusaders’ wars…. Each fighter deems death on behalf of Palestine as the shortest road to paradise….The war will be an opportunity for vast plunder…. ” On August 2, 1948, the NY Times reported that the founder of the largest Islamic terror organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, instigated: “Drive the Jews into the sea… and never accept the Jewish State.”

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Qatar: The World’s Wealthiest Family-Run Gas Station by Burak Bekdil see note please

By on May 31st, 2016

The cognoscenti pronounce Qatar, quite appropriately as “gutter.”….rsk

Many people describe Qatar’s treatment of expatriate laborers on World Cup sites as “modern day slavery.” Some 1,200 workers have already died and, according to warnings, up to 4,000 could perish before World Cup begins.

“The fact that thousands must die to build 12 fine stadiums for us has nothing to do with football,” said William Kvist of the Danish national team.

“We are committed to helping the destitute,” said Hamad bin Nasser al-Thani of Qatar’s royal family, who is chairman of the Doha-based Qatar Charity. How nice!

Why not promote “Islamic values” by taking in even just a few thousand Syrian refugees, instead of praising Turkey for taking in nearly three million Syrian Muslim refugees and praising it for promoting “Islamic values?”

The proud Gulf state of Qatar boasts human habitation dating back to 50,000 years ago. It may not be the only country across the world with such an impressive historical habitation story. But what makes it unique is its skillfully planned preservation tradition, particularly its persistent touch on medieval, not ancient, history.

Qatar is the world’s wealthiest country, or more of a family-run gas station. It boasts abiding by various aspects of the sharia (Islamic religious law), which, according to its constitution, it considers the main source of its legislation. In Qatar, flogging and stoning are legal forms of punishment. Apostasy (leaving Islam) is a crime punishable by the death penalty.

The Qataris, not knowing that their grandchildren would one day be the best strategic allies of their Ottoman colonialists’ grandchildren, fought the Ottomans to gain their independence in 1915, ending the 44-year-long Ottoman rule in the peninsula. Independence came at last, and lasted for about a year — until 1916, when Qatar became a British protectorate, retaining that status until 1971.

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