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2016

Arab Democracy’s Failure Eludes So-Called Experts By Andrew E. Harrod

Given American policymakers’ ignorance of Islam, “I am just worried about people like me running around with big theories trying to set foreign policy,” stated famed intellectual historian Francis Fukuyama in Washington, D.C. His confession occurred at “Democracy in the Arab World: The Obama Legacy and Beyond,” a recent conference that did little to alleviate the knowledge deficit among hackneyed Islamism apologists.

Fukuyama’s luncheon address at the downtown JW Marriot luxury hotel focused on the cultural factors that aided the development of modern societies. While China benefited from the appearance 2,300 years ago of the “first modern, relatively impersonal state,” Fukuyama said, the “Arab world [is] where I think the fundamental problem is” for human progress today. Although he worried that the U.S. had not made an effort to understand Muslim societies comparable to its Cold War study of Russia, Fukuyama’s own knowledge of Islam was spotty. He described an often repressive and all-encompassing sharia law as a mere “balance to political power.”

Referencing the late scholar Ernest Gellner, Fukuyama maintained that “contemporary Islamism is basically just a different version of European nationalism in the nineteenth century.” Just as Europeans transitioning from intimate rural communities to urban anonymity during industrialization sought a new identity, Islamists invoke a “universal umma that extends all the way from Morocco to Jakarta.” Similarly, this Islamism appeals to alienated second-generation European Muslim immigrants. Left unexamined was whether the cosmic worldview of a faith like Islam has considerably more ideological content, and can incite far more zeal, than nationalist allegiances, particularly in an increasingly globalized world.

At least Fukuyama didn’t minimize jihadist terrorism, unlike the preceding panelist, anti-Israel commentator Peter Beinart. He decried the “rise of ISIS and a massive increase fueled by cable news [coverage] of the threat of terror that emerged in 2014” and reflected upon President Barack Obama’s shared view that the “threat of terrorism had been exaggerated.” Obama rejected former President George W. Bush’s “war on terrorism” as the “new Cold War, the new World War II; there was fascism and communism, and now there was jihadism.”

Europe: Let’s End Free Speech! Are European Countries Now Police States? by Judith Bergman

According to New Europe, in Leeuwarden, “about twenty opponents of the plans [to establish asylum centers] in the region received police visits at home.” In other words, the Netherlands are engaging in state censorship, thereby raising the question: Is the Netherlands now a police state?

In the town of Sliedrecht, police came to Mark Jongeneel’s office and told him that he tweeted “too much” and that he should “watch his tone”: his tweets “may seem seditious”. His offense? One tweet said: “The College of #Sliedrecht comes up with a proposal to take 250 refugees over the next two years. What a bad idea!”

In September 2015, Die Welt reported that people who air “xenophobic” views on social media, risk losing the right to see their own children.

While ordinary European citizens risk arrest and prosecution for “xenophobic” remarks, a German EU Commissioner, Günther Oettinger, called a visiting Chinese delegation of ministers “slant eyes” (“Schlitzaugen”). European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has promoted Oettinger to be in charge of the EU budget.

Clearly, the law is not equal. EU Commissioners can make “xenophobic” remarks and get a promotion; European citizens, for exercising their right to free speech, are arrested and prosecuted.

In Europe, is the enemy now the governments? Evidence is mounting that expressing even a mild opinion that runs counter to official government policy can land you in prison, or at least ensure a visit from your friendly local Kafkaesque police. Has Europe effectively become a police state?

Several European governments are making it clear to their citizens that criticizing migrants or European migrant policies is criminally off limits. People who go “too far,” according to the authorities, are being arrested, prosecuted and at times convicted.

In the Netherlands, the police visited people who naïvely made critical comments about asylum centers on Twitter in October 2015. In the town of Sliedrecht, police came to Mark Jongeneel’s office and told him that he tweeted “too much” and that he should “watch his tone”: his tweets “may seem seditious”. His offense? The town had held a citizens meeting about a refugee center in the region, and Jongeneel had posted a few tweets. One said: “The College of #Sliedrecht comes up with a proposal to take 250 refugees over the next two years. What a bad idea!” Earlier he had also tweeted: “Should we let this happen?!”

He was not the only one. In Leeuwarden, according to New Europe:

“…about twenty opponents of the plans [to establish asylum centers] in the region received police visits at home. It also happened in Enschede, and in some places in the Brabant, where, according to the Dutch media, people who had been critical of the arrival of refugees and ran a page on social media on the topic were told to stop”.

Israel Puts the Spike Missile on its Apache Helicopters by Stephen Bryen and Shoshana Bryen

For this reason, Israel concluded that the U.S. under Obama was not a reliable supplier of either helicopters or missiles.

Israel’s Spike is superior to the Hellfire. It has longer range, making it safer to use against an enemy that possesses shoulder-fired ground to air missiles.

Worse yet, despite Saudi Arabia’s horrible bombing performance in Yemen, the U.S. continues to sell billions of dollars’ worth of weapons and has stepped up shipments of munitions.

The Spike is a better option than the Hellfire and safer to use, which is why 25 nations now use the missile and 25,000 or more have been produced.

Sometimes when decisions do not work out exactly as intended, they work out just fine.

In the midst of Operation Protective Edge — Israel’s response to 182 Hamas rockets and mortars fired at Israeli towns and villages in the first week of July 2014 — the Obama administration accused Israel of “heavy handed battlefield tactics,” including the use of artillery instead of precision-guided munitions. U.S. President Barack Obama halted the supply of Hellfire missiles and announced that all military equipment supplied to Israel would be vetted individually in the White House, instead of shipped, according to prior agreements, by the Pentagon to Israel.

The President, it appears, had been reading wild press stories about the damage to Gaza — which ultimately turned out to be concentrated in areas in which Hamas was stockpiling munitions and rockets and conducting command and control operations, which included firing more than 2,700 rockets and missiles during the rest of July. Israel struck an UNRWA-administered school, prompting cries of outrage, but UNRWA later admitted that it covered up that Hamas had used the school for military operations.

The Hellfire decision was especially ironic because it is a precision munition, generally less broadly damaging than bombs dropped from aircraft. The Hellfire can be fired from airplanes, drones and helicopters.

Ironic, too, because the United States has used Hellfire missiles against terrorists — often without the permission of the countries in which the terrorists were killed. A Hellfire was used to kill Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Kahn, American citizens, in Yemen. Al-Awlaki was designated a terrorist, and Kahn the editor of the al-Qaeda magazine Inspire, but U.S. law may have been violated by their assassination.

U.N. Agency Warns Iran on Nuclear Deal Notice follows disclosure that Iran had produced more than the permitted amount of heavy waterBy Laurence Norman

The head of the United Nations agency that oversees the Iranian nuclear deal warned Tehran on Thursday to stick to the accord after it was found for the second time to have breached one of its terms.

The International Atomic Energy Agency said last week that Iran had stockpiled slightly more than the allowable 130 metric tons of heavy water. Spent fuel can be taken from the heavy water to produce plutonium for a nuclear weapon.

Details of the violation emerged the day after Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president. During the campaign, Mr. Trump talked about tearing up the July 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and the U.S. and five other world powers. Since election day, he hasn’t commented publicly on the agreement.

Yukiya Amano, head of the IAEA, told the agency’s board Thursday that it was the second time Iran’s inventory of heavy water had exceeded 130 metric tons. He confirmed that Iran had pledged to transfer its excess heavy water out of the country under the agency’s supervision.

“It is important that such situations should be avoided in future in order to maintain international confidence in the implementation of the JCPOA, which represents a clear gain for nuclear verification in Iran,” Mr. Amano said, referring to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the nuclear accord’s formal name.

In a press conference Monday afternoon from the IAEA’s Vienna headquarters, Mr. Amano said Iran “is preparing to transfer a quantity of heavy water to other countries” and the agency is monitoring this.

However, he said the agency doesn’t yet know when that transfer will take place or how much heavy water will be exported. Mr. Amano said he would update the IAEA Board when there is more information.

Asked if his decision to express his concerns was connected to Mr. Trump’s recent election win, Mr. Amano said “by no means.”

“The reason why I expressed this concern is the fact that the inventory of heavy water surpassed 130 tonnes for the second time,” he said.

Besides the issue of excess heavy water, Iran is meeting its other commitments under the nuclear deal, the IAEA has repeatedly said. Those include a commitment not to separate plutonium or reprocess spent fuel for 15 years. Iran has also pledged to redesign and rebuild its Arak nuclear reactor in coming years so it doesn’t produce weapons-grade plutonium.

When the second violation of the deal’s provision on heavy water surfaced last week, U.S. officials played down it down, stressing that Tehran had made no effort to hide the excess material from the agency and had pledged to correct the situation.

Under the agreement, Iran is permitted to continue producing heavy water at its Arak production plant as long as any amount in excess of 130 tons is transferred out of the country. Officials familiar with the deal say Iran has struggled to find buyers for heavy water on the international market.

David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, estimates Iran is producing heavy water at a rate of around 25 tonnes a year.

“Thus, under current arrangements, Iran is likely to continue pushing up against this cap,” he said in a report published Tuesday.

Earlier this year, the Obama administration bought heavy water from Iran for nearly $10 million to help it meet the 130-metric-ton limit.

For its part, Iran claims the U.S. hasn’t upheld the spirit of the nuclear deal. It has failed, Tehran says, to do more to encourage European and other international banks to resume business with Iranian firms following the suspension of most economic and financial sanctions in January. Many U.S. sanctions remain in place. CONTINUE AT SITE

The New Trump Democrats Trump voters have become journalism’s biggest archaeological excavation site. Daniel Henninger

Will the donkey lie down with the elephant?

Two days after the election, Sen. Elizabeth Warren told the AFL-CIO executive council, “I will work with” Donald Trump.

Bernie Sanders: “I and other progressives are prepared to work with him.”

The Washington Post: “Pelosi says Democrats are willing to work with Trump.”

That was easy. Someone should tweet the news to the Occupy Trump Tower mobs on Fifth Avenue.

Of course this burst of Trumpian bonhomie comes with the word “if” attached: They’ll work with Donald Trump . . . if he becomes one of them. Which is to say, if he adopts the progressive policies and attitudes that just got the Democratic Party wiped out, from the presidency down to dogcatcher.

“If Republicans want to force through massive tax cuts,” thundered Sen. Warren, “we will fight them every step of the way.”

Even by the normal standards of postelection schadenfreude, it is hard not to be agog at the spectacle of Democrats trying to figure out what hit them and what to do about it.

A personal favorite is that Democrats must now distance themselves from “wealthy donors.” Party check-writers from Barbra Streisand to Jay Z put it all out there for Hillary, and this is the thanks they get—Bernie Sanders denouncing them to Stephen Colbert as “the liberal elite.”

A conclusion has emerged that the party forgot the forgotten man. In the past week, Trump voters have become the biggest archaeological dig in journalism, with the New York Times last weekend outputting three reports on lost tribes in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan.

President Obama paused during his trip to Greece to admit Mr. Trump won because of voter “anxiety” over the economy. That is the emerging Democratic consensus: The party needs to rediscover the economic well-being of the kind of people who voted Democratic from FDR to Bill Clinton. It is a good question how a party could forget an 80-year constituency.

Nancy Pelosi’s leadership of House Democrats is now under challenge, we are supposed to believe, from members who seethed in silence for years as the party became defined by the Streisandian elites on the East and West Coasts.

Ohio’s Rep. Marcy Kaptur and fellow Ohioan Tim Ryan are both considering an attempt to overthrow the party’s most-famous San Francisco Democrat after Thanksgiving.

Will the progressive websites publish their annual advice column, “How to talk to your uncle at Thanksgiving dinner”? Maybe this year they should just listen.CONTINUE AT SITE

Reversing Rule by Regulation Trump can dismantle much of Obama’s legacy with a pen and phone.

President Obama spent his final six years in office—and especially the last two—governing largely by executive fiat. He issued executive orders, and his administrative state issued tens of thousands of pages of new regulations that took on the force of law. He called it rule by pen and phone.

This infuriated millions of Americans and contributed to Donald Trump’s victory, and one irony is that this also means that Mr. Obama’s policy legacy is less durable. Mr. Trump will now have the chance to reverse these orders and regulations often without new legislation. Here are three ways he and Republicans can proceed:

New executive orders. Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute counts more than 250 executive orders signed by President Obama, plus more than 230 “executive memoranda.” These did everything from creating a new investment vehicle called MyRA, which seeks to encourage new savers to invest in government debt, to directing federal agencies to demand new data to investigate pay disparity by race and sex at government contractors. The Trump transition should review every one so the boss can rescind them if he wishes.

A related category are orders issued by federal agencies without a formal federal rule-making. Mr. Obama’s regulators made an unprecedented practice of issuing “guidance” that allowed agencies to duck rule-making while still forcing targets to comply—or risk enforcement action.

A classic of this genre is the Education Department’s rewrite of Title IX telling universities how they must handle accusations of sexual assault. Other examples run from auto lending to drug discovery to housing rentals. The President’s order legalizing four million illegal immigrants that is currently tied up in court can also be dropped at the stroke of a pen.

Mr. Trump can instruct his new cabinet secretaries to immediately void all such Obama guidance or else put it through the lawful rule-making process. He can also order federal agencies to immediately cease work on regulations in process or due to be sent for publication in the Federal Register.

Congressional Review Act. This legacy of the Gingrich era allows Congress to kill the many last-minute regulations now making their way through Mr. Obama’s agencies. For items enacted in the last 60 working days of this Congress—which probably will mean since late May this year—lawmakers can consider them in January without threat of a Senate filibuster.

That’s how Republicans dismissed Bill Clinton’s last-minute ergonomics rule in 2001. GOP lawmakers put four of these resolutions on the President’s desk during this Congress, but he vetoed them.

Bill De Blasio calls for more ‘disruption’ to protest Donald Trump

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/11/16/bill-de-blasio-calls-for-more-disruption-to-protest-donald-trump.html

Liberal New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is calling for more “disruption” to protest the election of Donald Trump.

“We have to recognize that all over this country, the more disruption that’s caused peacefully … the more it will change the trajectory of things,” he said in a radio interview on Monday, adding that Trump did not have a mandate to implement his agenda because he failed to win the popular vote.

De Blasio also pledged that New York City would not comply if Trump sought to restore “stop-and-frisk,” a controversial policy that was deemed unconstitutional by a U.S. district court judge in 2013. “They can threaten to take away money, but they cannot tell us how to police our streets,” he said.

The Democratic mayor, who aspires to be a standard bearer for the left, criticized members of his own party for failing to address the concerns of working-class voters, who “have every right to feel cheated.”

Yes, Trump’s Going to Dump the Iran Deal by Fred Fleitz

In the days following Donald Trump’s victory, a variety of experts – mostly Trump critics – pronounced that, despite Trump’s frequent statements during the presidential campaign that the July 2015 nuclear deal with Iran is one of “the worst deals ever made by any country in history,” he has no choice but to stick with the agreement after he assumes office.

Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif was one of the first to insist as much, claiming a Trump administration cannot back out of the nuclear deal because it is not a bilateral agreement between the United States and Iran but “an international understanding annexed to a Security Council resolution.”

Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council (which The Weekly Standard’s Lee Smith once described as “the tip of the spear of the Iran lobby” in the United States) echoed Zarif’s statement. In a November 11 Foreign Policy article, he argued Trump can undermine the Iran deal but cannot directly dismantle it because the JCPOA is a multilateral agreement “codified by the UN Security Council.” Any attempt by a Trump administration to renegotiate the deal would violate international law and isolate the United States, Parsi said.

Even some conservative experts have suggested Trump probably won’t try to significantly modify or discard the nuclear agreement, but will instead try to goad Iran into withdrawing by strictly enforcing the deal.

But Trump senior national-security adviser Walid Phares poured cold water on speculation that Trump plans to walk back his statements about the Iran deal, when he commented on Facebook over the weekend that the “Iran Deal will be dismantled.”

This firm statement by Phares confirmed previous statements he and Mr. Trump have made that the deal is a dangerous agreement that needs to be either significantly renegotiated or abandoned. As an expert who has followed the Iran nuclear program for many years inside and outside of government, I would like to expand on their statements by offering three key points about the nature of the deal and ten guidelines for renegotiating it.

Big Wind Blown Away in Vermont Big Wind had a rough Election Day in the Green Mountain State. By Robert Bryce

Big Wind lost big last Tuesday.

While it’s not clear what Donald Trump’s election means for federal energy policy, it’s abundantly obvious that the wind-energy sector’s agenda was crushed in Vermont. Indeed, thanks to the resounding — and somewhat improbable — election of a new Republican governor, Phil Scott, it is possible that Vermont could ban construction of new wind projects. And in the towns of Grafton and Windham, voters rejected the proposed Stiles Brook wind project by big margins.

Scott’s whopping nine-point victory over Democratic nominee Sue Minter is all the more impressive considering that Vermont voted overwhelmingly for Democrats at the federal and state levels. Hillary Clinton beat Trump in the Green Mountain State by 29 points, and Democrats won huge majorities of the popular vote in every other state and federal race. Minter was apparently hoping to ride Clinton’s coattails.

Instead, she lost to Scott, despite being backed by a pro-wind-energy PAC called Wind Works Vermont and by one of America’s most prominent environmentalists, Bill McKibben. McKibben is a resident of Vermont (he teaches at Middlebury College) and the founder of 350.org, a group which aims to “stop all new fossil fuel projects.” A few months ago, McKibben published a cover story in the New Republic in which he declared that the American economy should be running solely on wind and solar energy. He has frequently declared the need to “do the math,” but he didn’t bother to note that if such an all-renewable scheme were pursued, it would require a 20-fold increase in Vermont’s wind-energy capacity.

Although it cannot be stated definitively that wind energy was the deciding factor in Scott’s win over Minter, it is abundantly obvious that wind has been one of the most divisive issues in the state. During the Democratic primary for governor, two of the three candidates, Matt Dunne and Peter Galbraith, opposed wind-energy development. In fact, Galbraith made opposition to wind energy the primary focus of his campaign. In the August primary, Galbraith came in third, with about 6,500 votes. Shortly after the primary, he told me that wind-energy development “was the issue [in the Democratic primary] and I think in the general election it will be an issue as well.” It appears that nearly all of Galbraith’s supporters went on to vote for Scott, who ended up beating Minter by more than 27,000 votes.

Jewish Leftists Choose Hamas Over Trump Teaming up with the financiers of the murder of Jews to fight Trump. Daniel Greenfield

The Islamic Society of North America was named by the Justice Department as an unindicted co-conspirator in funding Hamas. It was linked to two Hamas funding fronts, the Holy Land Foundation and KindHearts. ISNA’s checks were made payable to the “Palestinian Mujahadeen” or “Holy Warriors” which was a name used by Hamas.

ISNA’s co-founder Sami Al-Arian was the local head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Mousa Abu Marzook, a top Hamas official listed by the Treasury Department as a Specially Designated Terrorist, received tens of thousands of dollars from ISNA.

This should have come as no surprise as both ISNA and Hamas are arms of the Muslim Brotherhood.

But the American Jewish Committee has decided to team up with the financiers of the murder of Jews to oppose Trump. The left wing Jewish group and an Islamist organization that wrote out checks to Islamic terrorists enabling them to kill Jews have formed the “Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council”.

Statements from both ISNA and the AJC made it clear that this was a reaction to Trump’s win.

“We are uniting to help the administration navigate in the proper constitutional manner, to uphold freedom of religion and constitutional rights for all American citizens,” Eftakhar Alam of ISNA said.

“It is a reaction to some of the bigotry and hate speech that came out of the campaign,” Robert Silverman, the AJC’s director of Muslim-Jewish relations said. “We’re concerned about the public discourse in the whole country. We’re also concerned about messages that originated within the two communities. The Trump phenomenon is only going to make it come together more quickly.”