Displaying posts published in

2016

Michael Angwin : How Green Activists Nuked Themselves

The anti-nuclear movement had everything going for it, from copious funding and the support of international NGOs to sympathetic press coverage and parliamentary supporters. Yet its crusade petered out, laid low by bogus science and ardent, absolutist ratbaggery.
Australia’s environmental warriors have failed in their campaigns over the past 40 years to stop the Australia’s uranium mining industry. In the past decade in particular, the anti-uranium movement has suffered devastating defeats, as uranium mining has expanded with bi-partisan support from Labor and conservative parties. It’s instructive to analyse why.

The anti-uranium movement operated on a permanent basis through the nation’s foremost environmental organisations and hundreds of other smaller organisations. It had access to considerable financial resources[1], to sympathetic media and to Commonwealth and state parliamentary sympathisers. It was gifted three nuclear accidents as a platform for its advocacy.

Given these propitious circumstances, how did the movement fail so completely to impede the development of Australia’s nuclear industry? What accounts for this monumental failure of policy, strategy and tactics? First, let’s look at the past decade’s landmark political decisions in support of uranium. The process began with the Howard Coalition government, and the ALP followed suit.

The centre-left Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, endorsed uranium mining and exports ten days after Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant was destroyed by a tsunami
Eight months later, Ms Gillard announced her government would export uranium to India, a non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, contrary to ALP policy. Shortly after, the policy fell humbly into line with her decision
Four uranium projects were approved under mainstream environmental laws, despite the close involvement of the anti-uranium movement in the assessment process
In 2016, South Australia’s centre-left government began to implement a Royal Commission report that endorsed SA as a suitable place for a global nuclear waste repository.

The anti-uranium movement emerged in the early 1970s to protest French nuclear testing in the Pacific. The movement next turned its attention to domestic uranium mining, using the Fraser government’s decision to permit mining at Ranger as a focus for activism. By the end of the 1970s, an anti-uranium strategy had emerged: frame uranium as a class-based issue and connect it with a broader political assault on the capitalist status quo; establish many small, local opposition groups; coordinate their activities; frame the movement as large, vigorous and publicly-supported; focus on emotions, especially fear; and target traditional land owners as a key point of resistance to mining.

However, even as insiders conceded at the time, ‘the ’70s movement did not fundamentally threaten Australia’s nuclear industry’.[2] The movement declined during the 1980s. The rise and decline of the Nuclear Disarmament Party paved the way for the co-option of the anti-uranium movement by the Labor Party[3]. The movement then declined even more rapidly, and uranium economics became much more important in shaping uranium development.

By the mid-1980s, anti-uranium activism tried a more mainstream advocacy strategy of influencing public opinion.[4] By the late-1990s, the movement’s strategy had become, by default, ‘isolated campaigning’.[5] While some environmental NGOs continued to fund full-time ‘anti-nuclear campaigners’, isolated campaigning has become the norm.

Why did it fail? A first clue is found in this history. The policy, strategy and tactics of the movement were shaped by Marxist ideological[6] beliefs. This never appealed to a mainstream Australian audience, which is more interested in workable solutions for real problems. The anti-uranium movement also faced the global failure of its founding ideology: in the 1980s, the Cold War ended and Soviet communism collapsed.

The ideological failure of the anti-uranium movement was accompanied by a long series of startling policy, strategy and tactical errors, particularly in making claims that had no credibility. For example, anti-nuclear crusader Helen Caldicott once claimed[7] a Howard/Bush conspiracy, involving the owners of the Alice Springs-to-Darwin railway, to store America’s nuclear waste at Muckaty Station, once proposed as the Federal government’s low-level nuclear waste site. This vast claim was based on the small fact that a subsidiary of Halliburton, a company with which former US vice-president Dick Cheney was once associated, was one of the handful of companies in a joint venture, to operate the rail road. There are many examples of this kind, and they illustrate the weakness of the anti-uranium movement’s advocacy: policy makers won’t take you seriously if you prosecute your case with selective facts, used out of context and without perspective.

Daryl McCann: Battlers Against the System

As demonstrated by both Trump and Sanders, a key feature in the 2016 US election has been a populist narrative about how foreign governments and companies, in cahoots with political and institutional insiders, have wrought ruin upon the nation.
Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton has endured two populist insurrections over the past eighteen months, one from the Left and the other from the Right. Both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have played the populist card, a conviction that ordinary men and women have been rorted by “the system” and that strong decisive action was required on behalf of regular folk to take back control of the nation from a coterie of cronies. The populist’s worldview is invariably a Manichean one of blameless “outsiders”—in alliance with a would-be political saviour—fighting the good fight against the “wicked insiders”. Sanders’s gripe was the state’s failure to safeguard the little person; Trump’s grievance is much the same, albeit for mostly different reasons.

A populist movement is a function of voters going rogue after deciding that the political status quo has lost its legitimacy—in the American case, the customary policies of the Democratic Party and the customary policies of the Republican Party. Populist revolts in America have emerged before at times of stress, from the People’s Party of James B. Weaver in the 1890s to the “Share the Wealth” movement of the Great Depression, the latter cut short by Huey Long’s assassination in 1935. Jack Ross, writing for the American Conservative in March 2016, insisted that Sanders’s politics should be seen as a contemporary version of Huey Long’s proletarian-flavoured radicalism rather than in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt-style liberalism and Henry Wallace’s progressivism or, we might add, Barack Obama’s New Left-style identity politics. Ross rationalises Sanders’s recourse to the middle-class identity politics of Black Lives Matter as the exception rather than the rule. For the most part, then, Senator Sanders differentiated himself from Hillary Clinton in his populist morality tale by implicitly casting her as the establishment candidate, an insider compromised by long and intimate association with “Wall Street speculators”.

Bernie Sanders, fittingly enough, kicked off his primary campaign by refusing to set up a Super PAC (political action committee) as proof that shady plutocrats and their Washington accomplices could not buy off the aspiring people’s hero. He was free to remain an independent operator and, presumably, the champion of outsiders. Central to his populist narrative was that an overclass had subverted democracy in America; decisions were being made that profited powerful oligarchical interests by selling out ordinary American workers, the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and Barack Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) being two obvious cases in point.

Sanders’s self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” insurgency also drew on a pervasive bitterness at the wage and wealth inequality in the modern-day US. Accordingly, Sanders’s policy rollout began with a range of government-guaranteed benefits for ordinary workers, from a new minimum wage to longer holidays. Sanders also pledged full remission on student-debt loans and a $70 billion plan to make tertiary education free. It was payback time for the outsiders.

Five weeks before the November 8 election an audiotape (dating back to a March 2016 fundraiser in Virginia) emerged of Hillary Clinton dismissing Bernie Sanders’s supporters as ill-informed Millennials who believed America should have “free college, health care” and that the Obama administration had not “gone far enough” in transforming the United States into “Scandinavia, whatever that means, and half the people don’t know what that means”. However, as Sanders’s campaign was surging at the time, Hillary Clinton entered into a bidding war with her rival. For instance, she promised a $250 billion infrastructure upgrade, only for Bernie Sanders to top this with a $1 trillion undertaking, throwing in high-speed internet access for rural America as a bonus. Why not? Add to that, of course, his plan for universal health care (or so-called Berniecare), a single-payer health plan that Sanders himself acknowledged would increase annual government spending on health from $1 trillion to $2.9 trillion. A Sanders presidency would have likely seen the resentments of the Occupy Wall Street movement to “the greed of corporate America” become the de facto creed of the White House.

Such was the appeal of Bernie Sanders’s leftist version of “the system is rigged” that he garnered almost 39 per cent of Democratic delegates in the primaries, possibly his most surprising victory being the March 8 victory in Michigan. In fact, he collected 46 per cent of delegates if “superdelegates”—party-appointed delegates not elected in primaries or caucuses—are excluded from the count. This was not the only way in which Democratic Party apparatchiks worked in favour of the establishment’s candidate. On the eve of the Democratic National Convention, held in Philadelphia, WikiLeaks revealed that the leadership of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) had conspired against Sanders from the beginning. For instance, some of the 20,000 leaked e-mails show that the DNC considered making Sanders’s Jewish background a campaign issue in some states. There was also evidence of collusion between the DNC and the Washington Post in the interests of the Clinton campaign. These troubling revelations forced DNC chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign but, tellingly, immediately afterwards she was hired by the Clinton campaign.

How al-Qaeda and ISIS Have Been Weighing in on Our Presidential Election By Bridget Johnson

If some countries are taking a vested interest in tinkering with the U.S. presidential election, terror groups have been generally taking a hands-off approach to next week’s vote.

After all, al-Qaeda reasoned, the next occupant of the White House is six of one and half a dozen of the other to them.

In its mid-May issue of the English-language Inspire magazine, after Donald Trump had secured enough votes for the GOP nomination, editor-in-chief Yahya Ibrahim noted that “today America is in a season of presidential elections, which will define the winning party to the presidency.”

“This may cause a slight difference to the American citizens but for us it is still the same story; this is because between a foolish candidate that openly declare[s] his enmity towards Islam and a candidate pretending to be a friend of Islam, thousands of Muslims continue to die as a result of the inhuman American policies in Islamic lands,” Ibrahim wrote for the al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula publication.

“After America failed to impose its direct domination and rule under the excuse of countering terrorism. And after America was exhausted in fighting many wars with Islamic groups. And after realizing that it is losing a battle rather than winning, they began to think of making arrangements on how to retreat from our lands ‘safely.’ America found that the best way to achieve this is by igniting the region with sectarian wars.”

Ibrahim decried “the dirty politics of America, led by the Democratic Party under the leadership of Obama.”

“And on the other hand we have the Republicans, who openly kill, fight and declare enmity towards Islam under the banner of the crusade,” the editor continued. “The Democrats smile at the Muslims while stabbing them at their backs.”

In a separate article, former Guantanamo inmate Ibrahim al-Qosi, who was transferred back to his home country Sudan in 2012 and joined AQAP two years later, wrote that 9/11 changed American politics “with regards to strengthening the rightist, white, racial and widespread-armed militias who are weary of the federal government internal and external policies.”

“These militias who think that the federal government in Washington does not serve the interest of the general white Anglo-Saxon American community of the protestant Christianity denomination,” al-Qosi added. “In addition to that they see the federal government serve the interests of the Jews and other minorities whom, according to them, must be curbed and get rid from power.”

The rest of AQAP’s Inspire publications throughout campaign season have been guides with practical tips for jihadists after the Orlando and Nice attacks, as well as a special issue about France banning the burkini on beaches.

There was no October surprise from ISIS in an attempt to influence the election; the ground offensive by coalition forces to recapture Mosul began mid-month, which could spark global revenge attacks. But the terror group’s official communications are centered around Mosul right now.

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The TRUTH About Hillary and Kathy Shelton By John L. Work

Candice E. Jackson, an attorney and advocate for women who have been the victims of other women in positions of power, recently agreed to an interview regarding the Kathy Shelton rape case.

Ms. Shelton, whom Ms. Jackson represents, was 12 years old in 1975 when she was brutally raped by Thomas Taylor.

Mr. Taylor’s defense counsel was Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Below, read this interview of Jackson by John L. Work, a former investigator with the Colorado State Public Defender’s Office and a retired Colorado law enforcement officer.

———————–

Work: Thank you so much for joining me, Candice. You’re an attorney, an author, and an advocate. One of your clients is Kathy Shelton, who as a 12-year-old child was the victim of a brutal rape in 1975.

During the pre-trial proceedings against the man who was eventually arrested and charged with that crime, Thomas Taylor, Ms. Shelton encountered Mr. Taylor’s defense counsel, now known to us as Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Please tell my readers how you came to represent Kathy Shelton as an attorney and advocate.

Jackson: During the process of writing my book Their Lives: The Women Targeted by the Clinton Machine back in 2005, I became close friends with women like Juanita Broaddrick and Kathleen Willey.

Based on my advocacy on their behalf over the years, when Kathy began being contacted by more and more press this year, she reached out to me feeling the need for an attorney to guide and advise her through this overwhelming process.

I was glad to get to know Kathy and represent her both as a lawyer and spokesperson. My foundation, Their Lives Foundation, fits this case like a glove, as my primary mission is to expose abuse of power (particularly when committed by powerful women) and give a voice to victims of power abuse.

Hillary Clinton’s mistreatment of Kathy Shelton is a stark illustration of women victimizing other women out of motives of ambition and ego, but there are hundreds of similar, lower-profile examples of abuse of power out there needing to be exposed. I also plan to continue to investigate and re-examine Kathy’s rape case from a legal and evidentiary angle so that the historical record is more complete with respect to how one of America’s most powerful female leaders chose to conduct herself in this particular situation, with respect to this particular victim.

This investigation will be important regardless of the results of this presidential election. Because the case is so cold, statutes of limitations likely bar any private action on Kathy’s behalf, even if evidence of wrongdoing crossing the line into civil or criminal misconduct were discovered; however, the court of public opinion and the history books warrant turning over every stone to reveal the facts of Kathy’s rape case.

Work: Central to Ms. Shelton’s grievance against Ms. Clinton is the affidavit in support of a pre-trial mandatory psychiatric evaluation, which Ms. Clinton filed with the Court.

In that affidavit, Ms. Clinton made some allegations which were destructive, to say the least, to your client’s character and reputation. Ms. Clinton’s affidavit attacked your client’s veracity, as well as her mental and emotional competence to testify.

The affidavit was devoid of named sources for the accusations. We have no idea who provided Ms. Clinton the information she used and represented as facts to support her motion for a Court-ordered psychiatric examination, because she didn’t include the names of those persons in her affidavit.

Will you please comment on the specific accusations Ms. Clinton made against your client and the effects they produced on Kathy Shelton, both in the short and long terms?

Jackson: What Ms. Clinton (then Ms. Rodham) said about Kathy Shelton in a court affidavit, under oath, was for the most part made up out of whole cloth.

There’s no reason to believe that Ms. Clinton had any credible source or factual basis for the outrageous, insulting, hurtful claims she made in that affidavit.

For instance, Ms. Clinton wrote that Kathy was emotionally unstable, that Kathy was prone to exaggeration, that Kathy had falsely accused people of touching her in the past, that Kathy came from a “disorganized family” (i.e., raised by a single mother) and therefore was prone to fantasize about older men and romanticize a sexual encounter.

These assertions and insinuations were probably typical blame-the-victim tactics of bygone eras, but in the mid-1970s when feminism had come into its own (particularly the anti-rape culture) and even our behemoth of a legal system was slowly catching up to standards of gender equality (e.g., rape shield laws began to be enacted state by state in 1974), one might expect a politically aware feminist and anti-rape advocate like Hillary Rodham to refuse to engage in blame-the-victim tactics — especially against a child victim.

The overall impact on Kathy as a young girl was to leave her feeling completely deprived of justice for the heinous crime committed against her, and leaving her feeling like it was somehow her fault.

I’d like to add, too, that this court affidavit was not the only place where Ms. Clinton has chosen to outright lie about Kathy and about this case.

Hillary’s two previous explanations of how she took the case are at odds with each other. In her audiotaped interview in the 1980s, she told journalist Roy Reed that the prosecutor (Mahlon Gibson) called her and said he had a defendant accused of rape and the guy “wanted a woman lawyer and would I do it as a favor to him.”

In her book Living History, she states that Mahlon Gibson called to tell her that an indigent prisoner accused of raping a twelve-year-old girl wanted a woman lawyer and that Gibson had recommended that the judge appoint Hillary. She states that she told Gibson she didn’t feel comfortable taking on such a client, but that Gibson “gently reminded me that I couldn’t very well refuse the judge’s request.” More recently, Hillary and her spokespeople have insisted that she was “court appointed,” implying that she was required to accept the case.

Significant questions exist as to all three of Hillary’s explanations. CONTINUE AT SITE

America’s Army of Mavericks In 2012, veteran counterterrorist officials concluded that the White House was suppressing intelligence on Islamic extremist threats to justify pulling out of the Middle East. By Mark Moyar

In November 2001, as the militiamen of the Northern Alliance were preparing to assault an Afghan city that remained under Taliban control, the militia’s commander, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, phoned an urgent request to the U.S. general in charge of the air campaign. Gen. Dostum explained to his American counterpart, Maj. Gen. David Deptula, that a Taliban leader in the city had just called him to boast that he had put his headquarters in Gen. Dostum’s own house. “You should bomb my house immediately,” Gen. Dostum said. “It’s the only house within miles with a swimming pool and tennis court.”

In a few minutes’ time, Gen. Deptula obtained overhead imagery of the house and ordered a B-1 bomber to drop two precision-guided bombs on it. But then the staff at U.S. Central Command intervened, putting the strike on hold until it could verify the target. Geospatial intelligence personnel faxed a satellite photo of the house to Uzbekistan, from which the photo was flown by helicopter into Afghanistan, where a Special Forces soldier carried it on horseback to Gen. Dostum. By then, of course, the Taliban leader had left. “If you want to bomb my house, go ahead,” Gen. Dostum informed Gen. Deptula. “But there is no one there anymore.”

This episode is one of many in James Kitfield’s “Twilight Warriors” that will be new to observers of America’s wars against Islamic extremism. Mr. Kitfield, a veteran national-security reporter whose earlier book, “Prodigal Soldiers” (1997), deftly narrated the U.S. military’s revitalization after Vietnam, here provides an enlightening tour of 21st-century counterterrorism—its successes and failures, its evolving technologies, and its ever-festering rivalries among national-security agencies. Along with voyaging through the Greater Middle East, he covers parts of Africa and Latin America, where U.S. agencies have combated terrorists and drug traffickers.

ENLARGE
Photo: wsj
Twilight Warriors

By James Kitfield
Basic, 405 pages, $27.99

Unlike many such accounts, “Twilight Warriors” does not dwell on Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama or their cabinet officials. Rather it focuses on the leaders at the next level down—those who prosecuted the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and other distant lands. Some of these individuals, like Gens. David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, are nearly household names, owing to their battlefield accomplishments. Two who are less familiar—Gen. Martin Dempsey and Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn—are presented more fully than before through Mr. Kitfield’s expansive interviews. Both are shown to be leaders who routinely overcame bureaucratic parochialism and hidebound thinking.

Germany Grapples With Refugee Tips in Terror Probes Officials welcome the efforts to track suspected criminals or Islamic State supporters, but say not all tips are helpful By Ruth Bender and Mohammad Nour Alakraa

BERLIN—When Syrian terror suspect Jaber Albakr escaped a police raid in the Eastern German town of Chemnitz in October, authorities posted an Arabic version of their wanted notice online 30 hours later.

By then, hundreds of Syrians had already shared their own translation on social media. Two days later, it was three Syrian refugees who captured and turned in the suspect.

“I came from a place where many people were killed; I don’t want anyone to die here,” said Abdalaziz al-Hamza, one of the first Syrians to post his translation of the notice on Facebook.

Refugees from the war-torn Middle East have been banding together to hound suspected terrorists and war criminals hiding among the nearly two million who have settled in Europe over the last two years, most of them in Germany.

The help, which ranges from tipoffs in immigration interviews to networks of amateur investigators, has been both a blessing and a burden for officials.

In Frankfurt, a Syrian human rights activist is collecting files on suspected war criminals and Islamists. In Bavaria, a refugee is sharing information on his former Islamic State captors. Online, refugees are posting pictures of suspected war criminals at a pace authorities can barely keep up with.

Some of the information from refugees is invaluable, security officials said, given authorities are often investigating crimes rooted in distant and inaccessible countries. But many of the tips are vague or unsubstantiated, evidence that is too thin to justify an investigation let alone a trial.

And some have been found to be false alarms based on personal agendas, leading at times to a fruitless strain on already tight resources, the officials said. The patchy effectiveness of the efforts has frustrated both the refugees offering the help, and officials still figuring out how to best use it.

“We have to be careful, we can’t simply go after someone just because one person thinks he did something,” said Jochen Hollmann, head of the state intelligence agency in Saxony-Anhalt.

In Germany, authorities have received 445 tips on potential terror and Islamist supporters over the past 18 months, and another 1,250 on suspected war criminals alone this year, according to the federal criminal agency BKA. Of the 445, 80 have led to in-depth investigations, the BKA said.

Islamic State has boasted of directing three attacks in Germany this year—two by refugees this summer and a murder by an unidentified knife-wielding suspect in Hamburg in October. The militant group claimed the Hamburg attack last weekend, and authorities said they are looking into the claim. CONTINUE AT SITE

Tehran’s Man in Beirut Lebanon’s new president is an ally of the Iran-backed terror group.

Lawmakers in Beirut agreed to elect Lebanon’s next President on Monday, breaking a deadlock that had crippled government for 29 months. The decisive vote was cast in Tehran. Iran wanted a Lebanese President who would be an ally of Hezbollah, the Shiite terror group that its chief proxy in the country. It found one in the 81-year-old former general Michel Aoun.

Under Lebanon’s explicitly sectarian political system, the President must be a Maronite Christian, while the Prime Minister is a Sunni and the Speaker of Parliament a Shiite. But in recent years Hezbollah has exercised a veto over Lebanese politics and tilted the balance in Tehran’s favor. It helps that Iran funds Hezbollah to the tune of around $200 million annually and supplies it with tens of thousands of missiles, making the group the strongest armed force in Lebanon.

Hezbollah’s presence in Lebanon allows Tehran to threaten Israel and defend Syria’s Assad regime, pillars of Iranian regional strategy. Mr. Aoun, though a Maronite, enjoys close ties with Hezbollah and isn’t likely to press the group to disarm. His Free Patriotic Movement party signed a memorandum of understanding with Hezbollah in 2006, and his rhetoric and positions are usually aligned with the Shiite group.

Mr. Aoun’s election marks a détente between Hezbollah and many in the Maronite community who have come to view the group and its Iranian backers as protectors amid a Syrian civil war that has flooded Lebanon with more than a million refugees, most of them Sunnis. It also represents a personal humiliation for Saad Hariri, who will again serve as Prime Minister under the deal. Hezbollah and agents of the Assad regime assassinated Mr. Hariri’s father, former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, in a 2005 car bombing.

How the Left Muzzles Opposition By David Solway

The engines of anti-democratic subversion have been grinding away for decades. The signs and portents all around us. The emergence of the scourge of political correctness and the lockstep leftist agitprop of the mainstream media, for example, are sure indicators of advancing democratic collapse. According to Reporters Without Borders, Canada ranks 18th and the U.S. 41st in its World Press Freedom Index — a rather shabby performance for ostensibly enlightened democratic nations. Political disinformation has come to supplant journalistic integrity in a sustained effort to steer the electorate toward the socialist agenda of anti-individualism, bigger government, state welfarism and bureaucratic expansion.

Another important way of facilitating the leftward drift is to mutilate the historical archive or reject the value and influence of history altogether. The historical register which binds a nation to its past and creates a holistic sense of national identity thus becomes a non-factor in the political and cultural zeitgeist. In Canada, for example, we have a postcolonial prime minister who believes that Canada is not determined by its history — “There is no core identity… in Canada,” Justin Trudeau bloviates, ignorant or dismissive of the institutions developed by classical British liberalism in the country, namely “freedom to associate, speak, create, and to be entrepreneurial.” Similarly, Title IX in the U.S. has materially watered down school curricula to the extent that students no longer have a secure grasp of their country’s history, or any grasp whatsoever — although the process of epistemic decay dates back many years.

In line with this movement of social engineering, importing third-world refugees with no experience of democratic institutions, particularly from the Islamic Middle East and North Africa, and seeding these immigrants in vote-sensitive regions guarantees loyalty to the progressivist, anti-democratic project and renders the eventual destination of one-party rule increasingly probable. The Hart-Celler 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, promoted by Ted Kennedy, and Canada’s policy of multiculturalism, adopted by former PM Pierre Elliott Trudeau in 1971, opened the floodgates. The flood is now in full tide.

There is yet another weapon in the ideological arsenal of the left which has been extremely effective in forcing compliance with and muzzling opposition to its homogenizing diktats. Official and quasi-official bodies that purport to defend “human rights” and that enjoy legal recourse to implement their decisions are perhaps the most potent agencies enforcing conformity to the prevalent ideology. This is because they have the power to levy onerous fines and judgments sufficient to damage and even lay waste the lives and careers of those who run afoul of their manifold proscriptions. They are the ringwraiths of the dark kingdom. Their websites, however, are golden; after all, protecting “human rights” sound like a noble endeavor. But there is a clandestine flavor to them too. Few know the trivial nature of many of the complaints and the drastic penalties levied for even inadvertent misdemeanors or honest mistakes. Passive or unsuspecting individuals will feel the wrath of these ersatz magistracies. At the same time, those who are cognizant of their sway and peremptory intent make sure to keep their heads down and act as they are expected to, cowering beneath the shadow of punitive reprisal. Compliance with the progressivist orthodoxy is thus assured.

Lebanon’s Government and Iran’s Victory By Shoshana Bryen

As a coalition of disparate forces – including the Iraqi military, Iranian-supported Iraqi Shiite militias, Kurdish forces, Turks, and Iranian militias – closes in on Mosul, Iraq, ready to oust ISIS from the capital of its self-proclaimed caliphate, it is easy to overlook events hundreds of miles away in Beirut. But events in both places are related.

At only half the size of Israel and with half the population, it is easy to overlook Lebanon altogether. Once a sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and diverse country – Beirut was called the Paris of the Middle East – it broke down into its constituent parts decades ago and now lives in sulky (if no longer generally violent) enclaves. Christians are separated into Protestant, Orthodox, and Catholic; Muslims into Sunni and Shiite; and the Druze are a separate entity. In theory, the president, chosen by Parliament, is always a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim, and the speaker of the Parliament a Shiite Muslim. In practice, Hezb’allah owns the south (including approximately 130,000 rockets and missiles aimed at Israel) and now, apparently, the government in Beirut.

After 45 rounds of balloting beginning after the election of 2014, the Lebanese Parliament has chosen retired Maronite General Michel Aoun as president. An enemy of Syria during the Lebanese civil war, in 2005, he made peace with Assad in Damascus and then forged an alliance with Hezb’allah at home. His ascension to the post – over Maronite Suleiman Franjieh, favored by Saudi Arabia – puts a point on Iran’s influence in Lebanon, and Iran cheered. Ali Akbar Velayati, Ayatollah Khamenei’s top foreign policy adviser, said, “The election of Michel Aoun as president shows new support for the Islamic resistance [against Israel].”

Perhaps, but it was at least as much a cheer for nailing down the eastern end of the long sought Shiite Crescent and enhancing Iran’s reach across the region.

Iran established Hezb’allah in 1983 as the anchor of the Crescent. It has financed the organization and supplied weapons and training, including those missiles in the South. Iran has taken more and more direct control of Hezb’allah activities and pulled it into the Syrian civil war, where it has taken tremendous casualties and lost some of its luster at home. (Even Shiite Lebanese object to their sons dying in Syria; they prefer the anti-Israel “resistance” meme.) In response to Iranian and Hezb’allah warfare against Sunni Muslims in Syria, as well as Iran’s role in the Houthi uprising in Yemen, the Gulf Cooperation Council and the Arab League, led by Saudi Arabia, labeled Hezb’allah a terror organization and cut off aid to Lebanon in March.

This, as much as anything, may have tipped the scales in favor of Iran’s candidate.