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November 2017

ANOTHER ANNIVERSARY: RAEL JEAN ISAAC

The hundredth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration has passed to mixed reactions. It has been celebrated, as it deserves to be—the achievements of the Jewish state that emerged from it are breathtaking—but also attacked and denigrated.

Some of the attacks are unsurprising. The “Foreign Minister” of the “State of Palestine” Riyad Malki said it was bringing legal proceedings against the British government in British and international courts, in his words, to “compel the British government to apologize and make reasonable reparations to make up for that tragedy [the Balfour Declaration] including recognizing the State of Palestine.” The UN is using the occasion to set aside $1.3 billion to fund Palestinian legal campaigns against Israel and to support creation of an independent Palestinian state.
Emily Thornberry

More unsettling are some British reactions. Melanie Phillips reports that Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn refused to attend the dinner celebrating the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, a dinner attended by Prime Minister Netanyahu as the guest of Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May. In his place he sent the Labor shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry who made no secret that she saw nothing to celebrate. In an interview with the Middle East Eye news site, Thornberry said: ”I don’t think we celebrate the Balfour Declaration but I think we have to mark it…and I think probably the most important way of marking it is to recognize Palestine.” Even more unsettling are the reactions of some hitherto respectable Jewish organizations. For example, the American Jewish Historical Society has clearly gone over to the dark side with its plan (only withdrawn under pressure) to “commemorate” Balfour with speeches by two anti-Israel activists, partnering with the viciously anti-Israel Jewish Voice for Peace.

Which brings us to the importance of another anniversary that went totally unremarked: the 24th year anniversary this September of the signing of the Oslo accords in Washington. There is a direct connection between the rampant, ever-growing hostility to Israel and the so-called “peace” agreement Rabin signed with Arafat. Until then, Arafat had been a terror chieftain whose fortunes were in sharp decline. Whatever the failures of Israel’s 1982 campaign in Lebanon, it had one major success, forcing the PLO, which had sowed havoc in both Jordan and Lebanon, to find refuge in Tunisia, a backwater where it remained weak and constrained. With Oslo Israel bestowed vigorous new life on the PLO—and on the worldwide assault on her own legitimacy.

As remarkable as Israel’s stupidity was the enthusiasm with which it was greeted by Israel’s supporters (a reminder—think catastrophic global warming—of just how wrong a “consensus” can be). As American Jewish organizations vied for a place on the White House lawn to witness signing of the “historic” peace agreement, AFSI was a lone pro-Israel organization in denouncing the agreement and in pointing out its inevitable disastrous consequences. There would be individuals who spoke out and indeed traveled to Oslo to protest the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Arafat, Rabin and Peres. These were the people who at the time we called “the real heroes of Oslo,” including Rabbi Avi Weiss, Ronn Torossian, David Kalb and Joshua Meisels of the Coalition for Jewish Concerns (AMCHA) as well as New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who brought a group of prominent New Yorkers to Oslo.

Move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem It’s the right thing to do, and it would be a political victory for the White House By Wilson Shirley

President Trump needs a win. Fortunately, one is within reach.

In 1995, Congress passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act, a law that mandated moving America’s embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to a “unified” Jerusalem by May 31, 1999. But that move never happened, and, as Ambassador John Bolton pointed out in his recent congressional testimony on the subject, the U.S. embassy to Israel remains the only American embassy not located in the host country’s capital.

How has the Jerusalem Embassy Act not yet been fully executed? One of the law’s provisions grants the president the authority to bypass its penalty for not moving the embassy by issuing a waiver, renewable every six months, which invokes “the national security interests of the United States.” The latest waiver was issued on June 1 of this year.

Every president since 1999, from Clinton to Bush to Obama to Trump, has kept up the unending string of waivers, declining to move the embassy to Jerusalem. Some of them have promised, as candidates, to make the move, but none have followed through. The next waiver is set to expire on December 1. On that day, Trump can break the streak.

Security concerns do not merit a waiver of this provision of the Jerusalem Embassy Act. It is true, as events across the Arab world in 2012 showed, that U.S. embassies and consulates are targets for attacks by violent extremists. That has been the case since at least 1998, when al-Qaeda terrorists blew up American embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya.The response of the United States to those attacks, however, was not to withdraw from Nairobi or Dar es Salaam. As Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law professor Eugene Kontorovich argued in his own congressional testimony, after these very attacks “the Executive undertook to hunt down and punish the perpetrators, while Congress appropriated extraordinary amounts for improved security at diplomatic facilities around the world.”

Recent events do not suggest that beginning to grant Jerusalem equal status with other world capitals would significantly endanger American security. Last April, Vladimir Putin’s Russia became the only country on Earth to actually recognize West Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state. The silence across a Middle East split on religious lines, riven by proxy wars, and aflame with extremism was deafening.

America’s policy of maintaining its embassy in Tel Aviv was born not of security concerns, but of legal deference to the U.N. General Assembly’s Resolution 181, a 1947 proposal that would have made Jerusalem into an international city governed by a “Special International Regime,” while partitioning the rest of Mandatory Palestine into Arab and Jewish sections.

Who Watches the Watchmen? History shows that special counsels almost inevitably overstep their mandates. By Victor Davis Hanson*****

Former FBI director Robert Mueller was supposed to run a narrow investigation into accusations of collusion between the Donald Trump campaign and the Russian government. But so far, Mueller’s work has been plagued by almost daily improper leaks (e.g., “sources report,” “it emerged,” “some say”) about investigations that seem to have little to do with his original mandate.

Now, there are leaks claiming that Mueller is going after former national-security adviser Michael Flynn for his business practices before he entered the Trump administration. Specifically, Mueller is reportedly investigating Flynn’s security assessment and intelligence work for the Turkish government and other Turkish interests. Yet possible unethical lobbying on behalf of a NATO ally was not the reason Mueller was appointed.

The Roman satirist Juvenal famously once asked how one could guard against marital infidelity when the moral guardians were themselves immoral. His famous quip, translated roughly as “Who will police the police?” is applicable to all supposedly saintly investigators.

Independent counsel Ken Starr was supposed to look into Bill Clinton’s supposed shady Whitewater dealings in Arkansas. He ended up investigating every aspect of Clinton’s life, including his many sexual escapades.

No doubt Clinton was a philanderer. But it was not Starr’s mission to prove to the nation what it had already suspected when it voted Clinton into the Oval Office.

In 2003, Patrick Fitzgerald was appointed as special counsel (by now-notorious former FBI director James Comey) to determine whether Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, had illegally exposed the allegedly covert status of CIA operative Valerie Plame. As with the Starr investigation, Fitzgerald soon presided over a media circus.

When the investigation was over, Libby was charged on five counts even though Plame may not have been a covert CIA agent at all. Also, it was reported early in the investigation that Fitzgerald knew that someone other than Libby (Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage) was almost surely guilty of first leaking Plame’s status.

But Fitzgerald was desperate for a big administration scalp. So he continued to lead an investigation that resulted in Libby’s conviction on four charges — in part based on Libby’s supposed disclosures to journalist Judith Miller. In her memoir, Miller later disavowed that Libby had ever given her classified information.

Special-counsel investigations are only as good as the society at large that orders them. The idea that a godly inquisitor, invested with extralegal authority, can somehow use superior wisdom and morality to solve an unsolvable ethical problem is a stretch.

Usually, these chasing-your-own-tail appointments are born out of media and political hysteria. The special counsel immediately feels enormous pressure to find anything to avoid being accused of running a “whitewash” or wasting time and money.

Germany: Surge in Migrant Attacks on Police “Migrants Have No Respect for Us” by Soeren Kern

“The police cannot win a war with the Lebanese because we outnumber them…. This applies to all of Gelsenkirchen, if we so choose.” — Lebanese clan in Gelsenkirchen, Germany.

Observers surmised that the real reason for the judge’s leniency was that he feared his family might be subjected to retribution from the clan.

Freddi Lohse, the Vice Chairman of the DPolG German Police Union in Hamburg, said that many migrant offenders view the leniency of the German justice system as a green light to continue delinquent behavior: “They are used to tougher consequences in their home countries. They have no respect for us.”

Violent attacks against German police have reached epidemic proportions, and Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door migration policy is to blame, official statistics show.

The Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt, BKA) reported 36,755 attacks against German police in 2016 — or an average of 100 per day, a significant increase over previous years.

Violence — including verbal and physical assaults, and even murder — against police is rampant in all 16 of Germany’s federal states. According to the BKA, the epicenter of the problem in 2016 was North Rhine-Westphalia (8,929 incidents), the state with the largest migrant population, followed by: Bavaria (4,930); Baden-Württemberg (4,355); Berlin (3,154); Lower Saxony (3,030); Hesse (1,870); Saxony (1,573); Rhineland-Palatinate (1,537); Hamburg (1,339); Thüringen (1,228); Schleswig-Holstein (1,237); Brandenburg (1,009); Saxony-Anhalt (899); Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (658); Saarland (521); and Bremen (486).

Preliminary data, recently leaked to German public radio, indicate that in terms of violence against German law enforcement officers, 2017 will be a record-breaking year. In Berlin alone, attacks against police this year are up 70% in Görlitzer Park, 35% at the Warsaw Bridge and 15% at Kottbusser Tor, according to the Berliner Morgenpost.

Sweden’s New Government Censorship by Judith Bergman

In the report, placing the word “refugees” in quotation marks, as well as “unaccompanied children,” is supposedly an expression of “hate”. (Many, if not most, migrants classified as “unaccompanied children” have turned out to be grown men).

Government agencies are going out of their way to protect the “integrity” of possible jihadists out of concern for a “democratic society” — the society that these jihadists want to subvert and destroy — and are using their government platform to smear non-mainstream media for matters as small as the use of quotation marks. What about the “integrity” of Swedish citizens and their right to not be blown up?

Why is a municipality sponsoring an organization that supports terrorists and even awarding it prizes? It appears that glorifying terrorism is acceptable in Sweden, so long as its victims are the Israeli children. Far from countering “hate”, Sweden appears to be doing all it can to strengthen Muslim extremism.

The Swedish government is now officially questioning free speech. A government agency has declared so-called Swedish “new media” — news outlets that refuse to subscribe to the politically correct orthodoxies of the mainstream media — a possible threat to democracy. In a government report, tellingly called “The White Hatred” written by Totalförsvarets forskningsinstitut (Total Defense Research Institute), a government agency under the Swedish Ministry of Defense, Swedish new media such as Samhällsnytt (formerly known as Avpixlat), Nyheter Idag and Nya Tider are lumped together with neo-Nazi media such as Nordfront.

“Hate” is defined broadly to include violent extremism, “hateful expressions”, jokes, internet trolling and even the use of certain quotation marks. For instance, in the report, placing the word “refugees” in quotation marks, as well as “unaccompanied children,” is supposedly an expression of “hate”. (Many, if not most, migrants classified as “unaccompanied children” have turned out to be grown men).

“One might find,” according to the report’s conclusion, “that pluralism of information sources… is a positive addition in a democratic society where freedom of speech is an important foundation”, but “the new media… stretch the limits of free speech,” which “threatens other democratic values”. The report further alleges that society risks becoming tolerant of the intolerant. That is rather rich coming from the authorities of a European country that has accepted Islamic intolerance to an astounding degree. There is even a proposal from a government minister to reintegrate returning ISIS fighters, who might still wish to destroy the tolerant society that houses them.

The report is part of a series commissioned by the Swedish government to conduct quantitative mapping and analyses of violent extremist propaganda spread in Sweden by the internet and social media. The survey is supposed to include violent extremist environments in Sweden: right-wing extremism, left-wing extremism and Islamic extremism.

A previous report, “The Digital Caliphate,” supposedly looks at Islamic extremism, but is rendered useless in a Swedish context by explicitly refusing to engage with concrete ISIS propaganda in Sweden for “ethical” reasons:

“It is not in itself illegal to sympathize with violent ideologies. Our work is not about mapping the views of private people, as that would be incompatible with an open democratic society. Our analyses have therefore been limited to protect the integrity of private persons. No data has been collected from pages protected by passwords, closed Facebook pages or other types of Facebook pages or social media where the user has sought to keep the material within a closed group. All the material comes from open sources… this means that the material analyzed is limited as a large part of ISIS propaganda happens in closed channels…”

Government agencies in charge of national security, in other words, are going out of their way to protect the “integrity” of possible jihadists out of concerns for a “democratic society” — the society that these jihadists want to subvert and destroy. Meanwhile, these agencies are using their government platform to smear non-mainstream media for matters as small as the use of quotation marks. What about the “integrity” of Swedish citizens and their right to not be blown up? Furthermore, this desire to protect the privacy of potential jihadists means that the most vital part of the work — mapping the extent of Islamist violent propaganda in Sweden — is still left undone.

Egypt: Saving the Sinai by Lawrence A. Franklin

Egypt could use the help of American desert-warfare Special Forces advisors, as well as actionable intelligence from trusted Bedouin desert trackers. Egypt might also improve relations with the Sinai’s principal Bedouin tribes and other locals by building, perhaps with US support, schools and health clinics.

Unless Egypt adopts a more effective military and political strategy against its jihadists, it could lose the entire Sinai, and the all-important Suez Canal, a prospect which would shake the foundations of both the regime and the region.

Egypt is no longer sovereign in the Sinai Peninsula. Islamic State terrorists, moving freely throughout the Sinai’s Northern Province, have been delivering stinging defeats on Egypt’s military and police convoys. The November 24 mass murder of Sufi Muslim worshippers by radical Sunni terrorists in the Northern Sinai Province underlines the Egyptian government’s loss of control in the area. If Cairo changes its tactics and strategy, however, the Sinai can be saved.

Initially, Islamic State terrorists in the Sinai Desert feasted on soft targets, such as Coptic Christian communities and local, lightly defended, police stations. The Egyptian military’s inability to prevent these attacks or subdue jihadist forces simply emboldened the terrorists. In mid-October, Islamic State jihadists even robbed a bank in the northern Sinai’s provincial capital, El-Arish, making off with about a million dollars to help finance their anti-government campaign. Large tracts of the northern Sinai are slipping out of Egypt’s control due to the military inefficiencies and counterproductive policies of government security forces.

These shortcomings include an unwillingness to change tactics, ineffective weapon systems for desert combat, and lack of proper logistical support. The troop convoys sent into the desert are “red meat” for the jihadists, “who mount sophisticated multi-tiered attacks and employ snipers to demoralize security forces.”

The jihadists station their lookouts atop high desert sand dunes to monitor the approach of security forces; convoys are visible from miles away. On one occasion, the terrorists were seemingly able to lure security forces into an ambush.

The advanced capability and sustainability of the Sinai jihadists is in part, a result of Hamas training and Iranian financial support. The sad fate of a police convoy upon which the jihadists inflicted heavy casualties underscores the typical military column’s overall vulnerability.

Another government vulnerability is political in nature. Cairo is failing in desert warfare against the jihadists also because it lacks the support of the Sinai’s Bedouin tribes. The ease with which Islamic State contingents navigate the desert’s dunes indicates that the terrorists have intelligence and logistical support inside Bedouin villages. The Islamic State’s “Sinai Province” was able to capitalize on the Bedouins’ hostility to the central government’s harsh treatment, such as scorched-earth tactics against villages near a recent military defeat of security forces. Egyptian military leaders has often penalized villages for allegedly not providing warning of proximate jihadist attacks.[1]

France Submits to Terrorism, Muslim Anti-Semitism by Guy Millière

In France, since 2012, more than 250 people were killed by Islamic terrorism — more than in all other European countries combined.

No other country in Europe has experienced so many attacks against Jews. France is a country where Jews are murdered because they are Jews.

“Muslim believers know very well what is happening. Only a minority is violent. But as a whole, they do not ignore that their birthrate is such that one day, everything here will be theirs”. — Luc Ravel, Archbishop of Strasbourg.

In Bagneux, France, on November 1, 2017, a plaque placed in memory of Ilan Halimi, a young Jew murdered in 2006 by a “gang of barbarians”, was destroyed and covered with graffiti. When a few days later, another plaque replaced it, the French government issued a statement that “hate will not win”.

There are many signs, however, that hate has already won and that France is sick. If these signs were already obvious a decade ago, they are even more obvious today. Voluntary blindness prevented them from being addressed.

Ilan Halimi was taken hostage in January 2006, then viciously tortured for three weeks. He was eventually abandoned, dying, on the edge of a road and died a few hours later.

Most of kidnappers, who were arrested a few days after the murder, were Muslims. They immediately confessed. They said they had chosen Halimi because he was a Jew and they thought that “all Jews have money”. Some added that Jews “deserve to suffer”.

They were tried behind closed doors. The leader, Youssouf Fofana, spat his bile against Jews and vehemently shouted the name of Allah during the whole trial, so the court could not hide that he was an Islamic anti-Semite. He was sentenced to “life” in prison — which in France means 18 to 20 years. If he had not assaulted his guards in the prison, he would already have be released. The other members of the gang, described by the prosecutor in a watered down way as “thugs looking for easy money”, were quieter and were handed down relatively light sentences. Today, almost all “the barbarians” are free.

Even books, accentuating the whitewash, describe the crime as just an ugly “sign of greed” among “poorly educated young people”.

Mugabism Without Mugabe The transition from one dictator to another is met with false cheers from his court.Theodore Dalrymple

We need more often to be reminded than informed, said Doctor Johnson, and if anyone needed to be reminded of how fragile and temporary the exercise of power is, and how changeable are courtiers and flatterers, especially of dictators, he could not do better than look at the website of the Bulawayo Chronicle, one of Zimbabwe’s newspapers of record.

On November 10, one of its main stories was the unveiling of a plaque commemorating Harare International Airport’s change of name to the Robert Gabriel Mugabe International Airport, a process presided over by His Excellency Comrade Robert Gabriel Mugabe himself, who “reiterated his gratitude on behalf of himself, his family and the entire country [for] the honour bestowed on him, saying it has brought joy to all Zimbabweans.” One is irresistibly reminded of a poem by the Nicaraguan poet and priest, Ernesto Cardenal, Somoza desveliza la estatua de Somoza en el Estadio Somoza (Somoza unveils the statue of Somoza in Somoza Stadium).

According to the newspaper report, the renaming was done “to match the stature of President Mugabe, a global icon.” The Minister of Transport told the president that the airport “is part of your legacy [and] wise leadership,” because “you have given priority to infrastructure and utility development in the country for the entirety of the people of Zimbabwe,” while another minister, Goneril-like, said that the renaming demonstrated “the pride [of] Zimbabweans in President Mugabe.”

Could these be some of the same ministers who, 11 days later, refused to attend a cabinet meeting called by Mugabe, who by then had been expelled from the ruling political party, the Zimbabwe African National Union—Patriotic Front? And could it be that the war veterans who, on November 9, wanted Mugabe’s wife to be made vice president were the same war veterans who, one week later, were calling for the president’s resignation? It could: the rats were leaving the sinking ship.

Zimbabwe’s next president will be Emmerson Mnangagwa, known as the Crocodile, the end of whose road the Chronicle was gleefully proclaiming only eight days ago, when he was expelled from the party with the unanimous agreement of ten regional committees.

John O’Sullivan Conduct Unbecoming

Liberation has wrought two problems. The lesser, as chivalry has died, is sexual harassment by those with power over someone they desire. The greater problem as the old restraints atrophy is that we don’t live in a world without rules but in one where they are unknown until broken.

It took less than two weeks before the Harvey Weinstein sex scandal and its impact on cultural politics spread from Hollywood and Broadway to the Westminster Parliament in London. “Sexminster” and “Kneegate” are the names of the scandal locally. It’s being treated by the media as an outbreak of sexual harassment among MPs so shocking that it may bring down Theresa May’s Tory government.

Yet one can’t help noticing that so far the total of all reported “offenses”—which range widely from one rape to two reports of Ministers touching knees surreptitiously over dinner—is only a small fraction of the rapes and serious assaults alleged against Weinstein alone. Whatever pretensions the House of Commons may still cherish, it’s very far from being Hollywood-on-the-Thames.

News and rumors of sex emerge with every twist of the 24-hour cycle, however. So, with that qualification, here is a quick summary of recent news from Babylon:

A dossier prepared by anonymous “researchers” alleged that forty Tory MPs were known to be guilty of sexual harassment of young aides and researchers. Some MPs and their harassed aides on the list, however, promptly stood up to identify themselves and to firmly deny the charges. Two of the MPs are taking actions for libel. The number of Tory MPs in the dossier has now been reduced to 25.
Though not mentioned in the dossier, a number of Labour figures were soon led into the dock. One MP was charged with aggressively vulgar sexual advances in a bar a decade ago; another with hinting broadly to a young Labour sympathizer that he nursed feelings that made her feel “uncomfortable” (he envied the young man who was her lover); and the third case, mentioned above, was that of a Labour apparatchik outside Parliament accused of rape by another young activist.
As the tumbrils began to roll, more names were outed. One former Tory Minister, married and once mentioned as a possible PM, was found to have sexted to a young woman after interviewing her for a job. (He decided not to offer her the job but risked texting her anyway.) Another Tory MP has been accused of putting his hands up the skirts of women MPs in the elevator—the only accusation so far that mimics the odd Hollywood stories of producers, writers, and actors masturbating in front of women they were hiring or working with. A third Tory, Charlie Elphicke, has in effect been expelled from the Tory benches by the Whips’ Office which also passed allegations involving him onto the police. He has not been told what the allegations are, however, and the police have not yet taken any action against him.

Draining the Swamp at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Skirmish over acting directors foreshadows a battle ahead. Joseph Klein

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has become ground zero in President Trump’s fight to “drain the swamp” permeating the deep state in Washington, D.C. This bureau was created during the Obama administration under the draconian Dodd-Frank Act, with the purpose of regulating various financial products directly affecting consumers, such as mortgages, credit cards, bank accounts and student loans. Barack Obama’s pick to run the agency as its director was Richard Cordray, who used the unilateral powers of his office to browbeat financial institutions, large and small. Mr. Cordray resigned late last week. A duel broke out between two claimants for the position of “acting director” to fill the vacancy left by Mr. Cordray until President Trump nominates, and the Senate confirms, his successor as director. Mr. Cordray tried, just before his resignation, to install his own pick for acting director, while President Trump appointed Mick Mulvaney, someone he trusts to jump start immediately the changes he believes are necessary to place some reasonable constraints on the run-away, unaccountable regulatory bureaucracy. For the moment, a federal court has supported the authority of the Trump administration’s appointment, but the opposition is considering various options, including an appeal. While it’s doubtful an appeal will succeed, it doesn’t look like the Deep State is ready to concede this battle just yet.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was originally the idea of then-Professor and now-Senator Elizabeth Warren, who regularly attacks anything connected to the financial industry. To ostensibly protect the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from any political interference, Congress granted the bureau’s director extraordinary unilateral powers. It also decided to delegate to the Federal Reserve Congress’s constitutional authority to appropriate the funds to run the bureau.

Before resigning his post a week earlier than planned, Director Cordray sought to extend his bureau’s overbearing regulatory regime for as long as possible by handpicking his own “acting director” to replace him temporarily. He did this through the artifice of appointing a deputy director, Leandra English, just before his resignation took effect. He based his action on ambiguous language in the Dodd-Frank Act, which he claimed empowered his just-appointed deputy director to automatically take over as the “acting director” upon his departure.

President Trump promptly used his authority, as the head of the executive branch, under a provision of a separate statute dealing with the filling of temporary vacancies, to appoint his own acting director, Mick Mulvaney (who is also serving as the budget director). The president served notice that he would not allow the swamp to continue as is at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.