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December 2017

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Roy Moore Accuser Makes Stunning Admission About Yearbook Signature By Tyler O’Neil

By on December 9th, 2017

On Friday, the woman who presented her yearbook as evidence that Republican Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore sexually assaulted her admitted that she herself had written at least part of the inscription. Beverly Young Nelson, who is represented by notorious lawyer Gloria Allred, admitted to adding to Moore’s inscription, although she still claims he originally wrote it.

“He did sign it,” Nelson insisted to ABC News’ Tom Llamas. He asked her, “And you made some notes underneath?” She then admitted, “Yes.”

Last month, Nelson joined a chorus of accusers, claiming that Roy Moore groped and attempted to rape her when she was 16. To substantiate her claims, Nelson produced a yearbook with the inscription, “To a sweeter more beautiful girl I could not say Merry Christmas. Christmas 1977. Love, Roy Moore… Roy Moore, DA. 12-22-77 Olde Hickory House.”

Allred, Nelson’s lawyer, originally said the entire message was penned by Moore, but on Friday Nelson revealed that at least the note “12-22-2017 Olde Hickory House” was her handwriting.

This may seem nit-picky, but Moore’s lawyer Phillip Jauregui raised questions about the alleged signature last month, noting that Moore’s signed name ended with the letters “D.A.” Moore was not a district attorney at the time, but an assistant district attorney.

Despite Nelson’s claim that she had never had contact with Moore since the alleged incident, she did actually interact with Moore in 1999, when she filed for divorce against her husband.

Jauregui noted that Moore’s assistant when he was presiding over Nelson’s divorce proceedings was named Delver Adams. Adams typically stamped his initials on court filings, leading to signatures reading “Roy Moore, D.A.” The presence of that “D.A.” after the signature and the fact that Nelson had a court action involving Moore in 1999 suggest the signature may be a forgery.

At the time of Jauregui’s statement, reporters noted that the “D.A.” from Adams did not look similar to the “D.A.” in the yearbook. That fact does not explain the existence of “D.A.” after Moore’s signature in the yearbook, however.

This admission might call the entire signature into question. Even if Nelson’s accusation is entirely false, however, there are still other women claiming Moore pursued them inappropriately when they were teenagers.

Gloria Allred did her side no favors by representing Nelson. As The Weekly Standard’s Chris Deaton reported, those who defend Moore despite the allegations cite Allred’s involvement as a reason. If the yearbook signature is indeed a forgery, that will diminish Allred’s credibility even further. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Who’s Playing Politics on Israel? Liberals accused Trump of putting politics above diplomacy when he recognized Jerusalem as the Jewish state’s capital. Pot, meet kettle. By Jonathan S. Tobin

By on December 9th, 2017

As far as the New York Times was concerned, it was simply a matter of fact: The only possible explanation for President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel was politics, pure and simple. A front-page news article proclaimed as much in its headline: “For Trump, an Embassy in Jerusalem Is a Political Decision, Not a Diplomatic One.”

The piece claimed that the move was more or less hatched in a meeting Trump held ten days before his inauguration with billionaire casino owner Sheldon Adelson and Zionist Organization of America president Morton Klein. At the meeting, Trump reaffirmed the promise he had made during the campaign to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Since all of his predecessors had reneged on the same promise, as far as the Times was concerned, the only possible reason for Trump to even consider keeping it was a fear of disappointing donors like Adelson and fervently pro-Israel base voters.

This thesis makes sense if you believe no rational president would ignore the collective wisdom of the foreign-policy establishment, but it has two basic problems. One is that it fundamentally misunderstands Trump’s view of the world and governing style, as well as the truth about the current standoff in the Middle East peace process. The second is that it ignores an even more obvious element of the new debate over Jerusalem: The president’s opponents are playing politics here as much as he is.

Was there a political benefit to Trump’s keeping his promise on Jerusalem? Of course. But while Trump seems to think more about the need to honor his campaign promises than most career politicians, everything he’s done since entering politics suggests that being broadly popular is not his primary concern.

Instead, it seems far more likely that the decision stemmed from Trump’s contempt for the conventions of policymaking. His instincts almost always lead him to distrust the experts and actively seek out the advice of dissenters from the conventional wisdom. This can often get him in trouble, but in this case, it alerted him to a basic fact that his predecessors’ deference to the experts caused them to ignore: The traditional approach to the Arab–Israeli conflict, which dictated a refusal to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, has been an abysmal failure.

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Did the DOJ Misuse the Steele Dossier — to Spy on the Trump Campaign? Some Trump supporters are making that claim. The president can disclose warrant applications proving whether it’s true. By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on December 9th, 2017

Will he or won’t he?

Will President Trump order the disclosure of any warrant applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (the FISA Court) in which the Justice Department and FBI presented any information derived from the Steele dossier?

We don’t need to imperil national security. There is no need to disclose the entirety of any application. There is no need to expose intelligence sources or methods of gathering information — they can be redacted. We don’t even need to see any actual application; a declassified summary of the relevant information will do. We just need to know if what administration supporters are saying is true: In seeking surveillance authority on the rationale that Trump associates were acting as agents of a foreign power, did the Justice Department and the FBI present the FISA court with the Steele dossier as if it were a product of U.S. intelligence reporting — rather than what it really was, a political opposition-research product commissioned by the Clinton campaign?

That is an explosive charge. So, at the very least, will the president order the Justice Department to provide any such FISA applications to the House Intelligence Committee — preferably along with an explanation of why the president’s own appointees at the Justice Department and the FBI have been defying the committee’s requests for information?

Even before controversy arose over the Steele dossier, many of us were prepared to believe that there was more evidence that the Obama Justice Department and intelligence agencies had been put in the service of the Clinton campaign than that the Trump campaign had colluded in a Russian espionage operation against the 2016 election. Now, the Trump administration’s most effective advocates on Capitol Hill and in the media have made a plausible circumstantial case that the Obama administration colluded with the Clinton campaign to conduct court-authorized spying on the Trump campaign.

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Merkel’s Not-So-Grand Coalition To duck a new election, she may move further left on policy.

By on December 8th, 2017

Angela Merkel’s leftward drift cost her center-right party seats in September’s German election, and her center-left coalition partners fared even worse for having governed with her. Yet now she proposes to move even further left at the behest of that losing partner so she can form another unpopular coalition with them? Go figure.

Mrs. Merkel has failed to form a government since September’s murky result in which her center-right Christian Democrats (the CDU and Bavarian CSU) lost 65 seats. Her first try at a coalition, with the free-market Free Democrats (FDP) and the urban leftist Greens, fell apart when the FDP refused to bend on energy policy and migration.

Yet Mrs. Merkel is resisting a new election or a minority government, on the theory that either would be a post-War novelty in Germany and would echo a less stable and more frightening time in the country’s history. Instead she’s trying to browbeat the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) into negotiating another grand coalition after months of SPD resistance.

The SPD has participated in such coalitions for eight of the 12 years that Mrs. Merkel has been in office and seemed to have concluded after winning their lowest post-1949 vote share in September that voters want an opposition party that opposes.

On the policy merits a grand coalition is likely to be a bad deal. Some SPD leaders think the party can mitigate the political fallout from cooperation with Mrs. Merkel by striking a harder bargain than it has in the past, and Mrs. Merkel might go along to keep power.

That would mean less tax relief than the €15 billion ($18 billion) cuts to personal income taxes Mrs. Merkel promised before the election, or a further retreat from modest pension reforms that raised the retirement age. The SPD also could pull Mrs. Merkel away from a more realistic approach to Middle Eastern migration.

The bigger consequences of another grand coalition would be political. Mrs. Merkel, having been punished by voters for her milquetoast centrism, would be bowing to the policy wishes of a center-left party that now has even less of a mandate than it did before the election. This will be worse than the instability of a minority government or another election because it signals that voter dissatisfaction doesn’t matter in Berlin. That, and not a second election, is what creates opportunity for political extremists on the left and right.

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A Foreign Policy for ‘Jacksonian America’ Sen. Tom Cotton has a worldview—even a doctrine—that is hawkish and realistic, though tinged with idealism. By Jason Willick

By on December 8th, 2017

At 40, Tom Cotton of Arkansas is the youngest member of the U.S. Senate. He was called a young man in a hurry four years ago when he announced, during his first and only term in the House, that he would challenge the incumbent senator, Mark Pryor. Now there is talk President Trump may nominate him to lead the Central Intelligence Agency as part of a national-security shake-up. Admirers have also suggested he is presidential timber.

I met Mr. Cotton this week in his Capitol Hill office to explore his foreign-policy thinking. What emerged was the outline of a coherent if contentious worldview—one might even call it a doctrine—that begins with a sense that U.S. foreign policy has been adrift for a quarter-century.

“The coalitions of the Cold War rapidly began to break down as soon as the Soviet Union dissolved,” Mr. Cotton says. That first became clear during the debate over the Balkan wars of the Clinton years. “You had some Cold War hawks that were all of a sudden sounding like doves,” Mr. Cotton says, referring to conservatives who’d been staunchly anti-Soviet but were wary of U.S. involvement in what was then Yugoslavia. “You had Cold War doves”—including the liberal humanitarians of the Clinton administration—“that were beginning to sound like Teddy Roosevelt, ready to charge up the hill. That pattern consistently repeated itself” in subsequent years.

When it comes to America’s present challenges—from Iran to North Korea, China to Russia, Syria to Ukraine—Mr. Cotton, a conservative Republican, is squarely on Team Roosevelt. “There is always a military option,” he says. “That is the case everywhere in the world.”

But he believes that the lack of a clear organizing principle for how and when to use that power has knocked America’s global strategy off kilter. It also has created a divide between foreign-policy elites and what Mr. Cotton calls “Jacksonian America”—heartland voters who favor a strong national defense but are skeptical of foreign entanglements and humanitarian interventions.

“Foreign policy, to be durable and to be wise, must command popular support,” Mr. Cotton says. Statesmen and diplomats “might craft what they think is a wise foreign policy—something that Metternich or Bismarck might draw up in his study,” he continues. “But without the support of Jacksonian America, the people who are going to cash the checks that are written by elites in New York and Washington”—that is, to pay the price for intervention—“no foreign policy can ultimately be successful.”

On that score, he thinks the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations all fell short. “Some of the interventions over the last 25 years, I think, have been plainly unwise and had very limited popular support, and they’ve created foreign-policy disasters,” he says. As a prime example, he cites the desultory 2011 air campaign in Libya, whose aftermath is now “destabilizing Europe and creating new terrorist breeding grounds.” President Obama, Mr. Cotton argues, “probably did the wrong thing” in helping to oust Moammar Gadhafi while leaving Bashar Assad alone. If the U.S. had intervened in Syria and not Libya, “we might have had a happier end in both.”CONTINUE AT SITE

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How Shariah Law Handles Family Cases in Greece

By on December 8th, 2017

How Shariah Law Handles Family Cases
Some Muslims in Greece are subject to rules based on the Quran governing marriages and legacies

Marriage
In a form of premarital agreement, the groom stipulates a specific amount of gold to be given to the bride in case of a divorce.
How Shariah Law Handles Family Cases
Some Muslims in Greece are subject to rules based on the Quran governing marriages and legacies

Divorce

The wife gets the gold set under premarital agreement, as well as three months of alimony payments. If the husband can’t fulfill the agreement, the couple has to stay married until he has the means to do so.
Inheritance
A dead person’s estate is distributed to all the legal heirs as set forth in Quran. A wife gets a 1/3 share, which drops to 1/8 if there are no children. Two-thirds of the assets are to be distributed among children at a ratio of 2:1 for sons and daughters. Other provisions apply to brothers, sisters and other relatives of the deceased.
Child custody
In case of a divorce, girls are to live with their mothers until age 10, boys until age 8. Thereafter they move in with their fathers, who are deemed more suited to teaching them how to behave. If the mother is found to be sinful, the mufti can decide that boys should live with the father from an earlier age.

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Shariah Law Puts Greece at Odds with European Court—and With Turkey Athens’s move to mute law’s impact on Muslim minority, spurred by human-rights concerns, draws Turkish president’s ire Nektaria Stamouli

By on December 8th, 2017

KOMOTINI, Greece—In this sliver of land on the border with Turkey, about 100,000 Greek citizens live with a relic of Greece’s historically fraught relations with its neighbor: Shariah law.

In Western Thrace, Shariah law is enforced for Muslim citizens, making Greece the world’s only non-Muslim country that officially applies laws grounded in the Islamic faith.

But that situation could soon be coming to an end, with the Greek government having submitted legislation this week that would make compliance with Shariah optional in the wake of a clash between Muslim rules and Greek laws. Government officials said it would become law before an international court rules that the current arrangement breaches Europe’s human-rights standards.

Meanwhile, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is set on Friday to visit Thrace, where about a third of the 350,000 residents are Muslims who mostly speak Turkish. In a tense exchange with Greece’s president in Athens on Thursday, Mr. Erdogan said the rights of the region’s Turkish minority to uphold their traditions weren’t being properly honored.

His visit and his comments on the sensitive issue come on the heels of Wednesday’s debate in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, on whether to condemn Greece—where about 2% of the population is Muslim—for applying Shariah rules to family law.

The special status for Shariah law in Greece stretches back to the 19th century, when the country regained its independence after more than four centuries under Ottoman rule. Under an agreement set forth in the 1923 Lausanne Treaty, which said Thrace’s Muslim minority should be allowed to live under its customs, Greek legislation enshrined Shariah rules to govern family law for Muslims there.

Today, three muftis appointed by Greek authorities act as judges and enforce Shariah. That arrangement has persisted even after Turkey abolished Shariah in 1924 as part of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s push to modernize Turkey.

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Chronicler of Islamic State ‘killing machine’ goes public By Lori Hinnant and Maggie Michael

By on December 8th, 2017

The historian carried secrets too heavy for one man to bear.

He packed his bag with his most treasured possessions before going to bed: the 1 terabyte hard drive with his evidence against the Islamic State group, an orange notebook half-filled with notes on Ottoman history, and, a keepsake, the first book from Amazon delivered to Mosul.

He passed the night in despair, imagining all the ways he could die, and the moment he would leave his mother and his city.

He had spent nearly his entire life in this home, with his five brothers and five sisters. He woke his mother in her bedroom on the ground floor.

“I am leaving,” he said. “Where?” she asked. “I am leaving,” was all he could say. He couldn’t endanger her by telling her anything more. In truth, since the IS had invaded his city, he’d lived a life about which she was totally unaware.

He felt her eyes on the back of his neck, and headed to the waiting Chevrolet. He didn’t look back.

For nearly two years, he’d wandered the streets of occupied Mosul, chatting with shopkeepers and Islamic State fighters, visiting friends who worked at the hospital, swapping scraps of information. He grew out his hair and his beard and wore the shortened trousers required by IS. He forced himself to witness the beheadings and deaths by stoning, so he could hear the killers call out the names of the condemned and their supposed crimes.

The blogger known as Mosul Eye kept his identity a secret as he documented Islamic State rule.

He wasn’t a spy. He was an undercover historian and blogger . As IS turned the Iraqi city he loved into a fundamentalist bastion, he decided he would show the world how the extremists had distorted its true nature, how they were trying to rewrite the past and forge a brutal Sunni-only future for a city that had once welcomed many faiths.

He knew that if he was caught he too would be killed.

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MY SAY: WHAT A DIFFERENCE A YEAR MAKES

By on December 8th, 2017

December 8, 2016 A federal judge on Wednesday halted Michigan’s recount of its 4.8 million presidential ballots, effectively ending a longshot attempt to challenge President-elect Donald Trump’s victory. U.S. District Judge Mark Goldsmith, who had ordered the state to start the recount to meet a federal deadline, said he had no reason to go against a state court ruling that Green Party candidate Jill Stein had no standing to demand the recount because she had no chance of winning and therefore was not an “aggrieved” candidate. Stein requested recounts in Michigan, where Trump won by just 10,000 votes, as well as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. All three states would have had to flip to Democrat Hillary Clinton to change the election result.

Dec 24, 2016 – The United States on Friday allowed a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlement construction to be adopted, defying … vote, which represented perhaps the final bitter chapter in the years of antagonism between President Barack Obama’s administration and Netanyahu’s government.

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Trump Puts Fact Ahead of Fiction in Israel The only reason recognizing Jerusalem as the Jewish State’s capital is controversial is that the world has been pretending it’s not for decades. By Jonah Goldberg

By on December 8th, 2017

The most exhausting thing about the Middle East — except for the bloodshed, poverty, tyranny, etc. — is that it refuses to conform to how it’s described in the West.

It’s like journalists, diplomats, and politicians want to announce a football game, but the players keep insisting on playing rugby. The field looks similar. The scoring isn’t all that different. It’s just a different game. But don’t tell the gang in the booth. They get furious when you point out that the facts don’t line up with the commentary.

Consider President Trump’s momentous (though for now mostly symbolic) announcement that the United States will recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Before you can debate whether this was a good move, you must acknowledge one glaring fact that the chatterers want to ignore or downplay: It’s true. Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. The Knesset, Israel’s parliament, convenes there. Israelis call it their capital for the same reason they claim two plus two equals four. It’s just true.

What makes the decision controversial is that everyone had agreed to pretend it wasn’t the capital in order to protect “the peace process.”

That’s another term that doesn’t quite correspond with reality. There is no peace process. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president finishing the twelfth year of his four-year term, has refused to meet with the Israelis to discuss anything since early in the Obama administration.

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