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May 2018

Israel Shows America How to Deal with Iran By David French

The Jewish state doesn’t take attacks on its citizens lying down. Why should the U.S.?

One of the great and enduring mysteries of American foreign policy is the ongoing, bipartisan tolerance for Iranian efforts to kill Americans by the hundreds. Iran has been waging an undeclared war against the United States since the Hostage Crisis of 1979–1981. Its hostile acts against the United States are almost too numerous to list, but the lowlights include the Beirut Marine barracks bombing, the Khobar Towers bombing, a successful Quds Force plot to kidnap and kill American soldiers in Iraq, and the hundreds of American deaths and injuries due to Iranian-designed and -supplied explosively formed penetrators, the most deadly form of IED in Iraq.

Yet time and again the American response has been muted at best and downright meek at worst, as in the case of the Obama administration’s dreadful Iran deal, when the world’s most powerful nation went hat-in-hand to the jihadist enemy that was killing its soldiers and actually empowered that enemy’s violent expansionism.

Iran has surged its forces throughout the Middle East. Iranian-backed militias threaten American allies in Iraq. Hezbollah, the Iranian Quds Force, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards have helped preserve the Assad regime and tip the balance in the Syrian civil war. Yemen is a killing field. And now, capitalizing on battlefield gains in Syria, Iran has worked to threaten Israel directly, building a military infrastructure that allows its forces to strike immediately across the border.

America should not fear Iran. For too long, we’ve allowed a paper tiger to kill our citizens. Israel has no such patience. We can learn from its example.

But Israel is not the United States. It has far less patience with threats to the lives of its citizens, and the Trump administration’s support allows it greater freedom of action to meet such threats vigorously.

Witness what happened last night: Iran attacked Israel, and Israel responded with devastating force. Utilizing its military assets close to the Israeli border, Iranian forces launched 20 rockets at Israeli positions in the Golan Heights. The Israelis claimed that the attacks were ineffective; the rockets either were intercepted or fell short of the border. Rather than respond tit-for-tat, the Israelis escalated, launching comprehensive attacks against Iranian positions in Syria. In the words of Israel’s defense minister, Avigdor Lieberman, “If there is rain on our side, there will be a flood on their side.”

The Obama Legacy Deserves To Be Destroyed Smash the rickety legacy of executive abuse!By David Harsanyi

http://thefederalist.com/2018/05/10/obama-legacy-deserves-destroyed/

It’s strange that a president who had such a transformative effect on our national discourse will leave such a negligible policy legacy. But Barack Obama, whose imperial term changed the way Americans interact and in some ways paved the way for the Trump presidency, is now watching his much-celebrated and mythologized two-term legacy be systematically demolished. This, in many ways, tells us that American governance still works.

When Donald Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the Iran deal, he could do so without much difficulty because the agreement hinged on presidential fiat rather than national consensus. But Obama’s appeasement of Iran was only one in a string of unilateral norm-busting projects that deserve to be dismantled.

You’ll remember the panic-stricken coverage we endured when the United States withdrew from the faux international Paris climate agreement last year. It’s true that the deal was oversold as a matter of policy (by both parties for political reasons), but it was symbolic of how the Obama administration concerned itself more with international consensus than domestic compromise. We know this because the president would never have won ratification for a deal remotely similar to the one he entered — nor did he attempt to. Obama, despite the hagiographic framing of his scandal-ridden presidency, had about as much interest in genuine concession as his political adversaries did.

Obama allies at home incessantly pointed to poll numbers as a justification for his executive abuse, mostly because the only polls that really mattered, congressional elections, continued to soundly reject his agenda. The defense rested on the idea that the Republican-led Congress had failed to “do its job” and act on issues Democrats had deemed vital. But Congress, of course, “acted” all the time by checking the president’s ambitions. This was not only well within its purview, but in many ways the reason the electorate handed the GOP Congress in the first place.

Who is paying Michael Avenatti? By Mark Penn,

So exactly who is paying Michael Avenatti? And is he a lawyer, an opposition researcher, a journalist, or a campaign operative?

He wants to make the discussion all about where Michael Cohen, President Trump’s personal attorney, got his money but, to have clean hands, Avenatti needs to come forward with exactly who is financing his operation, who his sources were for detailed banking information, and whether he really is an attorney solely representing Stormy Daniels or just using her as cover to wage a political operation.

From the beginning, this has been fishy. Daniels’s previous lawyer advised her to stick to her agreements. In contrast, Avenatti okayed her violating with impunity her non-disclosure agreement on “60 Minutes” despite a binding arbitration judgment against her. She acknowledged on Twitter that she is not paying for her lawyer. So who is? And did he indemnify her against all multimillion-dollar penalties?

It took a long time and even a court battle to find out that the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid for the Fusion GPS dossier, a fact that was disclosed only after the damage was done, as former British spy and the dossier’s compiler, Christopher Steele, had already created a vast echo chamber as though the material he was peddling had been verified in some way, which of course, it never was. Now Avenatti is being allowed to repeat this same process, mixing truths with half truths and evading accountability.

NBC News Defames Gatestone Institute by Gatestone Institute Must Read *****

Gatestone Institute, far from being “anti-Muslim”, is pro-Muslim. Gatestone does not want to see Muslims deprived of freedom of speech, flogged or stoned to death for supposed adultery. Gatestone is also opposed to “honor” killings, children forced into marriages; homosexuals flogged or killed, and so on. Is one to assume that NBC and its followers do want to see these abuses? Good to know.

Gatestone is, however, openly committed to educating the public about an aspect of Islam, namely Sharia law, which, according to the European Court of Human Rights and others, is incompatible with liberal democracy.

NBC states that Russian trolls tweeted a total of four Gatestone articles — out of more than 200,000 tweets identified by Twitter as being linked to Russian accounts. By way of comparison, the database shows that Russian trolls tweeted seven articles from Heidi Przybyla, the author of the NBC report.

A search of articles on Sputnik, the Russian government-controlled news agency, turns up 1,650 pages of NBC citations. “If getting retweeted 4 times makes you a Russian spy, NBC must be the Kremlin.” — Daniel Greenfield, journalist

The crimes are being played down by German authorities, apparently to avoid fueling anti-immigration sentiments. The director of the Criminal Police Association (Bund Deutscher Kriminalbeamter, BDK), André Schulz, estimates that up to 90% of the sex crimes committed in Germany do not appear in the official statistics.

NBC’s claims are based on truths, half-truths and untruths all woven together and framed in way not only to misrepresent Gatestone’s work, but also to destroy its reputation and that of others.

In what has been described as a desperate attempt “to keep the failing Russiagate conspiracy theory alive,” NBC News has published a false and defamatory report about Gatestone Institute. The article, originally published on April 23, 2018, has since been has been altered online several times.

The original report libels Gatestone Institute as an “anti-Muslim think tank” that is “part of an echo chamber that includes Russian media.” It is the NBC report, however, that seems to be part of an “echo chamber” to damage and delegitimize the current, duly elected, administration — and anyone ever associated with it — while using Gatestone Institute as a tool do that.

NBC’s report begins with an iteration of the Russia-Trump collusion story: that Gatestone’s former chairman, Ambassador John Bolton, now U.S. National Security Advisor, who has described Russia’s attempts to undermine the U.S. election as an act of war, was affiliated with “a nonprofit that has promoted misleading and false anti-Muslim news, some of which was amplified by a Russian troll factory,” implying that he was somehow colluding with Russia to spread anti-Muslim propaganda. NBC initially provides no evidence for this claim, but buried deep inside the article it asserts that, according to its “exclusive database,” Russian trolls tweeted a total of four Gatestone articles — out of more than 200,000 tweets identified by Twitter as being linked to Russian accounts. Bolton, on the contrary, is usually criticized for having hawkish views on Russia.

F.D.R., FREDERICK OSBORNE, EUGENICS

https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/30769/why-did-franklin-roosevelt-promote-nazi-sympathizer-eugenicist-frederick-osborn

Rather curious as to why a man who seemed sympathetic to the Nazi cause was promoted in America at a time when America was both physically and ideologically battling Nazi Germany. While Osborn liked to describe himself as a “positive” eugenicist, his writings and propensity for advocating duplicity seemed to suggest far different story…..

Many civil rights leaders alleged that, even after the revelation of genocide in World War II, eugenic influences remained strong in the United States because of Osborn and others of the Population Society (including John D. Rockefeller, Lewis Strauss, Karl Compton, and Detlev Bronk). He also encouraged and endorsed programs in Nazi Germany that sterilized Jews, Poles, and others deemed “unsuitable” to breed.[5] Although Hitler’s genocidal tactics and acts caused revulsion in the United States, he continued to promote eugenic ideals.[6]

In 1940, Osborn was selected by Franklin Roosevelt to chair the Civilian Advisory Committee on Selective Service. Five months later, he took over as Chair of the Army Committee on Welfare and Recreation, responsible for information and education services for military personnel. In September 1941, he was commissioned as Brigadier General and appointed Chief of the Morale Branch of the War Department (later called the Information and Education Division of Special Services). By the war’s end, he had earned promotion to Major General and had been awarded a bronze star in Paris, the Distinguished Service Medal, and the Selective Service Medal, and he was made Honorary Commander in the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

Soros Buying San Diego DA Race Just another day in the radical transformation of America. Matthew Vadum

Leftist billionaire George Soros is injecting big money into a San Diego district attorney race as part of his larger effort to install extremist prosecutors across America who will refuse to enforce inconvenient laws that liberals and progressives don’t like.

Soros, who turns 88 in August, has been underwriting district attorney races across America in an effort to dismantle the criminal justice system, empty the prisons, and sabotage the enforcement of immigration laws. Soros supports state and local efforts to resist U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and wants to cripple police in order to advance the neo-Marxist abstraction known as social justice that simplistically breaks the world down into race, class, and sex or gender. Radicals claim that American laws and institutions are inherently corrupt and that these systems protect, for example, wealthy, white, native-born, non-disabled males at the expense of everyone else.

Getting people who share Soros’s worldview into public office at every level is key to promoting his ugly vision of how America, which he calls “the main obstacle to a stable and just world order,” should look.

Months ago Soros saturation-bombed his Open Society Foundations philanthropy with an $18 billion donation, likely guaranteeing OSF will remain one of the most important players in left-wing activism for decades to come. According to the New York Times, this was “one of the largest transfers of wealth ever made by a private donor to a single foundation.” (Click here for a brief video primer on Soros narrated by yours truly. Click here for an in-depth Discover The Networks profile of Soros.)

Susan Rice’s Tears For the Disastrous Iran Deal Former Obama national security adviser defends the indefensible. Joseph Klein

Former President Barack Obama’s national security adviser and ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice has penned an op-ed column for the New York Times entitled “Trump’s Most Foolish Decision Yet.” Ms. Rice, who previously counseled the Trump administration to “tolerate” North Korea as a nuclear power, has now outdone herself with her most foolish op-ed column yet. She condemned President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Obama administration’s disastrous nuclear deal with Iran, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA for short. Ms. Rice was echoing the laments of her boss Obama and Obama’s feckless Secretary of State John Kerry.

Susan Rice argued in her op-ed column that the “U.S. is about to violate a nuclear deal that has worked.” She is wrong. It is the Iranian regime, not the United States, that lied its way into the JCPOA and has been in violation since. And the JCPOA has only worked for the Iranian regime, which reaped the benefits of sanctions relief and cash infusions upfront while making temporary loophole-ridden “commitments.” At best, all this fundamentally flawed deal has done is to create a pathway for Iran’s eventual attainment of nuclear weapons and the ballistic missiles capable of delivering them. In about ten years or so, if Ms. Rice is still dispensing advice, she will be counseling the president in office at that time to be prepared to “tolerate” a nuclear-armed Iran. That is what happens when all that a foreign policy consists of is leading from behind, strategic patience and kicking the can down the road.

In the very first paragraph of the JCPOA’s preface, the Iranian regime knowingly misrepresented its intentions, stating it “reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.” Iran repeated this “reaffirmation” in subsection (iii) of the JCPOA’s “Preamble and General Provisions.” Susan Rice most likely had this Iranian promise in mind when she wrote in her op-ed column that Iran “foreswore ever producing a nuclear weapon.” At the very time that Iran made this fraudulent misrepresentation of its intentions, which the Obama administration took as gospel, the regime was hiding its “atomic archive” documents on its nuclear weapons program. In 2017, the regime moved the archive to another secret location.

The Karl Marx Legacy By Herbert London

The bicentennial anniversary of Karl Marx on May 5 came and went. This marginal thinker who became a curious voice of the disenchanted has haunted the globe with puerile economic analysis that a class of people has embraced as its own.

Curiously Marxism is a plagiarized version of early Christian doctrine relying on antipathy to usury; and a belief in historical determinism. The so-called class struggle was a function of widespread discontent evident throughout the European continent during the 1848 “summer of discontent.” Even Marx himself lost confidence in the ideas and their popularity, by noting in Das Kapital, “Je ne suis pas un Marxist.”

Yet these ideas have an appeal that crossed borders and cultures. From China to Cuba the Communist party reigns ripping through the cultures and creating an elite status for party leaders. As Lenin supposedly said you cannot have an omelet without breaking eggs. The problem, of course, is that the eggs are broken, but the omelet remains a figment of the imagination.

For Marx, capitalism is one stage of history to be replaced through historical materialism and the dialectic till it reaches its ultimate state, communism. According to Marx capitalists are compelled to engage in competitive acts, but the productive forces unleased by competitive acts, ultimately undermine the system they were designed to bolster.

Why then would so many worldwide read Marx as the Bible of the Working Class? In my judgment Marx provides simple answers for complex questions. From a psychological point of view Marx has cut the metaphorical chains of control. The bourgeoisie of capitalism must recognize the extent to which working people are exploited. Marxists turn the world on its head – from the exploitation of the worker through the owners of production to the Party leaders who cannot countenance any opposition, including workers themselves.

Are We Waking Up from the Diplomacy Delusion? The real path to a more peaceful world. Bruce Thornton

President Trump this week withdrew the United States from the disastrous nuclear deal with Iran. It’s about time. In the long history of delusional diplomatic agreements, Obama’s pact with the genocidal mullahs to halt their development of nuclear weapons was was one of the worst since Neville Chamberlain handed Czechoslovakia over to Nazi Germany. Like Trump’s abandoning of the feckless Paris Climate Accords, ending the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action may contribute to a needed reevaluation of the West’s antique paradigm of diplomatic engagement as the best way to stop aggression and protect our country’s interests and security.

The Europeans, of course, are unhappy. They’ve been doing a bustling business with Iran ever since Obama delivered $1.7 billion in cash on pallets as the payola to the mullahs for going along with the charade. At home, the evangelical internationalists of both parties and the foreign policy establishment are caterwauling, with grim predictions of doom of the sort we heard about North Korea until Kim, his mind apparently focused by Trump’s tough talk, agreed to meet with the president. They all assert that Trump’s move is counterproductive, that under the watchful eye of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the agreement was working and that Iran had stopped it progress. Not counting ballistic missiles, of course. Now, they warn, Iran is free to start the program back up and obtain a weapon sooner than they would have if the deal remained.

This is what counts as a diplomatic triumph for delusional internationalists: for nearly forty years, a brutal, apocalyptic, fanatical cult has been at declared war on us, threatened our closest ally Israel with genocide, murdered our troops, kidnapped our citizens, fomented terrorism across the world, and declared openly and repeatedly its hatred of us and its intentions to harm our interests––this failing state that brutalizes its own citizens and rampages throughout the Middle East will see its acquisition of nuclear weapons delayed for maybe a decade.

Trump Frees Three American Captives From North Korea After years of failure, strong foreign policy produces results. Lloyd Billingsley

“As everybody is aware,” President Trump tweeted back on May 2 ,“the past administration has long been asking for three hostages to be released from a North Korean labor camp, but to no avail. Stay tuned!” Those who stayed tuned got the news from the president’s tweet Wednesday.

“I am pleased to inform you that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is in the air and on his way back from North Korea with the 3 wonderful gentlemen that everyone is looking so forward to meeting. They seem to be in good health. Also, good meeting with Kim Jong Un. Date & Place set.”

North Korea released Kim Dong-chul, 64, who owned a business in Rason, a special economic zone of North Korea. The Communist regime arrested the businessman in October 2015 and sentenced him to 10 years in prison on charges of espionage and subversion.

Tony Kim, 59, was arrested during a month-long assignment as a guest lecturer at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST). In April, 2017, as he awaited to board a flight, Kim was arrested for “committing criminal acts of hostility” aimed to overthrow North Korea.

Agricultural consultant Kim Hak-song, who also taught at PUST, was detained about the same time. The regime provided no details of the charges, which to all but the willfully blind were bogus.

“We thank God, and all our families and friends who prayed for us and for our return,” the three U.S. citizens said in a statement. “God bless America, the greatest nation in the world.”