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May 2018

Ukraine: Is Russia Planning A New Invasion? by Judith Bergman

Russia’s aggression into Ukraine came in direct violation of its obligations under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum.

“After four years of war, Russia has at least 260,000 troops deployed along the Ukrainian border,” ready to advance. — Oleksandr Turchynov, Chairman of Ukraine’s National Defense and Security Council, April 13, 2018.

The First Deputy Head of the Ukrainian Security Service, Viktor Kononenko, recently reported that Russia might be planning another attempt to destabilize Ukraine in the fall “under the pretext of protecting the Russian-speaking population”.

This April marks the fourth year of the ongoing war in Ukraine between the Ukrainian military and Russian backed separatists in the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics in eastern Ukraine, also known as the Donbas region. Prior to the beginning of the war in eastern Ukraine in April 2014, Russia annexed Crimea.

Russia’s aggression into Ukraine came in direct violation of its obligations under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Under the memorandum, in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons, Russia reaffirmed its “obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine” and promised that none of its weapons would ever be used against Ukraine except in self-defense or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.

Now, the question of further Russian or Russian-backed military operations in Ukraine has surfaced. In March, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko asserted that Russia has been strengthening its military presence on the border of Ukraine. According to Poroshenko:

“For more than one year, we have been repelling Russia’s military aggression on the front line… In his latest report General Zabrodsky reported in detail on the strengthening of the military presence of the Russian Federation along our border and continued stay of Russia’s regular troops in the occupied territories”.

Poroshenko explained that the Russians have, since 2014, deployed and reorganized their forces in a way that will be able to support a rapid invasion both from the north and from east of Ukraine. “Several mechanized divisions are fully prepared for intervention,” he said.

Obama Amnesia and the EPA By Julie Kelly

The Obama Amnesia afflicting our friends on the Left is particularly acute when it comes to the Environmental Protection Agency. It is as if lead-contamination oozed into our water supply; toxic chemicals that were deemed safe for eight years randomly started killing unsuspecting Americans; and algae blooms from agricultural run-off began popping up in the Great Lakes the very moment Donald Trump took the oath of office on January 20, 2017.

Notoriously profligate Democratic lawmakers who are now suffering from Obama Amnesia are suddenly distraught over allegedly inappropriate expenditures at the EPA. The use of tax dollars to boost the salaries of top staffers or to upgrade official vehicles now keeps these newly frugal stewards of public funds awake at night.

Obama Amnesia was on full display last week during two congressional hearings featuring EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. When the former Oklahoma attorney general took the helm of the EPA last year, he inherited a bloated, political, secretive, and unaccountable agency whose previous administrators’ misconduct was regularly overlooked by the media.

Nobody Cared About Gina McCarthy
Despite a number of scandals, there were no calls by theNew York Times editorial board for Obama EPA chief Gina McCarthy to resign, even after her agency caused the Gold King Mine spill (pictured above), an environmental catastrophe for which she refused to take responsibility.

When her agency was caught breaking the law for its illicit use of social media, or as Congress threatened to impeach her for perjury, no major newspaper demanded that McCarthy step down. While Obama’s EPA refused to ban allegedly dangerous chemicals such as methylene chloride or chlorpyrifos for years, the media and Democratic lawmakers refrained from accusing his administrators of poisoning children or killing people. After EPA employees were caught downloading porn, including child pornography, and McCarthy ignored or excused other egregious misconduct on her watch, it was crickets from our newfound EPA watchdogs in the elite media.

Tug of War Over the Iran Deal By Angelo Codevilla

Last week, French President Emmanuel Macron came to Washington to lobby Donald Trump to break his promise to undo Barack Obama’s “Iran deal.” A few days later, Europe’s biggest figure, Germany’s Angela Merkel, came to town for the same purpose. Trump’s tendency to bend to the latest pressure being no secret, it was also no surprise that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a dramatic speech, citing chapter and verse about Iran’s nuclear program, intended to pull Trump back to his campaign promise: His “No. 1 priority” as president would be to “dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran.”

Netanyahu’s speech—cast as it was in terms of promises made and broken regarding military security, as opposed to the commercial interests that Merkel and Macron had brought to bear—seems to have had its intended effect. Trump said that Netanyahu’s details proved that he, Trump, had been “100 percent right” about “the deal,” and that withdrawing from it would “send the right message” to North Korea and others.

Netanyahu’s critics did not challenge his contention that the details came from very recent acquisitions of Israeli intelligence. There is no way of knowing the truth of that. More important, they could not dispute the accuracy of those details. The U.S. government confirmed that Iran’s nuclear program continues. Their main rejoinder is that Iran’s nuclear weapons program—which contradicts official contentions that it does not exist—is an old story. No less true for being old.

I doubt anybody is surprised that “the deal” did not pause or slow Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, never mind stop it. Neither can anyone be surprised that the program kept the same director and personnel, and merely changed names as well as (some) venues. Not a few of the deal’s supporters state now that, as in 2015, the program’s strength “vindicates the need” for it.

In short, Netanyahu’s speech brought us back to square one. What should have been done then? What is to be done now?

Sanctuary Cities Protect Crooked Employers and Human Traffickers Exploitation of the vulnerable is anything but “compassionate.” May 1, 2018 Michael Cutler

We have all heard the bogus claim that “Sanctuary Cities” and “Sanctuary States” protect the “immigrants” from ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents and that the mayors of sanctuary cities are being compassionate.

There is no compassion to be found in exploitation

In reality, politicians who create and support sanctuary policies are every bit as disgusting and exploitative of illegal aliens as are human traffickers and unscrupulous employers who intentionally hire illegal aliens and benefit by sanctuary policies and, indeed those human traffickers and employers of illegal aliens are being provided with “sanctuary” and are being shielded from detection by ICE.

Mayors and governors of “sanctuary” jurisdictions are actually “partners in crime” with human traffickers and exploitive employers.

Before we go further, however, it is imperative to lay waste to that the false claim that mayors of sanctuary cities protect immigrants from immigration law enforcement agents.

Lies about sanctuary policies being motivated by “compassion” creates a hostile environment and antipathy for ICE agents and Border Patrol agents that impedes them from locating and arresting aliens who violate our immigration laws, but also makes it far more difficult for ICE and Border Patrol agents to engage with the public to develop actionable intelligence.

This hostility also endangers their safety (reportedly physical attacks on immigration law enforcement personnel have more than doubled in the past couple of years).

Let’s be clear, Immigrants need no protection from immigration law enforcement authorities.

Israel Exposes Iran’s Nuclear Lies Huge intelligence find proves Trump’s suspicions correct. Joseph Klein

Israel now has proof of what many suspected all along about the disastrous nuclear deal that former President Barack Obama reached with the Iranian regime. “Iran did not come clean on its nuclear program,” Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu charged, claiming that more than 100,000 Iranian documents Israel’s intelligence agents obtained from a secret “atomic archive” in Tehran prove the nuclear deal is “based on lies.” This latest development should make President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the nuclear deal a no-brainer.

Prime Minister Netanyahu announced in a press conference that the trove of secret nuclear weapons files came from a hidden Iranian site where they were moved in 2017. He said the files contain materials, which Israel has shared with the United States, that include “incriminating documents, incriminating charts, incriminating presentations, incriminating blueprints, incriminating photos, incriminating videos and more.” The prime minister added that the United States has confirmed its authenticity, a claim supported by Trump administration officials who have reviewed the secret documents.

“Prime Minister Netanyahu gave a powerful presentation today of compelling new evidence documenting Iran’s determined pursuit of a nuclear weapon,” a senior Trump administration official said, as quoted by the Free Beacon. “It certainly would have been helpful to have this information when the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] was negotiated but the Iranians decided to lock it away in a secret vault for future reference. Only the regime knows what else they’re hiding, but the revelations today don’t give us much confidence in their protestations that they have never had interest in militarizing their nuclear program.”

Caravan arrives, Honduran flags flying, middle fingers flashing By Monica Showalter

After a big buildup, the migrant caravan full of Central America’s finest has finally arrived, and as screengrabs from local television broadcasts show, they gave America the bird.

Seriously. Buried in a News 8 broadcast from San Diego was footage of illegal migrants and their supporters on the U.S. side breaching the U.S. fence on the border, waving a big Honduran flag, victory-style, and whipping out a big middle finger at America.

In times past, arriving immigrants used to kiss the earth. Today, they wave the middle finger at us. Look at these photos, both from News 8 and the CBS national report, rough and blurry, admittedly, showing just what that caravan was about in all its anti-American tenor, which frankly, should have been the lede to the story:

For a publicity stunt as staged as the migrant caravan from Central America, one that one might have expected to have been carefully choreographed to advance their narrative of needy people with sob stories needing asylum, what does it say that all we see are military-aged young men, some with tattoos, illegally entering the U.S. under the Honduran banner and angrily flashing the middle finger in what might be their first moments in America?

Here are more photos showing that this crowd (and its cheering section on the other side) is anything but the women and children in peril being promoted by the group’s organizers. Actually, it’s almost all single military-aged young men in small groups, who seem to be angry at our country and us for not letting them in on demand.

Of Refugees, Borders, and Invaders By Sarah Hoyt

Apparently the “caravan” of Central and Middle [oops! — Ed.] Americans that was headed towards our Southern border, still is headed towards our Southern border.

Sure, Mexico has stopped openly lending support, and the lawyers accompanying the merry band have stopped telling them it’s a shoe in, but they’re still coming.

The truth of the matter is that Mexico might not be lending open support to this attempt to test US borders, but they are in fact lending it their support, by not arresting these illegal aliens on their soil (Mexico has much tougher immigration laws than ours) and not offering them asylum there. Instead, they let what must be a significant and large multitude continue towards the US border.

Why are they doing it? The answer is fairly obvious. From the linked article:

The Central Americans, many traveling as families, on Sunday will test the Trump administration’s tough rhetoric criticizing the caravan when the migrants begin seeking asylum by turning themselves into border inspectors at San Diego’s San Ysidro border crossing, the nation’s busiest.

They’re coming to test the “Trump administration’s tough rhetoric”. In effect, they’re coming to test our borders and our decision to uphold their integrity.

It shouldn’t need to be said, but I’ll say it: I am not against immigration. It would be stupid and weird for me to be against immigration, given that I’m an immigrant myself.

I am not, however, a believer in open borders. The whole open borders project is a weird project of intellectual elites who view themselves as the aristocrats of the world and all cultures similarly blighted and in need of their input. It was never realistic, and it is less realistic than ever for the US.

The US, while a nation, possessed of territory, like all nations, is something quite new in the history of the world, as our founding principles are a radical departure from past countries and an effort to create a citizenship of belief.

Because I am quite devoted to our founding principles and the liberty which they secure us, I don’t believe in immigration simply for economic necessity or to escape this or that. While those are valid motives to immigrate anywhere – including here – you should come here with the intention of becoming an American, or as my friend, Dave Freer, himself an immigrant to Australia, puts it, FIFO: Fit in or F**k off.

This “caravan” coming to “test” our borders is the very antithesis of FIFO, and in fact, if we do not find a way to turn it away, and ship these people back where they came from, we might as well consider our borders non-existent. And you know what you call a country with non-existent borders? Not a country. To study the fate of such a land, read up on the tragedy of the commons.

If we are open land whom anyone may come and settle in, first we need to stop the welfare system because pioneers by definition don’t get welfare. And second, we can kiss our culture and our founding principles goodbye, because, in the face of a massive invasion by another culture, there is no way to make anyone acculturate (a painful process at best) or fit in.

I know that many people on the left and right will emphasize the plight of the people in this caravan as “refugees” and bring up both the long tradition of Americans taking refuges from anywhere, when they were in peril of their lives, and the breach of such a policy, such as the turning away of boats full of European Jews fleeing the holocaust. They’ll say that the turning away of these “refugees” is an act of malice and racism.

In fact, it is neither. There might be many reasons to take in refugees, but one of them is not to accept a caravan composed in other countries and passing through many countries on the way here.

Take one of the members of the caravan: Nefi Hernandez, who planned to seek asylum with his wife and infant daughter [who] was born on the journey through Mexico, worried he could be kept in custody away from his daughter. But his spirits lifted when he learned he might be released with an ankle bracelet.

Hernandez, 24, said a gang in his hometown of San Pedro Sula, Honduras, threatened to kill him and his family if he did not sell drugs.

First of all, I beg leave to not believe his dire peril, or at least that the story is somewhat shaded. Sure. Maybe he sold drugs for this gang, then did something they didn’t like and got in trouble, but I don’t believe drug gangs are in the habit of threatening someone to make them join the trade. There is something that doesn’t hang together there.

But in addition to that, a drug gang, no matter how lawless the country, is not a government. Even if they wanted you to sell drugs in this particular village, in this particular province, they’d be unlikely to follow you to the next province or the next village, let alone the next country. Hernandez comes from Honduras. That means to get to Mexico he had to cross another country, probably Guatemala. And to get to the US he had to cross another country, Mexico.

CONTINUE AT SITE

Iran lied (still does), people died, Obama hides By Ethel C. Fenig

Speaking in English to reach the widest international audience possible, Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu presented Iran’s own documents, videos, blueprints, and files, proving what opponents of the Iran agreement stated three years ago: Iran lied about its nuclear weapons development. Iran is developing nuclear weapons. Iran continues to lie.

You may well know that Iran’s leaders repeatedly deny ever pursuing nuclear weapons. You can listen to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei: “I stress that the Islamic Republic has never been after nuclear weapons.” … Well, tonight, I’m here to tell you one thing: Iran lied. Big time.

After signing the nuclear deal in 2015, Iran intensified its efforts to hide its secret nuclear files. In 2017, Iran moved its nuclear weapons files to a highly secret location in Tehran. …

So this atomic archive clearly shows that Iran planned, at the highest levels, to continue work related to nuclear weapons under different guises and using the same personnel. …

Iran was required by the nuclear deal to come clean to the International Atomic Energy Agency about its nuclear program. This was an explicit condition for implementing the nuclear deal. Iran has to come clean. So in December 2015, the IAEA published its final assessment of what it called the military aspects of Iran’s nuclear program. This is the report. …

Here’s what Iran actually told the IAEA. It said, Iran denied the existence of a coordinated program aimed at the development of a nuclear explosive device, and specifically denied – get this – specifically denied the existence of the Amad plan. The material proves otherwise, that Iran authorized, initiated, and funded Project Amad, a coordinated program aimed at the development of a nuclear explosive device. …

‘Americans and the Holocaust’ Review: What We Could Have Done A nuanced look at America’s efforts to stop the Holocaust—or lack thereof—shows why little about this subject is simple. By Edward Rothstein

Americans and the Holocaust

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Through 2021

What did we know and when did we know it? And what could have been done?

These are the questions posed by a new long-term exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Americans and the Holocaust.” And behind them is a long-simmering indictment. The accusations: that there was a continuous refusal before World War II to accept larger numbers of Jewish refugees; that there was a seeming refusal during the war to accept the scale of the murders; and that there was an outright refusal late in the war to expend any military effort in disrupting the Nazi killing machine.

We see the newsmagazines of the 1930s that reacted to Hitler’s rise; newsreels giving voice to native-grown American fascist wannabes; polls that revealed a resistance to getting involved in the growing conflicts; and excerpts of movies like “Casablanca” and “The Great Dictator” that began to confront the storm. The narrative carries considerable weight, partly because of the effort expended in understanding American action and inaction. It would have carried still more had other impulses not interfered.In treating the history chronologically the exhibition draws our attention to the sentiments of the period. There is, for example, the strong pull of isolationism in the 1930s (a force that President Franklin D. Roosevelt felt compelled to placate) as well as fear of economic collapse and wariness of foreign refugees. These attitudes, we also see, were not the result of ignorance. A crowdsourced sampling of American regional newspapers from the 1930s is offered on a touch-screen map, showing that Nazi mistreatment of Jews was widely reported. Touch-screen access to later reporting gives cogent evidence of how much was known about Nazi atrocities.

The refugee issue gets particular attention in a gallery dominated by graphics that suggest an ever increasing need was met by ever increasing resistance. The Immigration Act of 1924 permitted a maximum of 25,957 visas from Germany annually. But in 1933, only 1,241 were issued and there was a three-year waiting list. In 1939, when Nazi territories included Austria (with a 27,370 quota) and others (2,874), the limits were met but left a 11-year waiting list. In 1939, bills that proposed admitting 20,000 German refugee children never made it through Congress. After late 1941, there was no escape: Germany banned Jewish emigration from its territories.More affecting still are stories accessed through a touch-screen table. In 1939, Flora Hochsinger, living in Nazi-occupied Vienna, wrote to a woman referred to her: Harriet Postman in Waltham, Mass. Hochsinger said she had a Ph.D., worked for 32 years as a mathematics teacher, studied psychology with Alfred Adler, ran a children’s home in Vienna, knew needle-work and belt-making, and sought work. Ms. Postman contacted the White House, the State Department, celebrities, the agency B’nai B’rith and friends, but never found a sponsor. Hochsinger was deported from Vienna in 1942 and executed by a Nazi killing squad.To where do these accounts lead? In the final galleries, we see the duplicity of at least one official at the State Department— Breckinridge Long —intent on keeping out Jewish refugees. We learn about the too-little-known War Refugee Board established by Roosevelt early in 1944 to help address a problem belatedly acknowledged; among its modest achievements was a camp of 982 refugees from 18 countries established in Oswego, N.Y. And why wasn’t say, Auschwitz bombed? An animated map shows the slow Allied progress compared with the killing centers’ speedy work: By D-Day more than 5 million Jews had already been murdered. But even in late 1944, something might have still been done. Two letters in the exhibition capture the vexed nature of the issue: Dohn Pehle, director of the war Refugee Board, urges that bombing take place; Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy responds that the priority must be “the earliest possible victory over Germany.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Gone With the Windrush in Britain The Brits rebel against the results of their immigration policies.

Amber Rudd lost her job as U.K. Home Secretary this weekend amid a widening immigration scandal. Yet there’s every chance Britain’s political class—and voters—will let this crisis go to waste.

Ms. Rudd’s resignation is the latest fallout from the Windrush scandal. For two decades starting in the late 1940s, the U.K. accepted migrants from across the Empire (later, the Commonwealth) to rebuild after World War II. Known as the “Windrush generation” because one of the first ships to bring them was the HMT Empire Windrush, hundreds of thousands and their children worked hard, paid taxes, and assimilated into U.K. society.

A 1971 law granted these migrants permanent U.K. residence and a path to citizenship. But an unknown number either never obtained formal proof of their immigration status because they didn’t realize they needed it, or have lost the relevant paperwork. Now they’re running afoul of a 2012 law that requires employers, landlords and even hospitals to verify the immigration status of prospective tenants, employees or patients. Some face deportation.

That law was a product of Prime Minister Theresa May’s promise, when she was Home Secretary, to create a “hostile environment” for illegal immigrants. David Cameron had pledged in 2010 to reduce annual net migration to below 100,000. Since Britain couldn’t limit arrivals from EU countries, Prime Minister Cameron and Mrs. May had to limit other skilled immigrants. They also concluded that ramping up deportations might help meet their targets.