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August 2018

EU Unable to Neutralize US Sanctions against Iran by Soeren Kern

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12815/iran-sanctions-european-union

“Anyone doing business with Iran will NOT be doing business with the United States.” — US President Donald J. Trump.

“The EU is demanding that its largest corporations risk the entire cake for a few more crumbs.” — Samuel Jackisch, Brussels correspondent for German public broadcaster ARD.

“The fines are in the multibillions these days so it’s just not worth the risk for a small piece of business and maybe pleasing a European government.” — Investment banker quoted by Reuters.

The European Union has announced a new regulation aimed at shielding European companies from the impact of US sanctions on Iran. The measure, which has been greeted with skepticism by the European business media, is unlikely to succeed: it expects European companies to risk their business interests in the US market for interests in the much smaller Iranian market.

The so-called “Blocking Statute” entered into effect on August 7, the same day that the first round of US sanctions on Iran officially snapped back into place. Those sanctions target Iran’s purchases of US dollars — the main currency for international financial transactions and oil purchases — as well as the auto, civil aviation, coal, industrial software and metals sectors. A second, much stronger round of sanctions targeting Iran’s oil exports, takes effect on November 5.

New Anne Frank Play Casts ICE As The Nazis Holocaust victim’s legacy is misappropriated by deranged leftists. Matthew Vadum

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270964/new-anne-frank-play-casts-ice-nazis-matthew-vadum

A new leftist politics-tainted theatrical production of The Diary of Anne Frank in Los Angeles outrageously compares the Trump administration to the German Nazi regime by replacing Nazis hunting for Jews with ICE agents tracking down Latino illegal aliens.

Although the play is set to open Sept. 6 in Los Angeles, the comparison between Anne Frank and illegal aliens in the United States is beyond farfetched.

Illegal aliens enter the U.S. without permission. They are, legally speaking, the authors of their own misfortune. Nonetheless, efforts to apprehend them are not persecutory, and when they are caught, they are not persecuted. They are treated humanely at all times. They are given a hearing and due process. If they are found to be present unlawfully in the country, they are removed from it, not sent to forced labor camps of death camps.

Apart from trivializing the deaths of six million Jews and many others under Adolph Hitler’s Nazi regime, the play treats those who enforce our nation’s immigration laws as monstrous genocidal brutes and absurdly equates the idea of maintaining national borders with violent governmental persecution. It is a theatrical manifestation of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

A Racist Communist Famine Grows in South Africa Leftist land seizures and racist politics will lead to genocide. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270960/racist-communist-famine-grows-south-africa-daniel-greenfield

“Strongman politics are ascendant,” Barack Obama warned in South Africa. He spoke passionately about “the politics of fear and resentment” at the Mandela Lecture. He worried that we were entering a world, “where might makes right and politics is a hostile competition between tribes and races and religions.”

While the media used the remarks to attack Trump’s meeting with Putin, Obama had shared a stage with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa who had come to power promising to seize land from white farmers. Ramaphosa was the latest in a series of ANC strongmen, including his predecessor, an alleged rapist, beginning with the Communist terrorist whose legacy Obama was commemorating.

President Ramaphosa had vowed early on to seize land from white farmers without compensation. “The expropriation of land without compensation is envisaged as one of the measures that we will use to accelerate redistribution of land to black South Africans,” he had declared. And denied that such racist Communist tactics were unconstitutional. Now he’s moving to modify South Africa’s constitution.

Initially, the ANC, which is partnered with the South African Communist Party, had claimed that seizing land would not violate the law. Now it’s actually going to change the South African constitution.

Augusto Zimmermann The Feminist Abuse of Women

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/08/feminist-abuse-women/

The call for easily available divorce to counter the ‘oppression of marriage’ spawned social and economic effects that have fallen disproportionately on the poor and less educated. Fatherless households, to cite but one malady, are far more likely to produce rapists and murderers.

The dilemma of modern feminism is that its undeniable success in shaping contemporary values has, in Joan Price’s words, ‘cut women off from those aspects of life that are distinctly female desires, such as being a wife and raising children’.[1] Our western societies are plagued with a myriad of feminist fads that attack or undermine the more important and permanent things in our lives. This includes the family, which is the basic unit of a happy and prosperous society.

We are losing our first principles because we have allowed these radicals to seize a few half-truths (such as that some women may be abused by some men), and have emphasised them completely out of proportions. It is patently obvious that women have always been able to do most of the things men can do. But what is even far more obvious, though so often ignored, is that there is one thing a woman can do that a man simply cannot do: be a mother. But that seems to be precisely the very thing such feminists complain of the most: that women are mothers. As G.K. Chesterton once put it, ‘they support what is feminist against what is feminine’.

Sadly, the feminists who led the 1960s women’s movement regarded marriage as so burdensome they thought it approached slavery. Such militant ideologues presented the family life as a sort of prison for women, with a working career on the outside as a form of women’s liberation. And yet such anti-family radicals neglected to tell women that most men did not go to work to find self-fulfilment; quite the contrary. Husbands undertook external work not because they lacked more enjoyable ways to occupy their time; but because they sincerely loved and cared about their wives and children. They had to work out of love and to earn a livelihood. They made the sacrifice of taking appalling jobs because they felt obliged to provide for their loved ones in the family unit. They often worked long hours at terrible jobs that they positively hated, or at least barely tolerated for the sake of the income. Indeed, writes Dr Kelley Ross, ‘few men were so fortunate as to be doing something fulfilling or interesting that paid the bills at the same time’.[2]

The Return of James Monroe Latin America’s crisis turns Washington’s Cold War nightmare on its head. By Walter Russell Mead

“The era of the Monroe Doctrine is over,” then-Secretary of State John Kerry told the Organization of American States in 2013. It was, like many foreign-policy declarations of the Obama years, gloriously optimistic and utterly wrong.

President James Monroe’s declaration in 1823 that the U.S. would not permit the establishment of hostile powers in the Western Hemisphere has become the most famous idea in American foreign policy. The so-called Roosevelt Corollary of 1904 adds that if other nations in the Western Hemisphere default on their international obligations or endanger their neighbors through misgovernance, the U.S. has a “police power” to intervene.
A 1912 painting of the birth of the Monroe Doctrine showing, left to right, John Quincy Adams, William Harris Crawford, William Wirt, President James Monroe, John Caldwell Calhoun, Daniel D. Tompkins and John McLean.
A 1912 painting of the birth of the Monroe Doctrine showing, left to right, John Quincy Adams, William Harris Crawford, William Wirt, President James Monroe, John Caldwell Calhoun, Daniel D. Tompkins and John McLean. Photo: Getty Images

Monroe’s original doctrine and Roosevelt’s extension have never been popular in Latin America, but U.S. presidents from Thomas Jefferson to Bill Clinton have taken an activist role in the region when they saw fit.

Latin America policy has set off one firestorm after another in U.S. politics, especially during the Cold War. Notable examples include the Eisenhower-backed coup in Guatemala; the Kennedy administration’s Bay of Pigs fiasco; President Lyndon Johnson’s deployment of troops to the Dominican Republic; the Nixon administration’s opposition to Chile’s Marxist government ahead of the 1973 coup; and President Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal.

Yet after the Cold War it seemed that U.S.-Latin American relations could relax. The fall of the Soviet Union reduced American concerns about Latin American leftism. Radical governments took power in countries like Ecuador, Bolivia and even Venezuela, but this didn’t prompt a vigorous American response.

Meanwhile, some Latin American nations—most notably the regional giants of Mexico and Brazil—seemed to be completing a swift transition to modern democracy and stable growth. When Mr. Kerry proclaimed the death of the Monroe Doctrine in 2013, he did so on the belief that the U.S. not only faced no great-power competition in the region, but that the leading Latin American states had achieved such stability and prosperity as to make “policing” concerns obsolete.

The situation looks less rosy now. The main problem isn’t Washington’s Cold War nightmare of a triumphant Latin left spreading communism in the Western Hemisphere. It’s precisely the opposite: The implosion of Venezuela’s leftist government is driving a regional crisis. As waves of refugees flee the socialist utopia, bad actors ranging from Vladimir Putin to Hezbollah are nosing around in the ruins of the Bolivarian republic. This weekend’s alleged assassination attempt against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is a harbinger of more violence to come.

In better times, Venezuela’s oil wealth allowed it to lavish aid on its neighbors. Now that aid is drying up. Choices are narrowing for countries like Nicaragua, where near-civil-war conditions exist, and Cuba. Farther north in Guatemala, where some of the world’s highest homicide rates coincide with severe food shortages, asylum seekers stream toward the U.S. Washington can’t ignore so much instability so close to home.

Donald and the Di-Spy The point Trump should have made about Sen. Feinstein and the FBI. James Freeman

https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-and-the-di-spy-1533598269

Donald Trump couldn’t resist commenting on the news that Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein was the target of Chinese spying, but he missed the main point.

“I like Dianne Feinstein, I have to tell you, but I don’t like the fact she had a Chinese spy driving her, and she didn’t know it,” Mr. Trump averred at a Saturday rally in Ohio, adding: “Then she says to me: ‘Well, what did you know about this and that [Russia collusion]?’ I mean, give me a break, c’mon folks.”

But the issue here isn’t what Mrs. Feinstein says about Mr. Trump; it’s what the FBI told Mrs. Feinstein but didn’t tell Mr. Trump.

Foreign countries are always trying to steal U.S. secrets, and they sometimes succeed. In this case Mrs. Feinstein tweeted over the weekend that the FBI approached her five years ago with concerns about an “administrative” staffer in her San Francisco office with “no access to sensitive information.” She said she “learned the facts and made sure the employee left my office immediately.”

This is what the FBI should do, and the question Mr. Trump should ask is why the bureau didn’t treat him as a potential President with the same customary courtesy. The FBI claims it had concerns beginning in spring 2016 that low-level Trump campaign staffers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos were colluding with Russians. Yet rather than give the Trump campaign the usual defensive briefing, the FBI launched an unprecedented counterintelligence investigation into a presidential campaign, running informants against it and obtaining surveillance warrants. The country is still enduring the polarizing fallout from that decision through special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe.

Outrageous: Media shrug off Feinstein spy scandal story By Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/08/outrageous_media_shrug_off_feinstein_spy_scandal_story.html

Imagine for a minute if Representative Devin Nunes or Trey Gowdy or Matt Gaetz had employed a Russian spy for two decades. Imagine further that this Republican solon were married to a spouse who had made a fortune investing in Russia. Do you think such news would receive less than wall-to-wall coverage on CNN, MSNBC, or any of the other television news operations?

Yet, with very little media attention, the story has emerged that Senator Dianne Feinstein – of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, with access to the highest-level secrets – employed for two decades a spy who reported to China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS). When the news was first made public, buried paragraphs deep into a Politico story, hardly anyone noticed.

China, for example, is certainly out to steal U.S. technology secrets, noted former intelligence officials, but it also is heavily invested in traditional political intelligence gathering, influence and perception-management operations in California. Former intelligence officials told me that Chinese intelligence once recruited a staff member at a California office of U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, and the source reported back to China about local politics[.] …

According to four former intelligence officials, in the 2000s, a staffer in Senator Dianne Feinstein’s San Francisco field office was reporting back to [China’s Ministry of State Security]. While this person, who was a liaison to the local Chinese community, was fired, charges were never filed against him. (One former official reasoned this was because the staffer was providing political intelligence and not classified information – making prosecution far more difficult.) The suspected informant was “run” by officials based at China’s San Francisco Consulate, said another former intelligence official. The spy’s handler “probably got an award back in China” for his work, noted this former official, dryly.

Most of the media attention that mentioned the scandal did so to disparage President Trump for tweeting about it Friday night…

The Diversity Furies Overrun Another College By Richard Baehr

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/08/the_diversity_furies_overrun_another_college.html

Kenyon College, a small liberal arts college in Ohio, is my alma mater (and that of AT editor Thomas Lifson). Both of us highly valued the educational experience we received there, particularly as political science majors in a department full of outstanding professors who valued teaching over other pursuits. Many of the faculty in the department were trained by Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago and highly skilled at the Socratic method of class discussion.

All colleges have changed since my time as an undergraduate, but Kenyon for many years retained many of its unique charms – a campus acknowledged as one of the most beautiful in the world, a high level of collegiality among pretty much all members of the campus community, an ethos that would not allow disruptions of speakers or threats to outside speakers, and a tolerance of people who might think differently about something. The intangible aspects of those charms seem to have disappeared in the last year.

Recent graduate Adam Rubenstein described for the Weekly Standard the brouhaha created when a liberal drama professor sent out an advance copy of her new play about illegal aliens working on a farm, planned for a premiere on campus. The professor was soon blasted by the “Latinx” community and others in solidarity with this “marginalized” group. One might have thought the professor had committed war crimes, given the ugliness of the response, but after all, how dare a white woman try to write about a minority community? The author withdrew the play, and it was never performed on campus.

With a new campaign underway to raise $300 million for the college, Kenyon needed to prevent the news of what had happened from getting out to alumni in an unfiltered fashion, potentially doing damage to the college’s reputation. The college’s Alumni Bulletin decided to address issues raised by the play in a summer issue with essays by faculty, students, and alumni. I was asked to be one of the writers, and as it turned out, I was the only one of the eight authors who seemed uncomfortable with the new obsession at the college, thoroughly endorsed by the administration in the name of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (or, in reality, identity politics and white privilege). The essays were reviewed and edited by the Alumni Bulletin’s staff. At least mine was significantly edited and shortened. The essays can be read here (mine was the seventh of the eight in the link).

Shooting Up Chicago Thugs terrorize their neighbors in the Windy City.Heather Mac Donald

https://www.city-journal.org/html/chicago-violence-16098.html

An explosion of drive-by shootings erupted on Chicago’s South and West sides this weekend. At least 74 people were shot, and 12 killed, between 3 p.m. on Friday and 6 a.m. on Monday. In one seven-hour stretch, starting around midnight on Saturday, at least 40 people were shot, four fatally, as gunmen targeted a block party, the aftermath of a funeral, and a front porch, reports the Chicago Tribune. Over two and a half hours that morning, 25 people were shot in five multiple-injury shootings, including a 17-year-old who died after being shot in the face. An 11-year-old boy, a 13-year-old boy, and a 14-year-old girl were also hit over the course of the weekend’s bloodbath. Mt. Sinai’s emergency room shut down for several hours due to the overload of bodies; in May, the entire hospital went into lockdown following a virtual riot in its lobby among gangbangers, reported Tribune columnist John Kass.

Meantime, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and Illinois attorney general Lisa Madigan recently celebrated the issuance of a 232-page draft consent decree for the Chicago Police Department, possibly the longest police consent decree ever written. Among numerous other red-tape-generating provisions, it requires the CPD to revise its protocols regarding “transgender, intersex, and gender non-conforming individuals,” to make sure that the CPD policies properly define these terms and that officers address intersex, transgender, and the gender non-conforming with the “names, pronouns and titles of respect appropriate to that individual’s gender.” Last Thursday, a so-called anti-violence march shut down Lake Shore Drive to demand that the CPD hire more black officers and that City Hall spend more on social programs in the black community. Few voices, in other words, are tackling the actual cause of Chicago’s violence: the breakdown of the black family structure and a demoralized police department.

REPORT: Israeli Intelligence Assassinates Syrian Rocket Scientist By Jack Crowe

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/report-israeli-intelligence-assassinates-syrian-rocket-scientist/

The Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, assassinated a top Syrian rocket scientist on Saturday using a car bomb, the New York Times first reported Tuesday.

The scientist, Aziz Asbar, led a confidential unit known as “Sector 4” at the Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Center developing cutting edge missile technology designed to further Syria’s efforts to initiate the long range bombing of Israeli cities.

Asbar was killed along with his driver near the research center, which lies in the town of Masyaf and has long been believed to host chemical weapons development. The center has twice been the target of Israeli air attacks in the last year and Asbar himself had previously avoided two Israeli assassination attempts.

The prominent rocket scientist, who reportedly had his own security detail, regularly met with senior Syrian and Iranian government and military officials, including major general Qassim Suleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds force who has led Tehran’s efforts to prop up Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s brutally repressive government.

Israeli officials have refused to comment on the assassination, as is their policy. Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, spokesmen for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, denied Israeli involvement when confronted by reporters Monday.