Displaying posts published in

January 2019

Throughout the 1930s and ‘40s, support in the US for Germany and Nazi ideology was more extensive than generally known. By Janet Levy

Support for Nazism in a post-World War I-weary America was far more extensive than previously realized. In his new book, Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States, Bradley W. Hart reveals the sizable network of Nazi sympathizers, spies and supporters in the US during the 1930s and early 1940s.

Using newly available archives, Hart, an assistant professor at California State University, Fresno, reveals how key figures in US government, business, academia and the priesthood – along with German Americans – aspired to bring Nazi ideology to the US and keep the country out of World War II. Hart pores through unsealed archives and personal papers to tell the story of Hitler’s domestic advocates. Prominent isolationist groups – the German American Bund, the Friends of the New Germany, the Silver Legion and the America First Committee – politicians, corporations and universities, plus leaders such as industrialist Henry Ford, famed aviator Charles Lindbergh and celebrity priest Father Charles Coughlin, endeavored to advance Nazi ideology and cultivate support for the Third Reich in America. These individuals and entities not only pushed for isolationism and neutrality, they also distributed German propaganda, some with assistance from the German Embassy in Washington and German agents within the US.

Between 1933 and 1935, the Friends of New Germany – with an armed wing that engaged in brawls and painted swastikas on Manhattan synagogues – recruited 5,000 members, established two newspapers, and founded branches in five cities. After US authorities targeted the group’s leader for deportation, the group’s prominence was replaced by the German American Bund, with members largely drawn from recent German immigrants.

Schiff for Brains Misleads Congress By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/19/schiff-for-brains

It’s a good thing President Trump canceled the Democrats’ overseas excursion this weekend because Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) has some work to do here at home. For starters, he needs to take a red pen to his memo that defended the deceptive tactics used by the FBI to obtain a FISA warrant on Trump campaign aide Carter Page days before the 2016 presidential election.

The new chairman of the House Intelligence Committee authored a memo dated January 28, 2018, ironically titled, “Correcting the Record—The Russia Investigation.” But it is Schiff who needs to correct his own record in light of new and damaging information that contradicts several claims he made in that document.

The California congressman might also want to apologize to his predecessor, Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), who Schiff has spent the better part of a year trying to smear and discredit—even suggesting Nunes should be removed as chair of the committee—for releasing his memo that exposed how the FBI manipulated and misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in order to spy on the Trump campaign.

Thanks to reporting by The Hill’s John Solomon and others, we now know that the Justice Department and the FBI were in possession of parts of the dossier far earlier than Schiff suggested in his memo and that the dossier’s author, Christopher Steele, also was in contact with top officials months before Schiff claimed he was. Further, these same officials were warned about Steele’s motivations as well as the connection between the wife of a key Justice Department lawyer, who also was employed by the same opposition research firm that had retained Steele.

The new details also bolster Nunes’s contention that a footnote in the FISA application did not fully and accurately inform the court about the political origins of the dossier, even though the department’s hierarchy was well aware of its partisan provenance at the time.

Palestinians’ Anti-Semitic Stereotyping of Jews by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13572/palestinians-anti-semitic-stereotyping-of-jews

Abbas and the Palestinian leadership are clearly trying to drag Israel into a religious conflict with all Muslims, not only Palestinians. The Temple Mount has become their favorite platform for disseminating blood libels….

If anyone is defiling the sanctity of the holy site, it is Abbas and his representatives in the West Bank.

Were Israel to stop a Palestinian from entering a holy site because of his clothing, the foreign reporters based in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv would have rushed to the scene to interview the man and tell the world that Israel is violating freedom of worship. This is yet another example of how the media gives the Palestinians a pass and allows them to continue their vicious incitement against Israel.

Palestinians are continuing to use the Temple Mount, in Arabic known as the Haram al-Sharif, in Jerusalem, as a platform for incitement against Israel in general and Jews in particular.

This incitement, which began after Jewish tourists were permitted to resume their visits to the holy site in 2014, has since taken various forms. The Jewish visits to the holy site had been suspended for several years during the Second Intifada uprising, which erupted in September 2000.

Since 2014, the Palestinian Authority leadership, including President Mahmoud Abbas, have been waging an unprecedented wave of incitement against Israel and Jews to protest visits to the Temple Mount.

In 2015, Abbas announced that the Palestinians “won’t allow Jews with their filthy feet to defile our Al-Aqsa Mosque.”

General Stanley McChrystal’s Flawed Study of Leadership By Mikhael Smits

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/book-review-leaders-myth-and-reality-stanley-mcchrystal/

In the new Leaders: Myth and Reality, history outshines theory despite the best efforts of McChrystal and his co-authors.

Leadership is the religion of America’s ambitious. Middle managers, hedge-fund executives, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs alike make pilgrimage to conferences and peruse the bestselling breviaries on the subject. This month, high-school seniors who submitted college applications await judgment from admissions committees evaluating their “leadership experience.”

This societal obsession is not new. During the 19th century, sales of Plutarch’s Lives — the classic second-century study of great men — trailed only those of the Bible. And for all its misuse as a concept, leadership remains a desirable skill today, especially in wartime, for reasons Plutarch understood well. Describing the life of the Greek general Eumenes, he wrote: “As soon as the soldiers saw him they saluted him in their Macedonian dialect, and took up their shields, and striking them with their pikes, gave a great shout; inviting the enemy to come on, for now they had a leader.”

Few Americans today have led troops into battle. Fewer still have fought in multiple wars. During his 35-year career, U.S. Army general Stanley McChrystal led multinational forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, earning multiple times three medals — the Defense Distinguished Service Medal (twice), the Defense Superior Service Medal (twice), and the Legion of Merit (thrice) — that most soldiers never once receive. Four decades after he began fighting America’s wars, he remains active in American public life. He runs a leadership-advisory firm, frequents cable talk shows, teaches at Yale, and publishes books. In his latest, Leaders: Myth and Reality, he and coauthors Jason Mangone and Jeff Eggers turn to the study of leadership.

With Mangone and Eggers, themselves veterans (of the Marine Corps and Navy, respectively), McChrystal takes up the study of 13 deceased leaders. Adopting Plutarch’s style, they pair leaders for comparison: Maximilien Robespierre and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi are the Zealots, Martin Luther and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. are the Reformers, and so on.

Threatening Flyers Fail to Derail Ben Shapiro Campus Event By Mairead McArdle

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ben-shapiro-campus-event-goes-on-despite-threats/

Flyers with a threatening message that were distributed around the campus of George Washington University failed to discourage a conservative youth organization from hosting speaker Ben Shapiro on Thursday.

On the morning of the event, students spotted flyers around GW’s campus with a red “X” through a photo of Shapiro. The posters warned the university branch of the Young America’s Foundation, which hosted the lecture, to “get security.”

“Sadly, yet unsurprisingly, liberal authorities at GW dismissed the threat and refused to investigate,” YAF said in a press release. But the event went on as planned, and drew a standing-room-only crowd, according to the group.

“Nice try, leftists—Ben is still coming to campus,” GW’s YAF chapter wrote on Twitter.“We need to be bold when we have speakers and events on campus,” said George Washington University YAF co-president Aimee Triana. “I’ve been told by some of my peers that I’m the first conservative they’ve ever met.”

Special Counsel Labels Bombshell BuzzFeed Report ‘Not Accurate’ in Rare Statement By Jack Crowe

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/special-counsel-labels-buzzfeed-report-inaccurate/

A spokesman for special counsel Robert Mueller took the unusual step Friday of publicly correcting an inaccurate BuzzFeed News report that accused President Trump of suborning perjury.

“BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the Special Counsel’s Office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s Congressional testimony are not accurate,” special counsel spokesman Peter Carr said in a statement to BuzzFeed.

The statement was issued in response to a bombshell report, which cited two law enforcement officials and alleged Trump directed his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress about when exactly plans to construct a Trump Tower in Moscow concluded.

Cohen pleaded guilty in November to lying to Congress after admitting that his discussions with Russian officials regarding the construction of a Moscow Trump Tower continued until June 2016 and did not conclude in January of that year, as he previously testified before lawmakers. Cohen also admittedly lied to Congress about the extent of then-candidate Trump’s involvement in those discussions, many of which involved senior Kremlin officials.

Ruthie Blum Netanyahu’s welcome ‘ambiguity’ breach The battle against Iran is not merely military. It also involves no small amount of psychological warfare.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/netanyahus-welcome-ambiguity-breach/

In a virtually unprecedented move, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged on Sunday that the Israel Defense Forces has been “working with impressive success to block Iran’s military entrenchment in Syria.”

Breaking with Israel’s policy of operational “ambiguity,” Netanyahu not only stated generally that the Israeli military has struck Iranian and Hezbollah targets “hundreds of times” in recent years, but went into uncharacteristic detail about the latest strike. “Just in the last 36 hours, the air force attacked Iranian warehouses with Iranian weapons at the international airport in Damascus,” he said. “The accumulation of recent attacks proves that we are determined more than ever to take action against Iran in Syria, just as we promised.”

Netanyahu made these statements at his weekly cabinet meeting, exactly one week after U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton came to Jerusalem to reassure him that Washington would be “very supportive” of continued Israeli military action in Syria.

Nevertheless, Netanyahu’s so-called “breach” of ambiguity reportedly caused a stir among unnamed members of Israel’s defense establishment, who were horrified that the prime minister of all people would reveal such sensitive information to the enemy. You know, as though the world previously assumed that the attacks on Iranian and Hezbollah bases and weapons convoys had been carried out by, say, Norwegian forces.

Get Over It — Trump’s Probably Not Going Anywhere By Rich Lowry

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/trump-cannot-be-pressured-out-of-white-house/

Why would Trump ever quit?

The walls supposedly are always closing in on Donald Trump. The end is always beginning.

He’s going to quit. He’s going to be impeached and removed. He’s going to decide not to run again. Somehow or other, he’s going to relieve everyone of the responsibility of ever thinking of him again, and especially of the responsibility of defeating him in an election.

This is the perpetual backdrop to media commentary about Trump. It rocketed around the Internet a couple of months ago when Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker said Trump might not serve out his term. Fake Washington Post editions recently distributed in Washington were about Trump quitting. Such scenarios are a constant topic in private conversations.

The allure of all this is obvious. It is the promise of deliverance. After tormenting his enemies for so long, Trump’s going to make it easy for them. He’s just going to go away.

It is true that the odds of Trump somehow not serving out his term are, given his erratic personality and the wild card of the Mueller investigation, higher than those for a normal president serving in normal times. But they are still slim.

Perhaps Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report will send a torpedo into Trump’s bow. It seems more likely that a report will contain damaging and embarrassing revelations that, whatever the initial shock, will be quickly absorbed by the political system and especially Trump’s supporters.

The velocity of the news cycle, driven in part by the sheer volume and pace of Trump controversies, works in his favor.

Women’s March Leader Refuses to Acknowledge Israel’s Right to Exist By Jack Crowe

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/womens-march-leader-refuses-to-acknowledge-israels-right-to-exist/

Embattled Women’s March co-chairwoman Tamika Mallory refused to acknowledge the state of Israel’s right to exist during a recent interview on PBS’s The Firing Line and seemed to suggest that, unlike Palestinians, Israelis were not “native” to the region.

Mallory, who has been forced in recent days to confront questions about her association with notorious anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, acknowledged during the interview that “all people have the right to exist” but would not address the legitimacy of the Israeli state.

“I’m not Jewish, so for me to speak to that is not fair . . . because I’m speaking of the people who we know are being brutally oppressed at this moment,” Mallory told PBS’s Margaret Hoover. “Everyone has a right to exist. . . . I just don’t feel that everyone has a right to exist at the disposal of another group.”

“I believe that all people have the right to exist. And that Palestinians are also suffering with a great crisis. And that there are other Jewish scholars who will sit here and say the same,” she added. “I’m done talking about this, you can move on.”

The Women’s March lost the support of the Democratic National Committee and a host of other prominent liberal groups this week after Mallory defend her past praise for Farrakhan during a Monday appearance on The View.

“I didn’t call him the greatest of all time because of his rhetoric. I called him the greatest of all time because of what he’s done in black communities,” Mallory said Monday when asked about a February social-media post in which she labeled Farrakhan the “GOAT.”

More than half of the roughly 500 partner organizations that supported the nationwide Women’s March demonstration last year have abandoned the organization ahead of this year’s protests, which will take place Saturday in Washington, D.C. and other cities across the country.

The Lackluster Democratic Field Column: From seven dwarfs to twenty Smurfs Share Tweet Email 2020 Dems : Matthew Continetti

https://freebeacon.com/politics/the-lackluster-democratic-field/

Beto O’Rourke is lost. The former Democratic congressman, who unsuccessfully challenged Ted Cruz in last year’s election, has spent the last few weeks in a confused and melancholy state. Something possessed him to share images from a recent dental cleaning, perhaps the grossest introduction of a potential presidential candidate in the nation’s history. He gave an interview to the Washington Post where the only specific plank in his immigration platform was opposition to President Trump’s border wall. In the same interview, he mused that the Constitution may no longer apply to the United States, since we’re an “empire” with troops deployed around the globe and “trading agreements.” Then he published a blog post that read like wannabe Kerouac. “Learned about pump storage, battery technology, the role that production tax credits have had in making New Mexico a leader in wind energy production,” he wrote. O’Rourke himself has no trouble generating hot air.

Beto isn’t merely the slightly flaky, out-of-work husband of a real-estate heiress. He’s running third in polls of the 2020 Democratic presidential field. His emo style and recent missteps exemplify the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of the likely Democratic contenders. Judging from polls, Donald Trump is headed toward a one-term presidency. His best chance for reelection is pulling an opponent he can make as unpopular as he is. The Democrats seem more than willing to help him. In 1988, Democrats fielded the “seven dwarves” against George H.W. Bush. The 2020 cycle is shaping up to include 20 Smurfs. Trump is Gargamel.