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August 2019

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Exclusive: Mike Pompeo Says Good Riddance to the INF Treaty By Rich Lowry

By on August 2nd, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/mike-pompeo-us-withdrawal-inf-treaty/

And hits the Russians for their persistent noncompliance.

Bangkok — It’s official: The U.S. is out of the INF Treaty.

Here at the annual conference of ASEAN, the organization of Southeast Asian countries, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told National Review that the U.S. has triggered its formal withdrawal from the treaty. 

President Trump announced the imminent U.S. exit last October, starting the clock ticking toward the official date six months later, or today.

Signed in 1987, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was a key agreement in the late 1980s Reagan–Gorbachev diplomacy that proved the endgame of the Cold War.

After the Soviets deployed intermediate-range SS-20 missiles that could hit NATO countries from bases in the Soviet Union, the U.S. countered with its own intermediate-range missiles in Europe. President Ronald Reagan proposed the “zero option” to eliminate such U.S. and Soviet systems, and the INF Treaty did just that. 

The Russians have been flagrantly violating the treaty for years, and it doesn’t apply to China, which has massively built up its missile program, including intermediate-range systems. 

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

In Defense of Alan Dershowitz by David Oscar Markus

By on August 2nd, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14642/alan-dershowitz-defense

In fact, former FBI Director Louis Freeh studied the allegations and concluded that “the totality of the evidence refutes the allegations against Professor Dershowitz.”

The intent of The New Yorker seems to be to convince folks that Dershowitz is guilty even though there is not enough evidence to charge him, let alone convict…. This is where famed Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz finds himself: accused of a heinous crime without any real recourse or due process protection. As the accusations pop up on screens across the globe, they are assumed to be true even though Dershowitz has not been charged or convicted.

In fact, he has done the unthinkable and asked — in an op-ed with the Wall Street Journal — for the FBI to investigate him.

So what can be done to deter false allegations in the internet era? For starters, if a false accusation is made and proven, the accuser should be prosecuted and punished. There needs to be real consequences for falsely accusing someone of a crime.

Our criminal justice system is built on the notion that the burden is on the prosecution to prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt before one’s liberty, our most valuable asset, can be taken away. And for good reason. We don’t want innocent people in jail.

We are willing to live with some guilty folks going free so that we don’t have the horror of an innocent person behind bars. Our system, with all of its flaws (including the concept that prosecutors who charge people with baseless claims cannot be charged), has clung to this bedrock principle of presumed innocence.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

THE MENACE OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESS- JOSEPH EPSTEIN

By on August 2nd, 2019

https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/the-menace-of-political-correctness/

olitical correctness started out as a minor project of the international firm known as the Good Intentions Paving Company. What, after all, could be better intended than insisting that denigrating ethnic names (“polak,” “kike,” “spic,” “wop,” and worse) and language debasing women be debarred from public discourse and put out of bounds in civilized private conversation? Nothing, surely. But political correctness soon came to be about much more than social decorum. As with so many projects of the Good Intentions Paving Company, things haven’t worked out quite as planned.

Lashed up as it soon became with the campaign for a misguided equalizing in all American institutions, political correctness took a large leap forward in its ambitions. Criticism of any action or attempt to bring equality soon became, ipso facto, politically incorrect. Affirmative action—the rigging of admissions requirements at the country’s most prestigious universities in favor of what were deemed oppressed minority groups—was an early gambit in the campaign for equal outcomes and a boost, too, for political correctness. Criticizing affirmative action carried with it the penalty of being thought racist.

How could one admit minority students, it was felt, without catering to their special interests? So an ample buffet of courses in African-American, Chicano, and other studies were offered at universities. These courses would, naturally, be taught by matching minority-group faculty. To denigrate these courses, to argue that they were largely victimology, and as such that they lowered the standard once in place for the liberal arts in higher education, would in itself of course be politically incorrect, and most people who knew better were hesitant to step forth and say so.

What became known as the women’s movement soon claimed oppressed status, since it could not claim actual minority status. Homosexuals, male and female, were next on board. Hispanic Americans surely qualified, and so others who could construe a history—or, in the cant phrase of the day, a narrative—of inequality forced upon them. The United States began to seem a country of victims—and victimology, the study of victimhood from the point of view of the victims, became a dominant subject in high schools and especially in the social science and humanities departments of universities.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israeli Jets Appear to Have Struck Iraq for the First Time Since 1981 No nation has yet claimed the July air raids against two bases of a Shiite militia backed by Iran. By Jonathan Spyer

By on August 2nd, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israeli-jets-appear-to-have-struck-iraq-for-the-first-time-since-1981-11564700841

Two airstrikes on Shiite militia targets took place in Iraq last month. No country or organization has taken responsibility, but there are strong reasons to think they were carried out by Israel. If so, these would be the Jewish state’s first air raids on Iraq since the destruction of Saddam Hussein’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981.

The first of the raids, on July 19, targeted a militia base near the town of Amerli in Salah al-Din province, north of Baghdad. The second, three days later, struck Camp Ashraf, a former U.S. military base in Iraq’s Diyala Province. Both the Ashraf and Amerli bases are now controlled by the Badr Organization, a Shiite militia cum political party, in apparent cooperation with Iran.

According to Arabic media reports, the second raid was of considerably larger dimensions than the first. Al-Ain, the Emirati news website that broke the news of the Camp Ashraf action, reported about 40 dead Iranian Revolutionary Guard personnel and Iraqi Shiite militiamen.

The Saudi Sharq al Awsat newspaper last week attributed the attacks to Israel. Officials in Jerusalem have remained silent, but their country is the only serious candidate. The only other main enemies of the Shiite militias in Iraq are Islamic State and the U.S. and its coalition. The former lacks the capacity to mount air raids. The latter are engaged in high-stakes diplomacy intended to force an Iranian climbdown on the nuclear issue while avoiding a further deterioration in the relationship; open conflict is the last thing the U.S. and its allies want right now. That leaves Israel.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Palestinians: What Is Wrong With Building a Hospital? by Bassam Tawil

By on August 2nd, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14638/palestinians-gaza-hospital

One would expect Palestinian leaders to have welcomed a new hospital that would serve the two million residents of the Gaza Strip. These leaders, however, have no problem sacrificing the lives of Palestinian patients on the altar of their hatred of the peace plan.

The Palestinian Authority leadership is right about one thing: one party in this conflict is indeed using the dispute for its own ends – but it is not the Trump administration. The only party that deserves blame is Abbas and his associates. They are rejecting a desperately needed medical facility solely in order to be able to continue to lay the blame for the suffering of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip at the doorstep of Israel.

The Palestinian Authority is probably the only government worldwide that views establishing a modern hospital as a “conspiracy.” It now remains to be seen whether the international community will cave in to Abbas’s campaign and ditch the hospital project, or decide actually to help the Palestinian people, whose leaders know only how to help themselves.

It hardly counts as news that Palestinian Authority leaders are obsessed with US President Donald J. Trump and his administration. Yet, these leaders have actually reached a new depth of obsession: they are now seeking to prevent the establishment of a new hospital for their people in the Gaza Strip.

The new field hospital, consisting of 16 departments, is slated to be built near the Erez border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Israel. The hospital was approved by Israel as part of ceasefire understandings reached during the past few weeks with the Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip under the auspices of the United Nations, Qatar and Egypt.

The 43,000-square foot hospital will rely on the infrastructure, expertise and resources of an international NGO named Friendship and is meant to ensure a significant improvement in medical services to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Bizarrely, while Israel has approved the project, Palestinian Authority officials are trying to foil it. Palestinian Authority Minister of Health Mai Kaila, during a meeting in her West Bank office in Ramallah, reportedly told the UN Deputy Special Coordinator for Middle East Peace Process Jimmy McGoldrick on July 31 that the field hospital was part of a plan to separate the West Bank from the Gaza Strip and that the Palestinian Authority government considers the plan to build a hospital a “part of the Deal of the Century.”

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Social Media’s Transition from Novelty to Malignancy By Andrew I. Fillat and Henry I. Miller

By on August 2nd, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/31/social-medias-transition-from-novelty-to-malignancy/

Once Facebook escaped the cloistered world of mere campus life, it’s all been downhill—unless of course, you are one of those who invested in or went to work for the company early on. The company has endured a year of data breaches; privacy scandals; mismanagement; controversy over whether the company responded responsibly to the posting of a doctored video of Nancy Pelosi; and, finally, the largest fine ever imposed by the Federal Trade Commission, a whopping $5 billion. Co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has delivered seemingly endless public mea culpas and pledges to do better.

How did we get here? What made sense as a communications vehicle for a diverse but circumscribed group of people sharing many life experiences on campus and later as a helpful tool for the larger world, has transformed benign to malignant as fast as rapidly improving technology could take it there.

Students moved off the campus into the “real world,” taking Facebook with them. In those early days of social media, many Facebook competitors failed because they had developed neither the necessary campus constituency nor the needed degree of habituation among users, prior to graduation. In any case, as the graduates’ life experiences diverged, the nature of the communications was able to evolve along with them on Facebook.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

New Evidence Unveils Disturbing Facts About Hillary’s Email Scandal FBI is implicated in destroying evidence to benefit Clinton. Deborah Weiss

By on August 2nd, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274484/new-evidence-unveils-disturbing-facts-about-deborah-weiss

In breaking news, the American Center for Law and Justice or ACLJ (Jay Sekulow’s organization, not related to his role as the President’s attorney), has obtained actual copies of the immunity agreements pertaining to Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson in the Hillary email scandal. This was a stunning litigation win, hard-fought after years of litigation by the ACLJ attorneys, who were unable to extract the documents through the normal FOIA processes, due to a lack of cooperation by the government.  

In reviewing what the agreements uncovered, keep in mind that Cheryl Mills was Secretary Clinton’s Chief of Staff at the State Department and then bizarrely, she subsequently served as Clinton’s attorney, representing her in the email scandal.  Heather Samuelson worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign, and then became a Senior Advisor to her at the State Department, as well as the White House liaison. Somehow, she also became one of Clinton’s personal attorneys during the email scandal.

The immunity agreements issued by the government, were crafted so that the agencies could extract information from the parties, despite the fact that this is not necessary because DOJ has the power to require that the information be turned over.  Clinton kept classified emails on a private server in violation of Federal law, and the immunity agreements reveal that both Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson were actively involved in the cover-up of these emails as well as in the destruction of evidence. According to Jordon Sekulow, Executive Director of the ACLJ, it is extremely unusual for someone involved in a criminal cover up, who needs an immunity deal to ensure the evasion of jail time, later becomes the attorney representing the other potential criminal or co-conspirator.

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

House Democrats’ Missile Mess They want to block weapons the U.S. needs to deter China.

By on August 2nd, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/house-democrats-missile-mess-11564701864

The 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty officially passes into the annals of Cold War history on Friday, dumped by the Trump Administration after more than a decade of Russian violations. Congressional arms-controllers can’t revive the treaty, but they are aiming to deny the U.S. any defense advantages from its demise.

The INF treaty name is misleading, because it bans all ground-based missiles, nuclear or conventional, with a range between 500 and 5,500 kilometers. As a result of the treaty, the U.S. has the ability to launch mid-range missiles (like the Tomahawks used to strike Syria in 2017 and 2018) from the air and sea, but not from ground bases.

With the treaty defunct, the Pentagon now seeks to develop and test such weapons as part of its strategy to maintain an advantage over Russia and China. Yet House Democrats are trying to block this. A National Defense Authorization Act amendment, passed on a party-line vote, essentially forces the U.S. to continue to abide unilaterally by the INF. An appropriations bill eliminates funding even for research and development of mid-range weapons, though that was not prohibited under the treaty.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

The Left vs. the Crazy Left If you’re looking for a moderate president, you won’t find one in the Democratic field. By Kimberley A. Strassel

By on August 2nd, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-left-vs-the-crazy-left-11564701434

The nation has struggled to categorize the Democratic presidential candidates. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is some days a “populist,” others a “liberal.” Sen. Bernie Sanders is at pains to define “democratic socialism” as apart from plain, old “socialism.” The media describes Sen. Amy Klobuchar as a “centrist” or “moderate,” even as she insists on “proven progressive.”

There’s an easier taxonomy: Lefties vs. Crazy Lefties. That’s the choice Democrats have in the primaries, and the two pools from which Donald Trump’s opponent will come.

This summer’s debates have been primarily useful for highlighting how radically the Democratic Party has shifted. Barack Obama can fairly be described as the most liberal president in American history—from his command-and-control regulatory regime to the Affordable Care Act, from his tax hikes to his activist judges. Yet the entire Democratic primary field is now rebuking his agenda as small and weak, if not proto-Trumpian.

Mr. Obama avoided campaigning in 2008 on a public option, and the White House willingly jettisoned that demand in the final ObamaCare negotiations. He knew that at best it would muster 43 Senate votes, while senators like Joe Lieberman had vowed to filibuster a government “takeover” of health insurance that would balloon the national debt. House Blue Dogs similarly rejected it. Yet all 20 of the candidates on this week’s debate stage backed Medicare for any American, if not all of them.

Mr. Obama touted natural gas as a bridge fuel to a future lower-carbon environment. He kept his economy afloat by winking at the state-led fracking revolution, and since retirement he’s even (misleadingly) bragged that he was responsible for record new U.S. oil production.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

President Trump Shatters Left-Wing Myths By Rabbi Aryeh Spero

By on August 2nd, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/08/president_trump_shatters_leftwing_myths.html

President Trump is boldly providing much-needed relief to the American people. He is untying us from the bands of political correctness that have, in un-American fashion, forced Americans to accept liberal myths and farces.  He is telling it like it is, showing Americans that their freedom of speech cannot be muzzled by liberal censors or taken away by the left-wing speech and thought police.

It’s about time someone, as the President did, stopped all this baloney and labeled Al Sharpton the con-man he has been for decades. In the name of being a “civil rights leader”, Sharpton has gotten away with not paying millions of dollars in owed taxes; fomented rioting against Brooklyn’s religious Jews; led — with self-proclaimed racist Sonny Carson — a boycott of a Korean grocery store, where protesters called the owners “yellow monkeys”; held anti-Semitic, racially-charged rallies that led to the Freddy’s Department Store massacre; and knowingly and purposely destroyed the lives of two white police officers in the Tawana Brawley hoax.  Sharpton has been shoved down our throats as “reverend” while threatening “no justice, no peace.”

Finally, someone has demonstrated a compelling inner sense of truth to portray Sharpton as what he is: a creator of hoaxes and shakedowns, and a serial inciter of violence and racial strife for his own power and self-enrichment.

President Trump is broadening the scope of the Presidency by taking on issues no previous leader was willing to do. First he alerted us to a media no longer impartial but zealously preoccupied by manufacturing fake news in behalf of a radical left-wing agenda. He then exposed us to the dangerous reality of a vast government bureaucracy, akin to a shadow government, operating in behalf of its own interests and concerns and not those of the American people. The Deep State, confidently and without checks and balances, ignores representatives elected by the American people while pursuing a globalist and self-serving agenda.

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