www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/oct/15/hillary-clinton-delusional-about-donald-trumps-ele/
Losing it: Hillary Clinton has become completely delusional
Joseph Curl
www.foxnews.com/opinion/doug-schoen-democratic-debate-winner-surprise-biggest-loser
DOUG SCHOEN – Fourth Democratic debate’s big winner, 2 surprise showings and the biggest loser
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/10/corrupt_senators_took_ukraine_ca
Corrupt Senators Took Ukraine Cash By Daniel John Sobieski
https://thefederalist.com/2019/10/14/thousands-of-black-people-are-still-slaves-so-w
Every day across Africa, black men, women, and children are captured, bought, and sold into slavery with the Western world paying scant attention.
Every day across the African continent, black men, women, and children are captured, bought, and sold into slavery with the Western world paying scant attention. Human rights groups have marched and battled against abuses noticeably less cruel and evil than human bondage, yet no major organization has attempted to free today’s black slaves, much less taken meaningful steps to raise awareness about their plight.
For instance, in Mauritania, although slavery has been legally banned five times since 1961, it nevertheless persists with tens of thousands of blacks continuing to be held in bondage. While it is forbidden in the Qur’an for Muslims to enslave fellow Muslims, in Mauritania, racism trumps religious doctrine — as it did in the West — as Arab and Berber Muslims enslave African Muslims.
Twenty-five years ago, Mohamed Athié, a political refugee from Mauritania, and I brokethe story of a modern-day black slave trade in The New York Times. Our nascent American Anti-Slavery Group (AASG) mobilized the public, and piqued media interest. In Sudan, tens of thousands of African women and children from mostly Christian villages were being enslaved during the jihad raids of the Second Sudanese Civil War.
Americans heard stories of abduction, rape, beatings, forced conversions, and genital mutilation. Between 1995 and 2011, Christian Solidarity International, a grassroots human rights group, liberated more than 100,000 of these slaves in European- and American-funded slave buy-backs.
https://worldisraelnews.com/opinion-kissingers-record-on-israel-renders-him-unfit-to-speak-at-jewish-conference/
The Jewish Leadership Conference has invited Henry Kissinger to be featured speaker at its November conference in New York.
That Kissinger was invited to speak at the “Jews And Conservatism 3rd Annual Conference” is especially alarming because we now know that while Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan was fighting against the notorious Zionism-Is-Racism resolution at the United Nations, Kissinger was battling against Moynihan.
The ongoing question of Kissinger’s record on Israel and Jewish affairs should have precluded his selection as speaker, but his behind-the-scenes fight against Moynihan, especially considering the recent and explosive growth of support for BDS, which utilizes the racism charge to legitimize its anti-Israel crusade, should leave no question that the Jewish Leadership Conference has seriously erred.
Kissinger’s war against Moynihan, is detailed in Prof. Gil Troy’s book, “Moynihan’s Moment, America’s Fight Against Zionism as Racism.” A professor of history at McGill University, Troy is a political centrist, a widely-respected commentator on Jewish affairs and scholar. Troy keynoted the American Zionist Movement’s Biennial Assembly in March 2019.
Kissinger’s pressure on Israel not to strike first on the eve of the Yom Kippur War is well known. So are his 10-day stalling of U.S. arms shipments so that Israel would be — as he put it — “a little bloodied,” his cut-off of U.S. weapons to Israel during the “reassessment” in 1975, and his relentless campaign to undermine Soviet Jewry and the Jackson Amendment.
https://www.jns.org/opinion/a-cautionary-cannabis-tale-for-globe-trotting-israelis/
As well-traveled as they are, Israeli millennials are so conditioned by the freedoms they enjoy at home—and so enamored of cultures other than their own—that they frequently miscalculate the consequences of their actions abroad.
After spending six months in jail on the outskirts of Moscow, a young Israeli woman named Naama Issachar was sentenced on Oct. 11 to seven-and-a-half years of imprisonment in Russia.
Both the extreme sentence and trumped-up charges of drug-smuggling not only have traumatized the 26-year-old from Rehovot—and inflicted great anguish on her family and friends—but also has spurred the entire Israeli legal and political system into action.
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin sent a letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin, pleading with him to pardon Issachar. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who recently discussed the matter with Putin in person when the pair met in Sochi in September, made another plea on Tuesday.
Issachar was detained in April while boarding a connecting return flight to Israel from India, where she had been trekking around with a friend for a few months. As she was about to get on the plane, she was stopped by Russian airport security on the grounds that 9.5 grams of cannabis had been found in her suitcase as it was being transferred from the belly of one plane to another.
Issachar’s plight so grips the nation that it now occupies the top news slot, overtaking the massive reportage of the Turkish incursion against the Kurds in northeastern Syria. It also is garnering serious social-media attention and legal-fee crowdfunding.
https://geopoliticalfutures.com/the-origins-of-new-us-turkish-relations/
For several years, there has been a significant shift underway in U.S. strategy toward the Middle East, where Washington has consistently sought to avoid combat. The United States is now compelled to seek accommodation with Turkey, a regional power in its own right, based on terms that are geopolitically necessary for both. Their relationship has been turbulent, and while it may continue to be so for a while, it will decline. Their accommodation has nothing to do with mutual affection but rather with mutual necessity. The Turkish incursion into Syria and the U.S. response are part of this adjustment, one that has global origins and regional consequences.
Similarly, the U.S. decision to step aside as Turkey undertook an incursion in northeastern Syria has a geopolitical and strategic origin. The strategic origin is a clash between elements of the Defense Department and the president. The defense community has been shaped by a war that has been underway since 2001. During what is called the Long War, the U.S. has created an alliance structure of various national and subnational groups. Yet the region is still on uneven footing. The Iranians have extended a sphere of influence westward. Iraq is in chaos. The Yemeni civil war still rages, and the original Syrian war has ended, in a very Middle Eastern fashion, indecisively.
A generation of military and defense thinkers have matured fighting wars in the Middle East. The Long War has been their career. Several generations spent their careers expecting Soviet tanks to surge into the Fulda Gap. Cold Warriors believed a world without the Cold War was unthinkable. The same can be said for those shaped by Middle Eastern wars. For the Cold War generation, the NATO alliance was the foundation of their thinking. So too for the Sandbox generation, those whose careers were spent rotating into Iraq or Afghanistan or some other place, the alliances formed and the enemies fought seemed eternal. The idea that the world had moved on, and that Fulda and NATO were less important, was emotionally inconceivable. Any shift in focus and alliance structure was seen as a betrayal.
To All:
I am deeply sympathetic to Kurdish people and their aspirations. At the same time, US foreign policy has to take account of regional history that has never included us. How we do that remains to be seen. Our efforts in Iraq, Libya and Egypt were not successful – to say the least. S.B.
Kurdish forces, facing a well-armed and aggressive Turkey, appear to have turned to the Syrian government — meaning its sponsors in Iran and Russia — for rescue. It makes sense in historical terms, although it is likely to be bloody in current ones. Historical, in this case, means before the U.S. military presence in the northern part of the country.
The Syrian government is a minority Alawite (heterodox Shiite) one that had maintained control by allying with other minority groups in the country — such as Kurds and Christians — and with the Shiite rulers of Iran in order to keep a boot on the neck of the majority Sunni population. The war criminal Bashar al-Assad was simply following in his war criminal father’s footsteps — in 1982, Hafez al-Assad massacred tens of thousands of Sunnis in the town of Hama, ensuring general quiet until 2011. Young Bashar, being a less efficient criminal, has killed more than half a million people (the U.N. stopped counting in 2016) and creating what the U.N. estimated in 2018 to be more than 13 million displaced people — more than six million internally plus more than three million in Turkey and one million more in Lebanon.
Most of them are Sunni. Deliberately.
Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, declared two goals in the current operation: To remove what he considers a threat from a terrorist organization, the PKK (set this aside for a moment), and to open the way to resettle more than one million Syrian refugees back in Syria. The refugees have become a political and economic liability for Turkey’s government.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15036/erdogan-plan-annihilation-kurds
As the Voice of America itself reported on January 23, Erdogan’s plan was to resettle three million or more refugees from other parts of Syria in this “security zone” extending twenty miles deep into Syria. Twenty miles may not sound much, but – the VOA omitted to mention – almost all the Kurdish towns of northeastern Syria lie within that area. So Erdogan’s intention to annihilate the Kurdish presence in that area and replace it with others has been manifest ever since the beginning of 2019.
A whole series of Trump’s Republican supporters in the Senate expressed outrage over his decision, starting with Lindsey Graham (“Pray for our Kurdish allies who have been shamelessly abandoned by the Trump Administration”) and continuing with Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, who remarked: “As we learned the hard way during the Obama Administration, American interests are best served by American leadership, not by retreat or withdrawal.”
It is now clear that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan intended the annihilation of the Syrian Kurds already two years ago. Moreover, his plans became evident to the US military by the beginning of 2019 and were conveyed to President Trump at that time.
In order to disguise his plans, Erdogan revealed them stage by stage, by making first lesser and then greater demands on the US military, to which Trump agreed — sometimes in the course of telephone conversations with Erdogan. So Erdogan was able to hoodwink the US military up to January 2019 and to hoodwink Trump up to the current invasion: Trump resolutely defied contrary advice from the military (and from everyone else).
At first, Erdogan demanded the removal of Kurdish militias only west of the Euphrates river. This was the proclaimed aim of his so-called Operations Euphrates Shield and Olive Branch (the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Kurds from the Afrin area). With that accomplished, he began demanding a Turkish-controlled “security zone” east of the river, to be 32 kilometers deep. The US responded by agreeing to joint US-Turkish patrols in the area. Erdogan demanded that the Kurdish towns in the area should dismantle the fortifications that they had raised to defend themselves from the Islamic State (ISIS). The Kurds agreed, reassured by the US military that this step would remove any excuse for a Turkish invasion.
Finally, in October 2019, Erdogan asked Trump in a further telephone call to remove US troops from the patrols and Trump agreed, believing that by threatening Turkey on Twitter, he could deter a Turkish invasion. The invasion started forthwith. It has been stalled, maybe, now that the Kurds have invited the army of the Assad regime to deploy throughout northeastern Syria up to the Iraqi frontier. If so, the beneficiaries will include Iran, America’s arch enemy, which can now see its yearned-for highway all the way from Tehran to Quneitra on Israel’s border.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15034/syria-kurds-turkey-russia-iran
The U.S. Congress is looking to push back against Erdogan’s brazen foray into northeastern Syria. For months, there has been a bi-partisan effort on Capitol Hill to convince the Trump administration to implement sanctions on Turkey in the wake of its purchase of the Russian S-400 missile system. The events of this past week will likely only escalate pressure by Congress against the Erdogan regime.
“We defeated ISIS,” a Peshmerga general said, “only to see Iran and its Shia militias become stronger. They are filling the vacuum.”
Islamist-led Turkey has now joined those same Iranian-led forces in filling that vacuum — with the full acquiescence of the United States.
On the Iran-Iraq border a few weeks ago, I found myself just a few hundred meters from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), standard bearers of a regime that has practically copyrighted the phrases, “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.”
At the Kurdish Peshmerga military base stood a series of small, white structures spread out across the mountaintops on the Iranian side of the border.
“IRGC observation posts,” said one of my Kurdish hosts, eying the mountains warily.
The Pershmerga generals interviewed in Iraqi Kurdistan seemed eager to talk about the threat posed by the IRGC and the Iranian regime—not only to the Kurds, Israel and the broader Middle East, but also to the United States.
Tulsi Gabbard is the winner on her biography, substance, delivery and independence in a liberal circular firing squad.
However, the winner is President Donald Trump. As Peter Smith, an Australian journalist puts it:
“Republican presidents are always demonized by the Left but this time, with this president, it is different. The hate is palpable, extreme and unremitting, the depths unfathomable to which his enemies will descend in order to stitch him up with this bogus conspiracy or that one. Yet, with an aplomb not seen outside a superhero comic, he pummels them left and right. “
Peter Smith
https://amgreatness.com/2019/10/15/elite-universities-have-failed-to-produce-elites/
The higher education system composed of “elite” institutions has failed to produce a truly educated elite to serve the nation. They have instead produced bureaucrats, financiers, and the engineers of Silicon Valley. Highly ranked and regarded institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton or “public ivies” like the University of Virginia, University of Michigan, and UC Berkeley have failed to produce men and women who are statesmen, creators, and leaders.
Students, parents, and high school administrators spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars to get themselves and their students into these institutions. Why? Not because of the promise they will receive an education (one cannot call four years almost entirely devoid of facts and disconnected from reality an education) but because it is expected that the time and money spent will launch them towards financial and professional success. This is a tragedy for the nation and a disaster for these institutions. It is something that cries out for reform and action from conservatives.
The nation is in desperate need of a true aristocracy of merit. Throughout history, the elites of the regime, whether Roman, English, or American have shaped the virtues, goals, and laws through their influence and example. The current system is failing to produce them. Instead, it has given us students who work aggressively to be admitted into highly ranked institutions and, once admitted, are rarely kicked out. Immense resources are devoted to assisting these students, and if they are struggling there is a program, tutor, or relaxed deadline to ensure they graduate.
We have created a ruling class where admission into the elite, powerful, and wealthy circles of the nation is secured by one’s college acceptance. It is well known and expected that these students will go on to become doctors, politicians, scientists, businessmen, and bankers. They are not taught to think or to understand how man has answered the perennial questions of existence. Neither are they equipped with a firm grasp of history, literature, or reality. Instead, they are trained to mouth the pieties of our “thought leaders.” Praise of diversity and tolerance is demanded of them. Likewise, they are to refrain from controversial behavior (such as support for the Second Amendment, opposition to homosexuality or abortion). This reflects a failure in understanding what a liberal arts education is and its importance for a free society.
One can only hope that out of the sheep at Harvard and Yale there might arise a statesman. Yet we cannot count on this.
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