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Ruth King

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

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.

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

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.”

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

President Trump Shatters Left-Wing Myths By Rabbi Aryeh Spero

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.

Right From Wrong: Sex, lies and videotape Ruthie Blum

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Right-From-Wrong-Sex-lies-and-videotape-597452

Nothing better illustrates the perils of prematurely debating a criminal case in the context of social politics than the recent arrest of a bunch of Israeli teenagers in Cyprus.

On Monday evening, after nearly two weeks in police custody, the remaining seven suspects in what was originally believed to be the gang rape of a 19-year-old British tourist in Ayia Napa landed at Ben-Gurion Airport. The other five were released a few days earlier.

Upon their arrival in Israel, the boys – aged 15 to 18 – were greeted by tearful family members and cheering friends.

The kids’ parents, who had believed in their sons’ innocence all along, felt vindicated. For days on end, the Israeli media and punditry had been portraying the teenagers as predators who had preyed upon a young woman whose only mistake was to trust in the three with whom she had consensual physical relations.

Before all the facts of the case were known or revealed, the accused were convicted in the court of public opinion. According to initial reports, the victim recounted meeting two Israelis – one who spoke no English, and the other who served as a translator for their flirtation – and admitted to going to bed with both of them, as a well as with a third friend of theirs. She claimed that things went awry when she set up a date with them one night, and they showed up with a slew of additional guys in tow. It was then, she said, that they all took turns raping her.

HER STORY sounded plausible for a number of reasons.

First of all, she acknowledged having had consensual sex with at least three people whom she barely knew, giving credibility to her claims of subsequent violent gang rape.

Confessions of a Recovering Neoconservative By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/31/confessions-of-a-recovering-neoconservative/

The realignment of the political Right has prompted a public confessional of sorts, a raw acknowledgement that millions of us were led astray by Republiican leaders we trusted, we voted for, and we defended during times of war. We only have ourselves to blame, of course, because we did it with our eyes wide open. But the Trump era is forcing many Republicans to reexamine what we once believed and reassess what actually is true.

In a fiery speech earlier this month at the National Conservatism conference in Washington, D.C., Fox News host Tucker Carlson talked about purging his “mental attic” to dust off the ideas that he had accepted as legitimate over past few decades.

“The Trump election was so shocking . . . that it did cause some significant percentage of people to say ‘wait a second, if that can happen, what else is true?’” Carlson said. “Just look around . . . who are the good guys and who are the bad guys? A lot of the people we’ve been told are good guys are not. Some of them are the worst guys. I’ll let you figure out who.”

Carlson didn’t need to name names because the conservatives in the room, I assume, envisioned pretty much the same collection of bad guys—and they aren’t on the Left.

For the most part, the list would include Republican villains such as Bill Kristol, Carlson’s former boss at the now-defunct Weekly Standard, and a number of other conservative commentators still clinging to the mantras that afford them their sinecures; Bush family members and certain administration officials; former Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney and the late John McCain; former Republican congressional leaders such as ex-Speaker of the House Paul Ryan; and an assortment of well-heeled donors.

Robert Mueller: The Little Man Behind the Curtain Bill Martin

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/08/robert-mueller-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain/

Robert Mueller, decorated Vietnam veteran, distinguished lawyer, two-term director of the FBI and, more recently,  Russiagate special counsel, recently testified for some seven hours before two select committees on Capitol Hill. What the world witnessed was sad, pitiful and largely farcical as the vague and mentally adrift champion of those who long hoped he would bring down an elected President saw their ambitions not merely dashed but pulverised. For Mueller it was bad; for Democrats it was much worse.

As soon as Donald Trump announced his presidential aspirations and entered the Republican primaries an almighty deluge of derision and ridicule was unleashed from all quarters. He was known primarily as the brash, domineering central character in the TV program The Apprentice, and less so as a very wealthy, successful property developer. Neither persona would serve to endear him to the masses, the elites of the punditocracy opined,  speaking mostly for themselves as it turned out. All forms of the media were especially savage. They branded him a vulgar buffoon and much worse. Comedians mockingly encouraged him to ‘run, please run, and let us enjoy your humiliation of failing’. By the time he looked like winning the nomination a nascent fear was rippling through the Washington swamp the candidate had pledged to drain. True, Hillary Clinton’s ascension to the Oval Office was accepted by the Left and like-minded as an inevitability, yet the signs were ominous. ‘Regular, everyday Americans’, the trans-Pacific counterparts of John Howard’s battlers, liked much of what he was saying and did not mind the way he was saying it. After he was confirmed as the Republican candidate for the presidency, the camp of Trump’s followers grew rapidly and Clinton’s supporters became concerned that the “unimaginable” might just possibly come to pass. In the top layers of this cabal a  strategy to prevent it or, failing that, to destroy it took root and flourished. The plan’s objective was no less than a fully fledged, bloodless political coup to unseat a duly elected president. Much of the conspiracy is well known already, including the identities of the plotters in the top tiers of the FBI, the CIA, other security organisations, in the Justice and State departments, among prominent politicians of both major parties.

What we do know — and Mueller did not at his marathon testimonies — is that the Clinton campaign paid a British ex-spy to gather (manufacture?) fallacious information from dubious Russian sources about Trump having engaged in salacious conduct involving prostitutes while staying years earlier in a Moscow hotel. This was disseminated throughout Washington and passed to tame reporters, the specific intention being to drive Trump from the office should he be elected. This plot was “the insurance” and involved American and British individuals and, though he laughs it off as a joke, the curious involvement of Alexander Downer.