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Ruth King

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U.S. Intel Community Kept Exculpatory Evidence About Gen. Flynn’s Trip to Moscow Secret for Years By Debra Heine

By on January 4th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/report-u-s-intel-community-kept-exculpatory-evidence-about-gen-flynns-trip-to-moscow-secret-for-years/

Remember the huge fuss the never-Trump media made out of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn’s infamous December 2015 trip to Moscow? In articles written in 2016, 2017, and 2018 they suggested that the retired Army general was a “compromised” Russian stooge and that the trip bordered on treason. This has been a cornerstone of the Russia collusion narrative involving Flynn for several years now.

When Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley learned the truth in May 2017, he requested that the information be made public in fairness to Flynn, because it completely exonerated him of any wrongdoing in the affair.

“It appears the public release of this information would not pose any ongoing risk to national security. Moreover, the declassification would be in the public interest, and is in the interest of fairness to Lt. Gen. Flynn,” Grassley wrote in August 2017.

A year and a half later, the truth finally has come out: “Flynn’s attendance at the RT event was disclosed in advance to the intelligence community, he took proactive steps to ensure he could not be compromised by attendees and he then came back to the United States and reported intelligence designed to benefit America,” The Hill’s John Solomon reported on Wednesday.

Incredibly, the U.S. intelligence community has kept this exculpatory information secret for nearly two years, allowing the retired Army general’s name to be dragged through the mud.

According to Solomon’s sources:

Before Flynn made his infamous December 2015 trip to Moscow — as a retired general and then-adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign — he alerted his former employer, the DIA.

He then attended a “defensive” or “protective” briefing before he ever sat alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Russia Today (RT) dinner, or before he talked with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

The briefing educated and sensitized Flynn to possible efforts by his Russian host to compromise the former high-ranking defense official and prepared him for conversations in which he could potentially extract intelligence for U.S. agencies such as the DIA.
When Flynn returned from Moscow, he spent time briefing intelligence officials on what he learned during the Moscow contacts. Between two and nine intelligence officials attended the various meetings with Flynn about the RT event, and the information was moderately useful, about what one would expect from a public event, according to my sources. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Syrian Christians Plead for No-Fly Zone to Protect ‘Only Hope for Our Long-Term Survival’ By Bridget Johnson

By on January 4th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/syrian-christians-plead-for-no-fly-zone-to-protect-only-hope-for-our-long-term-survival/

A coalition of Syrian Christian political and military groups issued an appeal today to Christians around the world to back their call for a quickly established no-fly zone over northeast Syria to protect the region’s religious minorities from Turkish invasion.

The plea was signed by the Syriac Military Council, the Syriac National Council of Syria, European Syriac Union, American Syriac Union, and Syriac Union Party of Syria, and comes on the heels of the SMC — the Christian unit within the multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian Syrian Democratic Forces that has cleared regional territory of ISIS — warning that Christians in Syria are “at risk of extinction” at the hands of Turks after U.S. withdrawal.

The Chaldean-Syriac-Assyrian Christian coalition of groups represented in today’s request said they “urgently need protection from Turkey’s threats to invade and ‘cleanse’ our territory from Christianity, religious freedom, and democracy.”

“U.S. President Donald Trump’s sudden decision to withdraw U.S. troops leaves us powerless and open to be destroyed by either Turkey or other regimes scrambling to see our demise in the vacuum this will create,” they said. “Turkey is threatening us daily in the local media to invade and kill us. They are calling us ‘infidels.’ When Turkey was allowed to enter Afrin by the West, Turkey committed war crimes and ethnic cleansing against the religious minorities. All the Christians had to flee the area as Turkey’s jihadi troops conducted door to door searches to hunt the Christians down to kill them and destroyed all of Afrin’s churches. They had to flee with nothing, and take refuge in the area that Turkey is now threatening to invade: north and east Syria.”

The Christian coalition added that “when President Trump gave Turkey’s Recep Erdogan the permission to replace the U.S. forces this means Turkey will crush the multi-religious democracy that is happening in north and east Syria.”

“It alone is an island of religious freedom, decentralized and representative government, and is the only hope for our long-term survival as Middle Eastern Christians.”

The SDF alliance of Kurdish, Arab, Assyrian/Syriac Christians, and other ethnic minorities was founded in October 2015 and is about 70,000 strong. Equality is a core value of the SDF: the successful battle to rout ISIS from their declared capital, Raqqa, was commanded by Rojda Felat, a Kurdish woman, and the SDF spokesman, Kino Gabriel, is a Christian with the Syriac Military Council.

The Syriac Christian alliance stressed that they “know what it means to live under the Ottoman Empire’s Caliphate,” with a “collective memory of the Ottoman’s ‘special treatment’ of Christians” including laws that made them second-class citizens, the jizya “extortion taxes,” oppression, “persecution, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.” CONTINUE AT SITE

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The Nation of Islam and the House Democratic leadership members have a history with Louis Farrakhan. By Jeryl Bier

By on January 4th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-nation-of-islam-and-the-house-11546559607

Donald Trump has repeatedly faced calls to disavow anti-Semites, but Democrats have their own anti-Semitism problem. The new House majority leadership includes several lawmakers with ties to the nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan:

• James Clyburn of South Carolina. Mr. Clyburn, first elected in 1992, will hold the No. 3 post, majority whip, as he did in 2007-11. Mr. Clyburn is also a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, which in September 1993 entered what then-CBC Chairman Kweisi Mfumecalled a “sacred covenant” with the Nation of Islam. The pact was ostensibly dissolved in February 1994, after it emerged that Farrakhan aide Khalid Abdul Muhammad had given a speech in which he called Jews the “bloodsuckers of the black nation.” But in July 2000, Mr. Clyburn, then CBC chairman, formed a partnership with Mr. Farrakhan’s Million Family March.

In 2005 Mr. Clyburn became chairman of the Democratic Caucus. The same year, photojournalist Askia Muhammad reported that “practically all 43 CBC members” (including then-Sen. Barack Obama) met Mr. Farrakhan in preparation for the 10th anniversary of the Million Man March. In 2011 Mr. Clyburn again joined Mr. Farrakhan, for a town-hall gathering in Pittsburgh titled “The Disappearing Black Community.” Mr. Clyburn told the Final Call, the Nation of Islam’s newspaper, that he was “not bothered in the least bit” by criticism of the appearance.

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WaPo Reporter: Lie-A-Watha’s 2020 Run Has Registered A Whopping Zero On The Enthusiasm Scale Matt Vespa

By on January 3rd, 2019

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2019/01/03/wapo-reporter-lieawathas-2020-run-has-registered-a-whopping-zero-on-the-enthusiasm-scale-n2538368

So, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has announced she’s running for president. She’s a hard-core liberal. One of the faces of the progressive left in the Democratic Party. Maybe a tinge (using it very loosely here) more moderate than Bernie Sanders, but still pretty far left. So, there should be hyper-enthusiasm, right? She’s a Democrat, a liberal, and a woman, the three things that are defining the party right now. The future is female supporters must be flocking to her banner, right? Nope. The Warren wave is registering a whopping zero on the enthusiasm scale, and voters in Massachusetts who know her don’t like her compared to the other Democrats running. On CNN yesterday, host Alisyn Camerota asked Washington Postreporter if the Ready for Warren cohorts are jacked up—and no one is about Warren 2020. Umm…ouch (via NTK Network):

Camerota asked Linskey, who previously reported for Warren’s hometown Boston Globe, if she sensed the same hunger for Warren to run for president today as there was in 2016.

“I think that has changed a little bit. I think there is some truth to that,” Linskey said. “You look back to 2015 and the run-up to the 2016 election, and there was this organization, ‘Ready for Warren,’ really pushing her to run.”

Linskey noted that during many of Warren’s speeches in 2105, she was often interrupted by people urging her to run for president.

“That sort of enthusiasm…we haven’t detected it much yet,” Linskey said about Warren’s 2020 run.

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Benjamin Netanyahu in Brazil

By on January 3rd, 2019

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/

The great communicator with the deep sense of history at his very best, paying tribute in Brazil to Christian evangelicals, and reiterating Israel’s close friendship with Christianity in a world where so many Christians are imperilled.

“My wife Sara and I are delighted to be with you in Brazil.

We have no better friends in the world than the Evangelical community, and the Evangelical community has no better friend in the world than the State of Israel.

If you are a Christian in the Middle East, there’s only one place where you are safe. There’s only one place where the Christian community is growing, thriving, prospering. That’s in the State of Israel. Because everywhere else, if you’re a Christian, you have to be very careful, or you have to leave. Not in Israel. You are pour brothers and our sisters and we protect the rights of Christians as we protect the rights of all religions.

But this isn’t only a matter of justice, and it’s not only a matter of value. It’s a matter of the deepest sympathy in recognizing our common traditions, our common heritage.Israel and Jerusalem are one. And Jerusalem, from the time of King David, 300 years before King Hezekiah, was the capital of our people, has remained the capital of our people, and will remain the united, eternal capital of the Jewish people for all time. You don’t need this reminder because you know our history, and you know our common roots.

Our histories are intertwined, our faith is intertwined, our values are intertwined. And so every time that we dig with a shovel in our land, we find ancient synagogues or ancient churches. And sometimes we don’t even have to dig.

And when you come to Israel today, you see a country that welcomes you as brothers and sisters. You see a country that values religious freedom. You see a country that is pride of our past and carries our values to the future. You see a country where the ideal was that every person is born in the Image of God. This is the original idea of equality, in the ancient world, thousands of years ago.

These are the values that produced our modern civilization. And they’re anchored in the faiths that we hold dear. These are also the faiths, the values that create the future. Israel is seizing the future. We now have an opportunity in Brazil to seize it together. President Bolsonaro says, ‘We are brothers,’ he says. We are brothers, and we are going to seize the future together.

You know that President Bolsonaro’s first name in Hebrew is Yair, which is also the name of our son. But Yair means something in Hebrew: He who brings light. And I think that we have now an opportunity together to bring a lot of light to the people of Brazil and the people of Israel. This is an alliance of brothers.

So I want to invite all of you next year in Jerusalem. I want to invite all of you to come to Israel, next year, it’s only two days away. We shall welcome you with all the love and warmth that we reserve for family. You are part of our family and we are part of yours.

I look forward to seeing you in Jerusalem, my brothers and my sisters.”

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NYT Puff Piece On Democrat Ilhan Omar Again Whitewashes Her Apparent Anti-Semitism Ilhan Omar has tweeted, ‘Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.’ The New York Times didn’t see fit to discuss that in its profile. Warren Henry

By on January 3rd, 2019

http://thefederalist.com/2019/01/03/nyt-puff-piece-democrat-ilhan-omar-whitewashes-apparent-anti-semitism/

The bad news is that The New York Times decided to close 2018 by whitewashing the anti-Semitic record of incoming House Democrat Ilhan Omar. The good news is that the Times and Omar apparently still believe the whitewashing is necessary.

“Glorified and Vilified, Representative-Elect Ilhan Omar Tells Critics: ‘Just Deal’” is a fairly representative headline for the story by Sheryl Gay Stolberg, a puff piece of the sort one might find at Teen Vogue instead of the Gray Lady.

In this telling, soon-to-be representative Omar is the plucky immigrant who transcends bullies, the sexism of Somali culture, and the intolerance of an unnamed Christian pastor to become one of the first two Muslim women in Congress. Indeed, a professor quoted in the article calls Omar “the epitome of the so-called American dream, but for much of white Christian America, she’s an American nightmare.”

The problem with this sort of propaganda is what was left unreported. According to the story, “Her support for the boycott, divest and sanctions movement to pressure Israel to improve treatment of Palestinians is making Jewish leaders nervous.”

This formulation is laughably incomplete, beginning with the failure to quote any Jewish leader detailing their issues with Omar. (Lonny Goldsmith, editor of TCJewfolk, a media nonprofit in the Twin Cities, says only that she’s a “politician,” and in paragraph 23 of the story.)

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Churchill’s ‘Admirable Self-Restraint’ Adrian Williams Reviews “Churchill: Walking with Destiny” by Andrew Roberts

By on January 3rd, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/12/churchills-admirable-self-restraint/

In April 2002 The Atlantic published an essay by the Anglo-American writer Christopher Hitchens on Winston Churchill (“The Medals of His Defeats”), which reviewed some of the prominent and recent Churchill biographies and more broadly attempted to critically evaluate his career and legacy. After expounding on what he saw as the “Churchill cult”, fostered by sycophantic, sentimental historians whose works are riddled with turgid prose and hopelessly mixed metaphors, even the arch-contrarian Hitchens was unable to avoid the conclusion that Churchill was a great man.

This view, unsurprisingly, comes down to the events of May and early June 1940. These were the crucial few weeks in which, with the imminent fall of France and the threat of a German invasion of the British Isles, Churchill rallied a defeatist War Cabinet, spurned Hitler’s offers of a negotiated peace and resolved to commit his people to fight on to the end—events that may be fresh in readers’ minds after the recent release of the Churchill biopic Darkest Hour. So despite, for example, pointing to Churchill’s part in battlefield defeats like Gallipoli in the First World War, the ignominious retreats from Norway, France, Greece and Crete in the Second World War, or the inevitable dissolution of the now debt-laden British Empire by 1945, Hitchens writes:

I find that I cannot rerun the tape of 1940, for example, and make it come out, or wish it to come out, any other way … Alone among his contemporaries, Churchill did not denounce the Nazi empire merely as a threat, actual or potential, to the British one. Nor did he speak of it as a depraved but possibly useful ally. He excoriated it as a wicked and nihilistic thing. That appears facile now, but was exceedingly uncommon then … Some saving intuition prompted Churchill to recognize, and to name out loud, the pornographic and catastrophically destructive nature of the foe. Only this redeeming x factor justifies all the rest—the paradoxes and inconsistencies, to be sure, and even the hypocrisy.

To what hypocrisy is Hitchens referring? This is surely Britain’s wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, which he alludes to several times:

The argument about World War II and its worthwhileness is the most apparently settled and decided of all major questions in our culture … Even the standby argument of some anti-Churchill Tories (and others, including George Orwell), about the callous collusion between Churchill and Stalin, seems almost anachronistic in view of the eventual implosion of the Soviet system.

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Women’s March in Mostly White City Canceled for Being Too White By Katherine Timpf

By on January 3rd, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/womens-march-in-mostly-white-city-canceled-for-being-too-white/

Is no march at all better than a march with the wrong demographics?

Organizers of a Women’s March that was scheduled to take place in Eureka, Calif., on January 19 wound up calling it off over concerns that there were going to be too many white people there.

“Up to this point, the participants have been overwhelmingly white, lacking representation from several perspectives in our community,” states a post on the group’s Facebook page. “Instead of pushing forward with crucial voices absent, the organizing team will take time for more outreach.”

After the cancellation made news, the group posted a follow-up explanation.

“The organizers of the Eureka Women’s March in Humboldt County, California, are moving the focus towards an event date on March 9th, in conjunction with International Women’s Day, to ensure that the people most impacted by systems of oppression have an opportunity to participate in planning,” another post stated. “We failed to have the type of collaboration needed to be inclusive of some of the most underrepresented voices in our community, namely, women of color and people who are gender non-conforming.”

This is, in a word, stupid. For one thing, Humboldt County, where Eureka is located, is approximately 74 percent non-Hispanic white. In other words: The projected demographics of the march might have been a simple reflection of the demographics of the city where it was scheduled. It might not have been a racism issue or an inclusion issue, but a logistical one.

What’s more, I am having a hard time understanding how having no march at all is better than having a march that happens to be mostly white. If these marches do anything to fight Trump — which I’m not sure they do, but if they do, the way the organizers believe they do — wouldn’t they want to have as many of them as possible? It’s especially rich when you consider how often white women are slammed as a group because so many of them voted for Trump. People on the left have often calling these women traitors (and all other sorts of terrible names) because they chose Trump over Hillary, but when they try to do something to fight Trump, then that’s a problem, too? Give me a break.

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Afghan and Iranian Asylum Seekers Rampage Through German Town, Injuring 12 By Patrick Poole

By on January 3rd, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/asylum-seekers-rampage-through-german-town-injuring-12/

The Bavarian town of Amberg is in shock after a group of asylum seekers from Afghanistan and Iran rampaged through the city Saturday night. Four attackers aged 17 to 19 randomly beat exiting passengers at the train station, and then moved to the city center to continue their rampage.

According to reports, the attackers shouted “kafir” (a derogatory term meaning “non-Muslim,” “unbeliever”) and “n*****” at some victims.

In all, 12 victims ranging from ages 16 to 42 needed medical attention. A 17-year-old victim was treated for severe head wounds.

German authorities announced that at least two of the attackers have already had their asylum claims rejected, and that at least one should have already have been deported. This has prompted German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer to demand changes to deportation laws, as Deutsche-Welle reports:

Germany’s Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said asylum-seekers who commit violent crimes must leave the country, after a group of apparently drunken teenagers attacked a dozen people in the Bavarian town of Amberg.

“If existing laws are not sufficient, they must be changed,” Seehofer told Wednesday’s edition of Germany’s Bild newspaper. “The events in Amberg are very troubling. This is excessive violence, which we cannot tolerate.”

Seehofer — the leader of Bavaria’s Christian Social Union (CSU) party, the Bavarian sister party to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats — said that he would make suggestions to the federal government. Seehofer had already made similar proposals in mid-December for the beginning of this year.

…

The accused are currently being held in pretrial detention on charges of causing dangerous bodily harm. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Congresswoman Hopes Reparations Bill is Path to ‘Repair Some of the Damage’ Caused by Slavery By Nicholas Ballasy see note please

By on January 3rd, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/congresswoman-hopes-reparations-bill-is-path-to-repair-some-of-the-damage-caused-by-slavery/

Rep. Lee is famous for booting seating passengers off flights with insults and tantrums, and demanding their seats; she has stated that the US Constitution is 400 years old; asked if the Pathfinder had succeeded in taking a picture of the flag planted on Mars by Neil Armstrong in 1969; in 2010 she stated“Today, we have two Vietnams, side by side, North and South, exchanging and working.”not withstanding that there is no longer a South Vietnam. She graduated from Yale and the University of Virginia Law School….She should get reparations from those schools because she learned so little….rsk

WASHINGTON – Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) told PJM that the federal government should conduct a study of reparations for descendants of slaves to be able to determine the best way to “repair some of the damage” that slavery has caused to the African-American community.

Jackson Lee became the lead sponsor of H.R. 40, the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act, after Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) resigned from Congress.

The legislation seeks to “address the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery in the United States and the 13 American colonies between 1619 and 1865 and to establish a commission to study and consider a national apology and proposal for reparations for the institution of slavery, its subsequent de jure and de facto racial and economic discrimination against African-Americans, and the impact of these forces on living African-Americans, to make recommendations to the Congress on appropriate remedies, and for other purposes.”

“It’s a commission to study the issue of what was the economic impact of the work of slaves and how does it translate in the 21st century. And what we want to do is to build a narrative, a story of the facts and out of that be able to access how we repair some of the damage,” Jackson Lee said during a recent interview after her speech at the annual Legislative and Policy Conference organized by Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network.

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