Bay of Pics Media fakery targets Trump with photos of Obama-era child trafficking. Lloyd Billingsley
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270299/bay-pics-lloyd-billingsley
Over the Memorial Day weekend, photos of Central American children at a U.S. holding facility began to appear online. Democrats and their media allies quickly hailed the pics as the latest exhibit of anti-Trump hysteria.
“Look at these photos,” Linda Sarsour tweeted.
“Speechless,” tweeted Antonio Villaraigosa, former Los Angeles mayor and candidate for governor of California. “This is not who we are as a nation.”
“All of these photos are disturbing, but the first two are especially awful,” tweeted New York Times Magazine editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein, linking to headline hailing “First glimpse of immigrant children at holding facility.” And so on.
For the breathless tweeters, the photos were prima facie evidence that, as CNN’s April Ryan wondered, “is the Trump administration involved in a child sex-trafficking ring?”
Antonio Arellano, who claims to work for ABC in Houston, circulated a story about an ICE detention center in Texas with “a prison bus just for babies.” CNN’s Ana Navarro responded, “America, this cannot be who we are” and those who picked up Arrellano’s story included Kasie Hunt of NBC, Sharon Waxman of TheWrap, actor Alyssa Milano, and POTUS 44 staffer Michael Simon and Democrat Party strategist Zac Petkanas.
Trouble was, the story was from 2014, long before the Trump administration. Likewise, As Saagar Enjeti noted in the Daily Caller, the detention center photos “stem from a 2014 Arizona Central story showing migrant children in steel cages. The cages were implemented at the height of the Central American migrant crisis under the Obama administration.”
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270300/golan-heights-recognition-thwarted-swamp-ari-lieberman
Last week, House Foreign Affairs Committee Member, Congressman Ron DeSantis (R.,-Fla.), proposed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act recognizing the Golan Heights as an integral part of Israel thereby validating Israel’s 1981 annexation of the territory. Though non-binding, the declarative resolution, which would have likely passed if brought to the House floor for a full vote, would have sent a strong message to the world, but chiefly Israel’s enemies, that after eight years of relentless hostility from the previous American administration, the US-Israel alliance is back on track and stronger than ever.
But for inexplicable reasons, the amendment didn’t pass muster with the House Rules Committee and consequently, never made it do the House floor for a full up or down vote. Sources close to the matter stated that the White House put pressure on Speaker Paul Ryan to kill the resolution and render it dead on arrival. The White House for its part denied playing any role in the shelving of the resolution claiming to have only recently become aware of its existence. When contacted by the Washington Free Beacon for comment on the matter, Speaker Ryan’s office remained uncharacteristically mute.
On the heels of President Donald Trump’s historic decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital city and transfer the United States embassy there in compliance with U.S. law, a congressional resolution recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan would have represented a powerful one-two combination. It would have signaled an end to past anachronistic foreign policies dictated by the swamp.
Up until June 1967, the Golan Heights, a rocky volcanic plateau overlooking Galilee, served as a platform for Syrian artillery strikes against Israeli Galilean villages and collectives. It is roughly 45 miles long and 17 miles wide at its widest point. From 1948 until 1967, Syrian artillery harried and harassed Israeli farmers tilling their fields and fishermen tending to their business in the Sea of Galilee, also known as the Kinneret. In addition to artillery strikes, the Syrians also tried to divert the Golan’s waters from flowing into the Jordan River in an effort to deprive Israel of water resources. In sum, rather than using the Golan for productive purposes, the Syrians used the plateau to rain death and destruction and make life for Israelis miserable.
On June 5th 1967, Israel, rather than waiting for its enemies to hit first, acted resolutely and launched a preemptive strike against its belligerent Arab neighbors. While Israel was engaged in battling Egyptians to the south and Jordanians to the east, Syria decided to take advantage of the situation to indiscriminately shell Israeli towns, villages and farming collectives in Galilee.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12392/palestinian-treason
Ahmed Majdalani is now being accused by his own people of promoting “normalization” between Palestinians and Israel.
It is worth noting that those who took the decision to ban the PLO official Majdalani from entering Palestinian universities are living under the “moderate” Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, not under Hamas rule.
This is the same Palestinian Authority that receives funds from the US and EU. In other words, Americans and Europeans are funding Palestinians who are opposed to any form of “normalization” with Israel. If a PLO official’s visit to a conference in Israel is labelled treason, what would happen to a Palestinian who signed a peace agreement with Israel?
The Palestinians’ problem is not with a settlement or a checkpoint or a fence. They have a problem with the existence of Israel in any borders. Palestinians have still not come to terms with Israel’s right to exist, period; this is the essence of the Israeli-Arab conflict. They see Israel as one big settlement that needs to be ripped out.
Palestinian leaders have spent the past few months calling for boycotts of Israel and the US. The most recent call came just a few weeks ago, when Palestinian Authority leaders and officials called on all countries to boycott the inauguration ceremony of the US embassy in Jerusalem.
One of the officials who called for boycotting the ceremony was Ahmed Majdalani, a member of the PLO Executive Committee, and a top advisor to President Mahmoud Abbas. Majdalani is also famous for his repeated calls in the past few years for boycotting Israel in all fields.
Now, it seems that Majdalani is being forced to taste the same medicine he has been prescribing for Israel and the US. His efforts to promote boycotts of Israel and the US have backfired. Ironically, the boycotter Majdalani is now being boycotted by his own people. This is what happens when all you preach to your people day and night is hatred, incitement and boycotts. Eventually, you yourself become affected by the same messages of hate and brainwashing.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12294/facebook-terrorism
Nearly a year has passed since the establishment of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, announced by Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube, but groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas — among the 64 organizations currently designated by the State Department as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) — still have Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and YouTube videos.
The more important question, then, is whether Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms are providing “material support or resources” — in the form of a “tangible or intangible” property or service — to FTOs and Specially Designated Global Terrorists. The Counter Extremism Project appears to think that the answer is yes.
“[G]iven the volume of content uploaded to Facebook by the platform’s estimated 2.2. billion active users on a daily basis, the one percent of terrorist content that is not removed is a significant amount that needs to be addressed.” — Counter Extremism Project Executive Director David Ibsen.
During his Congressional hearings in April, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was interrogated by members of the House and Senate. Because it was evident from their questions that many of the lawmakers were actually clueless about how Facebook works, much time was wasted on Zuckerberg’s having to explain the basics of its tools and business model. A select few – among them Senator Ted Cruz — challenged Zuckerberg about the political slant of his platform, which has led to discrimination against conservative groups and individuals.
Zuckerberg acknowledged that:
“…Facebook and the tech industry are located in Silicon Valley, which is an extremely left-leaning place. And this is actually a concern that I have and that I try to root out in the company is making sure that we don’t have any bias in the work that we do, and I think it is a fair concern that people would at least wonder about.”
When asked about what Facebook is doing to prevent terrorists from using the platform to recruit and coordinate, Zuckerberg said that 200 of his (25,000) employees monitor such content and activity in 30 languages.
The question that Zuckerberg should have been asked is why organizations and individuals that are designated by the State Department as terrorists are able to open pages on his platform in the first place, let alone continue to maintain those pages, or block their content temporarily, before allowing it to be re-posted. It would have been a particularly relevant query, given the launch in July 2017 of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, announced by Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube. The stated goal of the Forum was to:
“help us continue to make our hosted consumer services hostile to terrorists and violent extremists.
http://thefederalist.com/2018/05/29/obama-says-didnt-scandals/
At a Las Vegas tech conference last week, former president Barack Obama told an audience that his presidency had been scandal-free. “I didn’t have scandals, which seems like it shouldn’t be something you brag about,” Obama joked, according to Newsweek. We hear this talking point quite often from Democrats.
Now, perhaps the president didn’t experience the fallout from a scandal, which is very different from never having been involved in one. For this confusion, Obama can thank the political media.
Why does it matter now? For one thing, historical revisionism shouldn’t go unchallenged. Democrats are running to retake power, and many of them were participants or accomplices in numerous corrosive scandals that have been airbrushed.
The other reason, of course, is that when we start to juxtapose the mythically idyllic Obama presidency with the tumultuous reign of Trump, we’re reminded that many journalists largely abdicated their responsibilities for eight years — which has a lot to do with the situation we find ourselves in today.
It’s not about Obama’s brazen lying about Obamacare or even recurrent abuse of power. I’m talking about supposed non-scandals like “Operation Fast and Furious,” a program devised by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) that put around 2,000 weapons into the hands of narco-traffickers (and an Islamic terrorist), leading to the murder of hundreds of Mexicans and at least one American, border agent Brian Terry.
The body count could have been higher when a homegrown extremist who, with another assailant, attempted to murder the audience at a “Draw Muhammad” contest in Garland, Texas with one of the Fast and Furious weapons. An off-duty police officer killed both of the attackers.
Despite the incompetence, absurdity, recklessness, and fatalities of the program, the entire affair never really received scandal-like attention. No one lost his job. There will almost certainly be a tweet from Trump this week that political media will afford more attention than a story in which an American border agent was murdered with the gun Obama’s ATF provided.
Not even when the administration refused to cooperate with congressional investigators was it handled like a scandal. Not even when a federal judge rejected Obama’s assertion of executive privilege in efforts to deny Congress files relating to the gun-walking operation was it treated as a scandal. Not even when we learned that Obama attorney general Eric Holder misled Congress about when he was made aware of the program did it rise to the importance of a Trump tweet. Holder became the first sitting attorney general in American history to be held in contempt of Congress — a vote that included 17 Democrats — and Obama still never paid a political price.
As it was, the Obama administration persistently ignored courts and oversight, breaking norms because it was allowed to do so. The president was articulate, friendly, and progressive. He might have executed an American citizen without a trial (not a scandal!), but his contempt for the process could be forgiven.
Flash back to September 2016, and let’s revisit a rumor that circulated widely in certain circles. It has been recounted so many times that it serves almost as a bedtime story for the Right. The scene: it’s the first joint appearance between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton—the Commander-in-Chief Forum sponsored by NBC—and it has just finished. Backstage, the now-disgraced moderator Matt Lauer is waiting to shake hands with the former first lady— but, instead, he is confronted by a furious Clinton and her entourage.
What faux pas had he committed? Apparently, Lauer had asked Clinton a question about her illegal email server that she was not prepared to answer, a question that she had not pre-approved.
According to the NBC insider who witnessed the scene, Clinton “proceeded to pick up a full glass of water and threw it at the face of her assistant and the screaming started.” She then lost her temper and began shouting at her staff. “You f —ing idiots, you were supposed to have this thing set up for me and you’ve screwed it up! If that f—ing bastard wins we all hang from nooses! Lauer’s finished…and if I lose it’s all on you ass—-s for screwing this up.”
This is a fantastic scene, one which would be hard to believe, if Clinton had not spent most of 2017 whining about her loss in assorted public forums, and blaming everyone but herself. The American public now understands that profanity-laced displays of manic rage are perfectly in keeping with the character of the former first lady so aptly nicknamed “Lady Macbeth” by a portion of the press. What makes this tirade so interesting, of course, is the dire prophecy that a Trump presidency would see Hillary and her gang not just humiliated or defeated but hanging by nooses—that is, presumably executed for treason.
Our Dumb Intelligence Community
Fast forward to 2018, and the scene now makes perfect sense. A growing segment of the American public now knows that the country’s intelligence community was spying on the Trump campaign, and then attempting to sabotage the Trump Administration with false allegations of “Russian collusion.” That’s #Spygate in a sentence.
Hey, what’s up. Long time no talk.https://amgreatness.com/2018/05/30/dear-ex-friends-in-the-resistance/
I think the last civil conversations we had occurred just days before November 8, 2016. You were supremely confident Hillary Clinton would win the presidential election; you voted for her with glee. As a lifelong Republican, I bit down hard and cast my vote for Donald Trump. Then the unimaginable happened. He won.
And you lost your fucking minds.
I knew you would take the loss hard—and personally—since all of you were super jacked-up to elect the first woman president. But I did not imagine you would become totally deranged, attacking anyone who voted for Trump or supported his presidency as a racist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobic Nazi-sympathizer.
The weirdness started on social media late on Election Night, as it became clear Hillary was going to lose. A few of you actually admitted that you were cradling your sleeping children, weeping, wondering what to tell your kindergartner the next morning about Trump’s victory. It continued over the next several days. Some of you seriously expressed fear about modern-day concentration camps. Despite living a privileged lifestyle, you were suddenly a casualty of the white patriarchy. Your daughters were future victims; your sons were predators-in-waiting. You threatened to leave Facebook because you could no longer enjoy the family photos or vacation posts from people who, once friends, became Literal Hitlers to you on November 8 because they voted for Donald Trump.
I admit I was a little hurt at first. The attacks against us Trump voters were so personal and so vicious that I did not think it could be sustained. I thought maybe you would regain your sanity after some turkey and egg nog.
But you did not. You got worse. And I went from sad to angry to where I am today: Amused.
As the whole charade you have been suckered into over the last 18 months starts to fall apart—that Trump would not survive his presidency; he would be betrayed by his own staff, family, and/or political party; he would destroy the Republican Party; he would be declared mentally ill and removed from office; he would be handcuffed and dragged out of the White House by Robert Mueller for “colluding” with Russia—let me remind you what complete fools you have made of yourselves. Not to mention how you’ve been fooled by the media, the Democratic Party, and your new heroes on the NeverTrump Right.
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/hhs-reports-of-1475-lost-unaccompanied-minors-completely-false/
The Trump administration has pushed back on reports that it “lost” 1,475 immigrant children, calling them “completely false.”
The kids, who arrived without guardians at the country’s southern border, were turned over to caretakers, who in late 2016 stopped responding to 30-day follow-up calls from the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which was trying to make sure they did not need more government aid, the Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement.
The calls were a new, extra step for HHS, and when the number of those who did not answer them was revealed in an April Senate subcommittee hearing, media outlets reported the children as lost.
“This is a classic example of the adage ‘No good deed goes unpunished,’” HHS Deputy Secretary Eric Hargan said. “These children are not ‘lost’; their sponsors—who are usually parents or family members and in all cases have been vetted for criminality and ability to provide for them—simply did not respond or could not be reached when this voluntary call was made.”
“The U.S. taxpayer can no longer be responsible for being a surrogate parent for every would-be illegal immigrant who crosses our border,” the department said.
Senator Rob Portman (R., Ohio) chastised federal agencies in April for not closing processing holes that allowed some unaccompanied minors to end up in the hands of human traffickers and abusers. The government must also make sure the kids show up for thecourt hearings that will decide whether they can stay in the country, Portman argued.
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/russian-journalist-critical-of-putin-shot-dead-in-ukraine/
A Russian journalist well known for his scathing criticism of the Kremlin was shot dead in his Kiev apartment Tuesday night, apparently in retaliation for his activism, according to Ukrainian national police.
“The first and the most obvious is his professional activities,” Kiev police chief Andriy Krishchenko said of the victim, Arkady Babchenko, who joins the growing ranks of anti-Kremlin activists and journalists who have died under suspicious and/or violent circumstances in recent years.
Babchenko, 41, began his journalistic career as a contract soldier in the Chechnya civil war, chronicling his experience in a bestselling book before serving as a military correspondent for several Russian outlets. He later fled Russia for Ukraine in February 2017 after receiving unspecified threats, which were likely prompted by his extensive reporting on Russian involvement in the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria.
