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Ruth King

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What Message Can Be Gleaned from Contradictory Ideas? By Eileen F. Toplansky

By on March 17th, 2017

Recently, I was sent this piece about Robert David Steele who was a former Marine Corps infantry officer and then a spy for the CIA. At his own site, he claims to be “the Chief Enabling Officer CeO [sic] of Earth Intelligence Network, devoted to teaching holistic analytics, true cost economics and open source everything engineering.” Thus, “his ideas would enable the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals — first within the USA and then globally [.]”

This is code for doing away with capitalism. After all, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism. She stated that “[t]his is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”

Here is a sampling of the Declaration of the Sustainable Development mandate

We envisage a world of universal respect for human rights and human dignity, the rule of law, justice, equality and non-discrimination; of respect for race, ethnicity and cultural diversity; and of equal opportunity permitting the full realization of human potential and contributing to shared prosperity.

Isn’t this already the foundation of American ideas and ideals?

To do this, Steele “proposed to Donald Trump that he close all 1,000 US military bases overseas and stop subsidizing military arms purchases by dictators and Israel.”

And this is when my antennae start to stir.

Notice the connection between dictators and Israel — Israel is the only true democracy in the Middle East, but Steele deliberately chooses to single it out. This is what the United Nations does on a regular basis and should be the first clue to Steele’s anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic bent.

The Sustainable Agenda continues with the following:

We reaffirm the outcomes of all major UN conferences and summits which have laid a solid foundation for sustainable development and have helped to shape the new Agenda. These include the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development; the World Summit on Sustainable Development [etc.]

Climate change is always part of this scenario; thus, “[c]limate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time and its adverse impacts undermine the ability of all countries to achieve sustainable development.”

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The Colossally Dishonest Swamp Attack On Dr. Sebastian Gorka’s First-Rate Scholarship By Barry Scott Zellen

By on March 17th, 2017

I read with increasing alarm what appears to be a coordinated smear campaign by former members of the Obama administration and their ivory tower proxies, taking aim in the now-partisan press (including the New York Times, Washington Post, and NPR) to undermine the reputation of strategic theorist Dr. Sebastian Gorka. Gorka has risen to prominence over this very same period after his appointment to serve as deputy assistant to President Donald Trump.

Without a drop of evidence, these critics have unfairly ridiculed Gorka’s fine scholarship and academic background, ignoring his many contributions to the literature of warfare over many years. In so doing, these liberal policymakers and ivory-tower academics in international relations and strategic studies show they remain unfamiliar with – and consequently unappreciative of – the great work their counterparts at America’s military academies. In fact, they appear all too-quick to dismiss America’s military scholars whose dedication and service to America’s warfighters should instead be respected and appreciated.

This is very much the case in the recent assault upon the reputation of Dr. Gorka. Gorka’s work deserves to be read, not attacked without merit. The attacks we see seem to be the work of a small group of Obama partisans indifferent to the carnage caused on their own watch, based on their failed leadership and strategy. They are likely still in shock at now being exiled from the swamp, but their own records speak to their responsibility for the rise of ISIS, and the spread of jihadist violence across the Middle East, North Africa and into the heart of Europe. Now, they have launched a coordinated hit job against Gorka within weeks of his joining the administration.

Consider perhaps the most egregious example, by Steven Simon and Daniel Benjamin in the Feb. 24 edition of the New York Times. Their hit-piece was shamefully mistitled, “The Islamophobic Huckster in the White House.” Simon, a former NSC-staffer now at Amherst College, and Benjamin, the State Department’s former counterterrorism coordinator now at Dartmouth, were both Obama administration officials and thus complicit in the orgy of violence unleashed by Obama’s counterterrorism policies.

Nearly as offensive was Daniel W. Drezner’s Washington Post hit-piece, “Survival Tips for Sebastian Gorka, PhD,” which came to press three days later, which stooped so low as to malign Dr. Gorka’s doctoral thesis, which I myself have found to be a fascinating, thoughtful, and original work. I know originality of thought, especially conservative thought, is seldom welcome within the liberal-biased academy, so one must fear for any students of Drezner who dare to think outside the box, or more aptly, outside the bubble. But don’t take my word for it, you can read Dr. Gorka’s fascinating dissertation here.

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Tale of Trump Adviser’s Alleged Nazi Ties Unravels Sebastian Gorka denies a report of his affiliations with Vitézi Rend By Liel Leibovitz

By on March 17th, 2017

Lord knows I’ve had my differences with the Forward before. I have them still, and often. They rarely unsettle me, if only because robust disagreements, especially on things that matter, are what we journalists should seek, not shun. But reading the paper’s exclusive report this morning arguing that Trump aide Sebastian Gorka is an actual crypto-Nazi, I’d like to reach out to my friends and colleagues across town and ask, with clear eyes and a full heart: Have you lost your minds?http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/227733/tale-of-trump-advisors-alleged-nazi-ties-unravels

To hear the piece tell it, Gorka, a top counter-terrorism adviser in the Trump White House, has sworn a lifetime oath to Vitézi Rend, an outfit that the story tells us is nasty nationalist group in Gorka’s native Hungary that giddily collaborated with Hitler. Well, not the Vitézi Rend—that group was outlawed by the Communists, naturally—but the off-shoot of Vitézi Rend, resurgent after Communism’s fall in 1989. Or at least an off-shoot of the group: there are two, and Gorka, according to the Forward’s sources, appears to belong to one of them, called Historical Vitézi Rend. How do we know that? A member of the group, Kornél Pintér, said so. “Of course he was sworn in,” Pintér told the Forward in a phone interview. “I met with him in Sopron [a city near Hungary’s border with Austria]. His father introduced him.”

Where to begin? Even if you take the Nazis at their word—which is inadvisable, as I realized from the very first time I watched Casablanca at the age of 9—you’ll notice that Pintér isn’t saying that he’d witnessed Gorka’s swearing in; he’s merely saying that he’d met the man because he was an associate of Gorka’s father Paul, a renowned member of the nationalist anti-Communist resistance.

Gorka himself told me that the allegations are flat-out false.

“I have never been a member of the Vitez Rend. I have never taken an oath of loyalty to the Vitez Rend. Since childhood, I have occasionally worn my father’s medal and used the ‘v.’ initial to honor his struggle against totalitarianism.” It’s a perfectly plausible explanation, and you’d have to be of a very specific mindset to still pursue allegations of Nazi affiliation.

Why didn’t Gorka simply tell this to the Forward? A source close to the White House, who was briefed on how the administration treated this story, explained things a little more to me.

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Are the Hard Leftists Aligned with Radical Islamists? by Najat AlSaied

By on March 17th, 2017

The leftist media and other American liberals insist on portraying President Trump’s position as a fight against Islam and Muslims. In fact, most moderate Muslims are not offended by the phrase “radical Islam,” because they are very distressed by the fact that their religion has been commandeered by the radicals and transformed from a religion of peace into a more radical version.

I just wonder where those feminists and John Kerry were when millions of Egyptian women needed their support when they marched against the Muslim Brotherhood, asking for America’s help. Where were they when thousands of Syrian and Iraqi women were enslaved and raped by radical ISIS militants?

While not a single voice among these liberal feminists spoke out against these inhumane acts perpetrated against Muslim women by radical Islamists, a Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer, Linda Sarsour, co-organized the anti-Trump Women’s March on Washington. What’s worse, these liberal feminists want Sarsour to represent all Muslim women, while in fact she speaks for nobody except herself and those who fund her.

Since the presidential campaign began, and then right up until the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on February 24, 2017, President Donald Trump has kept saying the same thing: that the United States is at war with radical Islam, mainly represented by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Yet, the leftist media and other American liberals insist on portraying his position as a fight against Islam and Muslims. In fact, most moderate Muslims are not offended by the phrase “radical Islam,” because they are very distressed by the fact that their religion has been commandeered by the radicals and transformed from a religion of peace into a more radical version. Unfortunately, instead of the leftists giving a voice to and supporting these moderate Muslims, a kind of leftist-Islamist alliance has emerged.

Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, a Saudi columnist for pan-Arab newspaper Al Sharq al Awsat, said in 2004:

“It is a certain fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, but it is equally certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are Muslims… The majority of those who were suicide bombers on buses, other vehicles, in schools and other places, all over the world, were Muslim”.

This statement from a well-known columnist and a former General Manager of the Al Arabiya news channel demonstrates how moderate Muslims are critical of their own culture and how they are saddened by how their religion has been hijacked by radicals. However, these appeals fall on deaf ears with leftists; they call moderate Muslims passive, which instead supports and furthers the radical Islamists’ cause.

In 2009, while millions of Iranians were in the streets opposing a radical, theocratic regime as part of their Green Revolution, then U.S. President Barack Obama ignored this historic moment and continued reaching out to Iran’s rulers, who are designated by the U.S. government as sponsors of terrorism. His appeasing attitude was a clear sign that the US was so eager to reach a nuclear deal by befriending the Iranian regime, that it was willing to tolerate the mullahs’ brutal repression and its hegemonic policies across the region.

In 2011, we witnessed the Obama Administration’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, in the form of billions of dollars that ensured its victory, ignoring the consequences their rule has had on moderate Muslims, Coptic Christians and secular groups. Many moderate Muslim women in Egypt entreated the Obama Administration to support them against the Muslim Brotherhood’s tyranny and misogyny, but to no avail.

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

‘Hidden Figures’ Is a Powerful Story of Black Achievement African-Americans have heard lots of excuses for failure and are hungry for inspiration.

By on March 17th, 2017

“There are two ways to disable people. One is by denying them an opportunity to compete. The other, more crippling, is to tell them they no longer have to compete and that every door will be opened. Such people can only wonder whether their accomplishments are real or simulated. Black Americans must refuse to surrender to incompetence, self-devaluation and self-marginalization. ”

People should never be defined by circumstances beyond their control—a principle exemplified by the three women whose stories are popularized in the Oscar-nominated film “Hidden Figures.” Based on a 2016 book by Margot Lee Shetterly, “Hidden Figures” chronicles how NASA mathematicians Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughan overcame legal segregation and racial discrimination to play a critical role in astronaut John Glenn’s orbital mission aboard Friendship 7 in 1962.

There is a thirst among black Americans for such inspiring messages. I witnessed evidence of this yearning last week when I attended a book signing with Ms. Shetterly at the Fredericksburg, Va., campus of the University of Mary Washington. The 1,000-seat auditorium was filled to capacity by a predominantly African-American audience. People were packed into the balcony and there wasn’t a spare inch of standing room anywhere along the walls. The 100 copies of “Hidden Figures” that organizers had brought to the venue sold out well before the presentation began. Even the local bookstores ran out of copies.

During the question-and-answer session following Ms. Shetterly’s talk, some in the audience lamented that they had not known earlier about the heroines of “Hidden Figures.” Children in the audience excitedly raised their hands to learn more about these pioneering “human computers” and their triumph over adversity.

There are thousands of such stories embedded in the history of black America. Sadly, they are rarely told by the elite media—black or white—and often ignored by academia. The most powerful antidote to disrespect is not protest but performance. Stories that convey this idea, however, are considered “off message” in the national narrative.

The dominant racial message today attributes black failure—academic, occupational and even moral—to an all-purpose invisible villain: “institutional racism.” Those who shake their fists and proclaim that white America must change before blacks can achieve anything are embracing a version of white supremacy clothed as protest. The debilitating effects of this attitude are exacerbated by liberals’ “white guilt.” Since the time of “race norming” and the promotion of Ebonics as a separate national language in the 1960s, white liberals have approached the black community with a combination of pity, patronage and pandering. CONTINUE AT SITE

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Beholding Hell Before Age 20 Growing up in Brooklyn, Freely dreamed of sailing the world in the wake of Odysseus. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, he got his chance. Greg Crouch reviews “The House of Memory” by John Freely.

By on March 17th, 2017

When young John Freely asked his mother if they belonged to the working class, she answered, “We would indeed be of the working class if your father could find steady work.” Mr. Freely was born in 1926, the son of two Irish immigrants struggling to gain a toehold in Brooklyn. By the onset of the Great Depression, his father had failed as a trolley-driver and longshoreman. His mother kept the family from starvation with overnight work as a Rockefeller Center cleaning woman, but endured many humiliating evictions until his father finally caught steady work as a gravedigger in Brooklyn’s Evergreen Cemetery.

On two separate occasions in the early 1930s, Mr. Freely’s mother took him and his younger sister back to Ireland to live with her people on the Dingle Peninsula. The young boy imbibed the Celtic lore of his grandfather in the primitive and poverty-stricken landscape that gained wide fame in the Great Blasket memoirs of Maurice O’Sullivan, Peig Sayers and Tómas O’Crohan. “The House of Memory,” the nonagenarian author’s account of the first quarter of his life, might be considered his contribution to the canon of the impoverished Irish, though life would soon carry him far from his upbringing.

When young John Freely asked his mother if they belonged to the working class, she answered, “We would indeed be of the working class if your father could find steady work.” Mr. Freely was born in 1926, the son of two Irish immigrants struggling to gain a toehold in Brooklyn. By the onset of the Great Depression, his father had failed as a trolley-driver and longshoreman. His mother kept the family from starvation with overnight work as a Rockefeller Center cleaning woman, but endured many humiliating evictions until his father finally caught steady work as a gravedigger in Brooklyn’s Evergreen Cemetery.

On two separate occasions in the early 1930s, Mr. Freely’s mother took him and his younger sister back to Ireland to live with her people on the Dingle Peninsula. The young boy imbibed the Celtic lore of his grandfather in the primitive and poverty-stricken landscape that gained wide fame in the Great Blasket memoirs of Maurice O’Sullivan, Peig Sayers and Tómas O’Crohan. “The House of Memory,” the nonagenarian author’s account of the first quarter of his life, might be considered his contribution to the canon of the impoverished Irish, though life would soon carry him far from his upbringing.

A polymath educated on the G.I Bill, Mr. Freely would earn a Ph. D. in physics and spend his academic career teaching at Istanbul’s Bosphorus University, somehow finding the time to write more than 60 books on topics that include Turkey, Greece and the history of science. He first acquired the rudiments of an education at Fourteen Holy Martyrs School and Brooklyn Tech, but it was outside of class that he developed his especial fondness for Homer; young Mr. Freely dreamed of sailing the world in the wake of Odysseus. Soon he would: The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor pushed the United States into the war, though not until the middle of 1944 was Mr. Freely old enough to join the Navy. Mr. Freely volunteered and was placed in “Amphibious Roger Three,” a Navy unit (considered one of the precursors of the Navy’s modern SEAL teams) that was being sent to China to train elite forces in the armies of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.

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Kimberley A. Strassel:The Republicans Relearn Politics The health-care bill is far from dead, and a contentious debate is a sign of vigor.

By on March 17th, 2017

With a hat-tip to Mark Twain, reports of the death of the Republican health-care bill have been greatly, vastly, even bigly exaggerated. What we are witnessing isn’t a legislative demise, but the rebirth of a long-lost Washington concept: politics.

From the moment Speaker Paul Ryan unveiled his ObamaCare repeal-and-replace bill, the media have declared it a doomed project. The newspapers have run out of synonyms for division, disunity, discord, conflict, struggle, mess. Since the only thing the media enjoy more than bashing Republicans is helping Republicans bash each other, the cable stations have offered a nonstop loop of a handful of GOP naysayers and grandstanders (cue Rand Paul) who wish the bill ill.

Perhaps the talking heads can be excused for their dim outlook. The Obama administration marked one of the more dysfunctional and destructive periods in Washington—eight years of threats, executive rule, noncommunication and opposition politics. So it is undoubtedly confusing for some people suddenly to watch an honest-to-goodness legislative process, with all its negotiating, horse-trading and consensus-building.
Under prior management, Nancy Pelosi did her thing, Harry Reid did his thing, President Obama did his thing, and the three tried not to talk if at all possible. The Obama legislative affairs team couldn’t have found Capitol Hill with a map.

Today’s negotiations over the health bill feature a White House that is working hand-in-hand with congressional leaders to get to yes. Even as the critics looped on cable TV, the Trump administration was working with House leaders on a substantive amendment to the bill to address conservative concerns before the legislation hits the floor.

Vice President Mike Pence held a listening session Wednesday with the Republican Study Committee, an influential bloc of 170 House conservatives. President Trump met last week with conservative activists. Sources confirm daily telephone round robins among Mr. Ryan, Mitch McConnell, President Trump, Mr. Pence, White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, and Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price.

One sign of progress: Rep. Mark Meadows (of the Freedom Caucus) and Sen. Ted Cruz (of Cruz-Still-For-President) penned a joint op-ed Thursday for this newspaper’s online edition, laying out their demands for the health-care bill. These two super-critics have not only refused to walk away from the negotiating table but are positioning themselves potentially to take credit for changes.

President Obama disdained Congress and didn’t want to legislate. He waited to see if he liked what his Democratic underlings brought him. Today veterans of the legislative process are professing admiration for the way Mr. Trump is handling this deal. CONTINUE AT SITE

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Russia’s Nuclear Menacing Shouldn’t Go Unanswered The U.S. ought to match Moscow’s buildup to show Putin he can’t possibly win a new arms race. By William Lloyd Stearman

By on March 17th, 2017

—Mr. Stearman is a former director of Georgetown University’s Russian Area Studies Program. He served on the National Security Council staff under Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and George H.W. Bush and is author of “An American Adventure, From Early Aviation Through Three Wars to the White House” (Naval Institute Press 2012).

The Russian military last fall deployed a battery of short-range, nuclear-capable Iskander missiles to Kaliningrad, the 6,000-square mile Russian enclave between Poland and Lithuania. The move raises a troubling question: Does Moscow believe there could be a limited nuclear conflict in Europe?

The idea should terrify everyone. A tactical nuclear conflict could easily escalate to an exchange of strategic nuclear weapons—which, while it would largely destroy Russia, would inflict widespread destruction on the U.S. and Western Europe. What can be done to prevent it?

The frequency of Russian nuclear saber-rattling has increased. NATO’s January 2016 annual report stated that the Russian military had conducted exercises including “simulated nuclear attacks on NATO Allies and on partners.” As former Defense Department official Mark B. Schneider observed in a recent issue of the U.S. Naval Institute’s magazine Proceedings, Moscow appears to have adopted an “escalate to de-escalate” strategy, responding to potential conventional conflicts with coercive threats, including the threat of a limited nuclear strike.

The decision last year by the U.S. and its NATO allies to place an antiballistic-missile system in southern Romania infuriated Moscow. “This is a direct threat to us. They are moving to the firing line,” said Adm. Vladimir Komoyedov, chairman of the State Duma’s defense committee and a former commander of the Russian Black Sea naval fleet. A second missile-defense site in Poland is under construction and is expected to be operational by 2018.

The Russians aren’t buying U.S. claims that NATO’s missile-defense systems are designed to protect Europe from an attack originating in a rogue state such as Iran. “Russia is doing what is necessary to protect itself amid NATO’s expansion toward its borders,” said President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, in response to Western criticism of the Kaliningrad deployment. “Romania’s stance and the stance of its leadership, who have turned the country into an outpost, is a clear threat for us,” said Alexander Botsan-Kharchenko, a senior Russian foreign ministry official, last month. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Trump’s Revealing Budget So much political drama over such a small part of the federal fisc.

By on March 17th, 2017

President Trump’s initial budget for fiscal 2018 is a public service, if not exactly in the way he intends. Its main virtue lies in showing voters the painful trade-offs to come if the U.S. doesn’t do something to control entitlement spending.

The “skinny” budget—so-called because a new Administration needs time to offer more details—is being denounced far and wide for cuts to domestic non-entitlement programs. In broad outline the White House wants to add $54 billion in budget authority for defense offset by $54 billion in cuts to every domestic department save Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs.

Critics are portraying these domestic cuts as shocking while Mr. Trump is advertising his defense increases as the largest in history. They’re both wrong. The annual federal budget is now more than $4 trillion, so the White House is proposing to shift a mere 1.35% of that to defense from other priorities. That’s it.

The proposal does represent a sharp change in priorities after the past eight years when President Obama squeezed defense in favor of domestic accounts. Defense spending has fallen to about 3% of the economy from 4.7% in 2010. Domestic discretionary spending boomed until the GOP Congress began to rein it in after fiscal 2011. The number of full-time equivalent federal employees increased even with the GOP limits to an estimated 2.137 million this year from 1.978 million in 2009.

The notion that this is a wholesale, much less cruel, restructuring of the federal government is a fantasy that only Washington would attempt to promote. Take the defense increase, which is welcome but not even close to Ronald Reagan’s buildup.

The proposal is a 10% increase over the 2018 budget cap set by the Budget Control Act. But it is only about 3% above what Barack Obama proposed in his final budget as he tried to neutralize the defense issue during the presidential campaign. Most of this money will meet urgent needs in operations and maintenance to keep planes flying and troops trained and moving. A serious defense budget that begins to meet Mr. Trump’s pledge to build a 350 ship Navy will have to start with the fiscal 2019 budget expected in May.

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Michael Galak: Bill Leak- Australia’s First Free-Speech Martyr

By on March 17th, 2017

I can’t imagine how Bill Leak coped as bravely and for as long as he did, not with the authorities and Muslim fanatics each determined to put his head on a pole. This is Australia’s disgrace: a relentless, speech-enforcing bureaucracy making common cause with head-loppers.
I do not ask, how he died, for medical opinion tells us it was a heart attack. I do ask why he had to die as he did, weary and stressed after months of unconscionable official harassment. Bill Leak, cartoonist extraordinaire is lost to us. No more of that sardonic wit. Gone forever the sharpshooting sniper whose targets were the pompous and the self-righteous and the lies they tell each other and will use any means at their disposal to make the rest of us bow before them too.

And if we don’t, if we refuse to genuflect before their lies? They’ll persecute us and make us pay, in Bill’s case with his life.

The Inquisition hated to spill blood, it preferred that heretics be racked and broken then quietly expire. Bill’s heart exploded, that is what the death certificate says. Yet still he died as countless heretics have died — those who dared to think differently, who dared to speak their heretic thoughts aloud. They died lest they contaminate others with their heresies. What did they accuse you of, Bill, what was your crime? Of telling the truth as you saw it? Of ruffling feathers by whipping idiots into lathers of froth and turmoil?

My hands are trembling as I write. My eyes are full of tears. My heart is heavy with foreboding. When an artist, a writer, a poet, a satirist is persecuted, the country that lets it happen slides toward totalitarianism. No, that’s wrong. A country that funds a spiteful bureaucracy to punish those of whose words it disapproves is already there. It’s just a question of degree. To tolerate that is worse than simply being stripped of the freedom millions died to win and defend. Rather, it is to throw away freedom and liberty like so much worthless rubbish. Today they pick off a cartoonist and a laughing, joyful mob dips its hankies in the blood for souvenirs. Tomorrow? It could be any door — your door, my door, any door — on which the enforcer’s fist bangs in the darkness.

I state it plainly, people, in the USSR, where I lived and grew up. Like Bill Leak, I was hauled in front of the unsmiling, self-righteous, angry, shouting komsomoltsy of the Young Communist League for my desire to emigrate to the West. My wife and I, two thought-criminals together. We were denounced as Western spies and Zionist traitors, criminals who deserved to be shot. We did not know at the time if we would have to find someone prepared to care for our four-year old daughter if we were taken away. In the USSR that was the fate of those who declined to submit to their tormentors. I saw people being accused in front of many of anti-Communist thoughts or deeds or words. I knew people, like Bill, who were taken to hospital with heart attacks. Their friends stayed silent or publicly turned against them. I saw all this and worse.

I lived it and survived it. I escaped it. Or so I thought.

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