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Ruth King

A Prison Bigger Than All of Western Europe Without the Russian exile system, perhaps the greatest machine of evil in human history, we’d have no ‘Crime and Punishment.’ Bartle Bull reviews “The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars” by Daniel Beer.

In late December 1849, in the brief hour of midday winter light, 28 young Russian gentlemen were marched up the steps of a wooden platform in St. Petersburg’s Semyonovsky Square. The platform had been hung with black cloth; the prisoners were given peasant cloaks of white. Soldiers lined the snowy plaza.

It took a czarist official half an hour to read out the death sentences. At last a firing squad raised its weapons. And then, hoofbeats muffled in the snow, a young officer came galloping across the square bearing an order of clemency from Czar Nicholas.

Stripped of rank and possessions, their clothes swapped for tattered prisoner garb, the convicts were sent off in fetters on carts to Siberia. One of the young men was Fyodor Dostoevsky. With “Crime and Punishment,” “The Brothers Karamazov” and other works, he would inaugurate an extraordinary phenomenon: the glorious contribution to world literature of the Russian exile system, the greatest sustained machine of evil in human history.

The system that reached its apotheosis under Stalin in 1937-53 had its origins in the late 17th century. In 1708, the bishop of the city of Tobolsk, western Siberia’s gateway to the penal continent to the east, explained that diseased elements of the body politic had to be excised and discarded “in the same way that we have to remove harmful agents from the body.” For the next 250 years, Siberia, one and a half times the size of western Europe, would be the cesspit for Russia’s human excreta. Penal labor camps would kill at least 12 million exiles in Stalin’s time alone, according to the historian Robert Conquest.
The House of the Dead

By Daniel Beer

Knopf, 464 pages, $35

The exile system’s czarist heyday in the long 19th century (1801-1917), under the last five Romanov rulers, is the focus of “The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars,” by British academic Daniel Beer. Mr. Beer’s excellent book will for some time be the definitive work in English on this enormous topic.

The members of Dostoevsky’s rebellious circle were romantic socialists partly inspired by the memory of an earlier, more famous and far more romantic band of true rebels, the Decembrists. Well-bred young officers who mounted an amateurish putsch against Czar Nicholas I in December 1825, the Decembrists earned history’s love with their sincere if foolhardy reformist idealism. It did not hurt their cult that they were followed to Siberia by beautiful wives renouncing forever the soirees of Petersburg. Eventually the Decembrists settled around Lake Baikal to found libraries and establish string quartets long after the czar had cut short their sentences. CONTINUE AT SITE

Detained in Turkey: A Journal Reporter’s Story Foreign correspondent Dion Nissenbaum describes being jailed at a detention center for 2½ days, with no contact with his wife or colleagues

The knock on the door of our third-floor apartment, not far from Istanbul’s historic Taksim Square, came shortly after dusk on Dec. 27. Three plainclothes Turkish policemen stood by the winding marble staircase in the hall with a letter, under orders from the Interior Ministry.

“You are under investigation,” a polite young officer told me (through a translator he’d called on his cellphone) as my wife and 7-month-old daughter looked on. “You are going to be deported, so pack a bag. We don’t know how long this is going to take.”

In the 14 months that I’d been based in Istanbul as a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, I had covered a dizzying series of events, including the failed July 2016 coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. We were preparing to move back to Washington in early January. But I knew that a visit from Turkish police was an ominous development.

More than 80 Turkish writers, journalists and editors are now behind bars under the country’s counterterrorism laws, which have grown more expansive since the coup. Turkey has sent high-profile journalists to maximum-security prison and shuttered more than 140 media outlets since the failed coup. Turkish authorities say that journalists often cross the line into promoting terrorist propaganda in stories about Turkey’s fight against Kurdish separatists or its campaign against those accused of links to the alleged coup plotters.

Western reporters aren’t immune. In 2015, two Vice News reporters from the U.K. were detained for a week after being accused of working with a terrorist organization while reporting on Kurdish insurgents in southern Turkey. An Iraqi colleague of theirs was held for 131 days. All three could face 50 years in prison after being charged with aiding Kurdish separatists—a charge that they deny.

My own case seems to have been in reaction to a tweet. Three days before Christmas, Islamic State released a gruesome 19-minute video that showed two men whom the jihadist group said were captured Turkish soldiers being burned to death. It instantly struck me as major news, likely to trigger a storm of outrage in Turkey. As I began to report on it, I retweeted a still image from the video that showed the shackled men in their military fatigues as the flames crept toward them.

My retweet set off a torrent of Twitter rage. “Do not forget this son of a whore’s face Istanbul,” one man wrote above a screenshot of my profile picture. The editor of a prominent pro-Erdogan newspaper (who has 72,000 Twitter followers) called for me to be deported. Angry Turkish nationalists accused anyone who spread the story of helping to promote Islamic State’s twisted agenda. Within minutes, I undid the retweet, but the damage was done. CONTINUE AT SITE

In Spy-Agency Revamp, Michael Flynn Shows His Influence Donald Trump’s pick for national-security adviser has been skeptical of the intelligence community By Gordon Lubold and Shane Harris

In 2010, then-Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, at the time the top U.S. military intelligence official in Afghanistan, slammed the U.S. spy apparatus he helped to oversee as bloated and out of touch. Four years later, he was fired as the head of the military’s largest intelligence agency—in his view for speaking truth to power about the inadequacies of the nation’s national security preparedness.

Today, Gen. Flynn, who retired in 2014 as a lieutenant general, is in a position to again push his views of how America should protect itself, this time as President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for national security adviser.

Gen. Flynn and senior Trump advisers are eyeing potential structural changes to components of the U.S. intelligence community. The Wall Street Journal reported this past week that transition team officials have discussed paring back the authorities of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and reducing the size of its staff, and also discussed possible changes at the Central Intelligence Agency.

The effort is still the subject of internal discussions, and the Trump transition team has made no formal plans, people familiar with the discussions said. Sean Spicer, a Trump spokesman, said Thursday that discussions have been “tentative,” and denied there were plans for an overhaul.

“The president-elect’s top priorities will be to ensure the safety of the American people and the security of the nation, and he’s committed to finding the best and most effective ways to do it,” Mr. Spicer said.

But Mr. Trump’s aggressive skepticism of the intelligence community clearly echoes Gen. Flynn’s views on both the organization and the quality of national intelligence and the need for changes, according to officials familiar with the transition team and Gen. Flynn. As the president-elect’s closest adviser on national security, he briefs Mr. Trump on developments and sits in on classified presentations from U.S. intelligence officials.

The Trump transition team said Gen. Flynn wasn’t available to comment.

In a series of tweets, Mr. Trump has questioned intelligence conclusions that Russia-linked hackers intervened to help him win the election. Current and former intelligence officials have said that they see Gen. Flynn’s influence in those tweets and in Mr. Trump’s frequent allusions to the intelligence community’s botched 2002 analysis of Iraq’s suspected weapons program.

“I absolutely see Mike Flynn’s fingerprints on that,” said a former U.S. official with ties to the Trump transition who is familiar with Gen. Flynn.

Proposed changes to the Office of Director of National Intelligence have been offered for years by critics who said the office had grown too large and beyond its original scope. In that respect, some officials said Gen. Flynn’s proposals could be the latest iteration of longstanding proposals. Others also detect a whiff of revenge.

Gen. Flynn was removed as head of the agency by James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, and Michael Vickers, the civilian head of Pentagon intelligence at the time, because of his poor management of the agency, said U.S. officials who were familiar with his removal. CONTINUE AT SITE

6 MINUTE VIDEOS ON ISRAEL BY YORAM ETTINGER

Western media and policy-makers try to seduce Israel to misread Palestinian and Islamic terrorism, to make-believe that “one’s terrorist is someone else’s freedom fighter;” that Palestinian terrorism is a reaction to occupation; that Palestinian terrorists are “lone wolves” not institutional….

6-minute-video: Israel facing Western seduction

6-minute-video: Iran – a clear & present danger to the USA
Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought: a US-Israel Initiative”
YouTube 6-minute-video on-line seminar on US-Israel and the Mideast
Video#29: http://bit.ly/2hVvebW; entire 40-video-seminar: http://bit.ly/1ze66dS

The Ayatollahs’ pursuit of nuclear capabilities – irrespective of the July 2015 agreement with the US – aims to achieve a mega capability, in order to remove the mega US obstacle to their 2,500-year-old mega goal of dominating the region and the globe….

6-minute video: Iran’s curriculum reflects Ayatollahs’ policy
Ambassador (ret) Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought: a US-Israel Initiative”
YouTube 6-minute-video on-line seminar on US-Israel and the Mideast
Video#30: http://bit.ly/2iSO5m8; entire video-seminar: http://bit.ly/1ze66dS

The July, 2015 agreement between Iran’s Ayatollahs and the Permanent Members of the UN Security Council and Germany has not moderated the Ayatollahs, according to a June, 2016 study by Prof. Eldad Pardo of Iranian K-12 school textbooks, which are the most authentic reflection of the mission, strategy, tactics, character, worldview and general direction of rogue regimes, such as the Ayatollahs….

The text of the 40-video-YouTube seminar on US-Israel relations and the Middle East is available at: http://theettingerreport.com/

Pence hails House motion on Israel, ‘our most cherished ally’ VP-elect applauds resolution calling Security Council’s anti-settlements resolution a ‘one-sided’ obstacle to peace

Vice president-elect Mike Pence on Thursday hailed a vote by the US House of Representatives declaring a United Nations Security Council resolution a “one-sided” obstacle to peace.

The House resolution was seen as a rejection of the Obama administration, which did not veto UNSC Resolution 2334 condemning Israeli settlements as illegal.

“Great to see strong bipartisan vote in Congress opposing recent UN resolution against our most cherished ally,” Pence tweeted early Friday morning. “America stands with Israel.”

House Resolution 11 declared the UN motion a “one-sided” effort that is an obstacle to peace, placing disproportionate blame on Israel for the continuation of the conflict and encouraging Palestinians not to engage in direct, bilateral negotiations.

Passed by a vote of 342-80, the measure puts the lower chamber of Congress firmly against President Barack Obama’s decision to withhold the US veto power from shielding Israel against the censure.

The IDF’s new social contract : Caroline Glick

Sgt. Elor Azaria, who was convicted of manslaughter Wednesday for shooting a terrorist in Hebron last March, is a symptom of what may be the most dangerous threat to Israeli society today.

Azaria, a combat medic from the Kfir Brigade, arrived at the scene of an attack where two terrorists had just stabbed his comrades. One of the terrorists was killed, the other was wounded and lying on the ground, his knife less than a meter away from him.

A cameraman from the foreign-funded, Israeli- registered anti-Israel pressure group B’Tselem filmed Azaria removing his helmet and shooting the wounded terrorist. According to the military judges, the film was the centerpiece of the case against him.

The day of the incident, the General Staff reacted to the B’Tselem film with utter hysteria. Led by Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gadi Eisenkot and then-defense minister Moshe Ya’alon, Israel’s generals competed to see who could condemn Azaria most harshly.

For the public, though, the issue wasn’t so cut and dry. Certainly Azaria didn’t act like a model soldier. It was clear, for instance, that he acted without proper authority and that his action was not permitted under the rules of engagement then in effect in Hebron.

But unlike the IDF’s senior leadership, the public believed that the fact that it was B’Tselem that produced the film meant that it had to be viewed with a grain of salt.

The name “B’Tselem” was seared into the public’s consciousness as an organization hostile to Israel and dedicated to causing it harm with the publication of the UN’s Goldstone Commission Report in 2009. Among the Israeli-registered groups that provided materials to the biased UN commission charged with finding Israel guilty of war crimes during the course of Operation Cast Lead against Hamas in late 2008 and early 2009, B’Tselem made the greatest contribution.

A testament to Israeli engagement : Ruthie Blum

A guilty verdict, coupled with a pardon, would be the perfect end to this horrible story.

On Wednesday, the verdict was issued in the trial of IDF infantry soldier Elor Azaria. The military court ruled that the 19-year-old medic, serving in the Shimshon Battalion of the Kfir Brigade, was guilty of manslaughter and unbecoming conduct, for his part in the March 24 killing of a knife-wielding Palestinian terrorist in the Tel Rumeida neighborhood of Hebron.

Due to the controversial nature of the trial, which from the outset was a political lightning rod, the verdict was not only broadcast live on all Israeli channels, but it was read aloud by the judge in its entirety. The many months’ worth of witness testimony and arguments from the prosecutors and defense attorneys boiled down to two main questions. The first was whether it was Azaria’s bullet that actually killed the subdued terrorist, whom he shot in the head. The second was whether Azaria’s action was warranted, or genuinely perceived as such by the soldier — who said he believed the terrorist was wearing a suicide belt under his jacket — causing him to make the kind of split-second judgment call required when facing a real-time enemy threat.

The reason that this particular case swept the country by storm had to do with the way it was handled from the minute that Azaria’s comrades came under attack at the height of the so-called “lone wolf intifada” — characterized by stabbings, car-rammings and, most recently, arson.

The left-wing foreign-funded NGO B’Tselem, which holds its own government responsible for terrorism against Israelis — on the grounds that Palestinian violence is an expression of justified frustration at their plight as an “occupied” people — was on the scene filming the event.

To counteract the group’s purposeful ambush to highlight IDF wrongdoing, particularly for international consumption — politicians and much of the public promptly came to Azaria’s defense. Many of us railed against the overly stringent rules of engagement that govern the Israeli military. The Hebrew term for the concept — “purity of arms” — says it all in a nutshell.

Meanwhile, members of the IDF top brass and the former defense minister made statements indicating that they had already decided that Azaria deserved to be punished. So, a case that should have been treated to a thorough internal investigation before it came to light was an immediate circus at which everyone had ring-side seats.

Good Morning America By Marilyn Penn

Lyrica, Xeljanz, Latuda, Brilinta, Entyvio, Vedolizumab, Toujeo, Prevagen, Xarelto – these are but a sampling of the words I learned while watching television news between 6 and 7:30 a.m. Some, like Lyrica or Brilinta might be new baby names for girls; some might belong to bellicose monsters – Vedolizumab and Xarelto; others have a tentative connotation – prevagen. All carry warnings of severe side effects, some including possible death, for which final effect seems a more fitting adjective. I wondered who names these drugs and whether that is a discrete profession or the product of a staff party with too much alcohol. Are these names with their strange letter combinations the substitute for the unreadable handwriting all doctors previously used to exclude us from their special knowledge? In our digital-happy world where prescriptions must be wired instead of written by the doctor, we may soon no longer need the pharmacists who were trained to decipher those heiroglyphics. One can only wonder at how frequently the wrong medication was previously procured and whether or not that made any difference.

After all, medical protocol tends to reverse itself every decade or so. We now “know” that peanuts should be offered to babies as early in their infancy as six months. Of course you must be certain that your baby won’t go into anaphylactic shock by feeding them – I use that ungrammatical pronoun so as not to offend any infant who might have a gender preference different from their visible nether-parts – an egg and seeing what happens. Babies who die from eggs wil not do well with peanut butter either.

Back to the inscrutable and often unpronounceable names for drugs – my second theory is that their expense necessitates a name that is rare and exotic and never encountered before. None of has ever seen an actual entyvio so we can imagine that its obscurity implies difficulty to harvest or even create in a test tube, making its astronomical price tag more justified. If, for example, you have to send couriers to the steppes of Kalookistan on Mongolian horses to search for entyvio leaves, of course it will cost a lot more than a drug that has only five letters in its mediocre name – advil, for one. While it’s true that the lengthy phenobarbitol is still not overpriced, that illustrates the difference between polysyllabic words and completely unrecognizable ones. We can make out pheno, a common prefix, and there’s that friendly barbi at the end. Try parsing vedolizumab for anything familiar and you’ll get my point.

I am grateful that I don’t need to ask for any of these drugs out loud and in full disclosure, I have to add one more word that did appear in the morning time slot and was not related to big pharma – trivago. Though I would have guessed it was a misspelled acronymic cure for vertigo, it’s actually a website for checking comparative hotel prices. Well, at least you don’t need a prescription for it so it’s safe to just forget it until they come up with a more ingenious name that you might actually remember – like hotelprice.com.

MICHAEL CUTLER MOMENT: PRESIDENT TRUMP’S IMMIGRATION/JIHAD CHALLENGE

This special edition of the Glazov Gang presents The Michael Cutler Moment with Michael Cutler, a former Senior INS Special Agent.

Michael discusses President Trump’s Immigration/Jihad Challenge,as he looks forward to the new president putting security back into the Department of Homeland Security.

Don’t miss it!

And make sure to watch Ingrid Carlqvist focus on How Sweden Became Absurdistan, as she shares her fear that her country could become the first Sharia state in Europe:http://jamieglazov.com/2017/01/06/michael-cutler-moment-president-trumps-immigrationjihad-challenge/

ALEC GROBMAN: THE TWO-STATE SOLUTION-WISHFUL THINKING DIVOTCED FROM REALITY

From the time of the British Mandate in Palestine (September 29, 1922 to November 29, 1947) to the present, numerous British, American and European government commissions and official emissaries have come to the region to investigate the underlying causes of the Palestinian Arab/Israeli dispute. Academics and journalists have added their own analyses.

In the absence of a solution, a myriad of myths continue to proliferate about the conflict. US Secretary of State John Kerry joins the pantheon of American diplomats, academics and journalists who appear either ignorant of why the dispute remains intractable, or are blinded by their contempt for Israel or their own biases. Many seem psychologically incapable of accepting the reality that Palestinian Arabs refuse to accept Israel’s right to exist, and that until they do so, the war against the Jews will continue.
Two Basic Questions Not Addressed

Some of these “experts” are so “obsessively focused” on the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria as “obstacles to peace,” they fail to ask two fundamental questions: Do the Arabs want a two-state solution? Is establishing a separate Arab state in the best interests of Israel and the West?

For many of Israel’s enemies and detractors, even the suggestion of abandoning this formula is proof that Israel does not want peace. The assertion that once the matter of the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria is resolved, a peaceful resolution of the conflict will be achieved, is fallacious. There is no mention of the homicide bombers; pervasive incitement in the schools, mosques and social media; attempts to deny Jewish connection to the land of Israel; the Jewish refugees expelled from Arab countries; or the deadly rock-throwing and fire-bombing attacks, beatings and stabbings.

Rarely, if ever, is there any recognition that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Yasir Arafat 94 percent of Judea and Samaria, which he refused, and then launched the second Intifada. Ten years later, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas 93.6 percent of Judea and Samaria with a one-to-one land swap. This means that expansion has not significantly reduced the land available for establishing a Palestinian Arab state.

To secure Abbas’s consent, the Jewish communities of Elon Moreh, Ofra, Beit El and Kiryat Arba would be destroyed, Hebron abandoned, and Jerusalem divided. In the process, tens of thousands of Jews would be expelled from their homes. Abbas rejected the offer.
Why Do Arabs Reject the Two-State Solution?