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Ruth King

The New Middle East By Ted Belman

The Obama Era opened with his Cairo speech, in which he embraced Muslims in general and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular. He planned to depose the secular dictators and replace them with the Muslim Brotherhood. Thus Gadhafi, Mubarak and Assad were marked for removal in that order. The EU was on board.

After supporting the takeover of Egypt by the Muslim Brotherhood headed by Mohamed Morsi, he backed the takeover of Syria by the Muslim Brotherhood in collaboration with the newly Islamist Turkey, headed by Recep Tayyid Erdogan, extolling him as his best friend.

Simultaneously, beginning in 2009, he reached out to Iran. He wanted to embrace it as an ally rather than to designate it as an enemy. His efforts culminated in the disastrous Iran Deal, which provided a tail wind to Iran’s hegemonic ambitions. He overlooked the fact that Iran was a long standing ally of Assad’s and was fighting to resist his removal, which was Obama’s stated goal.

Obama’s reach exceeded his grasp.

Libya, sans Gadhafi, is in chaos. The Egyptian military under Gen al Sisi is in power. He indicted Morsi for treason and banned Muslim Brotherhood again. Obama called his takeover of power a coup thus preventing the US from supporting him. Russia and Saudi Arabia have moved in to take up some of the slack.

Even though Turkey, the Gulf States and the Muslim Brotherhood shared his goal of removing Assad, they have not succeeded due entirely to Obama’s lack of leadership and unwillingness to fight. His removal of the last of the US military forces in Iraq and his willingness to have Iran manage Iraq gave rise to ISIS. Turkey and the Gulf states in different ways supported ISIS, which was Sunni and was seen as a proxy to stop Iran expansionism and topple Assad. The US over time began to see ISIS as a bigger threat than Assad and began to support the Kurds, who they originally shunned, so that they would fight ISIS. They did this even though Turkey was adamantly opposed.

Obama announced that if Assad used chemical weapons, that he would be crossing America’s red line. Rather than enforce that red line, he seized on a lifeline that Russia offered, namely, to work to remove the chemical weapons with the cooperation of Assad. This was a major turning point in the war, as Russia proceeded to take on a greater role in the fighting with America’s blessing, thereby enabling Syria to stabilize and go on the offensive. Russia was not so much interested in defeating ISIS as they were in stabilizing Assad and taking back some territory.

Meanwhile Obama’s plan to have the Muslim Brotherhood with the backing of Turkey replace Assad is no longer operative. The Muslim Brotherhood as a player in Syria is no longer discussed, let alone active. Turkey, who started out with grandiose ambitions to recreating the Ottoman Empire and assuming the mantel of Sunni leadership, has abandoned such ambitions and is working to contain the self-inflicted damage its policies have caused.

Erdogan’s embrace of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood has strained relations with Egypt, who has banned them and is actively fighting them. Egypt is also partnering with Israel to neutralize and contain Hamas in Gaza and all insurgents in Sinai.

Obama’s bellicose statements and actions regarding Cyprus have resulted in new alliance between it and Israel based on their mutual interest in defending and developing their new found gas reserves. Greece too has joined that alliance.

Erdogan has enraged the Russian bear by shooting down one of its fighter planes. As a result, Russia has imposed sanctions on Turkey and is supporting the Kurds who are an anathema to Turkey.

Erdogan started out trying to reconcile with Turkey’s Kurdish population but ended up fighting them instead, in addition to fighting the Syrian Kurds that the US was supporting. Along the way they alienated ISIS, who they were supporting. Now both ISIS and the Turkish Kurds are committing terrorist atrocities against them.

All this has given rise to a new Middle East.

William D. Rubinstein Blacks and Police in Violent America

Anyone who has experienced what America’s ghettos are actually like will know that popular depictions of cops as racist oppressors are distortions and caricatures. These myths and the statistics that belie them are worth exploring in some detail.
Are black people in the United States disproportionately subject to excessive force, including killings, by the police? American liberals certainly think so, and have repeatedly used the slogan, “Black lives matter.” On October 22 last year President Barack Obama said:

I think the reason the organisers use the phrase “Black Lives Matter” is not because they are suggesting nobody else’s lives matter. Rather, what they were suggesting is that there is a specific problem that is happening in the African American community that is not happening in other communities … The African American community is not just making this up.

But he also added, with greater wisdom, that those who make this claim should “back it up with data, not anecdote”.

Support for this contention has been fanned by two recent incidents in the United States in which unarmed black men were allegedly killed at the hands of the local police. Both incidents led to demonstrations and violence throughout America and to enormous media publicity around the world. The first occurred in Ferguson, Missouri (a suburb of St Louis), on August 9, 2014, when eighteen-year-old Michael Brown was shot and killed by police officer Darren Wilson. The second took place on April 12, 2015, in west Baltimore, Maryland, where a twenty-five-year-old black man, Freddy Gray, was arrested for possessing an illegal switchblade; while being transported to the local police station, he fell into a coma in the back of a police van and died. Both incidents and their consequences were widely reported in the Australian media, generally as open-and-shut examples of police brutality and racism, with little or nothing in the way of balance or nuance.

Anyone who has studied these events, or who has real experience of what the black slum areas of America’s cities are actually like, will know that the popular depictions of these events are distortions and caricatures. They are worth exploring in some detail, as are the realities of race and crime in the United States which lie behind them.

Ferguson, Missouri, a largely depressed suburb of St Louis, has a population of 21,000. In 1970 it was 99 per cent white; today it is 67 per cent black. In 1900 St Louis was the fourth-largest city in America, but its population has declined from 857,000 in 1950 to only 317,000 today, and it is now fifty-eighth.

Shortly before he was shot dead, and accompanied by a friend, Michael Brown robbed a local convenience store, grabbing and repeatedly threatening the store clerk. He then stole several packages of cigarillos (often used to wrap marijuana). Officer Darren Wilson had received word of the robbery and attempted to arrest the two men. Brown was six feet four inches (1.93 metres) tall and weighed 210 pounds (95 kilos). He was indeed unarmed, but was actively engaged in rectifying this deficiency, attempting to grab Wilson’s gun through the window of his police car (his DNA was found on the gun and inside the police car). The two robbers fled, with Wilson in pursuit. Brown stopped, turned towards Wilson and moved towards him. Wilson then shot him twelve times, the last shot being fatal.

A Grand Jury, appointed in the wake of the killing and subsequent rioting, deliberated for twenty-five days and completely exonerated Wilson. Many eyewitnesses, most of them local blacks, fully backed up Wilson’s account of the shooting. Nevertheless, almost immediately after the killing, hundreds of protesters gathered to throw bottles at the police, followed by the widespread looting of local shops and violent clashes with the police. These attracted worldwide publicity. Amnesty International sent a thirteen-strong contingent of human rights activists to monitor the local scene. (Amnesty is the body which has issued more reports critical of human rights violations in South Korea than in North Korea.) At the behest of the Obama administration, forty FBI agents were sent to interview potential witnesses; in addition, Obama’s Attorney-General sent his own set of lawyers to investigate further. Again, these investigations completely exonerated Wilson.

Guy Milliere : Villanous Behavior-The cynicism of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton

GOOGLE TRANSLATION

Everyone knows, except the deaf and blind, cynicism Barack Obama. This is not only the worst President of the United States: it is also the most coldly demagogue, most contemptuous vis-à-vis the institutions and the American people.

He choked multiple malpractice Hillary Clinton has, in itself, surprising. He himself violated the Constitution so often in eight years that he deserved a hundred times incapacity procedure, and he lied with such frequency that if the US mainstream media still doing their job, he would have left the house white long, covered with feathers and tar. Nevertheless, he crossed in recent days a few more steps, and showed that he really wanted to transform the United States into a banana republic.

The villainous behavior of Hillary Clinton is himself not to show this woman has literally skeletons in his closet, not just those dead in Benghazi. She is as sold to the highest bidder in recent years that his bank account, and the Clinton Foundation are now worthy of those of a villainous dictator of the Third World. It is so considered above the law it leaking state secrets through an email server that served to regulate small shadow between freedmen color business. She has herself to show that she was ready to lead the banana republic that Obama intends to leave a legacy.

The mainstream press has not reported all episodes of what may be a result if the Godfather Francis Ford Coppola Himself to make films, it is important to relate them here.

First episode: in April, Obama said Hillary was probably committed “negligence”, but it does not merit prosecution. The guideline to be followed by the FBI and the Department of Justice is drawn. Hillary Clinton delivers a truth-against sentence and appears serene: she knows, obviously it is safe.
Second episode: a few days ago, the Minister of Justice very docile Obama Loretta Lynch out and meets Bill Clinton on the runway at the Phoenix airport, and has a long conversation with her. They talk of children, golf and gardening, they say. What else could they talk about? In other times, a secret conversation between the Minister of Justice and a person was the subject of an FBI investigation (Bill Clinton was also involved in the FBI investigation) would have implied demand immediate resignation Minister of Justice and journalists have sneered if they were told that the conversation had focused on children, golf and gardening, but those were other times.
Third episode: Hillary Clinton questioned extensively by the FBI, to his delight, she said.She reported later that if elected President, Loretta Lynch will remain Minister of Justice.
Fourth episode: the FBI director paints a damning indictment against Hillary Clinton and describes very precisely all the reasons that should be worth to this indictment, but concluded that there are no material charges. Hillary, he said, had committed “serious negligence”, but that does not merit prosecution. The resemblance to the words spoken by Obama in April is not accidental.
Episode Five: Obama, in the moments following the declaration of the FBI director share countryside aboard Air Force one in Hillary company, and holds a meeting with her ​​in which he declares that it has all the qualities to succeed him.
Loretta Lynch closes the case.

Pro-Palestinian group: Israel behind US police killings NYU chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine finds way to blame Jewish State for US police offers killing African-Americans.Matt Wanderman

As demonstrators in the United States protest against recent incident in which police officers killed African American men, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) has found a way to blame Israel.

New York University’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine shared a post on its Facebook page claiming that “the same forces behind the genocide of black people in America are behind the genocide of Palestinians.”

Aside from the extreme hyperbole in describing growth from 1.3 million to 12.3 million over the past 70 years as “genocide,” the accusations bring to mind anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jews controlling the world.

SJP suggests that the Jewish State is responsible for all actions taken by police in the United States because some police officers spend a few days training in Israel.

Law enforcement agencies around the world frequently learn from each other, and officers from the US also regularly train with their foreign counterparts. Yet no other country is accused of being secretly responsible for the actions of each local station.

Islamic Spain in Middle Ages no paradise for Christians, Jews, women : Paul Monk

There is a widely held belief that in Spain, during the European Middle Ages, Islam, Christianity and Judaism co-existed peacefully and fruitfully under a tolerant and enlightened Islamic hegemony. Dario Fernandez-Morera, associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University in the US, with a PhD from Harvard, has written a stunning book that upends this myth.

The myth itself has been a comforting and even inspiring story that has underpinned the so-called Toledo Principles regarding religious tolerance in our time. It has buttressed the belief that Islam was a higher civilisation than that of medieval Europe in the eighth to 12th centuries and that the destruction of this enlightened and sophisticated Andalusia should be lamented.

The great Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, a century ago, saw it that way. US President Barack Obama and The Economist magazine have both very recently cited Muslim Andalusia as evidence that Islam has been a religion of peace and tolerance. In short, the myth of Andalusia has been a beacon of hope for working with Islam in today’s world with a common commitment to civilised norms.

This vision was spelled out in Maria Rosa Menocal’s The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (2002) and reinforced by David Levering Lewis’s God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 (2008). But it has deep roots. Edward Gibbon, in his famous 18th-century history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, wrote in glowing terms of the 10th-century Umayyad caliphate in Spain as a beacon of enlightenment, learning and urban living, at a time when Europe was plunged in bigotry, ignorance and poverty.

As someone who has long taken this vision for granted, it came as a considerable shock to me to discover that the conventional wisdom is quite unfounded. In The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise, Fernandez-Morera systematically refutes the beguiling fable. The picture he draws is starkly different from the conventional one, troubling in what it reveals and compelling in its arguments.

If we are to satisfactorily resolve current disputes about Islamophobia and the future of Islam as a world religion, this book is required reading. International reviewers have greeted it as a desperately needed corrective to delusion and propaganda. That will invite pushback from those who either remain committed to the myth or believe it is too important a beacon to allow it to be extinguished.

MARK DURIE: IT’S NOT PERSONAL…IT’S ISLAM

A widely-publicised Iftar dinner, intended to show that Malcolm Turnbull gets what it means to be inclusive, ended badly after he was advised that one of his guests, Sheikh Shady Alsuleiman, had taught that Islam prescribes death for adulterers, and homosexuals spread diseases. No rogue maverick, Australian-born Alsuleiman is the elected national president of the Australian National Imams Council.

Although insisting that “mutual respect is absolutely critical,” Turnbull subjected this prominent Muslim leader to public humiliation. He regretted inviting him to dinner and counselled the sheikh “to reflect on what he has said and recant.” In the middle of an election, wanting to limit fallout from the dinner-gone-wrong, held only days after the Orlando massacre, Turnbull stated that his no-longer-welcome guest’s views are “wrong, unacceptable, and I condemn them.”

Well, Mr. Turnbull may deplore Alsuleiman’s teachings, but the real challenge is that these were not merely his personal views. The sheikh’s teachings on homosexuality and adultery reflect the mainstream position of Islam, preached by many a Muslim scholar around the world today. Telling a sheikh to reject the sharia is like telling a pope to get over the virgin birth.

Western leaders pretend that the objectionable teachings of Muslim faith leaders are personal faults.

Many Australian Muslims will be disappointed at the treatment meted out to Sheikh Alsuleiman. An event designed to honour the Muslim community ended up providing a platform to denigrate one of their most respected leaders for promoting Islamic doctrines. Several Australian Muslim leaders have since dug in their heels to affirm support for the sharia position on homosexuals. So much for recanting.

While Turnbull refused to pass judgement on Islam itself, saying “there are different views of different issues, as there are in all religions,” he also sent a message that he is prepared to disparage Australian Muslims’ religious beliefs. It was a bitter pill for Muslims to swallow that this came in the form of a humiliating invite-to-disavow game of bait-and-switch, conducted during a pre-election media storm.

The cognitive dissonance is startling.

Carol Lee :President Obama Says He Shares FBI Director’s Concerns on Handling of Sensitive Data FBI chief James Comey said Hillary Clinton’s email use while secretary of state was ‘extremely careless’

President Barack Obama said Saturday that he shares the concerns of Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey over the State Department’s handling of sensitive information.

Mr. Comey said last Tuesday that the FBI found evidence during an investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email use of a department “generally lacking in the kind of care for classified information that is found elsewhere in the U.S. government.”
Asked for the first time about the FBI’s findings during a news conference at the conclusion of an international summit in Poland, Mr. Obama said: “I am concerned.”

Mr. Obama declined to comment on Mr. Comey’s statements, such as that Mrs. Clinton and her colleagues had been what the FBI director said was “extremely careless” in handling classified information.

State Department Objects to Jewish Homes in Jerusalem By P. David Hornik

Israel has announced that it will be building 800 new housing units. Of these, 560 will be in Maale Adumim, a town of 40,000 located four miles east of Jerusalem, and 240 will be in three Jerusalem neighborhoods.

State Department spokesman John Kirby reacted with unusually strong language:

If it’s true, this … would be the latest step in what seems to be the systematic process of land seizures, settlement expansions, and legalization of outposts that is fundamentally undermining the prospects for a two-state solution. We oppose steps like these which we believe are counterproductive.

Kirby added that Washington was “deeply concerned”:

This action risks entrenching a one-state reality and raises serious questions about Israel’s intentions.

It should be added that Maale Adumim and the three “East Jerusalem” (actually eastern, northern, and southern Jerusalem) neighborhoods are located on land that was illegally occupied by Jordan from 1949 to 1967, and that Israel seized from Jordan in the 1967 Six Day War after Jordan attacked Israel.

It should not, though, have to be added.

The notion that Israel, by building homes in such places, jeopardizes chances of resolving the Palestinian issue is fundamentally flawed, and the State Department — if it were not wedded to that notion — would be able to find out why by doing a little fact-checking.

As Evelyn Gordon illuminates, since Benjamin Netanyahu was elected prime minister in 2009 (he has been reelected twice), Israel has not been engaging in a “systematic process of land seizures” or anything of the kind. Actually, construction in “settlements” — a term now used even for Jerusalem neighborhoods — has slowed to a crawl:

As data from Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics unambiguously shows, since taking office … Netanyahu has built far fewer units in the settlements than any of his predecessors. True, he periodically announces grandiose building plans, as he did this week. But most are quietly frozen again immediately afterward; very few ever get built.

Gordon also reports on an investigation by Shaul Arieli — a leftist Israel who opposes Israeli construction in land previously occupied by Jordan — that finds:

In 2015, as in the preceding five years, almost 90 percent [of population increase in the “settlements” was] a result of natural population growth.

In other words — scandalous as some may find it — Israelis living in these communities have babies.

MY SAY: ABOLISH THE JOB KILLING REGULATORY FEDERAL AGENCIES

Tired of reading about Government Waste? go to http://www.openthebooks.com/
And please read this column:
To Reclaim America, Abolish the Federal Agencies By Michael Walsh May 17, 2016

https://pjmedia.com/michaelwalsh/2016/05/17/to-reclaim-america-abolish-the-federal-agencies/?singlepage=true

The decline of America, perhaps surprisingly, can be traced directly to the Nixon administration. Surprising, because the Left hated Tricky Dick with a passion that can only be compared with the passion that animates the never-Trump crowd: sheer, animal loathing. Surprising, because Nixon was the most domestically liberal, if not actually leftist, president we’ve had until Obama. Surprising, because to this day old Nixon-haters still foam at the mouth at the very thought of the man who took down the “pink lady,” Helen Gahagan Douglas, and saved Israel in 1973; a year later, of course, they finally sacked him over Watergate.

But it was during the first Nixon administration that the hideous monstrosity of the Environmental Protection Agency came into being by executive order, along with its ugly twin, the Occupational Safety and Health Act. Seemingly innocuous and well-intentioned at the time, both agencies have metastasized, their original missions completed and now forever on the prowl for something else to meddle with. They’re both unconstitutional, of course, but what’s even worse is that they’ve turned into rogue agencies, issuing edicts, orders and regulations largely devoid of congressional scrutiny — pure instruments of executive power, with none to gainsay them.

To get an idea of just how obnoxious and intrusive these do-gooder agencies have become, get a load of this from Lou Ann Rieley, who owns a farm in Delaware:

This week a young rancher in Wyoming, Andy Johnson, won a battle for private property rights against one of the bureaucratic entities that strikes fear in the hearts of farmers and ranchers nationwide, the Environmental Protection Agency.

Johnson fought back against a mandate from the EPA to dismantle a pond that he had built on his own land with the required state permits. Fines totaling $16 million were imposed before they were finally overturned in the wake of his court victory.

As I read about his ordeal I thought back through the years that I have managed our small family farm and the many times we have been harassed by government busy-bodies who thought it was in their purview to question us, investigate us, intrude on us, and regulate us.

Let’s stop right there. (You can read all about the Johnson case, which ought to outrage every real American, here.) Sixteen million dollars in fines? For what?

Obama Justice Department Laughed Off Armed New Black Panther Threat By J. Christian Adams

In 2009 and 2010, lawyers working at the United States Justice Department warned top Obama political appointees and other Justice Department officials about the dangerous threats of New Black Panthers to kill police officers and other whites. I was one of those lawyers who delivered those warnings.

Our warnings came in the context of the Voting Rights Act case I and other lawyers brought against the New Black Panthers on behalf of the United States in 2009, a case the Obama administration ultimately abandoned. Both top DOJ officials, including now Labor Secretary Tom Perez, as well as rank and file employees in the Civil Rights Division, were warned but did not take the New Black Panther threat seriously or otherwise considered the organization to be a laughable joke.

Allies in the media echoed the narrative that the defendants in the voter intimidation case were harmless clowns.

Among the information presented to top officials was a video produced by the New Black Panthers entitled “Training Day.” The video proposes killing police officers by ambush. I wrote about the video:

Another New Black Panther posing in the above photo and kneeling with a shotgun is “Field Marshal” Najee Muhammad. As I wrote in my book Injustice: One of them was Panther “Field Marshal” Najee Muhammad, who is seen in a Panther video called “Training Day” in which he encourages blacks in DeKalb County, Georgia, to don ski masks, lie in wait behind shrubs, and kill police officers with AK-47s. Following that exhortation he mocks the hypothetical victims’ grieving widows.