RUTHFULLY YOURS

What a difference an administration makes.

Under Bush, Muslim World League secretary-general Abdullah Al-Turki described the Jews as “perfidious” and suggested that “it is the natural disposition of the Jews who inherited this deception from their forefathers.”

Under Obama, the Muslim World League Journal ran an article claiming that “Jews” and “Jewesses” run the media. It was one of many violently anti-Semitic pieces that had appeared in the publication.

Under Trump, the Muslim World League sent a letter to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum before the commemoration of International Holocaust Memorial Day expressing, “our great sympathy with the victims of the Holocaust”. It goes on to completely disavow any support for the Holocaust or its denial, “This human tragedy perpetrated by evil Nazism won’t be forgotten by history, or meet the approval of anyone, except criminal Nazis or their genre. True Islam is against these crimes. It classifies them in the highest degree of penal sanctions and among the worst human atrocities ever.”

The letter was signed by Dr. Mohammad Al Issa, the new Secretary General of the MWL who had replaced Al-Turki in the summer of ’16. The MWL is under Saudi control and Al Issa, who is loosely associated with the reformers, was appointed as major changes were sweeping the desert kingdom.

The MWL Holocaust letter never mentions the Jews by name. It was sent to the Holocaust Memorial Museum, a United States government institution, rather than a Jewish communal institution. The new alignment between the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia is based on a growing threat from Iran. The letter allows Saudi Arabia to distinguish itself from Iran’s anti-Semitic obsession with the Holocaust.

President Trump’s first State of the Union aimed at bolstering the US posture of deterrence, reassuring allies and putting enemies and adversaries on notice.

The more reinforced the US posture of deterrence, the more restrained is the offensive conduct of Iran’s Ayatollahs and Islamic terror organizations – as well as the global activism of Russia and China – and the more secure are US allies, such as Israel, the Arab Gulf States, Jordan and Egypt.

The post-Reagan years have yielded a systematic erosion of the US posture of deterrence, adrenalizing the megalomaniacal veins of the rogue Ayatollahs and Muslim Brotherhood terrorists, whose machetes are at the throat of every US ally in the Middle East.

President Trump’s critical and urgent challenge is to reconnect the US national and homeland security policy with the 1,400-year-old unpredictable, violent, treacherous and threatening Middle East reality, and disconnect from former President Obama’s worldview, which window-dressed the volcanic, anti-Western Middle East reality to accord the principles of peaceful-coexistence and the struggle for human rights and economic prosperity.

The confidence of US allies in the Middle East – facing lethal threats internally and externally – was undermined by President Obama’s worldview, which subordinated the US independence of unilateral military action to multilateralism; accorded the UN and Europe central roles in shaping the international arena; considered any war as immoral, and aspired to advance peace at, almost, any price; assessed Islam as a religion of peace, not a threat; viewed Islamic terrorism as “workplace violence and the horrific outburst of violence” (as erupted in Ft. Hood, Texas in November 2009); determined that the triggers of terrorism were poverty, despair, erroneous US policy and US troops on Muslim lands; assumed that the means of combatting terrorism were law-enforcement, diplomacy, economic support, reasoning with rogue regimes and a very limited military commitment; embraced the worldview of the State Department, which opposed the establishment of Israel in 1948, and perceives the Jewish State a strategic liability in 2018.

In what has ironically been designated “Operation Olive Branch,” Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been trying to put the northwestern Syrian region of Afrin into a stranglehold. Turkey is now in its second week of bombardment over Afrin from the air and heavy tanks are now carrying out a ground offensive into the Kurdish region.

Erdogan is a brute and a thug, who has made a habit of trampling on the human rights of his own people. He used the failed military coup of July, 2016 to arbitrarily arrest and imprison anyone whom he considers to be his opposition, including dissidents, parliamentarians, journalists, and academicians. Many have been languishing in prison since the failed military coup, without right of habeas corpus, and in 2017, Erdogan further strengthened his ironclad grip on the country of Turkey by winning a referendum, so there is no longer a free and independent judiciary or a free and independent legislative branch. A former member of the opposition party in the Turkish Parliament recently told me, “Every Saturday night, my friends and colleagues gather to read the newspaper to see if they are on the list of people to be purged in the coming week.”

The late Soviet dissident, Andre Sakharov, once said, “One can always tell a nation’s foreign policy by the way they treat their internal dissident population.”

The State of the Union address issued by Donald Trump represented a refreshing break from the eight years of pusillanimous foreign policies pursued by past administration. Nowhere was this more evident than in the manner in which Trump described Iran’s repressive regime and attempts by the Iranian people to overthrow it through peaceful protest.

When it comes to Iran’s governing authorities, the Trump administration is under no illusions about the nefarious nature of this fascist theocracy. “We are restoring clarity about our adversaries,” Trump stated in a not too subtle jibe at his predecessor who seemed to be in a perpetual state of confusion about who his friends and enemies were. Trump also referenced the recent widespread Iranian protests, crushed with extreme ruthlessness by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and its Basij auxiliary militia. “When the people of Iran rose up against the crimes of a corrupt dictatorship,” he stated, “I did not stay silent. America stands with the people of Iran in their courageous struggle for freedom.”

By contrast, Barack Obama and his obsequious acolytes were besotted by the prospect of forging détente with the despotic mullahs of the Islamic Republic. His administration remained largely silent when Iranians took to the streets in 2009 to protest a rigged election. Some have speculated that his administration missed out on a prime opportunity for regime change. It was only downhill from there.

Where the seats of power are located matters. Given the populist revolt in the United States and Europe against the so-called global elite, it is time to refigure the geography of governmental and transnational power.

Take the United Nations. Much of the international body’s perceived negatives derive from being in the world’s richest and most visible city, New York. But what if U.N. elites did not have easy access to instant television exposure, tony Manhattan digs, and who’s-who networking?

Most of the world is non-Western. Many Western elites are apologetic over past sins of imperialism and colonialism.

So why not move the United Nations to Haiti, Libya, or Uganda? The transference would do wonders for any underdeveloped country, financially, culturally, or psychologically. U.N. officials without easy access to Westernized media and the high life might instead have more time to concentrate on global problems such as hunger, disease, and violence — and be personally enmeshed in the dangers they address.

Given the controversy over President Trump’s supposed disparagement of such countries as “sh**holes,” having an underdeveloped nation host the United Nations could refute such stereotyping. Relocating the U.N. to a capital such as Port-au-Prince, Tripoli, or Kampala would prove that such places are unduly underappreciated and surprisingly wonderful cities from which to conduct international governance.

Liberals treasure the United Nations. Conservatives don’t trust its often anti-democratic and anti-American tenor. So why not split the difference by staying in the United Nations but, after 66 years of a New York headquarters, finally allowing another country a chance at hosting the U.N.?

Two years ago, as then-secretary of State John Kerry was boasting in Davos about Obama’s deal with Iran, he acknowledged that some of the $150 billion given to the mullahs in Tehran “will end up in the hands of the IRGC or other entities, some of which are labeled terrorists. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that every component of that can be prevented.” He was right. We don’t know how much money went to fund Iran’s global terrorist activities. And we know even less about the billions in untraceable cash that was supposedly delivered to the mullahs or the recipients of that cash. How about investigating that? There should be ample evidence to prove Kerry and his boss President Obama have willfully engaged in terrorist financing and money laundering. That is unless the pertinent emails and documents related to the payments to Iran had been lost or destroyed.

After the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was implemented on January 16, 2016, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who wished to lift all sanctions on Iran, kept complaining that “On paper the United States allows foreign banks to deal with Iran, but in practice they create Iranophobia so no one does business with Iran.” As much as the Obama administration wanted to comply, it needed congressional support to do that. Thus, the Obama administration decided to circumvent U.S. anti-money laundering laws to help Iran’s economy.

Between March, 2012 and January, 2016, when the U.S. lifted the sanctions, Iranian banks had no access to the Belgium-based SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) system. During that time, according to a European oil trader, “Nobody could pay the Iranians via normal lines, not even in euros.” Yet, Iran has received billions of dollars in sanctions relief as incentives to attend negotiations with the United States and others in Geneva. In August, 2012, following a major earthquake in Iran, the Obama administration issued a 45-day general license allowing “registered NGOs to send up to $300,000 to for humanitarian relief and reconstruction activities. And what assurances were there to ensure the money got to the right hands? At that time, Treasury’s spokesman John Sullivan declared, “The license specifically forbids any dealings with entities on the OFAC SDN list such as the IRGC. There is also a mandated report to the Treasury and State Departments, so we can make sure the money does not end up in the wrong hands,” he said. However, he was not asked, and he did not give any information on how the cash was transferred to Iran.