Tehran Seeks a ‘Better Deal’ By Shoshana Bryen

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/12/tehran_seeks_a_better_deal_.html

“Iran is prepared to reach a ‘good agreement’ quickly, with the goal of protecting the Iranian people’s rights and interests,” the Iranian foreign minister announced as Ali Bagheri Kani, the country’s chief negotiator, was arriving in Vienna for another round of nuclear negotiations. Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper posits that the Islamic Republic is coming to Vienna to reap economic and political benefits for its people.

Go with it for a moment. Accept that Tehran only wants to take care of its people and seeks a better deal than the one that imposed sanctions, limitations, and inspections.

But be careful.

Western media and politicians like to date Iranian cheating from the Trump administration pullout of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). But Iran cheated on the terms of negotiations with both the IAEA and the P5+1 before, during and after the deal. No less an authority than President Barack Obama said after cheating on agreements with the IAEA over the Fordow site was exposed in 2009, “As the international community knows, this is not the first time that Iran has concealed information about its nuclear program.”

The JCPOA was intended to halt all enrichment at Fordow and make it an R&D facility. Now, Iran has acknowledged not only continuing enrichment, but at higher levels with advanced centrifuges barred by the JCPOA.

Foiling a Chinese Military Operation in the United Arab Emirates The Middle East becomes a battleground for U.S.-Chinese competition. Michael Ledeen

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/china-michael-ledeen/

China has long held a distinct advantage in the field of competitive intelligence, with its enormous edge in population.  This enables the People’s Republic to penetrate anywhere with a substantial ethnic Chinese population bloc with consummate ease, either by offering substantial amounts of money to potential allies or threatening to crack down on reluctant collaborators.

The Chinese have an ancient drive toward ethnic unity, and they do not accept the division of their people into tribes or clans. The current dictator, Xi, regards this unity in racial terms.  He believes that all Chinese share common characteristics, wherever they are born or raised.  Hence Xi believes that all Chinamen owe obeisance to the rule of China itself.  

It was no great surprise, then, when the United States discovered China at the heart of an espionage ring in the United Arab Emirates. The U.A.E. is one of the closest United States allies in the Middle East and has long manufactured American weapons and ammunition parts, but until recently there were only suspicions, not facts, to support the suspicions.  So far as Washington could tell, the U.A.E. was unaware of the military content of the Chinese project. So far as Washington could tell, the U.A.E. was unaware of the suspicions.  As the Wall Street Journal put the matter recently, the Middle East increasingly appears to be a primary ground for U.S.-Chinese competition.

The Chinese effort to penetrate the U.A.E. began like many of its previous espionage ventures, with considerable investment.  They apparently hoped to expand their outreach into directly manufacturing American equipment.  But their plot was discovered by American counter-espionage in time to prevent its fulfillment, and the plot was foiled.

Biden Suggests He Played a Part in Negotiations Between Israel and Egypt During the Six Day War By Debra Heine

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/02/biden-suggests-he-played-a-part-in-negotiations-between-israel-and-egypt-during-the-six-day-war/

Either Joe Biden’s faulty memory or his lifelong habit of padding his resume was on display Wednesday during a menorah lighting at the White House in celebration of Hanukkah.

During his remarks before the lighting, Biden bragged about “the many times” he’d been to Israel, and then decided to alter history and insert himself as an important player in the Six-Day War.

“I have known every — every prime minister well since Golda Meir, including Golda Meir,” Biden said to applause. “And during the Six-Day War, I had an opportunity to — she invited me to come over because I was going to be the liaison between she and the Egyptians about the Suez, and so on and so forth.”

This would be an impressive story, except Meir wasn’t Israel’s prime minister during the Six Day War of 1967 (she was PM from March 17, 1969 to June 3, 1974), and Biden was still in law school at the time, (where he ranked a dismal 76th in his class of 85).

National Review’s Jim Geraghty reports that Biden “did indeed meet Golda Meir in 1973—six years after the Six Day War,” but according to a contemporaneous classified Israeli memo, he spent his time trying to convince the prime minister to unilaterally withdrawal from areas in the region, rather than acting as an important liaison between Israel and the Egyptians.

Biden warned that Israel’s actions in the territories it had captured during the Six Day War, including the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, were leading to “creeping annexation.”

Since he believed Israel was militarily dominant in the region, he suggested the Jewish state might initiate a first step for peace through unilateral withdrawals from areas with no strategic importance.

The official said Biden criticized the Nixon administration for being “dragged by Israel,” complaining that it was impossible to have a real debate in the Senate about the Middle East as senators were fearful of saying things unpopular with Jewish voters.

Meir rejected Biden’s call for unilateral steps, launching into a speech about the region and its problems (possibly the spiel Biden alluded to in his own comments years later).

The official added his own personal impressions regarding the young senator at the bottom of the document, saying Biden was full of respect toward the Israeli leader and repeatedly said he had come to learn, “and yet while speaking displayed a fervor and made comments that signaled his lack of diplomatic experience.”

There was no indication in the Israeli memo that Meir saw Biden as her liaison.

Biden’s Two-Faced Agenda on Turkey by Burak Bekdil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17987/biden-agenda-turkey

Since the summer, everything on the Washington-Ankara axis seems to have gone wrong.

Is Biden the champion of human rights and universal democratic values that he claims he is? Or is he an unpleasant cheat with a disappointing fake democratic agenda?

U.S. President Joe Biden’s increasingly hypocritical policy on NATO’s increasingly difficult ally, Turkey, is badly zig-zagging between the U.S. leader’s self-declared advocacy for universal democratic values and Biden’s secret agenda, which he prefers dishonestly to hide: appeasing Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan behind closed doors and condemning Turkey’s democratic deficit in public. In less than two years Biden has swung from a pledge to oust Turkey’s autocratic leader to appeasing him behind closed doors.

In a December 2019 interview, then-presidential candidate Biden said that Erdoğan should be ousted from power through a democratic process and that support for the opposition was crucial. Turkey’s human rights record has gone downhill from there. The Council of Europe has said that if Turkish courts keep ignoring rulings from the European Court of Human Rights, it would start infringement proceedings against Turkey at the end of November.

All the same, on October 31, Biden and Erdoğan apparently had a 70-minute meeting in a “very positive atmosphere” on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Rome. They reportedly agreed to form a joint mechanism to improve ties. “During the meeting,” an Erdoğan aide told this author, “Biden’s lecture on human rights did not exceed two minutes.” It seems that a U.S. delegation will soon arrive in Ankara to work on that joint mechanism.

Biden’s Pandemic Death Toll: It’s Our Own Fault

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/12/03/bidens-pandemic-death-toll-its-our-own-fault/

With the Omicron variant of the novel coronavirus now the latest fashion accessory among the mask-lockdown-vaccine mandate crowd, President Joe Biden unveiled on Thursday his latest plan to keep us healthy. But we’ve seen this before. While running against President Donald Trump, he promised to “shut down the virus.” He failed.

But that’s not his fault, says the Whites House press secretary. We have only ourselves to blame. We haven’t been the pliant subjects Biden was relying on us to be. We’ve disappointed our Dear Leader.

Multiple times during the 2020 campaign Biden swore that if the country would elect him, he would end the pandemic. Yet it remains. Through Jan. 20 of this year, there were 425,000 deaths attributed to COVID-19, according to Centers for Disease Control data. The total now stands at 783,000 deaths, meaning that 358,000 have lost their lives to the disease under Biden.

Yes, more died while Trump was in office, each passing a sad occasion. But vaccinations didn’t begin until there was a little more than a month left of his presidency. Biden was the beneficiary of coming into office with a vaccination campaign already underway. And still death comes.

We won’t blame Biden for the fatalities. We understand that no one man or institution can shut down the coronavirus. But he should be dinged for his outright lie when he promised the country he’d end the pandemic. Either he knew he couldn’t do it, and intentionally misled voters, or he is dense enough to have believed his own words.

Neither possibilities reflect well on him.

On Monday, responding to the Omicron variant of the COVID virus, Biden said: “A year ago America was floundering against the first variant of Covid,” implying once again that he was responsible for America’s rapid response to the pandemic, including the rollout of the vaccines.

This, of course, is utterly false.

Will the Public Finally See What Happened in the Capitol Tunnel? When Americans finally view the surveillance footage, January 6 will make alleged police abuse at LaFayette Square look like a day in the (federal) park. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/02/will-the-public-finally-see-what-happened-in-the-capitol-tunnel/

For months, Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice has tried every trick in the law books to conceal from Americans a massive trove of video evidence that captured all the activity at the Capitol complex on January 6. Federal judges have played along, approving hundreds of protective orders to keep video clips—particularly footage recorded by the Capitol Police’s extensive closed-circuit television system—out of the public eye.

Time, however, is running out for the government.

Despite numerous discovery delays, Garland’s prosecutors are gradually turning over video evidence to defense attorneys as they prepare for trial. All surveillance video from the Capitol’s security system is designated “highly sensitive” government material; strict rules apply to the handling of every slice of footage.

There’s a reason why. As we have reported at American Greatness for months, one of the most scandalous untold stories about January 6 is egregious police misconduct that, in some instances, amounted to brutality by D.C. Metro and U.S. Capitol police. Had these attacks by law enforcement occured in any other public or private setting against leftist protesters, the national outrage would have resulted in mass firings and immediate calls for criminal investigations.

For example, the House of Representatives held two hearings last year related to its investigation into allegations of excessive force by members of the U.S. Park Police in LaFayette Square, located across the street from the White House, on June 1, 2020. Rioters protesting the death of George Floyd occupied the federal park for days, attacked law enforcement, set fires, and looted nearby property, which prompted the Secret Service to move President Trump to a safe location. An inspector general report later confirmed rioters assaulted federal officers with “bricks, rocks, caustic liquids, frozen water bottles, glass bottles, lit flares, rental scooters, and fireworks.” 

But LaFayette Square rioters were portrayed as victims rather than perpetrators of the violence. One activist, Kishon McDonald, a 39-year-old Navy veteran, testified to the House Natural Resources Committee in June 2020 that “police started throwing tear gas and flash-bang grenades at us for no reason . . . We were retreating. Using weapons on us was ridiculous. It just made the situation dangerous.” Officers also were accused of hitting protesters with riot shields and batons.

A similar yet more violent situation played out on Capitol Hill on January 6. Open-source video and testimonial evidence show Capitol and D.C. Metro police officers using flashbangs, “sting balls” filled with rubber projectiles, and excessive amounts of tear gas against peaceful protesters assembled outside the building an hour before the building even was breached. Other first-hand accounts describe physical assaults by police; one clip circulated on Twitter in late November shows several D.C. Metro police officers taking down and beating a protester who apparently breached a security line.

At least one protester, Ashli Babbitt, was shot and killed by Capitol Police Officer Michael Byrd, although she was unarmed and posed no lethal threat.

Hearing from the Defense 

Democrats, most Republicans, and the entire corporate news media not only have ignored provable instances of police brutality on January 6 but suggest “insurrectionists,” including Babbitt, deserved their fate. The same news organizations that for years have covered every angle of alleged police misconduct are selectively quiet when it comes to the egregious behavior by law enforcement during the Capitol protest.

Here Comes the Limited Hangout America’s Nixonian press corps takes a page from the Watergate playbook to try and cover up its active role in the criminal Russiagate hoax By Lee Smith

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/limited-hangout-lee-smith

Since Watergate, conventional Washington wisdom holds that the cover-up is worse than the crime. Richard Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) tasked former intelligence operatives to break into Democratic National Committee headquarters to wiretap the opposition. To cover up his involvement in the Watergate break-in, Nixon lied about what he knew and when he knew it, resulting in his resignation from office.

Whether Hillary Clinton was aware of the crimes committed between 2016 and 2020 to further her political ambitions is a question that may never be answered. What has been proved beyond any shadow of doubt by the U.S. Justice Department over the past few months is that top operatives in her 2016 campaign used concocted falsehoods to leverage active law enforcement officials who in turn used U.S. government programs and resources to spy on the Trump campaign—a violation of American political norms whose only real parallel is Watergate. We also know that under the pretext of “investigating collusion,” at least 40 Obama officials, including then-Vice President Joe Biden, spied on the Trump team. There is circumstantial evidence that Barack Obama knew what was going on, but since, miraculously, no one has ever publicly asked him about Russiagate, not even once, he hasn’t had the opportunity to either lie or come clean.

But with Trump now safely out of office, it appears that the cover-up is now cracking wide open. In September, John Durham, the special counsel investigating the origins of the FBI’s Russia probe, charged Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann with lying to the FBI. In September 2016, Sussmann, a former Justice Department official, passed reports to the bureau that were meant to incriminate the Trump circle by claiming evidence of links between the Trump organization and a Russian bank. Sussmann had told the FBI he was not acting on behalf of a client, but records Durham obtained from Sussmann’s law firm, Perkins Coie, showed he was billing the Clinton campaign for drawing up the reports and for the meeting itself.

Remember The San Bernardino Fourteen Key collaborator with terrorists Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik gets only probation. Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/remember-san-bernardino-fourteen-lloyd-billingsley/

On December 2, 2015, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik drove up to the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California, and began firing automatic rifles while still outside on the grounds. The American-born Muslim Farook and the Pakistani-born Malik, then barged inside where a holiday party was in progress.

There Farook and Malik gunned down Robert Adams, Isaac Amianos, Bennetta Betbadal, Harry Bowman, Sierra Clayborn, Juan Espinoza, Aurora Godoy, Shannon Johnson, Larry Daniel Kaufman, Damien Meins, Tin Ngyen, Nicholas Thalasinos, Yvette Velasco, and Michael Wetzel. The pair then fled in a black SUV and fired more than 100 rounds at police, wounding one officer.

Police took down the terrorists and inside their SUV found a trigger device to detonate bombs the Muslims had planted at the Regional Center. Had the bombs exploded, many others would have perished.

“We must seek justice for those who lost their lives in the recent attacks in Paris and San Bernardino,” said California attorney general Kamala Harris in a December 17 statement. Like the composite character David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, Harris failed to name any of the fourteen murder victims. On the other hand, the attorney general did make her priorities evident.

“Ultimately,” Harris said, “not only is it immoral and contrary to our values to stoke fear and cast aspersions against an entire faith and the millions of law-abiding American Muslims, but it is also strategically unwise. This very community is a critical ally in the short and long term fight combatting terrorism and radicalization here at home and across the world.”

Harris was joined by officials from the Muslim Public Affairs Council and CAIR, whose Los Angeles director Hussam Ayloush said “Islamophobic and xenophobic rhetoric by certain public figures has made Muslim communities an easy target for hate crimes.” Attorney general Harris, Ayloush added, “exemplified leadership” by addressing “the spike in hate crimes against American Muslims and other minorities.”

In a statement one year later, Harris recalled “those who lost their lives and the loved ones they left behind,” but named not a single victim or any of the “brave first responders.” Those were the San Bernardino police, but the word “police” does not appear. In similar style, Farook and Malik were not named, and Harris does not mention their possible motive for “the tragedy that took place.” Like the president, Harris hailed the Muslim community as an ally against terrorism. In this case, it wasn’t.

Yom HaGirush: The Inside Story of ‘Expulsion Day’ The largely forgotten ethnic cleansing, almost unparalleled in the history of human rights abuses Edwin Black

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/yom-hagirush-inside-story-expulsion-day-edwin-black/

Today, we speak of a largely forgotten ethnic cleansing largely unparalleled in the history of humanitarian abuses. Recall the coordinated international expulsion of some 850,000 Jews from Arab and Muslim lands, where they had lived peaceably for as long as 27 centuries. As some know, in 2014, the Israeli government set aside November 30 as a commemoration of this mass atrocity. It has had no real identity or name like “Kristallnacht.” But today, from this day forward, the day will be known as Yom HaGirush: “Expulsion Day.”

It has been a years-long road to identify and solidify this identity. It began the moment Hitler came to power in 1933. The international Pan-Arab community, coordinated out of Palestine and spanning four continents, formed a vibrant political and later military alliance with the Nazis. This partnership functioned in the rarefied corridors of governments, the riot-torn streets of many cities on all sides of the oceans, and eventually the gun-powdered trenches and frontlines of war-strangled Europe. The overseer of this alliance was Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, but he led an eager coalition of Arab leaders organized into the Arab Higher Committee, along with popular supporters from the Arab Street. They had fused with Nazi ideology and goals, which included the destruction of the Jews and the defeat of British influence.

After the Mufti fled criminal prosecution in Jewish Palestine in October 1937, he relocated to Baghdad. Iraq became the new center of gravity for the Arab-Nazi collaboration. By the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Iraqi Arabs under the guidance of the Mufti had imported all sorts of Nazi ideology and confederation into Iraq. On June 1–2, 1941, as Germany was poised to attack Russia and needed Arab oil, Nazi Arabs in Iraq launched a bloody two-day pogrom against its Jewish community which had dwelled there for 2,700 years—a thousand years before Muhammad. The hyphenation Arab-Nazi applies, not merely because these Arabs were fascist in mind and deed, but because they actually identified with Germany’s Nazi Party. Some rioters wore swastikas; many had actually marched in the Nuremberg torchlight parades. The Syrian Social Nationalist Party adopted a flag that spun off from Nazi Germany’s.

In that nightmare June 1–2 riot, Jews were hunted in the streets. When found, Jewish girls were raped in front of the parents, fathers were beheaded in front of their children, mothers were brutalized in public, babies were sliced in half and thrown into the Tigris River. The Baghdad mobs burned dozens of Jewish shops, invaded Jewish homes and looted them.

We will never know how many hundreds were murdered or mutilated because in the investigation that followed, many were afraid to come forward. But that bloody event became known as the Farhud, meaning violent dispossession. The Farhud spelled the beginning of the end of Iraqi Jewry—more than 140,000 souls.

Genocide, Stolen Land, and Other Lies about America Native Americans: War refugees on conquered American soil? Jason D. Hill

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/genocide-stolen-land-and-other-lies-about-america-jason-d-hill/

A few years ago, I was invited by a small liberal arts college in the Northeast to give a series of lectures on ethics and the formation of moral character to a mixed group of juniors and graduating seniors. I began the class with a discussion of how moral character was undoubtedly shaped by cultural norms, mores, traditions, and protocols but that, given the capacity of humans to question the sense-making narratives they inherit from their societies, the development of agency was also an individualist undertaking.

Before I could even finish my introductory remarks, an earnest young woman blurted out that such an undertaking would be immoral. There was no such thing as an ethical milieu in America. There were no uncontested cultural mores, norms and values because these all presupposed a moral space; a location in which ethical agency could emerge. America, she announced, was and continues to be, located on stolen lands. This land was forged in genocidal conditions to eliminate Native Americans from the continent. That we lived on their stolen land without their permission, that we had yet to admit that genocidal policies neutralized any possibility for an ethical space in which moral agency could be developed was not just naïve—it was immoral. The United States of America, she declared, was irrevocably tainted as a country. The concomitant agency that sprung from any spatial alignment within its reaches was bound to be ethically compromised. Just as a criminal can never legally purchase stolen goods and claim to feel reasonably attractive in them, so too, no American could claim to ever have a legitimate ethical identity short of giving back stolen lands to the Native Indians; or, paying them for all illegally acquired lands.

She was breathless at the end of her disquisition and visibly upset. She told me that my approach to the subject was wrong and that, respectfully, I was, perhaps, unknowingly, a participant in a continued colonial settler project.

I remained somber and thanked her for her passionate viewpoint. She corrected me to say that she had uttered an unassailable truth. I asked the class if it had thoughts on the matter at hand. To a person, everyone agreed with the student. Some added that Americans ought to leave the content and relocate elsewhere and give up even their homes to Native Americans. The discussion went on for around thirty minutes during which time I basically functioned as an objective moderator, pointing out, for instance, cases in which land was purchased in a legitimate manner by the Europeans and Americans from the Native Indians.

When one student declared that the moral but impractical thing would be for every American to offer him or herself up for execution to living Native Americans—I’d just about had enough of this malarkey. Almost sensing my frustration, the student who had engaged in her soliloquy told me she wanted my personal viewpoint—not some dispassionate attempt at a scholarly answer, as any such attempt would be jaundiced by historical biases shrouded in linguistic traps meant to ensnare the seeker of truth into a web of falsities.

I remained silent, however, for some reason. I wanted to grasp the magnitude of the spectacle unfolding before my eyes. In the subsequent months I read scores of articles of children in K-12 public schools being taught about America created out of stolen lands. I heard Vice President Kamala Harris deliver remarks on the day after Columbus Day, or what has come to be known as “Indigenous Day,” in October of 2021 to the National Congress of American Indians 78th Convention. There, Harris accused the United States of ushering in a “wave of devastation for tribal nations, perpetuating violence, stealing land, and spreading disease.”