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Turkey Adopts Eurasianism by Burak Bekdil

Posted By on July 30th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14625/turkey-adopts-eurasianism

Few observers back then warned that Erdoğan’s pro-West façade was fake and his deep adherence to political Islam, an enemy of the Western civilization, would one day urge him to seek non-Western alliances.

Turkey’s choice of a Russian-made air defense system that is primarily designated to hit NATO aerial assets is a reflection of its anticipation of an aerial military conflict with a NATO member in the future.

No doubt, the S-400 is also a sign of Erdogan’s disregard for Turkey’s increasingly problematic place in the Western alliance. Erdoğan’s ideologues keep on portraying the U.S. as an “enemy country,” and many Turks increasingly buy that line. Seven out of 10 Turks now report feeling threatened by U.S. power….

Ironically, it was an anti-Islamist, Kemalist Turkish general who first suggested that Turkey should align its foreign policy with the rising powers of Eurasia — all of Europe plus Asia. It was just eight months before President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) first came to power, and since then, has remained undefeated. The U.S. at the time was busy with the final touches on the military operation that would oust Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, in March 2003.

General Tuncay Kılınç, the powerful secretary general of Turkey’s National Security Council, said that Turkey should seek an alternative alliance with Russia and Iran. In November 2002, Erdoğan’s AKP came to power, pledging to pursue pro-EU, pro-West, liberal governance, and wrongly accusing Kemalist ideology of being an obstacle against liberal democracy — an incredible political story, to judge it 17 years later. Few observers back then warned that Erdoğan’s pro-West façade was fake and his deep adherence to political Islam, an enemy of the Western civilization, would one day urge him to seek non-Western alliances.

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Arrow – and Israel – in Alaska by Shoshana Bryen

Posted By on July 30th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14627/arrow-missile-test-alaska

Hitting a missile with a missile is what we do.

American and Israeli missile technology, missile capabilities and production capabilities are closely interwoven. They can be because our defense goals are interwoven. The ability to defend civilians from an enemy — regardless of the weapon the enemy brings to the battlefield — is the first and highest priority of both governments.

At the edge of Alaska, Israeli and American cooperation and coordination produced another test of a more humane way for “free people to rest secure.” Just watch out for those rogue amendments.

The recent Arrow 3 missile test in Alaska, announced on Sunday, was nearly taken out by a rogue. Not a rogue missile, mind you, but a rogue amendment to the to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Earlier this month, Congresswoman Lois Frankel (D-FL) proposed the following language:

“None of the funds authorized to be appropriated by this Act or otherwise made available for the Department of Defense for fiscal year 2020 may be made available for the research, development, testing, evaluation, procurement, or deployment of a United States shorter- or intermediate-range ground launched ballistic or cruise missile system with a range between 500 and 5,500 kilometers…”

The prohibition was aimed at the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. But according to one analyst:

(It) would prohibit funding for the U.S.-Israeli cooperative Arrow-3 missile defense interceptor and also severely impact the planning, execution, and evaluation of flight test of the United States Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS), integrated testing with friends and allies… The U.S.-Israeli cooperative Arrow-3 missile defense interceptor would be subject to the prohibition in the amendment and as a result the Missile Defense Agency would be unable to provide (funding) as required by the U.S.-Israeli Memorandum of Understanding…

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Trump Speaks the Politically Incorrect Truth By Christopher Roach

Posted By on July 30th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/29/trump-speaks-the-politically-incorrect-truth/

In an otherwise slow news week, President Trump again commanded national attention. Using his preferred medium of Twitter, he exposed the hypocrisy of major Democrats, who wax poetic about the poor people on the border, even as their own districts persist in crime and decrepitude. 

Unlike almost all of his predecessors, Trump is not afraid to counterattack his critics, nor is he cowed into silence by unfair claims that attacking his nonwhite critics is automatically racist.

Representative Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), who has been a frequent critic of President Trump, was in the crosshairs of the latest tweetstorm, in which Trump pointed out the appalling conditions in Cummings’ Baltimore district.

“Elijah Cummings spends all of his time trying to hurt innocent people through ‘Oversight,’” Trump said. “He does NOTHING for his very poor, very dangerous and very badly run district!” As with his “go back” attack on “the squad” several weeks ago, Trump’s latest remarks evoked feigned surprise and horror. It also prompted a fact-free defense of conditions in Baltimore (reminiscent of the defense of squalid Haiti last year) and, of course, many said this his observations were simply racist.

Many American Cities are Hell-Holes
Trump said something that everyone who has spent any time in America’s cities knows. Many of them are poor, dirty, badly governed, and dangerous—often the worst conditions are in black neighborhoods and majority-minority cities. These combined phenomena create a feedback of “white flight” and capital flight, as businesses, the tax base, and the middle class flee. Over the years, things have only gotten worse.

These majority-minority districts frequently elect useless demagogues, who deliver little, other than the rhetoric of flattery and blame. Cummings and his colleagues Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-Texas) are all archetypal cases. Not infrequently, extensive corruption is the handmaiden of these politicians—Detroit’s Kwame Kilpatrick comes to mind. Trump’s message in recent weeks is straightforward: those who purport to represent these poor and desperate people provide little in the way of good government or service to them.

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Democrats’ Attack Machine Revs Up Against Ratcliffe By Julie Kelly

Posted By on July 30th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/29/democrats-attack-machine-revs-up-against-ratcliffe/

Twenty minutes before President Trump announced Sunday afternoon on Twitter that Representative John Ratcliffe (R-Texas) would be his choice to replace Dan Coats as the director of national intelligence, the Democrats’ attack machine already was in action.

“John Ratcliffe, by one measure the second most conservative member of Congress, appears to believe that the Russia investigation was cooked up by Democrats who ‘committed crimes.’ Now Trump reportedly is considering placing atop the US intelligence community,” tweeted NBC News analyst Ken Dilanian, pejoratively known as “Fusion Ken” for his ties to the infamous opposition research shop, Fusion GPS.

(Take note of Dilanian’s scare quotes around “committed crimes” as if the whole thing was legit and not under criminal investigation by a U.S. attorney or a separate probe by the Justice Department inspector general.)

Trump then confirmed the pick on Twitter, saying Ratcliffe will “lead and inspire greatness for the Country he loves.”

Ratcliffe, a member of both the House Intelligence and House Judiciary committees, earned plaudits last week during the disastrous Robert Mueller hearings for his verbal vivisection of Mueller’s claims about not exonerating Donald Trump on alleged obstruction of justice offenses.

“The special counsel’s job, nowhere does it say that you were to conclusively determine Donald Trump’s innocence,” Ratcliffe told the bewildered prosecutor. “It’s not in any of the documents, it’s not in your appointment order, it’s not in the special counsel regulations, it’s not in the OLC opinions, it’s not in Department of Justice manual.”

Pointing out that the president, like any other American, is entitled to a presumption of innocence immediately caused the Left to brand Ratcliffe a Trump shill, lackey and suck-up.

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The One Debate Question That Must Be Asked — But CNN Won’t

Posted By on July 30th, 2019

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/07/30/the-one-debate-question-that-must-be-asked-but-cnn-wont/

Bringing greatness back to crime-ridden cities like Baltimore, reducing the cost of quality health care, jobs, secure borders, and plenty of other issues will determine the voters’ decision in 2020. But another concern is growing steadily, about a multi-pronged menace that directly threatens American lives, our rule of law, even the integrity of elections — and, by extension, the operation of our Constitution itself.

It is vital that the Democrats running for president be asked about fighting this violent threat during their debates Tuesday and Wednesday nights in Detroit — a city suffering the second-highest violent crime rate in the country, and run by Democrats for the last 60 years.

The question is this:

‘Do You Unreservedly Condemn Antifa?’

Nothing like that question will pass the lips of CNN’s Dana Bash, Don Lemon, and Jake Tapper, however.

Urban crime lacking an ideological motive is bad enough. The video of this Leninist domestic terrorist organization brutalizing the courageous, young Portland, Oregon-based internet journalist Andy Ngo during a June 29 violent demonstration has gone viral. Ngo was punched, kicked, his recording equipment stolen, his face and head doused with eggs and thick liquids, possibly including quick-drying concrete that blinded him.

As Ngo described Antifa’s “black bloc” practice last week to journalist Katrina Trinko, they wear “a uniform of … black clothing, long sleeve, and mask and sunglasses” letting them “easily melt into the crowd when some of them engage in criminal activities such as violence against individuals or property destruction.”

Ngo was hospitalized with a brain hemorrhage from which he has still not recovered.

As Ngo himself recently wrote, “CNN’s Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon have defended Antifa on-air.” And NBC’s “Chuck Todd invited Antifa ideologue Mark Bray on ‘Meet the Press’ to explain why Antifa’s political violence is ‘ethical.’”

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Finally, An American President Stands up to Sharpton An in-depth look at the “con man.” John Perazzo

Posted By on July 30th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274468/finally-american-president-stands-sharpton-john-perazzo

Al Sharpton has been in the public limelight for just over 30 years – ever since he first burst upon the scene by promoting the fake story of a white-on-black gang rape in upstate New York in 1987. But not until now has America had a president with enough courage to tell the nation exactly what Sharpton is: “Al is a con man, a troublemaker, always looking for a score,” said Donald Trump on Monday.  In response, Sharpton did the only thing he’s ever really learned how to do: He accused the president of harboring “a particular venom for blacks and people of color.” What a surprise. “Trump says I’m a troublemaker & con man,” Sharpton added. “I do make trouble for bigots.”

Let’s take a brief look at some of the career highlights of this self-anointed “troublemaker for bigots” shall we?

Supporting a Communist Front and Angela Davis

The February 9, 1971 edition of the Communist Party USA newspaper Daily World, noted that Sharpton had recently addressed a White Plains, New York rally in support of a CPUSA front group called The Committee to Free Angela Davis. At that time, the Marxist revolutionary Davis was in prison for her role in abetting the murder of a California judge.

Sharpton Praises the Marxist Holiday, Kwanzaa

On December 24, 1971, the New York Times quoted Sharpton praising Kwanzaa, the race-centered winter holiday that had been recently established by Maulana Karenga, a Marxist black nationalist who had once been arrested for assaulting and torturing two women. The philosophy underlying Kwanzaa is known as Kawaida, a variation of classical Marxism that also includes enmity toward white people. Practitioners of Kawaida believe that one’s racial identity “determines life conditions, life chances, and self-understanding” — just as Marxists identify class as the determining factor of one’s life conditions.

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Why Russia and China Are Joining Forces The past few years have witnessed a marked increase in American power. By Walter Russell Mead

Posted By on July 30th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-russia-and-china-are-joining-forces-11564441072

Russian and Chinese military aircraft probed South Korean and Japanese air defenses last week, leading the South Koreans to fire more than 300 warning shots before the intruders departed.

This was just the latest manifestation of a deepening alliance between Russia and China. James Dobbins, Howard Shatz and Ali Wyne described the emerging alignment in an April essay in the Diplomat. In 2016, Russia displaced Saudi Arabia as China’s largest source of imported oil. In 2017, the two countries held their first joint naval exercise in the Baltic Sea. In June 2018, Xi Jinping called Vladimir Putin “my best, most intimate friend,” and later that year Chinese forces participated in the largest military exercise on Russian soil since 1981.

The departing director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, says the two Eurasian supergiants are as close as they were in the 1950s. From Venezuela to Syria to Serbia, they are working to frustrate the West. They are also increasingly cooperating in sub-Saharan Africa and have found ways to reduce their competition in Central Asia.

Many analysts discounted the prospects for deep Sino-Russian coordination. Mr. Putin’s overarching foreign policy objective has long been to build up Russia as an independent great power between Europe and China; a close alliance with a rising China works against this goal. Tensions along their lengthy border, commercial rivalries, and Russian suspicion of Chinese designs on its Far Eastern territories tend to drive the two countries apart. Given Russia’s slow decline and China’s rapid rise, some expected Russia would support Western efforts to balance China rather than undermine them.

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Trump, Cummings, Pelosi and Baltimore Democrats have run the violent city longer than most of its residents have been alive. By James Freeman

Posted By on July 30th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-cummings-pelosi-and-baltimore-11564433687

“For example, a Member of Congress named Elijah Cummings said at a House subcommittee hearing in June of 1999: “I live in a drug-infested neighborhood. I know people who have been trying to get treatment for years.” Rep. Cummings elaborated on the horrific conditions in Baltimore:

I’ve known… little girls who I’ve watched grow up from babies and they’re selling their bodies for $5, at 14 years old. I see them everyday. I know the pain of coming home and seeing my home ransacked. My car broken into. Because people are in so much pain they don’t even know they’re in pain…”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosisuggests that President Trump is launching “racist attacks” when he points out the mess Democrats have made of Baltimore. At some point Democrats may have to explain why the city they’ve been running since her brother became mayor in the 1960s consistently fails to protect public safety.

This latest ugly Beltway argument began after Rep. Elijah Cummings (D., Md.), who has represented part of Baltimore for 22 years in the House, berated the acting head of the Department of Homeland Security for the condition of illegal immigrants detained by the Border Patrol. In a series of tweets last week, Mr. Trump compared U.S. border facilities favorably with Mr. Cummings’ congressional district, which the President called “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.” Mr. Trump added that if Rep. Cummings “spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place.”

It certainly is dangerous. Mr. Cummings’ ideological allies at New York University’s Brennan Center recently issued a report on violent crime last year in the nation’s 30 largest cities. Citing data from the Baltimore Police Department, the liberal Brennan crew reports that Baltimore has by far the highest murder rate of any of the 26 big cities for which 2018 data are available. Despite a decline in murders since Baltimore’s horrific 2017, Brennan reports that Baltimore’s 50.7 murders per 100,000 people add up to more than ten times the rate in New York City or San Diego.

The Brennan report makes the understatement of the year in calling Baltimore a “city that continues to struggle with violence.” And President Trump isn’t the only person who has noticed this tragic situation. Some people have been raising the alarm for years.

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Israel Demolishes Illegal Buildings; International Leaders, Media Demolish Truth By Lori Lowenthal Marcus

Posted By on July 30th, 2019

https://saraacarter.com/israel-demolishes-illegal-buildings-international-leaders-media-demolish-truth/?

Last week Israel demolished 13 illegally built buildings which were being erected by Arab Palestinians. Arab leaders screamed “war crimes” and “ethnic cleansing.” That the denunciations were absurd and based on utterly false predicates had no impact on the international response. In a perfect Pavlovian chorus, the media amplified the hysteria, followed by the United Nations the EU and other European leaders who claimed Israel’s action was akin to the destruction of peace in the Middle East. Only the refusal of the United States to join in the lynch mob prevented a formal UN Security Council measure against Israel.

But the real outrage was not Israel’s action in demolishing the buildings. The audacity, and the sloppiness, of the international media and international political leadership is the real outrage.

Because as anyone can see by reading the Israel Supreme Court opinion authorizing these demolitions, every single material “fact” asserted by these outraged protectors of the peace process is wrong:
– The land on which the buildings stood is not under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority, but, as explicitly provided by the Oslo Accords, under the jurisdiction, for security purposes, of the Government of Israel
– Instead it was included inside Israel’s security barrier at the request of the very Arabs who are now complaining;
– The Arab complainants had the benefit of years of due process, which they flaunted by continuously disobeying orders of the Israeli courts that required both the Army and the Arabs to maintain the status quo until the courts could assess the legal merits of the Arabs’ claims;
– The Arabs chose to build right up against Israel’s security barrier even though they had clear notice that such construction was illegal because it impeded the Israeli army’s ability to defend Israel’s citizenry from Arab terrorist attacks.
The fact that these realities are completely ignored by all of the outraged international “authorities” is a disgrace.

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Robert Mueller’s Feet of Clay Peter Smith

Posted By on July 29th, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/07/robert-muellers-feet-of-clay/

If your knowledge of the Robert Mueller fiasco in the United States is informed by any news service in Australia then you are ignorant of the facts. Therefore, let me give you the unvarnished facts as I see them.

First fact: Donald Trump is the most innocent politician in the world. How do I know this, you might ask? Nineteen, Hillary-loving, radical Democrat activists with law degrees, posing as impartial lawyers, investigated the heck out of him for two years on an unlimited budget and with the power to coerce witnesses, to threaten their families, to financially ruin them and to jail them. And yet they came up with squat. There is no other politician in the world who would have survived this kind of inquisition. None. Hence my conclusion that Trump is cleaner than Mother Teresa.

Second fact: Mueller had nothing to do with his own probe. He was titular. He came in each day to have coffee and engage in sheltered-workshop activities. Andrew Weissmann led the probe. He was the de facto Special Counsel. He hired all of the conflicted activists to assist him. He oversaw the writing of the report and the public statement that Mueller made after the report came out; sensibly instructing the doddery Mueller to take no questions about the report of which he had only passing acquaintance.