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John Kerry, Meet George Logan Is it a crime to meet with Iranian officials? It may well be. Seth Lipsky

Posted By on September 16th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/john-kerry-meet-george-logan-1537129799

George Logan, call your office. That’s my reaction to news that former Secretary of State John Kerry has, by his own account, been meeting privately with Iranian officials to try to save the nuclear deal.

Logan was the Pennsylvania politician whose unauthorized efforts to end the Quasi-War between France and America led to the Logan Act of 1799, which outlaws freelance diplomacy.

The New York Post has called Mr. Kerry’s conniving a “textbook violation” of the law. President Trump, after all, has pulled out of the nuclear accord and decided on a different course. Iran’s leaders, at least for the moment, are hanging onto the deal. Why not? It has brought billions to their coffers as they expand their military campaigns in the Mideast.

Last week the New York Times quoted “experts” as suggesting that the ayatollahs are “gambling” that Mr. Trump will be “crippled” in the midterm elections or swept out of office in 2020.

So have the Democrats been colluding with them? Or, as radio host Hugh Hewitt asked Mr. Kerry last week, has the former secretary of state been “trying to coach” Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif?

“That’s not how it works,” Mr. Kerry said. “What I have done is tried to elicit from him what Iran might be willing to do in order to change the dynamic in the Middle East.” He insisted he’d been “very blunt.” Mr. Kerry also told Mr. Hewitt that the administration appears “hell-bent-for-leather determined to pursue a regime change strategy” in Iran. “I would simply caution that the United States historically has not had a great record in regime change,” Mr. Kerry said. He added that it makes it “very difficult, if not impossible” for Iran to negotiate.

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Why Can’t I Criticize My Religion? by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on September 16th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12944/islam-criticism

On the surface, for those who wanted to reform Islam, the only place to do so appeared to be the West. We all assumed that here in the West, it would be safe to question and criticize. Instead, so many institutions utilize a far more subtle method of silencing criticism.
The more you conceal or disregard constructive criticism of Islam, the harder you are making it for reforms to occur in the religion and the easier you are making it for Muslim radicals to prevail.
The reason I criticize the radical elements of my religion is not because I have hatred in my heart, but because I desire to protect those who have been abused and abandoned by their leaders.

When I received a letter from a Shiite religious preacher from the United Kingdom, it did not surprise me. I receive many similar letters from extremist Muslims all over the world, as well as Western liberals, socialists, and others. Each time, opening these letters, I prepare for criticism of my careful scrutiny of my religion. As expected, the letter began with a familiar suggestion: “Stop criticizing your own religion.”

The letter went on to support this instruction with promises of the media and Western progressives favoring me and becoming far more supportive of me, if I were to align my views with their preferred talking points:

“If you stop criticizing Islam, the West will certainly be more welcoming of you, and you will receive more offers and opportunities to further your career.”

What is it that I say that rankles the left so much? I refuse to be apologetic for radical Islam in the West. I refuse to gloss over the darkest consequences to which rampant extremism has led. I do not waffle beneath the idea of multiculturalism or tolerance; some things are not meant to be tolerated. The message of the apologists is clear: Get in line. Send out the same messages that others are: about all aspects of Islam being a loving and benevolent religion. Focus on this and sweep the crimes against humanity under the carpet.

I truly wish I could.

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Yellow Journalism of Bob Woodward and the New York Times By Ilana Mercer

Posted By on September 16th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/16/yellow-journalism

It takes no time at all. You listen to Bob Woodward’s halting speech. You read his lumpen prose, and you get right away what undergirds his Trump-phobic tome, Fear: Trump in the White House.

Perhaps naively, the president had expected to fulfill his revolutionary campaign promises to American voters, an assumption that threw Woodward and the D.C. elites for a loop.

If past is prologue, voters don’t—and should not—get their way. After all, the views of Trump voters on American power are polar opposites of those held by the permanent state.

What does Boobus Americanus know? Nothing!

Woodward and the New York Times’ anonymous anti-Trump whistleblower consider the president to be stark raving bonkers for not grasping that Rome on the Potomac moves to its own beat. It does not respond to voters, except to mollify them with “bread and circuses.”

Mostly reflexively, not always consciously, “The Powers That Be” seek to retain and enlarge their sphere of influence. Nothing, not even the venerated vote, is allowed to alter that “balance.”

This means that established fiefdoms and the “thinking” underlying them are to remain unchanged and unchallenged. Foreign affairs, war-making, the post-war economic order and globally guided crony capitalism are examples.

Against this command-and-control apparatus, 62 million Americans rebelled. They liked Trump’s America First ideas enough to elect their champion as president.

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The Bob Newhart Peace Plan By Kevin D. Williamson

Posted By on September 16th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/oslo-accords-anniversary-israel-palestinian-conflict/

The Palestinians need to stop making war before their conflict with Israel can be resolved.

Jay Nordlinger likes to tell a story about “B-1 Bob” Dornan, the Republican congressman from California. He was a famously tough guy, an Air Force captain who survived two parachute bailouts in the Fifties and registered black voters in Mississippi in the Sixties. He said the hardest thing he ever did was quit smoking. But it’s the easiest thing in the world to do: You just stop it. Drinking, drugs, eating junk food — giving any of those up is a purely negative achievement. You just don’t do it anymore. Simple. “ Simple as a flower, and that’s a complicated thing.”

This week marks 25 years since the Rose Garden ceremony celebrating the signing of the Oslo Accords. You’ll remember the famous picture of a beaming President Bill Clinton kind of shoving PLO terrorist Yasser Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin toward each other to shake hands.

Like many of the purported victories of the Clinton administration, that moment of triumph has not aged very well. As Herb Keinon writes in the Jerusalem Post:

The longed-for peace still tarries, the New Middle East of Shimon Peres, one of the architects and leading proponent of the Oslo Accords, never emerged. In fact, some argue that the handshake 25 years ago did not improve the chances of peace between Arabs and Israelis, but actually — because it raised and then dashed hopes — pushed them farther away. A quarter-century since the formal kickoff of the Oslo process, peace between the two sides has rarely felt more distant.

A peace plan isn’t peace. Peace negotiations aren’t peace. Nobel Peace Prizes aren’t peace, either, though they were handed out after Oslo.

Peace is peace.

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Islam and the Culling Foot-Bridge By Amil Imani

Posted By on September 16th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/09/islam_and_the_culling_footbridge.html

Islam operates by two powerful schemes: reward and punishment. It mesmerizes the believer by its encyclopedic descriptions of Allah’s lush paradise that awaits the worthy faithful. For the kefir and a not-so-true Muslim, the destination is Allah’s dreadful hell.

Muslim clergy tirelessly preach about these two locations with great success. Fear of hell, for some, even out-muscles the attractions of paradise and works wonders in keeping the flock servile to the parasitic clergy.

A powerful, well honed scheme involves pol-e As-Sirāt (the footbridge of the path). The kefirs, after they die, do not even get a chance to see if they can cross this footbridge; they go directly to Allah’s hell. Yet all Muslims approach the footbridge. The problem is in crossing it. The preachers describe at great length how difficult it is to cross this bridge over the gorge of hell to the other side, where paradise is located.

A great majority of blindly faithful Muslims are either illiterate or semi-literate. These people tend to take everything the charlatan preachers say as literal truth; many panic with fear and beg the preachers to tell them what they need do to cross that dreadful footbridge. They become ripe for the picking. The preachers, well trained con artists that they are, burden these simpletons with all kinds of well rehearsed fabricated demands to keep the flock in their pen. The preachers say, for instance, that they must do this and they must do that to earn the good graces of Allah. And when they die, Allah will commission two angels to hold them on both sides and safely transport them over the bridge. Wayward Muslims, on the other hand, are all on their own and most likely will fall into the dreadful hell with their very first steps.

When asked about the mercy of Allah, since he is billed as the most merciful, can they count on his mercy to send them the helpful angel if they somehow, themselves, fail to live completely up to the standards of the faith? The preachers have a pet response to that, too. Allah’s mercy has limits. You had best not to count on it too much. He has already shown you his abundance of mercy by sending you his beloved messenger Muhammad. Allah guides, and it is your duty to follow. And if you are confused or in doubt about things, just go to the preachers. They will clarify things for you and set you on the straight path. The crafty preachers claim that they have spent their lives learning the intricacies of the faith, and it is their humble task to serve the believers.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The European Union Would Love to Control Your Internet Use By Janet Levy

Posted By on September 16th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/09/the_european_union_would_love_to_control_your_internet_use.html

Imagine an internet in which users can’t freely blog, parody, share material, or remix content – an online experience in which linking, code-sharing, and the unfettered use of art and images would be nearly impossible due to legal limitations. Unfortunately, this scenario – a restrictive internet culture – may soon be a reality in the European Union with the recent passage of the European Unions Copyright Directive. This new E.U. decree, which includes provisions for filtering and surveillance, could have a chilling effect on internet creativity and innovation, potentially increase censorship, and impose new market barriers for businesses worldwide.

The new regulations were originally proposed two years ago as part of the E.U.’s Digital Single Market policy that applies to 28 E.U. member-states and the four non-E.U. states of Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland. Essentially, it could have a global impact on non-E.U. countries across the world similar to the effect of the E.U.’s 2016 E.U.-wide data protection rules created under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The GDPR took effect in May this year and standardized data protection laws and set guidelines on controlling personally identifiable data. The Copyright Directive imposes requirements that will change the way netizens interface with online content by imposing mandatory upload filtering, a link tax, and certain prohibitions on user-generated content in public spaces. It requires online platforms to implement privacy-killing filtering systems that will ban content usage under the justification of copyright protections. Platforms will be held liable for copyright infringement and fines that could threaten their economic viability. To add to the confusion, the directive is just that, a suggestion, so each E.U. and non-E.U. party must create its own interpretation of the laws. The result could be that all 28 E.U. member-states have their own separate definition of what part of a link can be used and copyrighted.

As part of the proposed Copyright Directive, bots, applications that run automated tasks, will act as censors and arbitrarily decide what content can be accessed and shared or even deleted without the consent of the intended user. No technology will exist to distinguish between the outright copying of material and various forms of commentary. Under the E.U. directive, revenue streams could be claimed by publishers for small amounts of information, even tables, headlines, or images. Uploading of research articles from online repositories will be forbidden, and non-profit education services and universities will have to obtain copyright licenses and install filters. All data, research papers, and articles will exist behind a virtual paywall. Articles for submission will need to be scanned for potential copyright violations. Exemptions are proposed for research carried out “in the public interest,” but how that will be defined and who will be making those decisions are uncertain. Exemptions could easily be decided along political lines, amounting to a form of point-of-view censorship.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Trump Pulls Back the Shroud on South Africa By Steve Apfel

Posted By on September 16th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/09/trump_pulls_back_the_shroud_on_south_africa.html

Loathe or admire the apprentice who became the president, all owe a debt to Donald Trump. Upon telling his secretary of state to home in on fears that Mandela’s legatees had declared open season on white farmers and farmland, the habituated tweeter provoked his opposite number to defend what, to many, seems gutter politics.

If a road to Hell is paved with good intentions, another road going to the same venue is paved with bad intentions. It’s the road South Africa is on. Manipulators of a penniless mass may drum into them having been dealt a derisory thin edge of the wedge. Do the poor want to go on being pushed around and exploited? Are they content with being homeless and landless? Do they want the white Boers to harvest their lavish gift, the farmlands God meant indigenous people to have and to hold? Do they like being knocked over with a sneeze, or do they want to command respect? Victims may take back what is theirs by right.

The rabble-rousers are half-correct, which is a problem. Under colonial Britain and then Apartheid, South African blacks were displaced; whites did fill the gap. Agriculture thrived, and the Boer farmer lived off the lap of the land. The constitution of 1996 allowed for restitution. Land taken, unjustly by the whites, would be returned. There’d be a more equitable distribution of it in the future. Promises failed to happen, or nowhere near fast enough for a foot-stomping black majority. The Boer villain took the blame; so did black leaders (e.g., the godly Mandela on his plinth) for wanting to reconcile with the privileged whites. Again the instigators of violence make half a case. Land reform was sold to blacks as reward for voting the ANC and allies into the seats of power. Politics what it is, the lining of pockets came first, keeping promises a distant third or fourth or fifth.

But the instigators of trouble and strife are also half-wrong, and that makes another problem. A poll by the South African Institute of Race Relations found that a snippet, a mere 1% of black people see “speeding up land reform” as a top priority. The other 99% don’t want to be farmers. Even the rural poor prefer to live and work and own some real estate in the cities.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

About That Bible Museum in Washington By Alex Joffe see note please

Posted By on September 16th, 2018

This past spring a friend and I spent almost a full day at the museum. It is a noble undertaking, meticulously respectful of all faiths with dioramas, recreations of biblical villages and thousands of displayed texts………rsk

http://www.asor.org/anetoday/2018/09/About-That-Museum-Washington

On a quiet street corner two blocks south of the National Mall and just above the busy highway that is Virginia Avenue is the latest addition to Washington’s cultural life, the Museum of the Bible. But unlike the Smithsonian Institution, sprawled out across the Mall, this new museum is a private venture, a labor of love by the Green family of Oklahoma City, they of Hobby Lobby fame. From the outside, the building looks like a forgotten branch of the Bureau of Printing and Engraving. Inside is a state of the art museum, spread over seven floors and hundreds of thousands of square feet. But the Museum of the Bible is more than that; it is a unique performance space that operates on multiple layers to present an American Protestant perspective on the Bible, God, and History.

Some readers are doubtless ready to stop right here. That would be a mistake, not only because they’d miss some witty insights, but because the museum itself is a serious place that deserves consideration and respect, if only because of the questions it poses for us about the Bible. Who has the right to interpret the Bible? The museum makes it clear that, following the Protestant tradition, all people do. But using what tools? That’s where things get complicated.

Entering the museum through its main door, flanked by tablet-like engravings, visitors are thrust into a marble clad interior space that feels like the corporate headquarters of a global pharmaceutical firm.

Giant touch screens and video displays hint at what is to come, as do the moveable pillars of the Philistine temple in the children’s room, ‘Courageous Pages,’ which junior Samsons can push apart. Another important hint is the Vatican Museum room filled with manuscripts on loan; the museum has been relentless and successful in developing partnerships with other institutions around the world. On the one hand the strategy vastly expands the scope of the displays. On the other, this is a way for an upstart museum to generate respectability and put itself on the map.

Respectability is an important issue, both for the museum and for its patrons. Any new cultural institution in Washington needs to establish itself, and in a city dedicated to the Seven Deadly Sins and then some, a Museum of the Bible is at a disadvantage. So too is the Green family, which founded its first arts and crafts store in 1972. The chain now employs 32,000 people in 800 stores, and is famous for stocking over 70,000 different crafting and home decor items. It is also famous for winning its case in the Supreme Court, in which it argued that as a closely held corporation with religious objections, it did not have to provide contraceptive coverage to employees as otherwise mandated by the Affordable Care Act.

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Oslo at 25: A Personal View By Douglas Feith

Posted By on September 16th, 2018

https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/oslo-accords-douglas-feith/

Perhaps the most important misperception about Oslo is that it is – or was – a peace process, a two-sided affair, a matter of give-and-take in which each side’s promises depended on fulfillment of the other’s promises. My view, as a witness to some of the relevant history, is that it was a kind of unilateral Israeli withdrawal.

Oslo pretended to be a peace process. Israeli officials knew that Oslo lacked mutuality, but they misled the public about the relationship of withdrawal to peace.

The Rabin government’s top officials knew their priorities. Peace was important, and trading land for peace might be useful. But most important of all was reducing the burdens of the occupation. Even if Israel didn’t have the power to win peace from the Palestinians, it had the power to quit the territories on its own.

The idea of unilateral withdrawal had some appeal in Israel long before the first Oslo agreement. Years later, support in Israel for unilateral withdrawal had grown, even though (or maybe because) Oslo had been widely discredited by the terrorism that the Palestinian Authority incited and often perpetrated. Unlike the Oslo redeployments, Israel’s 2005 departure from Gaza was nakedly unilateral; it made no pretense of being a land-for-peace deal.

I served as a low-ranking Middle East specialist at the White House in the Reagan administration and much later as a senior Defense Department official in the George W. Bush administration. I will share a few Oslo-related stories from both of those periods.

Early on I saw that Oslo was more about Israeli withdrawal than peace. I was attuned to this point because of something that happened long before the famous September 1993 Rabin-Arafat handshake on the White House south lawn.

Twelve years before, during the first year of the Reagan administration, I was a National Security Council staff member. Yossi Beilin – at the time an aide to Shimon Peres, who was Opposition leader – came to Washington as the guest of the US Information Agency as part of a program to cultivate friendly relations with promising young foreign leaders. Beilin’s itinerary included a meeting at the White House and I was assigned to talk with him.

Mr. Peres had recently published an article in Foreign Affairs that Beilin was generally assumed to have written, so I asked him about it. The article made the well-known argument that, if Israel continued to hold the territories, the state could not survive as both Jewish and democratic. But, the article said, Israel should withdraw from the territories only if it received reliable Arab peace pledges.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Rift Between Police, Feds Allowed New Mexico Terror Compound To Fester The compound was under surveillance from both local and federal law enforcement, but it took several months for law enforcement to intervene despite local reports. By Kyle Shideler

Posted By on September 15th, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/09/14/rift-police-feds-allowed-new-mexico-terror-compound-fester/

Questions keep coming about how the U.S. justice system responded to a New Mexico compound that housed five alleged would-be jihadists and 11 reportedly malnourished children along with the remains of a twelfth child who died on the compound.

A federal grand jury recently indicted the five alleged jihadists on weapons and conspiracy charges, alleging the group created their compound in the desert outside Taos, New Mexico as a training camp and firing range to facilitate a “Common plan to prepare for violent attacks government, military, educational and financial institutions” and sought to “engage in jihad and form an army of jihad” according to the federal indictment published by the Department of Justice on September 11.

The five suspects—Siraj Ibn Wahhaj, Lucas Morten, Subhanah Wahhaj, Hujrah Wahhaj, and Jany Leveille—had previously faced state charges of child abuse, but the charges floundered in court after a New Mexico judge dismissed charges against all five suspects when state prosecutors missed a 10-day deadline for a preliminary hearing. Prosecutors argued extenuating circumstances but were rebuffed.

The federal charges echo information first laid out in the state prosecutors’ motion urging the judge in the case to reconsider the judge’s dismissal of bail, given evidence that the suspects had discussed targeted attacks against “corrupt institutions,” including schools and an Atlanta-area hospital. Suspects reportedly had repeatedly discussed a willingness to fight and kill law enforcement, and to die as “martyrs.” Prosecutors cited testimony from children inside the camp saying they were being trained to conduct school shootings or other attacks.

The five suspects were arrested after local police launched a raid to respond to reports of child abuse from inside the camp, only to discover a shooting range, multiple weapons, and documents describing a potential terrorist attack, including a document titled “Phases of a Terrorist Attack.”