FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Busting Illusions About Iran Trump puts America on the side of the people, not the Ayatollahs.

Posted By on January 3rd, 2018

Anti-government protests continue across Iran after six days, and the ruling mullahs and Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) are threatening a crackdown that could get ugly. The world should support this fight for freedom, which is exposing the illusions about Iran that dominated the Obama Administration.

Start with the claim that signing a nuclear deal with the Tehran regime would moderate its behavior. Ben Rhodes, President Obama’s chief foreign-policy salesman, said in June 2015 that “a world in which there is a deal with Iran is much more likely to produce an evolution in Iranian behavior, than a world in which there is no deal.”

Mr. Obama said the pact “could strengthen the hands of more moderate leaders in Iran.” And Vice President Joe Biden’s national security adviser Colin Kahl said in 2015 that the Iranians “are not going to spend the vast majority of the money on guns, most of it will go to butter.” Toward that end, the nuclear pact lifted international sanctions and unfroze $100 billion in Iranian assets.

Yet instead of using the money to improve the lives of Iranians, Tehran has used its windfall to back clients making trouble throughout the region. The mullahs have spent billions propping up Syria’s Bashar Assad with troops, weapons and energy shipments. Iran funds Shiite militias in Iraq, Hezbollah terrorists in Syria and Lebanon, and Houthi fighters in Yemen.

The protesters in the streets of Tehran, Qom, Shiraz and other cities are explicitly rejecting this adventurism, shouting slogans like “Leave Syria, think of us!” They want a better economy and more opportunities for their children, not campaigns to build a Shiite empire across the Middle East.

Another busted illusion is that there is a difference in policy between Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the supposedly moderate President Hasan Rouhani. Mr. Rouhani talks about listening to the protesters, but that will last only until the Ayatollah gives other orders. The Rouhani government has responded to the nuclear deal by arresting democracy advocates and taking American hostages like Xiyue Wang, a Princeton PhD student, and father and son Baquer and Siamak Namazi. The protesters are making no distinction between Mr. Rouhani and the mullahs.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

‘White-Informed Civility’ Is the Latest Target in the Campus Wars The rules of collegiate debate are also coming under attack as racist and patriarchal. By Steve Salerno

Posted By on January 3rd, 2018

From the land that irony forgot—which earlier gave us microaggressions and trigger warnings—comes a new and surprising movement, this time to combat civility. Civility, you see, is a manifestation of the white patriarchy. Spearheading this campaign are a duo of University of Northern Iowa professors, who assert that “civility within higher education is a racialized, rather than universal, norm.”

Their article in the Howard Journal of Communications, “Civility and White Institutional Presence: An Exploration of White Students’ Understanding of Race-Talk at a Traditionally White Institution,” describes a need to stamp out what they call “whiteness-informed civility,” or WIC. The pervasiveness of WIC, it seems, erases “racial identity” and reinforces “white racial power.”

Their thesis can be a tad hard to follow, unfolding as it does in that dense argot for which academia is universally beloved. But their core contention is twofold: One, that civility, as currently practiced in America, is a white construct. Two, that in a campus setting, the “woke” white student’s endeavor to avoid microaggressions against black peers is itself a microaggression—a form of noblesse oblige whereby white students are in fact patronizing students of color. Not only that, but by treating black students with common courtesy and expecting the same in return, white students elide black grievances, bypassing the “race talk” that is supposed to occur in preamble to all other conversations. Got it?

Something similar is happening in collegiate debate, where historically high standards of decorum are under siege as manifestations of white patriarchal thinking. So are the factual and logical proofs that debaters are normally expected to offer in arguing their case. Some participants are challenging the format, goals and ground rules of debate itself, in some cases refusing even to stick to the topic at hand.

Again the driving theory is that all conversations must begin by addressing race. As one top black debater, Elijah J. Smith, writes, debate must, before all else, “acknowledge the reality of the oppressed.” He resists the attempt on the part of white debaters to “distance the conversation from the material reality that black debaters are forced to deal with every day.”

Mr. Smith and his think-alikes seek to transform debate into an ersatz course in Black Studies. In a major 2014 debate finals, two Towson University students sidestepped the nominal resolution, which had to do with restricting a president’s war powers, in order to argue that war “should not be waged against n—as.” Two other students decided that rather than debate aspects of U.S. policy in the Mideast, they’d discuss how the common practices of the debate community itself perpetuate racism. Other recent debates involving black participants have devolved into original rap music. CONTINUE AT SITE

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

MY SAY: WOMEN OF IRAN: THROW DOWN YOUR HEADSCARVES JUNE 2009

Posted By on January 2nd, 2018

When the French résistance was fighting the Nazis in 1940, the British and the Americans encouraged them with oratory but withheld any material help. This led the French to say “the British will fight the Nazis to the last drop of French blood.”
I hesitate to encourage the women to resist to the last drop of their blood, but I am dismayed by a number of stylish, well coiffed, décolleté and manicured “feminists” in America, including Iranian expatriates, who urge the courageous women of Iran to continue their bloody struggle against the regime in Iran without naming the real enemy….Sharia. It is like telling them to die in vain.
The poster-boy for the rebellion is Moussavi and he and his “reformist” wife, who dresses in hijab, utter not a single word of opposition to Sharia, the cruel, misogynist Islamic law that oppresses women and reduces them to the status of animal.
The women of Iran were led down this path before by their mothers and grandmothers who encouraged them to overthrow the Shah and plunged that nation into the repressive hell-hole ruled by the Ayatollahs.
Revolution cannot be successful if sacrifice brings more Islamic repression and degradation with another face and a new set of Ayatollahs. Their jail is Islam and changing the warden from one thug to another will not set them free.
Women of Iran:
Freedom is what I see daily in my supermarket…women in saris, in hijab, Orthodox Jewish women in wigs or headscarves, girls in miniskirts, girls with navel rings who live and play and love and pray without fear of “honor killings” or stoning or lashing or rape, or forced marriages even at the pre-puberty age of nine.
Freedom is not just the right to vote for candidates that are both sides of the same coin. It is the right to live without fear that your father or your brothers will murder you for committing adultery or apostasy or a perceived insult to the Prophet. It is the right to read books…porn if you choose….see movies from musicals to erotica….to dance and to kiss in public….to divorce or marry …to drive and to travel and to choose how and when and if you must wear that scarf, all with the protection of the state and not the religious dictates of the state.
You are being compared to the crowds of oppressed people who brought down the Soviet Empire. They named their enemy. It was an evil ideology named Communism. Your enemy is an evil ideology named Sharia, which enables your tormentors.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

An Indian Embassy in Jerusalem, Please by Jagdish N. Singh

Posted By on January 2nd, 2018

New Delhi should now appreciate this American logic and refrain from opposing the current US administration’s decision on relocating its own embassy wherever it likes. New Delhi would have done better to vote against the resolution and support Washington on the capital transfer also to improve its ties with its two important natural democratic allies — the United States and Israel.

In the post-Cold War landscape, relations between Washington and New Delhi have attained new heights. India today needs American support for defence platforms and membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group. US President Donald Trump has already described India as a leading global power and expressed his readiness to support it in reaching this status.

India’s vote in favour of the recent UN General Assembly resolution critical of U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and shift its embassy to the holy city is most unfortunate. The resolution, adopted with 128 in favour to nine against, with 35 abstentions, expressed “deep regret” over this decision and stressed that Jerusalem “is a final status issue to be resolved through negotiations in line with relevant U.N. resolutions.”

The Trump administration’s decision on Jerusalem is very much in harmony with the morality of American democracy and the resolution of its Congress, and that if there are 56 Islamic states in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC); seven officially Roman Catholic states (Argentina, Bolivia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Liechtenstein, Malta and Monaco); four officially Protestant states (Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden); one Eastern Orthodox state (Greece), and one Anglican state (Great Britain), surely there is room for one Jewish state for a people who have continuously lived on that land for nearly 4,000 years.

Jerusalem has been in the heart of Jews. Israeli Ambassador to India Daniel Carmon repeated the claim to Jerusalem: “Jerusalem always was the capital of the Jewish people, is and will continue to be the capital of modern Israel. No vote at the General Assembly can change that.”

Ironically, the holy city was not part of Israel in the original 1947 UN Palestine partition plan. Under this plan Jerusalem was to be ruled by an international trusteeship. Confronted with the opposition of many Arab and Muslim countries to the very idea of a Jewish state, (not to speak of Jerusalem), the Jews in 1948 declared Israel as an independent state with Jerusalem as its capital. Israel liberated so-called East Jerusalem in 1967 from Jordan, which had illegally captured in the 1948-49 war. In June 1980, the Israeli government passed a “Basic Law” declaring Jerusalem “complete and united” as its capital.

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What to Make of Latest Protests in Iran? by Lawrence A. Franklin

Posted By on January 2nd, 2018

Security forces, such as agents of the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), are photographing the protests, enabling police later to arrest leaders of the protests, violence-prone demonstrators, and those holding aloft political and anti-regime placards.

The regime will, of course, try to weather this latest round of protests while arresting leading agitators, to be followed by torture, “recanting” show-trials, and executions.

For the past several days, Iranians have demonstrated against a government that has not delivered on promised economic improvement and against a regime whose ruling clerical class they despise.

The public’s animosity against the existing order, as past protests indicate, is no surprise. Particular aspects of this latest series of demonstrations, however, invite a critical eye by Iran-watchers.

The current protests began, not as usual, in the Iran’s capital, Tehran. The protests began in Mashhad, center of the wealthiest and most powerful religious foundation in the country. At first, the crowds were demonstrating for the long-promised but undelivered economic benefits that were supposed to follow the roll-back of internationally-applied sanctions against Iran, after the Obama administration delivered more than $150 billion to the Islamic Republic.

By the second night of protests, the demonstrators became more hostile and began to focus on political complaints. As a consequence, the regime may have viewed the spreading demonstrations more ominously.

In the past, demonstrations beginning in Tehran would then spread to smaller cities, provinces where non-Persian minorities were dominant, and then to rural regions. This time, it appears that rural citizens were in the streets early on. Also, the ongoing protests are not led or limited in large part to students and middle-class professionals, centered in northern Tehran. These protests also reportedly include laborers from South Tehran, usually the constituency of populist candidates such as former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (term: 2005-2013).

The regime, for its part, while quick to mobilize security forces and counter-demonstrations, has been slow to employ lethal suppressive measures. However, security forces, such as agents of the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), are photographing the protests, enabling police later to arrest leaders of the protests, violence-prone demonstrators, and those holding aloft political and anti-regime placards.

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Heroic Women Fighting for Freedom by Khadija Khan

Posted By on January 2nd, 2018

Iranian women, like many others, are sick and tired of living in layers upon layers of imprisonment.

Take note, those of you who want to see real women freedom-fighters. Look into the streets of Iran or listen to the chess champion Anna Muzychuk.

Iranian women, by risking their lives, have unmasked the faces of those trying to promote burqas and hijabs as supposed “symbols of liberation”.

The desperate attempt of Iranian people pouring out onto the streets against the Islamist regime exposes the bitter life that Iran’s citizens, especially women, have been forced to live for nearly forty years in the name of Islamic law, (sharia).

These demonstrations have also shown the ugly face of Islamists who take their own people hostage to quench their thirst for power — by repression, jail, torture, executions — any way they can.

Iranian women, like many others, are sick and tired of living in layers upon layers of imprisonment.

The regime in Iran clearly feels shaken by the resolve of these protestors: Iran’s leaders have promised to soften their misogynistic laws by not imprisoning women in Tehran who appear in public without their veils on.

The protesters, however, do not seem to be buying this offer: they are seeking the full elimination of extremism in the country. There is clearly no more trust in the promises of this regime.

The skeptics, in fact, are right. There is a catch. Although the regime announced that it would not arrest women who set aside Iran’s strict dress code, the regime also stated that these women would have to attend special “morality classes” by the sharia police.

Now why would a regime want that? Could it be so that the regime can document these women to keep a watch on them?

The shackles Iranians are trying to break are exactly the same ones that organizations such as CAIR, and cohorts of Islamist regimes such as Linda Sarsour, have been trying to sell to the Western public as symbols of “fashion” and “liberation”.

Such apologists simply serve as mouthpieces for these extremist regimes, which not only enslave their own people but also distort the economic and intellectual development of their people through a mindset of supremacy and hatred throughout global arena.

When the organizers of the Women’s March in the U.S. cherry-picked “abuses,” they left a vast number of women behind, unnoticed and unwelcome, who have been subjected to inhuman treatment for centuries.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Congress has a Black Caucus Racism Problem The vicious cycle of racism and thievery in the CBC must be broken. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on January 2nd, 2018

The Congressional Black Caucus had a front seat to #MeToo with the revelation that $220,000 had been paid out to a staffer alleging sexual harassment by Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL), a former judge impeached for bribery whose girlfriend has been on his payroll to the tune of $2.4 million, and that Rep. Conyers (D-MI) had his own sexual harassment settlement. That scandal forced Rep. Conyers to resign and hand the seat to his son at the behest of his wife, Monica, who had been convicted of bribery.

Corruption, fraud and bribery are ongoing problems at the Congressional Black Caucus.

After two decades of financial scandals, Rep. Corrine Brown (D-FL) was convicted of running a fake charity and sentenced in December. Rep. Chaka Fattah (D-PA) was sentenced last December for bribery, fraud and money laundering. His son, Chaka Fattah Jr, was already in prison on unrelated bank fraud charges. Around the same time the wife of Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Il) had wrapped up her prison sentence after her husband had ended his prison term a year earlier on fraud charges.

Hardly a year goes by without a criminal case involving a member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Bribery and fraud, fake charities and money laundering to pay for the high life are familiar CBC themes . Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. bought a gold Rolex, Michael Jackson and Malcolm X memorabilia, and mink capes. Rep. Brown stole from poor children to pay for an NFL luxury box (won’t you take a knee) and a Beyonce concert. Chaka Fattah Jr. bought Hermes ties and a Ritz-Carlton condo.

These aren’t aberrations. They’re part of the culture of corruption at the Congressional Black Caucus.

The year that Barack Obama, a former CBC member whose level of corruption outdid any of his former colleagues by climbing into the high stratospheric billions and using the Justice Department to run a massive slush fund, took office, every single House member investigated on ethics charges was CBC. A former study suggested that a third of CBC legislators had faced an ethics probe.

That’s what a culture of political corruption looks like.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Revolution in Iran Trump is no Obama and has voiced open support for the pro-freedom movement. Kenneth R. Timmerman

Posted By on January 2nd, 2018

For Mansour Osanlou, the former head of the bus driver’s union in Tehran, a “new revolution” has begun in Iran.

The protests, which began on Thursday in Iran’s most religious cities and spread throughout the country within twenty four hours, now bring together workers and intellectuals, the unemployed, and the elites – a combination not seen since the 1979 revolution that toppled the Shah.

On Saturday, security forces in Tehran used rubber bullets and truck-mounted water canon in an unsuccessful attempt to disperse protesters at Tehran University who were seeking to march on the Supreme Leader’s compound, Osanloo told me in a telephone interview.

They were chanting, “Death to the Dictator,” and “Khamenei should go.” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been Iran’s Supreme Leader since 1989, and until now, he has been portrayed as unassailable by friend and foe alike.

“We thank President Trump for his support, and call on the United States to hold the Islamic regime accountable if they kill or beat protestors or conduct mass arrests, as they did in 2009,” he told me.

The last time the Iranian people rose up, in June 2009, President Obama kept a shameful silence, allowing the regime to kill protesters in silence.

President Trump has the opportunity to change history by using his bully pulpit, which he began to do late Friday night through twitter.

“Many reports of peaceful protests by Iranian citizens fed up with regime’s corruption & its squandering of the nation’s wealth to fund terrorism abroad,” the President tweeted initially. “Iranian govt should respect people’s rights, including right to express themselves. The world is watching!”

And then he added the hashtag that has spread worldwide, #IranProtests.

The State Department followed with a more mildly-worded tweet on Saturday. “We are following reports of multiple peaceful reports by Iranian citizens. The United States condemns the arrest of peaceful protests in #Iran.”

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

“The Month That Was – December 2017” Sydney M. Williams

Posted By on January 2nd, 2018

Seventy-six years ago, December 7, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, drawing the United States into a World War that had been raging, formally, for over two years, since Germany invaded Poland on September 2, 1939. But Nazi militancy had begun earlier. They had re-armed beyond what they were allowed under the Treaty of Versailles in the early ‘30s. They had reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936 and they had annexed Austria in March 1938. A year later, in March 1939, Czechoslovakia fell. But the Allies did nothing. Eight years earlier, in September 1931, the Kwantung Army of the Empire of Japan invaded Manchuria. The world was aflame when Pearl Harbor was attacked. But a giant was stirred, and by war’s end over 60 million people (roughly three percent of the world’s population) were dead – approximately one killed every three seconds!

The most consequential news for the U.S. this past month, and perhaps for all of 2017, was the passage and signing of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. Its support was narrow and partisan, so has been compared to the Affordable Care Act of 2010. But, there is a significant difference. The ACA was designed to give government more resources, and greater control and power. This Bill gives government fewer resources, and less control and power. Its center piece is the reduction in the stated federal corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, which is slightly below the world average. The Bill allows businesses to expense capital expenditures (investments) when occurred. As well, companies are incentivized to re-patriate about $2.5 trillion held abroad. Tax rates for individuals were lowered, albeit modestly. The deductibility of state and local income taxes (SALT), which serves to mask aggressive spending on the part of many states, including California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey and my state of Connecticut, will be limited. That will negatively affect high-earners in those states. I would have preferred a simpler bill, and one, for instance, that acknowledges that “carried interest” is income. But this was the first time in a generation major tax reform has been achieved. The Bill should help boost economic growth.

As significant for economic growth has been the rolling back of regulations. For example, an apple farm in upstate New York, according to The New York Times, is subject to 5,000 rules. The repeal of Net Neutrality was a victory for free markets. The Act had nothing to do with neutrality and everything to do with regulation. It re-categorized broadband from Title I to Title II under the 1934 Communications Act, which meant carriers would be regulated as public utilities. Its elimination was a win for competition and the promise of 5G wireless, which may obviate the monopolies and duopolies of cable and fixed-line carriers.

Elsewhere domestically, the Mueller investigation suffered credibility issues, as anti-Trump bias was shown to be prevalent with a number of Mueller’s senior personnel: Bruce Ohr, Peter Strzok, Andrew Weissmann, Jeanie Rhee and Andrew McCabe. Increasingly, it looks like the collusion that should be investigated was that between the Clinton campaign and the FBI, rather than Russia and the Trump campaign. The Santa Barbara County wildfire in California became the State’s largest. Governor Jerry Brown said such fires are the “new normal!” Late in the month, the Northeast and Midwest of the U.S. were subjected to a prolonged arctic freeze. President Trump signed an Executive Order substantially reducing acreage in Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument, a tract of land so-named on December 28, 2016 by President Obama. Mr. Trump’s decision caused an uproar about separation of powers. However, National Monuments are created by Presidential edict, while National Parks are established by Congress. Doug Jones beat Ray Moore for the Alabama Senate seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Whether this proves good for the citizens of Alabama remains to be seen, but it was good for the nation and especially for the Republican Party. In a 7-2 decision, the Supreme Court backed the President’s travel ban from six predominantly Muslim nations. ISIS-inspired Akayed Ullah, a U.S. citizen and native of Bangladesh, was badly hurt when his suicide vest detonated prematurely on a Times Square subway platform. There were no other injuries.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

THE IRANIAN EXPLOSION OF TRUTH A popular uprising that has the potential to avert a world war. Caroline Glick

Posted By on January 2nd, 2018

There are many reasons to fear that the protests will fail to achieve their goal of overthrowing the regime.

If the Iranian regime is unable to brutally stomp out the countrywide protests raging through the country, and if the protesters achieve their goal of bringing down the regime, they will go down in history as the saviors of millions of people not just in Iran but throughout the world.

Given the earth shattering potential of the protests it is extraordinary to see the liberal media in the US and Europe struggle to downplay their significance.

Aside from a lukewarm statement on Twitter from British Foreign Minister Boris Johnson, as of Monday morning – five days into the protests – no senior European official had spoken in favor of the hundreds of thousands of Iranians marching throughout their country demanding freedom.

In the US, former members of the Obama administration and the liberal media have determinedly downplayed the importance of the protests. They have insisted that President Donald Trump should stop openly supporting the protesters and so adopt former president Barack Obama’s policy of effectively siding with the Iranian regime against the Iranian people who seek its overthrow.

These talking points have been pushed out into the media echo chamber by Obama’s former deputy national security adviser and strategic communications chief Ben Rhodes, his former national security adviser Susan Rice and former secretary of state John Kerry.

Obama’s Middle East coordinator Philip Gordon stated them outright in an op-ed in The New York Times on Saturday. Gordon called on Trump “to keep quiet and do nothing” in response to the protests.

In Gordon’s view, no matter how big their beef with the regime, the protesters hate the US more. And they really hate Trump.