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Europe: Combating Fake News by Fjordman

Posted By on April 1st, 2017

If present demographic trends continue, in a few decades, native Swedes could easily become a minority in their own country.

Swedish ambulance personnel want gas masks and bulletproof vests to protect their staff against the escalating attacks, similar to equipment used by staff working in war zones.

Most dangerous, however, is our inability to deal forcefully with problems undermining Western societies, because some Western media refuse to admit that the problems exist.

In January 2015 The New York Times denied that there are “no-go-zones” — areas that are not under the control of the state and are ruled according to sharia law — dominated by certain immigrant groups in some urban areas in Western Europe. The American newspaper mentioned this author, alongside writers such as Steven Emerson and Daniel Pipes, for spreading this alleged falsehood. The article was published shortly after Islamic terrorists had massacred the staff of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris on January 7, 2015. Other established media outlets such as the magazine The Atlantic also dismissed claims of no-go-zones.

Fox News issued an unusual on-air apology for allowing its anchors and guests to repeat the suggestion that there are Muslim “no-go zones” in European countries such as Britain and France.

Regarding the subject of “no-go-zones,” this is largely a question of semantics. If you say that there are some areas where even the police are afraid to go, where the country’s normal, secular laws barely apply, then it is indisputable that such areas now exist in several Western European countries. France is one of the hardest hit: it has a large population of Arab and African immigrants, including millions of Muslims.

I have been writing about the problems in Sweden and the rest of Europe for many years. The problems are unfortunately all too real. Here are a few facts:

Sweden surpassed ten million inhabitants in early 2017. The recent population growth is almost entirely due to mass immigration. If present demographic trends continue, in a few decades native Swedes could easily become a minority in their own country. The economist Tino Sanandaji suggests that this transformation could happen within the coming generation.

Statistics from January 2017 indicate that for people born in Sweden, the unemployment rate is 4.3%. Yet for people born abroad, the unemployment rate is a staggering five times higher, at 22.1%. This constitutes a huge economic and social burden for the taxpayers. The famous Swedish welfare state has been quietly cut back for many years.

In an essay published in February 2016, Stockholm police inspector Lars Alvarsjö warned that the Swedish legal system is close to collapse. The influx of asylum seekers and ethnic gangs has overwhelmed the country and its understaffed police force. In many suburbs, criminal gangs have taken control and determine the rules. The police, fire brigades and ambulance personnel in these areas are routinely met with violent attacks.

Malmö, Sweden’s third-largest city, houses over 300,000 people, as of 2017. Despite its modest size, the town has a crime rate equal to that of vastly larger cities. The local police are barely able to investigate murders. Less serious crimes often go unpunished. Malmö probably has the highest percentage of Muslim immigrants of any city in Scandinavia. The most Islamic city in Scandinavia also happens to be the most criminal and the most violent.

In November 2016, Malmö’s chief prosecutor Ola Sjöstrand publicly admitted that his office was approaching a total collapse in terms of criminal investigations. “If people are hit by crimes which then aren’t investigated, they will lose faith in the rule of law,” Sjöstrand told the regional newspaper Sydsvenskan.

During New Year’s Eve celebrations at the beginning of 2017, parts of central Malmö resembled a war zone. Young immigrants shouted “Jihad!” while throwing fireworks at people. Swedish teenagers gathered in a large group to avoid being robbed.

A janitor in Malmö was shot and sustained life-threatening injures while clearing snow in February 2017. Police detained several suspects, understood to be linked to gang violence, for questioning. A 15-year-old boy was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder.

Meanwhile, officials at a local electrical firm announced that they would no longer expose their staff to risk by taking jobs in Malmö; there is just too much violent crime in the city.

Beginning in March 2017, the emergency ward at the hospital in Malmö will lock the doors at night. This is a security precaution that became necessary due to repeated violent threats from certain gangs or clans against patients and staff.

In July 2015, the police in Malmö asked for assistance from the national police to stop the wave of violence. Apparently, even that response was not enough. In January 2017, the police chief, Stefan Sintéus, publicly appealed to residents in Malmö for help in containing violent crime and deadly gang shootings: “Help us to tackle the problems. Cooperate with us.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Flynn’s Reported Immunity Request By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on April 1st, 2017

And exactly what would you do if you were in General Michael Flynn’s shoes?

It is not just that the long knives are out for him. The arena in which they bay for Flynn’s blood is no longer one of truth and justice but of social justice. No distinctions between partisan disagreement and crime, between intelligence and law-enforcement, between responsibly discreet investigation and political theater.

Put Flynn aside. The country in which we live has become so infected by partisan rage that federal courts are not embarrassed to invalidate a perfectly lawful executive order (restricting alien travel) on the sole ground that it was issued by Donald Trump. Had the same order, word-for-word, been issued by Barack Obama, it would have been swiftly upheld, if challenged at all. Politically “progressive” judges, however, have adopted an irrebuttable “Trump is evil” presumption. The new president’s allegedly guilty mind outweighs his every action, no matter how solidly rooted in law.

The object of the Left’s game is to nullify Trump’s presidency, whether by impeachment or withering rebuke. The best way to get there is to demonize his associates, such that they are criminals and their crimes are his crimes. On that list, it doesn’t get higher than Mike Flynn.

Long before riding the front of the Trump Train, Flynn made himself the bête noire of the intelligence community, accusing it of politicizing intelligence analyses and concealing the ineffectiveness of Obama’s approach to jihadist terror – claims which, to the great embarrassment of Obama’s spy chiefs, have been corroborated by intelligence agency operatives. Like Trump, moreover, Flynn – brash, unpolished, and erratic – has a knack for making enemies on all sides, such that Washington is now full of two kinds of people: those out to get Flynn and those who whisper that he had it coming.

Even that does not begin to describe the jeopardy Flynn had to be sensing when his lawyer reportedly offered his cooperation with investigations into Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential campaign in exchange for some form of immunity from prosecution. But it does provide a sense of the poisonous atmosphere in which, as night follows day, government officials leaked the offer to the media, spinning it as an admission of guilt – although, of what offense, no one seems able to say.

Imagine that. During the months of the Hillary Clinton email scandal, we learned that the major subjects of the investigation – involving felony mishandling of classified information and destruction of tens of thousands of government records – retained counsel and sought various forms of immunity in exchange for their cooperation. Mind you, this was under circumstances in which they knew the Justice Department was in the tank for them – so in the tank that Mills and Samuelson were permitted to appear as lawyers representing Hillary Clinton, the main subject with respect to whom they had a five-alarm conflict of interest.

No matter. When the conduct of Democrats was at issue, the media told us not to read too much into immunity requests. Standard fare to get a lawyer and seek immunity – doesn’t mean you’ve done anything wrong. Even when subjects of the Clinton investigation claimed their Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination rather than testify before Congress; even when reports surfaced of bizarre Justice Department agreements that evidence from the subjects’ computers would be destroyed rather than preserved; even when publication of the subjects’ FBI interviews detailed patently misleading statements – the media-Democrat complex steadfastly maintained there was nothing to see here.

But Mike Flynn, against whom there is no evidence of criminal wrongdoing? He is apparently a cross between Robert Hanssen and Al Capone.

Flynn lost his job as Trump’s national security advisor because he provided to Vice President Pence (among other Trump officials) an incomplete version of his conversations with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the transition. The withheld information involved sanctions imposed by Obama, and consequent Russian hopes that Trump would undo them.

It may be that Flynn, belatedly realizing that any mention of sanctions was politically explosive, was “economical” with the facts when briefing Pence. But it could instead be that there was a garble on both sides – i.e., that Flynn took Pence to be asking whether he’d made any promises to Kislyak, but Pence took Flynn’s “no” to mean the subject never came up. Whatever the explanation, Pence was mortified when his public defense of Flynn turned out to be wrong. Flynn was cashiered in short order.

We can be confident, however, that Flynn gave Kislyak no satisfaction – not that doing so would have been a crime, as opposed to a galactic political lapse. We can be confident because the FBI was monitoring Kislyak’s phone, and – although national-security eavesdropping under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is classified – Obama officials leaked the intelligence to the New York Times, which actually is a crime. The newspaper thus reported:

Obama advisers heard separately from the F.B.I. about Mr. Flynn’s conversation with Mr. Kislyak, whose calls were routinely monitored by American intelligence agencies that track Russian diplomats. The Obama advisers grew suspicious that perhaps there had been a secret deal between the incoming team and Moscow, which could violate the rarely enforced, two-century-old Logan Act barring private citizens from negotiating with foreign powers in disputes with the United States.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

A Plan to Reform Our Failing Universities By David Solway

Posted By on April 1st, 2017

How can we save our universities from the rot that has invaded their precincts, eroding the traditional core of Western literary, cultural, scientific, technological, and professional instruction? What would such a makeover involve?

To begin with, Title IX should be abolished a.s.a.p. Originally intended to prevent sexual and racial discrimination — a well-intentioned but ill-conceived bipartisan measure signed into law in 1972 — Title IX has been corrupted beyond recognition, trampling due process in sexual harassment cases, feeding the campus rape panic, curtailing free speech rights in an effort to avoid “offense,” diluting the curriculum via “trigger warnings” and “microaggression” claims, establishing a culture of grievance, allowing talks and lectures by conservative speakers to be cancelled or disrupted, gutting men’s sports programs, and surrendering to the most absurd and untenable student demands. This abomination was promoted under the rubric of “equality” in a world where natural and imprescriptible inequalities abound in both the physical and intellectual domains. The casualties are merit and individuality. As R. B. Parish writes, in the name of equality our universities “renounce culture and strive to reduce everyone down to a common level… There must be no excellence.”

Additionally, measures should be taken to prevent universities from raising tuition fees irresponsibly (which, among other advantages, would also go a long way toward reducing unsustainable student debt). According to HSDC’s (Homeland Security Defense Coalition) annual report for 2016, the average cost of tuition fees in the U.S. is in the vicinity of $33,000 per academic year, rising in the elite universities to $60,000 and more. This is unacceptable. As I’ve written previously, “Tuition fees will need to come down, perhaps by decoupling Pell grants from tuition hikes,” and subsequently capped at a rate tied to inflation.

Universities will then have to devise ways of living within their means, by drastically shrinking administrative bloat, reducing professorial salaries by a percentage to be determined, and downsizing or eliminating Humanities departments that are either irrelevant or marginal, that is, courses of study that cannot deliver basic competence in reading and writing, knowledge of civics and history, familiarity with the classics of the Western tradition, and economic productivity.

Stringent provisions will have to be made within the new education bill indicating which departments and programs are to be subject to contraction or termination, in particular the variety of trendy identity studies, which produce undereducated and unemployable graduates who become a burden both to themselves and to society.

Another factor in salvaging the university would involve flensing excess SocProg blubber like Commissions for Ethnicity, Race and Equity or President’s Advisory Committees, among a myriad of such irrelevancies. These institutions are preoccupied with such nonacademic issues as inclusivity and diversity, aboriginal health sciences, accommodating students’ religious, indigenous, and spiritual observances, diversifying food on campus, and supporting survivors of sexual violence on campus (an epidemic that doesn’t exist). They are parasites and misfits, empowered by arbitrary authority, not by long tradition, codified religion or settled law, and eating up scarce resources that could actually be invested in education. Every university in North America is saddled with the enormous collective weight — and judging from the typical photos, the substantial weight of many of its members — of these useless and self-serving bodies parroting the cultural bromides and shibboleths of the day. The Club Med of every token identity group imaginable, they have got to go if the university is ever to be restored to scholarly vigor and parietal sanity.

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“The Immigration Dodge” by Mark Krikorian

Posted By on April 1st, 2017

Today’s bitter divides focus too narrowly on enforcement. All sides need to be clearer about what immigration policy is meant to achieve

The immigration debate in the U.S. has been contentious for decades, but Donald Trump’s candidacy and election have taken it to a new level of polarized animosity. Politicians and the public have focused, understandably, on Mr. Trump’s promise to build a “big, beautiful” wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and on what should be done with the millions of illegal immigrants currently in the country.

These are certainly important issues. But they are enforcement issues. They are less fundamental than a question that too often goes unaddressed in our debates: Why limit immigration at all? Almost everyone at least pays lip service to the need for limits of some kind, but we don’t often enough challenge each other to explain what limits we support and why.

If we are ever to have a rational debate about immigration—rather than a screaming match among combatants mostly intent on signaling their own moral virtue or ideological purity—the starting point has to be a candid acknowledgment of our goals and preferences. Politicians and ordinary voters shouldn’t be allowed to get away with saying “Of course there should be limits on immigration, but…” without explaining what they mean.

Almost all of the arguments for limiting immigration share a common theme: protection. Even those advocating much more liberal immigration policies acknowledge the need to protect Americans from terrorists, foreign criminals and people who pose a threat to public health. Supporters of stricter limits, such as me, seek wider protections: protection for less-skilled workers, protection for the social safety net, and protection for the civic and cultural foundations of American society.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Jonathan Haidt on the Cultural Roots of Campus Rage An unorthodox professor explains the ‘new religion’ that drives the intolerance and violence at places like Middlebury and Berkeley.By Bari Weiss

Posted By on April 1st, 2017

When a mob at Vermont’s Middlebury College shut down a speech by social scientist Charles Murray a few weeks ago, most of us saw it as another instance of campus illiberalism. Jonathan Haidt saw something more—a ritual carried out by adherents of what he calls a “new religion,” an auto-da-fé against a heretic for a violation of orthodoxy.

“The great majority of college students want to learn. They’re perfectly reasonable, and they’re uncomfortable with a lot of what’s going on,” Mr. Haidt, a psychologist and professor of ethical leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, tells me during a recent visit to his office. “But on each campus there are some true believers who have reoriented their lives around the fight against evil.”

These believers are transforming the campus from a citadel of intellectual freedom into a holy space—where white privilege has replaced original sin, the transgressions of class and race and gender are confessed not to priests but to “the community,” victim groups are worshiped like gods, and the sinned-against are supplicated with “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings.”

The fundamentalists may be few, Mr. Haidt says, but they are “very intimidating” since they wield the threat of public shame. On some campuses, “they’ve been given the heckler’s veto, and are often granted it by an administration who won’t stand up to them either.”

All this has become something of a preoccupation for the 53-year-old Mr. Haidt. A longtime liberal—he ran a gun-control group as an undergraduate at Yale—he admits he “had never encountered conservative ideas” until his mid-40s. The research into moral psychology that became his 2012 book, “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion,” exposed him to other ways of seeing the world; he now calls himself a centrist.

In 2015 he founded Heterodox Academy, which describes itself as “a politically diverse group of social scientists, natural scientists, humanists, and other scholars” concerned about “the loss or lack of ‘viewpoint diversity’ ” on campuses. As Mr. Haidt puts it to me: “When a system loses all its diversity, weird things begin to happen.”

Having studied religions across cultures and classes, Mr. Haidt says it is entirely natural for humans to create “quasireligious” experiences out of seemingly secular activities. Take sports. We wear particular colors, gather as a tribe, and cheer for our team. Even atheists sometimes pray for the Steelers to beat the Patriots.

It’s all “fun and generally harmless,” maybe even healthy, Mr. Haidt says, until it tips into violence—as in British soccer hooliganism. “What we’re beginning to see now at Berkeley and at Middlebury hints that this [campus] religion has the potential to turn violent,” Mr. Haidt says. “The attack on the professor at Middlebury really frightened people,” he adds, referring to political scientist Allison Stanger, who wound up in a neck brace after protesters assaulted her as she left the venue.

The Berkeley episode Mr. Haidt mentions illustrates the Orwellian aspect of campus orthodoxy. A scheduled February appearance by right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos prompted masked agitators to throw Molotov cocktails, smash windows, hurl rocks at police, and ultimately cause $100,000 worth of damage. The student newspaper ran an op-ed justifying the rioting under the headline “Violence helped ensure safety of students.” Read that twice.

Mr. Haidt can explain. Students like the op-ed author “are armed with a set of concepts and words that do not mean what you think they mean,” he says. “People older than 30 think that ‘violence’ generally involves some sort of physical threat or harm. But as students are using the word today, ‘violence’ is words that have a negative effect on members of the sacred victim groups. And so even silence can be violence.” It follows that if offensive speech is “violence,” then actual violence can be a form of self-defense.

Down the hall from Mr. Haidt’s office, I noticed a poster advertising a “bias response hotline” students can call “to report an experience of bias, discrimination or harassment.” I joke that NYU seems to have its own version of the morality police in Islamic countries like Saudi Arabia. “It’s like East Germany,” Mr. Haidt replies—with students, at least some of them, playing the part of the Stasi. CONTINUE AT SITE

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Tillerson Talks Tough With NATO Allies Over Military Spending German foreign minister said U.S. demands are misguided and unrealistic By Julian E. Barnes

Posted By on April 1st, 2017

BRUSSELS—The Trump administration kept its European allies on edge Friday by dispatching Secretary of State Rex Tillerson here with new and tougher demands that North Atlantic Treaty Organization members boost military spending, clashing with Germany in particular.

The top U.S. diplomat’s appearance Friday came as NATO diplomats expressed concerns that the alliance has been whipsawed by the Trump administration, getting understandings from high U.S. officials only to have President Donald Trump send out Twitter messages that appear to counter them.

Like Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Vice President Mike Pence on previous occasions, Mr. Tillerson balanced a message of reassurance with a demand for a new commitment from NATO allies to spend 2% of their gross domestic product on defense.

Mr. Tillerson made clear for the first time that the U.S. wants allies at the May summit of NATO leaders to back a U.S. initiative that would have countries adopt plans to meet alliance spending goals by 2024, and to agree to annual milestones to ensure the target is on track.

“As President Trump has made clear, it is no longer sustainable for the U.S. to maintain a disproportionate share of NATO’s defense expenditures,” Mr. Tillerson said at a meeting.While many allies accept the U.S. proposal, German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel contested the target on Friday. He said it was misguided and unrealistic to think that Germany would be able to raise its defense spending by $37 billion a year to achieve the 2% level. Mr. Gabriel acknowledged the need to spend more on the military, but said true security required spending on foreign assistance, the refuge crisis and other priorities. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Hungary Threatens to Close University Funded by George Soros by Kieran Corcoran

Posted By on April 1st, 2017

The government of Hungary is planning to pass new laws that would shut down a major university founded and funded by liberal billionaire George Soros.

Conservative leaders in the country want to implement extra regulation that would make it impossible for Soros’s Central European University (CEU) in Budapest to keep operating.

According to POLITICO, legislation proposed in the Hungarian parliament would revoke the institution’s ability to award degrees.

The move is part of a wider crackdown on the influence of foreign money in Hungarian politics.

Soros was born in Hungary, and spends significant sums on non-profits in the country, but is a naturalized US citizen.

CEU is technically an American institution, and is accredited to award degrees by the state of New York, despite having no physical presence there.

The proposed laws would ban institutions based outside the EU from issuing degrees unless they have a campus in their home territory as well.

A Hungarian government statement said: “Several institutions are acting unlawfully when they issue foreign university degrees here in Hungary while not conducting teaching in their country of origin, as prescribed by Hungarian regulations…

“The government will be making the Hungarian regulations stricter to include the fact that universities from outside the EU can only hold courses and issue degrees in Hungary on the basis of an international treaty.”

CEU officials claim the law has been written specifically to target them.

There is no love lost between Soros and Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party, who come from opposite ends of the political spectrum.

The new proposals have been condemned by Soros’s Open Society Network, university officials and the local US Embassy.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Telegraphic reminders of reality by Ruthie Blum

Posted By on April 1st, 2017

Upon her return from a class trip to Poland, taken as part of her Israeli high school education, my ‎daughter recounted with passion the experience of seeing the Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau — now a museum of atrocities — in person. ‎

I asked her how she felt about the letter I and the other parents had been instructed to write in secret, which the teacher was to ‎distribute three days after the 11th graders arrived in Poland. In my letter, I tried to provide ‎comfort for the emotional distress I assumed she would feel seeing the fingernail marks on the walls of the gas chambers ‎and the rooms full of Jewish hair, eyeglasses and shoes. But I also wanted to say something ‎uplifting about the history and future of our people, without prompting a cynical roll of her eyes.‎

I did this by expressing how proud I was to be the mother of native Israeli children, born and raised in ‎the Jewish state established just a few years after Adolf Hitler’s defeat and unsuccessful attempt at ‎executing the Final Solution. This, I told her, was one answer to her and her brothers’ occasional questions about why I left the land of Toys ‘R’ Us and Macy’s for Jerusalem, of all places.‎

‎”You’re not going to believe this coincidence,” my daughter said. “A girl in my class whose mother is ‎American wrote almost the same thing as you did. But her conclusion was that this was why we ‎needed a Palestinian state.”‎

This story came to mind with the release Thursday of a German-language telegram sent by Third Reich ‎SS commander Heinrich Himmler to Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini. The document, ‎dated around Nov. 2, 1943, was uncovered in the archives of Israel’s National Library. ‎

‎”From the outset, the National Socialist [Nazi] movement of Greater Germany has been a standard ‎bearer in the battle against world Jewry,” Himmler wrote to al-Husseini. “For this reason, it is closely ‎following the battle of freedom-seeking Arabs, particularly in Palestine, against the Jewish invaders. ‎The shared recognition of the enemy and the joint fight against it are creating the strong base [uniting] ‎Germany and freedom-seeking Arabs around the world. In this spirit, I am pleased to wish you, on the ‎‎[26th] anniversary of the wretched Balfour Declaration, warm wishes on your continued fight until the ‎great victory.”‎

What is striking about this telegram is not its contents — which simply constitute yet further evidence ‎of the warm relations between the Nazis and the mufti — but rather how similar its sentiments are to ‎those regularly voiced today. Not in Germany, where one could face charges for such anti-‎Semitic rhetoric, but in the Arab world and Palestinian Authority. ‎

In other words, my daughter did not have to travel to Europe for a tour of Hitler’s gas chambers to be ‎exposed to a purposeful and concerted effort to wipe her and her classmates off the face of the ‎earth.‎

FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Continuing Syrian Crisis and America’s Conundrums by Andrew Harrod

Posted By on April 1st, 2017

A Hudson Institute panel examines the difficult choices facing the United States in Mesopotamia.

“It is a vexed question, the end state,” stated Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Michael Doran concerning conflict-wracked Iraq and Syria during a March 10 Hudson Institute presentation in Washington, DC. His assessment would strike many as a dramatic understatement concerning the difficult challenges facing American policy in a murderously sectarian region discussed by him and his fellow panelists.

Providence Managing Editor Marc LiVecche criticized international inaction by the United States and other countries during the Syrian civil war between the Bashar al-Assad dictatorship and rebels since 2011. “The longer you continue avoiding, or not making intentionally, the right decisions then the negative consequences continue to barrel along through history, multiplying like bunnies.” The resulting quagmire is “making any right thing incredibly difficult, first to identify, and second to do.”

Yet Doran’s analysis indicated that appeals for action are easier said than done, particularly concerning safe zone proposals for Mesopotamian populations seeking shelter from the region’s maelstrom. “If you want to have control over it, you are talking about a significant application of direct American force and Americans, or working through proxies that have their own agenda that we may or may not agree with it.” He wondered about possible American responses if Assad’s Iranian and Russian allies “start pushing refugees into the safe zone” through this coalition’s favored tactic of ethnic cleansing. Alternatively, “what if Al Qaeda, ISIS [Islamic State in Iraq and Syria], and the Iranians and the Russians start creating sleeping cells in the safe zones?”

“In order to police the actual safe zone, you have to be ready to impose costs on the Iranians and Russians if they take any step that threatens your policy,” Doran stated. Thus “you are immediately in a competition with the Iranians and the Russians and you have to be willing to win the competition ladder. That requires a very significant American force package in the region.” “If our action in Syria is seen as a threat to the Iranian position, and it will be, the Iranians could act anywhere—it is one strategic theater” in the Middle East; “they could flood the Green Zone in Baghdad with Iraqi Shiite militiamen and so on.”

Doran noted that establishing safe zones “is not a solution, it has to be part of something larger” and that in fighting ISIS, “we need to be aware of the larger strategic context while we are taking care of this urgent problem.” He thus concluded:

Let’s drop the notion that defeating ISIS is our grand strategic goal in the region. Our grand strategic goal in the region is to build a new order in the region. To build a new order in the region we need partners. To get the partners we have to show that we are willing to compete with the Iranians and the Russians and that means we are also hostile to the Assad regime. It doesn’t mean we have to say regime change in Syria tomorrow, it doesn’t mean we have to drive the Russians all the way out of the region.

“We want to create an order that is favorable or at least acceptable to our major partners in the region,” Doran stated, but currently “what everybody sees is that the United States is ushering in an Iranian-Russian order.” This strategic situation helped explain why over 60 nations in an anti-ISIS coalition had not defeated ISIS’ “30,000 nasty guys in pickup trucks for over a year” as these nations “don’t really want to do the job.” America is the “only power on earth that thinks the destruction of ISIS is the number one priority in the Middle East. Everybody else is asking themselves what new order is going to replace the ISIS order, is it going to work to my advantage or not.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Candidate Clinton and the Foundation April 23, 2015

Posted By on April 1st, 2017

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s determination to reconnect with voters in localized, informative settings is commendable, but is in danger of being overshadowed by questions about the interplay of politics and wealthy foreign donors who support the Clinton Foundation.

Nothing illegal has been alleged about the foundation, the global philanthropic initiative founded by former President Bill Clinton. But no one knows better than Mrs. Clinton that this is the tooth-and-claw political season where accusations are going to fly for the next 19 months. And no one should know better than the former senator and first lady that they will fester if straightforward answers are not offered to the public.

The increasing scrutiny of the foundation has raised several points that need to be addressed by Mrs. Clinton and the former president. These relate most importantly to the flow of multimillions in donations from foreigners and others to the foundation, how Mrs. Clinton dealt with potential conflicts as secretary of state and how she intends to guard against such conflicts should she win the White House.

The only plausible answer is full and complete disclosure of all sources of money going to the foundation. And the foundation needs to reinstate the ban on donations from foreign governments for the rest of her campaign — the same prohibition that was in place when she was in the Obama administration.

The messiness of her connection with the foundation has been shown in a report by The Times on a complex business deal involving Canadian mining entrepreneurs who made donations to the foundation and were at the time selling their uranium company to the Russian state-owned nuclear energy company. That deal, which included uranium mining stakes in the United States, required approval by the federal government, including the State Department.