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Merkel Government Still in Denial by Vijeta Uniyal

Posted By on December 20th, 2016

Islamic State took responsibility for the December 19 Berlin truck-ramming attack that killed 12 people, similar to the July 14 attack in the French city of Nice, and countless car-rammings in Israel. Now Europeans feel what Israelis live with every day.

This month, the police union in the German state of Thuringia issued an open letter to the state’s Interior Minister, describing the crumbling law-and-order situation amid the rising migrant crime: “[You] are abandoning us completely helpless to a superior force… But what changes? Nothing. One instead gets a sense of uninterest.”

Meanwhile, representatives of Arab community were reported telling the police in Ruhr, “The police will not win a war with us because we are too many.”

Chancellor Merkel, Germany’s ruling elites and the media can continue putting a happy face on uncontrolled mass-migration from Arab and Muslim lands, or suppress news reporting on rising migrant crime, but they cannot wish away the country’s deteriorating law and order situation.

It should be evident to even a casual observer that her government still does not care about the victims of its own failed “refugee” policy.

Monday’s terrorist attack on a Berlin Christmas market killed at least 12 people and injured 50 others. Islamic State took responsibility for the truck-ramming attack, as recommend by the al-Qaeda magazine, Inspire, and similar to the July 14 attack in the French city of Nice, and countless car-rammings in Israel. Now Europeans feel what Israelis live with every day.

Police confer at the site of the December 19 car-ramming attack at a Christmas market in Berlin. (Image source: RT video screenshot)

Earlier this year, Germany was hit by a series of ISIS-inspired attacks and failed terror plots. Despite that almost all the perpetrators were recent Syrian or Afghan migrants, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in the middle of a re-election bid, has stuck to her claim that there is “no connection” between terror attacks in the country and uncontrolled mass migration from Arab and Muslim lands.

Ahead of an election year, Merkel and her coalition partners also want to avoid another mass sexual attack — in Cologne.

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Draining the swamp:Richard Baehr

Posted By on December 20th, 2016

In the final months of the presidential campaign, a popular refrain at Donald Trump rallies, ‎second only perhaps to “Lock Her Up,” was “Drain the Swamp.” The chant ‎ostensibly referred to clearing out the bureaucratic/lobbyist control over the ‎federal government, which had resulted in a government committed to serving the ‎needs of the protected few at the expense of the unprotected many and ‎debilitating America’s future growth prospects in the process.‎

There is no reason, however, why the term should not apply equally to the stale ‎thinking that has permeated diplomacy in the Middle East for decades, enabling ‎nonsensical beliefs to remain accepted and unchallenged. The fierce reaction to ‎the announcement that Trump adviser David Friedman will be the next ambassador to Israel is ‎evidence that among those who have actively participated in perpetuating failure ‎in the supposed Israeli-Palestinian peace process there are many now worried ‎about their jobs, their influence, or worse — that common sense, if given an ‎outlet and applied to the region, may produce something outside the allowed set ‎of acceptable policies to which they have adhered for so long.‎

In “Ike’s Gamble,” Michael Doran’s excellent book on the Eisenhower administration’s fumbling and errors ‎in the Middle East, Doran quotes Britain’s then-Prime Minister Winston Churchill in ‎considering why American policy in the region was such a mess. Referring to ‎U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Churchill said: “He was clever ‎enough to be stupid on a rather large scale.”

It would be hard to find a more apt ‎description for the thinking of New Yorker Editor David Remnick, New York Times columnists, or J Street spokespeople in their sustained ‎apoplectic states since the Trump election victory, now reinforced by the Friedman ‎nomination. These people will always make the same arguments, and draw the ‎same conclusions, regardless of the facts, so their current panic mode is not a ‎surprise. ‎

It is worth examining some of the long-running issues that Trump and Friedman should move on, ‎which really belong in the dustbin of history. ‎

Jerusalem: The U.S. Embassy belongs in Jerusalem. In 1995, when Bill Clinton was president, Congress passed the ‎Jerusalem Embassy Act, which called ‎for the embassy to be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem but provided a waiver for ‎the president to delay the move due to political or diplomatic considerations. ‎Presidents Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama chose to make use of the waiver each year of ‎their presidency, though each had campaigned promising to accomplish the move. ‎Ambassador-designate Friedman has been clear that he expects to perform his ‎duties from Jerusalem, perhaps starting work in the U.S. consulate in the city.‎

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Turkey’s Misdiagnosed Kurdish Problem by Burak Bekdil

Posted By on December 20th, 2016

Turkey’s Kurdish problem is not a military one. On the contrary, the military aspect of the problem is the consequence, not the root cause. Turkey’s Kurds have been demanding a homeland since the 19th century — long before the modern Turkish state was born in 1923.

It is time that Ankara rethinks its diagnosis about the Kurdish dispute. The Turks can start by asking themselves why their Kurdish compatriots choose to live in mountainous hideouts, fight, kill or be killed.

In this year’s Rule of Law Index, released by the World Justice Project, Turkey ranked 99th out of 113 countries, scoring worse than Nigeria and Myanmar.

Turkey can sometimes look like a bad joke. Turkey sits in the lowest ranks of any credible index measuring press freedoms and the rule of law.

Reporters Without Borders, for instance, in its 2016 report, put Turkey into the 151st place out of a list of 180 countries — ranked below Pakistan, Russia and Tajikistan.

In this year’s Rule of Law Index, released by the World Justice Project, Turkey ranked 99th out of 113 countries, scoring worse than Nigeria and Myanmar.

Turkey’s leaders, nevertheless, recently condemned the state of press freedoms in Europe and the United States. An official statement claimed that press freedoms had a problematic and restrictive state in “Western democracies such as, France, Germany, England, Sweden, Spain, Netherlands and the USA.”

But not all Turkish news is equally amusing. On Dec. 10, a twin bomb in Istanbul killed 44 people and injured more than 150. The perpetrators were an urban branch of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been fighting for a Kurdish homeland since 1984. The conflict has already taken nearly 40,000 lives.

The aftermath of one of the two December 10 bombs in Istanbul. The attacks killed 44 people and injured more than 150. (Image source: CCTV America video screenshot)

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan himself announced the more recent bloody picture. Calling for a “national mobilization against all terrorist organizations,” Erdogan said that 1,178 people have been killed since July 2015 in Turkey’s fight with the PKK. Bomb attacks by the Islamic State (ISIS) claimed another 330 lives. Those numbers exclude 248 people who died during the bloody coup attempt of July 15, as well as 9,500 apparent PKK members who were killed by Turkish security forces. Turkey also claims that it killed 1,800 ISIS members since July 2015.

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Palestinians: Welcome to the World of Western-Funded Terrorism by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on December 20th, 2016

Palestinians and their families are being financially rewarded by the West for taking part in terror attacks against Jews. It does not take a brain surgeon to figure out that this promotes terrorism.

Palestinian terrorists released from prison have far higher chances of getting a job with the Palestinian Authority (PA) government than people who went to university, because by carrying out an attack against Jews they become heroes, entitled to a superior job and salary.

The more time you spend in an Israeli prison, the more prestigious the job you will receive. Graduating from an Israeli prison is better than graduating from an Ivy League university.

These people have not been imprisoned for running a red light. Most of them are behind bars because they have masterminded suicide bombings and other terror attacks that have killed and maimed hundreds of innocent civilians during the past few decades.

So, when you hear that it is the PLO, not the PA, that pays the terrorists’ salaries, you might want to mention that this statement is a sleight of hand designed to dupe unsuspecting and well-intentioned American and European donors.

It is time to tell Abbas and his associates, in terms that they understand, that the West will no longer fund terrorists. This message, above all others, will discourage terrorism — and perhaps even encourage peace.

Killing Jews has become a profitable business. Palestinians who think of launching a terror attack against Jews can rest assured that their well-being and that of their family will be guaranteed while they are in Israeli prison. Here is how it works:

The Western-funded Palestinian Authority (PA) government, through its various institutions, provides a monthly salary and different financial benefits to jailed Palestinian terrorists and their families. Upon their release, they will continue to receive financial aid, and are given top priority when it comes to employment in the public sector. Their chances of getting a job with the PA government are higher than those who went to university, because by carrying out an attack against Jews they become heroes, entitled to a superior job and salary.

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The Indefensible Obama Policies By Herbert London

Posted By on December 20th, 2016

Dr. London is President of the London Center for Policy Research http://www.londoncenter.org/

On December 6 President Barack Obama defended his strategy for combating terrorism, a strategy – if one can call it that – based on restraint and withdrawal. Without mentioning Donald Trump’s name, the president went on to contrast his ideas with those enunciated by the president elect. He clearly attempted to make the case for why his successor should adhere to his approach.

That approach includes scaling back U.S. military presence abroad, a ban on torture and the closing of the detention facility in Guantanamo. President Obama referred to his approach as “smart policy” and noted with pride that “no foreign terrorist organization has successfully planned and executed an attack on our homeland, and it’s not because they didn’t try.” He argued, as well, for using diplomacy before military power, pointing to the Iran deal as the way to restrain a nuclear program.

While President Obama is keen on securing his legacy, the claims about “smart policy” are questionable. Alas, the scaling back of U.S. military presence has occurred with the precipitous withdrawal from Iraq, a symbol of misguided policy directives. The rise of ISIS is due in no small part to the departure of the U.S. military from the region. Similarly, the announcement that there will be a dramatic force reduction in Afghanistan on an announced date, led directly to enhanced field operations by the Taliban.

The emptying of Guantanamo, with detainees sent to various locations abroad, has resulted in at least a third of them returning to the battlefield to foment terror. But the inaccurate claim about Guantanamo is small potatoes compared to the assertion “no terrorist organization has successfully planned and executed an attack on our homeland…” While a 9/11 size attack has not occurred, “the tree of terrorism” has used splinter groups in the form of ISIS inspired terrorists to promote death from San Bernardino to Orlando. A change in tactics by terror organizations does not represent a change in purpose.

Clearly as Churchill noted, “jaw jaw is better than war war.” Diplomacy should precede military action as Obama noted. But soft power without the requisite hard power behind it is a negotiated void. The ceasefire talks over Syria is a case in point. U.S. presence is subordinate to Russian and Iranian troops. As a consequence, Turkish officials have described the U.S. position as “irrelevant.”

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FENCES: A REVIEW BY MARILYN PENN

Posted By on December 20th, 2016

After the opening shot establishing Denzel Washington and his buddy as garbage men making small talk while driving through Pittsburgh on the back of a truck, the movie closes in, metaphorically fencing in the audience to a small set that could be the staged version of this play. As director, Washington clearly wasn’t interested in opening up the play to be more cinematic – we are watching people whose damaged lives have been circumscribed by their race, their economic vicissitudes, their war experiences and mostly, their character flaws. Troy, the husband and father, was kicked out of his home at the age of 14, ending up in prison for a stint of 15 years, during which he discovered his talent for baseball. Ironically, prison was the only place where he had the freedom to play as he discovered when he was released in the years before Jackie Robinson integrated the sport.

For the first half of the film Troy is seen as the victim of a punishing father and a racist society that kept black men from developing their potential. His saving grace seems to be his happy marriage to Rose, played to perfection by Viola Davis, as a woman with enough strength to accept second place to a blustering, bigger than life man. Rose seems to be a woman capable of working on Tony and getting him to do the right thing despite his protestations to the contrary. She lets him talk his head off, gesture theatrically to his small audience of friend and family, but she pulls him into line when he’s let his steam off and gets him to do her bidding.

Suddenly the plot changes course and we discover that Troy has some secrets from Rose and the audience, ones he appears to feel guilty about initially though this soon gets rationalized into his entitlement as a man. His behavior becomes shockingly dense and abusive and our allegiances turn from his charismatic nature to the quieter less dramatic Rose whose behavior has some surprises for us as well. Though the mise en scene is kitchen sink reality, the language and entrance of minor characters are stagey in a formulaic way. Critics have compared this to Death of a Salesman and that is legitimate in its format as well as theme – there is a dated quality to how the characters interact even when the problems raised are beyond the boundaries of time, place and society’s conventions.

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U.S. Policy On Israel And The Obama-Trump Transition : Dr. Kenneth Levin

Posted By on December 20th, 2016

In a speech to the UN General Assembly on September 20, President Obama declared that Israel should recognize “it cannot permanently occupy and settle Palestinian land.”

If cast here by Obama in starker form than usual, seemingly to stake a legacy position, the statement is yet another rendering of a theme he has returned to on many occasions throughout the eight years of his presidency. But the essence of that theme is a lie: Israel has neither occupied nor settled “Palestinian land.”

In fact, for all the posturing on the subject by the Obama administration, by the EU and European states, by the UN, and by other nations and international bodies, there is no such thing as “Palestinian land” in international law, or at least there was not before the Oslo process, formally initiated in 1993.

To the contrary, international law supports Jewish claims to the so-called occupied territories. The League of Nations, in creating successor entities to portions of what was formally the Ottoman Empire, established the “Palestine Mandate” for the lands between the Jordan and the Mediterranean and the right of Jews to claim and settle in those lands.

Indeed, it called for “close settlement by Jews on the land, including state lands.” Article 80 of the United Nations charter subsequently preserved the application of the League of Nations Mandate’s stipulations.

One could argue that the Jews’ governmental body, by accepting the 1947 partition plan for Mandate Palestine, essentially gave up any claim to, including the right of settlement in, areas not allotted to it.

However, the Palestinian side rejected the plan and failed to establish a successor government in the areas that were to fall under its control. Subsequently, Judea and Samaria were occupied (with the killing or expulsion of all their Jewish residents) and annexed by Transjordan, which then renamed itself Jordan.

But only two nations, Britain and Pakistan, recognized Jordanian sovereignty in the territories. In 1967, Jordan – as King Hussein himself acknowledged – launched hostilities against Israel, and Israel, in its response, gained control of Judea and Samaria. In effect, whatever claims and rights Israel was prepared to give up in 1947 became irrelevant when no legitimate alternative government of Judea and Samaria emerged, and so the rights enshrined in the Mandate and in Article 80 of the UN charter remain in force.

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Castro Worship’s Last Hurrah : Daniel Mandel

Posted By on December 20th, 2016

What does it say about Messrs. Obama, Trudeau & Co. that their farewells to Fidel could have been voiced by communist toadies?

The retrospectives on Fidel Castro continue, even as the entombment of the Cuban dictator has passed. New photographic essays, retrospectives and interviews appear on our computer screens. So symbolic has this figure proved that I expect to see apologias and indictments into the New Year, if only because the former necessitate the latter.

Ponder the inability in some quarters to name unpleasant facts. President Obama never quite could bring himself to say “radical Islam” or to tell us what the “extremists” of which he spoke instead were extreme about. Here, he went a step further, silent on the ideology that animated Castro as well as the crimes to which they gave rise.

Indeed, the language deployed by some world leaders has been no more honest or creditable than that heaped upon Castro by veteran KGB stooges and communist fellow-travelers. Note the common resort to the purposely evasive, syrupy valedictory language normally reserved for the passing of a pioneering CEO or a charismatic motivational speaker — “powerful emotions” for someone who “altered the course of individual lives” (President Obama), “deep sorrow” for “a larger than life figure” (Canada’s Justin Trudeau), a “beacon of light,” an “absolute giant of the 20th century” (Marxist former London mayor Ken Livingstone), “a really great man” who “controlled things very firmly” (KGB agent of influence historian Richard Gott).

Note, too, the substitution of real or imagined successes to the exclusion of the dread, deadly deeds dispositive of the lives hundreds of thousands, if not millions. Nothing here of the show trials, the mass executions, the forced labor camps or the decades-long confinement of dissidents to windowless cells. Nothing of the 5,300 people killed resisting Castro’s forces; the one-fifth of Cubans who voted with their feet to escape totalitarian oppression; the lives of the still less fortunate 78,000 Cubans, lost in shark-infested waters fleeing in horror the only home they had known; the 14,000 Cubans killed in Castro’s wars abroad; the 6,800 politically motivated assassinations; the gulag of labor camps, known by their Spanish acronym UMAPs, holding tens of thousands for infractions as arbitrary as being gay, a Jehovah’s Witness or a Seven Day Adventist.

Indeed, the destruction of the lives of opponents was raised to a new virtue and the very concept of law explicitly subordinated to the enforcement of control through brute force. As Castro’s executioner, Che Guevara, put it, “To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution. And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.” These were not the aberrant words of a maverick henchman. Castro himself put it no less forcefully: “revolutionary justice is not based on legal precepts, but on moral conviction.”

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THE BOUNTIES OF OBAMA’S WEAKNESS-JED BABBIN

Posted By on December 20th, 2016

If you’ve already told Putin you won’t retaliate, why should he believe you now?
I hate the word “hacking.” It’s too vague, too innocent and wholly inadequate to describe how nations, terrorist networks, and others conduct espionage and sabotage by intercepting and manipulating supposedly secure communications transmitted on the internet.

The more accurate term is cyberwar. Russian cyberwar may have been the cause of the cyber intrusions that leaked Democratic National Committee and John Podesta emails that WikiLeaks published during the campaign, to the Democrats’ embarrassment. WikiLeaks denies these reports, contending that the disclosed documents came from either disgruntled Democratic campaign staffers or WikiLeaks’ own cyber intrusions.

President Obama, Podesta, and their media gang are consumed by their desire to delegitimize Trump’s election and have seized on the Russian cyberattacks to skew the November election results. Their point — which is entirely unproven — is that Putin aimed to elect Trump instead of Clinton.

But both the president and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson have admitted that there is no evidence whatever that anything the Russians did affected the counting of votes.

There’s a lot more to this. Whatever the Russians did or didn’t do, they apparently did try to affect or discredit the election. At least that’s what Obama claimed three months ago.

On September 5, President Obama had a ninety-minute meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in China. One of the items discussed was the reported Russian cyberattacks on the U.S. election system. Obama acknowledged the attacks after the meeting, saying that although America had problems with “cyberintrusions from Russia in the past… [o]ur goal is not to suddenly in the cyber arena duplicate a cycle of escalation that we saw when it comes to other arms races in the past.… What we cannot do is have the situation in which suddenly this becomes the wild, wild West…”

Last week Obama said something entirely inconsistent: “So in early September when I saw president Putin in China, I felt that the most effective way to ensure that that didn’t happen was to talk to him directly and tell him to cut it out and there were going to be serious consequences if he didn’t. And in fact, we did not see further tampering of the election process — but the leaks… had already occurred.” He said he’d handled the Russian cyberattacks just as he should have.

If you believe what Obama said in September, he decided not to escalate the ongoing cyberwar with Russia to avoid an internet arms race. If you believe what he said last week, he got tough with Putin and told him to knock it off or face terrible consequences after which — he claimed — Putin backed down.

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“Fake News” Sydney M. Williams

Posted By on December 20th, 2016

“Ninety-nine percent of failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses.”

George Washington Carver (c. 1864-1943)

Fake news! “Holy red herring,” as Robin might have said to Batman! The next thing they will be telling us that Santa Claus is fake! Come on! There has been fake news since time immemorial. Think of agencies like the CIA., M15 and the KGB that have always used fake news for purposes of deception. Consider the Apocryphal Press (www.apocryphalpress.com) run by my good friend and former classmate Tom Korson, who uses fake news for the purpose of humor. Think of The New York Times and the Financial Times, both of whom regularly confuse fact with fiction. Much of “real” news is fake.

Hypocrisy is embedded in the sanctimonious Left. Less than two months before the 2004 Presidential elections, Dan Rather went on Sixty Minutes and falsely targeted George W. Bush’s service in the Air National Guard. Later, Brian Williams lied about his helicopter being shot down in Iraq. In 2008, while running for President, Hillary Clinton lied about coming under fire when landing in Kosovo in 1996. She blamed the attack in Benghazi, which killed four Americans including the Ambassador in 2012, on a “hateful” video. In 2009, President Obama told us that under the Affordable Care Act “…we could keep our health-care plan, if we chose.” Or Al Gore’s talking of Polar Bears stranded on melting ice sheets. Or the drumbeat among mainstream media, in the weeks leading to the 2016 election, which assured voters that Donald Trump was too flawed to be elected President. And what about the “recall?” It was born amid great fanfare, but slunk off into the forest to die alone. We were told all of these stories were “real,” but none were. So, what about Santa Claus? With ten grandchildren, I’ll let someone less encumbered respond.

Most media today twist news to accord with a predetermined narrative. News sources on both the Left and the Right succumb to pressure from readers and viewers. But the left’s version is more heinous, as it makes a pretense of having no biases. They cloak their stories in a mantle of sanctimonious rhetoric. The New York Times, a week ago last Sunday, had the chutzpah to editorialize about guiding Americans back to a path of commonly accepted facts: “A President and other politicians who care about the truth could certainly help them along. In the absence of leaders like that, media organizations that report fact without regard for partisanship, and citizens who think for themselves, will need to light the way.” Mr. Sulzberger, it has been you and your staff that have persistently sculpted the news to fit your story lines. It is you and the liberal mainstream media that are so badly in need of a lantern.