Obama’s Cash for Iran’s Hostages The payoffs encouraged the ayatollahs to grab more Americans.

When is a payment for hostages not a ransom? When the Obama Administration says so.

That’s how the State Department has tried to spin a $1.7 billion settlement the U.S. reached with Tehran in January, when the nuclear deal was finalized and Tehran released five American hostages, including Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian. The Administration insists the payment merely settled a separate dispute related to the aborted sale of military equipment to the Shah of Iran in 1979.

New reporting by the Journal’s Jay Solomon and Carol Lee blows apart this story. On the day the U.S. hostages came home from Iran, an unmarked cargo plane landed in Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport with cash amounting to $400 million of euros, Swiss francs and other currencies. U.S. law forbids direct dollar transactions with Iran, and the $400 million in cash wasn’t disclosed to Congress. Justice Department officials objected but were overruled.

One reason the Administration is keen to deny that the cash was ransom is because it had already paid a high price by freeing seven Iranians charged or convicted of U.S. crimes and dropping extradition requests for 14 others. But the Iranians weren’t satisfied.

As the Journal reports, “U.S. officials also acknowledge that Iranian negotiators on the prisoner exchange said they wanted the cash to show they had gained something tangible.” Cash is an excellent way to pay terrorists, fund Hezbollah in Syria and the Houthis in Yemen, and buy dual-use, nuclear-related hardware—which Iran continues to do, according to reports from Germany’s intelligence services.

The Administration is pretending this money is being used for strictly kosher purposes. “The revenue that’s flowing to Iran is being used to support its currency, to provide moneys to the departments and agencies, build up its infrastructure,” CIA Director John Brennan said last week. Has he heard the word fungible?

The Iranians are less shy about their hostage taking. Iran’s negotiating team for the settlement payment “was largely staffed by members of its domestic spy service,” the Journal reports. Iranian defense officials told the press the cash was “a ransom payment.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Hillary and Israel, a 3-month romance: Richard Baehr

Hillary Clinton has vaulted to a solid lead in the presidential race following a Democratic Party convention where all the party heavies — President Barack Obama, husband and former President Bill Clinton, first lady Michelle Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and others applauded her greatness, her caring nature, her resolve, her readiness for the nation’s highest office and her achievement in smashing the “glass ceiling” to become the first woman to be nominated by a major U.S. party. Throw in her Republican opponent Donald Trump’s continuously shooting himself in the foot, and Hillary’s convention poll bounce becomes even greater. A host of fresh surveys from the last few days have given the former secretary of state a lead of between 3 and 9 points.

Never one to take elections for granted, Hillary and her team are making a strong effort to attract “never Trumpers,” encompassing many prominent members of the conservative movement, including its pro-Israel pundit class — from The Weekly Standard, the National Review, Commentary and other publications. On Tuesday, a Republican congressman from New York announced that he plans to vote for Clinton; several Republicans supporting Clinton spoke at the Democratic convention. When Republicans held their convention in Cleveland a week earlier, the Republican Governor of the state, John Kasich, stayed away. Ted Cruz, the Texas Senator who accumulated the second largest number of delegates at the Republican convention, refused to endorse Trump. The entire Bush family, including two former Republican Presidents, were 1,000 miles away and are clearly not planning to join the Trump team.

With the Republican Party in seeming disarray, and many Senate and House candidates keeping their distance from Trump, fearing the fallout of a disastrous defeat at the top of the ticket, the opportunity for Clinton to make inroads among Republican voters is significant. Over the last 20 years, the fortunes of Democrats in national elections have improved, as their vote share has increased among minority voters and college-educated suburban voters, particularly women. This year, Donald Trump is running very strong with white voters without a college degree (a 40-point margin in some surveys), but dramatically underperforming among whites with a college degree. This latter category is where the Clinton effort is focused. These suburban voters include a significant number of Jewish voters, most of them Democrats but a decent share of Republicans as well, in metro areas such as Philadelphia and Cleveland, and the three South Florida counties of Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach. These three states — Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida — are essential for Trump to have any chance of winning an electoral college majority.

Panic Mode: Khizr Khan Deletes Law Firm Website that Specialized in Muslim Immigration

Khizr Khan, the Muslim Gold Star father that Democrats and their allies media wide have been using to hammer GOP presidential nominee Donald J. Trump, has deleted his law firm’s website from the Internet.

This development is significant, as his website proved—as Breitbart News and others have reported—that he financially benefits from unfettered pay-to-play Muslim migration into America.

A snapshot of his now deleted website, as captured by the Wayback Machine which takes snapshots archiving various websites on the Internet, shows that as a lawyer he engages in procurement of EB5 immigration visas and other “Related Immigration Services.”

The website is completely removed from the Internet, and instead directs visitors to the URL at which it once was to a page parking the URL run by GoDaddy.

The EB5 program, which helps wealthy foreigners usually from the Middle East essentially buy their way into America, is fraught with corruption. U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has detailed such corruption over the past several months, and in February issued a blistering statement about it.

“Maybe it is only here on Capitol Hill—on this island surrounded by reality—that we can choose to plug our ears and refuse to listen to commonly accepted facts,” Grassley said in a statement earlier this year. “The Government Accountability Office, the media, industry experts, members of congress, and federal agency officials, have concurred that the program is a serious problem with serious vulnerabilities. Allow me to mention a few of the flaws.”

Grassley’s statement even noted that the program Khan celebrated on his website has posed national security risks.

“There are also classified reports that detail the national security, fraud and abuse. Our committee has received numerous briefings and classified documents to show this side of the story,” Grassley said in the early February 2016 statement. “The enforcement arm of the Department of Homeland Security wrote an internal memo that raises significant concerns about the program. One section of the memo outlines concerns that it could be used by Iranian operatives to infiltrate the United States. The memo identifies seven main areas of program vulnerability, including the export of sensitive technology, economic espionage, use by foreign government agents and terrorists, investment fraud, illicit finance and money laundering.”

HILLARY AND DONALD’S ILLITERATE INFRASTRUCTURE PLANS ARE STRAIGHT-UP ‘IDIOCRACY’ BY BENJAMIN WEINGARTEN

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are both on the campaign trail hawking the wonders of still more “stimulus” spending via public works projects. The American economy be damned.

Their shared fundamental belief that politicians can solve all manner of problems through wise public spending — or at least that the key to winning elections is convincing voters that they are the politicians who can do it — calls to mind President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho, the fictional president in the great political satire and social commentary of our time, “Idiocracy.”

Of the fictional secretary of the Interior, incorrectly named “Not Sure,” Camacho exclaims:While the President Camacho school of government may appear attractive to some on its surface, Clinton, Trump, and others who advocate central planning in general — and public works projects in particular — ignore its economic illiteracy.

One of the central problems with politics is that often the very policies that win votes are also the ones that are the most economically harmful.

Redistributing wealth to constituents, whether through “jobs” or direct handouts, is among the most common and pernicious of such policies. The system that the Founders bequeathed us would have limited such programs, but the legislative and judicial branches long ago neglected their fidelity to the Constitution and have created a vote-buying free-for-all not only accepted, but also openly celebrated by large swathes of the American people.

Front and center in the annals of economic boondoggles that make for good politics are the public works projects Clinton and Trump are currently pushing.

General Attacks Trump, Then Bombshell Truth on His Real Identity Explodes

At the Democrat National Convention, we saw plenty of liberal figures trotted out to scare America out of voting for Republican nominee Donald Trump. In spite of calling Trump’s remarks the previous week “dark,” fear was the principal product being sold by the left in Philly.

It didn’t end there, either. This weekend, retired Gen. John Allen told ABC News‘ George Stephanopoulos that electing Trump could cause a “civil military crisis, the like of which we’ve not seen in this country.”

“When we swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution, which is a document and a set of principles and it supports the rule of law, one of those is to ensure that we do not obey illegal orders,” Gen. Allen said in the interview, which was aired Sunday.

Allen apparently wasn’t just referring to Trump’s statement that he would reintroduce waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques, but that he would bomb the Islamic State group. Apparently, that’s an illegal order now, too.

“He’s talked about needing to torture. He’s talked about needing to murder the families of alleged terrorists,” Allen said. “He’s talked about carpet-bombing ISIL. Who do you think is going to be carpet-bombed when all that occurs? It’s going to be innocent families.”

“What we need to do is ensure that we don’t create an environment that puts us on a track conceivably where the United States military finds itself in a civil military crisis with a commander in chief who would have us do illegal things.”

That’s a pretty damning statement. Unfortunately, it’s even more damning — for the left — when you consider who Gen. Allen is.

As Erik Prince at Breitbart pointed out, Gen. Allen is far from a dispassionate retired general, merely weighing in on an unspeakable crisis (one might even call it a coup) that might foment itself in the military should Trump be elected.

New Jewish Apostates by Edward Alexander and Paul Bogdanor

On August 1, Professor Hasia Diner of NYU and Professor Marjorie Feld of Babson College in Massachusetts took to the pages of Ha’aretz to denounce the world’s only Jewish state for being racist, colonialist, reactionary, aggressive, and – this above all – Jewish. Vilification of Israel has long been de rigueur in that newspaper. “When it comes to defaming Jews,” says a character in Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock, “the Palestinians are pisherkes [small fry] next to Ha’aretz.”

On August 2, the same publication (perhaps as a result of some internal dissent) printed a powerful rebuttal by historian Jonathan Sarna of Brandeis. Jeffrey Goldberg of Atlantic Monthly declared that he was “getting ready to leave Ha’aretz behind.” Later he added: “when neo-Nazis are e-mailing me links to Ha’aretz op-eds declaring Israel to be evil, I’m going to take a break.”

Both Feld and Diner tell what might be called unconversion tales, from Zionism to Israelophobia, raw hatred of Israel, of its people, and, still more, of Diaspora Jews who recognize that securing Israel is the moral duty of this generation. Feld hints that she was awakened from her Zionist “delusions” by the outpourings of Noam Chomsky, a writer who would be rendered virtually speechless on the subject of Israel if he stopped equating the Jewish nation with Nazi Germany. His loathing of American Jewry was expressed as follows in 1988: “The Jewish community here is deeply totalitarian. They do not want democracy, they do not want freedom.” Beautiful and touching words! Are they also music to the ears of disillusioned history professors?

Diner, more than Feld, has ideas all her own, some of which may surpass Chomsky’s ravings. For example, she contends that “the death of vast numbers of Jewish communities as a result of Zionist activity has impoverished the Jewish people.” Was it “Zionist activity” and not the Third Reich and its collaborators that annihilated European Jewry? Was it “Zionist activity” and not Arab dictatorships that expelled one Jewish population after another from countries they had inhabited for over a thousand years? And was it “Zionist activity” and not the devastation left by communism that prompted more than a million Jews to leave Russia?

Diner complains that “the singular insistence on Israel as a Jewish and Zionist state” forced her to renounce her Zionist views. “Does Jewish constitute a race or ethnicity?,” she asks. “Does a Jewish state mean a racial state?” This from a teacher of Jewish history? Doesn’t she know that Jewish people are found in all races, and that anyone can become Jewish? Did none of Diner’s colleagues at NYU tell her that the “racial state” of Israel is the only country in history to have sought out and brought to its shores tens of thousands of Africans as free and equal citizens?

“The Law of Return,” Diner avers, “can no longer look to me as anything other than racism.” Yet other free countries have their own Laws of Return, occasioning no protest from the principled professor. The Armenian constitution, for instance, permits individuals “of Armenian origin” to acquire citizenship through “a simplified procedure.” The Lithuanian constitution proclaims: “Everyone who is ethnically Lithuanian has the right to settle in Lithuania.” The Polish and Ukrainian constitutions have identical provisions.

“Indignation”- A Review by Marilyn Penn

I haven’t read Phillip Roth’s “Indignation,” but the most interesting and subtle part of James Schamus’ screenplay adaptation is the backstory hinted at in the shiksa heroine’s past. The characters of Marcus Messer, the brilliant college student; his over-protective Jewish father, his kvelling Jewish mother, the over-bearing mildly anti-semitic college Dean – are all stock caricatures who each gets at least one opportunity to break out of their defined molds. But the character of Olivia Hutton, the beautiful blonde co-ed who performs a first date sex act that wasn’t common in the early 50’s, is developed with snatches of dialogue that seem to have sailed over the heads of most reviewers.

We learn early on that she has spent some time in a sanitarium after slitting her wrist, an act she chalks up to her early alcohol abuse. The privileged daughter of divorced parents, she is asked to describe them to the besotted Marcus who can’t understand her performance of fellatio without even being asked. Searching for clues to what she’s about, he questions her about her surgeon father and she hurriedly and nervously slams the door on that subject. Subsequently, after Mrs. Messer meets her, she cautions Marcus about not getting involved with such a wounded soul, cleverly pointing out the power that weak people exert over others. She asks Marcus about Olivia’s family and warns him to look more deeply since any girl who has attempted suicide at a young age may have been profoundly hurt within the confines of the family itself. In addition to the contrast between the annoying yet loving Jewish father and the sophisticated but abusive Christian father, we have the Jewish mother who doesn’t respect boundaries but whose insight offers the unspoken but most plausible understanding of Olivia’s promiscuous sexual favors and recurring mental anguish.

Unfortunately, most of this movie feels dated and schematic and the title character trait quickly becomes less clever than sophomoric. Particularly jarring was the awkward plot device of how Marcus discovers what has happened to Olivia who has dropped out of school; no Dean would ever have divulged such personal and confidential material to another student. None of the actors was able to rise above the stereotypical outlines of their parts, a fact that makes you realize the world of difference between competence and charisma. Roth’s literary experiments with narrative voice and flashback are deftly incorporated into the beginning and ending of the film, leaving you with more to think about than a coming of age story during the Korean War. Roth fans will flock to see this; others can wait for it on Movies on Demand.

MY SAY: WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE?

Another example of Hillary Clinton’s chicanery…and one can only ask…where is the outrage? rsk

Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi Debacle: Arming Jihadists in Libya . . . and Syria Looking ahead to the next installment of e-mails from WikiLeaks By Andrew C. McCarthy

As U.S. armed forces attack ISIS in Libya, WikiLeaks is poised to remind us that ISIS is in Libya — indeed, that ISIS is ISIS — thanks to disastrous policies championed by Hillary Clinton as President Obama’s secretary of state. Also raised, yet again, is the specter of Mrs. Clinton’s lying to Congress and the American people — this time regarding a matter some of us have been trying for years to get answers about: What mission was so important the United States kept personnel in the jihadist hellhole of Benghazi in 2012?

Specifically, did that mission involve arming the Syrian “rebels” — including al-Qaeda and forces that became ISIS — just as, at Mrs. Clinton’s urging, our government had armed Libyan “rebels” (again, jihadists) to catastrophic effect?

It has been less than two weeks since WikiLeaks rocked the Clinton campaign on the eve of the Democratic convention by leaking hacked e-mails illuminating DNC efforts to rig the nomination chase in Clinton’s favor. Now the organization’s founder, Julian Assange, has announced that WikiLeaks is soon to publish highly sensitive government e-mails that demonstrate Hillary Clinton’s key participation in efforts to arm jihadists in Syria. Just as in Libya, where Mrs. Clinton championed the strategy of arming Islamist “rebels,” the Syrian “rebels” who ultimately received weapons included the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda, and ISIS.

The Daily Wire and other outlets are reporting on Assange’s comments, published by Democracy Now. Clearly, we should not take Assange’s word for what is to be gleaned from the hacked records, which he says include some 17,000 e-mails “about Libya alone.” Let’s see if he has what he says he has. But it is worth setting the stage, because what is known is outrageous and has not been given nearly enough attention — largely because Beltway Republicans were complicit in the Obama-Clinton policy of allying with Islamists, and thus have shown no interest in probing the inevitably disastrous fallout.

As I have been pointing out for years, for example, we have never gotten to the bottom of why the State Department, under Mrs. Clinton’s direction, had an installation in Benghazi, one of the world’s most dangerous places for Americans.

Not All US Muslim Soldiers Are Equal The ever-growing list of “soldiers of Allah” who embed themselves in the U.S. military. Michelle Malkin

Bronze Star and Purple Heart recipient Captain Humayun Khan died heroically. But his exceptional courage in Iraq and his Muslim father’s post-Democratic convention histrionics on TV do not erase the security threat posed by killer warriors of Allah infiltrating our troops.

Don’t take my word for it. Ask all the forgotten Gold Star moms and dads who have lost their children because politically correct pushovers at the Pentagon looked the other way at the Muslim military menace.

Don’t take my word for it. Just re-read the ignored warnings issued by Muslim soldier Nidal Hasan, the vengeful mass murderer who gunned down 13 service members — including a pregnant private first class who lost her life and her child — and wounded more than 30 others at Fort Hood in 2009.

Two years before his rampage, while a senior-year medical school resident in psychology, U.S. Army Major Hasan delivered a 50-slide PowerPoint presentation to classmates and military superiors at Walter Reed. It was titled “The Koranic World View As It Relates to Muslims in the U.S. Military.” Quoting chapter and verse, Hasan illuminated “what the Koran inculcates in the minds of Muslims and the potential implications this may have for the U.S. military.”

Hasan cited the Verse of the Sword (“I have been commanded to fight the people until they testify that there is no deity worthy of worship except Allah”), explained “offensive” and “defensive” jihad and summarized the concept of “abrogation” — in which warring verses of the Quran trumped “peaceful verses.”

Cardinal Burke Breaks Ranks Brave remarks that speak unpleasant truths about Islam. Hugh Fitzgerald

We have heard many disturbing statements in recent years made by Catholic clerics, from bishops and cardinals right up to Pope Francis, who seem to believe that Islam is a religion like any other, that criticism of Islam is unjustified and based on the motiveless malignity of “Islamophobia,” and that the main duty of Catholics with respect to Muslims is not to challenge or confront them both as to their ideology and as to the many acts of Muslim terrorism, but to engage, rather, in endless Catholic-Muslim Dialogue. Ever since the Second Vatican Council, the Church has had an ill-considered mandate to engage in “dialogue” with Muslims, as the Committee for Ecumenical and Religious Affairs of the United States Conference of Bishops has stated:

“The declaration has been consistently upheld by recent popes. Pope John Paul II affirmed the need for dialogue with Muslims on numerous occasions throughout his long pontificate (1978–2005). For example, in Crossing the Threshold of Hope he remarked in the chapter entitled “Muhammad?” that “believers in Allah are particularly close to us” and that “the religiosity of Muslims deserves our respect” ([New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005], 91, 93). The pope also reiterated the central mandate of Nostra Aetate by reminding the faithful that they are called to maintain “a dialogue with followers of the ‘Prophet’” and that “the Church remains always open to dialogue and cooperation” (ibid., 93, 94).

Unfortunately, while American Bishops claim that Muslims have been willing to engage in such dialogue, they report that the Christian side has not been as forthcoming:

“Sadly, in recent years, there has been a deliberate rejection of this call to engage in dialogue with our Muslim brothers and sisters by some in the Catholic Church and in other ecclesial families. We understand the confusion and deep emotions…

Not “confusion” and unspecified “deep emotions,” but rage.

…stirred by real and apparent acts of aggression and discrimination…

Not unspecified “acts of aggression and discrimination,” but mass murder, repeated again and again.

…by certain Muslims against non-Muslims, often against Christians abroad. We, and increasingly our Muslim partners in dialogue, are concerned about these very real phenomena. Along with many of our fellow Catholics and the many Muslims who themselves are targeted by radicals…

Muslims have not been “targeted” in Europe, even if some have unavoidably been among those killed when large groups have been the target. It is only Shia Muslims in the Middle East and Pakistan who have been deliberately targeted, by Sunnis, and solely because they are regarded by those Sunnis as Infidels, even the worst kind of Infidels.