BOOKS Comments turned off

Left at the Mercy of the Mullahs Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent, should have become a cause célèbre after he was seized in Iran in 2007. Washington did next to nothing. By Reuel Marc Gerecht

Posted By on May 18th, 2016

Since the Central Intelligence Agency contractor Robert Levinson disappeared after a trip to the Iranian island of Kish in 2007, journalists, government officials and the curious have asked me: Of the various stories told about Mr. Levinson’s disappearance, which one makes the most sense?

Had he traveled to Iran at the behest of the CIA? Or had the former FBI agent gone to retrieve Dawud Salahuddin, an American-born murderer who’d become homesick? Maybe he was there to turn him into an asset. Or perhaps Mr. Levinson journeyed to Kish as a sleuth for a corporate client who had come out on the losing side of a shady business transaction.

These questions have been impossible to answer since the CIA’s side of this story remains classified. But Barry Meier’s book, “Missing Man,” provides more than enough information to make sense of Mr. Levinson’s tragic trip to Kish, a freewheeling entrepôt where Americans may visit without visas and where Iranian security forces seized the American, imprisoned him, and taunted his family and former colleagues with pictures of him disheveled and wasting away. Mr. Meier, a New York Times reporter who has covered this story for years, limns a depressing picture of the amateurish, voracious intelligence appetites of some in the CIA.

Mr. Meier is sympathetic to his subject. A 20-year FBI agent who’d focused on Russian organized crime, Mr. Levinson left the bureau in 1998 to make more money in the private sector, but his heart remained in government work. When he became a CIA contractor in 2006 “he was thrilled to be back in the game,” as Mr. Meier puts it. Interviews with Mr. Levinson’s colleagues and friends and selections from Mr. Levinson’s emails portray an ardent patriot who was less interested in delivering information to his corporate clients than feeding it to his friend, Anne Jablonski, in Langley’s Illicit Finance Group.

By the time Mr. Levinson departs for Iran—about a third of the way through the book—the reader has the distinct impression that the gregarious family man (seven children and a beloved wife) went to Kish to dig up information on the ruling clergy primarily to improve his stature and his billing potential with CIA analysts. It’s also pretty clear—Mr. Meier leaves some doubt—that the Illicit Finance Group had no idea that he was traveling to Kish to collect information on its behalf. The CIA has admitted to having a relationship with Mr. Levinson, but it has stuck to its story that he was a “rogue” contractor. CONTINUE AT SITE

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Anti-Israel Poisoning Starts Young Palestinian schools honor the killers of my father, a teacher. This would break his heart. By Micah Lakin Avni

Posted By on May 18th, 2016

My father, Richard Lakin, a 76-year-old retired elementary-school principal from Connecticut, was on a bus in Jerusalem last October when two young Palestinian men boarded and began shooting and stabbing passengers indiscriminately. Two passengers were killed that awful day and 16 injured, including my father. Despite the efforts of first responders and the nurses and doctors at Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital, my father died two weeks later. He had been shot in the head and stabbed multiple times in the head, face, chest and stomach.

Over the past seven months I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand what would cause two educated Palestinian men in their early 20s to board a public bus and butcher a group of innocent civilians, many of them senior citizens. I’m sorry to report that the Palestinian reaction to the attack has led me to believe that the “peace process” is more one-sided than ever.
Richard Lakin died in October 2015, two weeks after he was critically wounded in a Palestinian terrorist attack on a public bus in Jerusalem. ENLARGE
Richard Lakin died in October 2015, two weeks after he was critically wounded in a Palestinian terrorist attack on a public bus in Jerusalem. Photo: Associated Press

My father grew up a fighter for civil rights in America. He took those values with him in 1984 when he emigrated to Jerusalem, where he taught English to Arabs and Jews. He was a kind, gentle-hearted man who dedicated his life to education and promoting peaceful coexistence.

Yet Palestinian newspapers praised Baha Alyan, one of the terrorists who murdered my father, as a “martyr and intellectual.” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has met with the families of the attackers and praised them as “martyrs.” A Palestinian scout leader said Baha Alyan, who was shot and killed by a security guard before he could kill more innocent passengers, was “an example for every scout.”

Muhammad Alyan, the father of Baha Alyan, has been invited to speak at Palestinian schools and universities about his son the “martyr.” He recently spoke to children at Jabel Mukaber Elementary School in East Jerusalem, about a half a mile from where my father lived. Tragically, many Palestinian children, perhaps most, are still taught to honor terrorists and fight for the destruction of Israel. CONTINUE AT SITE

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

German Court Bans Bulk of Satirical Poem About Turkish Leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan Judges in Hamburg say TV sketch aired by comedian Jan Böhmermann violated Turk’s rights By Bertrand Benoit and Andrea Thomas

Posted By on May 18th, 2016

BERLIN—A German court on Tuesday banned a comedian from repeating large sections of a satirical text about Recep Tayyip Erdogan, handing the Turkish President a partial victory in his efforts to silence mockery and criticism in Germany of his person and policies.

The regional Hamburg court ruling on a complaint by the Turkish president said the text by comedian Jan Böhmermann qualified as satire and that those parts of it targeted at the president’s policies or leadership could be quoted.

However, the bulk of the text was described by the court as religiously disparaging, “reflecting prejudice of a racist nature” and containing sexual content. Those parts breached Mr. Erdogan’s rights and couldn’t be repeated, the court said.
The lawyer representing Mr. Erdogan in this case couldn’t be reached for comment, but Ralf Höcker, a lawyer representing the president in a separate but related case welcomed the decision. “Racist insults aren’t covered by the right to freedom of opinion,” said Mr. Höcker. “That’s this decision’s important message.” The Turkish President’s office declined to comment.

The court order, or preliminary injunction, can be appealed.

Meanwhile, Christian Schertz, a lawyer for Mr. Böhmermann, said the court had failed to grasp the comedian’s ironic detachment.

“The regional court of Hamburg makes the mistake of dissecting the poem and taking out and banning certain remarks that it regards as being degrading. This isn’t possible in the field of artistic freedom. Instead, the poem must be considered in its entirety and in the context of the (television) show.” CONTINUE AT SITE

ANTI-SEMITISM, POLITICS Comments turned off

His and Her Clintonomics Hillary says she’ll use Bill on the economy, but her policies are to the left of Obama’s.

Posted By on May 18th, 2016

In his 1992 campaign Bill Clinton liked to tell voters they’d be getting two for the price of one, and now Hillary Clinton is dusting off the same promise. She said this weekend in Kentucky that she’d put the First Husband “in charge of revitalizing the economy,” and she’s since added that “he’s got to come out of retirement” to raise incomes and put people back to work.

Mrs. Clinton’s remarks are a revealing turn, not least because so far she’s been running for President Obama’s third term. But since Democrats seem to agree that the economic status quo is dismal, and thus they can’t run on Mr. Obama’s record, the presumptive nominee is trying to confuse voters with halcyon memories of the 1990s boom.

The Clinton gang has since “clarified” that Mr. Clinton’s ministrations will be confined to distressed U.S. regions like inner cities or coal country. Maybe they realized that vowing to outsource one of her most important jobs might diminish her as a candidate.

Her larger problem is that the Obama-era Democratic Party has repudiated the Democratic Party’s Bill-era centrist agenda. They now call themselves progressives, not New Democrats, and they take their marching orders from Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, not Larry Summers and Alan Greenspan. Mrs. Clinton has accommodated this trend to the pre-Bill left.

The Clinton contradiction is that she claims she’ll produce economic results like her husband did with economic policies like Mr. Obama’s. For the record, let’s lay out the differences between the agenda that helped drive the prosperity of 1993-2001, when the U.S. economy expanded by 3.8% annually on average, and what Mrs. Clinton is proposing to close out the 2010s, when GDP growth has failed to exceed 2.5% in a single year.

• Taxes. Bill Clinton raised income taxes in 1993 to a top rate of 39.6%, but Democrats lost Congress in 1994 and he never did that again. In 1997 Mr. Clinton even compromised with the Newt Gingrich Republicans and cut the top capital gains tax rate to 20% from 28%. His wife wants to nearly double the top tax rate on long-term cap gains to 43.4% from 23.8%, in the name of ending “quarterly capitalism.” That’s higher than the 40% rate under Jimmy Carter, and she’d also impose a minimum tax on millionaires and above, details to come. CONTINUE AT SITE

POLITICS Comments turned off

Only Donald Trump Can Counter the Coup D’état of 2008 by Joan Swirsky

Posted By on May 18th, 2016

WHAT TRUMP “GETS”

Of the 16 “establishment” candidates the non-politician businessman Mr. Trump defeated to become the presumptive Republican presidential nominee of 2016, he, more than any of his former rivals, seems unabashedly patriotic, a man who appreciates, takes pride in, and feels deeply about America’s illustrious (and complicated) history. That history includes:

The Revolutionary War from 1775 to 1783, in which just a few brave souls broke from England in their successful quest for independence and freedom.
The Industrial Revolution from about 1760 to about 1840, which radically transformed America from primarily an agrarian culture to one driven by manufacturing and paving the way for our country’s wealth.
The Civil War from 1861 to 1865, in which our divided country was ultimately reunited and slavery abolished.
The women’s suffrage movement that began in 1840 and in 1920 resulted in the right of half our citizens to vote.
World War I (the Great War) from 1914 to 1918, which resulted in the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917, the German and the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, and the Ottoman Empire in 1922, and nearly 10 million deaths, including 116,516 Americans.
The Great Depression of 1929 that began in America after a fall in stock prices and metastasized into a worldwide catastrophe resulting in widespread welfare-relief programs and the rise of anti-capitalist, pro-Communist thinkers like Karl Marx.
World War II, 1939 to 1945, began in September 1939 when Germany, under Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime, invaded Poland and France, pummeled England, and subsequently attacked and conquered Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. The conflict involved the majority of the world’s nations and was marked by the Holocaust (in which 11-million perished, including six-million Jews), the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and 50-to-85-million fatalities––the deadliest conflict in human history. The Axis nations of Hitler’s Germany, Japan (under Emperor Hirohito and his Prime Ministers Tojo and Konoe), and Italy (under Mussolini) fought the Allied nations (England, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the United States of America, among others). The conflict concluded on September 2, 1945, with the official surrender of the last Axis nation, Japan.
The Korean War from 1950 to 1953 was between North and South Korea. A United Nations force, led by the United States, fought for the South, and China, assisted by the Soviet Union, fought for the North. The war ended in 1953, with the establishment of a Demilitarized Zone. But no peace treaty was ever signed so the two Koreas are technically still at war.
The Vietnam War from 1959 to 1975 pitted forces trying to unify the country under Communist control against the United States (aided by the South Vietnamese) trying to prevent the spread of Communism. While fought nobly for a noble cause, the war lost the support of the American public, and although U.S. and South Vietnamese forces won the Tet Offensive launched against them in 1968, President Johnson’s decision not to run again for president served to weaken U.S. resolve to win the war. His successor, President Nixon, started to withdraw U.S. troops in 1969, the last one leaving in 1973. The war ended in 1975 with Vietnam being unified under a single Communist government.
The War in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2014 was launched by President G.W. Bush in response to the attack on America on September 11, 2001. Its goal was to dismantle al Qaeda and the Taliban.
The Iraq War, 2003 to essentially the present, was also launched by Pres. G.W. Bush to rid the Mideast of weapons of mass destruction––which every intelligence agency in the world said existed––and to bring democracy to the Mideast. The conflict toppled dictator Saddam Hussein, but today Iraq is plagued by ongoing sectarian conflicts and the deadly presence of ISIS (the Islamic State of Syria).
All this is not to omit our country’s society-altering decade of the 1960s, in which the advent of The Pill, the Women’s Movement, the rise of the two-income family, men landing on the moon, the Black Power movement, the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy––all transformed our country profoundly, including the beginning of what has today become the seemingly irreparable breach between the perpetually seething and “victimized” left and, today at least, the ineffectual and accommodating right.

BOOKS Comments turned off

The Next Anti-Israeli Temper Tantrum By Lawrence J. Haas

Posted By on May 18th, 2016

Some two dozen well-known novelists are writing a book about Israel’s occupation of the West Bank that will lack context, ignore reality, give Palestinians a pass for their terror and Jew-hating, and do nothing to end the very occupation they deplore.

The occupation is “the most grievous injustice I have ever seen in my life … the worst thing I have ever seen, just purely in terms of injustice,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Jewish author Michael Chabon said after touring the West Bank city of Hebron in late April with his wife, the novelist Amy Ayelet Waldman – who are jointly leading the project to produce the book next year. Perhaps Chabon’s led a sheltered life, for the occupation in Hebron and elsewhere in the West Bank hardly compares to humanitarian horror in North Korea; political suppression in China, Russia and Cuba; and the lack of fundamental human rights across the Arab world.

Or perhaps it hasn’t occurred to Chabon, Waldman and the other esteemed novelists who include Mario Vargas Llosa, Geraldine Brooks and Dave Eggers – all of whom have visited the West Bank, East Jerusalem, or Gaza or will do so in the coming weeks – that they wouldn’t be allowed to investigate human rights in any of the aforementioned countries due to their autocratic rule.

But let’s set aside the writers’ naivete and take them at their word. “We decided,” Chabon and Waldman wrote in announcing the project in February, “to mark the 50th anniversary of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank by editing a volume of essays by notable international writers on topics involving life in the Palestinian territories, free of cant… [to] allow readers to understand the situation in Palestine-Israel in a new way, through human narrative, rather than the litany of grim destruction we see on the news.”

The writers are working with Breaking the Silence, a controversial group of Israeli soldiers and veterans who discuss their service in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. Their joint goal is simple: end the occupation. They hope that the writers will, as Breaking the Silence’s Yuli Novak put it, “touch the hearts of many people, both in Israel and internationally, in convincing them of the necessity to end it.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Israel as a Security Asset – For Everyone by Shoshana Bryen

Posted By on May 18th, 2016

The week of Israel’s 68th anniversary, NATO invited Israel – and three other countries – to “establish diplomatic missions to NATO headquarters.” This is not NATO membership, something to which Israel does not aspire, but recognition that Israel has something to offer the Atlantic Alliance. Prime Minister Netanyahu said, “The countries of the world want to cooperate with us because of our determined struggle against terrorism, because of our technological knowledge, our intelligence deployment and other reasons.”

It may have something to do with the revelation that Israel had warned Brussels of lax airport security before the terror attack at Zavantem Airport in March. Or the discovery that Israel had offered France a tracking system for terror suspects after the Charlie Hebdo/kosher supermarket attacks and nearly a year before the September bombings that killed 130 people in Paris. France had declined. An Israeli source said, “French authorities liked it, but (an official) came back and said there was a higher-level instruction not to buy Israeli technology… the discussion just stopped.”

It may have something to do with NATO member Turkey’s increasingly perilous position in the Middle East. Facing increased Kurdish restiveness, spillover from the Syrian war, ISIS imposed genocide, and increasingly strained relations with Russia over Syria and Ngorno-Karabakh, restoring security cooperation with Israel might be a lifeline for Ankara. This would account for Turkey dropping its opposition to Israel’s NATO mission.

Or maybe NATO is reverting to its previous view of Israel as a security partner and moving closer to the traditional American position, regardless of the increasingly shrill tenor of European politics (we’re not the only ones). There is history here.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

MICHAEL CUTLER MOMENT: OBAMA’S PATHWAY TO THE “BORDERLESS WORLD”

Posted By on May 18th, 2016

http://jamieglazov.com/2016/05/17/michael-cutler-moment-obamas-pathway-to-the-borderless-world/This special edition of The Glazov Gang presents The Michael Cutler Moment with Michael Cutler, a former Senior INS Special Agent.

Mr. Cutler discussed Obama’s Pathway to the “Borderless World,”unveiling how the Radical-in-Chief is opening America to Islamic terrorists and transnational criminals.

Don’t miss it!http://jamieglazov.com/2016/05/17/michael-cutler-moment-obamas-pathway-to-the-borderless-world/

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Why Hasn’t Obama Fired Ben Rhodes? By Claudia Rosett

Posted By on May 18th, 2016

It’s a good bet that by now the entire foreign policy cosmos — from “the Blob” to the 27-year-old reporters — has read the New York Times magazine profile of Deputy National Security Advisor Benjamin Rhodes, “The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru.” The reporter, David Samuels, had extraordinary access to the White House, multiple well-placed sources and in his 9,500 word piece he provides plenty of attribution, including quotes from Rhodes himself. We get a detailed look, behind the White House facade, at Rhodes, “master shaper and retailer of Obama’s foreign policy narratives,” complete with his contempt for Congress, the press and the public; his manipulation of the media; and a case study of his “narrative” of lies concocted to grease a path for Obama’s signature foreign policy achievement — the unpopular, murky, amorphous and deeply dangerous Iran nuclear deal.

Freighted with the far-reaching effects of a major treaty, the Iran deal was never submitted by Obama to the Senate for ratification as a treaty. Framed as an agreement with Iran, it was never signed by Iran. Sold by the administration as a transparent deal, it is turning out to be a slush heap of secrets. The real blob in this drama is the rolling sludge of presidential over-reach, White House fictions and raw abuse of public trust that has brought us everything from the indigestible “Affordable Care Act” to the Benghazi “video” narrative, to the Iran deal.

As the Washington Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo reports, leading members of Congress are calling on President Obama to fire Rhodes “over accusations the White House intentionally misled lawmakers and the American public about the contents of last summer’s comprehensive nuclear agreement with Iran.”

In a letter to Obama, Senators Mark Kirk, John Cornyn and John Barrasso cite Rhodes’s statement to the New York Times that the White House peddled a phony narrative to sell the Iran deal because he considered it “impossible” for elected lawmakers to have “a sober, reasoned public debate, after which the members of Congress reflect and take a vote.” They note, if Rhodes “had conducted himself this way in a typical place of business outside Washington, where American taxpayers work, he surely would have been already fired or asked to resign.”

So, why does Ben Rhodes still have his job?

The broad answer involves the moral vertigo of modern Washington, the Instagram attention span of too many members of a Twitter-driven press corps, and the self-abasements of a culture in which the old American spirit of individual responsibility and free enterprise has been devolving — with many a prompt from President You-Didn’t-Build-That — into a selfie-snapping contest for “safe spaces” and “free stuff.”

In that context, dude, what difference does it make if Boy Wonder Ben Rhodes, speechwriter and “strategic communicator,” mind-melded with the President, carries on manufacturing and marketing the “narrative” that passes these days for foreign policy? Once you dispense with the baggage of reality, and its knock-on effects for those multitudes of lesser mortals who have never flown on Air Force One, what’s left is former White House staffer Tommy Vietor (“Dude, this was like two years ago”), buddy of Ben Rhodes, techno-chatting to one of Washington’s best reporters, Eli Lake, (who knows plenty) that he’s sure most folks outside of Washington think the Rhodes profile was just a “fascinating profile of a brilliant guy with a really cool job.” CONTINUE AT SITE

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

MY SAY: THIRD PARTY CANDIDATE? THIRD RATE STRATEGY

Posted By on May 17th, 2016

The high dudgeon of the Never Trumpsters is so ridiculous. The best they can offer is a sad list of also rans who lost. Do conservatives really want to subvert the popular, democratically chosen candidate when the mother of political evils is the other choice? Puleez! I like and respect Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse. He has a great future in the GOP? Why squander resources on a quixotic quest when he has so much to bring to the Senate?

Andy McCarthy and Roger Kimball are among some conservatives whose disdain for Trump was known. They have both come around to conceding that Hillary Clinton is worse. …Far worse…..rsk