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September 2018

Demonization of Nunes Is a Window into Our Times By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/13/demonization-of-nunes

Much of what we now know about the unethical and often illegal behavior of the FBI, CIA, National Security Agency, and Department of Justice emerged due to the efforts of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Its chairman during its stunning disclosures has been Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), who in turn has been constantly demonized for his efforts.

Yet without the committee’s digging, Americans would not have known that Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid for an unsubstantiated 2016 dossier on Donald Trump compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele.

Prior to the committee’s work, we did not know that the FBI and Justice Department used unverified information from the Steele dossier to obtain a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court allowing for the surveillance of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

Without the committee’s disclosures, Americans would not have had any idea that Bruce Ohr, who once ranked fourth in the Department of Justice hierarchy, coordinated opposition research on Trump with Steele, the FBI and Fusion GPS. Ohr took this unethical step because his wife was working for Fusion GPS—a fact that was withheld on federal disclosure forms.

The Nunes-led committee also uncovered the names of prominent FBI and Justice Department officials—including James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Rod Rosenstein, and Sally Yates—who had approved FISA court warrant applications that were based on the largely discredited Steele dossier.

Most dramatically, we learned that members of the Obama Administration had unmasked the names of U.S. citizens swept up in government surveillance. Many of those names were illegally leaked to the press. This disclosure forced former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power and former National Security Adviser Susan Rice to confess that they had requested most of the unmaskings. Rice had previously denied it.

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence also confirmed that FBI agents had interviewed former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and did not think he had lied to them concerning his contact with a top Russian diplomat.

The Failure to Help Taiwan Trump bows to Beijing when it protests U.S. help for Taipei.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-failure-to-help-taiwan-1536707341

The U.S. recalled its ambassadors to El Salvador, the Dominican Republic and Panama on Friday, which prompted a cryptic warning from Beijing of all places not to “gesticulate” or make “thoughtless remarks.” So why are American and Chinese diplomats jousting in Latin America?

The answer is Taiwan. In the last 15 months Beijing has convinced the three countries to drop diplomatic recognition of the island and establish relations with mainland China. The U.S. recalled its ambassadors to signal that it will downgrade ties with countries that switch. Only 17 nations now recognize Taiwan, and several of those are wavering.

China’s diplomatic campaign is part of a larger effort to force Taiwan to accept reunification. Chinese leaders have threatened war if there is no progress toward this goal, and Chinese military forces are conducting maneuvers around the island. Taiwanese understandably refuse to give up their de facto independence or their hard-won democracy.

The U.S. show of solidarity with Taiwan is welcome, and perhaps the démarches will deter more diplomatic defections. But the Trump Administration could do much more to help the island. For example, in June the U.S. opened a new de facto embassy in Taipei. Taiwan’s friends in Congress requested that a cabinet-level official attend the ceremony. But after China threw a tantrum, the U.S. was represented by the assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs.

U.N. Is Called to Recognize Christian Genocide By Marlo Safi

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/united-nations-must-recognize-christian-genocide-iraq-syria/

The designation of ‘genocide’ would free up the flow of much-needed aid to some of the world’s most persecuted people.

This week, the United Nations Human Rights Council began its third (and last) regular session of the year, where a major ally of persecuted Middle Eastern Christians will again implore the U.N. to recognize the genocide of Syrian and Iraqi Christians.

At the 39th UNHRC session, which runs from September 10 to September 28, the European Centre for Law and Justice will be presenting an appeal to the Council to recognize ISIS’s ongoing, rampant persecution of Christians in Iraq and Syria as a “genocide,” as it’s enshrined in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

The European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ) is the American Center for Law and Justice’s European affiliate, and it has been a consistent advocate for persecuted minorities in the Middle East. Their testimony at this session will be their seventh declaring that ISIS is committing genocide against Christians and other religious and ethnic minorities. Before this, their most recent testimony was May 25, when they requested that the U.N. appoint a special adviser to lead an investigative team to collect and preserve evidence of the genocide.

Iran’s Shaky Foundations By Shoshana Bryen

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/09/irans_shaky_foundations.html

Current U.S. 5th Fleet exercises designed to ensure freedom of navigation in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea are a welcome sight.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has spent years extending its claims across the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, and the Red Sea. It has sponsored wars and militias in Iraq, Syria, Yemen plus terror organizations in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, along with farther-flung activities in Africa and South America. That, plus its huffing and puffing, have made the mullahs look ten feet tall.

Iran claims to have designed and built a new jet fighter plane.
It claims security control of the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz and threatens to block oil exports from other countries if Iran is constrained by sanctions. Iran has ordered the U.S. Navy out of the Gulf.
It announced a military pact with Syria that it claims will give it access to all of Syrian territory.

But the regime is on shaky ground.

The “jet fighter plane” in the Iranian video is a 1950s-era American F-5F.
The United States Navy is in, and will remain in, the Gulf, and, in fact, the last Iranian harassment of U.S. Navy ships was in mid-2017, after the Navy received orders to respond to unsafe Iranian activity around American ships.
The military pact appears mainly a way for Iran to try to recoup its multibillion-dollar losses in Syria by claiming contracts for reconstruction when the war ends. It isn’t clear who the Iranians think will actually pay for reconstruction.
And, pact or no pact, Israel is maintaining red lines preventing an Iranian military buildup. Israel has acknowledged some 200 raids into Syria.

President Trump: Your Thinking Out Of The Box Has Been Good…Now Make it Great Gerald Honigman

Seth Frantzman reported for the Jerusalem Post on September 9, 2018 about a precision Iranian ballistic missile attack on Kurds deep inside of Iraq which hit the exact building–some accounts say exact room–where Kurdish opposition leaders were meeting. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps was sending a message to others besides Kurds with this strike.

Like their otherwise centuries’ old rivals for regional hegemony–Turks and (mostly Sunni) Arabs as well–the one thing all three are in agreement about is the denial of political and even basic human rights to some forty million native people who pre-date at least the Turks and Arabs in their region by millennia. Both of the latter have outlawed Kurdish language and culture. The twenty two million Kurds in Turkey–about a fourth of the latter’s total population–have been renamed “Mountain Turks” by Ankara; and besides Saddam Hussein’s Anfal Campaign in “Arab” Iraq in the 1980s, which took some 200,000 Kurdish lives, the title of the Kurdish scholar, Ismet Cherif Vanly’s book, The Syrian ‘Mein Kampf ‘Against The Kurds (Amsterdam, 1968), says all you need to know about how Syrian Arabs have dealt with them as well.

The Iranians have continued hanging Kurdish dissidents again this week. All three nations have slaughtered either tens or hundreds of thousands of Kurds during the past century.

Please pay close attention to these excerpts from the JP report…

“The big picture then is an Iranian missile threat throughout the region… US allies have missile defense technology to confront the Iranian threat. Israel has a layered system of missile defense including Iron Dome, David’s Sling and the Arrow program, while Saudi Arabia has used Patriot missile batteries to stop the Houthi missiles. This has proven effective. It is also why the IRGC decided to test out its missiles by targeting defenseless Kurdish groups in northern Iraq.” Those defenses, of course, could be overwhelmed by huge numbers of missiles being fired at the same time.

Note, please, that very last line in the quote above about “defenseless” Kurds. Now let’s really begin…

US departure from conventional wisdom Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

The evolution of President Trump’s stance on the Palestinian issue reflects extrication from conventional wisdom, which was embraced by his predecessors and the establishment of the State Department, academia and the media, while systematically crashed against the rocks of Middle East reality.

In contrast to his predecessors, Trump and his advisors – National Security Advisor John Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, Special Emissary Jason Greenblatt and Ambassador David Friedman – have concluded that the bolstering of US national security, morality and common sense behooves the US to take a realistic – and not an artificially neutral – position on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Moral equivalence has not advanced national security.

The timing of the official release of President Trump’s policy – the eve of the September 11 memorial of the 3,000 fatalities and 6,000 injured – underlines the awareness that advancing national and homeland security mandates a clear differentiation between entities which combat terrorism systematically and effectively (e.g. the US and Israel), on the one hand, and those who produce, train, educate and incite terrorists (e.g. the Palestinian leadership, Iran’s Ayatollahs and other Islamic regimes), on the other hand.

Unlike his predecessor at the White House, Trump and his advisors realize that the restoration of the US’ posture of deterrence is a precondition to the enhancement of the US’ national and homeland security, requiring the fending off – and not succumbing to – pressure, threats and terrorism. Hence, the disavowal of the self-defeating 2015 Iran Deal, the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish State and the restructuring of US policy on the Palestinian issue.

Hungary Defiant in the Face of EU Censure by Soeren Kern

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12998/hungary-eu-censure

“We need a new European Commission that is committed to the defense of Europe’s borders.” — Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
“A few months ago … there was an election in Hungary. The Hungarian people decided what should happen, and during the election campaign we discussed all of the issues — including CEU, the NGOs, and all of the important political issues. And the people decided on these issues. And now the European Parliament is taking upon itself the task of overruling the decision made by the people of Hungary and forcing the Hungarian government to implement what they are attempting to impose on us in place of the people’s decision.” — Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
“Hungary and the Hungarian people have been convicted because we have proven that migration is not needed and that it can be stopped.” — Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjártó.
“Hungary’s decisions are made by the voters in parliamentary elections. What you are claiming is no less than saying that the Hungarian people are not sufficiently capable of being trusted to judge what is in their own interests. You think that you know the needs of the Hungarian people better than the Hungarian people themselves…. This report applies double standards, it is an abuse of power, it oversteps the limits on spheres of competence, and the method of its adoption is a treaty violation.” — Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

The European Parliament has voted to pursue unprecedented disciplinary action against Hungary over alleged breaches of the European Union’s “fundamental values.” The EU has accused the Hungarian government of attacks against the media, minorities and the rule of law.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has denied the charges, and said they are a retaliation for his government’s refusal to take in migrants from the Muslim world.

The censure represents another salvo in a showdown between pro- and anti-EU forces over populism and nationalism ahead of European Parliament elections in May 2019.

Germany: Stifling Dissent to Mass Migration by Vijeta Uniyal

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12997/germany-migration-dissent

Hans-Georg Maassen, the head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, BfV, has dismissed claims that right-wing gangs chased non-Germans during the late August demonstrations in Chemnitz after the fatal stabbing of a German by a group of migrants. That news flew in the face of Chancellor Merkel’s repeated use of the charge of a “hunt on foreigners” in describing the incidents.
According to the domestic affairs spokesperson for Merkel’s Christian Democratic party, Maassen “would answer parliamentarians’ questions about his comments at special meetings next week. In these “hearings,” politicians are expected to bring more pressure to bear on the intelligence chief, in an apparent attempt to make him recant his statements.
Maassen is not the only one in the crosshairs of the mainstream politicians. Rattled by the recent wave of protests against country’s open-door immigration policy, establishment parties across the political spectrum are calling for the populist anti-immigration Alternative for Germany party (AfD) to be placed under police surveillance.
In early September, authorities in the states of Lower Saxony and Bremen placed their regional chapters of Young Alternative, the AfD’s youth wing, under surveillance citing “suspected ties to extremists.”

In Communist East Germany, truth-telling involved risks. The penalty for it was often loss of one’s professional career and social status, if not more. Today, challenging the state-approved narrative in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Germany can sometimes have similar consequences.

Only Trump Could End Palestine A bad time for bad ideas. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271267/only-trump-could-end-palestine-daniel-greenfield

The Soviet Union had a perverse genius for convincing the United States to not only adopt its most destructive ideas, but to also become their chief sponsor under the delusion that it would somehow stop the destruction that its old Communist enemy had unleashed around the world.

It’s fitting that President Trump struck at two terrible red birds with one stone by dumping the UNRWA. Both the UN and Palestinian nationalism were the brainchildren of Soviet Communists that the leftist American foreign policy establishment adopted under the supposed guise of fighting Soviet influence, and was then in turn quickly picked up by a clueless Republican foreign policy establishment.

Republicans embraced Arab nationalism since President Eisenhower sided with Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Hitler admiring military dictator and his nationalization of the Suez Canal, over the UK, France and Israel. In what he would later describe as his greatest mistake, Eisenhower threatened his former British allies with economic warfare to keep Egypt’s Arab Socialist regime from going over to the Communist side.

It didn’t work.

But every Republican administration until now had embraced Arab nationalism and its ugly malformed terrorist stepchild, Palestinian nationalism.

Even the Reagan administration.

All the Soviet Union needed to do was adopt a bunch of Islamic terrorists and the United States would show up like a jealous rival to shower them with love, flowers and chocolates. After the Soviet Union collapsed, its old Arab Socialist client states, the Islamic oil kingdoms that first corrupted our foreign policy, and domestic Muslim Brotherhood lobbies continued successfully playing this game of Br’er Rabbit and the Briar Patch with the American Br’er Fox. With no more Soviet Union to compete against, the rationale for supporting terrorists was to convince them to turn moderate or to stop them from allying with more “extreme” terrorists. The only way to stop the terrorists was to adopt them.

A Suggestion for Nikki Haley Time for a U.N. speech exposing Islamist propaganda. Hugh Fitzgerald

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271301/suggestion-nikki-haley-hugh-fitzgerald

It was recently revealed that the photograph posted online by an Arab propagandist, Abdullah Alsaafin, of a two-year-old girl identified as Bayan Abu Khamash, supposedly killed by Israeli bombs, had in fact been taken from Instagram, where the girl was identified as an American two-year-old, Elle Lively McBroom.

“War is deceit,” said Muhammad, and the uncovering of deceit is a legitimate defense in such a war. Now that we know the source of that photo, there are several things that might be done. Instagram or Twitter or wherever Abdullah Alsaafin has an account might be publicly appealed to, to remove his account in light of the fact that he has been caught malevolently misusing, for the purposes of propaganda, a photograph on Instagram. Instagram cannot police every misuse of its contents, but when such a blatant and dangerous example is brought to its attention, it has a responsibility to act. It should not only remove Alsaafin’s account (if he has an Instagram account; otherwise the places where he posted the false photo should remove his account), but explain that it is doing so because of his malevolent theft, with malice aforethought, of a two-year-old’s photograph.

This is one of many examples where the Arabs have used fauxtography. Recently, I was informed, Arab propagandists had posted pictures in the aftermath of the earthquake in Mexico, identifying them as scenes in Gaza. Photographs of destruction in Syria have been similarly applied. During the 2006 war in Lebanon, Hezbollah — and willing Western journalists — engaged in fauxtography of every kind. Burning tires in the smoky distance were presented as burned out buildings, an untouched Qur’an was carefully placed in the middle of rubble, and then deliberately set on fire, long after the building it was said to have been in had been reduced to rubble.