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November 2019

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Trump makes pro-Israel history again by Ruthie Blum

By on November 19th, 2019

https://www.jns.org/writers/ruthie-blum/

Every action that his administration has taken stems from the understanding that the so-called “Israeli-Palestinian peace process” has failed repeatedly—not only as a result of being based on a false premise, but of following the same old paradigm.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s dramatic announcement on Monday that the “establishment of Israeli civilian settlements in the West Bank is not per se inconsistent with international law” sent shockwaves around the world. In retrospect, however, it shouldn’t have come as such a surprise.

Since his election three years ago, U.S. President Donald Trump has been consistent in his efforts to reverse the policies of the administration of his predecessor, Barack Obama. Not only in relation to Israel. But his pro-Israel stance has been steady and unapologetic from the get-go, which is as it should be.

Indeed, each of his decisions—such as recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moving the embassy accordingly, defunding the Palestinian “pay for slay” machine and acknowledging Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights—has been geared towards cementing the natural U.S.-Israel relationship in a healthy way. Every action that his administration has taken stems from the understanding that the so-called “Israeli-Palestinian peace process” has failed repeatedly—not only as a result of being based on a false premise, but of following the same old paradigm.

Team Trump has been engaging in what the high-tech sector refers to as “disruption.”

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MY SAY: ROE V AMERICAN WARRIORS

By on November 19th, 2019

 President Trump pardoned soldiers facing prison terms for “war crimes” and flouting the military rules of engagement. How can one apply rote rules to decisions made in the moment of high risk situations?

Lt. Col.David Bolgiano, U.S. Air Force and Author of: Combat Self-Defense: Saving America’s Warriors From Risk-Averse Commanders and Their Lawyers wrote:

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/haditha/themes/roe.html

Rules of engagement are a device used by a commander to set forth the parameters of when, how, for what duration and magnitude and geographical location, and against what targets our forces can employ force, generally deadly force … in a theater of operations.

The rules of engagement, strictly speaking, as they work in the military, contain a caveat … that nothing in these rules of engagement shall limit the right, inherent right, of self-defense. And what’s left unspoken but is legally significant, is the phrase, when confronted with “an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury.”

Why is there confusion over the right to self-defense? …

The confusion over the inherent right of self-defense doesn’t come from the written word. It doesn’t come from the law.  The confusion over the inherent right of self-defense comes from assessing judgment-based shootings after the fact that, in the clear vision of 20/20 hindsight, may not appear to be reasonable when, in fact, by law and by tactics, they were. 

In January 2005, a vehicle approached a hastily constructed traffic control point on the route from downtown Baghdad to Baghdad International Airport. The vehicle approached the checkpoint in speeds close to 60 miles per hour, ignored flares and warning signs to slow down and halt, at which point the soldiers on the traffic control point reasonably perceived a threat, an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury, and engaged the vehicle.

In the clear vision of 20/20 hindsight, we learned that it was an Italian intelligence officer driving the vehicle who was, unfortunately, shot and killed.  But that decision at the time the soldier [pulled] the trigger was, nevertheless, reasonable.

And that’s where a lot of the confusion comes from. It comes from folks that don’t understand the tactical dynamics of an encounter and wish to impose, one, either their Hollywood notion of what’s reasonable, or two, try to judge the person by what is learned in the clear vision of 20/20 hindsight.

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The Swamp’s Swingline Stapler Julie Kelly

By on November 19th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/18/the-swamps-swingline-stapler/

We are to believe that crying EPA employees, out-of-the-loop ambassadors, holier-than-thou law enforcement chiefs, and jobless assistant deputy undersecretaries for blah-blah affairs are the victims of a rogue president who must be removed from office for hurting their feelings and challenging their authority.

In December 2008, Barack Obama summarily fired every ambassador appointed by George W Bush.

The media did not care for four reasons. First, it was Barack Obama. Second, they recognized that the president controls the executive branch. Third, it was a parting shiv to Bush. Finally, it was Barack Obama.

Whether any of the ousted diplomats cried is unknown.

But now in the Trump era, as Obama-era somnambulists awake every day to a new outrage that heretofore had been considered standard operating procedure inside the Beltway, a dismissed ambassador is given hours to vent her thoughts and feelz in front of one of Capitol Hill’s most powerful committees. If you weren’t moved by the sad tale of former Ukrainian Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch—an Obama appointee—getting the ax by Donald Trump, according to Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, you don’t have a pulse.

Perhaps Wallace has a point. After becoming accustomed to heads of state referring to you as “Madame Ambassador” and “Your Excellency,” being addressed as “Ms. Y” by a dozen or so Georgetown University whippersnappers would bruise anyone’s ego. (Yovanovitch admitted that she still retains a position at the State Department at the same salary with no daily responsibilities but also is allowed to moonlight as a Georgetown fellow. Sweet gig.)

Further, being forced to move out of a mansion in Kyiv tended to by a doting staff that helps you host important receptions for important people would sting, too. In one telling moment, Yovanovitch explained that the night she learned of her pending dismissal, she was hosting a party for a Ukrainian anti-corruption activist. “I was at my house,” she told one Democratic lawmaker.

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Trump impeachment inquiry obstructed by Democrats’ ‘whistleblower’ secrecy charade Andrew C. McCarthy

By on November 19th, 2019

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/trump-impeachment-inquiry-democrats-whistleblo

Congressional Democrats are obstructing the impeachment inquiry.

You heard that right. It has become rote for House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and his fellow Democrats to chide the Trump administration for blocking testimony from White House staffers and the president’s private lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. Yet, those witnesses actually have confidentiality privileges that are well settled in federal law, shielding communications between the chief executive and his top advisers, and between attorney and client, from disclosure.

When a person asserts a privilege recognized by law, we don’t call that obstruction. We call it the law in action.

By contrast, Schiff is playing a lawless game with the so-called whistleblower: predicating the impeachment inquiry on this intelligence official’s complaint while blocking Republicans from questioning the official and other policy officials with whom he dealt. The suppression of relevant information obstructs the congressional investigation.

I have argued from the outset that the “whistleblower” is not actually a whistleblower in the strict legal sense because the statute governing the protection of such sources is inapposite. (That is, the statute covers disclosures relating to activities of the intelligence services, not the president’s conduct of foreign relations.) For present purposes, though, let’s assume I am wrong and that the “whistleblower” is covered.

If this were a legal case, there is not a court in America that would keep the whistleblower’s identity and the details of his role in the origins of the Democrats’ Ukraine investigation under wraps.

Congressional Democrats are not merely withholding the identity of the whistleblower. They are denying committee Republicans the right to question other witnesses about relevant dealings with the whistleblower.

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BOOKS, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Mao Zedong’s Traveling Circus David Hanna

By on November 19th, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/11/mao-zedongs-travelling-circus/
Brian DeMare is a cultural historian and teacher of modern Chinese history at Tulane University in New Orleans. His first book, Mao’s Cultural Army (2015), found the cultural revolution “to be a profoundly theatrical event”. It was also a profoundly murderous event and DeMare’s second book,  Land Wars, this time on Mao’s agrarian revolution, depicts similar excesses but does not sufficiently condemn them for what they were: a politically self-serving democide of the Party’s potential opposition in the villages of rural China.

Coined by Professor R.J. Rummel, whose research provides voluminous statistics on governmental killing, the word democide involves acts of genocide, politicide and mass murder. By necessity, the self-protective despotism of communist one-party rule entailed all three of them. While DeMare’s narrative does little to emphasise this point explicitly, his recounting of the Maoist bastardry which savaged rural China will do much to support that contention.

DeMare foregrounds Mao’s intuitive conviction that the Chinese peasantry could make or break the revolution, and DeMare’s varied researches and narrative style make Land Wars a highly informative and readable account of how a communist mastermind artificially induced an agrarian revolution. “Historians,” writes DeMare, “must engage Mao’s narrative of revolution in order to understand what truly occurred in rural China as the Communists came to power.”

The central theme of Land Wars is that Mao’s peasant revolution was a fantasy, a fiction which the Party’s “work teams” were commanded to convert into reality. While DeMare effectively “deconstructs and questions Mao’s narrative”, he simultaneously and mysteriously manages to affirm its reification. DeMare provides abundant and horrifying evidence that China’s agrarian revolution is, as he says himself, “nothing to be lionised” and yet despite a painstaking litany of revolutionary deceit, human rights abuses, theft, slaughter and rapine, he finds the overall results unworthy of “wholesale denunciation”.

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Pompeo’s statement on settlements is a diplomatic turning point Caroline Glick

By on November 19th, 2019

http://carolineglick.com/pompeos-statement-on-settlements-is-a-diplomatic-turning-p

Monday will long be remembered as a turning point in Middle East history.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s statement Monday that Israeli settlements are not illegal per se is the most significant shift in U.S. Middle East policy in the past generation. Jerusalem’s status as Israel’s capital has been a matter of U.S. law since 1996. There was little interest in Washington in recent years in pressuring Israel to withdraw from the Golan Heights. But the issue of the legality of Israeli settlements has been the defining issue of much of the international discourse on Israel for a generation.

In the vast majority of cases, the discourse has revolved around the widely held allegation – with no basis in actual law – that Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria are illegal. This allegation has served as the justification for a continuous barrage of condemnations of Israel in international arena and for anti-Israel legal verdicts in international courts including the International Court of Justice at the Hague in 2004 and the European Court of Justice last week. The unsupported allegation that Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria are illegal was also the basis for UN Security Council Resolution 2234 from 2016 and is a basis of the International Criminal Court’s ongoing probes of Israelis.

Pompeo made two revolutionary assertions in his statement. First, he said that “after carefully studying all sides of the legal debate,” like the Reagan administration before it, the Trump administration has concluded, “The establishment of Israeli civilian settlements in the West Bank is not per se inconsistent with international law.”

Second, Pompeo noted, the near ubiquitousness of the false assertion that settlements are illegal has not advanced the prospects for peace. To the contrary, it has harmed the chances of getting to peace.

In his words, “calling the establishment of civilian settlements inconsistent with international law has not advanced the cause of peace.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Has The Iranian Empire Overreached? Shoshana Bryen 

By on November 19th, 2019

https://www.dailywire.com/news/bryen-irans-imperial-overreach

Since December 2017, a sort of “rolling rebellion” has been occurring across Iran. It is bigger, deeper and stronger than the Green Revolution of 2009 and taking place in great measure outside Tehran, where the population is more diverse. There have been strikes of truckers, bazaar shopkeepers, teachers, farmers, and students. See #WhiteWednesday on Twitter to watch brave Iranian women go into the streets and take off their head coverings. Sometimes they dance. Sometimes their husbands, fathers, and brothers go with them. Sometimes they are arrested and sometimes they go to jail. Unfortunately, it took the suicide of a young woman facing seven years in prison for attending a soccer match to get the attention of the Western press.

In May of this year, widespread upheaval convulsed the country and thousands were arrested. This weekend, news of increasing protest in Iran comes from the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) — an organization with a mixed record of acceptance by the U.S. government, but with indisputable reach inside the country. According to NCRI’s Washington office, at least 65 cities have seen violent demonstrations, with people killed and injured by authorities. Videos, presumably from cell phones, show that pictures of the Ayatollah Khameini have been set on fire and demonstrators are chanting “Death to the Dictator” and “Death to Rouhani.” You can follow @AlirezaNader for more.

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Denmark: Shootings, Car Torchings, Gang Violence by Judith Bergman

By on November 19th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15037/denmark-shootings-gang-violence

“These numbers underline, first of all, that we are talking about a problem that has to do with ethnicity. The argument that this has nothing to do with foreigners has to be taken off the table.” — Trine Bramsen, legal affairs spokesperson for the Social Democrats, in Berlingske Tidende, August 24, 2017.

“In addition to a common fondness for crime, the culture of immigrant gangs is a cocktail of religion, clan affiliation, honor, shame and brotherhood… The harder and the more brutal [you are], the stronger you are, and then you create awareness of yourself and attract more [people]”. — Naser Khader, member of the Danish Parliament for the Conservative Party and co-founder of the Muslim reform movement, in a blog, “Immigrant gangs are also culture and religion” in Jyllands-Posten, November 2018.

“[T]he price for the failed integration [of immigrants] is [paid] by those with the least resources. It is the schools and neighborhoods of the working classes that are destroyed….” — Niels Jespersen, op-ed in Berlingske Tidende, October 1, 2019.

People with the means to move, such as Lunøe, will take their children and run to safer areas. What will happen to the many that are unable to do so and have no choice but to stay in the crosshairs of the shootings, the knives and the car-torchings?

On September 24, the US embassy in Denmark published a security alert. It warned US citizens in Copenhagen that:

“The Danish National Police urge individuals living in or visiting the areas of Nørrebro, Ishøj, and Hundige to exercise heightened awareness at all times due to a recent increase in gun violence. Copenhagen Police have instituted a stop-and-search zone in a large area covering Nørrebro. The ordinance – which will run through September 30 – allows police officers to stop and search anyone within the area without cause”.

The alert also encouraged US citizens to “keep a low profile”, “do not physically resist any robbery attempt” and “use caution when walking or driving at night”.

Police in Copenhagen eventually decided to extend the stop and search ordinance in parts of Copenhagen until October 14.

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Iran’s Palestinian Proxies: United Against Israel by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on November 19th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15182/hamas-islamic-jihad-united

Hamas is hardly on its way to transforming itself into a non-violent movement that would uphold Israel’s right to exist. Its decision to refrain, this time, from pounding Israel with rockets is in no way a sign of moderation or pragmatism. Instead, the terror group needs a break from the fighting in order to prepare better for its main goal: to take down Israel down, once and for all.

Hamas leaders – like their PIJ counterparts – are motivated for their own well-being; the well-being of the two million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip is a joke to them. Why else would PIJ endanger their people by forcing Israel to respond to the launching of hundreds of rockets toward Israeli civilian communities?

This is not a good guy/bad guy scenario. Instead, it is a temporary rift between two extremely bad guys, both of whom are wholly committed to destroying Israel, even if that means destroying their own people along the way as well.

Iran’s Palestinian proxies, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), after last week’s round of aggression towards Israel, are said to be at odds with each other. PIJ is reportedly disturbed that Hamas did not join in firing rockets at Israel in retaliation for Israel’s assassination of senior PIJ commander Bahaa Abu al-Ata in the Gaza Strip. PIJ, it seems, feels that Hamas left it out in the cold.

The two terror groups may not enjoy a full meeting of minds – as witnessed by Hamas’s current failure to bombard Israel with rockets, but these differences are unlikely to escalate into a major confrontation between Hamas and PIJ.

At the end of the day, both groups share the same strategy and goals, as well as the same “enemy” – Israel. They may disagree, but when it comes to waging jihad (holy war) and eliminating Israel, Hamas and PIJ always manage to find common ground.

PIJ’s disappointment in Hamas has nothing to do with Hamas’s recognizing Israel’s right to exist and laying down its weapons: Hamas has done neither. Rather, PIJ and its supporters are disappointed because Hamas chose to refrain, this time, from firing rockets into Israel when PIJ was busy doing just that last week.

Hamas, of course, remains committed to its ideology. Its charter, to which it also remains committed, states:

“There is no solution to the Palestinian problem expect by jihad. Palestine has been an Islamic Waqf throughout the generations and until the Day of Resurrection; no one can renounce it or part of it, or abandon it or part of it.”

Hamas’s charter also makes it clear that the terrorist group “views the other Islamic movements with respect and appreciation.” The charter goes on to explain that even when Hamas “differs from them in one aspect or another on one concept or another, it agrees with them on other points and understandings.”

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Purging the Pro-Lifers Democratic AGs bar anti-abortion candidates from any support.

By on November 19th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/purging-the-pro-lifers-11574122435

Anti-abortion Democratic officeholders are about as rare as pandas, but many in their party’s leadership won’t be satisfied until they’re extinct.

On Monday the Democratic Attorneys General Association decreed that it will only give money and strategic help to AG candidates who “publicly commit” to supporting access to abortion. The message: If you’re a pro-life Democrat, or merely one with misgivings about the party’s opposition to any restriction on abortion, don’t run for attorney general. Or for any other office.

Mark this as one more step toward making America’s two main political parties into warring cultural camps with no room for individual conscience. American politics was healthier, and less polarized, when Democratic ranks included pro-lifers and some Republicans favored abortion rights. Compromise and tolerance were easier to come by.

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