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Ruth King

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CIA That Funded the ‘Moderate Muslim Brotherhood’ Narrative Opposed to the Group’s Terror Designation By Patrick Poole

By on February 9th, 2017

According to our late PJ Media colleague Barry Rubin, the CIA paid for the research and travel expenses for then-Nixon Center researcher Robert Leiken and his younger colleague Stephen Brooke to travel around the Middle East and Europe meeting with Muslim Brotherhood leaders. They reportedly met with Muslim Brotherhood members in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Tunisia, the UK, Spain, and elsewhere.

This resulted in a still-classified paper commissioned by the National Intelligence Council and, according to Barry Rubin, paid for through a CIA contract. Barry Rubin was hired to write the rebuttal to the Leiken/Brooke paper.

This became the basis for an article by Leiken and Brooke in the March/April 2007 issue of Foreign Affairs entitled, “The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood.” This one article became the basis for virtually every single talking point in support of the Muslim Brotherhood parroted by the “smart set” and the media.

At the time, I wrote a three-part criticism of the Leiken/Brooke Foreign Affairs article. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)

There is proof of Barry’s claim about the U.S. intelligence community’s role in hyping the “moderate Muslim Brotherhood” narrative, namely the admission by Leiken himself.

With their Foreign Affairs article in hand, Leiken and Brooke were tasked to push compliance with this narrative throughout the Bush administration agencies.

A June 2007 New York Sun report by Eli Lake tells of an event Leiken hosted by the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research that reveals:

Earlier this year, the National Intelligence Council received a paper it had commissioned on the history of the Muslim Brotherhood by a scholar at the Nixon Center, Robert Leiken, who is invited to the State Department meeting today to present the case for engagement.

[…]

Mr. Leiken’s Foreign Affairs paper and classified study for the National Intelligence Council has gotten the attention of senior National Security Council officials and Secretary of State Rice, according to two administration officials.

“The NIC asked me to provide an analysis of the Muslim Brotherhood and I was happy to oblige,” Mr. Leiken said.

The intelligence community has not always been so sold on the Muslim Brotherhood’s so-called moderation.

After 9/11, a joint U.S.-European intelligence analysis on the Muslim Brotherhood that raised concerns about the organization’s global goals was obtained by reporters Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, then at Newsweek :

As the spread of Islamic radicalism began to accelerate a few years ago, a team of U.S. and European intelligence agency officials collaborated on a secret study of a sensitive subject: the global operations of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Their classified report highlighted what its authors saw as disturbing trends. Founded by fundamentalists in Egypt in 1928, the Brotherhood has grown rapidly in recent years and established beachheads in over 70 countries, including virtually every major nation in Europe and the Middle East, as well as many parts of Africa. According to the report, a copy of which was obtained by NEWSWEEK, the group’s members “frequently communicate and meet in secret” and appeared to have access to hundreds of millions of dollars.

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Pity the Children of the Islamic World By Eileen F. Toplansky

By on February 9th, 2017

In April 2016, a video by Hamas was exposed showing “hysterical children in the company of exorcising preachers. It is a humiliating and invasive rite practiced at the Al-Nil School in Gaza City.” It is, however, hardly a surprise for people who have followed this never-ending child abuse, as this video exhorts the children to become “warriors” in the jihad or holy war against Israel and the infidels.

These children are taught to hate. Yet, when the French historian of Moroccan heritage, George Bensoussan, stated that “[i]t is a shame to deny this taboo, namely that in the Arab families in France, and everyone knows it but nobody wants to say it, anti-Semitism is sucked with mother’s milk” he was put on trial for saying this.”

As Khaled Abu Toameh explains “[Palestinian] children do not dream about becoming doctors, pilots or engineers; an entire generation of Palestinians, particularly those in the Gaza Strip, has been raised on the glorification of suicide bombers and anyone who kills a Jew.”

In fact, “what is happening to the Palestinian people, who have forever been led by leaders who care nothing for their well-being, is a tragedy of national proportions.” And, of course, the first victims are the children.

Since 1996, the Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), under the direction of Itamar Marcus, has exposed the schoolbooks and propaganda material used to brainwash Palestinian children. In 2015 a report issued by PMW highlighted the Palestinian Authority’s teaching its children to “reject Israel’s right to exist, encourag[ing] them to view Jews as evil and direct[ing] them to embrace terrorist murderers as role models. This report exposes a world of demonization, incitement and hate that Palestinian children are urged to adopt.”

When shown the hateful material emanating from the PA, then Senator Hillary Clinton “condemned the PA’s messages to children and stated that the official PA TV broadcasts were ‘a clear example of child abuse.'” In fact, the textbooks “do not give Palestinian children an education; they give them an indoctrination. When viewed . . . in combination with other media that these children are exposed to, we see a larger picture that is disturbing… because it basically profoundly poisons the minds of these children.”

Common themes running through the hate-filled messages include:

Israel has no right to exist.
Israel will disappear and be replaced by Palestine.
Violence — “armed struggle” — is legitimate to fight Israel.
Muslims must fight an eternal Islamic war against Israel.
Killers of Israelis are heroes and role models.
Martyrdom or death for Allah is the utmost honor.
Jews are “monkeys and pigs.”
Jews are “enemies of Allah.”
Jews are the “most evil of creations.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Michael Galak :The Fountainhead of Trump’s Philosophy

By on February 9th, 2017

Dr Michael Galak and his family came to Australia as refugees from the Soviet Union in 1978
The global Left rants, raves, riots and wears pink hats in its ongoing refusal to accept that Hillary Clinton isn’t president. No doubt they revel in the perverse pleasure of putting their anger and impotence on display, but they would learn more of their enemy by reading Ayn Rand.
Donald Trump’s first actions as POTUS continue to trigger unprecedented worldwide hysterics, vapours and hissy fits in progressivistas who did not get the president they had banked on seeing installed in the White House. These often grotesque convulsions bring to mind — to my mind, at any rate — the body movements of laboratory mice with electrodes implanted in the pleasure centres of their brains. The mice son learn that the simple act of pressing a lever produces the dopamine that results in uninterrupted sexual pleasure, so they press those levers to the exclusion of anything else. They don’t eat, they don’t sleep, they don’t drink. They do nothing but pleasure themselves.

There is a difference, though, between these two groups of dopamine lovers. Where pleasure-fixated mice endlessly push their laboratory levers, progressives are embracing their Trumpian pain to attain the consolation of a self-righteous and politically correct collective orgasm. Masochism? Quite probably, but drawing a perverse pleasure from displays of public agony is the only way they have left to re-assert a feeling of control over a world turned upside down, a world they can grasp but simply cannot accept. On November 7 their universe was as they thought it should be. They dominated the public pulpit, the media and universities, set and policed the topics that might be discussed and dictated how they must be discussed. Then came Trump and their comfortable intellectual environment evaporated. The satisfaction drawn from the fury of their protests is the palliative of the uncomprehending.

Angry accusations of racism, misogyny, political bullying, plus all the other deadly sins thrown at the new president, have two main sources. These people do not know how, or do not wish, to think for themselves; they depend for their opinions on the ‘authority’ of well-placed and influential intellectual gurus. This explains the cognitive dissonance sen o often on the Left; without it, how can you protest Trump’s sexism while making common cause with Islamic groups, whose sexism is wovn into their very fabric. The impending loss of this pre-programmed pattern of approved and endorsed intellectual functioning frightens and angers them. What we see, operating at a physiological or gut level, is a Pavlovian mass reflex.

And there is another source, a philosophical one, which represents the profound, fundamental and irreconcilable difference in the weltanshauunung between the progressivistas — ‘dependents’, as I call them — and creative people like Donald Trump. This source has a name, a well-formulated philosophy, a body of literature and, what’s more, a substantial following. This particular philosophy and its followers were derided, denigrated and, as often as not, prohibited by the totalitarian regimes of both the Soviets and the Nazis. Needless to say, it was hated by progressives all over the world, who accused its followers of lack of empathy, of egotism and of a refusal to follow the directives of the Politburo.

I am talking about the ‘objectivist’ philosophy founded and formulated by Ayn Rand. It appears that that author’s ideas have a staunch adherent, a man who now happens to be the President of the United Sates of America.

I strongly suspect this consideration will need to be taken into account when Australia’s relationship with the new US administration has to be re-formulated. And make no mistake, reformulated it will have to be, as the near-disastrous Turnbull phone call to Trump demonstrated with all too obvious clarity. This is not such a profound thought. However, it is a key to predicting and understanding Trump’s thinking. I speak, of course, of Ayn Rand and her philosophy, which Trump is said to regard as one of his main vectors in life.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

British Parliament Gives Brexit Go-Ahead Commons votes 494 to 122 in favor of U.K.-EU divorce talks By Jason Douglas and Nicholas Winning

By on February 9th, 2017

LONDON—Members of the British Parliament’s lower house overwhelmingly gave Prime Minister Theresa May a green light to begin the country’s formal withdrawal from the European Union, leaving the government on course to begin Brexit as planned by the end of March.

The House of Commons voted 494 to 122 on Wednesday to approve a government bill authorizing it to start the divorce process. The proposals now must go before the unelected upper house, which is also expected to pass it.

“We are a democracy and we are going to do what the people voted for,” said John Penrose, a Conservative lawmaker who initially favored staying in the EU, referring to a June referendum in which Britons decided, 52% to 48%, to leave the bloc.
A parliamentary vote was once seen as so potentially contentious that the government fought against holding it, acquiescing only after the Supreme Court so ordered in a case brought by anti-Brexit activists.

But the political landscape has shifted considerably since that lawsuit was filed in July, with strong U.K. economic growth and public support for Mrs. May’s plans for a decisive break from the EU. She has said she intends to trigger exit negotiations next month.

A poll published by YouGov PLC in January found 55% of Britons broadly supported Mrs. May’s Brexit objectives. Another YouGov survey earlier this month found that Mrs. May’s Conservatives would get 40% of votes in a general election, compared with 26% for the main opposition Labour Party.

Mrs. May’s position has been strengthened by the performance of the British economy, which ended 2016 as the fastest-growing member of the Group of Seven advanced countries, defying predictions that a vote for Brexit would damp growth.

Wednesday’s win for Mrs. May in the House of Commons followed months of sparring between the government and those who oppose Brexit or want Mrs. May to cut a deal that keeps the U.K. more closely tied to the continent and the EU’s single market.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Who’s Afraid of Student Journalists? The American Association of University Professors likens reporting on campus to ‘witch hunts.’ By John J. Miller

By on February 9th, 2017

Mr. Miller is the director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College, a writer for National Review, and the founder and executive director of the College Fix.

Riots last week at the University of California, Berkeley stopped Milo Yiannopoulos, a right-wing provocateur who contributes to Breitbart News, from speaking on campus. The violence forced the cancellation of his event and inflicted $100,000 in damage to school property, according to administrators. Then it spread to New York University, where police arrested 11 protesters who tried to halt the libertarian comedian Gavin McInnes from talking to students.

The American Association of University Professors has said nothing about this coastal turmoil. Yet it has condemned what it apparently regards as a greater threat: students who provide accurate reports on the shouted-down speakers in their auditoriums and the left-wing biases in their classrooms.

In a 1,000-word statement released last month, the AAUP bemoaned “new efforts by private groups to monitor the conduct of faculty members,” which it likened to “witch hunts.” Then it named names: Professor Watchlist, Campus Reform and the College Fix.

I know a little about the first two groups and a lot about the third: I founded the College Fix seven years ago. Every day the website publishes articles by student journalists, who work with our professional editors to tell true stories about campus politics and culture. Our goal is to create compelling and original content, while identifying a new generation of promising writers and editors before they make the mistake of going to law school.

In recent days, the Fix has carried accounts of the disturbances at Berkeley and NYU. Our writers also have covered Barnard College’s proposal to require attendance at workshops on “inclusion and equity,” plus Pepperdine University’s decision to remove a statue of Columbus, whose presence has became too “painful,” according to the school’s president, Andrew K. Benton.

The Fix also brings readers into classrooms, as it did last fall when professors turned their lecterns into bully pulpits. One article described how Bruce Conforth, a music lecturer at the University of Michigan, began an election-eve class by urging students to vote for Hillary Clinton because she favors abortion rights, a higher minimum wage, and tuition-free college. Readers who questioned the article’s accuracy could watch an accompanying video of Mr. Conforth’s stump speech.

Professors who proclaim their own partisanship are bad enough, but some even turn their classrooms into semester-long re-education camps. Last fall at the Colorado Springs campus of the University of Colorado, history lecturer Jared Benson and sociology instructor Nicholas Lee taught a course titled “Resistance and Revolution.” In expletive-laden lectures, these self-styled Marxists called America’s founders “terrorists,” compared the Sons of Liberty to the Westboro Baptist Church, and ridiculed “the taxation-without-representation argument” as “asinine” on the grounds that American revolutionaries were rich men who didn’t want to pay their fair share. They also insisted that Ronald Reagan had little to do with the demise of the Soviet Union and that Martin Luther King Jr. was a secret communist (which they meant as a compliment). CONTINUE AT SITE

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Banning The Muslim Brotherhood By Rachel Ehrenfeld

By on February 9th, 2017

President Trump is considering designating the global Muslim Brotherhood organization as terrorist. It’s about time.

Two days before he signed the Executive Order on “Protecting the Nation from Terrorist Attacks by Foreign Nationals, the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) began organizing nationwide protests against the anticipated order, which the mischaracterized the suspension of U.S. visas to Muslim refugees and travelers from only seven out of fifty Muslim-majority countries, as a “ban.” CAIR was immediately joined by progressive Left organizations that protested the election of Donald Trump as President. Thus Left-leaning ill-informed organizations, CEOs of tech companies (How many of their employees are immigrants, or Work-Visa holders from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen?) and Democratic-run-States joined forces with MB-affiliated groups to undermine the power of the President and the security of the nation.

On October 28, 2005, President George W. Bush denounced IslamoFascist movements that call for a “violent and political vision: the establishment, by terrorism, subversion, and insurgency, of a totalitarian empire that denies all political and religious freedom.” The Muslim Brotherhood was not on his list.

On June 6, 2006, this author proposed, in FrontOageMag to outlaw the Muslim Brotherhood. The article concluded: “In the interest of preserving freedom in the U.S. while advancing it globally, it is time for our government to thoroughly investigate the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots and consider designating it as a terrorist organization.

In the same vein, the U.S should not allow foreign donations to U.S. educational, and public organizations and institutions from Islamic countries that prohibit religious freedom.”

These suggestions, however, were dismissed on grounds that the MB is a “reformist” organization. It took years for many in the West to realize the MB has fooled them into endorsing the oxymoron of “Political Islam.” It took the Muslim Brotherhood, first in Tunisia and Egypt, and with other radical Islamist groups in Syria, Libya, and Iraq to destabilize the Middle East. Only after the MB globalized their murderous ideology and threatened Muslim nations in the Middle East, several Arab countries banned the organization. More recently concerned groups in the West have been considering banning the MB and its affiliates

Below is a version of the June 6, 2006, FrontPageMag article:

The Muslim Brotherhood (Al-Ikhwan Al-Muslimun)[2] also known as the Ikhwan is a good example of what resident Bush described on October 28, 2005, and what we must protect the U.S. against.

The Muslim Brotherhood (“MB”) organization describes itself as a political and social revolutionary movement; it was founded in March 1928 in Egypt by Hassan al-Banna, who objected to Western influence and called for the return to original Islam.[3]

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How We’ll Stop a Rogue Federal Agency Congress can defund Elizabeth Warren’s unaccountable and unconstitutional CFPB. By Rep.Jeb Hensarling

By on February 9th, 2017

Mr. Hensarling, a Texas Republican, (District 5)is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.

The Obama presidency placed no greater burden on America’s growth potential than the avalanche of regulations that smother the U.S. economic system. The most destructive and dangerous of the new regulatory bureaucracies created by the Democrat-dominated 111th Congress is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The CFPB stands with ObamaCare as a crowning “achievement” of Mr. Obama’s transformation of America. With unprecedented automatic funding provided directly by the Federal Reserve, the agency is unanswerable to anyone. Democrats chose to insulate it from Congress, the president, voters and the democratic process. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia noted as much in its recent PHH v. CFPB decision, which ruled the bureau’s governing structure unconstitutional. The court said the unelected CFPB director “enjoys more unilateral authority than any other officer in any of the three branches of government of the U.S. Government, other than the President.”

The CFPB is arguably the most powerful, least accountable agency in U.S. history. CFPB zealots have the power to determine the “fairness” of virtually every financial transaction in America. The agency defines its own powers and can launch investigations without cause, imposing virtually any fine or remedy, devoid of due process. It requires lenders essentially to read their clients’ minds, know and weigh their clients’ comprehension levels, and forecast future risk. It can compel the production of reams of data and employ methodologies that “infer” harm without finding any specific instance of harm or knowing violation.

The regulatory web spun by the CFPB can make every provider of financial services guilty until proven innocent, inviting selective enforcement and financial shakedowns. The CFPB is the embodiment of James Madison’s warning in Federalist No. 47 that “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary, in the same hands . . . may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

This tyranny has harmed the very consumers it purports to help. Since the CFPB’s advent, the number of banks offering free checking has drastically declined, while many bank fees have increased. Mortgage originations and auto loans have become more expensive for many Americans.

No corner of American finance is beyond the CFPB’s grasp, even auto dealers—which are specifically excluded from its jurisdiction by the Dodd-Frank Act. To dodge this legal constraint, the CFPB regulates auto dealers through enforcement “bulletins” on auto lenders, employing statistical analysis rather than specific acts to charge lenders with discriminatory lending. The race of borrowers is inferred based on the borrowers’ names and home addresses. Through this ruse they smear and shake down lenders.

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The Non-Silence of Elizabeth Warren The next Democratic President is going to get the Trump treatment.

By on February 9th, 2017

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-non-silence-of-elizabeth-warren-1486598042

The activist base of the Democratic Party is demanding rage and resistance to Donald Trump and all his works, and Senate Democrats are listening. Jeff Sessions was confirmed as Attorney General Wednesday on a party-line vote, though not without more pointless melodrama and the informal launch of Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 presidential campaign.

The Massachusetts progressive’s latest diatribe against her fellow Senator Sessions was interrupted after she repeatedly violated Senate Rule XIX, which prohibits members from besmirching the character and motives of their colleagues. After warnings that she ignored and a Republican motion, the Senate rebuked Ms. Warren 49-43. As a result, she lost her privileges to participate in the rest of the AG debate.

Ms. Warren is now claiming she was “silenced,” which is true if she means the Senate floor for an interval lasting fewer than 24 hours. It is not true if she’s talking about the Facebook Live video she taped outside the Senate chamber on Tuesday night, her live call-in to Rachel Maddow’s prime-time television show, her sundry media appearances on Wednesday or her fundraising emails off the incident.

“This is not what America is about—silencing speech,” Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Wednesday, shortly after Ms. Warren announced an April publication date for her new book, “This Fight Is Our Fight.” For a martyr to censorship, she’s remarkably prolific.

Social media are overflowing with memes featuring the likes of Rosa Parks,Harriet Tubman and various suffragettes along with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s comment about the Senate sanction: “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.” Likening one of the most powerful people in the world to an underground-railroad conductor may be a tad histrionic, but you be the judge.

HRH Warren isn’t a victim, even if she enjoys feeling she is, and Republicans aren’t trying to get her to “shut up,” as if that’s possible. She knowingly broke protocol and said Mr. Sessions was “racist” and prosecuting “a campaign of bigotry,” among other gross, false and personal insults that Democrats now feel entitled to hurl. Our guess is that Ms. Warren wanted to be punished so she could play out this political theater.

A question for Republicans is whether Mr. McConnell enhanced the Warren brand by responding to her provocations in this way. She already has a formidable platform but the story dominated Wednesday’s news. Then again, sooner or later Mr. McConnell had to send a signal that Senate rules can’t be violated with impunity.

The larger context is that Democrats have slowed Senate confirmation of President Trump’s cabinet to the slowest pace since Eisenhower, and by some measures since the 19th century. Though they lack the votes to defeat anyone, they’ve boycotted hearings, maxed out debate time, denied routine courtesies and delayed procedural votes.

New Jersey’s Cory Booker even testified against Mr. Sessions, which no Senator had felt to do against a colleague since Congress was formed in 1789—a period that includes the Civil War and two world wars.

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FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

America’s 19th nervous breakdown by Richard Baehr

By on February 9th, 2017

With apologies to the Rolling Stones, America’s nervous breakdown since President Donald Trump’s inauguration seems to be of a different order of ‎magnitude than the many other emotional meltdowns of recent decades (the Clinton, Bush, or Obama derangement syndromes). It will almost certainly worsen in the weeks ahead with continued ‎fights over immigration and the Supreme Court nominee.‎

Sunday night, America celebrated one of its true national holidays: Super Bowl ‎Sunday, an event watched by 100 million people, a third of the population. ‎This year, the political fog that envelops all matters these days naturally ‎also surrounded the football game, which turned out be a masterpiece as these games go. In the ‎weeks leading up to the game, one team became the Trump team, the other the anti-‎Trump team. A startling come-from-behind victory for the Trump team (the New ‎England Patriots) was immediately viewed as a repeat of the upset on Election Day, Nov. 8, and was caricatured as such.

The absurdity, of course, is that the owner of the Trump team is a ‎Jewish Democrat (though friendly to Trump), and the owner of the anti-Trump ‎team (the Atlanta Falcons) is a Jewish Republican. So, too, Trump carried Georgia ‎and was beaten badly in Massachusetts. The halftime performer, Lady Gaga, was ‎attacked from the left for not making a personal statement slamming Trump. Everything now has to be viewed as political. ‎

With the game over, America’s annual six-month nightmare without professional or college football has begun. This will allow ‎partisans to focus more intently on the heated political wars. On the U.S.-Israel ‎front, however, there is likely to be significant change and arguably far fewer ‎political battles between the two countries.‎

In the final weeks of President Barack Obama’s term, the administration seemed somewhat ‎obsessed with Israel. U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power abstained on ‎Security Council Resolution 2334. Secretary of State John Kerry felt the need to ‎give an hour-long speech justifying the U.N. inaction that allowed the ‎resolution to pass, and fire a few parting shots at Israel and its prime minister over ‎settlements, as well as trying and failing one more time to make a persuasive case ‎for the Iran nuclear deal. The Obama team released money ($221 million) that had ‎been held up by Congress to send to the Palestinian Authority. ‎

Israel has been an afterthought in the early weeks of the Trump administration. ‎This is not a bad thing. There have been many presidential executive orders, but ‎none directing a move or directing planning for a move of the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The Iran nuclear agreement has not been torn up. The ‎administration has been far less fixated on Israeli settlement activity, despite ‎announcements by Israel of construction plans for 5,000 new units that in the ‎Obama years would have caused the faces of the administration spokespeople to ‎become purple with rage and scorn.

The administration, while releasing a short ‎statement on settlements, allowed that policy changes would not come until after ‎Prime Minister Netanyahu comes to Washington to meet with Trump next ‎week. The administration also sharply reversed policy toward Iran, choosing to ‎put the country on notice for its ballistic missile tests, which violated U.N. Security ‎Council Resolution 2231, the resolution that accompanied the nuclear deal. The ‎Trump White House also initiated sanctions against a few dozen Iranian individuals ‎and firms for the missile tests. Most dramatically, the Trump administration ‎seemed anxious to communicate to the leaders in Tehran that the days of America ‎serving as Iran’s lawyer and backstop — excusing away Iranian violations of one ‎agreement or another — were over.‎

The national newspaper of record for the anti-Trump forces, The New York Times, ‎chose to see in the release of the administration’s short statement on settlements ‎an action that fit a pattern of continuity of Trump foreign policy with Obama ‎foreign policy. They saw the same thing in the fact that Trump had neither disowned ‎the Iran nuclear deal nor had gone to war yet with the mullahs. Sadly for the paper, the ‎announcement condemning the ballistic missile tests and announcing sanctions ‎came shortly thereafter. The New York Times may have been clutching at straws ‎to suggest that it retained some semblance of balance in evaluating Trump (he is more ‎like Obama, so he is not that bad on X and Y).‎

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Iranian authorities hanged 87 people in the month of January 2017, that’s one execution every nine hours.

By on February 9th, 2017

Iran Human Rights (FEB 3 2017): According to reports compiled by Iran Human Rights, the Iranian authorities hanged 87 people in the month of January 2017, including two juvenile prisoners and six prisoners who were executed in public. Out of the 87 executions, only 19 of them were announced by official Iranian sources. Most of the executions which were carrieed out in Iran in January 2017 were for drug related charges.

According to research conducted by Iran Human Rights, executions tend to significantly increase in the months leading to an election in Iran but significantly decrease or stop a couple weeks before the election. Iran Human Rights is deeply concerned that a new wave of executions have started in Iran and worries that the number of executions will increase following the “Fajr Decade” celebrations.

Iran Human Rights urges the international community, especially European countries, to pay attention to the execution crisis in Iran, and calls on all countries which have diplomatic relations with the Iranian authorities to call on the Iranian authorities to stop executions.

“In the month of January, we witnessed an average of one execution every nine hours, including two juvenile offenders and six public executions. Lack of reactions from the international community to these executions encourages the Iranian authorities to execute even more people in the months leading to the 2017 presidential election,” says Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, spokesperson for Iran Human Rights.

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