RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the summer of 2013, Iran was sliding into geopolitical, diplomatic, and economic chaos. The Iranian economy was within a few months of a downward spiral that Tehran had no good options for halting. A binding United Nations Security Council resolution had ordered Iran to halt all uranium, plutonium, and ballistic-missile work, and to disclose the full scope of its previous nuclear cheating, or face increasing isolation.https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/lets-make-a-bad-deal/

The Iran Wars

By Jay Solomon view book

Then the Obama administration led the P5+ 1 powers in launching negotiations with Iran. In exchange for sitting down and talking, the Iranians would get hundreds of millions of dollars monthly, stabilizing their economy. Eventually U.S. diplomats offered Iran a deal that legalized full-blown uranium, plutonium, and ballistic-missile work on a timeline—with international sponsorship for Iranian work in the meantime—and did not force the country to disclose its previous nuclear cheating.

The deal also immediately released roughly a hundred billion dollars to Iran, shredded the international sanctions regime, would have American officials traveling to drum up business for Iran, removed restrictions on a range of Iranian terrorists, and allowed Iran to keep spinning thousands of centrifuges throughout the deal—and then, to sell all of that, the president and his allies said that American diplomats did the best anyone could have.

In his essential new book, The Iran Wars, Wall Street Journal chief foreign-policy correspondent Jay Solomon chronicles the changing nature of the American approach to Iran following 9/11. As he makes clear, beginning in 2006, officials from the Treasury Department had been traveling around the world systematically building pressure on Iran because of its nuclear program. American officials occasionally cajoled, but just as often they unapologetically deployed American economic power against reluctant foreign entities: businesses, banks, and countries were told they had to choose between having access to the U.S. financial system or doing business with Iran.

Top American officials devoted careers to traveling the globe personally delivering warnings, and then having to back them up. Banks who tested American resolve found themselves facing billions of dollars of fines. So did nations: India faced financial chaos when the U.S. made good on threats to cut off sanctions-busting institutions. There were outcries in almost every case, but U.S. officials used American power and Iran’s toxic reputation—this was the era of Iran’s Holocaust-envying President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—to systematically isolate Iran.

Solomon matter-of-factly describes Barack Obama as obsessed with changing the U.S. position toward Iran, and willing to subordinate much of American foreign policy in service of that goal. Obama started his administration sending secret letters to the head of state, the Ayatollah Khamenei, which recognized the prerogatives of the “Islamic republic” and foreswore regime change. He broadly cut funding to anti-regime groups and specifically abandoned Iranian moderates during the early days of the Green Revolution in 2009, after the regime fixed an election. When nuclear talks seemed to be stumbling, he sent another letter to Khamenei effectively offering Syria as within Iran’s sphere of influence.

Walter Ze’ev Laqueur is an American historian and political commentator. He was born in Poland in 1929. He is author of may outstanding and prescient books…rsk

For many Europeans of my generation—those who came of age before World War II—Romain Rolland (1866-1944) was not only the most important writer of our time but a beacon of light in a very dark world. Novelist, essayist, dramatist, art historian, humanist, pacifist, idealist without compare, he was our great guide in the battle against philistine obscurantism on the one hand, creeping barbarity on the other.http://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2016/09/romain-rolland-beacon-of-light-or-apologist-for-evil/

Were we right about him? Since his name is now all but unknown, it would be helpful to start with the bare facts.

Born in a small town in Burgundy, France, Rolland was early on recognized as a budding young intellectual star. After attending the elite Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, he became a teacher and lecturer in the history of art and music. In those days, he seems not to have had much interest in politics; throughout the furor over the Dreyfus affair, the great political battleground of his thirties, he appeared to favor neither side.

The same irenic (or perhaps non-committal) temperament informs Jean-Christophe, the huge ten-volume novel that made him famous. Appearing in installments from 1904 to 1912, it tells the cradle-to-grave story of a young German composer who makes his way to Paris, what he experienced there—especially his burgeoning friendship with a young Frenchman—and how these experiences influenced him and shaped his life and ideas. For that novel, and for his writings at the outbreak of World War I urging Germany and France to resolve their differences through a shared devotion to the lofty goals of truth and humanity, he was awarded the 1915 Nobel Prize in Literature. Fittingly, he passed along the prize money to the Red Cross in Geneva. Later on he wrote a series of what would become known as “heroic biographies”; among the passionately admired figures profiled in these books were Beethoven, Michelangelo, Tolstoy, and Gandhi.

It was Rolland’s stand in the Great War, and specifically his stirring denunciations of the senseless mass murder that sustained it, that made him so influential at the time, and even more so in later years when that conflict came to be seen as the root from which sprang the subsequent scourges of fascism, Communism, and World War II. In the 1930s, he became the leading intellectual supporter of the anti-fascist cause in Europe.

And here things began to become more complicated. An incurable romantic, Rolland was a fervent admirer of German culture, and the most eminent interpreter of Germany in France. After 1933, although saddened by the rise of Hitler in Germany, he still regarded Italian fascism and Mussolini as a greater danger than Nazism. (The fact that his earlier books were still being published in Germany may have affected that judgment.) At the same time, however, he also came to adore Josef Stalin, going so far as to justify almost all of the Soviet tyrant’s crimes. No Marxist, not even a socialist, he defended the Soviet Union as a leading force in the battle against fascism, and that conviction, together with his impulsive political romanticism, enabled him to suppress any misgivings he might have had about the Moscow show trials of 1936-1938 and the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939.

Fly the frindly skies of Jihadair…..rsk
Some deliveries may occur as early as this year

The U.S. government has given plane makers Boeing Co. and Airbus Group SE the all-clear to deliver jetliners to Iran Air in one of the highest-profile trade breakthroughs since nuclear sanctions were lifted on the Islamic Republic in January.

Western powers removed sanctions on Iran in return for the country agreeing to constrain its nuclear program. Business has been slow to materialize, though, amid concern among western businesses of running afoul of continued U.S. restrictions on doing business with Iran.

Iran Air announced in January it planned to buy Airbus planes, but the transaction stalled amid a lack of approvals from the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control rules. OFAC had to approve the license because a portion of Airbus planes are made in the U.S.

Airbus, which was first to secure a plane deal with Iran, was first to receive the green light to transfer 17 planes to Iran Air, signaling the tide may be turning for doing business with Iran. Hours later Boeing, the world’s largest plane maker by deliveries, said it too had received its corresponding license.

Airbus on Wednesday said some of those deliveries may occur as early as this year, a spokesman said.

Boeing aims to sell 80 jets directly to Iran Air as part of a proposed deal valued at up to $17.6 billion. It would be among the largest by a U.S. firm since the sanctions were loosened. Boeing said Wednesday it remained in talks with Iran Air about an existing tentative deal on plane purchases.

Boeing’s sales team has visited Iran several times this year, though no senior executives have been in attendance.

I could not pass this up. It is one of the dumbest, most politically correct, and insulting pro-immigration ads that has passed my desk. It has appeared on German TV. Paul Joseph Watson reports on Infowars: A television ad currently airing in Germany invites blonde-haired, blue-eyed women to embrace “tolerance” by wearing the Muslim hijab head dress.

The commercial begins with the text “Turkish women wear the hijab,” as a veiled woman is seen with her back to the camera.

However, when she turns around it immediately becomes clear that the woman is a white, blonde-haired German, before she states, “Me too! It’s beautiful!”

“Enjoy difference – start tolerance,” states the woman.

The campaign is funded by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, as well as German taxpayers, who are forced to obtain a state television license or face prison time.

Instead of reversing its suicidal immigration policy, it appears as though Germany is now encouraging its female population to avoid the mass sex assaults committed by Muslim migrants in numerous major cities by submitting to Islam and covering themselves up.

The outfit worn by the model is about as Sharia compliant as a Halloween gypsy costume you might see at a college sorority party. Frankly, it is quite fetching. It is distinctly not Turkish or any style resembling approved Islamic norms. The woman is not wearing a hair-covering hijab. It is definitely an invitation to rape, as she is decidedly “uncovered meat,” to judge by Sharia measures of “modesty.”

If any woman appeared in Germany (or in France, or in Sweden, or in any Muslim conquered or invaded Continental country) in that kind of outfit she would be immediately surrounded by Muslim men, groped, and thrown to the ground and given the Lara Logan Cairo treatment. The costume would be ripped from her body. Then she could “enjoy the difference” and do her bit in “enjoying tolerance.” Right? If she complained, she could be punished by Merkel’s tolerance police and accused of “racism” or “Islamophobia.” “You did not start tolerance!” they’d shout.

You have to ask yourself what possessed the minds of the producers of the ad to turn out such a putrid piece of propaganda. Well, it could not have been sanity. Speaking of Turkish dress, Turks in Germany are especially brutal as they like to disfigure their European victims after the gang rapes. I’ve only seen Turkish belly dancers so attired in movies.

Please note that it is not Muslims or any of those Muslim male adult “refugees” who are being asked to “start tolerance,” although they may, as criminals, “enjoy the difference” in the act of sexual assault. It is German women who are being urged to submit to Islam by voluntarily covering themselves up and staying out of sight. I would be as welcome to an Obama or Hillary Clinton rally dressed as Uncle Sam or sporting a “Make America Great Again” cap. A German woman would stand a similar chance of non-molestation in any Muslim “no-go” neighborhood. I’d be beaten up by #Never Trump morons and social justice warrior thugs.

On another front, “refugee” champion George Clooney, who owns about a dozen million-dollar mansions around the world, including at Lake Como, Italy, is reluctant to allow migrants anywhere near that personal refuge from reality. As with other members of the establishment “elite,” Clooney wishes to insulate himself from the destructive consequences of his policies. Dealing with the rapes, robberies, and other culturally “enriching” habits of savages is not for him, just for the hoi polloi, otherwise known as the “deplorables.” Hillary Clinton unintentionally handed Donald Trump the perfect meme by calling his supporters “a basket case of deplorables.”

Breitbart reported on July 13th:

The migration of hundreds of people from Arab nations, Africa, and Asia was triggered following the Swiss government’s decision to close its southern border with Italy.

Now, waiting for smugglers to lead them into northern Europe, groups of migrants are camping out in tattered tents around the Lake Como resort.Flimsy dwellings, clothes and trash are scattered around the Northern Italian town’s railway station, where dozens of new families and refugees have flocked….

The migrant camp is, oddly enough, just steps away from the front door of immigration activists’ George and Amal Clooney’s multi-million dollar lakeside mansion in Lake Como, according to the Daily Mail.

The couple was recently pictured drinking tequila while watching fireworks on a boat near the property alongside their close friend Bill Murray.

The Clooneys have taken refuge from the Hollywood spotlight in their summer home in Italy for years. Last year, Page Six reported that Clooney was mulling putting his Lake Como villa on the market due to ever-present and intrusive paparazzi.

It is unclear if the recent deluge of refugees pouring into town will have an affect on Clooney’s decision to sell or not.

The power couple has spent some time talking about the migrant crisis. The Clooneys met privately with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in February and praised and thanked her for her leadership during the crisis….

George has previously described Trump as a “xenophobic fascist” who wants to “ban Muslims from the country.”

I guess Clooney is hoping we don’t label him as a “xenophobic fascist,” as well, for thinking about selling his Lake Como mansion to put some distance between him and his adopted “children.” No, we won’t call him that. Instead, we’ll call him a hypocritical pull-peddler and social justice warrior who is reluctant to rub shoulders with the “refugees” or risk having Amal groped or worse by other culture “enrichers.”

Amal Clooney, the British-Lebanese human rights attorney who married George in 2014, slammed Republican presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump this past April, saying his immigration stance and promise to build a wall on the Mexican border do not represent “U.S. values.”

George and Amal know as much about “U.S. values” as I do about phrenology or dialectical materialism.

That also goes for the MSM. It has abandoned all pretence of reporting any news concerning Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and adopted a “what we say goes” philosophy of slander and puffery. It may not pass as “truth,” but who’s to say what truth is? It’s whatever we want it to be, and if you don’t believe it then you’re a racist, xenophobic, anti-Islam pig. Never mind that Hillary is sodden with corruption, chargeable felonious offenses, and treason, we, the MSM, believe she knows all about “U.S. values” and we want this beast to sit in the White House and guide this country to the oblivion it so richly deserves, to continue the destruction implemented by Barack Obama. We stick our tongues out at objectivity and truth.

Justin Raimondo of the LA Times reported in his August 2nd article, “To fight Trump, journalists have dispensed with objectiviity.” He asks:

Why are the rules of journalism being rewritten this election year?

At a time of extreme partisanship in our country and in the midst of what may be the most contentious presidential election in U.S. history, a congressional committee did something extraordinary: It issued a bipartisan and unanimous report on an extremely divisive issue. This issue is whether former National Security Agency technician Edward Snowden, who stole 1.5 million classified documents and leaked thousands to the news media, is a true whistleblower or a traitor.

The report by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (where I worked for five years) found what many of us have long argued: Snowden is not a whistleblower; he is a disgruntled former intelligence employee who did enormous damage to U.S. national security. Click here to read the unclassified summary of this report.

The House Intelligence Committee report could not be better timed, having come out the day before the opening of Oliver Stone’s hagiographic film Snowden and a new campaign by liberal groups and the news media to persuade President Obama to pardon Snowden for the contribution he supposedly made to the cause of protecting civil liberties.

The five findings in the committee report’s unclassified summary are stunning.

Snowden Caused Tremendous Damage to National Security.

The vast majority of the documents he stole have nothing to do with programs impacting individual privacy interests — they instead pertain to military, defense, and intelligence programs of great interest to America’s adversaries. Although many experts had already concluded this, the report added that the U.S. government has spent at least hundreds of millions of dollars and will eventually spend billions to counter the damage done by the Snowden leaks.

The most well-known Snowden disclosure concerned the NSA metadata program, which collects phone records but not the contents of phone calls. Although this program has long been overseen by the congressional intelligence committees and helped halt several terrorist attacks against the United States, Snowden’s leaks about it led to a hysterical and uninformed reaction by the press and some members of Congress that led Congress and President Obama to implement major restrictions, which have made this program much more difficult for intelligence officers to use to identify and track terrorist suspects.

Snowden’s defenders claim that since the metadata program violated the Constitution and the privacy rights of Americans, Snowden was justified in leaking information to the press about it and therefore should receive a presidential pardon. Putting aside that Snowden didn’t bother trying to raise his supposed concern about this program through legal channels, the facts are that the vast majority of court decisions on this program upheld it as legal, Congress and the Justice Department have monitored it, and only very minor abuses were discovered. To read more on this issue, see my May 2015 NRO article “NSA Data Collection: Necessary or Unconstitutional.”

While the unclassified report summary does not give specifics of how Snowden’s leaks benefited U.S. enemies and terrorists (that is probably detailed in the classified version available to all House members), U.S. intelligence officials have publicly stated that Snowden’s leaks have allowed ISIS and al-Qaeda to evade detection by Western intelligence services. Former CIA director James Woolsey has called for Snowden to receive the death penalty because his leaks of NSA monitoring techniques helped the ISIS-inspired terrorists who committed the November 2015 Paris terrorist attacks conceal their electronic communications.

The Obama State Department is convinced that Syrian dictator Bashar Assad and his regime’s cronies are financing terrorism. How come? Well, because they conduct business in cash.

In fact, in its most recent annual report on state sponsors of terrorism, State frets “that 60 percent of all business transactions [in Syria] are conducted in cash and that nearly 80 percent of all Syrians do not use formal banking services.” This has created a “vast black market,” the components of which are exploited by “some members of the Syrian government and the business elite . . . in terrorism finance schemes.”

Interesting thing about that: There are only three countries on the list of state sponsors of terrorism — Syria, Sudan, and Iran. That last one is worth highlighting. Iran, after all, is not just the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism; it is also the world’s leading state sponsor of . . . Syria — providing it with lots of that cash the State Department is so concerned about.

Oh, I nearly forgot: Iran also happens to be the jihadist regime that President Obama just gave $1.7 billion to . . . in cash.

Or should I say, at least $1.7 billion.

It is hard to decide what is the most appalling thing about Obama’s $1.7 billion payoff to the mullahs: the ransom for the release of American hostages, which has predictably induced Tehran to take more hostages; the pallets of untraceable currency loaded on multiple planes of the national airline regularly used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to arm Assad and facilitate terror; the withdrawals from a shadowy Treasury Department fund structured in a manner designed to conceal that money was being transferred to Iran. The transaction is so shocking, one can easily forget that it is just the latest in a long series of payoffs.

CIA Director: Terrorism a ‘Distorted Interpretation of Various Religious Faiths’ By Bridget Johnson

WASHINGTON — CIA Director John Brennan said this week that terrorist groups “have been unfortunately successful in attracting individuals to their distorted ideology and distorted interpretation of various religious faiths” largely due to lacking political and economic reforms in many countries.

“There are a lot, a lot of opportunities for these terrorist groups to capitalize on those problems and issues. To me, I’d like to think that, you know, the United States has demonstrated, through the course of time, that we take very seriously the obligation and responsibilities that go along with what I refer to as American exceptionalism,” Brennan said at a Center for Strategic and International Studies forum Wednesday marking the 10th anniversary of the Justice Department’s National Security Division.

“My definition of American exceptionalism may be different than others,” he added. “I don’t think that we as people are better than others. I think that we as a country, though, have been tremendously fortunate and blessed to have the resources, the people, we’re the world’s melting pot. We are, without a doubt, the world’s superpower.”

Brennan said he wished the U.S. had “that magic wand” to resolve issues like the Syrian war.

“And despite the challenges that we still face there, good on the United States for trying… Unfortunately, there are individuals who opt for violence and militarism as a way to push forward their agendas and to try to achieve their aims, again, which are perversions of religious faiths.”

The CIA chief said President Obama is an “exceptionally quick study” and “would always want to be asking questions about what it is that we know and with a lawyer’s mind” during presidential briefings.

At the moderator’s urging, Brennan reflected on “Underwear Bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to down a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day 2009. Leon Panetta was in charge of the agency at the time; Brennan was Obama’s homeland security advisor.

“I can vividly recall getting the call at home at about, I forget what it was, maybe noon or 11:00 on Christmas Day when I was preparing the Christmas dinner for my family,” Brennan said. “And all of a sudden we found out that somebody — somebody’s underwear was on fire on a plane in Detroit and there may be something to this.”

The Navy’s newest and most technologically advanced surface ship, future USS Zumwalt (DDG 1000) pulled into Naval Station Norfolk Wednesday for another port visit on the 3-month journey to its new homeport in San Diego.

Crewed by 147 Sailors, Zumwalt is the lead ship of a class of next-generation multi-mission destroyers designed to strengthen naval power. They are capable of performing critical maritime missions and enhance the Navy’s ability to provide deterrence, power projection and sea control.

Capt. James A. Kirk, Zumwalt’s commanding officer, commented on the significance of the ship’s visit to Norfolk.

“It is a great opportunity to bring Zumwalt to Norfolk, an area steeped in naval history and ever vital to the U.S. Navy,” said Kirk. “It is a chance for the Sailors of Zumwalt to show their Atlantic Coast shipmates the teamwork, technical expertise and toughness it takes to operate a Zumwalt-class destroyer.”

While in Norfolk, Zumwalt is scheduled to perform operational proficiency training, certifications and preparation for its October commissioning.

“Training is the foundation of every operation we perform in the Navy, and it is our job to ensure we use the time in Norfolk to get as much quality training as we can. Successful training pays dividends for Sailors out at sea,” said Kirk.

Zumwalt departed Newport, R.I., Monday following a weekend of visits from students of several Navy schools, including the Naval War College, and distinguished government and military visitors.

“Our first ever port visit was to Newport, or the U.S. Navy’s surface warfare center of gravity, where we were able to host tours and give our schoolhouse surface warfare officers and other distinguished guests a look at the future of the surface fleet,” said Kirk.

USS Zumwalt will be formally commissioned during Fleet Week Maryland in Baltimore, Oct. 15.

Last week North Korea conducted its fifth nuclear test, this one a 10-kiloton, miniaturized warhead that can be put on a missile. If North Korean claims are true, this successful test, along with the 20 long-range missile tests conducted this year, shows that a rogue thug state is on the brink of being able to send a nuclear-tipped missile as far as Chicago. President Obama responded with the usual empty diplomatic bluster, threatening “additional significant steps, including new sanctions to demonstrate to North Korea that there are consequences to its unlawful and dangerous actions.” Once again, the magical thinking of international diplomacy puts our national interests and security in mortal danger.

We’re well beyond a century’s worth of the delusional idealism of what historian Corelli Barnett calls “moralizing internationalism.” This is the notion that non-violent diplomatic “engagement,” economic sanctions, and transnational covenants and institutions like the U.N. can deter or stop aggression without a credible threat to use force.

A particularly surreal version of this stubborn belief appeared in early 1914, in the British National Peace Council Peace Yearbook:

Peace, the babe of the nineteenth century, is the strong youth of the twentieth century; for War, the product of anarchy and fear, is passing away under the growing and persistent pressure of world organization, economic necessity, human intercourse, and that change of spirit, that social sense and newer aspect of worldwide life which is the insistent note, the Zeitgeist of the age.

A few months later the world exploded into the gruesome carnage wrought by trench warfare, machine guns, poison gas, and a billion artillery shells fired. Despite that horrific lesson, the victors, still in thrall to the same internationalist delusions, created the League of Nations. The League spent twenty years in diplomatic chatter, feeble sanctions, and feckless appeasement that culminated in 60 million dead in World War II. Followed, of course by the creation of the U.N., yet another feckless and corrupt manifestation of historical amnesia.

Seventy years later we still haven’t learned anything. The history of the West’s attempts to keep North Korea from acquiring a nuclear weapon is a depressing chronicle of diplomatic failure. Consider just two years of that history:

The Obama administration finally admitted that, in addition to the $400 million in foreign currency secretly flown to Iran on January 17, 2016, it also sent Iran two more planeloads of $1.3 billion in cash over the following 19 days.

Since these payments coincided with the release of four Americans illegally held by Iran, they have been widely condemned as ransom. The Obama administration disputes this and claims that the payments were to settle a U.S. debt to Iran incurred during the rule of the Shah. However, after initially insisting there was no link between the $400 million payment and the release of the Americans, the administration said on August 18 that it delayed this payment as leverage to ensure that Iran would release the U.S. prisoners.

The additional payments were an open secret in Washington ever since an August 22 New York Sun article by Claudia Rosett revealed 13 transfers of $99,999,999.99 from the Treasury Department to the State Department’s “Judgment Fund” (a fund used to resolve foreign claims) on January 19, 2016, to pay an undisclosed foreign claim. Rosett wrote that the State Department acknowledged in letters to Congress in March that the United States paid $1.3 billion out of the Judgment Fund to Iran as interest on the $400 million payment but did not explain how this money was paid.

The administration continues to peddle the preposterous claim that that the $1.7 billion payment was not linked to the prisoner release and was paid to resolve a dispute pending before the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal at The Hague. Obama administration officials maintain that this payment may have saved the U.S. taxpayer billions because the court was likely to order the United States to pay a much larger settlement. These claims are so ridiculous that even liberal late-night host Stephen Colbert mocked the administration for making them, saying that “a lot of people are saying this sounds like ransom because they know what the word ‘ransom’ means.”

Many Republican Congressmen insist that these payments set a dangerous precedent of normalizing the payment of ransoms to a state sponsor of terror. Senator Marco Rubio yesterday introduced the “No Ransom Act” to prohibit the federal government from paying ransom to Iran. The bill would also stop any further payments to Iran from the U.S. Treasury Department’s Judgment Fund until Iran returns the ransom money it received and pays the American victims of Iranian terrorism what they are owed, a sum estimated to be $53 billion. Rubio’s bill is co-sponsored by Republicans senators Cornyn, Kirk, Ayotte, Barrasso, Capito, Scott, Burr, Johnson, Fischer, Cotton, Perdue, Collins, Isakson, Risch, and Heller. Congressman Mike Pompeo introduced the same bill in the House and will be joined by many GOP co-sponsors.