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Trump Receives Morocco’s Highest Award for Middle East Work

Posted By on January 16th, 2021

https://www.theepochtimes.com/trump-receives-moroccos-highest-award-for-middle-

President Donald Trump on Friday received Morocco’s highest award for his work in advancing a normalization deal between Israel and Morocco, a senior administration official told Reuters.

In a private Oval Office ceremony, Princess Lalla Joumala Alaoui, who is Morocco’s ambassador to the United States, gave Trump the Order of Muhammad, an award given only to heads of state. It was a gift from Morocco’s King Mohammed VI.

White House senior adviser Jared Kushner and Middle East envoy Avi Berkowitz received other awards for their work on the Israel-Morocco deal, which was reached in December.

The United States in the last five months helped broker deals between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco. The agreements are aimed at normalizing relations and opening economic ties.

The Kushner team had been working on reaching more agreements between Israel and the Arab world. But time has run out and no more are expected before Trump leaves office on Wednesday.

By Steve Holland

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel and the U.S.: Maintaining the Alliance Against Iran Shoshana Bryen

Posted By on January 16th, 2021

https://www.newsweek.com/israel-us-maintaining-alliance-against-iran-opinion-

There are three primary threads involved in Western containment of the Islamic Republic of Iran and preventing it from acquiring nuclear weapons capabilities: diplomacy, economic pressure and what the Israelis call “cutting the grass.” 

Diplomacy can be harsh and can include economic pressure, as in the “maximum pressure campaign” of the outgoing administration, designed to cut off the mullahs’ funds in hopes of either collapsing the Tehran regime or forcing it to enter serious negotiations. It can also be soft, as in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, or Iran nuclear deal) of the Obama administration, offering positive incentives in exchange for limitations or time constraints on threatening behaviors. “Cutting the grass”—reducing or eliminating actual military threats as they emerge in real time—has been Israel’s preferred method, and can be coupled with either of the two others.

“Maximum pressure” and “cutting the grass” have worked in tandem to severely constrain Iran. Hezbollah’s budget has been cut, Iran’s formerly 80,000-strong militia in Syria, commanded by Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) officers, has been reduced to approximately 10,000, and the people of Iran have been protesting against their government. On the other hand, Iran has found ways to spend its limited funds on its priorities—namely, ballistic missile technology and nuclear weapons capability.

While the incoming Biden administration has made clear its preference for soft American diplomacy, a continuing alliance with Israel—public or tacit—that pressures Iran on the ground can serve both countries’ interests.

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Trump orders US military’s Central Command to include State of Israel

Posted By on January 16th, 2021

https://www.jns.org/trump-orders-us-militarys-central-command-to-now-include-israe

Michael Makovsky, president and CEO of JINSA, noted that the realignment “will strengthen strategic planning, defense cooperation and deterrence against Iran by America and its regional allies.”

 U.S. President Donald Trump has ordered the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), which oversees the mission of the U.S. military in the Middle East, to include Israel, reported The Wall Street Journal on Thursday, citing U.S. officials.

Until now, Israel had been part of the U.S. European Command for the sake of America’s Arab allies that have had adversarial relationships with the Jewish state.

The development of the Abraham Accords—in which CENTCOM members the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain normalized relations with Israel—has allowed for pro-Israel groups to make the case that the time is ripe for Israel to fall under CENTCOM as well. (Sudan and Morocco, the other more recent signees of the Abraham Accords, are not part of CENTCOM, as Sudan does not have military cooperation with the United States and Morocco is part of the U.S. Africa Command.)

One of the pro-Israel groups to advocate for the move was the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), whose president and CEO, Michael Makovsky, said that the realignment “will strengthen strategic planning, defense cooperation and deterrence against Iran by America and its regional allies.”

“I hope it might also smooth the way for the Pentagon to utilize Israel more for regional operations, including by prepositioning precision-guided munitions (PGMs) and other much-needed weaponry for American, Israeli, and possibly, partner Arab forces,” he continued. “PGMs are critical to Israel’s continued ability to defend U.S. interests by rolling back the military footprint of Iran and its proxies.”

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Evidence of planned attack on Capitol undercuts Dems’ incitement claim By Valerie Richardson

Posted By on January 16th, 2021

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/jan/14/trump-impeachment-democrats-incitement-claim-under/

The Democratic impeachment claim that President Trump spurred the attack on the U.S. Capitol by whipping his supporters into a violent mob is coming under scrutiny as evidence mounts that the siege was not spontaneous but planned well in advance.

The release of initial court documents show that at least two suspects arrived on or before Jan. 6 armed with explosives, tactical gear and caches of weapons. Facebook has come under fire for failing to remove “Stop the Steal” pages allegedly used by organizers weeks and even months ahead of the rally.

Also emerging are media reports that investigators believe the assault was coordinated and “not just a protest that spiraled out of control,” as CNN reported Thursday, and that the FBI knew beforehand of plans for a “war” at the Capitol, as per The Washington Post.

Donald Trump Jr. connected the dots Thursday after flagging an interview with Just the News editor John Solomon, who said the FBI, the New York Police Department and the U.S. Capitol Police had intelligence about the possibility of an organized siege.

“If these federal law enforcement agencies had prior knowledge that this was a planned attack then POTUS didn’t incite anything,” the president’s son tweeted. “If he didn’t incite anything then Nancy Pelosi and the Dems used impeachment on yet another sham political witch-hunt.”

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The Trump Era Held Up A Mirror To Our Shattering CultureBy Emily Jashinsky

Posted By on January 15th, 2021

https://thefederalist.com/2021/01/15/the-trump-era-held-up-a-mirror-to-our-shattering-culture/

Where the anxieties of the working class and Baby Boomers were channeled into Trump, the anxieties of the left were channeled into a furious, culture-wide censorship campaign.

“The madness of Trump, as bad as it was, it really needed to happen. We really needed a reflection of our world’s greatest problem, which is not climate change, but sociopathy and narcissism. Especially in America. It’s going to kill the world. It’s not capitalism, it’s narcissism.” So said songstress Lana Del Rey, reflecting on the Trump administration this week.

She’s right to dig deeper than climate change and capitalism, but wrong to finger an incurable element of the human condition for America’s ills. The broader point, however, is important. Del Rey is arguing that Trump’s political ascent exposed or, perhaps, accelerated a cultural clash. She seems to be convinced this exposition will ultimately be constructive.

I’m not so sure. The problem is not that we’re all as narcissistic as Trump. The problem is that we’re all as anxious. Characterizing Trump as anxious may seem odd—and I’m certainly not invoking the psychological concept—but his central promise to “Make America Great Again” was predicated on a reasonable anxiety that the version of America he knew and loved was slipping away. That resonated immensely, and for some eminently fair reasons.

Where the anxieties of the working class and Baby Boomers were channeled into Trump, the anxieties of the left were channeled into a furious, culture-wide censorship campaign. Each vessel has profound issues made worse by their inevitable confrontation, which accelerated this painful culture clash in which we’re now engulfed. So why are we anxious?

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Are the End Times Near? By David Solway

Posted By on January 15th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/01/are_the_end_times_near_.html

A few years back my wife and I flew to Georgia where she was keynoting a panel discussion on feminism at Kennesaw State University. We were picked up at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta by the conference organizers, who naturally engaged Janice in conversation about the devastation wrought by feminism in the culture at large and academia in particular.

At one point I intervened to suggest that feminism was merely a subsidiary issue, as was the case with every other culture-wrecking movement and socially destabilizing factor confronting the Western world: identity politics, neo-Marxism, political correctness, radical environmentalism, “climate change,” “social justice,” outcome egalitarianism, information censorship, trans-national authoritarianism, abortion on demand, anti-meritocracy, chain immigration, “white supremacy” — the list goes on. Our hosts were initially taken aback, suspecting that I may merely have been playing devil’s advocate, but soon understood the argument I was making. Feminism was no doubt a critical issue, a socially destructive and culturally malignant phenomenon, but only one of many indices of something of far greater import: the approaching disintegration of Western civilization.

Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of The West, published 1918-1922, laid out the trajectory of the enfeeblement and decay that awaited us, developing a theme that went as far back as the Greek historian Polybius, but that, in the wake of a war that wiped out a generation, seemed less a “theme” than an historically imminent reality. The greatest poet of the modern age, William Butler Yeats, felt it in his bones, working out a visionary schematism in his prose volume A Vision and reflecting on the inevitable in his timeless poem “The Second Coming,” written one year after the end of the Great War: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last/Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?” Robert Bork’s must-read Slouching Towards Gomorrah hammers out Yeats’s vision in lurid contemporary detail, pointing toward a “syndrome” of collectivist attitudes dominating the culture, the debilitation of the family structure, and a “left-liberal moral consensus” diluting the text of the U.S. Constitution.

In his master volume On the Eve of the Millennium: The Future of Democracy in an Age of Unreason, published in 1995, Irish historian Conor Cruise O’Brien was not sanguine about the prospects for Western civilization in the coming years.

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Joe Biden: Impeachment’s Biggest Loser By Liz Peek

Posted By on January 15th, 2021

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/01/15/joe_biden_impeachments_biggest_loser_145045.html

EXCERPTS:

To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, there they go again.  Frantic to extinguish any chance Donald Trump will ever again run for office, Democrats have pushed through an express-train impeachment, concluding the president incited “violence against the government of the United States.”  

The hasty undertaking, unencumbered by deliberations, investigations, or witnesses’ sworn testimony, cheapens the sober intent of the impeachment process. It smacks of partisan vindictiveness. When New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries describes the president himself as a “living, breathing, impeachable offense,” he gives the game away.

But rushing to impeach a president who has only seven days remaining in his term is itself an affront to our democracy. Impeachment is meant to be a last resort means of expelling a president, not a political weapon. There has not been a serious probe of what happened that terrible day, how the rioting was organized and by whom. Timelines and social media accounts show that the breaching of the Capitol took place even as Trump was still speaking to the large crowd of followers, and that the organizers may have plotted out the event in advance, mainly on Twitter and Facebook.

Democrats have no patience for a sober assessment of what went wrong; they want to humiliate a president who provoked and embarrassed them for four years, and who has accomplished much despite their incessant resistance.

Instead, Democrats have wounded not only President Trump, but their own president-elect.

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The Road to Dystopia Philip Ahlrich

Posted By on January 15th, 2021

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/01/on_the_road_to_dystopia.html

When O’Brien, the interrogator from the Thought Police in Orwell’s 1984, holds up four fingers and asks Winston Smith, an imprisoned member of the underground opposition, how many he sees, poor Winston persists in saying he sees four.  But that is not what O’Brien wants to hear.  “No, Winston, you are insane.  There are five fingers.”  The interrogations continue until Winston, wracked with pain and exhaustion and persuaded of his insanity, agrees finally through his tears that he was lying to himself, that he had always been lying to himself, and admitted that he saw five fingers.  He understood that two and two make five.  Emptied of his individuality and broken by the inquisition, he also knew that he had won the victory over himself.  He knew he was a flaw in the social pattern.  He learned, he understood, he accepted.  And in the end, he knew that he loved Big Brother. 

The new liberal programs of revisionist history and psychological persecution now directed toward the American people are not at all dissimilar to the enforcement techniques of Orwell’s Thought Police.  Whoever controls the present controls both past and future.  The Democrats are telling us to live with a lie and to believe the lie, for the lie is stronger than the truth.  They do not tell us that such compulsory instructions are the instruments of a totalitarian regime.

The great lie is that America is a racist nation, that the Constitution of the United States is a racist document, and that you are a racist if you believe otherwise.  We are told to believe these things or we are judged insane by those who are insane.  Unfinished minds that accept these misguided narratives in pursuit of political identity and power are mistaking a disease of reason for a virtue.  Any political movement toward unrestricted power requires pervasive thought and behavioral controls upon targeted populations, and we are now watching the Democratic Party, a faction entirely without conscience, accelerating rapidly down these lines of force in pursuit of one-party rule and eventual socialism.

KRD NEWS, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Great Unraveling The old order is dead. What comes next? Bari Weiss

Posted By on January 15th, 2021

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-great-unraveling?utm_campaign=post&utm_me

Thought comes before action. Words come before deeds. Media that profits from polarization will stoke it. Lies — maybe harmless for the moment, maybe even noble — create a lying world.

I’ve known this for a while. It’s why I left The New York Times. And it is why, as much as I miss doing journalism, I’ve been cautious at every next step. 

Hate sells, as the journalist Matt Taibbi has convincingly argued, and as anyone looking at Twitter trending topics over the past few years can see. If Americans are buying rage, is there a real market for something that resists it? 

Hate sells and hate also connects. Communities can grow quite strong around hatred of difference, and that’s exactly what’s happened to the American left and the right. It is painful to resist joining a mob when that mob includes most of your friends. It feels good, at least in the short term, to give in.

So part of my hesitation about what comes next is that I have been unsure about who will have the strength to stand apart from the various tribes that can give their members such pleasure of belonging. It is hard to know how to build things that are immune to these dangerous forces when the number of the people who are — or appear to me — immune to it is so very small.

Perhaps a psychologist can explain what makes these people resistant. Is it personality type? Is it principle? Is it rootedness in a real community with real people who you love and who love you and who you trust when they call you out on your bullshit?

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Everything Is Broken And how to fix it By Alana Newhouse

Posted By on January 15th, 2021

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/everything-is-broken?fbclid=IwAR0nDY-7y7m7QPRsOJT8yV5lUM9UyNp5wKadX-qUdemLKr4KwO1cJh_k67o

EXCERPT:

I had barely started processing this when Norman moved to change the subject: “Now, can I ask you two something? How come so much of the journalism I read seems like garbage?”

Oh, God.

David and I looked at each other, simultaneously realizing that the after-school special we thought we were in was actually a horror movie. If the medical industry was comprehensively broken, as Norman said, and the media was irrevocably broken, as we knew it was … Was everything in America broken? Was education broken? Housing? Farming? Cities? Was religion broken?

Everything is broken.

Let’s say you believe the above to be hyperbolic. You never fell through the cracks of the medical system; as far as you understand it, there are plenty of ways for a resourceful person to buy a home in America these days; you easily met a mate and got married and had as many children as you wanted, at the age you wanted to have them; your child had a terrific time at college, where she experienced nothing at all oppressive or bizarre, got a first-class education that you could easily afford and which landed her a great job after graduation; you actually like the fact that you haven’t encountered one book or movie or piece of art that’s haunted you for months after; you enjoy druggily floating through one millennial pink space after another; it gives you pleasure to interact only with people who agree with you politically, and you feel filled with meaning and purpose after a day spent sending each other hysteria-inducing links; maybe you’ve heard that some kids are cosplaying Communism but that’s only because everyone is radical when they’re young, and Trump voters are just a bunch of racist troglodytes pining for the past, and it’s not at all that neither group can see their way to a future that looks remotely hopeful … If this is you, congratulations. There’s no need to reach out and tell me any of this, because all you will be doing is revealing how insulated you are from the world inhabited by nearly everyone I know.

If, on the other hand, the idea of mass brokenness seems both excruciatingly correct and also paralyzing, come sit with me. Being on a ship nearly 4 million square miles in area along with 330 million other people and realizing the entire hull is pockmarked with holes is terrifying.

But being afraid to face this reality won’t make it less true. And this is the reality.

For seven decades, the country’s intellectual and cultural life was produced and protected by a set of institutions—universities, newspapers, magazines, record companies, professional associations, cultural venues, publishing houses, Hollywood studios, think tanks, etc. Collectively, these institutions reflected a diversity of experiences and then stamped them all as “American”—conjuring coherence out of the chaos of a big and unwieldy country. This wasn’t a set of factories pumping out identical widgets, but rather a broad and messy jazz band of disparate elements that together produced something legible, clear, and at times even beautiful when each did their part.