ISRAEL Comments turned off

Adopting the Palestinian narrative Elliot Abrams

Posted By on March 18th, 2018

This piece is reprinted with permission and can be found on Abrams’ blog “Pressure Points.”

Seventeen “national security leaders” recently issued an alarming statement about Israel-Palestinian peace and U.S. policy. The statement was carried as an ad in The New York Times and a PDF version can be found here.

In my view, the statement is fairly radical in its departure from what has been U.S. policy for decades. How?

The Statement claims that “previous U.S. administrations” have “accepted” a Palestinian demand for “equal and minimal land swaps.” I will speak only about the George W. Bush administration. We understood that land swaps were a very useful idea to make the two-state solution work, but we did not back any demand that they be “equal and minimal.” That was to be negotiated by the parties.
The Statement says that “Jerusalem [is] to be the capital of Israel and Palestine, in the west and the east of the city respectively, an open city for the faithful of the three monotheistic religions.” The Bush administration also left the borders of Jerusalem to be determined by the parties, and never insisted on an “open city” – whatever that means.
The Statement calls for “ensuring the security of the two states consistent with their respective sovereignty and supported by a third-party security mechanism.” The Bush administration understood that security was an enormously complex and dangerous issue, but did not demand a “third-party security mechanism.” Again, the meaning of that phrase is entirely unclear, while it has long been entirely clear that Israel would not hand its security over to the United Nations, the United States, NATO troops, or any other possible “mechanism.”
The Statement says our goal should be “two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security.” What’s missing here? Compare the words of President Bush when addressing the United Nations General Assembly in 2002: “In the Middle East, there can be no peace for either side without freedom for both sides. America stands committed to an independent and democratic Palestine, living side by side with Israel in peace and security. Like all other people, Palestinians deserve a government that serves their interests and listens to their voices.” The Statement makes no mention whatsoever of freedom or democracy, simply abandoning the hopes and indeed the rights of the Palestinian people in this regard.
The Statement says that a deal between the Israelis and Palestinians “remains a core U.S. national interest.” Really? A desirable goal to be sure, but as one thinks of the rise of China, American military preparedness, missile defense, Iranian and North Korean nukes, energy issues, and the like, does solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict qualify as a “core national interest”?

MEDIA Comments turned off

CNN:CLAPPER NEWS NETWORK

Posted By on March 18th, 2018

The media always rewards its leakers.

The late pundit Robert Novak used to say that government officials can choose to be either “a source or a target.” In other words, leak information to reporters and you can count on flattering coverage and protection from them. An added bonus to leaking, as former Intelligence Director Jim Clapper discovered, is that the network to which you are leaking will turn you into a paid contributor. According to Congressman Jim Jordan, speaking to Fox News, “Clapper was actually the guy leaking information” to CNN about the presidential briefing on the Steele dossier that served as the pretext for the media feeding frenzy over possible Russian blackmail of Trump.

One can only laugh at the utter fraudulence of CNN: it pads its panels with government officials who leak to it, then presents them to its audience as “nonpartisan” experts commenting on the aftershocks of the very stories they leaked.

Trump’s intuition about a politicized intelligence community is confirmed daily by the rantings of its former members who treat the studios of television news like a retirement center. Eager to get in on this act, NBC recently hired former CIA director John Brennan, who also ingratiated himself to reporters through leaks. On his Twitter account, he describes himself as “nonpartisan” and NBC supports that con by letting him comment on the investigation his partisan manipulation of intelligence instigated.

Almost all of the principals responsible for the Russian farce are confirmed liars and leakers. They said Trump Tower wasn’t the target of spying. It was. They said a FISA warrant wasn’t issued. It was. They said Trump officials weren’t unmasked. They were. They said (as even the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman acknowledged) Hillary didn’t finance the Steele dossier. She did.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

It turns out purple states are the ones standing up for campus free speech

Posted By on March 18th, 2018

Florida this week joined eight other states that have banned “free speech zones” at public colleges — which, in the topsy-turvy way things work on campus these days, is a win for free speech.
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It’s a win because schools set up such zones in order to limit speech everywhere else. This cuts at the (orderly) free exchange of views that is supposed to be at the heart of any college’s mission.

But that ideal runs counter to the progressive dogma that young men and women need protection from ideas that somehow cause them pain. And it makes things tough on college administrators who must deal with the kids (and non-student radicals) who’ll happily stage a riot to serve their inner censors.

Thus Florida State, for example, offered a campus “compliance” map showing the exact locations where literature distribution and sign postings can take place — because the zones are otherwise so hard to find.

Yes: It actually takes a law to stop many school officials from caving in to the left.

Interestingly, the states that have taken this principled stand tend to be “purplish” ones, neither deep lefty blue nor righty red: Virginia, Missouri, Arizona, Kentucky, Colorado, North Carolina, Tennessee and now Florida — plus Utah, whose many Mormons have historic reasons for respecting speech rights.

It’s shameful that such laws are needed — and depressing that states like New York are behind the curve.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Mueller’s Investigation Flouts Justice Department Standards By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on March 18th, 2018

Gates was charged with $100 million in financial crimes — and pled guilty to two minor offenses, one of them highly questionable.

These columns have many times observed Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s failure to set limits on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. To trigger the appointment of a special counsel, federal regulations require the Justice Department to identify the crimes that warrant investigation and prosecution — crimes that the Justice Department is too conflicted to investigate in the normal course; crimes that become the parameters of the special counsel’s jurisdiction.

Rosenstein, instead, put the cart before the horse: Mueller was invited to conduct a fishing expedition, a boundless quest to hunt for undiscovered crimes, rather than an investigation and prosecution of known crimes.

That deviation, it turns out, is not the half of it. With Rosenstein’s passive approval, Mueller is shredding Justice Department charging policy by alleging earth-shattering crimes, then cutting a sweetheart deal that shields the defendant from liability for those crimes and from the penalties prescribed by Congress. The special counsel, moreover, has become a legislature unto himself, promulgating the new, grandiose crime of “conspiracy against the United States” by distorting the concept of “fraud.”

Why does the special counsel need to invent an offense to get a guilty plea? Why doesn’t he demand a plea to one of the several truly egregious statutory crimes he claims have been committed?

Good questions.

The Multi-Million-Dollar Fraud Indictments . . . and Penny-Ante Plea
On Thursday, February 22, with now-familiar fanfare, Mueller filed an indictment against Paul Manafort and Richard Gates, alleging extremely serious crimes. Let’s put aside for now that the charges have absolutely nothing to do with the stated rationale for Mueller’s appointment, namely, Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible Trump-campaign collusion therein.

According to the special counsel, Manafort and Gates conspired to commit more than $25 million in bank fraud. In all, the indictment charges nine bank-fraud counts, each carrying a potential penalty of up to 30 years’ imprisonment (i.e., 270 years combined). Furthermore, the two defendants are formally charged with $14 million in tax fraud (the indictment’s narrative of the offense actually alleges well over twice that amount). There are five tax-fraud counts, yielding a potential 15 years’ imprisonment (up to three years for each offense), against each defendant.

BOOKS, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Sean O’Callaghan The Real Heroes of Ireland’s Dirty War

Posted By on March 17th, 2018

Today, being St Patrick’s Day, we’ll leave the harps, shamrocks and green-tinted sentimentality to others. Instead, hear from the assassin of an Ulster policeman. ‘I am deeply ashamed of that act,’ he writes, ‘like many young Irish republicans, I thought I was fighting for Irish freedom. I was not’

Secret Victory: The Intelligence War That Beat the IRA
by William Matchett
William Matchett, 2016, 272 pages, about $30
_________________________________________

Some might regard the title of this book as making a grandiose claim. Others may deride it, or ignore both title and book, choosing instead to believe that whatever fragile peace Northern Ireland enjoys today is a blessing bestowed by Tony Blair, Gerry Adams, Bill Clinton and an assortment of peaceniks, chancers and conflict resolution groupies. Many such people have lined their pockets by grossly inflating their influence in the “peace process” and exporting their inanities to gullible audiences worldwide.

In reality they reaped the harvest of peace that others had sown in a long intelligence war, and William Matchett’s book is the perfect antidote to their delusions. The author is a former senior officer in the Special Branch of the Royal Ulster Constabulary who fought the IRA (and their loyalist counterparts) for a quarter of a century and who has gone on to advise police forces across the world on counter-terrorism. He describes with the familiar understated practicality of the North’s Protestant-Unionist majority how he and his Special Branch colleagues were able to win a war of intelligence within the civil law.

One experience of mine in Crumlin Road Jail in Belfast in 1989 confirmed for me—not that I needed much convincing—the absolutely central and critical role that RUC Special Branch played in degrading the Provisional IRA, and forcing it to end its campaign of murder and intimidation against the people of Northern Ireland. I was being led, in the company of seven IRA members, through the tunnel from the jail to the courthouse, each of us handcuffed to another prisoner. I happened to be handcuffed to a senior and long-standing member of the IRA from Dungannon, County Tyrone, named Henry Louis McNally. I knew him quite well from my days as an IRA operative in the mid-1970s in County Tyrone. He was once named, by Ken Maginnis, an Ulster Unionist MP in the House of Commons, as being directly responsible for the murders of seventeen members of the security forces. He had been arrested, charged, and later convicted of the attempted murder of British soldiers travelling by bus to their base in Antrim.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

German Interior Minister: “Islam Does Not Belong to Germany” by Soeren Kern

Posted By on March 17th, 2018

“Islam does not belong to Germany. Germany is shaped by Christianity. This tradition includes work-free Sundays and church holidays and rituals such as Easter, Pentecost and Christmas…. My message is that Muslims have to live with us, not next to or against us.” — Horst Seehofer, Germany’s new interior minister

“Many Muslims belong to Germany, but Islam does not belong to Germany. Islam is at base a political ideology that is not compatible with the German Constitution.” — Beatrix von Storch, Alternative for Germany (AfD)

“The state must ensure that people feel safe whenever they are in the public realm. People have a right to security. This is our top responsibility. It means that there should not be any no-go areas — areas where no one dares to go. Such areas do exist. We must call them by name. We must do something about it.” — German Chancellor Angela Merkel, RTL television, February 26, 2018

Germany’s new interior minister, Horst Seehofer, in his first interview since being sworn in on March 14, has said that “Islam does not belong to Germany.” He has also vowed to pursue hardline immigration policies, including the implementation of a “master plan” for speedier deportations.

Seehofer’s remarks prompted an immediate firestorm of criticism from the self-appointed guardians of German multiculturalism, including from Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has repeatedly insisted that “Islam belongs to Germany.”

The backlash will raise questions about how much Seehofer — a former minister-president of Bavaria and a vocal critic of Merkel’s open-door migration policies — will be able to accomplish during his tenure.

In a March 16 interview with Bild, Germany’s largest daily newspaper, Seehofer was asked if Islam belongs to Germany. He responded: “No. Islam does not belong to Germany. Germany is shaped by Christianity. This tradition includes work-free Sundays and church holidays and rituals such as Easter, Pentecost and Christmas.”

Seehofer added that Muslims living in Germany are “of course” part of Germany. But that does not mean, he said, “that we therefore, out of false deference, give up our country’s traditions and customs.” He added: “My message is that Muslims have to live with us, not next to or against us. To achieve that, we need mutual understanding and consideration, which is only achieved by talking to one another.”

Seehofer’s commonsensical remarks opened yet another chapter in the decade-long debate over the phrase, “Islam belongs to Germany.” The words were first uttered in September 2006 — at the time there were 3.5 million Muslims in Germany, compared to more than six million today — by then Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble.

Speaking ahead of the first-ever German-Islam Conference, an institutionalized dialogue between representatives of the German government and of Muslims in Germany, Schäuble said:

“Islam is a part of Germany and a part of Europe. Islam is a part of our present and a part of our future. Muslims are welcome in Germany.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Leave McMaster Be By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on March 17th, 2018

About every two months, there are rumors that Gen. H. R. McMaster might be let go as Trump’s national-security adviser (along with many other stellar appointees).

The world, however, is a much more logical and predictable place than it was 14 months ago. We’ve restored ties to the Gulf monarchies; Israel is again treated with respect. There is no talk any more of an ascendant ISIS caliphate. Ukrainians have been armed; Putin has had tighter sanctions slapped on him. NATO-member defense expenditures are up 5 percent. The U.S. military is being rebooted. Controversial moves, such as leaving the Paris climate accords and moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, are no longer controversial and are winning a consensus that such moves were overdue. The existential threat of a North Korean nuclear missile with the potential to hit the West Coast that was dropped on the nation last year is being dealt with through stepped up efforts to recalibrate missile defense, regional allied solidarity, historically tough U.N. sanctions, and a restored U.S. deterrence, rather than the old talk, talk, talk/give, give, give protocol of the “Agreed Framework,” “Six-Party Talks,” and “Strategic Patience” failures of the last 30 years.

The general doctrine of the National Security Council’s strategic blueprint — principled realism — is more or less a euphemism for the restoration of deterrence. Perhaps it is now less likely that Iran will send missiles in the direction of U.S. warships or take American sailors hostage or that U.S. diplomats in hostile countries will be subject to hearing loss. Much of that turnabout has been due, in various ways, public and private, to Trump’s national-security team of Mattis-Haley-Pompeo — and McMaster — who all have tried to define Trump’s Jacksonianism as an approach that is neither Obama recessional nor Bush-era preemptory nation-building. The appointment of Mike Pompeo at State solidifies that team.

On the principle that failure is punished and success rewarded, it makes no sense to lose someone integral to such progress, much less to chronically leak a wrongheaded move that would disrupt a successful team on the eve of dealing with both the North Korean threat and the various surreal side agreements and absurd protocols of the flawed Iran nuclear deal.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Morality Upside down By Marilyn Penn

Posted By on March 17th, 2018

NY State has just granted parole to one of three killers in the Black Liberation Army who in 1971 shot two cops in the back, shooting one 22 times as he pleaded for his life. The three member State Parole Board claimed that the 70 year old prisoner had finally taken responsibility for his actions and expressed regret and remorse for his crimes. Think of that standard compared with the Metropolitan Opera firing 74 year old James Levine for incidents of purported sexual harassment which took place many decades ago and were not reported until years after. Think of the 83 year old architect Richard Meier whose exhibition of collages was just canceled by Sotheby’s and whose gift to his alma mater Cornell was similarly declined due to allegations of sexual harassment, which included the affront to one of his assistants in having to look at images of female genitalia in the collages.

The pack hysteria that has overtaken America has been headlined by the Hollywood response to Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey , Bill Cosby and many other members of that community, largely on the basis of testimony of sexual harassment or assault given years after that may have occurred. In the case of James Levine, the media reported abuse of teenagers and of interest, the film which received many Academy Award nominations, winning the Oscar for its screenwriter, is Call Me By Your Name, a languorous look at a homosexual affair between a teenage student and a much older graduate student. The difference in age is never questioned, nor is there any trace of assumption that the older man might have unduly influenced the younger one. To the contrary, the boy’s father confesses his own regret at not having had the courage to experience a similar rite of passage in his own youth. Almost every man accused by the MeToo and TimesUp posses has apologized profusely either for wrong-doing or for being insensitive albeit misinterpreted, yet this has been insufficient for the various corporations, foundations, museums, universities and media centers for whom dismissal is the only appropriate response.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Key To Middle East Peace Is An Arab-Israeli Peace Shoshana Bryen

Posted By on March 17th, 2018

President Trump’s “peace process” envoy Jason Greenblatt hosted an odd and auspicious “ problem-solving meeting” at the White House to discuss the “humanitarian crisis in Gaza.” Among the 19 countries at the table were Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. And Israel. The Palestinians declined to attend and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) was not invited.

In one way, it was a great move; in another…meh.

Kudos to Messrs. Trump, Greenblatt and Kushner for tossing out the Oslo parameters and — whether by design or just by following the logic — changing the conversation from limited and literally deadly Palestinian incitement and foot-stomping demands to a broad-based Arab State role in the process. By doing so, they have taken a step toward solving a problem they may not even have been planning to tackle.

The Palestinians are the weakest link in regional politics, which is why the “Palestinian-Israeli peace process” was doomed from the start. It is impossible for Palestinians to announce that they recognize the legitimacy of Jewish nationhood and are prepared to accept for themselves a split, rump state squeezed between their enemy Jordan and their enemy Israel while the Arab States with the money and the guns disapproved. The more the U.S. pressed for concessions that would rile the bankers, the more the Palestinians retreated. Intransigence and violence were their defense against having to defy their patrons.

The core issue was never drinking water — or a state — for the Palestinians. It is the failure of most Arab States, including most of those at the table, to recognize the legitimacy and permanence of the State of Israel in the region. “Secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force,” says UN Resolution 242, and that is the obligation of Arab States to Israel. The meeting did not fulfill the criteria, but it surely was a step in the right direction. Having met and sat and talked in the house of the world’s only superpower, Arab States can’t unmeet, unsit, or untalk. Or deny.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

New Text Msgs Reveal FBI Agent was Friends with Judge in Flynn Case Congressional members say DOJ stonewalling information on FBI texts: Sara Carter

Posted By on March 17th, 2018

Newly redacted text messages discovered by congressional investigators reveal that an embattled FBI agent at the center of the Russia investigation controversy was close friends with a District of Columbia judge who recused himself from the criminal case over former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, congressional members said, and text documents show.

The never before seen text messages, which were a part of the texts given to Congress by the Department of Justice, show that FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok and his paramour FBI attorney Lisa Page discussed Strzok’s relationship with U.S. District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras, who presided over a Dec. 1, 2017, hearing where former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. Strzok was removed from Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel’s Office last year after anti-Trump text messages between him and his FBI agent lover were discovered by the DOJ’s Inspector General Michael Horowitz. But on Dec. 7, without warning, Judge Rudolph Contreras was removed as the presiding judge on Flynn’s case. Little information was given at the time as to why Contreras was removed.

“We’re asking the department of justice and the FBI to give us the documents we need to do proper oversight…”
Mark Meadows (R-NC)

DOJ officials did not immediately respond for comment.

In a text message chain from Page to Strzok on July 25, 2016, she writes, “Rudy is on the FISC! Did you know that? Just appointed two months ago.” At that point, the pair continues to discuss other issues but comes back to Contreras, “I did. We talked about it before and after. I need to get together with him.” Then later Strzok appears to return to his discussion about Contreras.