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Michael Connor :The Spy from Parramatta High……..(Fascinating Espionage)

Posted By on January 14th, 2017

Espionage story, family story, incredible story — that’s the essence of Victor and Frances Metianen’s journey from the cricket-club social scene of suburban Sydney in the 1930s to the dark world of what they believed in their fervent innocence to be Stalin’s workers’ paradise.

When “Sally” met “John” she was wearing a green headscarf and her shoes, European size 36, were new. Carefully positioned, “on the left hand side of the bosom”, was a white brooch. The place was Eighth Avenue, New York, in late August 1943. The first words they exchanged were passwords, crafted for them in Moscow.[1] She was an illegal, a spy about to begin living in New York as an American citizen. He was her contact with the Soviet Naval GRU, or military intelligence, based in Washington. Since the previous December coded cables, planning her voyage from Moscow to Vladivostok, then to San Francisco and onwards to the “Big Town”, had been volleying back and forth between Washington and Moscow. The American-based operatives asked her shoe size so that she could be outfitted with suitable local footwear. In the cables, tantalising parts of which were decoded in the Venona project, she was called the Australian Woman and Sally.

Behind the two cover names the Venona investigators found an Australian-born Soviet woman. Her real name, they suggested, was Francia Yakil’nilna Mitynen—“exact spelling not verified”. FBI information claimed she had been known as Edna Margaret Patterson and had remained in America until she disappeared in 1956.[2] In the cables there is no indication of what her operational objectives had been. Until the highly secret Venona transcripts were made public, few outside the intelligence world had known that the Soviets operated a Naval GRU. At that point the story generally comes to a stop. Suggesting an unsuccessful search by ASIO, a security file, now in the National Archives of Australia, has the Venona spelling of her name on the cover, but she is not mentioned in the few pages it holds.[3]

The reason for the lack of progress in the Australian search may simply be in the confusion of the spellings of her family name. It is highly likely the Australian Woman was Frances Metianen, born at 85½ Morehead Street, in the Sydney suburb of Redfern on January 31, 1914.[4]

Frances was the second daughter of James and Julie (as they were known in Australia) Metianen, an émigré Russian family who arrived in Australia before the revolution, and returned to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, straight into Stalin’s mincing machine.

Interesting as it is, the Venona spy story is a part of an extraordinary family story.

Metianen’s parents had arrived in Sydney on a Japanese liner from Nagasaki with their two-year-old-son Victor in May 1912.[5] Her elder sister Leonore (Lena) was born the following year, though there does not appear to be an Australian birth certificate, and was followed by Frances in 1914.[6] At the time of her birth, James claimed to have been born in St Petersburg in 1886 and married in Siberia in 1906. In the years they lived in Australia none of the family appears to have taken out Australian citizenship. When they left the country in the 1930s they probably travelled on laissez-passers without the return visas which may have offered some slight protection against the Stalin purges, or not.

James was employed as a fitter in the Eveleigh railway workshops. Perhaps there had been a political motive for leaving Russia, for after the 1917 revolution and coup he actively supported the Bolshevik dictatorship. On a Sunday in 1919, amidst the public speakers in Sydney’s Domain, he was arrested for selling an illegal communist newspaper, the Brisbane-published Knowledge and Unity. He was sentenced to a fine of five pounds, or one month imprisonment. Presumably he paid the fine.[7]

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RUTHIE BLUM: THE CYBER BIKINI INTIFADA

Posted By on January 14th, 2017

Along with bloodlust and brawn, Hamas proved this week that it also has brains, at least where its enemies’ weaknesses are concerned. But even though the terrorist organization that controls the Gaza Strip has grown quite proficient at using the internet to incite violence against Jews, it clearly is still no match for Israel in the realm of cyberspace.

Unbeknownst to the Israeli public until Tuesday, while Hamas was distributing candy in the streets of Gaza to celebrate Sunday’s truck-ramming attack — which killed four IDF soldiers who were about to embark on an educational field trip — the Islamist goons had been engaged in a clever sting operation to obtain classified information from the Israeli military.

Posing as beautiful girls on social media, with enticing photos and hip Hebrew lingo, Hamas cyber operatives succeeded in seducing boys in uniform.

As in the documentary film and later MTV series “Catfish,” these young guys believed that the scantily clad women they were chatting, flirting and exchanging messages with were genuine bombshells, and even potential girlfriends. Well, until the “girls” stopped responding, that is, as soon as they got their targets to download a certain app, which was actually spyware.

According to the IDF blog, this app “can turn a mobile device into an open book — leaving contacts, location, apps, pictures and files accessible … [and] can stream video from the camera and audio from the microphone.”

This was a case, the blog said, of Hamas using a weapon that was not a bomb, gun or vehicle, but rather a simple friend request.

It is not clear how many soldiers initially fell for the trap, but the scheme was uncovered by the IDF Military Intelligence Directorate’s Information Security Department when complaints of other suspicious online activity were lodged. In the process of investigating those issues, the Hamas “honey plot” was uncovered.

To counteract such threats, which the IDF reported happily resulted in no security breaches, a campaign has been launched to warn soldiers about cyber entrapment and provide guidelines for those whose phones have already been compromised.

Meanwhile, the IDF may expand its social media rules for soldiers to forbid them from revealing any information about their military service over the internet.

The irony of this foiled attempt on the part of Hamas is two-fold. In the first place, one of the aspects of Western democracies that the Islamist terrorist organization aims to eradicate by way of the sword is the freedom of men and women to behave as they wish, consensually, anywhere from the boardroom to the bedroom.

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Scare Pollution: A Review By Charles Battig

Posted By on January 14th, 2017

Steve Milloy is one persistent gentleman. Combining his legal and statistical education, he has spent most of his years ferreting out the false use of statistical techniques in the field of epidemiology. He continues the same quest in his latest book Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA (2016) Bench Press. This is his sixth such book since Science-Based Risk Assessment: A Piece of the Superfund Puzzle (1995).

Just what is epidemiology? One definition: “the science concerned with the study of the factors determining and influencing the frequency and distribution of disease, injury, and other health-related events and their causes in a defined human population for the purpose of establishing programs to prevent and control their development and spread.” Milloy notes that “The key to the value of epidemiology as an investigative tool is that a researcher must be looking for a relatively high rate of a relatively rare event in a human population… Epidemiologic results are essentially correlations and, as we all learn in Statistics 101, correlations do not equate to causation.” The “devil is in the details” aphorism comes to life as Milloy exposes the EPA’s use of any minute level of correlation as evidence of statistically significant correlation to justify its definition of Clean Air standards.

Milloy’s latest book documents his multiple attempts in multiple formats to hold the EPA to basic standards of ethical epidemiologic theory and practice. His book details the quixotic nature of that quest.

An executive order by President Richard Nixon in 1970 unified federal environmental activities into a single new organization, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Though the EPA was never officially organized by Congress as a presidential cabinet-level department, Nixon’s new federal bureaucracy undertook the writing and implementation of Clean Air Act (1970) laws. This unique status of the EPA as an all-powerful federal agency lacking cabinet-level status continues to the present. It has developed itself into a self-perpetuating rogue agency which defies congressional oversight attempts, as Milloy documents. From its $1 billion annual budget and 4,000 employees in 1970, the EPA expanded into a $6 billion annual budget with 16,000 employees by 1991.

Milloy began working on a variety of environmental issues involving the EPA in 1990. However, his quest for truth in statistics in identifying such impacts on human health has identified one issue at the top of the pile of EPA “malfeasance” actions. That is the matter of air quality standards.

Milloy: “When EPA began regulating PM in 1971, it regulated relatively large pieces of dust and soot that were anywhere from 25 to 45 millionths of a meter (one to two thousandths of an inch) in diameter. In 1987, EPA revised its rules to focus on smaller bits of dust and soot that were 10 millionths of a meter in diameter (about half the width of a human hair) — so-called PM10 (pronounced P-M-ten). In November 1996 under Administrator Browner, EPA proposed to regulate even smaller bits of dust and soot, particles that were 2.5 millionths of a meter in width — so-called PM2.5 (pronounced P-M-two-point-five).

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Dr. Kenneth Levin :The Radical-in-Chief’s war on Israel ensues unabated.

Posted By on January 14th, 2017

At the Camp David talks in July, 2000 hosted by President Clinton, Yasser Arafat rejected the proposals for a final status agreement put forward by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and offering Arafat virtually all the territories beyond the pre-1967 armistice lines. He rejected as well Clinton’s suggested amendments to Barak’s offer. Nor did Arafat submit any alternative proposals.

The reason for Arafat’s tack was not difficult to discern for anyone who had been paying attention to what the Palestinian leader had been saying and doing since the inception of the Oslo Accords in 1993. It was not that he was unwilling to take control of more territory and add to the forty percent of the West Bank and most of Gaza already handed him by Israel. Rather, the problem for Arafat was that the Camp David talks were cast as “end of conflict” negotiations. It was understood that any territorial agreement would be accompanied by Arafat signing away all further Palestinian claims against Israel, and this was something Arafat had no intention of doing.

Arafat had made clear his goals for the Oslo process at its very inception. On the night of the signing of the initial Oslo agreements on the White House lawn in September, 1993, he was on Jordanian television from Washington explaining to his fellow Palestinians and to the wider Arab world that Oslo was the first phase of the Palestine National Council’s 1974 program. This was a reference to the so-called Plan of Phases, according to which the Palestine Liberation Organization would acquire whatever territory it could gain by negotiations, then use that land as a base for pursuing its ultimate goal of Israel’s destruction. Arafat made at least a dozen references to this perception of Oslo within a month of that broadcast, and he and his associates referred to it many times thereafter. Once established in Gaza in July, 1994, Arafat also became involved in promoting the increased terror to which Israel was subjected in the ensuing months.

In the wake of abandoning Camp David, Arafat undertook a two-pronged strategy to advance his objectives. He unleashed a still more intense, indeed unprecedented, terror war against Israel, both to weaken Israeli resolve and, potentially, to win world sympathy as Israel’s response, against assailants imbedded within the Palestinian civilian population, would inevitably – he anticipated – cause large-scale civilian casualties.

He also undertook a diplomatic campaign to win international, particularly European, support for recognition of all lands beyond the pre-1967 lines as “Palestine”; in effect, granting it all to the Palestinians without the bilateral negotiations and agreements called for in the Oslo accords and without the Palestinians having to foreswear future, additional claims against Israel culminating ultimately in her dissolution.

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‘Homeland,’ Season 6 Review: A Politically Correct Carrie Gone is the series’ original vitality, replaced with predictable politeness.By Dorothy Rabinowitz

Posted By on January 14th, 2017

It’s a far from familiar Carrie, bipolar scourge of terrorists, who shows up in season 6 of “Homeland,’’ set in that destination strivers around the world dream of living in—namely, Brooklyn. She’s there having abandoned any further service to the CIA, because—she makes clear in the show’s opening episodes—she’s become increasingly dismayed by America’s policies in the Middle East. Not to mention at home, where she’s appalled to discover that the U.S government has been taking the threat of homegrown terrorism seriously and going so far as to investigate enthusiasts of jihad, creators of websites for the dissemination of messages from Islamic State, devotees of suicide bombers, and even charging some suspected of connection with terror networks abroad.

So it is that we find an even more chronically infuriated Carrie than the one of previous seasons. Instead of chasing around the capitals of the world hunting down terrorists about to set off explosions intended to take the lives of tens of thousands of unbelievers, she’s now spending her days in her Brooklyn offices devoted to legal defense of Muslim males she considers unjustly charged victims of the U.S. government. Unjustly charged in many ways, in Carrie’s view—the most remarkable aspect of which is her complaint that the government investigators aiming to prevent the next mass murder of Americans never stopped to consider the emotional factors driving these subjects, or to take into account the fact that the efforts of some of the would-be perpetrators bent on grand-scale terror assaults turned out to be ineffectual anyway. It’s around about this point in her reasoning that you begin to miss the other Carrie who used to pop pills by the handful, and to wish she’d go and find that bottle she used to keep handy.

In episode 1, awash in introductions to Carrie’s new views, she’s furious about the fate of one man convicted of trying to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge, using a blowtorch. “He’s doing 20 years essentially for being an idiot,” she broods. She goes into action in the case of a young Muslim, of Nigerian background, arrested as an online fan of jihadists and celebrator of suicide bombers, with a busy website—a possible material supporter of terror networks abroad. But in Carrie’s assessment, “just an angry kid.” In the unlikely event anybody has, within the first five minutes, not grasped the re-education mission of the series’ new season, the writers once given to obliqueness in the interest of mystery and style have Carrie hammering the messaging home. “Law enforcement,” Carrie declaims, “has to stop harassing and demonizing an entire community.”

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The Climate Intelligence Agency Democratic CO2 obsessions reach new comic heights.

Posted By on January 14th, 2017

Democrats must have concluded that climate change will defeat Donald Trump’s nominees, or perhaps the subject’s omnipresence at the confirmation hearings merely reflects their own political preoccupations, or their rich donors’. Whatever the reason, no job is too irrelevant for global warming to intrude.

Perhaps you think Mr. Trump named Mike Pompeo to the Central Intelligence Agency because of his spycraft expertise, or to defeat terror groups. Kamala Harris has other ideas. The new California Senator burned her question time on Thursday cross-examining Mr. Pompeo about “the scientific consensus” on global warming.

Citing NASA and “most of the leading scientific organizations world-wide,” Ms. Harris repeatedly asked about the human contribution to climate trends. “Do you have any reason to doubt NASA’s findings?” Mr. Pompeo replied that “I, frankly, as the director of CIA would prefer today not to get into the details of climate debate and science. It just seems—my role is going to be so different.”

When Ms. Harris kept pressing, Mr. Pompeo dryly replied, “I do know the agency’s role. Its role is to collect foreign intelligence.”

Meanwhile, in a nine-page questionnaire to Ben Carson, who is being sent to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Elizabeth Warren wanted to learn what the doctor thought about “C0 2 and other greenhouse gas emissions,” because extreme weather like flooding poses “a significant risk to public housing.”

“What other actions will you take to adapt to or prevent climate change while you are HUD Secretary?” Ms. Warren wondered. Maybe Dr. Carson’s tenure will be the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and the planet began to heal.

At least Rex Tillerson would have some relation to climate policy at the State Department, such as the Paris carbon deal. But Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley wanted to know about the mountain pine beetle, an invasive forest species he claimed was expanding as a result of warming.

Mr. Tillerson called warming a “serious risk” and added that “the facts on the ground are indisputable in terms of what’s happening with drought, disease, uh, insects, all the things you cite,” though he also mentioned “uncertainty” about the scientific models and the economic cost of a response. That was too much for Mr. Merkley, who said he’d oppose the nomination.

The real meltdown is scheduled for next week, when Scott Pruitt will be grilled about leading the Environmental Protection Agency. Washington’s Patty Murray has called the Oklahoma Attorney General “a climate change denier,” New Hampshire’s Jeanne Shaheen claimed the nomination was “a capitulation to polluters,” and Bernie Sanders said on CNN that “it is rather ironic that Mr. Trump has nominated somebody to head the EPA who doesn’t much believe in environmental protection.”

Mr. Pruitt has a scrappy legal background, including a constitutional challenge to the EPA’s abusive Clean Power Plan, but the real irony is that his environmental record, as traditionally understood, is strong. As AG, he negotiated a state compact with Arkansas to clean up phosphorous pollution in the Illinois River, lobbied for the federal 2016 Frank Lautenberg Chemical Safety Act, and sued poultry farms that didn’t control waste runoff as well as oil companies with leaking underground storage tanks.

That these achievements no longer count as environmental protection shows how far the progressive carbon panic has gone.

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Trump May Herald a New Political Order Seldom does a presidential election mark a permanent shift. The last time it happened was 1932. By John Steele Gordon

Posted By on January 14th, 2017

For all their noise and news dominance, presidential elections typically don’t change the country all that much. That isn’t a bad thing but a sign of how strong American democracy is. It rarely veers far from the center, where successful policy usually lies. But on rare occasions, deep historical currents and extraordinary political talents produce an entirely new order. It happened in the presidential elections of 1828, 1860, 1896, 1932—and, quite probably, 2016.

Denied the presidency in 1824 by what he called a “corrupt bargain” in the House of Representatives, Tennessee’s Andrew Jackson swept to a landslide four years later. He was the first president from west of the Appalachians—indeed, the first from anywhere other than Virginia or Massachusetts. Born dirt-poor, Jackson was also the first president to rise to affluence solely by his own effort.

It soon became clear that the country had entered a new political era. “Jacksonian democracy” moved the locus of power sharply down the socioeconomic scale. Soon most states repealed property requirements for voting, a first step toward universal suffrage.

Jackson created the modern Democratic Party, and the intense opposition to his policies coalesced into the Whig Party, establishing the two-party norm that prevails to this day. No wonder the great 19th-century American historian George Bancroft considered Jackson the last of the Founding Fathers.

The next great shift came with Abraham Lincoln. By the 1850s, slavery had become the dominant issue in American politics. The Republican Party, founded in 1854 as an expressly abolitionist party, grew rapidly as the Whigs collapsed. When Lincoln, the Republican nominee, won the presidency in 1860, the Union quickly came apart. South Carolina seceded barely a month after the election. Six more states were gone by Feb. 1, 1861, with a month still to go before Lincoln’s March 4 inauguration.

It would take the greatest war in American history to reunite the country. By the time the Civil War was over, the nation had been transformed. The South, impoverished and politically crippled, would be effectively a Third World country inside a First World one for 100 years. The North, with its rapidly expanding industry and growing population, was politically dominant. More than half the antebellum presidents had been Southern. In the century after the war ended, only two Southerners were elected to the White House: Woodrow Wilson, a Virginia native who made his career in New Jersey, and Texas’ Lyndon B. Johnson.

Presidential elections in the decades after the Civil War tended to be close. Grover Cleveland barely beat James G. Blaine in 1884. Four years later, Cleveland earned a popular-vote plurality while losing to Benjamin Harrison. In an 1892 rematch, Cleveland narrowly beat Harrison, becoming the only president to serve nonconsecutive terms.

But William McKinley’s decisive victory in 1896 marked the dawn of an era of Republican dominance that lasted more than a generation. McKinley ran on a platform of “Sound Money, Protection, and Prosperity,” a doctrine that suited the interests of the nation’s fast-rising affluent classes. His opponent, the Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan, was one of the great orators of American politics. Bryan railed against the gold standard and called for an inflationary monetary policy, which would have benefited debtors, including most farmers in the West and South.

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Palestinians: A Strategy of Lies and Deception by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on January 14th, 2017

Abbas here lied twice. First, it is a lie that he is prepared to return to the negotiating table with Israel. In the past few years, Abbas has repeatedly rejected Israeli offers to resume the stalled peace negotiations.

Abbas’s chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, claimed this week that his boss was ready to resume the peace talks with Israel in Moscow….Indeed, Abbas had “earlier” voiced his readiness to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Moscow. But Abbas once again outlined his preconditions for such a summit… This means that Abbas has not abandoned his preconditions for resuming the peace talks with Israel. The timing of Erekat’s announcement in Moscow is clearly linked to the Paris peace conference. It is part of the Palestinian strategy to depict Israel as the party opposed to the resumption of the peace talks.

Abbas has in the past reluctantly condemned some of the terror attacks against Israel. But these statements were made under duress, after being pressured by the US or EU.

In fact, his “condemnations” are nothing but political pablum, a sop to the West.

The Palestinian terrorist who rammed his truck into a group of young Israeli soldiers last week was doing exactly what his president urged Palestinians to do.

The Germans and French should not believe Abbas when he says that he condemns truck terror attacks in their countries. The scenes of Palestinians celebrating carnage in Jerusalem should serve as a wake-up call to the international community. The message of the call? That the overall Palestinian strategy – like the jihad strategy – is built on lies. Both continue to feature terror as one their main pillars.

What members of the international community do not seem to understand is that… [t]he terrorist who rammed his truck into a German Christmas market did not carry out his attack in outrage at a German settlement or a checkpoint. The terrorist who mowed down French people celebrating Bastille day was not protesting French “occupation.” Abbas and his cohorts, like the terrorists in Europe, are part of just one big global jihad against all “infidels” – including them.

The Palestinian Authority and its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, still believe that they can fool all of the people all of the time. This has always been the Palestinian strategy: nothing new here. Yet one likes to think that world leaders and decision-makers in the West will eventually – perhaps today? – wake up to the fact that the Palestinians are playing them for fools.

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Hillary’s E-mails and the Justice Department The DOJ Inspector General’s review will focus on the FBI, not DOJ. By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on January 13th, 2017

The Justice Department’s inspector general has announced that his office will conduct a review that will focus principally on FBI director James Comey’s public statements regarding the Clinton e-mails investigation during the 2016 campaign.

These were the three highly unusual announcements describing the status of the investigation in which no charges were filed: (1) the detailed presentation on July 5 of: the evidence uncovered against Hillary Clinton, a legal analysis of the applicable criminal statute, Comey’s determination that an indictment was not warranted, and his opinion that no reasonable prosecutor could disagree with his assessment; (2) the October 28 letter to Congress indicating that the Clinton e-mails case was being reopened owing to newly discovered evidence (derived from the separate investigation of disgraced former representative Anthony Weiner [D., N.Y.], and specifically from a computer shared by Weiner and his estranged wife, Clinton aide Huma Abedin); and, finally, (3) the announcement on November 6 – virtually the eve of the election – reaffirming Comey’s decision (announced July 5) not to seek an indictment.

It is undoubtedly appropriate for Michael Horowitz, DOJ’s inspector general, to consider whether these actions departed from law-enforcement protocols – as I have previously explained. But it is worth noting what the IG will not be reviewing: the Justice Department’s conduct.

The IG’s press release makes no mention of the Justice Department’s decision not to open a grand-jury investigation, despite significant concrete evidence of criminal wrongdoing – the decision that deprived the FBI of the use of subpoenas to compel the production of evidence. Neither will the IG be reviewing the multiple irregular immunity agreements granted by the Justice Department in a case in which no criminal charges were filed, including agreements that reportedly called for the destruction of evidence (laptop computers of top Clinton aides) after a strangely limited examination of their potentially incriminating contents.

There will similarly be no inquiry into why the Justice Department allowed subjects of the investigation (who had been granted immunity from prosecution) to appear as lawyers for the main subject of the investigation – despite ethical and statutory prohibitions on such conduct. Nor, evidently, will the IG be probing why the attorney general furtively met with the spouse of the main subject of the investigation – the spouse who just happens to be the president who launched the attorney general to national prominence by appointing her as a district U.S. attorney in the Nineties – on an airport tarmac just days before Mrs. Clinton submitted to a perfunctory FBI interview, after which came Comey’s announcement that charges would not be filed.

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Obama’s Transparent Presidency: Caroline Glick

Posted By on January 13th, 2017

Obama and his followers in the US and around the world refuse to see the connection between the policies borne of that ideology and their destructive consequences.

President Barack Obama promised that his would be the most transparent administration in US history.

And the truth is, it was. At least in relation to his policies toward the Muslim world, Obama told us precisely what he intended to do and then he did it.

A mere week remains of Obama’s tenure in office.

But Obama remains intent on carrying on as if he will never leave power. He has pledged to continue to implement his goals for the next week and then to serve as the most outspoken ex-president in US history.

In all of Obama’s recent appearances, his message is one of vindication. I came. I succeeded. I will continue to succeed. I represent the good people, the people of tomorrow. My opponents represent the Manichean, backward past. We will fight them forever and we will prevail.

Tuesday Obama gave his final interview to the Israeli media to Ilana Dayan from Channel 2’s Uvda news magazine. Dayan usually tries to come off as an intellectual. On Tuesday’s show, she cast aside professionalism however, and succumbed to her inner teenybopper. Among her other questions, she asked Obama the secret to his preternatural ability to touch people’s souls.

The only significant exchange in their conversation came when Dayan asked Obama about the speech he gave on June 4, 2009, in Cairo. Does he still stand by all the things he said in that speech? Would he give that speech again today, given all that has since happened in the region, she asked.

Absolutely, Obama responded.

The speech, he insisted was “aspirational” rather than programmatic. And the aspirations that he expressed in that address were correct.

If Dayan had been able to put aside her hero worship for a moment, she would have stopped Obama right then and there. His claim was preposterous.

But, given her decision to expose herself as a slobbering groupie, Dayan let it slide.

To salvage the good name of the journalism, and more important, to understand Obama’s actual record and its consequences, it is critical however to return to that speech.

Obama’s speech at Cairo University was the most important speech of his presidency. In it he laid out both his “aspirational” vision of relations between the West and the Islamic world and his plans for implementing his vision. The fundamentally transformed world he will leave President-elect Donald Trump to contend with next Friday was transformed on the basis of that speech.

Obama’s address that day at Cairo University lasted for nearly an hour. In the first half he set out his framework for understanding the nature of the US’s relations with the Muslim world and the relationship between the Western world and Islam more generally. He also expressed his vision for how that relationship should change.

The US-led West he explained had sinned against the Muslim world through colonialism and racism.

It needed to make amends for its past and make Muslims feel comfortable and respected, particularly female Muslims, covered from head to toe.

As for the Muslims, well, September 11 was wrong but didn’t reflect the truth of Islam, which is extraordinary. Obama thrice praised “the Holy Koran.” He quoted it admiringly. He waxed poetic in his appreciation for all the great contributions Islamic civilization has made to the world – he even made up a few. And he insisted falsely that Islam has always been a significant part of the American experience.

In his dichotomy between two human paths – the West’s and Islam’s – although he faulted the records of both, Obama judged the US and the West more harshly than Islam.

In the second half of his address, Obama detailed his plans for changing the West’s relations with Islam in a manner that reflected the true natures of both.

In hindsight, it is clear that during the seven and a half years of his presidency that followed that speech, all of Obama’s actions involved implementing the policy blueprint he laid out in Cairo.

He never deviated from the course he spelled out.