“ΧΡΗΣΙΜΕΣ ΚΑΙ ΕΝΔΙΑΦΕΡΟΥΣΕΣ ΔΗΜΟΣΙΕΥΣΕΙΣ”!..
1.
9 STEPS TO SUCCESSFULLY COUNTER JIHAD
The crucial strategies that will turn the dire conflict in America’s favor.
[Pre-Order Jamie Glazov’s new book, Jihadist Psychopath: How He Is Charming, Seducing, and Devouring Us, HERE.]
Editors’ note: In light of the skyrocketing phenomenon of Muslim migrants stabbing unbelievers in random stabbing sprees in Europe, as well as the calculated denial that leaders, authorities and media are enforcing about it, Frontpage has deemed it important to bring attention to the crucial steps America and the West must take to robustly confront the unceasing onslaught by Jihad and its leftist enablers. We are, therefore, reprinting below Frontpage editor Jamie Glazov’s July 12, 2016 Breitbart article, “9 Steps to Successfully Counter Jihad”.Having written the article in the closing chapter of the disastrous Obama administration, the author recognizes and celebrates the life-saving turn-around disposition that the Trump administration has brought in to counter Jihad. Frontpage is most confident that the suggested steps below will continue to be the overall focus of the new administration — which, thankfully, is now taking many of the crucial and constructive steps vis-à-vis our enemy.
9 Steps to Successfully Counter Jihad.
By Jamie Glazov
While the Obama administration continues to allow the Muslim Brotherhood to direct American foreign policyand, therefore, to implement “strategies” that render America defenseless in the face of Jihad and stealth Jihad, there are some alternative strategies that have the potential to turn this catastrophic situation around completely in America’s favor.
Below are 9 concrete steps that, if implemented by a future American administration, would make a big difference in preserving our civilization and in defending Americans from terrorism:
1. Label the Enemy and Make a Threat Assessment.
The Obama administration continues to refuse to label our enemy and, therefore, it continues to enable our defeat in the terror war. It is urgent that we name our enemy (i.e. Islamic Jihad) and definitively identify what ideology inspires our enemy (i.e. Islamic law).
2. Scrap “Countering Violent Extremism.”
“Countering Violent Extremism” is the pathetic and destructive focus of the Obama administration in allegedly fighting the terror war. On the one hand, this “focus” is vague to the point of being meaningless and completely incapacitates us. On the other hand, this focus allows the administration to perpetuate the destructive fantasy that there are other types of “extremists” — who just happen to be the Left’s political opponents — that pose a great threat to the country.
For example, as Stephen Coughlin has revealed, the “violent extremists” the administration is clearly worried about are the “right-wing Islamophobes” whom the administration obviously considers to be the real threat to American security.
The “Countering Violent Extremism” is trash and needs to be thrown in the garbage.
3. Stop “Partnering” With Muslim Brotherhood Front Groups.
The government needs to stop cooperating with, and listening to, Muslim Brotherhood front groups such as CAIR and ISNA immediately. The Muslim Brotherhood document, the Explanatory Memorandum, has made it clear that the Brotherhood’s objective is to destroy our civilization from within by our own hands with the influence of these groups. Moreover, as Robert Spencer advises, there needs to be legislation that will bar all such groups and affiliated individuals from advising the government or receiving any grants from it.
4. Implement a Concrete “Countering-Jihad” Strategy.
After discarding the “Countering Violent Extremism” absurdity, a concrete Counter-Jihad strategy must become an official policy. It must specifically register that Jihadists are the enemies and that Islamic law (Sharia) is what specifically motivates them.
Most importantly, as Sebastian Gorka urges in Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War, the government needs to lay down a vision, an actual “threat doctrine analysis” in a thorough document, just like George Kennan’s Long Telegram and NSC-68 did in laying out the strategic foundation to fighting communism in the Cold War. It is absolutely mind-boggling that nothing of this sort exists today in our terror war — and it is a reflection of the Left being in charge and of the destructive defeat that it is sowing.
5. Launch Our Own Counter-propaganda Campaign.
The Left and Islamists engage in propaganda 24/7. What does our propaganda war entail? Zilch.
Sebastian Gorka is crucially correct, therefore, when he recommends a national counter-propaganda campaign that involves a two-part approach: the first being the bolstering of efforts to define our enemy (Steps #1 and #4 above) and, second, the strengthening of our allies and partners in their own counter-propaganda efforts – which must include our empowering of Muslims who are trying to form an anti-Jihadist version of Islam.
Consequently, educational programs have to be set up everywhere, from public schools to universities to workplaces, in businesses and numerous other institutions. These programs must crystallize what exactly Islamic Law is and how it inspires and sanctions violence against unbelievers. This has to also involve, as Gorka urges, “a nationwide program of education that includes the armed services as well as federal, state, and local police forces and the intelligence community.”
The education campaign must also focus on the second part of Gorka’s counter-propaganda campaign, which is to help strengthen Muslims who seek to seize Islam from the jihadists’ hands.
6. Affirm Sharia’s Assault on the U.S. Constitution as Seditious.
Once the truth is accepted that jihadis are inspired and sanctioned by their Islamic texts, it must logically become required that mosques, Islamic schools and groups have to immediately curtail any teaching that motivates sedition, violence, and hatred of unbelievers (i.e. remember how CAIR advised Muslims not to talk to the FBI). Indeed, once the government discerns and labels the elements of Islamic law that threaten the American Constitution, any preaching and spreading of those elements in America must be labelled as seditious.
7. Put Pressure on Mosques, Islamic Groups and Schools.
Authorities have to start subjecting mosques and other Islamic institutions to surveillance — and discard the suicidal leftist notion that it is “racist” and Islamophobic to do so. Islamic institutions have to be made to buffer their lip-service against terror with actually doing something about it. As Robert Spencer counsels, this has to involve introducing programs that teach against jihadists’ understanding of Islam — and these programs have to be regularly monitored by the government. (This will be a part of Gorka’s suggested counter-propaganda campaign discussed in Step #5).
Spencer rightly stresses that the paradigm has to become that Muslim communities have to win the “trust” of intelligence and law enforcement agents, rather than the other way around, which is, absurdly and tragically, the case right now.
8. Bring Counter-Jihadists into the Government.
Instead of having Muslim Brotherhood sympathizers like Mohamed Elibiary serving on the U.S. Homeland Security Advisory Council (he “resigned” in Sept. 2014 under mysterious circumstances), and Muslim Brotherhood-linked individuals like Huma Abedin serving as the right-hand woman of Hillary Clinton, we need to bring in people who actually love America and want to protect it. We all know who these noble and courageous individuals are – and some of them are referenced in this article. The government must also bring in brave Muslim individuals who genuinely reject Jihad and empower them in propagating their anti-jihadist vision for Islam.
(P.S. Yes, there is an argument to be made that Islam cannot be Islam without Jihad. But the debate over this belongs in another forum. And whatever the answer, it does not mean that the effort to empower Muslims who want to make the anti-jihadist Islamic vision possible should not be made.)
9. Ridicule the Enemy.
Ridicule is a vicious and potent weapon. There is a baffling and shameful silence in our culture’s sphere of comedy, especially in Hollywood and our media, with regard to the myriad ingredients of Sharia and Jihad that merit at least a million hilarious satirical sketches.
Bill Maher, for whatever unappealing drawbacks he has in conservatives’ eyes, has set a bold standard in this respect in his Burka Fashion Show skit. American comedians need to start writing scripts that follow in Maher’s footsteps and Americans need to encourage and equip them to do so – and to also vigorously defend them from the attacks and slanders they will inevitably receive from totalitarian leftist and Islamic forces.
We must never underestimate the crippling effect of comedy on the totalitarian Mullahs of the world. Indeed, the contemptuous, snickering and roaring laughter of people, as they gaze at the pathetic rules and lives of Sharia’s gatekeepers, poses a danger to tyrants like no other.
Jamie Glazov holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Russian, U.S. and Canadian foreign policy. He is the editor of Frontpagemag.com, the author of the critically-acclaimed, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror, and the host of the web-tv show, The Glazov Gang. His new book is Jihadist Psychopath: How He is Charming, Seducing, and Devouring Us. Visit his site at JamieGlazov.com, follow him on Twitter: @JamieGlazov, and reach him at jamieglazov11@gmail.com.
2.
MEMORIES OF LEFTIST GLEE ABOUT 9/11
How progressives saw poetic justice in planes plunging into U.S. buildings packed with innocents.
[To get the whole story on why many leftists celebrate Jihadist attacks on America, pre-order Jamie Glazov’s new book, Jihadist Psychopath: How He Is Charming, Seducing, and Devouring Us: HERE.]
I will never forget how, seventeen years ago on this day, many of the leftists around me in my neighborhood and community had very little trouble expressing their glee about Al Qaeda’ strike on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.
I had known some of these leftists for years, and after the fall of the Soviet empire in 1989–91 many of them bitterly lamented to me that the “alternative to capitalism” was now gone. A significant number of them retreated into a silent and sullen shell.
Then came 9/11.
Almost overnight, these individuals underwent a miraculous transformation. A bright sparkle could once again be detected in their eyes, as their revolutionary selves came out of a deep slumber. Never had I seen them so happy, so hopeful, and ready for another attempt at creating a glorious and revolutionary future. Without doubt, September 11 represented a personal — and morbid — vindication for them.
The images of the innocent people jumping to their deaths from the Twin Towers evoked no sympathy from these individuals. Instead, they saw only poetic justice in American commercial airplanes plunging into American buildings packed with people. For my leftist acquaintances, the jihadist terror war gave promise of succeeding in a project in which Communism had failed: to obliterate the capitalist system itself. “The U.S. brought this on itself,” they stated repeatedly — and with scornful self-satisfaction.
These disturbing personal encounters I had were a microcosm of the Left’s behavior on the U.S. national scene. In the blink of an eye after the Twin Towers went down, leftists were beating their breasts with eerie repentance for their own government’s supposed crimes and characterizing the tragedy that their nation had just suffered to be some form of karmic justice.
Immediately following the 9/11 attack, leftist academics led with a drum roll. The very next day after the terrorist strike, the Left’s intellectual guru, Noam Chomsky, exonerated the terrorists, stating that the Clinton administration’s bombing of the pharmaceutical plant in Sudan constituted a far more serious terrorist act and warning that 9/11 would be exploited by the United States as an excuse to destroy Afghanistan.
Leftist academics across the country regurgitated Chomsky’s themes, cheering the 9/11 terrorist acts, which they deemed a just retribution for America’s transgressions:
History professor Robin Kelley of New York University stated: “We need a civil war, class war, whatever to put an end to U.S. policies that endanger all of us.”
History professor Gerald Horne of the University of North Carolina asserted that “the bill has come due, the time of easy credit is up. It is time to pay.”
Professor Eric Foner of Columbia University, the renowned Marxist historian, expressed his personal confusion about “which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House.”
Barbara Foley, a professor of English at Rutgers University, felt 9/11 was a justified response to the “fascism” of U.S. foreign policy.
Mark Lewis Taylor, a professor of theology and culture at Princeton Seminary, thought the WTC buildings were justifiable targets because they were a “symbol of today’s wealth and trade.”
Robert Paul Churchill, a professor of philosophy at George Washington University, rationalized that the terrorist attack was justified:
What the terrorists despised and sought to defeat was our arrogance, our gluttonous way of life, our miserliness toward the poor and its starving; the expression of a soulless pop culture . . . and a domineering attitude that insists on having our own way no matter what the cost to others.
Of course, the infamous Ward Churchill, as we know, outdid all the others, blaming not only Bush and America, but the “little Eichmanns” inside the buildings for the attacks.
Churchill, Chomsky, and their kin on the academic Left were joined by prominent figures in the progressive culture at large. Norman Mailer stepped forward to opine that the suicide hijackers were “brilliant.” In his view, the attack was completely understandable, since “Everything wrong with America led to the point where the country built that tower of Babel which consequently had to be destroyed.”
Oliver Stone affirmed that he saw 9/11 as a “revolt” and compared the subsequent Palestinian celebrations with those that had attended the celebrations in the French and Russian Revolutions. Susan Sontag, meanwhile, held that the terrorist attack was the result of “specific American alliances and actions.”
From the religious camp, Tony Campolo, a leading Christian evangelist who served as one of former President Clinton’s “spiritual advisers,” believed that 9/11 was a legitimate response to the Crusades.
The American flag, a hated symbol to the Left, also became a target: Novelist Barbara Kingsolver was incredulous that her daughter’s kindergarten teacher instructed the students to come to school the next day dressed in red, white, and blue. Nation columnist Katha Pollitt had the same reaction regarding her teenage daughter’s impulse to fly an American flag outside the family home. Pollitt told her that she could “buy a flag with her own money and fly it out her bedroom window, because that’s hers, but the living room is off-limits.” This was, Pollitt explained, because the American flag stands for “jingoism and vengeance and war.”
Similar sentiments were heard throughout Europe as well. The German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen described 9/11 as “the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos.” Dario Fo, the Italian Marxist who won the 1997 Nobel Prize for literature, observed: “The great [Wall Street] speculators wallow in an economy that every year kills tens of millions of people with poverty, so what is 20,000 dead in New York?” [1]
And so, on this sad day, we remember leftists’ eerie and maniacal ecstasy at the images of Americans leaping to their deaths while holding hands — as they jumped from the Towers on 9/11 to escape the burning flames.
And we come to reflect on why the Left celebrated when, on that tragic day, more than 3,000 Americans died.
The Left, at its very core, is saturated with malice and the yearning for the destruction of its own host Democratic-Capitalist society. In that yearning, as I have documented in United in Hate, it automatically sides with America’s totalitarian and terrorist adversaries.
On this 17th Anniversary, let us not forget the victims of 9/11 — and who murdered them. And while we pray for and honor the victims, let us also not forget who celebrated this monstrous crime with delight, mockery and sinister smirks.
For it is only in understanding what we are up against that we will be able to protect ourselves from it — and to save ourselves from its venomous and poisonous fangs.
Note:
[1] All these statements are now on the public record. Paul Hollander has an extensive sampling of them in his Understanding Anti-Americanism: Its Origins and Impact at Home and Abroad, pp. 24–27. For a wide selection of academics who verbalized praise of the 9/11 attacks, see David Horowitz, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. Horowitz’s Unholy Alliance also contains a large sampling of leftists’ reactions to 9/11.
[Photo: Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons — Public Domain]
3.
ISRAEL BEEFS UP ITS MILITARY
But military spending is no substitute for strategic depth and defensible borders.
Israel’s shrillest critics often accuse the Jewish State of exaggerating security threats. Some detractors have even characterized Israel’s security conscious leaders as “paranoid.” We often hear them spew tired and meaningless banalities like “peace of the brave” and “risks for peace” in connection with their calls for unilateral Israeli concessions. But Israelis, who have been compelled to fight seven wars with their Arab neighbors since acquiring hard-fought statehood, know better. They are keenly aware that peace treaties with authoritarian leaders and two-bit kings, generals and sheikhs are worth no more than the paper on which they’re written.
Nothing underscores this concept better than outrageous but unsurprising statements recently made by Jordan’s former prime minister, Abdelsalam al-Majali. In an August 18 televised interview, al-Majali, who was a signatory to the 1994 Jordan-Israel peace treaty, stated, “The Arabs do not have any power. If we ever have military power, will we let them keep Haifa? We’ll take it.” And just in case anyone had any doubts as to the meaning of his words he added, “If tomorrow we become stronger and can take Haifa by force, will we really decline just because we have an agreement with them?”
The comments were made in Arabic to an Arabic audience. This is typical. Arab leaders often speak in forked tongues when the topic centers on Israel and have become adept at this type doublespeak. When addressing Western audiences, they moderate their tones and often employ euphemisms and ambiguities to mask their real intentions. But it is an entirely different affair when they address their fellow kinsmen where their true pernicious intentions are exposed.
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu is under no illusions about the catastrophe that would befall his nation if Israel let its guard down for one second. He once insightfully observed that “If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel.” As a result, the Netanyahu-led government has invested heavily in defense. Nearly 6 percent of Israel’s GDP, or $19.6b was allocated toward defense spending in 2017.
All branches of the armed forces are slated to receive substantial upgrades to their operational capabilities. The Israel Air Force (IAF) currently operates a squadron of F-35 “Adir” 5th generation stealth fighters. Israel was the first nation outside of the U.S. to have deployed the F-35 and the aircraft has already seen successful operational use in the Syrian theater. The IAF is expected to take delivery of 50 of these machines, which when added to Israel’s existing fleet of F-15 Strike Eagles and F-16 Sufa fighters will ensure that the IAF maintains its air supremacy over the skies of the Mideast for decades.
The armored corps is slated to receive upgrades to its vaunted Merkava IV tanks with artificial intelligence (AI) enhancements. The new tank will be called the Barak and in addition to AI enhancements, will receive an improved cannon, improved Active Protection System (APS) capable of swatting anti-tank guided missiles and RPGs before the projectiles can reach the tank’s armor, and a 360-degree Virtual Reality (VR) system enabling the crew to survey the terrain without having to expose themselves to enemy fire.
Israel’s Ministry of Defense (IMoD) recently announced the establishment of a missile corps which will be attached to the ground forces. It is a revolutionary concept that will enable the ground forces to deploy rockets possessing various ranges of between 30 and 150 kilometers with unprecedented precision. The missile corps will be integrated with the Tzayad battlefield management system. This platform allows all units in the theater of operations to see each other through interconnected touch-screen tablets and computers. By simply touching a screen, a commander can communicate to all other units the location of friend and foe alike within seconds. Soldiers of the missile corps would then swing into action launching deadly rockets from as far away as 150 kilometers with incredible precision. The establishment of the missile corps will enable the IAF to concentrate on more strategic targets while the missile corps deals with tactical targets.
The Israel Naval Service will also soon see a significant boost to its operational capabilities with the acquisition of four Sa’ar-6 class super corvettes equipped with sophisticated sea-to-sea missiles, torpedoes, point-defense systems, anti-aircraft missiles and rapid-fire cannon. These along with other naval assets will patrol Israel’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) and ensure that maritime traffic in the eastern Mediterranean, the Gulf of Eilat and the Red Sea remains unimpeded. Advanced Dolphin II class submarines, equipped with Popeye Turbo cruise missiles (which can be nuclear tipped) will ensure that Israel maintains second strike deterrent capabilities. Moreover, the Dolphin II’s in Israeli service can be submerged for up to 30 days and are extremely quiet making them ideal platforms for covert operations against close and distant targets.
While these and other military upgrades to Israel’s formidable military will enhance Israel’s security, they are no substitute for strategic depth and defensible borders. Israel’s current leadership understands that the Jordan Valley, with its steep depression and high ridgeline, presents the best natural defense against an attack from the east. Moreover, the Samarian mountain range, which overlooks Ben Gurion Airport and part of Israel’s coastal plain, must never be vacated by Israel. Finally, Israel without Judea and Samaria (West Bank) is only nine miles wide at its narrowest point. In 1998, when then Texas Governor George Bush visited Israel and was informed of this fact, he quipped that there were driveways in Texas longer than that. That humorous observation correctly sums up Israel’s strategic situation and that is why Judea and Samaria is integral to Israel’s security needs.
4.
THE WASHINGTON INSIDER – MEDIA RESISTANCE
Who really runs the government?
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism
The oldest institution in Washington D.C. isn’t the White House (1817), the Smithsonian Castle (1855) or the Old Ebtitt Grill (1856): it’s government insiders conspiring with friendly reporters against their rivals and superiors. Even when Washington D.C. was uninhabitable during the summer months, the telegraph wires still burned with smears, innuendos and leaks even with no one around to leak.
When the Washington press corps isn’t firing stupid questions at press secretaries, it’s lunching at places like the Old Ebtitt Grill while jotting down gossip, innuendo and talking points from government insiders. The only industry with a more incestuous media than Washington D.C. is some 2,700 miles away in Hollywood. But lately the forbidden affairs between reporters and insiders make Hollywood seem tame.
Take James Wolfe and New York Times reporter Ali Watkins, where the thirty year difference between the Senate Intelligence Committee security director and the 26-year-old Pulitzer nominee (the most disgraceful Pulitzer jorno who hadn’t actually colluded in Communist genocide) and his marriage didn’t obstruct trigger the scruples of media outlets getting the inside scoop between the sheets.
The New York Times verbally shrugged it off. “Their relationship played out in the insular world of Washington, where young, ambitious journalists compete for scoops while navigating relationships with powerful, often older, sources.” Or as Harvey Weinstein called it, business as usual.
The anonymous insider New York Times op-ed lays bare the farce that is the insider-media resistance swamp. “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” the headline blared.
Please.
“Resistance” makes you think of guerrillas hiding in jungles, partisans shooting from behind brick walls, not a Washington D.C. insider lunching with a New York Times editor. Government bureaucrats sabotaging elected officials didn’t begin with President Trump. Every Republican president (and some Democrats) have faced the courageous resistance of careerists who occasionally switch from ordering overpriced office chairs at taxpayer expense to pursuing their personal and political agendas, also at taxpayer expense. Only under Trump would these professional cretins be compared to the Maquis.
The insider-media resistance legitimized Hillary Clinton opposition research as a basis for spying on Trump officials, it let Comey allegedly leak classified documents and a thousand other treacheries.
Say what you will about Antifa and leftists who dress up as giant private parts or characters from the only Hulu original show that anyone watches, at least their “resistance” puts them on line for a beating or a photo that will make them cringe at family reunions for two generations. And they really believe in something. That something may be evil, but to quote Walter Sobchak, “At least it’s an ethos.”
The Washington insider resistance is the pathetic work of colorless careerists whose ideology rarely runs deeper than their next job. Their leftism is the reflexive protective social coloration and goes no deeper than Comey or Mueller’s Republican credentials. Had President Trump not threatened to drain the swamp, they would have done only as much undermining of his administration to get them a date, a good story at the next cocktail party or a post-government gig. But then Trump threatened the way of life of men and women who would have been happy if the Soviet Union had won the Cold War as long as they were allowed to keep their job titles, their gym memberships and their endless lunches.
Why does this “resistance” resist? Why does every Washington D.C. insider have his own pet reporter?
The unglamorous truth is that beyond the marble and white stone, the Imperial City is a snake pit where government careerists, bureaucrats and political appointees, engage in constant intrigues. Success in D.C. has very little to do with performance and a great deal to do with contacts and publicity. Everyone important enough to get coverage starts cultivating reporters and anonymously planting stories that make him look good and everyone in his way look bad. That’s the social disease of Washington D.C.
Both the media and the insiders have escalated their usual abusive behavior, with the insiders leaking classified information, doing serious damage while boasting about being a “resistance”. But it’s not a dramatic break with the past. Instead it’s a corrupt illicit relationship turning even more corrupt.
The “anonymous” op-ed casts light on just how much of Washington D.C. is driven by an incestuous relationship between government insiders and the reporters who are supposed to cover them, but instead collude with them. The media shapes the policy consensus while the insiders shape the media. And policy gets made not by elected officials, but by an echo chamber of unelected officials, appointees and their media pals. This echo chamber defines the popular view inside and outside Washington D.C.
Normally elected officials colluding to undermine elected officials would be deemed a threat to democracy, but the echo chamber insists that they’re saving America from President Trump.
That’s the “resistance” of careerists looking to balance jobs in the Trump administration with future job opportunities. It’s the lifers who never leave Washington D.C. riding the revolving doors from government to lobbying and consultancies, and then back to government again, who change addresses and suburbs, but never stop playing their corrupt games and hate anyone who threatens them.
Some call them the “Deep State”, but like “Resistance”, it’s far too grand a name for small, petty people who would sell their sisters for a leg up, who claim to believe whatever is popular at any given moment.
And switch just as easily the next.
The only thing that Washington D.C. insiders ever resist is reform. That, not the supposed suffering of illegal aliens, Muslim terrorists or whatever Dem victim group is hot this week, is what motivates them.
President Trump came from the real estate world to a medieval court with the semi-modern trappings of ubiquitous Blackberries and encrypted apps to connect leakers to New York Times reporters. He threatened to drain the swamp and reform the racket. And that threat bound the Washington D.C. insider and the Washington D.C. reporter closer together than ever around fighting a common enemy.
The insider-media connection is older than the White House and Old Ebtitt, old enough that its members have come to think of Washington D.C. as their own, and of Trump as a parvenu, an upstart threatening to reform them out of existence just because he happened to have won an election.
Elections, the D.C. lifers know, come and go. Corrupt relationships however are forever.
The media is an integral part of the Washington D.C. swamp. The relationships that insiders cultivate with reporters are an important weapon in staving off reforms. The idealistic politician who starts talking reform quickly gets distracted by a thousand crises manufactured by threatened D.C. lifers.
That’s why the media has been so sharply paranoid about the loss of its privileges. Cutting back press conferences, opening them up or criticizing the media were all deemed a threat to the First Amendment. It’s not just about hating President Trump and his politics. The media depends on its network of contacts. Any threat to its contacts is a threat to the careers of influential reporters.
When a New York Times journalist is prepared to allegedly sleep for scoops with the knowledge of her superiors, imagine what sort of lies, smears and attacks the media will unleash to protect its sources.
The anonymous op-ed is the tip of the iceberg. The swamp dwellers like the slime too much. And they will do whatever they can to stop elections from overturning their powers and privileges.
5.
ONLY TRUMP COULD END PALESTINE
A bad time for bad ideas.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.
The Soviet Union had a perverse genius for convincing the United States to not only adopt its most destructive ideas, but to also become their chief sponsor under the delusion that it would somehow stop the destruction that its old Communist enemy had unleashed around the world.
It’s fitting that President Trump struck at two terrible red birds with one stone by dumping the UNRWA. Both the UN and Palestinian nationalism were the brainchildren of Soviet Communists that the leftist American foreign policy establishment adopted under the supposed guise of fighting Soviet influence, and was then in turn quickly picked up by a clueless Republican foreign policy establishment.
Republicans embraced Arab nationalism since President Eisenhower sided with Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Hitler admiring military dictator and his nationalization of the Suez Canal, over the UK, France and Israel. In what he would later describe as his greatest mistake, Eisenhower threatened his former British allies with economic warfare to keep Egypt’s Arab Socialist regime from going over to the Communist side.
It didn’t work.
But every Republican administration until now had embraced Arab nationalism and its ugly malformed terrorist stepchild, Palestinian nationalism.
Even the Reagan administration.
All the Soviet Union needed to do was adopt a bunch of Islamic terrorists and the United States would show up like a jealous rival to shower them with love, flowers and chocolates. After the Soviet Union collapsed, its old Arab Socialist client states, the Islamic oil kingdoms that first corrupted our foreign policy, and domestic Muslim Brotherhood lobbies continued successfully playing this game of Br’er Rabbit and the Briar Patch with the American Br’er Fox. With no more Soviet Union to compete against, the rationale for supporting terrorists was to convince them to turn moderate or to stop them from allying with more “extreme” terrorists. The only way to stop the terrorists was to adopt them.
Late in the first decade of a new century, the Clinton administration’s normalization of Yasser Arafat and his PLO terrorists had become almost nostalgic reminders of a more innocent time. In its heyday under Obama, the foreign policy left was glutted with a wish list of Islamic terrorist groups to normalize.
Weapons were flowing to Islamic militias from Syria to Libya: Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen were handed on a silver platter to the Brotherhood and its Islamist allies, Iran was getting billions in cash, its Iraqi PMUs were using our air power for air support, Boko Haram was being kept off the list of sanctioned foreign terrorist groups despite its genocide of thousands of Christians, there were talks with the Taliban and support for a Hamas-PLO unity government in the Terrorist Occupied Territories in Israel.
Then President Trump showed up and, unlike so many establishment Republicans, showed no interest in the received wisdom that the Republican establishment had picked up from the left which had picked it up from the Soviet Union in the great rummage sale of the worst ideas in human history.
The failed foreign policy in which the United States curried favor with its enemies to moderate their positions, fought terrorism by supporting it, served everyone’s values and interests but its own, went out the door faster than a tweet. Diplomacy would no longer be about assembling stakeholders in the international community in fancy New York restaurants. Nor would it suffice for American interests to be served in some indirect fashion, dependent on the goodwill of its enemies, and in ways unlikely to ever materialize.
The Palestinian nation building project, one of the insane hubs around which American foreign policy had senselessly spun, is one of the first casualties of the Trump era in foreign policy.
The peace process with the terrorists had been underway for a generation with nothing to show for it except terrorism. The UNRWA had been around for generations, a special UN agency dedicated to perpetuating a war on Israel while acting as an employment agency and rocket storage firm for Hamas.
But getting rid of either one was unthinkable. “Just imagine the consequences,” the entire spectrum of foreign policy experts, thought leaders, bureaucrats, media pundits and the rest of the gang of Chauncey Gardiners who represent the Republican establishment would chorus in unison.
And President Trump shrugged.
The PLO strategy of alternating threats with flattery, playing the victim, then throwing a tantrum, promising to make a deal while demanding concessions up front, has played very badly with Trump.
Former Secretary of State John Kerry’s meddling by urging PLO officials to attack Trump personally while allegedly promising them that Trump would soon be gone and Kerry might replace him, backfired badly.
Instead of getting a payday, the Pallies are getting pressured. Defunding the UNRWA, like the recognition of Jerusalem, is a warning. Ending the UNRWA terror cash pipeline doesn’t just save money; it’s another sign that the United States is losing interest in the Palestinian nation building project.
The United States had adopted the Soviet Union’s Palestinian nation building project as its own. Time and bureaucracy had made it a Washington D.C. fixture like one of those obscure statues on a side street off the city’s hub whose purpose no one remembers, but which no one can get rid of.
Now President Trump is playing iconoclast.
The Palestinian nation building project was invented by the Soviet Union to destroy Israel, and to spread terror around the region and the world. Every effort to neutralize it, to buy off its leaders and fulfill their demands has only brought it closer to its goal.
But President Trump has never accepted the central premise of appeasement. He has never believed that buying off our enemies while getting nothing in return will turn them into friends. The more determined he and his team are to get something out of the PLO, the more the terror group falls back on its usual array of threats and victimhood, the closer the terrorists come to losing their biggest backer.
The PLO is already a historical artifact, a relic of a bygone Arab Socialism as dated as its Soviet -trained leader, a relic of 90s Clinton diplomacy, unpopular with its own people and other Arab States.
The left has moved on to BDS and Hamas. Democrats and Republicans clung to the PLO’s Palestinian Authority because they couldn’t think of anything else to do. Trump’s people can and are.
The PLO exists because we fund it and support it. And without the United States, the PLO is history.
But the Palestinian nation building project is only one of many falling dominoes. Subsidizing a terrorist group in exchange for a peace it has never made is one of the more absurd entries in our foreign aid ledger. But it’s been on the books for so long, that no one dared to touch it or question it.
A warm wind of change is blowing through the halls of power even as fall touches Washington D.C. And that wind doesn’t only bear bad news for the PLO, but for all the bad ideas that the left borrowed from the Soviet Union and that the Republican establishment then decided to fight to the death to defend.
The left planted bad ideas like viruses in the echo chamber of our policy machine. What frustrates the left and the establishment is that Trump appears immune to the viruses infecting Washington D.C.
Only Nixon could go to China, the apologists once said. But only Trump could cut off Palestine.
6.
TRUMP ADMINISTRATION REOPENS RUTGERS ANTI-SEMITISM CASE
Campus hate groups have just been put on notice.
The Trump administration has decided to reopen a case brought by a Zionist group against Rutgers University, previously closed by the Obama administration in 2014, alleging that the university had allowed Jewish students to be subjected to a hostile environment in violation of Title VI of the U.S. Civil Rights Act. The issue, ignored by the Obama administration, was whether the students were discriminated against based on their actual or perceived Jewish ancestry or ethnicity. Kenneth L. Marcus, the new assistant secretary of education for civil rights, decided that the case deserved another look. As the New York Times reported, Mr. Marcus’s decision “put the weight of the federal government behind a definition of anti-Semitism that targets opponents of Zionism, and it explicitly defines Judaism as not only a religion but also an ethnic origin.” The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights will be examining not only the past case it has reopened. It will also examine whether a hostile environment for Jewish students continues to exist at Rutgers.
According to the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), which filed the original complaint on July 20, 2011, the allegations included claims of physical threats and anti-Semitic comments posted on Facebook against at least one Jewish student, and discrimination against Jewish and pro-Israel students. The discrimination charge involved an anti-Israel event entitled “Never Again for Anyone,” sponsored by an anti-Israel student group called “Belief Awareness Knowledge and Action (BAKA),” where an admission fee was allegedly imposed and selectively enforced against Jewish and pro-Israel students.
In reopening the case, Assistant Secretary Marcus focused on the anti-Israel event held on January 29, 2011. He concluded that the Obama administration had erred in dismissing the case because it disregarded evidence that the admission fee allegedly imposed on Jewish students seeking to attend the event was discriminatory, based on ethnicity. The Obama administration also disregarded evidence that Rutgers had failed to respond appropriately to student complaints regarding the pricing policy. The evidence of discrimination, as reported by Algemeiner, included an e-mail purportedly from a BAKA student volunteer at the anti-Israel event stating that there was a need to start charging an admission fee because “150 Zionists just showed up,” although “if someone looks like a supporter, they can get in for free.” Assistant Secretary Marcus noted that singling out “150 Zionists” for an admission fee “could have been based at least partially on a visual assessment, as opposed to individually polling all 150 such unexpected arrivals as to their views on the policies of the state of Israel.” The selection of whom to charge, he said, “could have been rooted in a perception of Jewish ancestry or ethnic characteristics common to the group.” He added that it is “important to determine whether the conduct related to Israel was motivated by anti-Semitism” and to “determine whether terms such as ‘Zionist’ are actually code for ‘Jewish.’”
What makes Mr. Marcus’s decision to reopen this Rutgers case so significant is that his Department of Education civil rights office decided for the first time to use the definition of anti-Semitism used currently by the U.S. Department of State. This definition, which goes beyond the purely religious dimension, recognizes that under certain circumstances anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism can conflate. The State Department definition describes three ways in which anti-Semitism manifests itself with regard to the state of Israel, taking into account the overall context (known as the three “Ds” of anti-Israel bias that constitute anti-Semitism):
“DEMONIZE ISRAEL:
Using the symbols and images associated with classic anti-Semitism to characterize Israel or Israelis
Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis
Blaming Israel for all inter-religious or political tensions”
“DOUBLE STANDARD FOR ISRAEL:
Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation
Multilateral organizations focusing on Israel only for peace or human rights investigations”
“DELEGITIMIZE ISRAEL:
Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, and denying Israel the right to exist”
The State Department definition makes clear that anti-Semitism does not include “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country.”
Students for Justice in Palestine, on numerous occasions at Rutgers and at other college campuses across the country, has crossed the line between legitimate criticisms of Israeli government policies and blatant anti-Semitism as defined by the State Department. Amongst its various manifestations of anti-Semitism, Students for Justice in Palestine has actively pushed for the Hamas-inspired Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against the Jewish state to be adopted at Rutgers and other college campuses. BDS is premised on the three “Ds” of anti-Semitism when it comes to the Jewish state of Israel. It is part of Palestinian activists’ campaign of hate against Jews on campus.
Against this backdrop of hate, it is no coincidence that Jewish students at Rutgers, like elsewhere, have reported an upsurge of hostile actions against them, including a swastika found spray-painted on the outside wall of a Rutgers University residence hall last fall. According to a Brandeis University report released in October 2016, entitled “Hotspots of Antisemitism and Anti-Israel Sentiment on US Campuses,” approximately 39 percent of Rutgers’ Jewish students said they perceived a “hostile environment to Israel.” Approximately 25 percent perceived a “hostile environment toward Jews.” As many as one third have witnessed anti-Semitic harassment. Rutgers was among the small number of schools, out of the universe of schools surveyed, that emerged as a setting for Jewish students’ relatively more frequent exposure to anti-Semitic statements, such as “Israelis behave like Nazis” or “Jews have too much power in America.”
Rutgers officials have a mixed record in dealing with anti-Semitism on campus. They did reject a call for the university to take part in the BDS movement against Israel. On the other hand, the Rutgers’ chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine got away with sliding fake “eviction” notices with a municipal code number in the top-right corner, including a case and warrant number, under hundreds of doors at the Rutgers New Brunswick campuses. The Rutgers Bias Prevention Education Committee found no violation of the student life policy prohibiting harassment, according to a letter written by the school’s senior assistant general counsel. The Students for Justice in Palestine chapter claimed that the “eviction” notice, which failed to state it was not real until its third paragraph, was supposed to educate students how Palestinians feel when they receive real eviction notices from Israeli authorities. Evidently, invading students’ rights to privacy in their own dorm rooms with fake eviction notices slid under their doors, causing some of the targeted students to feel insecure in their residences, is not considered harassment at Rutgers.
Several Rutgers professors have spewed anti-Semitic hate. The university took action against one of them, a tenured Rutgers microbiology professor, Michael Chikindas, who had posted vile anti-Semitic material on social media. These included a post calling Judaism “the most racist religion in the world,” a claim that “Israel is the terrorist country aimed at genocidal extermination of the land’s native population, Palestinians,” and a charge that “the Armenian Genocide was orchestrated by the Turkish Jews who pretended to be the Turks” He also posted all manner of anti-Semitic caricatures of Jews.
In a letter sent last December to Rutgers faculty members, University President Robert Barchi and Chancellor Debasish Dutta stated that Professor Chikindas was “found to have posted extensive bigoted, discriminatory, and anti-Semitic material on social media. This material perpetuated toxic stereotypes and was deeply upsetting to Jewish students, faculty, and staff across our community. The fears and concerns they have expressed to us and many university leaders are both justified and understandable.”
In response, the university stripped the anti-Semitic professor of his position as director of Rutgers’ Center for Digestive Health at the Institute for Food, Nutrition, and Health. Students will be able to avoid having to sit in his class room because he will be barred from teaching any required courses. He will have to participate in a cultural sensitivity training program. The university may take further disciplinary actions, which could include suspension without pay or even dismissal if approved by a five-member faculty panel. This was a good first step, but only a modest one in dealing with the problem of faculty and other voices of anti-Semitism at Rutgers.
Rutgers still has a long way to go. Kudos to Assistant Secretary Marcus for shining a light on the rising tide of anti-Semitism on American college campuses, including Rutgers.
“ΧΑΙΡΕΤΕ“!
“ΕΛΛΗΝΑΣ“
-/-
