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1. ANTIFA THUGS TARGET ICE / ΑΝΤΙΦΑ: “Ο… ΣΤΡΑΤΟΣ ΤΟΥ SOROS“!..
The Left interferes in immigration law enforcement — and plans to escalate its lawlessness.
February 19, 2018
The anarchist thugs of Antifa are branching out into obstructing immigration law enforcement, apparently no longer content with shutting down conservative speakers and beating up those they promiscuously label “fascists.”
A case in point was last Thursday, Feb. 15, when about 70 activists surrounded a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) van that was attempting to enter the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles. The anarchists chanted “no more deportations,” “Trump and Pence must go,” “f–k ICE,” as well as slogans in the Spanish language.
Although the two ICE agents in the van at the time were unharmed and there were no arrests, the action was viewed by anarchists as a successful test of the tactic. Antifa intends to expand its use of the approach. Given Antifa’s ugly track record, this could mean violent, terroristic attacks on law enforcement.
The nighttime action was leftist retaliation for ICE officers doing their jobs by enforcing the law. ICE reportedly detained more than 200 illegal aliens in Los Angeles during a recent five-day enforcement sweep.
Radical leftist Rabbi Aryeh Cohen bitterly complained to the Los Angeles Times about ICE doing what it is supposed to do.
“The original goal was to really loudly proclaim that we’re not going to stand for ICE destroying families … on Valentine’s Day of all days,” said Cohen, who is on the board of Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice, which helped to publicize the action.
“When the ICE/DHS van came, our group of people decided it was time to put their bodies in front of the machinery of deportation,” he said.
Cohen is also “part-time Rabbi-in-Residence” in Southern California at Bend the Arc Jewish Action Inc., a George Soros-funded 501(c)(4) nonprofit social advocacy organization.
ICE had no choice but to carry out the raids, according to ICE Deputy Director Thomas Homan.
Because sanctuary jurisdictions like Los Angeles prevent ICE from arresting criminal aliens in the secure confines of a jail, our officers are forced to conduct at-large arrests in the community, putting officers, the general public and the aliens at greater risk and increasing the incidents of collateral arrests.
California, which is thought to be home to more than 2 million illegal aliens, has declared itself a “sanctuary state.” A state law took effect Jan. 1 that dramatically curtails the power of state and local law enforcement to hold, question, and transfer detainees at the request of federal immigration authorities. It also penalizes employers for cooperating with ICE.
The bizarre, almost certainly unconstitutional, law has been attacked as “unconscionable” by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions who is trying to block federal crime-fighting grants from flowing to sanctuary jurisdictions.
The sanctuary movement gave illegal aliens permission to rob, rape, and murder Americans by, among other things, stigmatizing immigration enforcement. Some left-wingers call sanctuary jurisdictions “civil liberties safe zones.” The phrase blurs the distinction between citizens and non-citizens, implying illegal aliens somehow possess a civil right to be present in the U.S. These sanctuary cities really ought to be called traitor citiesbecause they are in open rebellion against the United States.
Two local Antifa groups, the Koreatown Popular Assembly and the Los Angeles chapter of Refuse Fascism, participated in the picket line Thursday that eventually broke up after police ordered the crowd to disperse.
Antifa are the self-styled anti-fascists who embrace fascist tactics and have gained new prominence in the post-Obama era. They trace their roots back to Nazi Germany. Although they opposed the Sturmabteilung (SA), or Nazi storm troopers, they also used violence to intimidate political opponents and break up their meetings and rallies. It could be argued that the ideological distance between Antifa and the now-defunct National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, abbreviated as NSDAP) or Nazi Party, is so slight it can be measured in millimeters.
Refuse Fascism held a rally in support of the action last week that was headlined by Refuse Fascism organizer Michelle Xia. Xia shouted into a megaphone, mustering an array of hoary agitprop clichés.
She said:
This regime that is in power right now is fascist and it is illegitimate and what they are doing right now is ethnic cleansing. It is not too extreme to call it ethnic cleansing. It is not too extreme to call it fascism. If we stay silent in the face of these attacks this is going to open up a pathway for these people to go after more and more people until they consolidate power and it looks like Nazi Germany again.
The Koreatown Popular Assembly organized the action against law enforcement in response to the Trump administration’s “mass escalation of raids by ICE” on so-called sanctuary cities “as punishment for not cooperating with immigration authorities,” according to an article attributed to the Black Rose Anarchist Federation on the anarchist website It’s Going Down.
This is why it is essential to organize a popular response and resistance to targeted raids which are intended to strike fear in and demobilize immigrant communities. Even the small act of blocking a single van with two officers inside shows that it’s possible to disrupt ICE’s activity in Los Angeles and organizers are looking to expand this tactic.
Employing the kind of language Marxist agitator Saul Alinsky used, the article held up the Koreatown Popular Assembly as an inspirational example of participatory democracy in action.
It is significant that these actions are not the efforts of stand alone activists or NGO [i.e. nongovernmental organization] directed staff but a result of discussion, debate and decision making by a base of everyday people choosing the priorities based on their immediate reality and needs. The Koreatown Popular Assembly is still small and embryonic but stands out as an example of how radicals can move beyond isolated projects and work to build popular power from below.
The Koreatown Popular Assembly used the same tactic of obstruction against ICE the month before, the article stated. It created a “Rapid Response Network that mobilized together with other groups on January 18 to surround a neighborhood 7-Eleven and prevent ICE from returning to the neighborhood to obtain documents from the store manager.”
Although the convenience store’s manager later met with ICE officials elsewhere, “the mobilization successfully prevented ICE from entering the neighborhood as a form of community intimidation.” This kind of mobilization constitutes “counter intimidation to ICE.”
In other words, this is a case of Antifa mob rule versus the rule of law.
The Koreatown Popular Assembly prepared for the 7-Eleven mobilization by canvassing local stores in search of illegal aliens seeking help. Flyers in Korean, Spanish, Tagalog, Bengali, and English were distributed. The Rapid Response Network operates a 24-hour hotline for reporting ICE enforcement activities.
The article performs a rhetorical sleight-of-hand by dubbing those conspiring to obstruct law enforcement as “first responders,” in a creepy attempt to confer a kind of legitimacy on network operatives. This dreadful euphemism is a perversion of language calculated to boost the image of these lawbreakers, and ought to enrage real first responders who save lives such as ambulance personnel, firefighters, and police.
The article states:
With over a year of preparation and training the hotline is staffed with around 30 dispatchers who volunteer to do two to three 4-hour shifts a week. In turn the network has trained nearly 100 first responders who are registered based on geographic areas and dispatched with text messages via an open source software platform.
Whether any of the “first responders” are themselves illegal aliens is unclear.
As for Xia’s group, Refuse Fascism, its goal is to overthrow the U.S. government through occupations and crippling strikes. The activists and their tactics are examined in Antifa, the third leg of the documentary film series, America Under Siege, by Dangerous Documentaries and Cohesion Films. (I am one of two executive producers of the series. Dangerous Documentaries is Capital Research Center’s movie studio.)
Refuse Fascism is a project of the Revolutionary Communist Party, according to KeyWiki, Trevor Loudon’s online encyclopedia of politics. Among its founders are Cornel West and unrepentant domestic terrorist Bill Ayers.
Refuse Fascism prefers Kim Jong-un over Donald Trump, siding with the gulag-filled Stalinist hermit state of North Korea that has threatened to incinerate the American homeland with nuclear weapons. The group has organized demonstrations against the Trump administration that have turned violent, including those around Inauguration Day a year ago. The group also spouts pro-North Korean propaganda talking points.
George Soros funds the Alliance for Global Justice (AfGJ), which accepted donations on behalf of the ultra-violent Occupy Wall Street movement as a so-called fiscal sponsor. Fiscal sponsors take in donations on behalf of unincorporated or small groups so that donors can deduct the donations from their taxes, charging the group receiving the donation a processing fee. AfGJ now serves as a fiscal sponsor for Refuse Fascism.
Antifa groups are going to need money if they wish to escalate their activities against ICE and the Trump administration.
Chances are, George Soros will oblige them.
2. PROGS LOVE A MAN IN A UNIFORM
Why the media fell in love with North Korea’s Kim Yo-jong.
Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
The “uniform” the eighties band Gang of Four was singing about is not the one our Armed Forces wear. Our military uniforms are the emblem of a superb professional fighting force that is accountable to Constitutional limits, and commanded by a civilian president elected by the sovereign people. No, progressives love the uniform worn by the “strong man,” the “man on horseback,” the “great leader,” what in Latin America is called a “caudillo,” or “cacique,” or more crudely, “El Gran Chingon,” the thugs with the gaudy Gilbert-and-Sullivan uniforms bedecked with rows of phony medals.
Hence the left’s admiration for Castro, Mussolini, Lenin, Stalin, Chavez, and most recently Kim Jong Un’s sister, the head of propaganda for the North Korean terror state whom the left’s media lackeys effusively praised during her appearance at the Olympics. No matter how blood-stained, any tyrant can be an object of the left’s affection, as long as he or she is on the side of “revolution” against the hated capitalists and the repressed bourgeoisie. This century-long love affair explains the endless parade of useful idiots making pilgrimages to totalitarian hell-holes like Stalin’s Russia or Chavez’s Venezuela or Castro’s Cuba, there to swoon over the Potemkin heaven on earth.
It also accounts in part for the surreal, cult-like worship of the tin-pot messiah Barack Obama, whose very trouser crease could thrill the starry-eyed pundit, whose banal rhetoric could send tingles down the leg of the most hard-bitten journalist. That’s why Obama’s use of Executive Orders and his “phone and pen” to subvert the Constitution’s separation of powers was celebrated by the same progressives who squeal about any Republican president’s “imperial overreach.”
That’s because power is a good thing to the left––as long as it’s used by the right people to construct their egalitarian utopia and “get things done.” Just listen to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman swooning over China’s efficiency at “getting things done”: “One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.” This is the modern version of the cliché that “Mussolini made the trains run on time,” or the paeans to Stalin’s “miracle” of rapidly industrializing Russia penned by Walter Duranty or Lincoln Steffens. They seem to have forgotten that the power to command forced labor can build a lot of things, from pyramids to autobahns––and precisely engineered death camps.
That “pragmatism,” needing only enough power to build the “better future,” lay at the heart of early progressivism, just as it rationalized the excesses of Marxism and Nazism. Woodrow Wilson whined about the inefficiency of divided government and the inability of the president to make “good” laws. He fretted about superstitions like the balance of power and limited government, which proscribed the centralized power of a technocratic federal government that could run our society and economy more efficiently in order to achieve greater equality, social harmony, and prosperity. Several decades of serial bloody failures to make this pipe dream a reality has not deterred the true believes. They still long for the strong leader, a “soft” despot to be sure, one filled with therapeutic bromides, but still a despot who would not be stopped by antique Constitutional niceties, or concern himself too much with protecting our natural rights.
This explains why Obama was the progressives’ dream boat, complete with the tinsel and gilt messianic aura that most “great leaders” peddle. And like them, he failed to fulfill the dream of “equality” and “social justice.” Obama did succeed, however, at “fundamentally transforming” America into a country dominated by the wannabe totalitarians who abused the Bill of Rights and turned government agencies and the coercive power of the state against the citizens they were supposed to serve. But the Constitution and the common sense of enough American voters proved strong enough, at least for now, to check this abuse of power, proving once again the brilliance of the Founders’ Constitutional architecture.
There’s something, though, even more disturbing about the left’s fondness for the “man in a uniform”: the way it bespeaks an unhealthy love of power, and a sick fascination with political violence. How else do terrorists like Angela Davis or Bill Ayres get themselves reintegrated into society and living among us as celebrities, these two in universities that have “Peace” programs and preach non-violence? Or thuggish groups like Antifa and Black Lives Matter get glowing media coverage and White House invitations? Or psychopaths like Che Guevara, who enjoyed personally executing political prisoners, become matinee idols? Or history’s greatest mass murderer, Mao, still decorate pop art and tee-shirts? Leftists love “a man in a uniform” because when they say, “I need an order,” to quote the Gang of Four again, he answers “Shoot! Shoot!”
Unlike our comfortable “caviar communists” parading their “radical chic,” the earlier more honest totalitarians admitted that brutal violence is necessary to sweep away the old order’s remnants, whose “false consciousness” impedes the creation of utopia. Karl Marx warned the Prussian government in 1843, “We are ruthless, and ask no quarter from you. When our turn comes we shall not disguise our terrorism.” Vladimir Lenin responded to a critic of his war of extermination against the Kulaks, “Do you think we can be victors without the most severe revolutionary terror?” Stalin was brutally laconic: “Death solves all problems. No man, no problem.” The logic is clear for the left: if the enemy is the bourgeoisie, then the violent elimination of the whole class is necessary. As the founder of the Soviet Union’s secret police said, “We are not waging war against individual persons. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class.”
Our modern leftists and leftist-lite progressives may have lost their gumption for getting their own hands bloody, but they still have their attraction for the strong man who is happy to bathe his in blood up to the elbows.
The problem with endorsing violence to realize political ideals is that human nature, with its conflicting passions and interests, is vulnerable to the corruption of power, an observation over a thousand years old when Lord Acton composed his famous aphorism in the 19th century. The Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions had acknowledged this tragic fact about human weakness. The Founders knew it too, and so made the limitation of power the foundation of our political order. And even then, they still worried about the tendency of political power to aggrandize itself and threaten political freedom and other rights. As Thomas Jefferson wrote,
Whereas it appeareth that however certain forms of government are better calculated than others to protect individuals in the free exercise of their natural rights, and are at the same time themselves better guarded against degeneracy, yet experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.
No matter how well-intentioned, no matter how lofty the ideals for which one sets out to kill one’s fellows, in the end the intoxication of power becomes too great, and those using it soon degenerate into murder and tyranny.
This simple fact about the left is what made the hysteria over Donald Trump’s potential “fascism” or malign nationalism so preposterous. Progressivism and communism are the kissing cousins of fascism, and it is their adherents who admire political violence for noble causes––“any means necessary,” as the slogan went in the sixties. Today it is their devotees who get misty-eyed over the “great leader” who promises to sweep away the impediments––human rights, law, traditional morality, faith––that try to limit violence. That’s why today there is no Antifa on the right, no mobs trying to shout down speakers or intimidate them with violence, no murderers turned into specious martyrs, no terrorists living comfortably with university sinecures and book contracts, and no psychopathic criminals the subjects of sentimental Hollywood biopics.
That’s because genuine conservatism loves freedom more than power, and recognizes that all humans, no matter how smart or well-intentioned or idealistic, cannot be trusted with power for too long. And that in turn makes conservatives Constitutionalists, for our political order was built on that ancient wisdom, as was Western civilization itself. When we reject that wisdom and puff ourselves up with arrogance because we are better engineers, we pave the way for the hubris that Sophocles said breeds the tyrant, whose excesses provoke a murderous nemesis.
3. NETANYAHU VS. THE LEFT’S DEEP STATE
The deep state is waging war on Trump and Netanyahu.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.
In a year and a few months, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will have spent more time at the helm of the Israeli government than any other man. The other man is David Ben-Gurion, the Socialist leader who repressed Zionist nationalist movements in Israel by fiat, by law and, as in the Altalena, by murder.
That factoid may not matter much to most people, even most Israelis, but it matters a great deal to the remnants of Ben-Gurion’s regime, the leftists who don’t win elections, but do control the government. Until ’77, Israel’s Prime Ministers came from the Labor Party. The last Labor Prime Minister left office in 2001. It’s not just that Netanyahu is eclipsing Ben-Gurion, but that Labor has become irrelevant.
But of course the Labor Party isn’t irrelevant. Its candidates may be a joke. Its base of support consists of Tel Aviv hipsters who never actually leave their leftist bubble except to visit Paris, New York or Berlin. Their burning social issue is how much more Daddy has to pay to get them a place in their trendy neighborhood. Not even Obama’s best people could help them get much mileage out of that one.
After the ’15 election, Haaretz, the paper of record for the Israeli anti-Israel left, had wailed, “Leftist, secular Tel Aviv went to sleep last night cautiously optimistic only to wake up this morning in a state of utter and absolute devastation.” Leftist secular Tel Aviv has been devastated for nearly two decades.
But Labor’s deep state still runs much of Israel the way it did when Ben-Gurion was still alive. It doesn’t just have the media and academia, the non-profits and the elites, the way most national ‘lefts’ do. It also controls the old machinery of government that it spent generations running and robbing.
Ben-Gurion’s tenancy may be a factoid to most, but it’s a sore insult to Labor. And its deep state is working overtime to force Netanyahu out of office using fake scandals, fake news and fake police.
This isn’t a new obsession. If you think CNN’s Trumpmania is bad, the Israeli police and media have spent the better part of a decade trying to invent ridiculous Netanyahu scandals. How ridiculous?
Netanyahu’s wife was accused of stealing bottle deposits. “Attorney general mulls probe into Sara Netanyahu’s bottle deposits” isn’t a gag, it’s an actual headline. The catering budget at the prime minister’s residence has been under investigation for years. But there was no investigation when Shimon Peres, the last rotten remnant of the Ben-Gurion regime, threw a lavish birthday party that cost millions and included Bill Clinton, Robert De Niro and Barbara Streisand. Clinton’s fee of $500K was paid by the JNF, which instead of planting trees, was paying one dirty leftist to lionize another.
Israel’s lefty fake news outfits cheered Peres, but took issue with Netanyahu’s ice cream budget.
Another Netanyahu investigation involved the nursing care provided to his father-in-law before his death, because the Israeli left has no more concept of decency than it does of national security.
None of these scandals ever actually go away. Much like the left’s perjury traps and obstruction of justice campaigns against Trump, discredited scandals are rolled into accusations of a cover-up.
And when that doesn’t work, then there are accusations of a media cover-up.
One of the investigations for which Israel’s lefty deep state cops want to charge Netanyahu involves an accusation that he had traded favors for positive coverage from Yedioth Ahronoth. But, as Caroline Glick points out, it never actually happened. Another accusation claims that Netanyahu provided favors in exchange for positive coverage from the Walla! news site. Both accusations testify to the left’s obsession with sowing fear into any media outlet providing positive media coverage of Netanyahu.
Israel Hayom, a free paper that covered Netanyahu positively, was targeted with a law banning the distribution of successful free papers. This attack on a literal free press was known as, “Law for the Advancement and Protection of Written Journalism in Israel”. Lefty journalism has plenty of ‘protektsia’ in Israel. But who will protect Israelis from the ‘journalists’ and their political bosses?
And who will protect actual journalists who report unfavorable information about the left’s deep state?
The message is that any paper that reports the truth might be accused of conspiring with Prime Minister Netanyahu by the police leadership who have their own incestuous relationship with media outlets.
Israel has a first-world military and a third-world police. Israel’s military is competitive, professional and heroic. Its police force is Middle Eastern. At its best, it’s useless and at its worst, it’s deeply corrupt and abusive. The same holds true for the entire justice system which remains a fossilized remnant of its socialist past that deserves to be classed with those of Russia or Uzbekistan.
The Netanyahu era has seen some limited reforms of the judiciary, but the police haven’t changed.
In the United States, the inciting incident of the Flynn investigation appears to have been his advocacy on behalf of FBI Supervisory Special Agent Robyn Gritz who had accused former boss Andrew McCabe and others of sexual discrimination. Police Commissioner Roni Alsheich used the campaign against the Prime Minister to accuse a female police officer who had complained about sexual harassment by a superior back in ’11 of secretly doing Netanyahu’s bidding.
The commander whom she had accused of sexual harassment was in the unit investigating Netanyahu.
Alsheich also suggested that private detectives were investigating his investigators. Both are a convenient way of shifting the blame for his own people’s misconduct to Netanyahu. Covering up sexual harassment and opening up the prime minister’s chair for Labor kills two birds with one stone.
Prime Minister Netanyahu has spent a good deal of his life trying to clean up the corrupt system that Ben-Gurion and his dirty socialists inflicted on Israel. It’s a system where the law is nothing and personal connections are everything. At its worst, party membership was required for government jobs. The machinery of government did the bidding of insiders and crushed the outsiders who got in their way.
Some things have changed.
Israel has a booming private sector. Its growing population of the descendants of Holocaust survivors, refugees from Muslim countries and the Soviet Union have little love for or allegiance to Labor. Its government bureaucracy is a widely loathed corrupt boil on an incredible nation. (As it always was.)
But Labor’s state within a state still wields a great deal of power. It is no coincidence that in recent years, it locked up a prime minister and president who originated from the conservative Likud while Labor’s corrupt politicians have gotten a pass. Isaac Herzog, Labor’s head of the opposition, served as the errand boy for international criminals like Marc Rich and Octav Botnar. But Arafat will rise from the grave to sign a peace deal before a Labor princeling sees the inside of a prison cell.
Money from the estate of Botnar, a Communist, was funneled through Herzog, his lawyer, to Labor for its anti-Netanyahu ads. Rich was a wanted fugitive who bought a pardon from Bill Clinton.
Herzog was Rich’s lawyer.
But the media would rather talk about Netanyahu’s ice cream budget, Sara Netanyahu’s bottle deposits and how much the electrician got paid. The left always accuses the right of its own sins and crimes.
Some may wonder how a country under threat of terrorism, invasion and nuclear annihilation is wasting time on this nonsense instead of dealing with the real threat. Easy. The leftist deep state isn’t interested in dealing with the real threat. It undermined Netanyahu’s efforts to take out Iran’s nuclear program.
Israel’s retired top security bosses routinely pal around with anti-Israel groups and spread anti-Israel propaganda. Ami Ayalon, Carmi Gillon and Yuval Diskin, the former bosses of Shabak, Israel’s version of the FBI, defended the anti-Israel activists of Breaking the Silence. Ayalon had also served Labor in the Knesset. Breaking the Silence has received money from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund which was among the most aggressive funders of the campaign for the Iran Deal to protect its nuclear terror program.
The deep state is rotten and disloyal. And it’s launching a coup to put its own Labor man in power.
It’s not just the Ben-Gurion date that symbolizes the transfer of power from the corrupt socialist state of Labor to a cleaner Israel that fulfills the aspirations of those who dreamed and fought to make it real.
President Trump’s victory offers Netanyahu the opportunity to redefine Israel’s relationship with the PLO that was imposed on it by the Clintons and their Labor allies. Instead of leftist apparatchiks like Dennis Ross and Aaron David Miller calling the shots, pro-Israel Trump associates like David Friedman and Jason Greenblatt are breaking with the old failed ideas and defining a new future for Israel.
That made it more urgent for Labor’s deep state to stop Netanyahu. That’s why the charges are in.
Labor failed to stop Netanyahu at the voting booth despite Obama’s experts working for them. And Obama isn’t around to restrain Netanyahu. A deep state coup against democracy is its last option.
The doomsday option isn’t just about stopping Netanyahu, it’s about stopping Israel.
The people won in America and Israel. But that just means that the deep state in both countries is becoming more ruthless in its efforts to defeat the voices, hopes and dreams of Americans and Israelis.
4. IDF CYBER WARRIORS THWART MAJOR ISIS AVIATION TERROR ATTACK
Spread across the country, the online soldiers of Unit 8200 are on the front line of Israel’s cyber wars 24/7, 365 days a year to identify possible threats and effectively neutralize them.
Soldiers in the IDF’s Unit 8200 played a large role in thwarting a major Islamic State terrorist attack this past summer, which aimed to bring down a civilian airliner headed from Sydney to Abu Dhabi, the army has revealed.
In cooperation with Israel’s intelligence community, soldiers provided exclusive intelligence that they had gathered on an attack that was being planned. The intelligence led to the arrest of the suspects, who were in a very advanced stage in executing the plot, the army said.
Spread across the country, these online soldiers of Unit 8200 are on the front line of Israel’s cyberwars 24/7, 365 days a year, to identify possible threats and effectively neutralize them.
“About half of Unit 8200 is engaged in operational activity beyond Israel’s borders,” a senior officer in Unit 8200 told military reporters on Tuesday, referring to the interception and analysis of signal intelligence gathered by troops. “Because of our abilities, we are very attractive to foreign countries,” he added.
The ISIS-inspired attack against an Etihad Airways flight from Sydney to Abu Dhabi was thwarted, according to Australian officials, in July. Four men were arrested in Sydney suburbs for planning two separate attacks, including one where a bomb, which was to be carried onboard the plane by an unwitting “mule,” would be detonated while in the air.
The organization has long since ceased to have anything to do with human rights.
January 24, 2018
Who still takes Human Rights Watch seriously? Well, I know the Guardian does, because it was that paper, the flagship of the British left, that alerted me the other day to the fact that HRW had issued its annual report. A quick search showed that the report had also made headlines in other major media, such as Newsweek and ABC News.
The report, of course, is nominally about human rights around the world. But it’s been a long time since HRW, founded in 1988, was really about human rights. For a long time now, it’s been hiring staffers with radical political backgrounds who are quick to berate Western democracies, especially the U.S. and Israel, while turning a blind eye to brutal Third World regimes, especially Islamic ones. Exemplary of HRW’s perverse perspective was its years-long campaign of defamation against British gay-rights activist Peter Tatchell, who won its wrath by speaking up about the execution of gays in Iran.
The individual behind the slander of Tatchell was Scott Long, then director of HRW’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trangender rights program. Long didn’t just reprove Tatchell; to quote Tatchell, he “grossly misrepresented and denigrated my campaigns in defense of gay people persecuted by Iran and in opposition to Islamist fundamentalism.” In a breathtakingly unscrupulous 2009 essay, Long issued a series of flagrantly dishonest charges against Tatchell that Tatchell convincingly refuted, one by one, on his own website. Despite widespread criticism of Long for his savaging of a highly regarded gay-rights hero, HRW took five years to finally apologize to Tatchell and give Long the heave-ho.
In 2009, HRW suffered a major embarrassment. Robert L. Bernstein, its founder and longtime chairman, who had stepped down in 1998, wrote a New York Times op-ed reproving HRW for what it had turned into. HRW, he recalled, had been established “to pry open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms and support dissenters.” Yes, he granted, “open, democratic societies have faults,” but they also have ways of fixing them. Closed societies don’t – which is why HRW’s founders “sought to draw a sharp line” between the two and “prevent the Soviet Union and its followers from playing a moral equivalence game with the West.” But in the eleven years since his departure from HRW, lamented Bernstein, HRW had increasingly ignored this crucial open/closed distinction.
A year after Bernstein’s op-ed came another devastating critique. In a wide-ranging piece for the Times of London, Jonathan Foreman quoted a human-rights expert who wasn’t surprised by HRW’s silence on violence in Iran (“Their hearts are not in it….Let’s face it, the thing that really excites them is Israel”); cited writer Noah Pollak’s observation that HRW “cares about Palestinians when maltreated by Israelis, but is less concerned if perpetrators are fellow Arabs”; and noted that “one newly hired researcher came to HRW from the extremist anti-Israel publication Electronic Intifada.”
Then there were HRW’s fundraising dinners “for members of the Saudi elite in Riyadh,” at which HRW official Sarah Leah Whitson “curried favour with her hosts by boasting about HRW’s ‘battles with pro-Israel pressure groups, such as NGO Monitor.’” When Foreman asked HRW executive director Kenneth Roth about the Saudi dinners, Roth replied: “Because somebody is the victim of a repressive government, should they have no right to contribute to a human-rights organisation?” As Foreman pointed out, Roth’s answer was disingenuous in the extreme: rich Saudi elites are not “victims” of the Saudi government but intimate allies of it, while “most Saudi dissidents are either in prison or live abroad in exile.”
In 2010, the same year Foreman’s piece appeared, George Soros announced a $100 million gift to HRW – which makes it not unreasonable to view the organization as having been, since then, at least in part, a megaphone for Soros’s fiercely globalist, anti-Israel, and anti-American views.
As of 2013, nothing had changed at HRW: writing in the Spectator, Nick Cohen condemned its refusal to support secular Muslim women against their brutal male oppressors in London’s East End. Both Amnesty International and HRW, he wrote, “look with horror on those who speak out about murder, mutilation and oppression if the murderers, mutilators and oppressors do not fit into their script.” Cohen also noted that HRW’s executive director, Kenneth Roth, had “urged Western governments to support the Muslim Brotherhood governments in the Middle East.”
It’s 2018, and Roth is still in charge – and HRW is still plagued by the same problems. The other day, at the Paris press conference presenting this year’s annual report, Roth put on a display that brilliantly summed up the extent to which today’s HRW is driven not by concern for oppressed people and dissenters in closed societies but by hostility to political developments in democratic countries that offend its leftist ideology.
The theme of Roth’s presentation was populism – which, from the way he talked about it, you’d have thought was ideologically equivalent to Communism or Nazism. This time last year, said Roth, things looked bleak: Trump had won power “by scapegoating and demonizing minorities, by attacking human-rights principles, and by undermining democratic institutions.” Other “populists,” such as Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Marine Le Pen in France, seemed to be on the verge of winning power.
During the last year, Roth asserted, Trump has done “enormous damage” and “great harm.” He’s overtly embraced “racism,” “misogyny,” and “xenophobia.” He’s “declared war on the United Nations.” (The report itself contended that Trump had “won the presidency with a campaign of hatred against Mexican immigrants, Muslim refugees, and other racial and ethnic minorities, and an evident disdain for women.”) Fortunately, the last year has also seen the rise of a powerful “resistance,” with Trump experiencing pushback from “judges, journalists, civic groups” and “the woman’s movement,” which have prevented a “Muslim travel ban” and kept Trump from “eviscerating Obamacare.”
Elsewhere, Roth maintained, developments aren’t so positive: politicians like Mark Rutte in the Netherlands and Sebastian Kurz in Austria have “decided to compete against the populists by mimicking them” – that is, by becoming “far-right lite” – but in doing so, they’ve only ended up “legitimizing the ideology of the authoritarian populists.” Emmanuel Macron, by contrast, has “vigorously defended democratic principles” and managed nonetheless to beat Marine Le Pen. For Roth, Macron’s election was “a turning point.” With a perhaps unsurprising excess of self-importance, Roth revealed that HRW was holding the press conference in Paris as a way of giving a thumbs-up to Macron.
Roth also had kind words for the EU. Speaking glowingly of the “values on which the European Union has been founded,” he eulogized the superstate for pressuring Poland’s prime minister to yield to its directives. In other words, Roth praised a group of non-elected leaders for pushing an elected leader to do their bidding – and defy his people’s wishes. Finally moving on from the U.S. and Europe, Roth addressed the tragedy of Venezuela – only instead of blaming it on Communism, he attributed it to Maduro’s “form of authoritarian populism,” thereby equating Maduro with Trump. Roth also eventually got around to mentioning nightmarish events in other actual hellholes around the planet, but it all felt pro forma compared to his opening salvo on Western “populism.”
If there were any doubt, in short, Roth dispelled it: HRW remains a tool of Soros and the rest of the globalist elite. It pretends to defend human rights and democracy while demonizing citizens of free countries for daring to stand up to policies that they didn’t choose and that do them grave harm. In the eyes of HRW, the Democratic Party platform is equivalent to “human rights” while everything Trump stands for is a human-rights violation. For HRW, human rights means open borders and blanket amnesty for illegal immigrants; any citizen who doesn’t want his or her country to pursue these policies is by definition a populist, a supporter of authoritarianism, and an enemy of human rights.
HRW’s annual report actually refers to Angela Merkel’s “courageous 2015 decision to admit large numbers of asylum seekers to Germany” (a decision it characterizes as a “defen[se of] democratic values”) and identifies “the rights of refugees and immigrants” as “the most contentious issue on the continent today.” What about the security of native Europeans? What about terrorism, migrant rape, the depletion of welfare systems by illegal aliens, and rampant Jew-bashing by Muslim youths? What about the fact that the policies pursued by Macron and approved of by HRW have caused the sidewalks of Paris to be crowded with refugee tent villages, the streets to be blocked, at certain times of the day, by seas of prayer rugs, and the Jews of France to flee, in growing numbers, to Israel, America, and elsewhere?
No, to care about such things is to be an enemy of human rights. No longer even remotely resembling the organization Robert L. Bernstein founded thirty years ago, HRW has become a thoroughly Orwellian outfit, using the word “authoritarian” to describe elections in which voters take back their power from arrogant political establishments and using the word “democracy” to describe rule by out-of-touch elites who disdain the electorate, who prioritize illegal immigrants over citizens, and whose response to Islamic terrorism is to worry not about the victims but about “anti-Muslim backlash.” For the powers that be at HRW, in short, the term “human rights” has nothing to do with human rights – it’s nothing more or less than a club they can use to beat their ideological enemies.
6. Sen. Ron Johnson: ‘Secret Society’ in FBI Held Meetings
Sen. Ron Johnson (Susan Walsh/AP)
By Cathy Burke | Wednesday, 24 Jan 2018
Sen. Ron Johnson said Tuesday an informant has told lawmakers a “secret society” existed within the FBI that held clandestine meetings — a jaw-dropping allegation suggesting potential corruption “at the highest levels.”
In his bombshell claim to Fox News’ “Special Report with Bret Baier,”the Wisconsin Republican said he was “suspicious” about five months’ worth of missing texts between FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page — and charged special counsel Robert Mueller is “in no position” to conduct the current probe of Russian influence in the 2016 election.
“What this is all about is further evidence of corruption, more than bias,” he said. “Corruption of the highest levels of the FBI. The secret society — we have an informant talking about a group that was holding secret meetings off-site.
“There is so much smoke here.”
Baier, who seemed taken aback, replied, “Let’s stop there. Secret society? Secret meetings off-site of the Justice Department? You have an informant saying that?”
“Yes,” Johnson replied, adding: “We have to dig into it . . . This is bias, potentially corruption, at the highest levels of the FBI. Robert Mueller used to run the FBI. He’s in no position to do an investigation over this kind of misconduct.
“I think at this point, we probably should be looking at a special counsel to undertake this investigation. Congress is going to have to continue to dig.”
The five-month period of missing Strzok and Page texts covers a period of time that includes President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the firings of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and FBI Director James Comey, and the appointment of Mueller as a special prosecutor.
Last month, the Justice Department released hundreds of their texts covering the early months of 2016. Both served for a short period of time on Mueller’s team, with Page leaving over the summer and Strzok being reassigned late last year to the FBI’s human resources division after the discovery of the exchanges with Page.
Johnson’s charge was not the first time the claim of a “secret society” surfaced. On Monday night, Reps. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., and John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, also referenced the possibility of secret meetings during an interview with Fox News’ Martha MacCallum.
“We learned today about information that in the immediate aftermath of [Trump’s] election, that there may have been a secret society of folks within the Department of Justice and the FBI — to include Page and Strzok — that would be working against him,” Ratcliffe said.
“I’m not saying that actually happened, but when folks speak in those terms, they need to come forward to explain the context with which they used those terms,” he added.
Gowdy said the “secret society” reference occurred the day after Trump won the presidential election in November 2016.
“There’s a text exchange between these two FBI agents, these two supposed to be objective fact-centric FBI agents, saying that perhaps this is the first meeting of the ‘secret society,'” Gowdy said.
“So of course I’m going to want to know what secret society you’re talking about because you’re supposed to be investigating objectively the person who just won the Electoral College; so yeah I’m going to want to know,” he said.
7. NETANYAHU BLASTS SOROS FORFUNDING PRO-ILLEGAL PROTESTS
February 5, 2018
One of the truly perverse arguments that Soros cronies have trotted out is that opposing the aspiring Bond villain is anti-Semitic. Never mind that Soros and co. have an extensive history of anti-Semitism.
George Soros hates Jews.
He collaborated with the Nazis during the Holocaust and insisted that helping confiscate property from Jews brought him no guilt. “There was no sense that I shouldn’t be there, because that was well, actually, in a funny way, it’s just like in markets that if I weren’t there of course, I wasn’t doing it, but somebody else would.” He described the season of these horrors as “the most exciting time of my life.”
Soros grew up in a “Jewish, anti-Semitic home”. He called his mother a “typical Jewish anti-Semite” who hated his first wife because she was “too Jewish”. After undergoing psychoanalysis, he was able to understand that his shame was rooted in his Jewishness. He had a special contempt for Jewish philanthropies after a failed attempt to defraud a Jewish charity in London.
He was booed when he undermined the presentation of an award to a Holocaust survivor by comparing Israeli Jews to Nazis. Elie Wiesel had declared in disgust, “I heard what happened. If I’d been there—and you can quote me—I would have walked out.”
That same year, Soros blamed the Israeli government for a “resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe”. He might have been more honest if he took responsibility considering his funding of groups that traffic in anti-Semitic smears. And his own anti-Semitic allegations that “attitudes toward the Jewish community are influenced by the pro-Israel lobby’s success in suppressing divergent views.”
But the same leftists who insist that killing Jews isn’t anti-Semitic, claim that criticizing Soros is. But the Israeli government is quite clear on what it thinks of Soros. At issue, this time around, is the flow of illegal migrants into Israel. Much like in the US and Europe, the left quickly swarmed to protest against any deportations.
Netanyahu made the statement during a meeting of Likud ministers, in response to Science Minister Ofir Akunis (Likud) who said local aid organizations are funded by foreign governments and foundations.
“George Soros is also funding the protests,” Netanyahu said, according to leaks from the meeting carried by Channel 10. He reportedly added that former US president Barack Obama “deported two million infiltrators and they didn’t say anything.”
Soros is funding them, I’m sure. Though the EU probably is too. Along with others in the lefty network.
Meanwhile here’s how bad the situation has gotten in parts of Israel.
Tiger left Sudan and his parents and five brothers. His face and hands have visible scars. He carries on his person a knife hidden under his shirt in a leather case. Eight years ago he infiltrated Israel, worked in Eilat and escaped three years ago after local police began, in his words to, “sit on my tail.”
The third organization called HaKilerim (The Killers) was considered the most dangerous and specializes in collecting protection money from Jewish businessmen, Sudanese refugees and Romanian workers, Chinese and Filipinos who settled in the area and opened small businesses, as well as prostitutes and drug addicts.
In southern Tel Aviv, on Neve Shanan Street, as soon as darkness falls, the criminals go out and business owners go on alert. “By five – six pm most shops are closed fearing criminals will steal, rob and take protection money,” says a man who sell shoes in the area. “Whoever stays open gambles with his life. Those who do not pay, the criminals break the windows of their stores and put their knives to his throat, destroying and stealing merchandise. They are not afraid of the police. They have nothing to lose.”
This is exactly what Tiger does. Although his appearance is not particularly scary, he makes his rounds of the stores and collects the protection money and gives the money to his boss. “That’s what I do in Sudan. Never learned in school, my parents had no money to send me to school, and to my family not be hungry we were stealing from shops, houses, anything that could get us money,” he says. “I know the South Tel Aviv as if I was born here. Jews also pay us money to keep them in business. Those who do not pay, we destroy his business and steal his money.”
This is what the left is fighting for. Just as in the US and Europe, leftists fight to destroy their host country.
Here’s an appearance by May Golan, a longtime activist against migrant crime, on Sean Hannity.
“ΑΝΤΙΛΑΛΟΣ“
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