11 ΕΝΔΙΑΦΕΡΟΝΤΑ ΑΡΘΡΑ ΓΙΑ ΤΙΣ Η.Π.Α. !.. (+) 1 ΥΓ
Φίλοι μου!
– Έχουμε πει ότι μέσα στον Ιανουάριο του 2017, “θα τα πούμε” για τις Η.Π.Α., αν και εφ’ όσον ο νεοεκλεγείς Αμερικανός Πρόεδρος Κος ΤΡΑΜΠ ορκιστεί τελικά Πρόεδρος, αφού γίνεται μέχρι και τώρα(!) μάχη από τους Παγκοσμιοποιητές, ώστε να τον “πετάξουν” από την εξουσία, η οποία -λογικά- είναι εμπρός του!
– Έφτασαν φίλοι μου στο σημείο οι “Δημοκρατικοί“, με πρώτον τον Ομπάμα, να κατηγορήσουν τη Ρωσία, χωρίς την παρουσίαση αποδείξεων, ότι επηρέασε τις εκλογές υπέρ του ΤΡΑΜΠ, με “χάκινγκ”, μη σκεπτόμενος ότι η δημοσιοποίηση μιας τέτοιας πληροφορίας, ενός τέτοιου γεγονότος, ακόμα και αν είναι πραγματικό, αληθινό και ακριβές, ΠΟΤΕ ΔΕΝ ΚΟΙΝΟΠΟΙΕΙΤΑΙ(!), για λόγους που σχετίζονται με τη… Ψυχολογία του λαού (μιας των Υπερδυνάμεων μάλιστα), όπως και της εικόνας ενός Έθνους !
– Είπαμε ότι θα αναφερθούμε -κυρίως- στην εξωτερική πολιτική Ομπάμα, όσο ήταν Πρόεδρος και αυτό, Θεού θέλοντος, θα το πράξουμε!
– Ως “ορντέβ” και εισαγωγικά όμως, κρίνω σκόπιμο να σας προβάλλω κάποια άρθρα, αφορώντα τις Η.Π.Α., τα οποία έχω χαρακτηρίσει ως “πολύ δυνατά” και να σας καλέσω, όταν βρείτε χρόνο, να τα μελετήσετε και να προβληματιστείτε!..
– Δεν έχει νόημα, στην παρούσα φάση, να σας γράψω τις απόψεις μου επ’ αυτών, εκτιμώ όμως ότι “λίγο ως πολύ” είσθε σε θέση να τις αντιληφθείτε! Άλλωστε εδώ, στο σάϊτ μας, ο στόχος είναι να πειστείτε για τα όσα γράφουμε, μέσα και μόνον από επιχειρήματα και γεγονότα, κάτι που ευθέως σχετίζεται με την ΑΞΙΟΠΙΣΤΙΑ μας, την οποίαν θεωρούμε βέβαιο, (για όσους ασφαλώς μας έχουν από την αρχή μας, ως σάϊτ, διαβάσει), ότι έχετε βαθμολογήσει με “ΑΡΙΣΤΑ”!..
Είναι όπως λέμε: “ΤΟ ΒΡΟΝΤΑΝΕ ΟΙ ΜΩΡΑΪΤΕΣ“!.. (Αν με αντιλαμβάνεστε)!
– Πάμε λοιπόν!
“ΠΑΡΤΕ ΝΑ ‘ΧΕΤΕ“!..
1.
AFTER 8 YEARS OF OBAMA, TIME TO RESET THE U.S.-ISRAEL ALLIANCE
The key steps the next president must take to undo nearly a decade of damage to U.S.-Israel relations.
September 16, 2016
It is no secret that the U.S.-Israel alliance has been under a severe strain for the last eight years, principally due to the non-friendly and often hostile positions of the Obama administration. The United States and Israel have had their differences under previous administrations and, at times, there were sharp disagreements but they rarely made it to the front pages. This is because leaders of both nations understood that disagreements, to the extent that they existed, were best addressed behind closed doors and away from prying eyes.
Obama changed all that during his first year in office with his infamous apology tour when he went to the Mideast to visit various Muslim countries to apologize for contrived wrongs and deliberately skipped over Israel despite the fact that he was a mere 20-minute plane ride away. It was a spiteful snub designed to show the Israelis and Arabs that Obama intended to fundamentally change the nature and dynamic of the U.S.-Israel alliance. The snub was followed by additional indignities including shabby treatment by the Obama White House of visiting Israeli dignitaries and guttural name-calling by anonymous White House aides. The person (likely Ben Rhodes) responsible for hurling the “Chicken-sh*t” vulgarity was never disciplined.
Obama’s plan to realign America’s alliances backfired miserably. He expected Israel to grovel but under the steady stewardship of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel did not cave into the pressure. Instead, Israel sought new alliances forging strong bonds with India, Africa, the Balkan countries and various eastern European countries. Relations also warmed between nations harboring traditional enmity toward Israel, like Russia and China.
By contrast, the Muslim world spiraled further into medieval backwardness. Arab nations that were spared the chaos brought upon by the so-called “Arab Spring” sought new alliances. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf nations watched as a feckless Obama appeased the Islamic Republic and allowed the mullahs to run amok and have their way. They too moved closer to Israel as a result.
The next president will be presented with daunting Mideast challenges. ISIS, the catastrophic Iran deal, Iran’s regional meddling and the Muslim migrant crisis. The list seems endless but there is one thing the next president can and must address upon assuming office and that is to reset the U.S.-Israel alliance. These two great democracies share ethical values and strategic interests, and the alliance must be strengthened for the sake of regional stability and moral clarity.
The first thing the U.S. must do is move to recognize Israel’s 1981 annexation of the Golan Heights. The Golan was liberated by Israel from Syria during the 1967 Six-Day War. Prior to its liberation, the strategic Golan Heights served as a platform for Syrian bombardment of Israeli communities in Galilee. The area is sparsely inhabited by roughly 20,000 Jews and 18,000 Druze. Many of the Druze, who were formerly citizens of Syria, accepted Israeli citizenship and the number of those accepting Israeli citizenship continues to rise.
Syria is no longer a sovereign nation in any sense. The area formerly known as Syria has been Balkanized. Assad is a mere puppet of Iran and his army has been reduced to a mere 50,000. Iran, with the help of its mercenary forces, including Hezbollah and the remnants of Assad’s army, controls much of western Syria, on a north-south axis. The Kurds control much of northern Syria. ISIS controls large swaths of eastern Syria while a smattering of Islamist and other Sunni militias control pockets in between. No one in their right mind seriously believes that Israel will ever hand over the Golan to Assad, ISIS or the Iranians. In sum, Syria is a mess and the realities of the situation dictate that the Golan Heights should remain Israeli. It is incumbent upon the United States to come to terms with this fact.
The second thing the next president must do is to comply with existing congressional legislation mandating that the U.S. embassy be moved to Israel’s capital of Jerusalem. The U.S. embassy is currently and irrationally situated in Tel Aviv. In 1995 and again in 2002, congressional legislation directed the president to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Every 6 months, the executive branch exercises a waiver which enables it to legally circumvent the law. The official U.S. policy is that the ultimate status of Jerusalem is to be determined by the parties to the conflict. This strange and counter-productive policy has at times led to bizarre and comicalexchanges between members of the press corps and government officials with the latter unable to name Israel’s capital city.
It is time to put an end to this charade. In 1948, Israel secured the newer western portion of the city while the Jordanians seized and occupied the eastern portion. The Jordanian occupation, which lasted for 19 grueling years, could best be characterized as cruel and inhumane. Jews were ethnically cleansed from places where they lived for generations. Jewish institutions in the eastern portion were dynamited or turned into garbage dumps. Even Jewish cemeteries were not immune from Muslim cruelty. Headstones in the ancient Mount of Olives cemetery were used as paving stones and to build latrines for the Jordanian legion. Christians didn’t fare much better. During the Jordanian occupation, the Christian population was halved.
The Six-Day war brought an end to the inhumanity. Israeli forces liberated the eastern part of the city and unified it with the west. Jerusalem has always been central to Jews and Judaism. It is the site of both the first and second temples and was designated the capital city under two Israelite commonwealths. Under Israeli rule, the city is now a thriving metropolis where all faiths are free to worship as they please but it was rendered a backwater when under Ottoman Turk and then Jordanian occupation.
Any move to recognize Jerusalem – any part of Jerusalem — as Israel’s capital would naturally meet with hysterical protest from the Muslim world. An attempt to mute that protest by placing the embassy in the western half of the city – a relatively benign action – would meet with the same frenzied outcry. Half-hearted attempts to satisfy everyone will end up pleasing no one. The U.S. action with respect to the embassy relocation must therefore be resolute and unequivocal. Therefore, the ideal location for the future embassy would be along the imaginary dividing line, between the eastern and western sides of the city. This would send a clear message to all parties that the United States recognizes all of Jerusalem as the undivided capital of the State of Israel. It is the moral and correct thing to do. Other friendly nations would quickly follow suit. As for the Arab protests…well, let them protest.
Lastly, the next president should recognize that Judea and Samaria (commonly referred to as the West Bank) are territories that are disputed, not “occupied,” and that the so-called settlements (a pejorative term meant to denigrate thriving communities) are legal under international law.
An announcement of this nature would not be without precedent. During his term, Ronald Reagan noted that he did not believe that settlements were illegal and George W. Bush gave implicit recognition to the legitimacy of settlements when he unequivocally stated that, “In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949…”
Jews have been residing in Judea and Samaria long before the first Muslim colonizer set foot in the Land of Israel. This inconvenient truth has not prevented the Palestinian president for life, Mahmoud Abbas, from boorishly declaring that “In a final resolution, we would not see the presence of a single Israeli — civilian or soldier — on our lands.” Israel’s fascist critics are quick to obscenely label Israel as an “Apartheid state” but the reality is that it is the Palestinian Arabs who practice Apartheid in both word and deed. They will not be satisfied until every last non-Muslim is ethnically cleansed from what they consider to be “Muslim soil.”
A famous and common Muslim chant during the years leading up to the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict was “first Saturday then Sunday,” an ominous reference to finishing off the Christians after dealing with the Jews. That hateful and xenophobic expression resonates in today’s Middle East. Following the expulsion of 1,000,000 Jews from Muslim lands, the Arabs turned their unwanted attentions to other minorities including Christians, Kurds and Yazidis.
It is undisputed that Obama has had a deleterious effect on the U.S.-Israel alliance and has placed it under enormous strain. Even members of his own party have had to rein him in from time to time. The alliance nevertheless endured despite his best efforts to sabotage it. Let’s hope that the next president, whoever that may be, works to improve relations between natural allies facing common enemies. Implementing these recommendations would instantly reverse the damage inflicted by Obama during the past eight years and would send the right signals to the enemies of democracy.
2.
HOW THE ESTABLISHMENT WILL TRY TO DESTROY TRUMP
The war is already underway.
December 8, 2016
Shortly before Thanksgiving, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni wrote a column that should chill you to the bone.
Titled “Donald Trump’s Demand for Love,” Bruni said: “I had just shaken the president-elect’s normal-size hand and he was moving on to the next person when he wheeled around, took a half step back, touched my arm and looked me in the eye anew. ‘I’m going to get you to write some good stuff about me,’ Donald Trump said.”
Bruni is a fabulous writer, but if he ever writes good stuff about you, Mr. President-elect, YOU WILL HAVE FAILED.
I assume this was just our president-elect doing something he gets the least credit for, which is being nice. But you can never be too careful.
The Times is in total opposition to Trump’s stated goal to make America great again. Trump has got to know — not next year, but by 5 p.m. today — that anyone pursuing his agenda will incite rage, insanity and spitting blood from that newspaper.
There’s a long and tragic history of Republicans who won the war but lost the peace by trading results for respectability.
The first President Bush not only promised not to raise taxes, but also laid out the steps Democrats would take to get him to break that promise. “And the Congress will push me to raise taxes,” he said in his iconic 1988 convention speech, “and I’ll say no, and they’ll push, and I’ll say no, and they’ll push again, and I’ll say to them, ‘Read my lips: No new taxes.’”
He was a good prognosticator! Congress did exactly as he’d anticipated. But instead of saying “no,” Bush caved.
That betrayal cost the GOP its most popular issue. As the Times’ Michael Wines put it (shortly before Bush predictably lost his re-election bid), with the president’s sellout, Republicans gave up “a political weapon so fearsome that it had destroyed three Democratic presidential candidates in 12 years.”
The Times had spent months hectoring Bush about the “yawning deficit,” denouncing his “obdurate refusal” to raise taxes, and promising “political popularity” for the “needed” tax hike. But the moment Bush raised taxes, the Times couldn’t stop crowing about his broken promise.
That was always the whole point. Not the “yawning deficit.” Not raising revenue. But to get the GOP to give up its most potent issue.
Trump has just annihilated 16 far more experienced Republican rivals, the Clinton machine and the entire media/Hollywood/Wall Street complex by raising the one issue no other politician would touch: putting America’s interests first on immigration.
What promise do you think they want Trump to break?
Luckily for the country, Trump doesn’t seem obsessed with what the elites think of him. But his advisers include just the type of Republicans whose second-tier law schools make them particularly susceptible to the cheap respectability of establishment media approval.
Trump has been a politician for only a little more than one year. He has no experience with the tricks that will be played to get him to betray voters on his signature issue. The first president Bush knew what was coming — and he still broke his promise.
Manifestly, if anyone in Washington seriously wanted to build a wall, deport illegals, return criminal aliens to their own countries, end the anchor baby scam and prevent jihadists from immigrating here to kill Americans, it would have been done already.
Nearly every promise Trump made on immigration is 100 percent within the power of the president. For example:
It is already the president’s job, as commander in chief, to protect the borders.
It is already the Department of Defense’s job to build border walls.
It’s already the law that citizenship is not acquired by being born on U.S. soil to an illegal alien. (No Congress has ever passed such a law, nor has the Supreme Court ruled that they are.)
It is already the secretary of state’s duty to rescind visas from countries that refuse to take their criminals back.
It is already the president’s job to prohibit the entry of any class of immigrants he deems “detrimental to the interests of the United States.”
It is already the president’s job to remove immigrants who commit crimes, entered our country through fraud (i.e., every single refugee), are in the country illegally or who become public charges.
None of those things have ever been done before for one reason: The entire Washington establishment is unalterably opposed to enforcing our immigration laws.
Trump will have no trouble enacting the rest of his agenda. If congressional Republicans are good for anything, it is to repeal Obamacare, cut taxes and regulation, confirm good judges and protect the Second Amendment. No one but Trump would have done it, but not even Nancy Pelosi is going to attack Trump for keeping jobs in America.
Only when it comes to immigration will Trump be Gary Cooper, out there alone against every powerful entity in America. Just as he was during the campaign.
On immigration, Trump will be furiously opposed by: Democrats, Republicans, the permanent bureaucracy, the Chamber of Commerce, George Soros, The Wall Street Journal — in fact, the entire media, except four webpages, six bloggers and five talk-radio hosts — and hundreds of taxpayer-funded immigrant grievance groups. And that’s just off the top of my head.
He’ll even be opposed by his own hand-picked U.N. ambassador! (It is an amazing fact that at the 2016 State of the Union, both the Democratic president’s address, and the Republican governor’s response, attacked candidate Trump’s immigration proposals.)
There’s a reason millions of Americans were showing up at Trump’s rallies chanting, “Build the Wall!” and not, “End Obamacare!” “Cut taxes!” “Save the Second Amendment!” — or any other slogan that could have been chanted just as easily at a Jeb! Rally.
There are only a handful of people in the entire country with the knowledge and ability to enforce our immigration laws. Any Cabinet appointees likely to impress The New York Times aren’t going to get it done. They won’t have to expressly defy Trump. They just won’t do it.
Perhaps they’ll make some showy effort at deporting illegals — and then back down at the first La Raza lawsuit. Or they will allow career government lawyers to submit briefs in court that cite all the wrong cases. Or they’ll wait for Speaker Paul Ryan’s approval to do anything. Or they’ll be moved by a Nikki Haley speech about the vibrant diversity of Somali refugees. Or they’ll be scared off by Washington bureaucrats who say, You can’t do that!
But if Trump chooses from among the few people who know how to get it done (Kris Kobach, Kris Kobach or Kris Kobach), his promises will be kept. He can relax. He can spend all his time playing golf, living in Trump Tower, yelling at American CEOs trying to outsource jobs — and engaging in appalling conflicts of interest with his businesses.
He could even shoot someone on Fifth Avenue. (I propose GOP consultant Rick Wilson!)
Trump is down to his last wish from Aladdin. He can impress The New York Times, or he can make America great again. But he can’t do both.
3.
WHAT WILL REPLACE ISIS?
This is a war to determine whether the future will belong to the West or to Islam.
October 28, 2016
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.
Before long the same administration that declared the fighting in Iraq over several times will claim victory over ISIS. The timetable for its push against the Islamic State appears to have less do with the victimized Christians and Yazidis who have been prevented from coming here as refugees in favor of Syrian Muslims than with the Clinton presidential campaign. Like Obama’s declarations that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were over, the announcement that ISIS has been defeated will be premature.
It is based on a profound misunderstanding and misreading of Islamic terrorism.
Long before its current string of defeats, ISIS had begun evolving into another Al Qaeda; a multinational alliance of Jihadists scattered around the world. Bombing Mosul isn’t hard, but try bombing Marseille, Brussels or London. There is no doubt that the ability of ISIS to temporarily establish a caliphate allowed it to build a network that could carry out terror attacks from New York to Miami to Nice to Munich. But it would be dangerous to assume that losing Iraq and Syria will stop ISIS.
ISIS doesn’t matter. The idea of ISIS does. And the idea of ISIS is Islamic supremacism.
The organization we think of ISIS has transformed and rebranded countless times. Even now our leaders vacillate between calling it ISIS, ISIL or, more childishly, Daesh, while it dubs itself the Islamic State. We have been fighting it in one form or another for over a decade. It would be unrealistically optimistic to assume that the war will end just as this old enemy has shown its ability to strike deep in our own cities.
The bigger error though is to think that we are fighting an organization. We are fighting an idea. That is not to contend, as Obama does, that we can debate it to death. It is not the sort of idea that argues with words, but with bullets, bombs and swords. But neither does it just go away if you seize a city.
Al Qaeda in Iraq not only survived the death of Zarqawi, but it became even more dangerous under Baghdadi. It would be risky to assume that ISIS will die with him. Instead it may very well grow into a new phase of Al Qaeda, one that ties together some of the world’s deadliest Islamic terror groups into a network that is decentralized enough that it will not suffer from Al Qaeda’s leadership fatigue.
The rise of Islamic terrorism has been an incremental process in which new groups learn from the mistakes of the old and supersede them. If ISIS does recede into a localized oblivion, reemerging only on occasion to suicide bomb something or someone in Baghdad, then a deadlier and even more effective group is likely to take its place. Each group will move one step closer to realizing the caliphate.
To break the cycle, we must confront the idea of the caliphate at the heart of Islamic terrorism.
ISIS is not un-Islamic. It is ruthlessly and uncompromisingly Islamic in that, unlike its predecessors in the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, it makes the fewest compromises to civilizational sensibilities. Its goals are the same as those of every Islamic political organization, including those dubbed moderate. It seeks to restore and enforce an Islamic system in every part of the Muslim world before moving on to conquer and subjugate the non-Muslim world. If this were merely some fringe belief held by a tiny minority of extremists, then it could be bombed to pieces in some Syrian or Iraqi backwater.
But it’s the driving force of Islam. That’s why it won’t go away. No amount of appeasement will banish it.
Taking in more Muslim settlers, pressuring Israel and letting the Muslim Brotherhood colonize our foreign policy won’t do it. We’ve tried it and it actually makes Islamic terrorism much worse.
When the announcement is made, the usual suspects will pat themselves on the back for having defeated ISIS by mobilizing a Muslim coalition. But it wasn’t Obama who mobilized a Muslim coalition. The coalition, such as it was, mobilized them. Obama provided useful support to Islamic state sponsors of terror, such as Iran and Turkey, assorted Islamic Jihadists on the ground, some blatantly associated with Sunni and Shiite terror groups in their internal Jihadist conflict with ISIS over who will fight us.
The “allies” we are aiding today will be the ones bombing us tomorrow.
And that is why claiming credit for beating ISIS accomplishes nothing. ISIS is an expression of an Islamic impulse encoded in the Koran. Islamic groups differ in the tactical expression of that impulse. ISIS was nastier and uglier than most of the Islamic terror groups we had dealt with before this. Though even it found its Boko Haram affiliate in Nigeria occasionally a little too much to stomach.
If ISIS vanishes from the world stage, Islamic terrorism will be easier to dismiss. Or so the thinking goes. The Islamic State was better at viral videos than the media that tried to whitewash Islamic terror. It was hard to ignore. But a scattering of Islamic terror groups around the world will be forgotten by the public.
History suggests that’s wishful thinking.
Islamic terrorism has shown no signs of receding. Growing Muslim populations, both at home and in Muslim settlements in the West, and the increase in travel and communications, the infrastructure of globalism, spread it from the most backward to the most advanced parts of the world. Wealthy and unstable Muslim countries, rich in oil but poor in power, finance its spread through mosques and guns.
These are the ingredients that give us ISIS or any other combination or letters that stands for Islamic terror. To do anything meaningful about it, we would have to reverse the decline of the West.
Islam originally spread into a vacuum created by civilizational decline. Civilizational decline is why it is rising once again. An obscure local terror group eventually turned into ISIS by filling a power vacuum. Even as Obama performs another touchdown dance, some other group will be making that same journey. Its mission will be the familiar one of replacing our civilization with its own.
Until we come to terms with this civilizational struggle, we will go on fighting endless wars in the sand and coping with endless terror attacks in our own cities because we have failed to recognize the nature of the enemy. We are not fighting an acronym, whether it’s ISIS or ISIL; we are fighting an Islamic State.
This is a war to determine whether the future will belong to the West or to Islam.
4. THE LEFT IN POWER: CLINTON TO OBAMA
David Horowitz explains how the Democrats became a leftwing party in Volume VII of the Black Book of the American Left.
October 28, 2016
Below is Richard Baehr’s review of David Horowitz’s new book, The Left in Power: Clinton to Obama(reprinted from American Thinker with permission). The book is volume 7 of The Black Book of the American Left, a multi-volume collection of David Horowitz’s conservative writings that will, when completed, be the most ambitious effort ever undertaken to define the Left and its agenda. (Order HERE.)We encourage our readers to visit BlackBookOfTheAmericanLeft.com which features Horowitz’s introductions to Volumes 1-7 of this 9-volume series, along with their tables of contents, reviews and interviews with the author.
Every year, there is some report of the blissful ignorance of American history demonstrated by the supposedly best and brightest at elite American universities. Suffice it to say the collected writings of David Horowitz on the American Left, which constitute part of a solid foundation for understanding the last half century of American politics, are nowhere to be found on any college or high school reading list.
Horowitz’s latest book, The Left in Power: Clinton to Obama, is the seventh volume in his nine-volume collection, The Black Book of the American Left. This new volume provides a collection of his writings over the last quarter century, focusing primarily on the Left’s control in our government and culture. As Horowitz reveals, even during the Bush years, conservatives were on the defense and leftists controlled the narrative as they attempted to destroy Bush and his chances for re-election in 2004. Their primary mode of attack was to undermine America’s efforts in Iraq almost from the start of the conflict, when just months earlier a majority of Senate Democrats and near half of House Democrats had supported the President. The Left then destroyed Bush’s second term with bogus charges of racist neglect in the handling of Hurricane Katrina. There was plenty of incompetence in the response to Katrina, but local and state officials — all Democrats, of course, and many of them African American — were the principal operators on the ground during the crisis.
The immediate abandonment of support for the Iraq war effort was a signal event in American history, sending a message that a large part of the Democratic Party was not remotely concerned about the morale of our men and women fighting overseas. The weak effort by some Democrats to hold onto an ounce of patriotic resolve — “end the war, support the troops” — was designed more for campaign speeches than any meaningful attempt to convey national unity for the effort underway by our armed forces. So too, the obsession with Abu Ghraib gave the lie to the Democrats’ “support our troops” message, as a broad brush was used to paint the incident as somehow what you would expect from our military on a routine basis.
Horowitz outlines this narrative, faulting the Bush administration for failing to fight harder to present its story of why we went into Iraq and the risks if we had done nothing. Regrettably, the Bush administration never had a chance to get a better defense of the Iraq war out to the media. Most in the media considered the Bush administration illegitimate due to its narrow victory in the 2000 presidential contest, a lie to be sure. Unfortunately, it is almost certainly true that the media today are far more in the bag for the left than ten or twenty years ago and work harder at pushing the left’s agenda. The soft liberalism of Walter Cronkite has been replaced by cable and national network anchors who routinely bury stories embarrassing to their side and focus on those that can do damage to the other side. During the current Presidential election cycle, we have seen the most prestigious media organs explain why it is necessary and appropriate for them to be biased this year. It is a special time, they argue, because Trump is, in their view, a unique threat to the Republic.
On the other hand, the media have been loath to consider the damage to the country caused by Barack Obama — the loss of respect abroad for America’s will to fight, the degradation of our military readiness, the fraying of ties with allies, and the near obsessive outreach to America’s enemies that led to agreements such as the nuclear deal with Iran, best described as an abject surrender of American interests that will lead to the funding of fanatical nuclear regime. About 85% of those supposedly sensible pro-Israel Democrats walked the plank behind their great leader on that deal, with no visible regrets to date. There was simply too much political risk to oppose the first black president of their party. The media were happy to parrot the administration’s talking points for the nuclear deal, something the manipulators crowed over at the White House.
At least in the propaganda use of Abu Ghraib, the Left was honest in revealing what it thinks about the military. As Horowitz outlines in article after article, the Left is fighting a war that most Americans do not see, disguising its intentions through its aggressive, unceasing promotion of “progressive” policies “to make America a better place.” This commitment to deception emerges, Horowitz reveals, from the allegiance to the ideology of Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals,” a formative doctrine for both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The progressive goal is to achieve a new society that has never been seen before in this country, though it has been promised and has catastrophically failed in many places around the globe. In America, the Left is not only unconcerned with selling their program to the public, but also, Horowitz argues, it is fearful of the result of voters knowing what it is pursuing. One prime example was the admission of MIT professor and Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber that health care law would never have made it through Congress if it had been presented honestly.
The Left is also busy at work making it easier for itself to win politically. Horowitz provides chapter and verse on the Left’s efforts to rapidly change the composition of the voting pool — motor voter registration with no birth certificate required, fighting every effort to combat voter fraud with charges of racism and “turning the clock back,” even when states were willing to pay for potential voters obtaining the needed documents to register, support for open borders, expansion of legal immigration, and amnesty and citizenship (and voting rights) for more than ten million already in the country illegally. Here the Left’s mentor and financier is George Soros and his buddies, who have funded dozens of organizations which fight on multiple fronts every day to advance the left politically. And Horowitz has done a great public service by his Discover the Network listing of the people responsible for America’s steady drift to the radical Left.
The Left uses the racism charge in many of the confrontations it creates. Of course, the problems of America’s inner cities, all under complete control of one political party for half a century, have never been of even near equal interest to the Democrats as their ability to continue to win enormous majorities among inner city voters, particularly African Americans. The Left has fully endorsed the teacher unions’ opposition to charter schools, and voucher programs, though both are popular with minority group parents and children. The two major teachers unions are simply too powerful a support group for the Democratic Party (campaign cash, votes, and volunteers) for the Left to support policies that might lead to a better future for kids as opposed to continued growth in expenditures for the teachers unions and their workforce.
In the last two years, the Soros-funded Black Lives Matter movement has created a near national hysteria over the alleged systematic effort by police to kill unarmed black men. Between two and three dozen unarmed blacks are killed by cops each year, many of them in situations where the ”victims” were almost certainly responsible for what happened to them — Michael Brown in Ferguson is a prime example. One wonders where the news media are to report on the police shooting of unarmed whites, which greatly outnumber those of unarmed blacks. Perhaps because there are no riots, or looting, these incidents have no cachet. More likely, they do not fit the systemic racism charge now routinely thrown around by everyone from the current President to Hillary Clinton.
In Chicago in 9 months this year, over 400 blacks, mostly men, have been shot and killed, almost exclusively by other black men. By year end, over 4,000 Chicagoans will have been shot. One might think this was a bigger story of urban calamity and civil society breakdown than a shooting in Charlotte. Chicago’s mayor says that police “have gone fetal,” avoiding making stops in crime ridden neighborhoods, with the ACLU looking over their shoulder demanding a report for every stop, and activists in the neighborhoods treating the police with scorn and abuse, following a bad police shooting captured on video and kept hidden from the public by Chicago’s mayor to protect his re-election bid. Rahm Emanuel must also have read Alinsky, for he knows whose hide to protect first and foremost. The victims of the police pullback in Chicago, Baltimore, St, Louis and other cities, called “the Ferguson effect,” are many more dead black men, killed in crime waves that are reminiscent of the 1990s. Even the FBI Director admits the Ferguson Effect is real, when not covering for Hillary Clinton.
Horowitz’ latest book is full of insights and straight talk on the goals and the mission of the Left, and how it has advanced its cause this last quarter century. He provides the kind of arguments that keep his books from getting reviewed by the New York Times. And there is always a horrible slur available from the Left to describe a viewpoint that counters one of its missions. The Left chooses to ignore the argument and uses character assassination for the people making it. It argues that these are people (Horowitz included) unworthy of serious consideration, or respect.
Silencing the critic or the dissident or limiting his visibility has been a long time weapon of the Left. So far, Horowitz keeps writing, and America is free enough that the Left, though it clearly wants to, cannot ban his books. George Soros and his family have another $20 billion to spend on changing America. The Alinsky acolytes have their mission laid out to make use of the funds and create an America where the smart bureaucrats can organize society and distribute its wealth, so results are all equal. And we can all sing along with the Pete Seeger songs as we turn away from any role overseas (where of course we have primarily been an agent of evil) and disinvest in defense every year.
Let’s hope that some of America’s young will read Horowitz’ books,and learn what their professors and teachers won’t teach them.
5. THE PSYCHOPATHIC AND INSINCERE JIHAD
Islam’s natural appeal to “criminals, psychopaths, and murderers.”
October 28, 2016
Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Whenever Muslims engage in behavior that ostensibly contradicts Islam—from taking drugs and watching porn to killing fellow Muslims—Islam’s apologists loudly proclaim “Aha, see, they’re not true Muslims!” Or, in the words of CIA head John Brennan on the Islamic State: “They are terrorists, they’re criminals. Most—many—of them are psychopathic thugs, murderers who use a religious concept and masquerade and mask themselves in that religious construct.”
Overlooked is that many self-styled jihadis are indeed “psychopathic thugs, murderers”; some may not even believe in Allah at all. Yet this does not exonerate Islam, for its “religious construct” was designed to entice such men.
As usual, this traces back to the prophet, Muhammad. After telling his followers that Allah had permitted Muslims four wives and limitless concubines (Koran 4:3), he later claimed that Allah had delivered a new revelation (Koran 33.51) permitting him, Muhammad alone, to marry and sleep with as many women as he wanted. In response, his young wife Aisha quipped: “I feel that your Lord hastens in fulfilling your wishes and desires.” (Apostates from Islam regularly cite this episode as especially disenchanting them with the prophet.)
But it is the concept of jihad that especially comports with those who seek to indulge their carnal appetites. For whoever fights in the name of Allah and/or seeks to empower Islam—that is, jihadis/terrorists—is exonerated of all blame and, if he dies fighting, guaranteed the highest levels of paradise (where more sex awaits).
That’s because Allah made a “pact” with them. According to Koran 9:111: “Allah has bought from the believers their lives and worldly goods, and in return has promised them Paradise: they shall fight in the way of Allah and shall slay and be slain…. Rejoice then in the bargain you have struck, for that is the supreme triumph.” Muhammad elaborated: “Lining up for battle in the path of Allah [jihad to empower Islam] is worthier than 60 years of worship.” Moreover,
The martyr is special to Allah. He is forgiven from the first drop of blood [that he sheds]. He sees his throne in paradise…. He will wed the ‘aynhour [supernatural, celestial women designed exclusively for sexual purposes] and will not know the torments of the grave and safeguards against the greater horror [hell]. Fixed atop his head will be a crown of honor, a ruby that is greater than the world and all it contains. And he will copulate with seventy-two ‘aynhour.
As for those Muslims who reject jihad, Muhammad said “they will be tortured like no other sinful human.” (For many more Islamic scriptures depicting jihad as the greatest undertaking, one that earns unconditional forgiveness and paradise, see here.)
There is no denying that the historic growth of Islam is related to its carnal incentives. After more than a decade of preaching in Mecca, Muhammad had about 100 followers, mostly relatives. It was only when he became a successful warlord and caravan raider that his followers grew and multiplied. So long as such fighters helped spread the banner of Islam into infidel lands, they were deemed good and pious Muslims—regardless of their true intentions, priorities, or even faith.
Many of the original jihadis now revered in Islamic hagiography were by modern standards little more than mass killing psychotics. Consider Khalid bin al-Walid: a Meccan pagan, he opposed Muhammad for years; but when the prophet seized Mecca, Khalid—like many of Muhammad’s foes, such as his archenemy, Abu Sufyan—expediently converted, proclaimed the shahada, joined the winning team, and then went a-jihading—mutilating, plundering, raping, enslaving, crucifying, and setting people on fire in the process. But because he did so under the banner of jihad, this serial killer and rapist is today one of Islam’s most revered heroes.
The reason for this is that nowhere in Islam is there talk about the “condition” of the jihadis’ “heart,” or if he’s “right” with God. Allah is not God: he is not interested in “hearts and minds” but in fighters and swords. So long as his fighters proclaim the shahada—“There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger”—and fight under the banner of Islam, they can take, plunder, murder, and rape the infidels; and if they die doing so, they go to paradise.
Such was the genius of Muhammad: in the Arabian society he lived in, members of one’s tribe were as inviolable as non-members were free game, to be plundered, enslaved, or killed with impunity. Muhammad took this idea and infused it with a pious rationale. Henceforth there would be only two tribes in the world: the umma—which consists of all Muslims, regardless of race—and the “infidels,” who deserve to be plundered, enslaved, or killed with impunity for rejecting Allah.
This explains why other tribal/nomadic societies—Turks and Mongols/Tatars, whose way of life consisted of preying on everyone outside their tribe—also converted to Islam and, under the banner of jihad, continued preying on the other, the infidel, but now as venerated “champions of the faith.”
Christian Europe was aware of Islam’s true appeal from the very beginning. Theophanes the Byzantine scholar (d. 818) wrote the following about Muhammad in his chronicles:
He taught those who gave ear to him that the one slaying the enemy—or being slain by the enemy—entered into paradise [see Koran 9:111]. And he said paradise was carnal and sensual—orgies of eating, drinking, and women. Also, there was a river of wine … and the women were of another sort, and the duration of sex greatly prolonged and its pleasure long-enduring [e.g., Koran 56: 7-40, 78:31, 55:70-77]. And all sorts of other nonsense.
Centuries later, St. Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) made similar observations:
He [Muhamad] seduced the people by promises of carnal pleasure to which the concupiscence of the flesh urges us. His teaching also contained precepts that were in conformity with his promises, and he gave free rein to carnal pleasure. In all this, as is not unexpected; he was obeyed by carnal men. As for proofs of the truth of his doctrine…. Muhammad said that he was sent in the power of his arms—which are signs not lacking even to robbers and tyrants. What is more, no wise men, men trained in things divine and human, believed in him from the beginning. Those who believed in him were brutal men and desert wanderers, utterly ignorant of all divine teaching, through whose numbers Mohammed forced others to become his follower’s by the violence of his arms.
There is, finally, another group of Muslims who should not be overlooked. These do not give a fig for Allah nor wish to be “martyred” in exchange for paradise, but they rely on Islam to justify robbing, enslaving, raping, and killing non-Muslims, as many Christian minorities in nations like Pakistan and Egypt will attest. Because their victims are just “infidels”—and it’s a sin to aid a non-Muslim against a Muslim (that is, a non-tribal member against a tribal member)—Muslim criminals target non-Muslim minorities precisely because they know Muslim authorities will not do a thing on behalf of the victimized infidels.
In short, enough of these claims that this or that jihadi is, in the words of the CIA’s Brennan, “terrorists,” “criminals,” “psychopathic thugs,” and “murderers.” Yes, they are. But that doesn’t change the fact that one group of them is convinced that no matter how immoral or perverse their behavior is, as long as they continue fighting and dying in the name of jihad, paradise is assured them; and another group doesn’t care a bit about the afterlife, but knows that, as long as they only victimize “infidels,” no Muslim will hold them accountable. In both cases, Islam aids and abets their behavior.
6. THE CLINTON AGENDA OF GLOBAL GOVERNMENT AND ‘PROGRESSIVE INTERNATIONALISM‘
How the Democratic presidential candidate would use the UN to crush individual liberties.
September 20, 2016
Hillary Clinton is planning to hold “a number of bilateral meetings” during this week’s gathering of world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where climate change and the rights of migrants and refugees will top the agenda. Hillary loves the United Nations. She said while serving in the Senate, for example, that “a strong United Nations is in America’s interest.” As Secretary of State, she declared that the UN “remains the single most important global institution.” She added, “We are constantly reminded of its value.”
The UN’s value to Hillary, however, requires this organization of sovereign states to overstep the limitation on its authority set out in the United Nations Charter. The UN Charter specifically stipulates that the UN is not allowed to “intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.” Globalists like Hillary Clinton have sought to use the UN and its endless whirl of global forums, summits, and treaties to advance what Hillary has called “progressive internationalism.” Only too happy to oblige, the UN bureaucracy has poked deeply into issues traditionally associated with the internal affairs of each member nation, including parents’ authority over their children, gun control and the terms under which each nation decides the terms under which to admit foreign individuals from outside its borders.
Hillary illustrated her view of the UN as an instrument of global governance when, as First Lady, she lauded the late CBS anchor Walter Cronkite, whom had just received an award from the one world government advocacy group, the World Federalist Association. Cronkite declared in his remarks at the event held at the United Nations headquarters in New York that “we must strengthen the United Nations as a first step toward a world government patterned after our own government with a legislature, executive and judiciary, and police to enforce.” After Cronkite concluded his remarks, Hillary Clinton referred to Cronkite as “no better captain that I can imagine” to “sail across the unnavigated seas of the 21st century.” She added, “For decades you told us ‘the way it is,’ but tonight we honor you for fighting for the way it could be.”
Here are just a few examples of the “progressive internationalism” leading potentially to Walter Cronkite’s vision of “a world government” that Hillary Clinton found, in her words, so “inspiring”:
- It takes the UN global village to divide child from parent – Hillary Clinton said at a campaign event on September 15ththat “Standing up for children has been the work of my life.” Perhaps, but during the course of her career she has put down stay-at-home moms and supported the anti-parent UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which her husband signed as president. This treaty potentially pits children against their parents. Irrespective of the child’s age, parents would not have the final say on their child’s access to materials the parents find to be morally offensive. Children are empowered to bring their parents to court if they are denied the legal right granted by the UN treaty “to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of the child’s choice.” Hillary Clinton’s idea of “progressive internationalism” includes inserting the United Nations and the state between parent and child.
Hillary Clinton’s unwillingness to leave parents alone in raising their children goes way back. In her 1979 bookChildren’s Rights: Contemporary Perspectives, Hillary wrote: “Decisions about motherhood and abortion, schooling, cosmetic surgery, treatment of venereal disease, or employment & others where the decision or lack of one will significantly affect the child’s future should not be made unilaterally by parents.” In Hillary’s 1970s Harvard Educational Review article “Children Under the Law,” she actually compared the idea of parents exercising ultimate authority over their dependent children to slavery.
- Global gun control norms supersede the Second Amendment – Hillary Clinton supported and helped negotiate the UN Arms Trade Treaty that her successor John Kerry signed as Secretary of State. This treaty represented the first step in maintaining a firearms “control list” registry, which would be subject to sharing with the UN and other state parties.
“Guns, in and of themselves, will not make Americans safer,” Hillary declared during a Democratic presidential primary debate last year. “Arming more people is not appropriate response to terrorism.” Given this mindset, it is not surprising that Hillary viewed Australia’s firearms confiscation as a “good example,” which she considered “worth looking at” when formulating U.S. gun control policy. Hillary liked the way Australia “clamped down going forward” on gun ownership. As reported by Business Insider journalist Christina Sterbenz, Australia’s legislation required “all firearm-license applicants to show ‘genuine reason’ for owning a gun, which couldn’t include self-defense.”
- Religious beliefs must yield to secular progressive ideology – Speaking at the Women in the World Summit in New York last year, Hillary Clinton said that in order to fully secure the reproductive rights of women, “deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.”
While Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, she encouraged the United Nations’ push for treating the gay, lesbian and transgender agenda as a matter of universal human rights. She declared in her speech at the United Nations in Geneva that perhaps the “most challenging issue arises when people cite religious or cultural values as a reason to violate or not to protect the human rights of LGBT citizens.” These objections, she said, are “not unlike the justification offered for violent practices towards women like honor killings, widow burning, or female genital mutilation.”
In Hillary’s upside down view of the world, a photographer with deeply held religious beliefs regarding same sex marriage, who conscientiously objects to being compelled to associate himself or herself with a gay or lesbian wedding by having to comply with a request to photograph it, is just as bad as an individual who cites his or her Muslim beliefs as justification for committing an honor killing.
- Open the U.S. to many more Middle Eastern refugees– One year ago, Hillary Clinton called for the United Nations to hold an “emergency global gatheringwhere the U.N. literally tries to get commitments” to admit more Syrian refugees. “I obviously want the United States to do our part.” She added that “this is an international problem that demands an international response. The United States must help lead that response.”
This week the United Nations is taking up Hillary’s suggestion by holding two days of summit meetings on refugees and migrants. On the second day, Hillary’s former boss, Barack Obama, is hosting a “Leaders’ Summit on the Global Refugee Crisis.” Its purpose, according to the State Department, is, among other things, “to galvanize significant new global commitments to…admit more refugees through resettlement or other legal pathways.”
As president, Hillary Clinton can be expected to expand the UN’s role even further in pushing countries to admit more refugees and migrants, irrespective of risks and costs, with the U.S. leading the way. She has already called for admitting for resettlement, in towns and cities throughout the United States, at least 65,000 Syrian refugees annually – a 500 percent increase over Obama’s already irresponsible level. She would do so despite the serious risks to Americans posed by refugees from terrorist infested areas whom are incapable of being robustly vetted, and despite the huge additional estimated lifetime costs at the federal, state and local level.
It is past time that we change the terms of debate in our national conversation concerning the proper definition of multilateralism, including the proper role for the United Nations. Too often we hear the fallacious argument that to support the principle of multilateralism one must wholeheartedly support the United Nations as its most legitimate manifestation. The United Nations is obviously the largest multilateral institution in the world since its membership spans the globe. But in some instances, its very size—and its large number of autocratic member states—are handicaps because they dilute a sense of common purpose at a level that really means something and result in actions or inactions at the UN that contradict its founding principles. However, for Hillary Clinton this does not really matter so long as the UN remains a useful instrument to advance her “progressive internationalist” agenda.
7. MICHAEL FLYNN AND WHAT HE MEANS FOR TRUMP’S FOREIGN POLICY
Why Tehran is worried.
December 7, 2016
Originally published by the Jerusalem Post.
In the US and around the world, people are anxiously awaiting US President-elect Donald Trump’s announcement of his choice to serve as secretary of state. There is no doubt that Trump’s choice for the position will tell us a great deal about the direction his foreign policy is likely to take.
But the fact is that we already have sufficient information to understand what his greatest focus will be.
Trump’s announcement last week that he has selected Marine General James Mattis to serve as his defense secretary is a key piece of the puzzle.
Mattis has a sterling reputation as a brilliant strategist and a sober-minded leader. His appointment has garnered plaudits across the ideological spectrum.
In 2013, US President Barack Obama summarily removed Mattis from his command as head of the US Military’s Central Command. According to media reports, Mattis was fired due to his opposition to Obama’s strategy of embracing Iran, first and foremost through his nuclear diplomacy. Mattis argued that Iran’s nuclear program was far from the only threat Iran constituted to the US and its allies. By empowering Iran through the nuclear deal, Obama was enabling Iran’s rise as a hegemonic power throughout the region.
Mattis’s dim view of Iran is shared by Trump’s choice to serve as his national security adviser. Lt. General Michael Flynn’s appointment has been met with far less enthusiasm among Washington’s foreign policy elites.
Tom Ricks of The New York Times, for instance, attacked Flynn as “erratic” in an article Saturday where he praised Mattis.
It is difficult to understand the basis for Ricks’ criticism. Flynn is considered the most talented intelligence officer of his generation. Like Mattis, Obama promoted Flynn only to fire him over disagreements regarding Obama’s strategy of embracing Iran and pretending away the war that radical Islamists are waging against the US and across the globe.
Flynn served under Obama as the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He was fired in 2014 for his refusal to toe the administration’s mendacious lines that radical Islam is not the doctrine informing and inspiring the enemy, and that al-Qaida and its fellows are losing their war.
What Obama and his advisers didn’t want to hear about the US’s enemies and about how best to defeat them Flynn shared with the public in his recently published book Field of Fight, which he coauthored with Michael Ledeen, who served in various national security positions during the Reagan administration.
Flynn’s book is a breath of fresh air in the acrid intellectual environment that Washington has become during the Obama administration. Writing it in this intellectually corrupt atmosphere was an act of intellectual courage.
In Field of Fight, Flynn disposes of the political correctness that has dictated the policy discourse in Washington throughout the Bush and Obama administrations. He forthrightly identifies the enemy that the US is facing as “radical Islam,” and provides a detailed, learned description of its totalitarian ideology and supremacist goals. Noting that no strategy based on denying the truth about the enemy can lead to victory, Flynn explains how his understanding of the enemy’s doctrine and modes of operation enabled him to formulate strategies for winning the ground wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
And win them he did. As he explains in his book, Flynn oversaw the transformation of the US’s strategies for fighting in both theaters from strategies based on top-down decapitation of the enemy’s leadership to a groundup destruction of the terrorist networks.
Flynn’s strategy, which worked in both countries, was based on the premise that it wasn’t enough to kill “high value” targets. The US needed to develop a granular understanding of the terrorist networks from the village level up the line. Only by taking out the local terrorist leaders would the US be able to destroy the ability of the likes of al-Qaida, the Iranian-controlled Shi’ite militias and the Taliban to quickly mobilize new forces and reignite fighting shortly after every successful US operation.
Flynn’s book contributes three essential insights to the discussion of the global jihad. First, he explains that the Bush and Obama administrations were both unable to translate military victories on the ground into strategic victories because they both refused to join their military war with a war of ideas.
The purpose of a war of ideas is to discredit the cause for which the enemy fights. Without such a war, on the one hand the American people sour on the war because they don’t understand why it is important to win. On the other hand, without a war of ideas directed specifically at the Islamic world, Muslims worldwide have continued to be susceptible to recruitment by the likes of ISIS and al-Qaida.
As Flynn notes, the popularity of radical Islam has skyrocketed during the Obama years. Whereas in 2011 there were 20,000 foreign recruits fighting for ISIS in Iraq and Syria, by 2015, the number had risen to 35,000.
Flynn’s second contribution is his forthright discussion of the central role the Iranian regime plays in the global jihad. Flynn chronicles not only Iran’s leadership of the war against the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. He shows that their cooperation is global and predates 9/11 by several years.
Flynn recalls for instance that in 1996 British troops confiscated an al-Qaida training manual written by Iranian intelligence in a terrorist training facility in Bosnia. Six Iranian “diplomats” were arrested at the scene.
Flynn is unflinching in his criticism of the Obama administration’s moves to develop an alliance with Iran. And he is almost equally critical of George W. Bush’s war against terror.
For instance, Flynn argues, “It was a huge strategic mistake for the United States to invade Iraq militarily.”
Iran, he said was the main culprit in 2001 and remains the main enemy today.
“If, as we claimed, our basic mission after 9/11 was the defeat of the terrorists and their state sponsors then our primary target should have been Tehran, not Baghdad, and that method should have been political – support of the internal Iranian opposition.”
Flynn’s final major contribution to the intellectual discourse regarding the war is his blunt identification of the members of the enemy axis. Flynn states that the radical Islamic terrorist armies operate in cooperation with and at the pleasure of a state alliance dominated by Russia and Iran and joined by North Korea, Venezuela and other rogue regimes. Flynn’s frank discussion of Russia’s pivotal role in the alliance exposes the widely touted claims that he is somehow pro-Russian as utter nonsense.
In Flynn’s view, while Russia is Iran’s primary partner in its war for global domination, it should not be the primary focus of US efforts. Iran should be the focus.
In his words, the best place to unravel the enemy alliance is at its “weakest point,” which, he argues, is Iran.
Flynn explains that the basic and endemic weakness of the Iranian regime owes to the fact that the Iranian people hate it. To defeat the regime, Flynn recommends a strategy of political war and subversion that empowers the Iranian people to overthrow the regime as they sought to do in the 2009 Green Revolution. Flynn makes the case that the Green Revolution failed in large part because the Obama administration refused to stand with the Iranian people.
Flynn is both an experienced commander and an innovative, critical, strategic thinker. As his book makes clear, while flamboyant and blunt he is not at all erratic. He is far-sighted and determined, and locked on his target: Iran.
Whoever Trump selects as secretary of state, his appointment of Mattis on the one hand and Flynn on the other exposes his hand. Trump is interested in ending the war that the forces of radical Islam started with the US not on September 11, 2001, but on November 4, 1979, with the seizure of the US embassy in Tehran.
With Mattis and Flynn at his side, Trump intends to bring down the Iranian regime as a first step toward securing an unconditional victory in the war against radical Islam.
8. INTEGRATION IS NOT THE ANSWER TO MUSLIM TERRORISM
It’s not cultural integration, but religious disintegration.
April 1, 2016
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.
There is a famous photo of Anjem Choudary, the head of multiple banned organizations calling for imposing Sharia law on the UK whose follower was responsible for the Lee Rigby beheading, getting drunk as a young law student. Friends recall “Andy” smoking pot and taking LSD, sleeping around and partying all the time. Andy was really well integrated, but he still turned back into Anjem.
While the proliferation of segregated Muslim areas, no-go zones in which English, French or Dutch is the foreign language, is a major problem, it is a mistake to think that “integration” solves Islamic terrorism.
It doesn’t.
The Tsarnaev brothers who carried out the Boston Marathon bombings seemed integrated. Nobody noticed anything wrong with Syed Rizwan Farook, the San Bernardino shooter, or Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square bomber. They weren’t lurking in a no-go zone. They had American friends, an education and career options if they wanted them. They didn’t want them. And that’s the point.
Bilal Abdullah was a British-born doctor who tried to carry out a terrorist attack at Glasgow International Airport. He wasn’t marginalized, jobless or desperate. He had a cause.
Quite a few converts have become Muslim terrorists. If integration were the issue, white converts to Islam wouldn’t be running off to join ISIS or plotting terrorist attacks like Don Stewart-Whyte, who converted to Islam and planned to blow up planes headed from the UK to the US. Along with his friend Oliver Savant, the son of a secular Iranian father and British mother, they are the reason why you can’t carry liquids onto a plane.
Muslim terrorism is not caused by failed integration, but by a conscious disintegration. What is often described as “radicalization” is really a choice by “integrated” Muslims to become religious and to act on their beliefs. Muslim men who formerly dressed casually begin growing beards and wearing Salafist garb. They consciously reject what Western society has to offer because they have chosen Islam instead.
Islamic terrorists have not been alienated by our rejection. They champion an alien creed that rejects us.
The debate over Islamic terrorism is bogged down by a refusal to name it and understand what it is. ISIS is not a form of “nihilism” that European Muslims resort to after being alienated by racism and driven to despair by joblessness. It’s an alternative system that draws on over a thousand years of Islamic religion and culture. It’s not a negative choice, but a positive one. It’s not an act of despair, but of hope.
Social, linguistic and cultural integration won’t stop Islamic terrorism. They may prevent it in some cases and accelerate it in others. But it’s not the primary factor. Religion is. Cultural integration won’t make much of a difference in the face of religious disintegration.
This is the type of integration that is the real problem. Some of the worst Jihadists are culturally integrated and religiously disintegrated. They speak the native language fluently. They are intimately familiar with popular culture. They move easily among the native population. It’s their belief system that is fundamentally disintegrated and whose demands cannot be integrated without a civil war.
Their choices are not a referendum on our society. What we do in response to their terrorism is.
The issue is not economic. It is not linguistic. It is not about alienation or racism. It is about religion. And Europe is not comfortable with religion. It assumes that the religious is political, but in Islam, the political is instead religious. Europe has given no thought to how Islam can be integrated as a religion. Instead it has relied on the assumption that all religions are basically alike and that the aims and ideas of Islam are therefore interchangeable with those of Catholics, Lutherans, Jews and anyone else.
Every Islamic terrorist attack sends the message that its ideas and aims are not interchangeable.
Europe does face challenges of cultural integration. But cultural disintegration isn’t blowing up airports or subways. Religious disintegration is. Cultural disintegration accounts for crime, riots and unemployment. It occasionally feeds into Islamic terrorism, but ideological violence is aspirational. It’s generally practiced by members of the middle class with money, leisure time and lots of self-esteem.
Like left-wing terror, Islamic terrorism is based on realizing a set of ideas about what the world should be like. These ideas are already embedded in the worldview of every Muslim to some degree. This is not a clash of civilizations or even cultures. It is a collision between the political and the religious.
The EU’s Federica Mogherini states, “Islam belongs in Europe…. I am not afraid to say that political Islam should be part of the picture.” Mogherini thinks of political Islam as a social welfare organization with a steeple, like the rest of the political religions of Europe. But political Islam is theocracy. And Europe was never able to integrate theocracy. Instead it overshadowed it with nationalism and then Socialism.
Secular Europe has forgotten what religion is. Religion is passion, conviction and redemption. It is not something that you occasionally live on the weekends. It transforms your life and your worldview.
How do you integrate that? Do you do it with language lessons, job training and a pat on the back?
Islamic terrorism is what happens when Muslims “get” religion. Not of the occasional casual variety, but of the fundamentally transformative kind. Integration assumes that once Mohammed is at university and drinking beer that he won’t suddenly decide to Jihad his way across Europe. But there are plenty of examples that show what a poor and fitful defense this is against the rebirth of a religious conviction.
Cultural integration is an issue, but the real issue is philosophical integration. The real challenge is not in linguistic integration, but in the integration of ideas. And it is impossible to do that without addressing what Islam actually is and what it believes. Islam is not Lutheranism with more Arabic. Political Islam is not a soup kitchen and a used clothes bin. It is a conviction that the world is locked in a titanic struggle between Islam and the infidels, the forces of light and darkness, which must be won at any cost.
How do you integrate an ideology that is convinced that non-Muslim political systems are evil into Europe? What explanatory videos will you use to admonish Ahmed from Syria that he shouldn’t set off bombs at the railway station even though his religion commands him to fight the infidels? Which job will you use to induce Abdul to abandon his fervent belief that everyone must live under Islamic law?
Sanctimony and denial won’t untangle this Gordian knot. No amount of NGOs will turn Islam into something else. Cultural integration won’t transform Muslims into non-Muslims. All it does is make them conflicted and insecure. And that is why it is those second-generation culturally integrated Muslims who go to bars, call themselves Andy or Mo, sell drugs, go to university, who take a detour into Syria and come back with bomb plans and big plans for transforming Europe into an Islamic state.
Cultural integration builds up a conflict with Islam. Some Muslims respond to it by abandoning Islam, others by embracing it. If we fail to recognize this, then integration becomes a ticking time bomb.
9. FBI Başkanı Comey’den DAEŞ uyarısı
FBI Başkanı Comey, terör örgütü DAEŞ’in sosyal medyayı da kullanarak çok sayıda “küçük küresel saldırılar” düzenlemeyi hedeflediğini bildirdi.
17.12.2015 New York
NEW YORK
ABD Federal Soruşturma Bürosu (FBI) Başkanı James Comey, Amerikan kamuoyunu DAEŞ terörü konusunda uyanık olmaya çağırdı.
Comey, New York Polis Teşkilatı’nın (NYPD) Manhattan’daki merkezinde düzenlenen “Terörle Mücadele” konulu konferansta yaptığı konuşmada, terör tehdidinin artarak devam ettiğini belirtti.
“Bazıları radikalleşiyor” ifadesini kullanan Comey, Amerikan kamuoyundan teröre karşı uyanık olmalarını istedi.
Teröristlerin ve sempatizanlarının erişilmez şifreli mesajlaşma sistemleri aracılığıyla iletişim kurduklarını kaydeden Comey, “Lütfen o vahşilerin, başarmak istedikleri şeyi gerçekleştirmelerine izin vermeyin” dedi.
Comey, DAEŞ’in büyük saldırılar yerine sosyal medyayı kullanarak dünyanın birçok yerinde “küçük küresel saldırılar” düzenleme hedefinde olduğunu söyledi.
Sosyal medyayı kullanmayan El Kaide’nin büyük terör saldırılarına odaklandığını belirten Comey, DAEŞ’in ise büyük saldırılar yerine, sosyal medyayı aktif kullanıp dünyanın birçok yerinde daha fazla “küçük küresel saldırılar” gerçekleştirmeyi hedeflediğini kaydetti.
Muhabir: Selçuk Acar
10. THE AMERICAN MILITARY AND THE SPECTER OF AN UNTRUSTWORTHY COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF
A track record of failure and fabrication puts military voters on edge.
September 8, 2016
In August 1993, Hillary Clinton’s husband Bill dispatched a force of U.S. Army Rangers and Delta Force commandos to war-torn Somalia in an effort to seize the Somali warlord, Mohammed Farrah Aidid. Military commanders had assessed the need for armor and air cover to carry out the dangerous mission. They requestedM-1 Abrams tanks, Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, as well as AC-130 gunships but the Clinton administration obscenely denied the request placing U.S. forces in a very vulnerable situation.
On October 3, a taskforce of lightly armed U.S. forces seized a good portion of Aidid’s political and military echelon in Mogadishu as they assembled for a meeting in the capital but the operation stirred a hornet’s nest and the troops began engaging Somali militiamen in urban combat. Two Black Hawk helicopters were subsequently shot down with rocket propelled grenades. The nature and dynamic of the mission rapidly changed from a lightening operation involving quick seizure and extraction to one of protracted urban combat pitting outnumbered and outgunned U.S. forces against thousands of Somali militiamen armed to the teeth with machine guns, RPGs, mortars and recoilless rifles.
Though the Rangers and Delta Force commandos ultimately prevailed, 18 soldiers were killed (some of the bodies were mutilated), 73 were wounded and a helicopter pilot was captured. Had the request for armor and air cover been granted, there is no question that the outcome of the Battle of Mogadishu would have been vastly different and U.S. casualties would have been minimal. Adding insult to injury, Aidid’s aides, captured at great cost and sacrifice, were quickly released on orders from the political echelon.
Bill Clinton should have resigned but instead passed the buck to his loyal secretary of defense, Les Aspin, who resigned in disgrace a few months later. Bill Clinton never served in the military, never went to military school and had no concept of what it means to be a soldier and send men to battle to fight and die. Clinton was and still is a power hungry, political opportunist and nothing more. His inexcusable actions, in denying our service members the best equipment, cost lives.
Fast forward 23 years. With her husband’s backing, Hillary Clinton now seeks the same office previously occupied by her husband. Like her husband, Hillary is a political opportunist with an insatiable lust for power. Her only foreign policy “achievement” was to transform Libya into an ISIS/al-Qaida haven through short-sighted and irresponsible interventionist policies.
Hillary also shares a more ominous resemblance to her husband. Her complacency and sheer incompetence on the days leading up to September 11, 2012, needlessly cost the lives of four American heroes, including J. Christopher Stevens, the first U.S. Ambassador killed in the line of duty since 1979.
The Islamist assault on the U.S. consulate office in Benghazi on the anniversary of the 9-11 attacks was meticulously planned and well-coordinated. Requests for beefing up security at the site were either ignored or denied by Hillary’s State Department. An additional contingent of U.S. military personnel or private military contractors could have meant the difference between life and death.
Despite Clinton’s best efforts to stage-manage the Benghazi hearings (as emails from the Clinton camp suggest), the Select Committee on Benghazi released a damning report that reflected poorly on the former secretary of state’s actions before, during and after the September 11, attack. Poor intelligence and needless bureaucratic bungling prevented rapid deployment of forces to the theater.
But it was Clinton’s web of lies, spun after the Benghazi assault, that truly highlight the wretchedness of this person. As countless emails reveal, Clinton was well aware that the consulate attack was premeditated and the work of trained Muslim terrorists. But that did not reconcile well with the narrative her boss was attempting to peddle to the American people – chiefly that al-Qaida was on the run and America was winning the war on terror. So instead, she along with Ben Rhodes and Susan Rice concocted a story about how an obscure YouTube video about Mohammed was responsible for the cold-blooded murder of four Americans. Clinton though, went one step further than the other Obama stooges. She told this lie not only to the American people but also directly to the family members of the victims of the attack.
Clinton is a serial fabricator who maintains a sociopathic-like lack of empathy for anyone or anything that stands in her way. That includes the families of the victims of Benghazi. Like her husband, Hillary Clinton’s fateful decisions cost American lives and like her husband, she shirked responsibility and failed to own up to her faults.
A recent NBC News|SurveyMonkey poll suggests that Trump leads Clinton by a whopping 19 points among current and former members of the U.S. military. That group understands what it means to be Commander-in-Chief. It requires character, honesty and a proven track record of getting the job done. These traits and characteristics are sorely lacking in Hillary Clinton.
11. THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION AND THE KURDS — A CONVERSATION WITH SHERKOH ABBAS
President of the Kurdish National Assembly of Syria talks chaos in Turkey and hopes for Kurdish statehood.
November 16, 2016
Kurdish Peshmerga forces fighting the Islamic State (IS) in both Iraq and Syria have exhibited courage, determination, and a unique pro-American attitude in the Arabic speaking world. In Syria, however, the Kurdish forces combating the Islamic State bravely and successfully are being attacked by the Turkish army as ordered by President Erdogan. Human rights activist Dilovan Mirkhan told ARA News (November 13, 2016) that “The Turkish army stationed on the borderline with Syria, bombed residential buildings in the Mosako town in Afrin, adding that the bombardment led to massive destruction in the area.” Mirkhan reported that “Dead bodies of eight civilian victims were collected subsequent to the attack, and many others remained stranded under the rubble.”
It should be unacceptable for the incoming Trump administration to allow Turkey’s dictatorial president Erdogan to attack the very forces (the Kurds) who are liberating portions of Syria from the IS. Moreover, it is also high time for the U.N. and the U.S. to recognize the Kurdish people’s right to self-determination. The U.N. has held endless sessions in support of Palestinian rights and requests for statehood. The Kurds, numbering tens-of-millions, deserve much more from the international community. There are 22 Arab states but no Kurdish state. Given the critical role the Kurds are playing in liberating Iraq and Syria from the barbarism of the IS, the time has come to reward the Kurds with a state of their own.
Kurds have been oppressed by Saddam Hussein in Iraq and gassed in Halabja. Hafez Assad, the dictator of Syria expelled hundreds of thousands of Kurds from the Al-Hasakeh region, with similar numbers becoming stateless. The Islamic Republic of Iran has equally oppressed its largely Sunni-Muslim Kurds. It has denied political and cultural rights to its Kurdish citizens. Turkey, where the Kurds count for almost 20% of the population, is currently bombing the Kurds at the Kurdish-majority region of southeastern Turkey, and in Syria.
This reporter asked Sherkoh Abbas, President of the Kurdish National Assembly of Syria (KNA-S), to respond to the current situation in Syria.
Joseph Puder (JP): With Donald Trump becoming the new occupant of the White House, and Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, what would you like the new administration to do in Syria?
Sherkoh Abbas (SA): I hope to see the Trump administration abandon the outdated policy of maintaining the unjust legacy of the colonial Sykes-Picot agreement. Similarly, Trump should reverse the previous U.S. administration’s investment in cozying up to ruthless Middle East regimes at the expense of its existing allies. Instead, the new administration should support its natural allies such as the Kurds in the Middle East and the Amazigh people (Berbers) in North Africa.
Supporting an independent Kurdistan would help finish the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and reduce Iran’s influence in the region, particularly in Iraq and Syria. Working with the Kurds would also sever the Shiite Crescent. Moreover, open support for the Kurds would check Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his ambitious Neo-Ottoman Empire.
The U.S. under the Trump presidency, should provide full and direct support to the Kurds on all levels, including the delivery of arms, unlike the Obama administration. Arms to the Kurds should bypass Baghdad, and go directly to the Kurds.
During the primaries, Trump expressed support for the Kurds. We will call on him to do just that. The Kurds share the same values with the U.S. and they are eager to work with America.
JP: What do you expect from the Trump administration with regards to an independent Kurdish state in Syria?
SA: Syrian Kurds are currently fighting on behalf of humanity in their struggle with the Islamic State. As quid-pro-quo, the Kurds would like U.S. help in creating a federal system in Syria to start with, and ultimately supporting outright Kurdish independence in Syria. Israel, Russia, and some European nations are promoting a federal state for the failed states of Iraq and Syria.
JP: Are the leaders of the People’s Protection Units (YPG) ready for an independent Kurdish state in Syria?
SA: The YPG needs to distance itself from the Assad regime as well as the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), and work with all the Kurds, including over 5,000 Syrian Peshmerga forces currently fighting to take Mosul. It must become inclusive instead of a dictatorial regime. The YPG does not enjoy the overwhelming support of the Syrian Kurds. The majority of Syrian Kurds want democracy and independence.
The YPG is vacillating between its work with the U.S., Russia, and the Assad regime. The YPG has to face the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and IS, as well as other terror groups. The Arab Gulf states, particularly Qatar, is supporting the FSA, which is ideologically close to the Muslim Brotherhood. Turkey, a NATO-member, is too close to the IS and al-Qaeda, and their agenda is to get rid of the Assad regime and the Kurds.
JP: What influence can you and the Kurdistan National Assembly of Syria (KNA-S) exert on the powers that be in your home town of al-Qamishli and Kurdish Syria?
SA: Most of the Syrian Kurds are loyal to Kurdish tribal and civic leaders, and have strong alliances with Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). The YPG opposes such relationships, and thus is not a consensus organization. The Kurdistan National Assembly of Syria (KNA-S) is aligned with tribal and civic leaders and the KRG in Iraq. We could deliver the “Kurdish street,” and additional soldiers to finish IS.
This year KNA-S has assembled a wide-ranging delegation of Syrian Kurds, including YPG officials, to come to Washington for talks with U.S. administration officials. Unfortunately, the State Department did not furnish visas to the delegates from Syria to enter the U.S. Hopefully, the Trump administration will invite the KNA-S to re-assemble the same delegation for talks in Washington.
JP: Given Erdogan’s dictatorial behavior toward the opposition in Turkey, and especially toward the Kurds in Southeastern Turkey, what would you advise the incoming President Donald Trump to do with regards to Erdogan and Turkey?
SA: Turkey ruled by Erdogan is a lost case, and it is not a friend of the U.S. Turkey’s intimate relationship with radical Islamic groups requires explanation. Erdogan’s regime has its eyes focused on Aleppo in Syria and Mosul in Iraq, ostensibly to prevent the formation of an independent and contiguous Kurdistan, comprised of Iraqi and Syrian Kurdistan.
The Trump administration should prevent the Turkish army forces from entering Syrian territory under the guise of fighting IS. The reality is that Turkey is only interested in fighting the Kurds, and preventing the creation of an independent Kurdish state, or an autonomous Kurdish region in northeastern Syria.
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“ΧΑΙΡΕΤΕ“
“ΕΛΛΗΝΑΣ“
ΥΓ.
α. Σήμερα μόνον “μαύρο χρώμα”, σε ένδειξη πένθους για τα θύματα στο Βερολίνο και ασφαλώς το ελληνικό “μπλε“, το οποίο δεν θα λείψει ποτέ!..
β. Όταν θα σας γράψω “άρθρο – μάθημα χωρίς πληρωμή” τότε θα δείτε πώς σκεπτόμαστε, όταν θέλουμε να βρούμε… “πράγματα”! (Φράση που την καθιέρωσε ο τέως βουλευτής και τέως ποδοσφαιριστής του ΘΡΥΛΟΥ μας, ο γίγας… Ανατολάκης! Αχαχαχαχα ). Προς το παρόν θέλω μόνον να ρωτήσω: “Από πότε ο Γκιουλέν και οι οπαδοί του μετεβλήθησαν από -επιτρέψτε μου- “Ηπιο-Ισλαμιστές”, (λεξιπλασία), σε… Τζιχαντιστές, ρε Τούρκο – Καραγκιοζάκια“; Αυτό γράφεται, επειδή έσπευσαν οι Τούρκοι να δώσουν Γκιουλενική ταυτότητα στον δολοφόνο του Ρ/Πρέσβη Καρλώφ, ενώ οι Κούρδοι με την παρακάτω “φωτο” που “κυκλοφόρησαν”, άλλα… λένε, για την… “Χρυσή Πέτρα” / “… Αλλάχ Σχωρέστον” κι αυτόν! Δείτε – Διαβάστε – Σκεφτείτε:
– Δεν ήθελα, όπως άλλωστε σας το είχα γράψει, να ξανα – ασχοληθώ με το θέμα, αλλά επειδή έγιναν όλοι και πάλι ειδικοί και ακούγονται “Χ” παπαριές και μάλιστα με στόμφο! Θα γράψω ένα άρθρο μάθημα για το θέμα και θα αντιληφθείτε πώς σκεπτόμαστε, βρίσκοντας και τον / τους… ενόχους της δολοφονίας Καρλώφ! Με την ευκαιρία:
– Ρώσοι! Μην εκπλαγείτε(!), όταν διαπιστώσετε ότι πίσω από τη δολοφονία του Καρλώφ ήταν η ΜΙΤ – Τ/Κράτος! Οι… “Άγγελοι” βλέπουν και ξέρουν πολλά!.. (Χακάν δεν… “καθάρισες” καλά τη ΜΙΤ! Πρόσεχε)!..
– Προς όλους τώρα τους… ειδικούς που και (!) στη σημερινή πτωχευμένη Ελλάδα βρίθουν! “Κοι! Επειδή, πιθανώς και σε λίγο χρόνο ακόμα, από τώρα, να παιχτεί στο Πεδίο η ύπαρξή μας, ΣΑΣ ΠΑ-ΡΑ-ΚΑ-ΛΩ, σε ό,τι τουλάχιστον αφορά τις χώρες ΤΟΥΡΚΙΑ – ΑΛΒΑΝΙΑ, … ΒΟΥ-ΛΩ-ΣΤΕ το (!), (είμαι όσο πιο επιεικής μπορώ να είμαι μαζί σας), διότι θα οδηγήσετε την χώρα σε Κ/Φ”!!!
– Θυμίζω στους πραγματικούς ειδικούς την κυκλοφορία ψευδών ειδήσεων! Ορισμένες των συγχρόνων ΜΥ έχουν ολόκληρες Διευθύνσεις, οι οποίες ασχολούνται με την παραγωγή ψευδών ειδήσεων – πληροφοριών και πολλούς ελεγχόμενους – στρατολογημένους στο Πεδίο, “δικούς τους” επιστήμονες, οι οποίοι είναι “πρώτα ονόματα” στην χώρα του αντιπάλου τους! Θυμηθείτε τί έλεγε για το θέμα ο “ΑΡΧΑΓΓΕΛΟΣ“!.. Είναι πολύ εύκολο και ΘΑ ΕΠΙΔΙΩΧΘΕΙ(!!!) 100%, προ και κατά τις όποιες επιχειρήσεις, η δια του ΔΙΑΔΙΚΤΥΟΥ -κυρίως, (αφού θα υπάρξουν και οι ασπάλακες των Πρεσβειών, οι οποίοι πιθανώς να θελήσουν να προσφέρουν τη… βοήθειά τους), διασπορά ψευδών ειδήσεων! Προσοχή λοιπόν, μην γίνει στην εποχή μας το “ΔΙΑΔΙΚΤΥΟ”, πχ οι Βούλγαροι του 1974, η η τουρκική… προέλαση στη Δ. Θράκη, το 1974 πάλι, κλπ!..
Διαβάστε το παρακάτω κείμενο:
‘Fake News’ and its Dangers
The past few months have seen the media focus on “fake news”—-hoaxes, propaganda, and disinformation designed to increase web traffic on social media websites. Numerous sites now make up stories to drive traffic to themselves—oblivious to facts, accuracy, propriety, and truth.
“Fake news” is a euphemism for a broad range of falsehoods and alleged conspiracies that are not similarly insidious—all lies aren’t equal.
Phony stories about how Hillary was supposed to have described Sanders’ supporters (“a bucket of losers”) is not in the same realm of offense as specious allegations that Hillary is part of a sex trafficking ring. Some charges are toxic dog whistles for ancient and dangerous bigotries that are calculated to suppress reason and arouse passion.
Peddling falsehoods about children, sex and violence is by its very nature incendiary. These are allegations that put the “perpetrators” in a category of humans that generates contempt and in potential peril. There is a reason that convicted child sex offenders are housed in separate and isolated prison sections—-they are viewed as the lowest of the low.
These kinds of specious charges have a long pedigree—with reason, common sense and the alleged “perpetrators” being the true victims. Historically, these allegations have been the source of immeasurable bigotry and hate for which Jews have a special sensitivity—and with good reason.
“Blood libel” accusations against Jews go back centuries and analogously involve baseless charges of violating and murdering young children. The medieval charges surfaced in recent times in Russia at the turn of the last century, in Atlanta, Georgia in 1913, and in Orleans, France in 1969.
The accusations played on angry, receptive, unreasoning and believing publics.
It is troubling that in 2016 we have individuals being considered for positions near the pinnacle of power in the White House who traffic in the kind of “fake news” that bears an uncanny resemblance to historic conspiracy charges involving kids.
Donald Trump’s designated National Security Advisor (“NSA”), Gen. Michael Flynn has a son, Michael Flynn, Jr. who has served as the general’s chief of staff in his security business. Junior was a member of the Trump transition team until just a few days ago.
Flynn Jr. has engaged in vile conspiracy-mongering about Pizzagate. Allegations that a pizza joint in Washington, D.C.—Comet Ping Pong—is the center of a child sex-trafficking ring run by major Democrats (including Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager, John Podesta). The more lurid and fantastical allegations include a subterranean network of rooms beneath the store that is used for trafficking, imprisonment and worse.
In the 1969 Orleans, France resurgence of anti-Jewish hate (cited above), similar to the recent allegations, shop owners (all Jews) were accused of violating and spiriting away young children who entered their seemingly innocuous stores.
The predictable response to the Comet Ping Pong allegations was elicited on Sunday when a gunman entered the pizza shop—literally “loaded for bear”—with an AR-15-style assault rifle, fired a shot [hitting no one], intent on “self-investigating” the allegations of the sex ring. He is now in jail.
One might have assumed in the age of Google search and instant access to news and data, that this kind of idiocy would have a very short half-life and that folks with a modicum of intelligence and morality would dismiss the absurd allegations out of hand. Public figures like Clinton and Podesta aren’t running sex crime operations (especially since Clinton has twenty four hour Secret Service handlers). But modern technology seems to have worsened the problem.
Flynn Jr. persistently propagated the insidious lie of pedophilia in the pizza joint via Tweets, even persisting in them after the shooting (the allegations he wrote “hadn’t yet been proved false” and the apprehended shooter was really “an actor”). Mercifully, the Trump team has let Flynn junior go. He is off the transition team and will, presumably, not be on the government payroll.
But his father, our future National Security Advisor, appears to have a similar penchant for made up stories—including Clinton and sex-trafficking. According to The New York Times, his staff used to refer to “Flynn facts”—his “habit of making broad assertions that are not based in fact.” As the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, Cong. Adam Smith observed, Flynn senior “has regularly engaged in the reckless public promotion of conspiracy theories that have no basis in fact…and is oblivious to the facts, or intentionally ignorant of them.”
This is not about “fake news” and salacious stories, it is about reasoning and intellects that accept fantasy as fact and suspend intellectual rigor.
What is so troubling about believers in and trumpeters of “fake news” is their obvious abandonment of reason, discernment and good sense. The absence of intellectual honesty in failing to demand evidence and factual corroboration before repeating illogical conspiracy myths suggests a susceptibility to other forms of sloppy thinking and the willing vilifying of opponents. An ominous proclivity for those concerned about bigotry, civility and a functioning government.
Will someone with those traits be running our foreign policy and advising our new president? If the former Secretary of State, First Lady and senator from New York could be so fallaciously castigated, what groups or individuals are safe from “fake news” and its unfounded calumnies? We all have reason to be concerned.
PS Steven Colbert has an hilarious take on “fake news,” Pizzagate and the thinking behind it on The Late Show.
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