“Inside Every Progressive Is A Totalitarian Screaming To Get Out”!.. ΕΝΗΜΕΡΩΣΗ!..
ΦΙΛΟΙ ΜΟΥ!
“ΧΩΡΙΣ ΣΧΟΛΙΑ“ ΟΛΑ ΤΑ ΠΑΡΑΚΑΤΩ ΚΕΙΜΕΝΑ Η(ΔΙΑΖ) ΣΧΕΔΟΝ ΟΛΑ!
ΟΣΟΙ ΟΜΩΣ ΜΑΣ ΜΕΛΕΤΟΥΣΑΤΕ ΚΑΙ ΜΕΛΕΤΑΤΕ ΑΚΟΜΑ, ΘΑ ΚΑΤΑΛΑΒΕΤΕ ΜΟΝΟΙ ΣΑΣ ΤΙ ΣΧΟΛΙΑ ΘΑ ΚΑΝΑΜΕ, ΣΧΕΤΙΚΑ ΜΕ ΤΑ ΠΑΡΑΚΑΤΩ ΑΡΘΡΑ!
1.
The Left’s Immigration Laws: The Ultimate Con Game
Undermining public safety, public health, national security and the jobs and wages of American workers.
I have written ever so many articles about how globalists have used deceptive language to deceive Americans about the true nature of our immigration laws, beginning with President Carter’s edict, issued during his administration, that INS employees, replace the legally accurate term “Illegal Alien” with the deceptive term, “Undocumented Immigrant.”
CHARLOTTE, North Carolina – U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) released additional information Thursday on more unlawfully present foreign nationals facing serious criminal offenses in Mecklenburg County, who under the county’s ICE non-cooperation policy would currently be released back into the local community where they would be free to reoffend.
2.
An Open Letter to Greta Thunberg
You are not a moral leader. But I will tell you what you are.
Greta Thunberg:
You have declared yourself a leader and said that your generation will start a revolution. You have comported yourself as a credentialed adult and climate change activist who has fearlessly addressed politicians and world leaders. You have dropped out of school and declared that there isn’t any reason to attend, or any reason for you to study since there will be no future for you to inherit. You have, rather than attend your classes, been leading Friday Climate Strikes for all students in your generation across the globe. Your attendance at oil pipelines has been striking. There, you unequivocally declare that all oil needs to remain in the ground where it belongs.
I shall, therefore, against the backdrop of your activism, address you as an adult rather than as a child.
In September of 2019 you crossed the Atlantic in a “zero carbon” racing yacht that had no toilet and electric light on board. You made an impassioned plea at the United Nations in which you claimed that, “we have stolen your dreams and our childhood with our empty words.” You claimed that adults and world leaders come to young people for answers and explained in anger: “How dare you!” You claimed that we are failing you and that young people are beginning to understand our betrayal. You further declared that if we continue to fail your generation: “We will never forgive you.”
You have stated that you want us to panic, and to act as if our homes are on fire. You insist that rich countries must reduce to zero emissions immediately. In your speeches you attack economic growth and have stated that our current climate crisis is caused by “buying and building things.” You call for climate justice and equity, without addressing the worst polluter on the planet China; the country that is economically annexing much of Africa and Latin America. You dare not lecture Iran about its uranium projects — because that’s not part of the UN’s agenda, is it?
You proclaim that we need to live within the planetary boundaries, to focus on equity and “take a few steps back” for the sake of all living species. You resent the hierarchical distinctions between human and animals and entertain no qualitative distinction between a monkey, a malaria-infested mosquito and a snarling hyena. You mouth slogans such as: “We have set in motion an irreversible chain reaction beyond control,” and you advocate for universal veganism on the Ellen DeGeneres show. You do not buy new clothes, and you don’t want the rest of us to either. You want us all to stop flying in jet planes without giving us an alternative as to how we would re-transform our financial and trading systems—to say nothing of our personal enjoyment of the world—without regression to a primeval era. Few can afford to cross the Atlantic in a $6M zero carbon yacht financed by rich people who made their wealth by the very means you condemn as loathsome.
There are a few things that we, the rational adults of the world who are not bowing to you like guilt-ridden obsequious Babbitts need to say to you, Greta.
First, we did not rob you of your childhood or of your dreams. You are the legatee of a magnificent technological civilization which my generation and the one before it and several others preceding it all the way to the Industrial Revolution and the Renaissance, bequeathed to you. That growth-driven, capitalist technological civilization has created the conditions for you to harangue us over our betrayal. It is a civilization that eradicated diseases such as small pox from the word, and that lifted millions out of abject poverty in a universe you think is dying and decaying. It assured you a life expectancy that exceeded that of your ancestors. Most likely by focusing on economic growth which you demonize, and scientific advancement, that civilization will further enhance a robust quality of life and health for your descendants.
Here is a hard truth to ponder, Greta: if the great producers of this world whom you excoriate were to withdraw their productivity, wealth and talents—in short—their minds from the world today, your generation would simply perish. Why? Because as children you have done nothing as yet, with your lives besides being born. This is what we expect of children until such time as they can be producers by learning from their elders. You are understandably social and ecological ballast. You are not yet cognitively advanced to replicate the structures of survival of which you are the beneficiaries.
Children are important installments on the future. We have invested in you. It is you and your smug generation which think they have nothing to learn from the older ones who are failing themselves. Whom do you expect to employ the majority of you if you have neither the job credentials or life competency skills to navigate the world? The future unemployable-skipping- school-on-Friday obstreperous children?
The truth, as one anonymous blogger aptly put it, is that your generation is unable to work up to forty hours per week without being chronically depressed and anxious. Its members cannot even decide if they want to be a boy or a girl, or both, or neither, or a “they.” They cannot eat meat without crying. I might add that your generation needs “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” as pre-conditions for learning in school. Its members have a pathological need to be coddled and protected from the challenging realities of life. Your generation is the biggest demander and consumer of carbon spewing technological gadgets and devices. An hour without any of them and too many of you succumb to paralyzing lethargy. Your generation is the least curious and most insular set of individuals one has ever encountered. Your hubris extends so far that you think you have nothing to learn from your elders.
Yes, we have betrayed you: by capitulating the world of leadership to bored, attention-deficit children who spout bromides, platitudes and slogans that a rudderless and morally relativistic culture accepts because a significant number of its denizens have become intellectually bankrupt and morally lazy.
The logical endpoint of your ecological vision would see us living in primeval conditions eking out an existence in jungle swamps in which we would regard poisonous snakes and man-eating tigers as our moral equals. We would have to adapt ourselves to nature rather than adapt nature to meet our needs, like all members of civilized civilizations do. Your vision would see us foraging for mushrooms and plants without knowing which were inimical to our digestive systems. Under your system we would swelter from heat, die from rampant plagues and starvation because there will be no air-conditioning units, no sophisticated plumbing and irrigations and sewer systems, no anti-bacterial soap made from animal matter, no pesticides and chemicals to sanitize our food and drinking supplies: just one primordial swamp of human putrefaction.
If civilization is left in the hands of your ecofascist supporters we will be living in grass huts, drinking animal feces infested water, and shrinking in fear from polar bears instead of killing them for food when they attack us.
Greta, living in complete harmony with nature is the death of creativity. Understand this. All great civilizations were forged in the crucibles of proper exploitation of the earth. Those who lived on land with oil and did nothing with it never had a right to it in the first place. Non-usage of God’s resources is the cardinal sin because it results in the un-development of our human capabilities, and makes us indistinguishable from beasts.
Your generation needs to be taught the morality of wealth creation, rather than only parasitically benefiting from it. The only revolution you will lead is one into nihilism and civilization regression. You need to learn about the moral case for fossil fuel. You owe it to yourself to understand how as, Kathleen Hartnett White has detailed, the harnessing of the vast store of concentrated energy in fossil fuels allowed mankind, for the first time in human history, to escape intractable constraints and energy limits that had left all but the very privileged in total poverty and depravity. Before the Industrial Revolution all societies were dependent on a very limited flow of solar energy captured in living plants for subsistence needs such as food, fuel and shelter.
But we, the creative enterprisers, will not go back to the Dark Ages. Your philosophy can be summed up as follows:
What was good for my anthropoid ancestors is good for me. Do not rock the boat, or even build one as that will require cutting down a tree. Do not disrupt nature. Do not dare to see the earth as rightfully belonging to us. We don’t have the right to use our brains in a manner that can transform our needs into a material form. Let’s conveniently forget that production is the application of reason to the problems of survival. Let’s all diminish the grandeur of man and his luminous potential. Crush the Thomas Edisons of this world.
The apocalyptic world vision you hold has been a strip landing for those who have hated progress throughout history. Your apocalyptic predictions have been made for millennia, and, we’re still here. We will still be here long after you’ve grown up and we have forgiven you for skipping classes, thereby lowering the intelligence quotient of an entire generation.
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Jason D. Hill is professor of philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago, and a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. His areas of specialization include ethics, social and political philosophy, American foreign policy and American politics. He is the author of several books, including “We Have Overcome: An Immigrant’s Letter to the American People” (Bombardier Books/Post Hill Press). Follow him on Twitter @JasonDhill6.
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[Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons]
3.
Hillary Clinton’s Latest Book is Another Miserable Failure
Here’s the book Hillary really needs to write.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
What Happened, Hillary’s compendium of excuses and conspiracy theories about losing the election, opened with 100,000 in hardcover sales. Two years later, her latest book racked up a 30,000 debut.
And it got worse from there.
The Book of Gutsy Women, a collection of feminist stories by Hillary and Chelsea Clinton about role models like eco-brat Greta Thunberg, Rachel Carson, and Bella Abzug, remembered respectively for helping revive malaria and ugly hats, is the #1 bestseller in Women’s Studies on Amazon.
That’s about all it has going for it.
Even in its debut, the lazy cash-in fell behind the latest Trump conspiracy tract, Rachel Maddow’s Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth. Even Maddow’s title sounds like something a crazy homeless man might yell at you while waving a cup of his own urine, so it obviously sold more than twice as many copies as Hillary’s feminist tract.
Hillary might have taken a lesson from What Happened, which outsold her own memoirs, that her ex-base is a lot more interested in conspiracy theories about Republicans than feminist heroines. Lefties might claim that they want to read about inspiring women, but they really want to flip through a spittle-flecked rant written on tin-foil paper which blames all their problems on a vast-right wing conspiracy.
How could Hillary, who has been living that way for a generation, not pick up on the obvious?
Only the die-hard Hillaryites, who wear matching pantsuits to her book tours, and eagerly shell out hard cash for the opportunity to smell her chardonnay breath, showed up on Day 1. And there was no Day 2.
The Book of Gutsy Women debuted at No. 3 in NPD’s BookScan list which gathers data from thousands of booksellers. By next week, it was down to No. 10, meanwhile Maddow’s explanation of how the space aliens conspired with the Russians to elect Trump so he could let them construct a base in Wisconsin and perform experiments on local cows continued to reign over the bestseller list.
To add insult to injury, Hillary didn’t just fall below Maddow, but also below Gregg Jarrett’s latest book on Spygate, Witch Hunt: The Story of the Greatest Mass Delusion in American Political History, and Bill O’Reilly’s The United States of Trump: How the President Really Sees America. Unlike Hillary, O’Reilly’s book had a much smoother descent because the word of mouth was better than on Gutsy Women.
The news wasn’t much better from the New York Times, whose best seller list is notorious for being rigged to favor its favorites. Gutsy Women debuted at No. 2, then crashed down No. 8 and then No. 13. The Los Angeles Times list saw Gutsy Women come in at No. 5, crash down to No. 14, and then disappear like a Maddow UFO flying over Moscow with a load of Wisconsin ballots.
Even Chelsea Clinton, who is to literature what Alvin and the Chipmunks is to opera, managed to score No. 1 New York Times bestsellers with her She Persisted collection, whose premise, stories about feminist heroines, is suspiciously similar to Gutsy Women, but couldn’t do it with her mother on board.
Ponder this.
Instead of Bill and Hillary creating a career for Chelsea based on nepotism, Hillary is actually weighing Chelsea down. In 2017, Chelsea Clinton’s She Persisted: 13 American Women Who Changed the World was a No. 1 New York Times bestseller. Take that same formula, add Hillary, and sales actually go down.
The next time Hillary wants to co-write a book with Chelsea, the former Pets.com sock puppet interviewer will have to hold an uncomfortable conversation about cutting her mother loose.
It’s either that or watch Hillary kill her new hobby of writing listicle books like she killed pantsuits, compulsive lying, and Vince Foster. Bill Clinton is already remembered, not as a two-term president, but as the other half of an unlikable two-time failed presidential candidate.
After wrecking Bill’s legacy, Hillary can finish the job by wrecking her daughter’s writing career.
Fast forward to the end of October and Gutsy Women had been buried by everything from two cookbooks, Food: What the Heck Should I Cook? and The Pioneer Woman Cooks, an Elton John biography, and Newt Gingrich’s Trump vs. China.
Maybe Hillary should have taken a smoke signal from Elizabeth Warren and written a cookbook?
“Destined to be a classic in the tradition of Profiles in Courage, The Book of Virtues and We Should All Be Feminists,” Jonathan Karp, the President of Simon and Schuster, had declared.
Two of these things are not like the other. And none of them are like The Book of Gutsy Women which is destined to be a classic the way that one of its authors was destined to be the President of the United States. What it is destined for is remainder bins, the shelves of 99 cent stores, and the town dump.
Much like its authoress.
Simon and Schuster had invested a whole lot of money in Hillary Inc. It paid her a record $14 million advance for Hard Choices, her second memoir, a flop, it paid her $8 million for her first memoir, Living History, it suffered through It Takes a Village and Dear Socks, and got back into bed with her for what was supposed to be a book of personal essays, and instead The Book of Gutsy Women happened.
And that’s all she wrote. Literally.
“For the past 21 years, the Gallup survey has ranked Hillary Rodham Clinton as the most admired woman in the world, and there are at least 65 million people in the United States who agree,” Karp had claimed. “We think a lot of them are going to want to hear her stories.”
Not so much.
Yes, the Gallup survey does claim that 65 million people admire Hillary Clinton. What it fails to mention is that they’re all located in a single Cook County cemetery. And none of them buy books because there isn’t a single Barnes and Noble bookstore that they can reach and return from before the sun rises.
The last time reality didn’t accord with Hillary’s polling, she blamed an international conspiracy. Now that her latest book sold fewer copies than SpongeBob Goes to the Doctor, it’ll have to be interstellar.
But the reality is that nobody likes Hillary. The only time people bought her books was when they expected her to have something to say. Living History sold big because everyone was waiting for her to dish on her husband’s affair. What Happened did very well because readers were waiting for her reaction to losing the election. There’s a winning formula here that Hillary ought to learn from.
Hillary’s books sell really well after she’s involved in a disaster, whether it’s her husband cheating on her, or losing an election. If she wants another bestseller, she needs a huge disaster to write about.
Bill Clinton cheating on her again won’t surprise anyone. And no one will let her run for president again.
That just leaves an extensive confession of her crimes. Everything from Whitewater to the Steele Dossier. In one book. It’ll outsell Living History and What Happened combined. She could even call it, What Really Happened. Unfortunately, the only place for her to go afterward would be a 6 by 8-foot cell.
But just think how many copies her fourth memoir about life in prison would sell.
4.
Turkey: Arming Genocide of Christians in Nigeria?
Erdogan’s support for jihadis appears to go far beyond ISIS.
This article was first published by the Gatestone Institute. Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Concerning Turkey’s increasingly suspect role in supporting jihadis — most recently, ISIS’s slain leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was found hiding in Syria’s “last refuge” for jihadi rebels, just three miles from Turkey’s border — one of the least mentioned is Turkey’s apparent alliance with the “other” ISIS, that in Nigeria, Boko Haram.
During a recent episode of bi’l waraqa wa’l qalam (“With Paper and Pen”), an Egyptian news program that airs on TenTV, its host, Nasha’t al-Deyhi, said:
Leaked information confirms that Turkey is a terrorist state; it supports terrorists — including with weapons. It supports terrorists with weapons. This time, however, not in Syria … Today’s leak confirms without doubt that Erdogan, his state, his government, and his party are transferring weapons from Turkey to — this is a shock, to where you may ask — to Nigeria; and to whom? — to the Boko Haram organization.
He then played an intercepted audio of what he said were Mustafa Varank (currently Turkey’s Minister of Industry and Technology) and Mehmet Karatas (a manager at the partly state-owned Turkish Airlines).
The gist of their brief conversation in Turkish, according to the Arabic transcript, is that weapons were being transferred from Turkey to Nigeria — and that there was a concern that the weapons might kill not just Christians but Muslims.
(This audio clip would seem to be the same leaked recording that was first reported by international media outlets in 2014. Varank served as Senior Advisor to Recep Tayyip Erdogan between 2011 and 2018.)
According to al-Deyhi, the recording is proof positive that Turkey is the one supplying Boko Haram with its weapons — including sophisticated weapons — the source of which has long puzzled international observers. He also offered to send the audio with translations to the Nigerian government, and apparently anyone else interested.
Boko Haram is an Islamist terrorist organization centered in Nigeria and spreading throughout west Africa. It has long engaged in the sorts of atrocities that ISIS is known for — mass slaughter, church bombings, kidnapping, rape, forced conversion — years before ISIS was even founded. As Nigeria is roughly half Christian and half Muslim, Boko Haram’s primary target has been Christians. Boko Haram and other Muslims — particularly the Fulani tribesmen, whose sophisticated armaments have also puzzled Western observers — have been slaughtering Christians to the point of genocide.
As for the issue of distinguishing between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria, Islamic law makes clear that Muslims, when prosecuting the jihad, should be careful not to kill fellow Muslims. For instance, according to a 2012 report, after Boko Haram stormed a college in Nigeria, they “separated the Christian students from the Muslim students, addressed each victim by name, questioned them, and then proceeded to shoot them or slit their throat,” killing up to 30 Christians.
Some Nigerian activists have already acted on this information by bringing it to the attention of U.S. lawmakers. According to an October 11, 2019 Nigerian news report by Steve Oko:
A US-based lawyer and rights activist, Emmanuel Ogebe, has filed a petition to the United States of America over alleged arms supply to Boko Haram terrorist organisation by Turkey.
According to Ogebe, President Edorgan [sic] of Turkey is one of those supplying Boko Haram with arms.
In a petition to the US Congress wired via a US Congress man [sic], Chris Smith, the lawyer alleged that a Turkish aircraft was directed to airlift arms to Nigeria for Boko Haram.
According to the petition made available to Wawa News Global, discussions between the airline manager and government officials were intercepted by Egyptian Intelligence.
In his letter to Congressman Smith, Ogebe writes:
An Egyptian TV program has again drawn attention to a concern I raised in testifying before your committee of evidence that Turkish Airlines surreptitiously flies armament into Nigeria. As a business operating in the US, I once again urge for proper scrutiny, investigation and sanctions as necessary. As we approach the sixth anniversary of the FTO [foreign terrorist organization] designation of Boko Haram, it is important that those sanctions be enforced especially as Turkey’s current onslaught on the Kurds could potentially recalibrate ISIS which already has a West African phalanx in Nigeria.
Erdogan has turned “Turkey into a safe haven for Hamas terrorists and a financial center for funneling money to subsidize terror attacks,” Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, recently said; “While he [Erdogan] was busy murdering those who have helped keep the world safe from the threat of ISIS, he allowed ISIS members to break out of prison and subject the world to future attacks.”
Worse, it appears that Erdogan’s sponsorship of terrorism may not be limited to neighboring Middle Eastern nations; it appears to have reached deep into Africa. A serious investigation with possible sanctions is in order.
Raymond Ibrahim, author of the new book, Sword and Scimitar, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and a Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
5.
Democrats, Tyranny, and Sophistry
Something more ancient and dangerous is going on than just the usual Democrat double standards.
Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
The Democrats are furiously busy with preemptive damage control of the ongoing investigation by U.S. Attorney John Durham. As well they should. This and other investigations of the origins of alleged Russian electoral interference has morphed into a criminal probe that likely will implicate members of the Obama administration’s FBI, DOJ, and CIA, and tear off the veil of misdirection that the Democrats and their lackeys in the media have draped over the dirty tricks they employed during the 2016 campaign and Trump’s first years in office. If this happens, the Democrats’ equally dicey attempts to impeach the president will crumble.
Once again, we are being subjected to progressive double standards and “projection” of their own sins onto others. But something more ancient and dangerous is going on: The links between tyranny and sophistry.
With the hoax of Trump’s collusion with Russia to wound his rival Hillary Clinton debunked by the Dems’ hand-picked special prosecutor and his team of partisan Democrats, California Democrat Representative Adam Schiff has been attacking Durham and AG William Barr. Schiff’s joint statement with Jerry Nadler (D. NY), his accomplice in the House impeachment show-trial, is a masterpiece of jaw-dropping hypocrisy:
These reports, if true, raise profound new concerns that the Department of Justice under AG Barr has lost its independence and become a vehicle for President Trump’s political revenge. If the Department of Justice may be used as a tool of political retribution, or to help the President with a political narrative for the next election, the rule of law will suffer new and irreparable damage.
The glaring double-standard––this description more accurately fits Obama’s self-described “wingman,” AG Eric Holder, more than AG Barr–– is laid out in a Wall Street Journal editorial:
Democrats know that the Hillary Clinton campaign paid Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on Mr. Trump, and Fusion hired former British spook Christopher Steele, who compiled a dossier of allegations about Mr. Trump from Russian sources that turned out to be false. Worse, Fusion funneled the dossier to the FBI, which used it to persuade the secret FISA court to issue a warrant to eavesdrop on Trump official Carter Page. Democrats now want to discredit any attempt to hold people accountable if crimes were committed as part of this extraordinary dirty trick.
Moreover, as the Journal further points out, even if the charge that Trump demanded from the Ukrainian president an investigation of Joe Biden and his son in exchange for foreign aid is true, which it isn’t, it doesn’t compare to the Democrats’ very real Russian collusion. In Trump’s alleged attempt, he failed and the aid reached Ukraine even though there was no investigation. In contrast, the Democrats succeeded: “Russian disinformation was used by America’s premier law enforcement agency to justify investigating an American presidential campaign.” That “dirty trick” makes Watergate look like a jaywalking infraction.
How do we explain this shameless behavior of the Dems? A lot of smart people are characterizing the Democrats’ behavior as “projection” which according to Psychology Today, “is most commonly used to describe defensive projection—attributing one’s own unacceptable urges to another. The concept emerged from Sigmund Freud’s work in the 1890s.” In other words, a subconscious defense mechanism for people who can’t consciously acknowledge their own bad behavior.
But there’s nothing subconscious about what the progressives are doing, and telescopic psychologizing is notoriously unreliable, not to mention it lets offenders off the hook for what they say. If speech is conscious, it’s not projection, it’s lying. The more likely explanation is that Dems are following the ancient roadmap for reducing a democracy to tyranny: using sophistical rhetoric to gull the masses into giving an elite power outside the normal political protocols.
Plato, Aristotle, and Polybius laid out the conditions by which a democracy degenerates into tyranny. An ambitious man or faction, dissatisfied with the normal political processes for obtaining and using power, will win over the masses by redistributing property from the rich to the poor. Other instrument of this process are violence and sophistical rhetoric: The public speeches made during deliberations over policy. Once in power, a tyrant will concentrate more and more power in his and his faction’s hands, bringing about a regime based on violence and injustice.
For a century we have been witnessing a slow-motion, “soft” version of this process. Starting with progressive Woodrow Wilson, the Federal government has grown ever larger and more intrusive, concentrating power in federal agencies at the expense of the states, local government, civil society, families, and individuals. Obama’s presidency was the next giant step down the road to tyranny, his policies, especially Obamacare, marking an advance in centralized, concentrated power.
The ancient tyrant used violence to consolidate his power; our “soft despots,” as de Tocqueville called them, use federal investigative agencies and the instruments of political accountability to attack their enemies. Over the last three years we watched the FBI, DOJ, and CIA manipulate and abuse their powers to engineer the appointment of a Special Prosecutor armed with investigative and subpoena powers. Their aim was to destroy politically the duly elected president. Along the way they skirted and violated the law, just as ancient tyrants ignored the city-state’s procedures and protocols for using power.
When the Mueller investigation failed and the Democrats took back the House of Representatives, they then abused their oversight committee powers to lay the foundation for bringing impeachment charges. Next the traditional protocols of impeachment established in the cases of Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton have been abandoned. Rather than the House voting for articles of impeachment, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her Luca Brasi Adam Schiff have used secret hearings and engineered anonymous “whistleblower” complaints based on second-hand information and mere personal opinion. I suppose it’s a civilizational advance that today our wannabe tyrants use procedure rather than the brutal violence the tyrants of old employed.
Back then, another important tool for aggrandizing power was rhetoric. A persistent theme in Athenian literature of the fifth-century B.C. is the dangers of public speeches made by orators trained in the skills of rhetoric by sophists. The main complaint, copiously documented in philosophy and literature, is that the “art of persuasion,” as Aristotle called political oratory, “makes the worse argument the better.” Indeed, sophists had exercises called dissoi logoi that argued both sides of a question. Sophistical rhetoric, then, turns the false, the unjust, and the bad into the true, the just, and the good by manipulating the citizens’ emotions, self-interest, and factional passions. Many Athenians, especially those opposed to the democracy, warned of the dangers of sophistical oratory. For example, Euripides’ Medea, who has been abandoned by Jason for a more politically useful bride, becomes enraged when Jason to her face tries to argue that his betrayal will benefit Medea: “The plausible speaker,” she tells Jason, “who is a villain deserves the greatest punishment.”
The dangers of being “slaves to the ear,” as Thucydides’ Cleon describes those who gape at a clever speaker, have been exponentially multiplied in our times. Today we are saturated with information and images 24/7, 365; we are now “slaves to the eye” as well as “slaves to the ear,” for the opportunities for sophistical rhetoric on social media, cable news, and twitter are unlimited, their effects magnified by the power of dramatic images. This explains the pronouncements coming from the House Democrats, echoed by their factotums in the media that quote and film them.
Take their complaints, for example, about Trump’s alleged “quid pro quo” that he imposed on the Ukrainians. Yet Dems are silent about Joe Biden’s bragging on video about an actual quid pro quo: His threat to withhold foreign aid until a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating the company that was paying Biden’s son $50-80 grand a month was fired. This hypocrisy exposes perfectly the essence of sophistry, which is “the big lie,” one people believe despite its transparent falsity. And of course, the whole “Russia collusion” and “interference in our election” crimes were in fact perpetrated not by Trump and the RNC, but by Hillary Clinton and the DNC, with ample help from allegedly non-partisan federal agencies.
Meanwhile, the House’s ongoing procedures for impeachment reek of Soviet-era show-trials, in which the accused cannot confront his accusers and cross-examined them––a model pioneered during the Obama era in our colleges and universities with their star chambers that tried accused sexual assaulter. This injustice was corrected by Trump and his Secretary of Education Betsy De Voss. Does anyone think a President Warren or President Biden will not turn back the clock to that ancient judicial instrument of tyranny?
For true believers like the bipartisan NeverTrumpers, such blatant falsehoods and unjust procedures are irrelevant as long as they serve to overthrow Trump’s administration, either by a successful impeachment, or by damaging the president enough that he is defeated in 2020. In other words, regime change, the overthrow of a legally elected president, and the disenfranchising of his 63 million supporters. The more long-term cost, of course, will be a quantum leap in the century-long progressive aim of changing our Constitutional republic into a tyrannical technocracy.
If that sounds extreme, just listen to the Democrat’s proclaimed policy goals: socialized medicine, gutting the First and Second Amendments, ceding more national sovereignty to the global technocratic elite, and appropriating through ruinous taxation more of the country’s wealth to finance more redistributionist schemes for their clients. Meanwhile, they shrug off the violence and verbal attacks on Republicans by Antifa and other goons, or, like Representative Maxine Waters, they even encourage them.
If we allow this coup to happen, we will have proved de Tocqueville a prophet by creating a tyranny “more extensive and more mild [than ancient tyranny],” one that “would degrade men without tormenting him.”
6.
The Google Archipelago
Imprisoned in Big Digital’s cyberspace gulag.
Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Back in January, 2018, I interviewed New York University professor Michael Rectenwald for FrontPage Mag (here) about his experience being outed as “the Deplorable Prof,” the man behind an anonymous Twitter account which he used to criticize the “anti-education and anti-intellectual” social justice ideology of his fellow leftist academics. The subsequent shunning and harassment he endured from his colleagues and the NYU administration drove Rectenwald to declare himself done with the Left, and he later published a book about it titled Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and its Postmodern Parentage (which I reviewed for FrontPage Mag here). The book is a must-read for understanding the intellectual collapse of the American university under the weight of a totalitarian ideology.
Now the prolific Rectenwald has published another short but vital work, Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom from New English Review Press. In it he argues that what he calls the “Big Digital” technologies and their principals like Google represent a new form of corporate state power and leftist authoritarianism. The once-and-future Deplorable Prof agreed to answer a few questions about this dangerous development.
Mark Tapson: Michael, thanks for taking time out for another interview. In Springtime for Snowflakes you exposed and combatted social justice totalitarians. How does your new book Google Archipelago follow from and expand upon the former one? What insights and/or experiences took you in that direction?
Michael Rectenwald: Hi Mark. Thanks very much for conducting this interview. I’m particularly grateful that you’ve asked me, again, to write out my answers, because I believe that I’m a much better writer than speaker.
Google Archipelago (hereafter GA) traces the metastasis of social ideology into the digital realm. It may be regarded as the second in a series of installments on social justice, a series that I began in Springtime for Snowflakes, and which I may continue in a third book, thus completing a trilogy.
The book represents a study of the vastly extended and magnified manifestation of the leftist authoritarian-totalitarian ideology as it expands into cyberspace, extends throughout the cyber-social body, and penetrates the deepest recesses of social and political life. In GA, I connect Big Digital’s politics with its technologies. I argue and demonstrate that the technologies are intrinsically leftist and authoritarian.
For reasons I give in the book, the only way to make sense of the politics of such organizations as Google, Facebook, Twitter, et al and how this politics is reflected in its technologies is to see Big Digital as the leading edge of an economic and governmental conglomeration that aims to monopolize human life on a global scale. Big Digital’s political ambition is to establish a two-tiered system consisting of global corporate-cum-state monopolies on top, with “actually-existing socialism” for everyone else. I call this two-tiered system “corporate socialism,” which I choose over the term “techno-feudalism,” used by others. I have very good reasons for adopting the name corporate socialism rather than techno-feudalism, not the least of which is the penchant of the monopolists for using socialist rhetoric and ideology in their attempts to bring the two-tiered system into existence. Corporate socialism aims to arrive at a singular, one-world state, with vast globalist monopolies controlling production. These monopolies would be paralleled by a socialism or equality of reduced expectations for everyone else. Unwary dupes like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez serve corporate socialists by habituating the masses to this state of affairs. The objectives of corporate socialism are ushered in under the guise of an economic and social equality, an equality of reduced expectations for the vast majority. The corporate socialists don’t need equality; equality pertains strictly to the majority deemed destined to live under the reduced expectations of “actually-existing socialism” on the ground.
Ultimately, Big Digital attempts to replace reality with a digital simulation or simulations, simulacra posing as substitutes for reality—to introduce simulated and faux realities or simulacra that displace and replace the real. Forget fake news. Try fake reality.
MT: The title of your book obviously echoes Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. How are the social media of today, what you call Big Digital, imprisoning us in a sort of gulag of simulated realities?
MR: Yes, the allusion to Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago is blatant and quite deliberate. In the most basic rendering, the Google Archipelago simply represents a digital version of the Gulag Archipelago. Just as the Gulag Archipelago was a penal and surveillance system for the censorship, control, disciplining, and disappearing of dissidents, so too does the Google Archipelago undertake the same functions, only digitally. The Google Archipelago obviously represents a more technocratic, less corporal, and more sanitized set of apparatuses for its tyranny over the masses. But it is no less insidious for these differences. Indeed, it may be more insidious because it is subtler and more surreptitious. It leaves fewer if any traces, requires less force, and may assume greater deniability. While disappearing the denizens of the Soviet Union could be messy and bloody, digital disappearances or deletions are much easier to undertake and leave fewer if any traces. It is easier to delete digital subjects than it is to delete analog ones.
MT: Your new book is loaded with intriguing, challenging concepts. Can you briefly explain, for example, what “Digital Maoism” and “Google Marxism” are?
MR: I adopt the term “Digital Maoism” from Jaron Lanier, although I expand its meaning and significance considerably. As I define it, Digital Maoism refers to the ways in which the digital realm is used to deliberately encourage the formation of rabid digital Red Guards, the SJW bots that swarm around and attack dissenters en masse. But the term also refers to the aspect of that the digital realm that intrinsically lends itself to collectivism, as digital representations, including digital representations of people, ideas and beliefs, are sorted into bundles of zeros and ones by algorithms. Algorithmic “thinking” is intrinsically collectivizing. Thus, the digital tends toward the agglomeration and collectivization of digital subjects and ideologies and the simple sorting of groups and ideologies into zeros and ones, or “good” and “bad.” Hashtags also represent an example of how digitized human bots or people wielding Twitter effigies agglomerate or collectivize around topics, as well as around those engaging said topics. Hashtags tend to bundle digital subjects into the notoriously perfervid and fanatical Red Guard-like Twitter swarms that attack dissidents like pack animals. Other means serve to agglomerate Facebook fascists. (As readers of Frontpage Mag know, fascism is by definition a collectivist political ideology.)
Google Marxism is both the socio-political and economic structure of technocratic corporate socialism and the primary ideological formation that supports said socio-political and economic structure. I derive the term from George Gilder, but expand its meaning considerably.
MT: For an academic with such a literary background, you seem to have no traditionalist preference for books. Your recent work even erases the boundary between books and social media; for example, you devote an appendix of your book, as you did in Springtime for Snowflakes, to your best Facebook statuses. And at one point in Google Archipelago you even blur the lines between nonfiction and story. Why did you choose such unconventional techniques to make your argument?
MR: In GA, I weave fictional interludes and social media posts into the seams and hems of argumentative prose in order to show how the digital realm destabilizes reality. I mean to have the text perform effects of the reality subversion that it describes. I mean to intentionally disorient the reader, to render for the reader experiences of the reality disruption that I see produced in cyberspace, to blur the lines between reality and fiction by interposing fictional material within a “real” text that describes the disruption of reality by fiction. I like to think that I invented a new genre that may be called “historical-science-fiction-as-cyberpunk-within-nonfiction.” I don’t know whether it works. I do know that I particularly enjoyed writing the fictional interludes.
MT: You conclude by saying that the 21st century wants to reduce us to zeroes and ones – maybe even just zeroes – and that all of us need a metaphysics of truth to counter the false realities of the “New Knowledge.” What is one way each of us can pursue a metaphysics of truth and do something about this encroaching totalitarianism?
MR: As I suggest in the book’s conclusion, the main way to counter the false reality of “New Knowledge,” or the false narratives of encroaching totalitarianism, as I see it, is to pose more compelling because-more-faithful-to-the truth narratives, narratives bent toward truth and against that the attempted coup of reality by the narratives of/about simulated realities.
The narrative and normative project that I propose for countering the dominant narratives of cyberspace runs parallel to and accords well with the project for truth that President Trump is undertaking as he attempts to thwart the narratives of simulated reality that the contemporary left is propagating in the political sphere proper.
Both projects should counter the faux, simulated realities propagated in mainstream and dominant digital media narratives, narratives of/about simulations that are supposedly narratives of the real. Both would counter the new (leftist) McCarthyism, only in different registers—although the new (leftist) McCarthyism is actually a sham or simulacrum, whereas the original McCarthyism was legitimate, although deemed a sham or simulacrum by the sham-makers themselves, those subverted by the very political ideology whose impact they deemed grossly overblown. The original McCarthyism was not insane or delusional but instead failed only by misunderstanding the nature, while underestimating the depth and reach, of communist ideological subversion, a subversion supposedly analogous to but really entirely different from the supposed subversion perpetuated by Trump. Cries of “Russian bots” “collusion,” and Ukrainian “quid pro quos” are parts of a narrative of/about simulated realities. Cries of communism were a part of a true narrative that was deemed false by none other than those under the ideology in question.
Both projects, the one undertaken to counter the so-called New Knowledge of Big Digital Delusion, which is instead a new nescience, a lack of knowledge or worse, and the one to counter the simulacrum of leftism in the political sphere proper, must insist on a metaphysics and narrativity of truth, one that nevertheless will be deemed a narrative of/about a simulation by those actually responsible for producing narratives of/about simulations.
MT: Thanks again, Michael. To dive into Michael Rectenwald’s mind-bending newest work, click here.
Warning on A Warning
Be on the lookout for an axe to grind.
As Fox News reports, the Justice Department is demanding information on the anonymous Trump administration official allegedly behind the September 5, 2018, New York Times oped headlined, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” The same official is reportedly the author of A Warning, billed as “an unprecedented behind-the-scenes portrait of the Trump presidency from the anonymous senior official whose first words of warning about the president rocked the nation’s capital.”
The DOJ wants to know if the author has legal obligations, non-disclosure agreements and so forth, but the DOJ attempt may be unnecessary. Fox News doubts whether the official is still in the administration but it is possible the author boasts White House experience during the previous administration.
The New York Times publisher of the oped prequel, was the employer of the Stalinist Walter Duranty, who long before Adam Schiff wrote fake stories about Ukraine. More recently, the Times was also home to faker Jayson Blair, who perpetrated “frequent acts of journalistic fraud.” This same newspaper, the Dead Sea Scrolls of fake news, proclaimed red diaper baby David Axelrod “Obama’s narrator.”
In the 2017 Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, the official biography by Pulitzer Prize winner David Garrow, Axelrod does not appear until page 820. After more than 1,000 pages, Garrow cites an unidentified reporter who explains “The whole Obama narrative is built around this narrative that Obama and David Axelrod built, and, like all stories, it’s not entirely true.” That fits the way Axelrod sees himself.
“I felt more comfortable, and proficient at, telling stories than I did creating the ads that were state-of-the-art in Washington,” Axelrod revealed in his 2015 Believer. “I knew Barack was an exceptional writer,” he writes, though the future president had no record of publication. True to form, Axelrod’s style is evident in Dreams from My Father, which David Garrow proclaimed a “historical novel,” and the author a “composite character.”
What animated The Audacity of Hope, Axelrod writes, “were stories written with the narrative skill of a gifted novelist. It occurred to me, in reading the manuscript, that Obama approached every encounter as a participant and an observer.” So in more ways than one, Axelrod duly shows up in that story. “Axe,” as the president called him, kept rather quiet after David Garrow proclaimed Dreams from My Father to be fictional. At that point, the narrator shifted into damage control.
In 2018, Iran deal promoter Ben Rhodes came out with The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House. Rhodes reported to David Axelrod, “a brilliant strategist who weighed in on every issue.” According to Rhodes, the president’s “first memoir, Dreams from My Father, is a kind of Rosetta Stone to Obama’s life and world view.” Rhodes claims he reread it “a dozen times” but never notes that official biographer David Garrow pronounced the book a work of fiction. Rhodes effectively airbrushes Rising Star out of existence.
Also in 2018, former First Lady Michelle Obama, like her husband never known as a writer, came out with Becoming. Halfway through this account readers meet David Axelrod, who would “lead the messaging and media for Barack.” True to form, Axelrod’s fingerprints are all over this account, which charges that questions about POTUS 44’s authenticity are “deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks” and posed a danger to the family. This is a version of Axelrod’s charge that anyone less that worshipful of POTUS 44 must be a racist.
As Carol Feisenthal recalled in Chicago Magazine, “In 2009, Axelrod followed Obama to the White House where he was given an office near the ‘Oval’ and unusual access to the rookie president.” The narrator handled the messaging, signed off on everything, and has insider knowledge of how the White House works. With the “narrative skill of a gifted novelist,” the proficient storyteller is the ideal candidate for an anonymous hit job on President Trump, who spoiled POTUS 44’s plan to appoint his own successor and take out Trump. As FBI coup plotters Strzok and Page revealed, the president “wants to know everything we are doing.”
As David Garrow’s Rising Star reveals, the narrative Obama and David Axelrod built back in the 1990s is “not entirely true.” Like Dreams from My Father, A Warning may recount actual events and people but is best regarded as complete fiction.
“Axe” never uses a word when a paragraph will do, so look for the elephantine style, unctuous dialogue, and characters with one name only. Look also for what Axelrod and other POTUS 44 acolytes say about the account. Whatever Axelrod’s contribution, A Warning, will be entirely predictable, totally understandable, and completely without significance, with one exception.
A Warning can also be seen as an example of the left projecting onto others the very thing they are doing. The 2018 New York Times oped claimed that anyone who works with Trump “knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.” Readers may wonder what first principles were in play when POTUS 44 told the American people they could keep their health plan, called the Fort Hood terrorist mass murder “workplace violence,” and shipped billions in cash to Iran.
A Warning is due for release on November 19. Look for the movie version in the run-up to the 2020 election.
8.
The Socialists vs. Billionaires Democrat Primary
Bloomberg joining the primaries from hell will make them even worse.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Joe Biden is running out of money.
He blew too much cash on private jets while blowing away debating opponents with his confused mumbling and bleeding eye. Now Joe’s down to the single digit millions, while Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are in the double millions. Unless Joe can wangle a job on the board of a corrupt Ukrainian gas company, he’s not going to be able to afford private jets or a political campaign.
Kamala Harris is cutting staff and scaling back her campaign. Julian Castro is supporting his staff as they look for new jobs in a successful campaign. Too bad there aren’t many of those left. The only candidates still polling as if they’re in the running are Biden, Warren, Sanders, and Buttigieg, in a distant fourth place, buoyed by donations from vegan restaurateurs who don’t care if he actually wins or not.
Between them, Sanders and Warren command about 40% of the Democrat vote. Biden’s dying campaign has been shrinking from a third to around a quarter. And it’s largely dependent on black voters associating him with Obama. A project that’s gotten zero help from the actual Obama.
It’s time for the one thing the Dem dogfight desperately needs. More terrible candidates.
As money becomes the central factor, it’s the candidates with a fanatical following, the two radical socialists, Warren and Sanders, and the candidates with money to burn, who can stay in the race.
Tom Steyer, an eco-billionaire, bought his way into the primary, onto the debate stage, and was even accused of trying to buy endorsements. He’s blown through $47 million without batting an eye. With $1.6 billion to play with, Tom can keep this up a whole lot longer than Joe Biden can stay awake.
And, just to make matters more interesting, Michael Bloomberg appears to be jumping into the race. The former New York City mayor is rich enough to outspend Steyer 25 to 1. One of his political advisors had warned last time around that he had spent $100 million just to win reelection in New York City. Democrat apparatchiks have been suggesting that he was ready to spend $500 million on this election.
A bidding war between Bloomberg and Steyer for Democrat voters is just the thing to kick the economy into even higher gear and ensure President Trump wins reelection.
Steyer and Bloomberg can outspend and outlast Biden and all the other candidates who aren’t militant socialists glomming off the tsunami of socialist cash flowing through ActBlue to anyone willing to call for eliminating private health care and sending everyone who misuses transgender pronouns to a gulag.
And that could turn the primaries into a grueling battle between the millionaire socialists, who want to take away everyone’s health insurance, and the eco-billionaires, who want to make everyone eat gruel.
The socialists who are merely millionaires, (Warren’s net worth is $12 million while Bernie recently joined the 1%), will attack the billionaires as pernicious examples of income inequality. Why should some people have billions while others have mere millions to spend on their three homes?
Class warfare is going to be an uphill battle when your qualification to be one of The International’s “wretched of the earth” is not being able to afford to fly private jets outside of a presidential campaign.
But that won’t stop Warren and Sanders from claiming to be members of the working class even though the latter has never worked a day in his life and the former was paid six figures to teach a single class.
At Harvard.
If that’s the working class, what the hell is the average American slaving away at a 9 to 5 job?
On the other side of the great class divide between seven figures and ten figures, Steyer and Bloomberg are duplicative candidates. Both are old billionaires obsessed with environmentalism while projecting all the human warmth of Greta Thunberg in her native Swedish habitat. Aside from their mutual platform of banning all forms of energy that don’t depend on sunny days or windy nights, Bloomberg is also obsessed with banning sodas, salt and guns, while Steyer is fixated on impeaching Trump.
Neither is a good fit for inheriting Biden’s base of black voters. But then neither are Warren and Sanders.
If Biden’s campaign collapses, black voters would have to choose between four other old white people they don’t like, and Buttigieg, a candidate who consistently pulls in fewer black voters than the KKK.
That’s going to be a problem because black voters are a huge part of the Democrat base.
If the Dems go in to 2020 without a presidential candidate who stirs passion or at least some enthusiasm among black voters, they might as well just give up now and fly their private jets into the Gulf of Mexico.
And can you imagine anything more likely to stir interest among black voters than Bloomberg, Sanders, Warren, and Steyer, arguing over which of them is more oppressed on account of having less millions?
The good news for the socialists is that Bloomberg and Steyer’s obsession with destroying human civilization to save the planet is likely to turn off black voters even more than Sanders and Warren turning every debate into a Marxist faculty meeting at some obscure New England college.
Ecology is not a selling point for black voters.
On the other hand, Bloomberg won elections in a minority city by buying support on a scale and with a directness that would stagger even Steyer. His allies included the likes of Lenora Fulani, an anti-Semitic black nationalist associated with an alleged Marxist cult. The support of black leaders and black voters is not the same thing. That’s what Hillary Clinton found out twice the hard way. And it may not matter.
Black voters don’t have to ‘blexit’ their way to Trump. They just have to shrug. That happened in 2016.
And Hillary, unlike Warren, actually had an extensive pipeline to black voters. She also had Bill, a guy who, like Biden, could campaign in the black community as a natural. If Biden goes, the only remaining turnout hope will be mobilizing angry lefty middle class suburbanites on an unprecedented scale. And it’s one thing to do that in local and midterm elections. And a very different thing to do it nationwide.
President Trump understood that Biden and Warren were the weak points in the Dem 2020 lineup.
Biden’s fall and Warren’s rise set off a civil war between rich and super-rich Democrats, between socialists and Wall Street, and that conflict between the socialists and billionaires could cripple them.
The financial fallout of that conflict opened the door for Bloomberg’s seeming quixotic bid. It’s gotten Bill Gates to talk about withholding his money. And he’s not alone. In a primary battle between unlikable socialist millionaires and eco-billionaires, the only winners will be the campaign consultants and Trump.
9.
Al-Baghdadi and Trump’s Syrian Chessboard
The Al-Baghdadi assassination and related events demonstrate that Trump is not flying blind in Syria.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s many critics insist he has no idea what he is doing in Syria. The assassination of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi over the weekend by US Special Forces showed this criticism is misplaced. Trump has a very good idea of what he is doing in Syria, not only regarding ISIS, but regarding the diverse competing actors on the ground.
Regarding ISIS, the obvious lesson of the Baghdadi raid is that Trump’s critics’ claim that his withdrawal of US forces from Syria’s border with Turkey meant that he was going to allow ISIS to regenerate was utterly baseless.
Trump fundamentally changed the US’s counter-terror fighting doctrine, particularly as it relates to psychological warfare against jihadists.
The raid did more than that. Baghdadi’s assassination, and Trump’s discussion of the mass murderer’s death showed that Trump has not merely maintained faith with the fight against ISIS and its allied jihadist groups. He has fundamentally changed the US’s counter-terror fighting doctrine, particularly as it relates to psychological warfare against jihadists.
Following the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration initiated a public diplomacy campaign in the Arab-Islamic world. Rather than attack and undermine the jihadist doctrine that insists that it is the religious duty of Muslims to fight with the aim of conquering the non-Muslim world and to establish a global Islamic empire or caliphate, the Bush strategy was to ignore the jihad in the hopes of appeasing its adherents. The basic line of the Bush administration’s public diplomacy campaign was to embrace the mantra that Islam is peace, and assert that the US loves Islam because the US seeks peace.
Along these lines, in 2005, then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice prohibited the State Department, FBI and US intelligence agencies from using “controversial” terms like “radical Islam,” “jihad” and “radical Islam” in official documents.
The Obama administration took the Bush administration’s obsequious approach to strategic communications several steps further. President Barack Obama and his advisors went out of their way to express sympathy for the “Islamic world.”
The Obama administration supported the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood against Egypt’s long-serving president and US ally Hosni Mubarak and backed Mubarak’s overthrow with the full knowledge that the only force powerful enough to replace him was the Muslim Brotherhood.
Trump unceremoniously abandoned his predecessors’ strategy of sucking up to jihadists.
As for the Shiite jihadists, Obama’s refusal to support the pro-democracy protesters in Iran’s attempted Green Revolution in 2009 placed the US firmly on the side of the jihadist, imperialist regime of the ayatollahs and against the Iranian people.
In short, Obama took Bush’s rhetoric of appeasement and turned it into America’s actual policy.
The Bush-Obama sycophancy won the US no good will. Al Qaeda, which led the insurgency against US forces in Iraq with Iranian and Syrian support was not moved to diminish its aggression and hatred of the US due to the administration’s efforts.
It was during the Obama years that ISIS built its caliphate on a third of the Iraqi-Syrian landmass and opened slave markets and launched a mass campaign of filmed beheadings in the name of Islam.
In his announcement of Baghdadi’s death on Sunday, Trump unceremoniously abandoned his predecessors’ strategy of sucking up to jihadists. Unlike Obama, who went to great lengths to talk about the respect US forces who killed Osama bin Laden accorded the terrorist mass-murderer’s body, “in accordance with Islamic practice,” Trump mocked Baghdadi, the murdering, raping, slaving “caliph.”
Baghdadi, Trump said, died “like a dog, like a coward.”
Baghdadi died, Trump said, “whimpering and crying.”
Trump posted a picture on his Twitter page of the Delta Force combat dog who brought about Baghdadi’s death by chasing him into a tunnel under his compound and provoking him to set off the explosive belt he was wearing, and kill himself and the two children who were with him.
ISIS terrorists have richly proven they require no provocation to commit mass murder.
Trump later described the animal who killed Allah’s self-appointed representative on earth as “Our ‘K-9,’ as they call it. I call it a dog. A beautiful dog – a talented dog.”
Obama administration officials angrily condemned Trump’s remarks. For instance, former CIA deputy director Mike Morell said he was “bothered” by Trump’s “locker room talk,” which he said, “inspire[s] other people” to conduct revenge attacks.
His colleague, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff retired admiral James Winnefeld said that Trump’s “piling on” describing Baghdadi as a “dog” sent a signal to his followers “that could cause them to lash out possibly more harshly in the wake.”
These criticisms are ridiculous. ISIS terrorists have richly proven they require no provocation to commit mass murder. They only need the opportunity.
Moreover, Trump’s constant use of the term “dog” and employment of canine imagery is highly significant. Dogs are considered “unclean” in Islam. In Islamic societies, “dog” is the worst name you can call a person.
It is hard to imagine that Baghdadi’s death at the paws of a dog is likely to rally many Muslims to his side. To the contrary, it is likely instead to demoralize his followers. What’s the point of joining a group of losers who believe in a fake prophet who died like a coward while chased by a “a beautiful dog – a talented dog?”
Then there is Russia.
Trump’s critics insist that his decision to abandon the US position along the Syrian border with Turkey effectively surrendered total control over Syria to Russia. But that is far from the case. The American presence along the border didn’t harm Russia. It helped Russia. It freed Russian President Vladimir Putin from having to deal with Turkey. Now that the Americans have left the border zone, Turkish President Recep Erdogan is Putin’s problem.
Putin’s biggest problem in Syria is financial. The Russian economy is sunk in a deep recession due to the drop in global oil prices.
And he is not the main problem that Trump has made for Putin in Syria.
Putin’s biggest problem in Syria is financial. The Russian economy is sunk in a deep recession due to the drop in global oil prices. Putin had planned to finance his Syrian operation with Syrian oil revenues. To this end, in January 2018, he signed an agreement with Syrian President Bashar Assad that effectively transferred the rights to the Syrian oil to Russia.
But Putin hadn’t taken Trump into consideration.
US forces did not withdraw from all of their positions in Syria last month. They maintained their control over al-Tanf airbase which controls the Syrian border with Jordan and Iraq.
More importantly, from Russia’s perspective, the US has not relinquished its military presence adjacent to Syria’s oil facilities in the Deir Azzour province on the eastern side of the Euphrates River. Indeed, according to media reports, the US is reinforcing its troop strength in Deir Azzour to ensure continued US-Kurdish control over Syria’s oil fields.
To understand how high a priority control over Syria’s oil installations is for Putin it is worth recalling what happened in February 2018.
On February 7, 2018, a month after Putin and Assad signed their oil agreement, a massive joint force comprised of Russian mercenaries, Syrian commandos and Iranian Revolutionary Guards forces crossed the Euphrates River with the aim of seizing the town of Khusham adjacent to the Conoco oil fields. Facing them were forty US Special Forces deployed with Kurdish and Arab SDF forces. The US forces directed a massive air assault against the attacking forces which killed some 500 soldiers and ended the assault. Accounts regarding the number of Russian mercenaries killed start at 80 and rise to several hundred.
The continued US-Kurdish control over Syria’s oil fields and installations requires Putin to continue directly funding his war in Syria.
The American counter-attack caused grievous harm to the Russian force in Syria. Putin has kept the number of Russian military forces in Syria low by outsourcing much of the fighting to Russian military contractors. The aim of the failed operation was to enable those mercenary forces to seize the means to finance their own operations, and get them off the Kremlin payroll.
Since then, Putin has tried to dislodge the US forces from Khusham at least one more time, only to be met with a massive demonstration of force.
The continued US-Kurdish control over Syria’s oil fields and installations requires Putin to continue directly funding his war in Syria. So long as this remains the case, given Russia’s financial constraints, Putin is likely to go to great lengths to restrain his Iranian, Syrian and Hezbollah partners and their aggressive designs against Israel in order to prevent a costly war.
In other words, by preventing Russia from seizing Syria’s oil fields, Trump is forcing Russia to behave in a manner that protects American interests in Syria.
The focus of most of the criticism against Trump’s Syria policies has been his alleged abandonment of the Syrian Kurds to the mercies of their Turkish enemies. But over the past week we learned that this is not the case. As Trump explained, continued US-Kurdish control over Syria’s oil fields provides the Kurdish-controlled Syrian Democratic Forces with the financial and military wherewithal to support and defend its people and their operations.
Moreover, details of Baghdadi’s assassination point to continued close cooperation between US and Kurdish forces. According to accounts of the raid, the Kurds provided the Americans with key intelligence that enabled US forces to pinpoint Baghdadi’s location.
As to Turkey, both Baghdadi and ISIS spokesman Abu Hassan al-Mujahir, who was killed by US forces on Tuesday, were located in areas of eastern Syria controlled by Turkey. The Americans didn’t try to hide this fact.
The Turkish operation in eastern Syria is reportedly raising Erdogan’s popularity at home. But it far from clear that the benefit he receives from his actions will be long-lasting. Turkey’s Syrian operation is exposing the NATO member’s close ties to ISIS and its allied terror groups. This exposure in and of itself is making the case for downgrading US strategic ties with its erstwhile ally.
Even worse for Turkey, due to Trump’s public embrace of Erdogan, the Democrats are targeting the Turkish autocrat as Enemy Number 1. On Tuesday, with the support of Republican lawmakers who have long recognized Erdogan’s animosity to US interests and allies, the Democratic-led House overwhelmingly passed a comprehensive sanctions resolution against Turkey.
The al-Baghdadi assassination and related events demonstrate that Trump is not flying blind in Syria. He is implementing a multifaceted set of policies that are based on the strengths, weaknesses and priorities of the various actors on a ground in ways that advance US interests at the expense of its foes and to the benefit of its allies.
Timmerman vs. Puder: The U.S. Presence in Syria
Frontpage hosts an exchange.
The exchange below is a dialogue/debate Frontpage is hosting on Trump’s recent decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria. Joseph Puder argues that U.S. should remain in Syria — while Ken Timmerman counters with an anti-interventionist argument. Frontpage will be continuing a discussion on this vital issue.
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The U.S. Must Have an Active Presence in Syria.
By Joseph Puder
The physical elimination of the arch-terrorist Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS who sought to be the “Emir of the Believers,” has made the world a safer place. Al-Baghdadi’s cruelty and his campaign of murder, rape and enslavement of the Yazidis, made him the world’s number one criminal. The Trump administration deserves credit for his demise, and the special forces that hunted him merit the highest awards and rewards. The killing of Al-Baghdadi notwithstanding, the current U.S. policy of withdrawing from Syria and ultimately from throughout the Middle East is a fatal mistake. In today’s world, the oceans alone are no barriers from terror, or catastrophic attacks as the 9/11 terror attack has shown.
The U.S. departure from Syria has created a vacuum. In fact, the U.S. military base near the city of Manbij in northern Syria did not stay empty for long after U.S. forces departed. The Russians arrived the next day. Now, as a result, a trio of brutal autocrats: Putin, Erdogan, and Assad will divide the spoils among them while the U.S. is out of the picture.
The U.S. withdrawal from Syria, if not remedied, would make the U.S., in the eyes of its allies in Jerusalem and Arab Sunni states, an unreliable partner. The abandonment of the Kurds to Erdogan’s mercy was received with deep dismay and concern in Israel. True, the U.S. has had little to gain from sending American G.I.’s to the blood-stained streets and deserts of Syria. The ostensible reason for the U.S. initial involvement in Syria was to defeat the ISIS terrorists and their Caliphate. That mission seemed to be accomplished for the most part by regaining all the territories ISIS captured, and the killing and detaining of most of its fighters in Syria.
The thousands of captured ISIS jihadi terrorists have been guarded by the predominantly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). However, when the U.S. gave Erdogan a green light to enter the Kurdish-controlled area in northern Syria and attack the SDF and the all-Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), the fate of the ISIS prisoners is no longer clear. There are reports that hundreds of them escaped and might form fighting units. Erdogan’s islamist ideology and his partnership with the Islamist Turkish Free Syrian Army TFSA) which is mostly Arab in composition, might very well recruit the ISIS fighters to join them in fighting the Kurdish forces.
It may be true that ISIS no longer controls territory in Syria or Iraq, but it remains a viable fighting guerilla force with branches worldwide. Moreover, the ISIS ideology didn’t disappear. It is present in Sunni communities both in Iraq and Syria. The Iraqi Sunni-Muslim hostility towards the U.S. stems from what they perceive as the U.S. giving the Shiite-Muslims power in Baghdad in the aftermath of the dictator Saddam Hussain’s demise. The Shiite-led governments in Iraq made the mistake of excluding the Sunnis from power, which led to such monsters as Abu Bakr Baghdadi to emerge as a powerful terror chief. The disbanding by the U.S. of the Sunni-led Iraqi army, channeled many Iraqi Republican Guard officers into the ISIS ranks.
In Syria, the Sunni-Arab majority (Sunni-Arabs in Iraq are 21% of the population) has resented the Alawi (a sect affiliated with Shiite-Islam to which the Assad family belongs) dictatorial rule since the mid-1960’s. The wholesale butchery of Sunnis by Hafez Assad in 1982, and to even greater extent, during the current civil war by his son Bashar Assad, is unlikely to be forgotten, and it is inevitable that the Sunnis are determined to exact revenge on the Assad family and the Alawites community in particular, and Shiites in general. Thus, if it is not a rejuvenated ISIS, it might be another Sunni extremist terror group. They will also aim at punishing Americans. Erdogan’s Turkey is more than likely to support these Sunni jihadists, albeit covertly.
The presence of Iran and Iranian Shiite proxies in Syria is like waving a red cape to a bull for the Sunni community. The civil war has deepened the Sunnis feeling of being persecuted. Sunni rebels have inflicted some serious blows to the Iranian expeditionary forces. Ariane Tabatabai, writing in Foreign Affairs Magazine (August 16, 2019) pointed out that, “To date, Tehran spent an estimated $15 billion propping up Assad – even as the Iranian economy has crumbled under sanctions for the better part of the war. Additionally, the Islamic Republic is thought to have sent some 10,000 operatives, including combat troops to Syria between 2011 and 2014. This number omits non-Iranian forces backed by Tehran (including Hezbollah personnel as well as Shiite militias from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen-JP), which the Wall Street Journal put at 130,000 in 2014. And by Tehran’s own admission, at least 2,100 Iranians had died in the conflict by 2017, including a number of high-ranking military commanders. Today, even as the war winds down, Iranian body bags continue to return home.”
Given its investments in human lives and financial resources, it is unlikely to see Iran leave Syria at its own choosing. The U.S. didn’t send troops to Syria to bring about an end to the bloody civil war, nor has the U.S. committed its forces to deliver freedom or justice for the Syrian people. The U.S. government did however express its intention to maintain an open-ended military presence in Syria to counter Iran’s influence and oust Syria’s dictator Bashar Assad. The Guardian reported (January 17, 2018) that U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said that “the U.S. intends to maintain an open-ended military presence in Syria, not only to fight ISIS and al-Qaida but also to provide a bulwark against Iranian influence, ensure the departure of the Assad regime, and create conditions for the return of refugees.”
Now that the Kurds have been pushed out by the Turkish army with U.S. consent, and the Assad regime, and its Russian protectors have filled the space vacated by the Kurds, Iran and its proxies would have a clear path through northern Syria to reach the Mediterranean Sea and threaten Israel, both from Lebanon and southern Syria. The U.S. abandonment of its Kurdish allies has prompted them to shift sides and invite Assad to consolidate his control over all of Syria. Assad’s Russian backers have already entered areas under previous U.S. control. Now, Russia and Turkey are dividing northern Syria. Turkey got the area it already captured, while Russia has secured the rest for Assad.
The New York Times (10/30/2019) concluded it survey on Syria’s future, “Four American adversaries gained under Syria’s new geography. Assad’s control expanded. Iran, a long-time ally, could gain a long supply route to its proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon. ISIS has an opening to regroup amid the chaos. And Russia cemented its status as the main foreign power in Syria.”
The U.S. policy on Syria needs to be reversed. The U.S. should not allow Assad to take over northern Syria and end the Kurdish dream of autonomy, if not outright independence. At this stage, the U.S. should at the very least offer the Kurds aerial protection from Turkey’s indiscriminate bombing, and from Assad’s troops. If it isn’t too late, the U.S. could return some of its special forces to be imbedded with the Kurds. The only way the U.S. might have a say in the future of Syria, is to have an active presence on the ground.
*
Trump Puts the Interventionists on the Ropes.
By Kenneth R. Timmerman
A U.S. withdrawal from Syria would be a “fatal mistake.” This is a refrain we have been hearing from interventionists across the political spectrum for some time.
It would be a mistake, the interventionists say, because the U.S. departure creates a vacuum that has already been filled by our adversaries, makes us appear an “unreliable” partner, and opens a “clear path” for Iran to reach the Mediterranean and directly threaten Israel.
But let’s recall the actual reason we sent troops into Syria in the first place. It was a decision taken by President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton in 2012 as part of a larger strategy to empower the Muslim Brotherhood and weaken secular leaders who opposed them, such as Libya’s Qaddafi, Egypt’s Mubarak, and Syria’s Assad.
As a 2012 Intelligence Information Report makes clear, “The West, Gulf Countries, and Turkey support the opposition [in Syria]; while Russia, China, and Iran support the [Syrian] regime.”
The memo goes on to state that the powers supporting the opposition want to see the creation of “a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in Eastern Syria,” another term for a caliphate. This is precisely what led Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign to accuse Obama and Hillary of “creating” ISIS. As I argued at the time, he was right.
For the past three years, of course, we have directed our military aid in Syria to the YPG Kurds, who helped us to eradicate the ISIS geographical caliphate. That is now mission accomplished.
Congress never authorized a war in Syria. Nor do we have any abiding national security interest in Syria, except to prevent the return of an ISIS geographical caliphate fueled with Syrian oil.
Do the interventionists really believe we should sacrifice the lives of U.S. military personnel to promote the creation of a Kurdish state? I have spent quite a bit of time over the past decade visiting with Kurdish military and civilian leaders in the 12,000 foot Qandil mountains along the Iran-Iraq border, and sympathize with Kurdish aspirations to a national homeland.
I have argued that the U.S. should take the PKK off the terrorism list, because they have been fighting a defensive war to prevent the extermination of Kurdish culture in Turkey, not seeking to impose their hegemony on Turkey.
But the Kurds are their own worst enemy. In the one place where Kurds have established a self-governing homeland – the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq – they have created a failed state, rife with corruption, that oppresses Assyrian Christians and Kurdish dissidents alike, while failing to counter Iranian infiltration.
No American president, let alone Congress, has ever declared the creation of a Kurdish national homeland a policy priority. Perhaps they should. But President Trump never pledged such support when he deployed U.S. military personnel to Rojava. To argue today that we are “abandoning the Kurds” smacks of crocodile tears. Don’t forget that U.S. troops will be securing all that Syrian oil near Deir es Zor and turning over the proceeds to… the Kurds.
Is it in our national interest to check the imperialist expansion of the Islamic State of Iran? Arguably, yes. But there are many ways to do that without troops in Syria. One way is to deploy U.S. naval assets to enforce freedom of navigation in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. President Trump has increased U.S. naval patrols in the area over the past year.
Another is to reinforce the defenses of Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The Iranian drone and missile attack on Abqaiq in September was a brazen act of defiance, aimed at destabilizing the Saudi monarchy. But again, is it in our national interest to protect a ruling royal family? Or just, as President Trump argues, the oil? These are discussions worth having.
A third is to empower Israel to strike at Iran whenever it strays beyond its borders or overtly threatens Israel. Instead of punishing Israel for defending itself, as President Obama did repeatedly, this president has given Israel the green light to defend itself and we should applaud him for it.
The best way by far of checking the Islamic State of Iran would be to empower the Iranian people to overthrow the regime, as I have argued repeatedly in this space and elsewhere. In April 2016, I delivered a background paper to then-candidate Trump setting out ways the United States could use soft power, including our international broadcasting, to achieve that goal.
President Trump has outraged Democrats because he is actually keeping his campaign promises to limit our overseas adventures. It’s very easy to imagine the United States following the Iranian sucker-punch against our drone in June and stumbling into another endless war. Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps leaders were drooling at such a prospect.
Instead of responding militarily at the time – a move that earned him grudging respect from some of his opponents – the President drew a clear line in the sand that so far the Iranians have respected: any attack that draws American blood will be met with massive retaliation.
Every president has committed acts that have caused his critics to argue that he has damaged U.S. credibility overseas. And yet, despite all of it, the United States remains the go-to power for those seeking protection against aggressors and wannbe hegemons.
The President’s critics are right about one thing: the threat from jihadi Islam is not about to go away. The killing of this or that terror chieftain is a game of whack-a-mole and, while necessary, will not end the jihadi terror movement. Nor will the deployment of a few thousand troops in Syria.
This is a generational struggle –but it is not our struggle. It is up to Islamic scholars and Muslim leaders to end the threat of political Islam through a political and religious reformation. But don’t hold your breath.
In the meantime, this president has thrown the Deep State into disarray by failing to heed their dire warnings about the Syria pullout, Russia, and so many other things. They want the United States to be in a perpetual state of war, because the fog of war spreads tremendous power to the Guardians of Secrets and conveniently covers over their lies.
“Thank God for the Deep State,” former CIA director John McLaughlin told a CBS News correspondent on October 30.
Every American who loves liberty should get a chill down their spine when they hear those words.
11.
A Totalitarian Marxist, Not a “Social Democrat”
In a single tweet, Bernie Sanders openly reveals his totalitarian agenda.
Not that we needed any further confirmation of Bernie Sanders’s deep-seated contempt for the United States and its heritage, but a monumentally significant tweet that he sent out on Tuesday made it crystal clear that his political agenda has nothing whatsoever to do with defending the Constitution of the United States. Rather, it is entirely about gaining limitless power and dominance over the lives, the actions, and even the private thoughts of every living American. In a manner reminiscent of Barack Obama’s pledge to “fundamentally transform the United States of America” during his presidency, Sanders tweeted: “Our campaign is not only about changing the system politically and economically. We will change the value system of this country.”
Sanders is made of precisely the same totalitarian stuff as Obama. And like Obama, Sanders’s entire adult life has been devoted to giving aid and comfort to America’s totalitarian enemies. Lest you think that this might be an overstatement, consider the cold, hard facts.
When Sanders was a young man attending the University of Chicago in the 1960s, he joined the Young Peoples Socialist League, which was the youth wing of the Socialist Party USA, which today advocates a “revolution” that will bring “radical and fundamental change in the structure and quality of economic, political, and personal relations.” Sounds very much like the platform of one particular 2020 presidential candidate, doesn’t it?
After college, Sanders, as Daniel Greenfield has detailed, lived and worked for a number of months in an Israeli kibbutz which was co-founded by Aharon Cohen, an Israel-hating Arabist who was arrested for spying on behalf of the Soviet Union in the 1950s, and who referred to the genocidal Joseph Stalin as the “Sun of the Nations.” Sanders stayed at Cohen’s kibbutz as a guest of Hashomer Hatzair, a Zionist-Marxist youth movement that pledged its allegiance to the Soviet Union. Hashomer Hatzair’s founder, Ya’akov Hazan, described the USSR as a second homeland. In 1953 Hazan lamented “the terrible tragedy that has befallen the nations of the Soviet Union, the world proletariat and all of progressive mankind, upon the death of the great leader and extolled commander, Josef Vissarionovich Stalin.” “We lower our flag in grief in memory of the great revolutionary fighter, architect of socialist construction, and leader of the world’s peace movement,” Hazan added. “His huge historical achievements will guide generations in their march towards the reign of socialism and communism the world over.” In a similar vein, Eliezer Hacohen, one of HH’s ideological leaders, characterized Marxism as “the key to renewing our spiritual creativity.”
Sanders made unsuccessful runs for the U.S. Senate in January 1972 and November 1974, and for Governor of Vermont in November 1972 and November 1976—all on the ticket of the far-left Liberty Union Party (LUP). Sanders’s LUP platform called for the nationalization of all U.S. banks; public ownership of all utilities, drug companies, capital, and major means of production (such as factories); and the establishment of a worker-controlled federal government. According to the Guardian, a press release from Sanders’s 1974 campaign stated that the candidate advocated “the public takeover of all privately owned electric companies in Vermont.” Moreover, Sanders called for a 100% income tax on America’s highest income earners.
In a 1973 open letter to Vermont Senator Robert Stafford, Sanders called for the nationalization of America’s energy industry: “I would also urge you to give serious thought about the eventual nationalization of these gigantic companies…. The oil industry, and the entire energy industry, should be owned by the public and used for the public good — not for additional profits for billionaires.”
During his 1974 Senate run, Sanders said that one plan he was considering would make it illegal for anyone to accumulate more wealth than he or she could spend in a lifetime, and that any income above $1 million per year would be taxed at a rate of 100%. “Nobody should earn more than a million dollars,” he stated.
Sanders reiterated a number of his positions in 1976. “I will be campaigning in support of the Liberty Union utility proposal which calls for the public ownership of Vermont’s private electric companies without compensation to the banks and wealthy stockholders who own the vast majority of stock in these companies,” he said in a July press release. “I will also be calling for public ownership of the telephone company — which is probably the single greatest rip-off company in America.”
In a press release the following month, Sanders, evoking the totalitarian spirit in which the Berlin Wall had been constructed, introduced a proposal to punish private companies wishing to relocate to more business-friendly environs: “We have got to begin to deal with the fact that corporations do not have the god-given right to disrupt the lives of their workers or the economic foundation of their towns simply because they wish to move elsewhere to earn a higher rate of profit.” He stated that large businesses should not be able to leave a city without first obtaining permission from that locale and the workers therein; and that if the company failed to get that approval, it should be required to pay the workers a guaranteed two years of severance, and to pay the town 10 years of taxes. “In the long run,” Sanders added, “the problem of the fleeing corporations must be dealt with on the national level by legislation which will bring about the public ownership of the major means of production and their conversion into worker-controlled enterprises.”
In 1976, Sanders said: “I believe in socialized medicine, public ownership of the drug companies and placing doctors on salaries. The idea that millionaires can make money by selling poor people drugs that they desperately need for highly inflated prices disgusts me.”
In the mid-1970 as well, Sanders became the head of the American People’s History Society, which journalist Paul Sperry has described as “an organ for Marxist propaganda.” “There,” writes Sperry, “[Sanders] produced a glowing documentary on the life of socialist revolutionary Eugene Debs, who was jailed for espionage during the Red Scare and hailed by the Bolsheviks as ‘America’s greatest Marxist.’ This subversive hero of Sanders, denounced even by liberal Democrats as a ‘traitor,’ bashed ‘the barons of Wall Street’ and hailed the ‘triumphant’ Bolshevik revolution in Russia.”
Sanders left the LUP in 1977 and became a political Independent. In 1981 he was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont, by a margin of just 10 votes. He was subsequently re-elected three times and served as mayor until 1989.
Sanders created some controversy when he hung a Soviet flag in his mayoral office, in honor of Burlington’s Soviet sister city, Yaroslavl, located some 160 miles northeast of Moscow. Also during his tenure as mayor, Sanders placed restrictions on the property rights of landlords, set price controls, and raised local property taxes in order to fund communal land trusts. Further, he named Burlington’s city softball team the “People’s Republic of Burlington,” and its minor league baseball team the “Vermont Reds.” Local business owners, meanwhile, distributed fliers complaining that Sanders “does not believe in free enterprise.”
According to an Accuracy In Media report by Cliff Kincaid, Sanders during the 1980s “collaborated with Soviet and East German ‘peace committees’” whose aim was “to stop President Reagan’s deployment of nuclear missiles in Europe.” Indeed, he “openly joined the Soviets’ ‘nuclear freeze’ campaign to undercut Reagan’s military build-up.”
In the 1980s as well, Sanders paid a friendly visit to Fidel Castro’s Communist totalitarian dictatorship in Cuba, where he had a pleasant meeting with the mayor of Havana.
In 1985 Sanders traveled to Managua, Nicaragua, to celebrate the seventh anniversary of the rise to power of yet another totalitarian tyrant, Daniel Ortega and his Marxist-Leninist Sandinista government. In the course of his speech there, Sanders said: “[I]n the last 30 years, the United States has overthrown governments in Guatemala, [the] Dominican Republic, they murdered Salvador Allende in Chile, they’ve overthrown the government of Grenada, they attempted to overthrow the government of Cuba, they overthrew a government in Brazil, and now they are attempting to overthrow the government of Nicaragua.” He also denounced the U.S. for “dominating weak nations and poor nations.”
In a letter which he addressed to the people of Nicaragua, Sanders denounced the anti-Communist activities of the Reagan administration, which he said was under the control of corporate interests. Assuring the Nicaraguans that Americans were “fair minded people” who had more to offer “than the bombs and economic sabotage” promoted by President Reagan, he declared: “In the long run, I am certain that you will win, and that your heroic revolution against the Somoza dictatorship will be maintained and strengthened.”
Following his trip to Nicaragua, Sanders penned a letter to the White House indicating that Ortega would be willing to meet with Reagan to negotiate a resolution to the conflict. The mayor also sought to enlist the help of former president Jimmy Carter, telling him that the people of Nicaragua were very fond of him (Carter). Sanders even invited Ortega to visit Burlington, though the Nicaraguan president declined.
Also after his trip to Nicaragua, Sanders praised the living conditions under that country’s Communist regime:
- “No one denies that they are building health clinics. Health care in Nicaragua is now free…. Infant mortality has been greatly reduced.”
- “[The Nicaraguan government is] giving, for the first time in their lives, real land to farmers, so that they can have something that they grow. Nobody denies that they are making significant progress.”
- “Sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country [like Nicaragua] is because people are lining up for food [e.g., bread lines]. That’s a good thing. In other countries, people don’t line up for food. The rich get the food, and the poor starve to death.”
In an August 8, 1985 interview with a Vermont government-access television station, Sanders drew parallels between the Castro and Ortega regimes. “In 1961,” he said, “[America] invaded Cuba, and everybody was totally convinced that Castro was the worst guy in the world, that all the Cuban people were going to rise up in rebellion against Fidel Castro. They forgot that he educated the kids, gave them health care, totally transformed the society.” During the same interview, Sanders characterized Ortega as “an impressive guy” while criticizing U.S. President Ronald Reagan. “The Sandinista government, in my view, has more support among the Nicaraguan people, substantially more support, than Ronald Reagan has among the American people,” said Sanders.
When Sanders in 1988 married his wife, Jane, the couple honeymooned in Yaroslavl, Russia. In an interview with that city’s mayor, Alexander Riabkov, Sanders acknowledged that housing and health care were “significantly better” in the U.S. than in the Soviet Union, but added that “the cost of both services is much, much, higher in the United States.” After returning to the U.S., Sanders told reporters that he had been “extremely impressed with their [the Soviet] transportation system.” He continued: “The stations themselves were absolutely beautiful…. It was a very, very effective system. Also, I was impressed by the youth programs that they have. Their palaces of culture for the young people, a whole variety of programs for young people. And cultural programs which go far beyond what we do in this country.”
In November 1989 Sanders addressed the national conference of the U.S. Peace Council, a Communist Party USA front group whose members were committed to advancing “the triumph of Soviet power in the U.S.”
By 1990 Sanders was a leading member of Jesse Jackson‘s National Rainbow Coalition, and he ran successfully for Congress as a socialist, representing Vermont’s single, at-large congressional district. In 1991 he co-founded the Democratic Party’s most fervently socialist wing, the Congressional Progressive Caucus. During the ’90s as well, he participated multiple times in the Socialist Scholars Conferences that were held annually in New York City.
In November 2006 Sanders ran successfully for a seat in the U.S. Senate. Then-Senator Barack Obama, whom Sanders described as “one of the great leaders” of that legislative body, campaigned enthusiastically on Sanders’s behalf. When a Washington Post reporter asked Sanders just prior to the election: “Are you now or have you ever been a Socialist?” Sanders replied, “Yeah. I wouldn’t deny it. Not for one second. I’m a Democratic Socialist.”
And that has been Bernie Sanders’s self-description ever since. “Democratic Socialist” is a term that is intended to sound benign, so as to conceal the fact that Sanders is in fact a hard-core, uncompromising Marxist who is on a crusade to advance the creation of an all-powerful government that controls and dictates every aspect of every American’s life. To his core, to his marrow, he is in every respect a 100% totalitarian who – while routinely casting aspersions upon the United States — has openly revered the Marxist totalitarian dictators of such nations as the old Soviet Union, Cuba, Nicaragua. As the old saying goes, you could look it up.
12.
How Baghdadi’s Death Reveals Trump’s Clever Syria Strategy
U.S. president outsmarts Putin — leaves him with Syria headaches as U.S. withdraws.
According to conventional thinking, President Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from northeast Syria opened the door to a resurgence of ISIS. “Make no mistake, President Trump ignores the national security threat posed by ISIS at our nation’s peril,” Senator Bob Menendez, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said last week. How foolish Senator Menendez and his fellow critics look now after President Trump announced on Sunday that a special operations raid, which he had approved and closely monitored, resulted in the cowardly death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS.
“Last night, the United States brought the world’s number one terrorist leader to justice,” the president said in remarks from the White House, describing the operation in detail. “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is dead. He was the founder and leader of ISIS, the most ruthless and violent terror organization in the World. The United States has been searching for Baghdadi for many years. Capturing or killing Baghdadi has been the top national security priority of my Administration. U.S. Special Operations forces executed a dangerous and daring nighttime raid into Northwestern Syria to accomplish this mission.”
Al-Baghdadi was cornered in a tunnel of a well-fortified compound in Syria’s northwestern Idlib province, a few miles from the Turkish border, where he was hiding. Following a firefight, Baghdadi detonated a suicide vest, killing himself along with three children the brutal jihadist leader had dragged with him into the tunnel.
“I got to watch much of it. No personnel were lost in the operation, while a large number of Baghdadi’s fighters and companions were killed with him. He died after running into a dead-end tunnel, whimpering and crying and screaming all the way,” President Trump said. “The thug who tried so hard to intimidate others spent his last moments in utter fear, in total panic and dread, terrified of the American forces bearing down on him,” the president added. DNA tests were conducted, confirming the dead ISIS leader’s identity.
So much for the critics who claimed that President Trump’s troop withdrawal from the portion of the Syria-Turkey border where Syrian Kurds had been living under temporary U.S. protection was a gift to ISIS. The successful al-Baghdadi operation speaks for itself, coming just a few months after al-Baghdadi’s so-called caliphate was eliminated. Moreover, the president made clear that this operation was not a one-off mission. “Baghdadi’s demise demonstrates America’s relentless pursuit of terrorist leaders, and our commitment to the enduring and total defeat of ISIS! The reach of America is long,” President Trump declared. “Terrorists who oppress and murder innocent people should never sleep soundly, knowing that we will completely destroy them.”
The special forces managed to take “highly sensitive material and information from the raid,” the president said. The trove of information collected will hopefully expose ISIS networks, the identities of potential replacements for al-Baghdadi, and ISIS’s plans for future attacks.
Despite the Kurds’ disappointment with President Trump’s withdrawal decision and the resulting Turkish operation that pushed Kurds away from territory they had controlled on the Syrian side of the border with Turkey, “Kurdish intelligence officials in both Syria and Iraq helped locate the target of the raid,” according to a New York Times report, citing a senior American official. The U.S.-Kurd alliance is obviously not irretrievably broken when common interests such as the destruction of ISIS are concerned.
President Trump’s critics also complained that his troop withdrawal from northeast Syria was a gift to Russia.
“Russia is the clear winner of the latest developments,” declared Joost Hiltermann, the Middle East director of the International Crisis Group. “Russia as the hegemonic power in Syria, that is now the coming reality.”
Senator Menendez wondered “whether President Trump is acting directly at the behest of Russian and Turkish leaders.”
Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is peeved that President Trump had not given her advance notice of the al-Baghdadi mission, insulted the president to his face about ten days ago when she accused him of helping Russian President Vladimir Putin by withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria. “All roads with you lead to Putin,” Pelosi said before storming out of a White House meeting. President Trump was right not to trust erratic Pelosi or her leak-prone Democrat colleagues like House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff with advance notice of such a dangerous mission. It could have ended disastrously if they had allowed information about the raid to get out before our troops had returned safely.
As the al-Baghdadi mission demonstrated, reports of the demise of U.S. primacy in the region are premature. The United States remains perfectly capable of wielding its vast intelligence and military capabilities when it chooses to do so in support of U.S. national security objectives. In this case, President Trump had decided, based on highly reliable intelligence, that there was an opportunity to kill or capture ISIS’s leader, which was clearly in the vital interest of the United States. The fact that U.S. aircraft would be passing through airspace in Syria controlled by the Russians to reach the target would not be allowed to get in the way of the mission. President Trump said that the Russians had been given advance notice of the flights without being told, however, their purpose.
“We told the Russians we were going in because we were going over them,” President Trump explained to reporters during the press conference that followed his announcement of the mission’s success. “And they were curious, but we said we’re coming. We said look, one way or another we’re coming.” The president noted that the Russians would be happy with the mission because they “hate ISIS, too.”
Although President Trump thanked Russia, along with Iraq, Syria, Turkey and the Kurds, for their cooperation, this was an all-American military operation from start to finish. To save face, a Russian Defense Ministry spokesman tried to cast doubt on whether the operation had actually occurred – a notable case of sour grapes.
President Trump made clear that U.S. forces would remain in Syria as long as necessary to combat ISIS and to protect the oil fields in northern Syria from ISIS or Iranian seizure. Neither Russia nor the Syrian Assad regime will be getting their hands on the oil fields either, so long as the U.S. maintains its military presence there. What exactly then will Russia be gaining from the U.S. withdrawal in northeastern Syria, where the Syrian Kurds had been relying on U.S. protection from Turkey’s forces? Not as much as President Trump’s critics think, according to Zev Chafets, a prolific writer who was a senior aide to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and the founding managing editor of the Jerusalem Report Magazine. In an article entitled “Trump Outsmarts Putin With Syria Retreat,” Mr. Chafets wrote that Russia will, by necessity, have to take on more responsibility for fighting ISIS and other jihadists as well as reconstructing Syria.
“Sooner or later, al-Qaeda, Islamic State or the next iteration of jihad will break loose in Syria,” Mr. Chafets wrote. “When that happens, the Russians will be the new Satan on the block. Their diplomats in Damascus will come under attack, as will Russian troops. More troops will be sent to defend them. Putin’s much-prized Mediterranean naval installations will require reinforcement. And so on. Soon enough, jihad will inflame Russia’s large Muslim population. Moscow itself will become a terrorist target.”
Russia will also have other headaches. Having saved the Assad regime from near collapse and claiming that it is now the main sheriff in Syria, Russia will have the burden of trying to coax Assad towards building a durable post-war government that may include some opposition elements. Russia will also be obliged to help with Syria’s reconstruction in order to avoid a breakdown of any restored order. “As the big power in charge, Russia…will be expected to help its Syrian client rebuild the damage from the civil war,” Mr. Chafets noted. “Physical reconstruction alone is expected to cost $400-500 billion. This is a bill Trump had no intention of paying — and one more reason he was glad to hand northern Syria to Putin. Russia cannot afford a project of this magnitude.”
Although Mr. Chafets appears to minimize the importance of the northern Syria oil fields at least in the short term, they do have strategic importance in the longer term. So long as the U.S. controls the oil fields with the help of the Kurds, who may gain some benefit from them financially, the U.S. – not Russia – will control a vital source of revenue that could eventually be used to help pay for Syria’s reconstruction. This will become part of the economic leverage that will maintain America’s influence as the Syrian civil war winds down and a post-war Syria begins to take shape.
Russia will also have to manage the relationship it forged with the Iranian regime as the two countries fought on the same side to prop up Assad. Russia must do so while having developed a relationship with Israel for trade reasons as well as because of the significant number of Russians now living in Israel. Russia’s dual relationships with two players in Syria who are arch enemies of each other puts Russia into a difficult position. As Mr. Chafets observed, Russia has to contend with “the ongoing Israel-Iran war, which is being fought largely in Syrian territory.” Russia has tried to remain neutral so far, and will have to figure out how to ensure that it does not get entangled into the Israeli-Iranian conflict to the point that it begins to undermine its larger goals in Syria and the Middle East as a whole.
Thus, while Russia can be expected to reap some benefits from President Trump’s decision to reduce U.S. military presence in Syria, Russia is not the clear winner and the United States is not the clear loser. Far from it. “Critics who see the U.S. withdrawal as an act of weakness that will hurt American prestige and influence in the Middle East are wrong,” Mr. Chafets concluded. “The Arab world understands realpolitik and will read Trump’s indifference to the fate of Syria as the self-serving behavior of the strong horse. For that is what the U.S. is. It has far more naval power, air dominance, strategic weaponry and intelligence assets than any other country in the region, including Russia.”
The successful American operation to take out Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is living proof of continued U.S. dominance in the Middle East when it considers its core strategic security interests to be at stake. If Putin wants to inherit the Syrian blood-stained sandbox and the headaches that go with it, that should certainly not keep us up at night.
13.
Erdogan Lauds Koranic Harshness Toward Non-Muslims
Urging Koranic conquest.
Notwithstanding any limited “support” Turkey may (or may not) have provided the successful U.S. raid which liquidated ISIS’s al-Baghdadi, Turkish President Erdogan made some revealing, indeed pathognomonic remarks, during last Friday’s (10/25/19) prayers in Istanbul’s Great Camlica Mosque.
A Turkish writer in exile who is a very fluent, gifted Turkish to English translator, translated (below) the triumphal report by Yeni Akit, an outlet enamored of the Turkish President and his traditionalist Islamic political party, the AKP.
On October 25, Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan attended the Friday prayers at the Great Çamlıca Mosque in Istanbul. He was accompanied by Istanbul’s governor Ali Yerlikaya, mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, Istanbul’s chief of police Mustafa Çalışkan and the head of the Istanbul branch of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), Bayram Şenocak. After the Friday prayers, hafiz İshak Danış recited from the Koran Sura Al-Fath (which means “victory, triumph, conquest” in English, Koran 48:29: “Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah ; and those with him are forceful against the disbelievers, merciful among themselves.” ). Then Erdogan took the microphone, reciting a part of the verse in Arabic and then in Turkish. He told the congregants: “My dear brothers. First of all, I congratulate your holy Friday. The Koranic verses that Danış just recited commands us to be violent towards the kuffar (infidels). Who are we? The ummah [nation] of Mohammed. So [the Koran] also commands us to be merciful to each other. So we will be merciful to each other. And we will be violent to the kuffar. Like in Syria.” Erdogan then went on to refer to another Koranic verse (61:13: “And [you will obtain] another [favor] that you love – victory from Allah and an imminent conquest; and give good tidings to the believers.”) in Arabic: “Inshallah, God has promised us in Syria (in Turkish): ‘Nasrun minallahi ve fethun karib ve beşşiril mu’minin.’ [‘Victory from Allah and an imminent conquest; and give good tidings to the believers.’]. We see it is happening right now. With the permission of Allah, we will see it even more. I will meet some presidents of foreign countries at the Dolmabahce Palace today. I ask for your permission now to go there.”
Authoritative Koranic commentaries—classical and modern—as well as canonical hadith, traditions of Islam’s prophet Muhammad, support Erdogan’s hateful and predatory views toward non-Muslims.
The Egyptian polymath al-Suyuti (d. 1505) was recognized as a brilliant jurist, historian, and biographer, among whose many scholarly contributions are about twenty works of Koranic studies, including seminal Koranic commentaries. Suytui’s Tafsir al-Jalalayn (co-written with his mentor al-Mahalli), as the great contemporary Dutch Islamologist Johannes J.G. Jansen (d. 2015) noted in his treatise “The Interpretation of the Koran in Modern Egypt,” remains one of the most popular as well as the most authoritative Koranic commentaries in Egypt. Maulana Muhammad Shafi (d.1976), was a former grand mufti of India (prior to the August, 1947 partition), and author of Maariful Quran, which remains the best-known Koranic commentary in Urdu, and a major, influential modern interpretation of the Koran. Shafi also wrote more than three hundred books, and in addition to these literary works, broadcasted tafsir of the Koran on Radio Pakistan for a number of years.
Below are the authoritative glosses by al-Suyuti, and Shafi on Koran 48:29, and 61:13, respectively:
(Suyuti; 48:29): “Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, and those who are with him—his Companions among the believers (Muslims)—are fierce to the unbelievers, and do not show mercy on them, merciful to one another—gentle with one another, and showing mutual love as between parents and their children.”
(Suyuti; 61:13): “And He (Allah) will give you other blessings in the things you love: support from Allah and imminent victory. Give good news to the believers (Muslims)—of victory and conquest.”
(Shafi; 48:29): “The first quality of the Companions mentioned here is that they are hard against the unbelievers, and merciful to one another. It was proven time and again that they were harsh against the unbelievers. They sacrificed all their ethnic and tribal relations for the sake of Islam. This was especially demonstrated on the occasion of Hudaibiyah….In a Hadith, the Holy Prophet has said, ‘He who loves for the sake of Allah and hates for the sake of Allah has attained the highest degree of faith’”
(Shafi; 61:13) “There is one blessing that will be granted right here in this world, which is the Divine help and an imminent victory, that is, conquests of enemy territories….it would include all later Islamic conquests of Arab and non-Arab territories.”
The canonical hadith (Sunan Abu Dawud 4681; p. 200) cited in part by Shafi from his gloss on Koran 48:29, reads in full:
“It was narrated from Abu Umamah, that the Messenger of Allah, said, ‘Whoever loves for the sake of Allah and hates for the sake of Allah, gives for the sake of Allah, and withholds for the sake of Allah, he will have perfected his faith.’ ”
By Islamic consensus, The Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute For Islamic Thought / The Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre, Amman, Jordan has defined, and epitomizes, “mainstream Islam.” Each year, this authoritative, mainstream international Islamic organization puts out the “The Muslim 500—The World’s 500 Most Influential Muslims.” The major aims of this mainstream Islamic organization, per its 2007 Charter, are:
- “to protect, preserve and propagate traditional, orthodox, ‘moderate’ Islam as defined by the international Islamic Consensus on the ‘Three Points of the Amman Message’ arrived at over the years 2005-2006.”
- “to spread knowledge of the ‘Amman Message’ of November 2004 and the principles it contains in so far as these best represent traditional, orthodox, ‘moderate’ Islam.”
- “to establish, propagate and publicize the religious and legal positions of traditional, orthodox, ‘moderate’ Islam on key issues relevant to life in the modern world.”
Acknowledging his stature in Islamdom, and apropos to the RISSC’s own stated commitment to “traditional, orthodox, ‘moderate’ Islam,” Erdogan is ranked #1—the most influential Muslim—in the 2019 The Muslim 500. Turkish President Erdogan’s rather glowing The Muslim 500 profile, notes,
Erdogan was the Prime Minister of Turkey, for 11 years, winning three consecutive elections with a majority (2002, 2007 and 2011), before becoming Turkey’s first popularly-elected president in August 2014, and then securing a second term in the 2018 election.
His 2019 profile adds, almost rapturously,
Erdogan secured 52.5% of the vote in the 2018 Presidential election (electoral turnout was 86%), and thereby avoided a second round runoff. This was a continuation of his remarkable popularity and success at the ballot box over the past two decades…During his terms, Turkey has seen unprecedented economic growth, constitutional reform, and re-emergence as a global Muslim power.
Thus, not only do Erdogan’s Koranic invocations sanctioning harshness towards non-Muslims and their jihad conquest, comport with their authoritative glosses, the Turkish President himself is revered by the mainstream. Global Muslim Umma.
14.
What Baghdadi’s Death Tells Us About the Real Terror Threat
Always look for the country behind the curtain.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
What’s the best place to look for the terrorist leader of a defeated Islamic terrorist group? When his men are on the run, look for his hideout in or near the country that sponsors him.
We didn’t find Osama bin Laden hiding in a cave in Afghanistan, but in a compound in a Pakistani military city. And Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the former Caliph of ISIS, wasn’t hanging out in his home turf, but in an area controlled by Turkey and its allied Islamist militias right off the Turkish border.
Osama bin Laden’s death confirmed the reports of his ties to Pakistan, and Baghdadi’s death confirmed the rumors of the links between ISIS and Turkey. Those links may not as run as deep as those between Pakistan, the Taliban, and Al Qaeda, but when Baghdadi wanted someplace to hide out with his family, he didn’t huddle with his forces, but picked a location under the shadow of the Turkish military.
As Robert Spencer, an expert on the theology and geopolitics of Islamic terrorism, noted, “It strains credulity that Turkey, with its interests in northern Syria, did not know he was there. Al-Baghdadi was killed in Barisha in the Idlib province, a town of no more than 2,500 people right on the Turkish border.”
Where did we actually find the Caliph of ISIS? Allegedly, he’d been living in the home of Abu Mohammed Salama, a Hurras al-Din leader. The Islamic terror group, whose name means Guardians of Religion, had been listed as Al Qaeda in Syria in its Specially Designated Global Terrorist designation. Hurras al-Din had formerly been part of Tahrir al-Sham which has been cooperating closely with Turkey.
One of Tahrir’s four components was the Al-Nusra Front, which was formerly the official Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria. While the US bombs Tahrir al-Sham, Turkey, a NATO member, works with it.
If a NATO member is openly working with an Al Qaeda faction, how can it possibly be trusted?
Both Hurras and Tahrir play a dominant role in Idlib. They, supposedly, don’t get along. And they, likewise, supposedly are hostile to ISIS. Except that Baghdadi’s death tells us that’s a sham.
While ISIS was calling Hurras “apostates”, and Tahrir was supposedly hunting Baghdadi, he was living under their protection, not those of his own men, which he wouldn’t have done without a deal. And there wouldn’t have been a deal unless it was part of a much broader operational arrangement. It’s hard to believe that Turkey would not have been clued in on a deal involving its own Islamist terrorist allies.
Earlier this year, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, the head of Al Qaeda, had ridiculed Jihadist groups in the area for operating under Turkish authority. Al Qaeda’s Jihadists have been debating whether to accept Turkey’s support. Baghdadi’s death tells us how it all played out. Turkey worked with Tahrir while ISIS worked with Hurras. The two Al Qaeda splinter groups pretended to be feuding, but were really a pipeline.
ISIS connected to Hurras which linked in to Tahrir which is under Turkish authority. That’s why Baghdadi was in Idlib. Meanwhile the Al Qaeda splinter groups in this drama were pretending to fight ISIS.
It’s the same old story.
There are no lone wolf terrorists or lone wolf terrorist groups. Like Marxist terror groups, Islamic terrorist organizations don’t exist in isolation. Even ISIS, despite its insistence that Baghdadi was the sole source of legitimate Islamic authority, was not without its state sponsors. Much like its Al Qaeda parent.
The root cause of the problem is not Islamic terror groups. It’s Islamic terror states.
September 11 would never have happened without Pakistan’s ambitions for Afghanistan, and Qatari and Iranian backing for Al Qaeda. ISIS would never have become a major terror threat without Assad’s use of Al Qaeda to attack American soldiers during the Iraq War, and the entire Arab Spring project by Qatar, its Muslim Brotherhood allies, the Gulf states, and the region’s motley assortment of Islamists.
On the Shiite side, every Islamic Jihadist group, from Hezbollah to the Houthis, begins in Tehran. And Iran’s backing has kept even, supposedly, hostile Sunni groups like Muslim Brotherhood terror organizations, the Taliban, and Al Qaeda afloat.
Islamic terrorism is not something that happens because teenagers watch videos on the internet. It doesn’t happen because of a few guys in a cave. Those are the end products of state sponsorship.
The entire existence of ISIS is due to the nature of Islamic terrorism as a defining state institution.
When we tried to shut down Saddam Hussein’s support for Islamic terrorism, the Sunni and Shiite parts of the country fragmented into dueling Islamic terror groups. Saddam’s old Sunni loyalists poured into what would become ISIS. The Shiite majority built up Islamic militias under Iranian control.
The Arab Spring had the same effect, shattering countries like Libya into their defining components. And those components are tribal identity groups with Islamic militias as their offensive and defensive arms.
Islamic terrorism is a fundamental feature of Islamic civic life at every stage of development. That’s why Islamic terrorism doesn’t go away. The names of the groups change. The leaders and the fighters die. But the endless war goes on because it’s an expression of Islamic tribal, religious, and state institutions.
Pakistan will keep on backing Islamic terrorists because that gives it influence and control over parts of its country, of Afghanistan, and over the United States. Iran will keep on backing terrorists because that’s the best way for a Shiite Islamic minority state to project its power. Qatar will keep backing Islamic terrorists because that’s the only way for a miniscule rich state to gain enormous territorial influence. Turkey will keep backing Islamic terrorists as long as Islamists who dream of rebuilding their own Caliphate are running the show in Istanbul. That’s why the terrorists will always keep coming back.
This is a problem that goes back to the founding of Islam. Mohammed and his followers started out as the original Islamist militia, leveraging tribal alliances and conflicts to take over a big piece of the world. The Islamic State, like so many Jihadis over the centuries, was just trying to follow in his footsteps.
We can’t fix the problems of Islamic societies. But we have to recognize that this is the root cause.
Islamic theology transformed tribal warfare into a religious experience. It made killing, raping, and enslaving enemies into a meaningful way of life, not just for those who partake in it, but for the countless millions who support them. Exporting democracy to the region was always a fool’s quest. Islamic societies already have their own form of democracy. Its ballots are bombs and bullets.
Power struggles aren’t settled with political compromises, but the old-fashioned way, by war.
That’s the endless war.
Americans have constant elections. Muslim societies in the region are constantly fighting. There’s never a final settlement, just as there’s no final election that determines once and for all who runs America.
Instead of exporting our way of settling differences to the Muslim world, they’ve exported their way of settling differences to the United States and to Europe. And, instead of convincing Muslim countries that multilateral diplomacy is the way to channel their global ambitions, they have managed to enlist us and involve us in their traditional form of multilateral diplomacy, supporting multiple terror groups.
Fighting Islamic terrorist groups like Al Qaeda or ISIS as if they were an isolated phenomenon is as pointless as insisting that every single Islamic terrorist is really a lone wolf. It ignores reality.
Islamic terrorist groups can’t be defeated without dealing with the states that sponsor them.
15.
The Silent Bystanders in the War Against the Jews
Fear, cowardice — or silent approval — is precisely the road on which Hitler triumphed.
Author’s note: This piece is dedicated to Renia Spiegel, the so-called Polish “Anne Frank” who kept a diary in Premyslani where my maternal ancestors once lived.
Visibly Jewish civilians are being beaten on the streets in Europe and in North America. It reminds me of what happened in Germany in the mid-30s as documented by Erik Larson in his 2011 “In The Garden of the Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin.”
In addition, Jewish students and Jewish professors are being driven off campus and out of academic associations, or forced to walk a dangerously unpleasant gauntlet of campus anti-Israel/pro-Palestine demonstrations (Israel Apartheid Week), and BDS resolutions in favor of boycotting one country only (Israel).
In 2003, when I published “The New Anti-Semitism,” I received many letters from Jewish professors who were already struggling with being penalized and ostracized for their pro-Israel fact-based views. Free speech was awarded to those with anti-Israel views, not to those who dared defend the Jewish state. With their permission, I turned these letters over to the Education editor at the New York Times who was very interested in doing a story about this. Unfortunately, unsurprisingly, she was “stopped at the highest levels.” This same editor was also not allowed to review my own book. Since then, I have exhausted myself by writing countless articles about how the Western intelligentsia have, once again, betrayed the Jews.
More important, a number of important books began to appear on this subject including The Uncivil University: Intolerance on College Campuses by Aryeh Kaufmann Weinberg, Gary A. Tobin, and Jenna Ferer (2009), Nora Gold’s novel Fields of Exile (2014), and most recently, Anti-Zionism on Campus: The University, Free Speech and BDS edited by Andrew Pessin and Doron S. Ben Atar (2018) and Israel Denial: Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, and the Faculty Campaign Against the Jewish State by Cary Nelson (2019). I have also continued to write about this phenomenon in countless articles and in a new edition of The New Anti-Semitism.
I am not sure how successful any of us have been in breaking this cognitive war blockade. Linda Sarsour, no longer a women’s rights leader, now the Pro-Palestine activist that she has always been, continues to appear on campuses around the country as do countless others who share her views.
This anti-Semitic/anti-Zionist onslaught also exists online, in private groups devoted to other academic subjects (psychology, psychiatry, the history of feminism), where no one is particularly expert in Middle East matters. This does not stop the poisonous propaganda from appearing.
In my time, I have left two online groups and was forced out of a third. Always, always, the same two reasons were at issue. An outpouring of raw anti-Semitism/anti-Zionism which was allowed to dominate the conversation—or an undigested piece of pro-Palestine and pro-Islamist propaganda which took pride of place instead of our usual discussion. Holding another, more knowledgeable or more positive view on Israel or a critical view of Islam, even in terms of women’s rights, was always interpreted as a Thought Crime, a High Crime, a traitorous act, and as proof of racism, Islamophobia, and right-wing conservatism.
Encountering this was always sobering, enraging, demoralizing, and sometimes even traumatic. But what most got my attention was either the pile-on (when and if it occurred) or, something far more ominous: The silence, the utter silence of the bystanders.
Recently, I unexpectedly experienced yet another online anti-Semitic rant. I decided to share it with one of my Shabbos guests, a 92-year-old survivor of three Holocaust-era forced labor camps. I wanted her view of the matter.
Luna Kaufman is an amazingly beautiful and distinguished Polish-American Jew. She attended High School with the “Polish Pope,” (John Paul II), is committed to interfaith work, is also a musicologist—and believes that all important matters are exceedingly complex.
Kaufman published a Memoir, Luna’s Life: A Journey of Forgiveness and Triumphs (2009). If anyone could tell me if I had over-reacted or missed an opportunity to educate, she might be the one to do so.
I told her about a woman, an early feminist whom I’ve never met and who had just visited Poland for the first time to get in touch with her Polish roots. She raved, online, about the Polish people. One woman in the group (not me), said that the Poles, however charming, once murdered Jews and that one might mention that as well. Silence prevailed for some hours. I did not want this single voice to stand alone and so I suggested some books about Polish anti-Jewish pogroms and massacres to develop a more balanced picture of the Poles. Why not read Anna Bikont about what happened in Jedwabne or Jan T. Gross on this?
The woman responded. “I knew it would not be long before I heard from you, I was just waiting.” And then she let unleashed some filthy Jew-hatred. “Unless your writer has substantiation, this is defamation. Where are the accounts of this, the photos, the arrests, the police records, the death records? The Jews have exaggerated the role of Poles in the Holocaust; at least one hundred Poles died trying to save Jews—what about them? I am sick and tired of Jews who are still maligning certain countries in order to get financial reparations.”
And then, unbelievably, she writes: “My most recent boyfriend was Jewish…There is no natural animosity between Polish workers and Jewish workers. If there was any acrimony between Jews and Poles, I feel it is class-based NOT religion-based. Poor Jews were just as abandoned by RICH JEWS as they were by rich Poles. Poor Jews in the USA were just as oppressed by capitalist owners (in fur factories) as were poor Polish workers. Don’t be gullible Phyllis. There are many tricks they use when they are publicizing a cause.”
Appealing to class warfare and class solidarity did the trick. The first woman who spoke said that maybe she should “drop her grudge.”
What this woman wrote was raw, hot, and resentful, a function of newly found pride wounded to the quick. It was also totally ignorant.
However, what had my attention was how silent the online group became, how no one wanted to challenge or upend this Big Lie and risk being bullied. This kind of fearfulness, cowardice, avoidance of feared punishment—or silent approval—is precisely how Hitler triumphed.
Luna nodded her head gravely and said nothing. We sat in silence for a minute. Then, she agreed with my observations and concerns. I continued.
“Perhaps many members in this online group missed this exchange entirely. Maybe they got to it weeks later, if ever, and felt it was too late to comment, the group had moved on. Everyone was already talking about other things. Two women wrote to me privately, safely, cautiously, but did not weigh in on this subject publicly, for all to read. Privately, I asked one woman:
“What would Flo Kennedy, (a high profile African-American feminist), have said if another feminist claimed that slavery had not existed, or if it had, that there had not been too much of it, and that at least 100 white people had died trying to save black slaves and that anyway, black people are now exaggerating the extent of slavery in order to get reparations?”
Her response: Flo would have given them a piece of her mind and moved on.
Readers: I said I would never again speak online in this group and I moved on. Yet again. Which is not always a good thing if one wishes to remain connected to cherished colleagues and to remain “in the know.” This is the danger involved when pro-Israeli or Israeli professors are not invited to speak—or may do so only under conditions of extreme hostility and harassment; when their papers are not accepted by academic journals, their projects not funded, etc.
Then, Luna told me a story.
“You know, Jews were also brutal to other Jews who were under their whip. That’s how it seemed to me when I was a young teenager in the camps. One man, a Jew, was put in charge of the selections for who would go to Auschwitz. I hated him. But he told me that he knew who was dying anyway and that’s who he tried to pick.
Still, he had an awful job but he performed it with great vigor. But things were complicated. This same kapo was in charge of the barracks where sick people were warehoused. The ‘hospital.’ I was there, I was quite sick. When the Russians came to liberate us, he knew that they were going to kill everyone who was sick or dying. He rushed in and threw me out of the barracks. This saved my life. So, when he was put on trial for his crimes, I refused to testify against him. They hanged him anyway.”
And so: Things were complicated.
What useful conclusion, if any, may I draw? That one of these silent, bystander women may one day hide a Jew on the run? Or that this woman with Polish, Christian ancestry may one day come to regret her ignorant and hateful words and try to make amends? I no longer know how to relate to those with whom I once honorably served in battle in another war—but who are now my opponents in the war against the Jews.
Reprinted from IsraelNationalNews.com.
16.
Poll: Netanyahu wins if direct elections are held
In the April Knesset election, Blue and White finished tied with the Likud for the number of mandates, and in the September election, Blue and White finished ahead of the Likud by one seat.
Amid the ongoing deadlock, a proposal has been made to hold an election just for prime minister – Gantz against Netanyahu – while leaving the current composition of the Knesset intact.
Thirteen percent of the respondents said that they would not vote for anyone. Nine percent replied that they were undecided.
The survey showed that if another full parliamentary election were to take place, the result would again be that neither the right-wing bloc nor the left-wing bloc would have an assured majority to form a government coalition in the 120-seat Israeli parliament.
17.
Palestinian Authority sends unaccounted billions to terror groups
PMW says that the PA’s financial records for the years 2011-2018 show that the PA transferred 7 billion shekels to the PLO. The PLO then transferred that money to terrorist groups.
Other members include groups designated as terror organizations by the U.S. and the E.U. such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Palestinian Liberation Front.
The Ma’an news agency reported on June 17, 2018, “PLO Executive Committee member [and Fatah Central Committee member] Azzam Al-Ahmad denied that the allocation from the Palestinian National Fund to any Palestinian organization, including the Popular Front [for the Liberation of Palestine] (PFLP), has been stopped.
“In a telephone conversation with Al-Ahmad from Amman, he said: ‘There is no truth to the rumors that [PA] President Abbas or any other party has stopped the allocation to the PFLP.”
PMW says that although Abbas could have stopped the funding, as he has done so sporadically in the past, “the PA has systematically used U.S. and EU money to fund organizations that the donors themselves have designated as terrorist organizations.”
The Israeli watchdog group reports that the EU’s own “2017 – 2020 Joint Strategy Towards a democratic and accountable Palestinian State” declares that “Democratic principles” and the “holding of elections” are “non-negotiable principles.”
But PMW notes that the requirement that the PA “adhere to even basic standards of financial transparency is only useful if something is actually done with that information.”
“If the countries that donate considerable aid to the PA do not demand that the PA explain why it squandered billions of shekels of aid – including by providing funding to non-functioning bodies and terrorist organizations – as it cries poverty and begs for aid, then the PA will continue to use and abuse the goodwill of the donor countries.
“Allowing the PA to continue these practices does nothing to achieve any peace-related goal. The opposite is true. When the international donors turn a blind eye to the PA’s obvious abuses, they simply embolden and facilitate the PA to deepen the rifts.”
18.
Netanyahu hands Bennett defense ministry
The appointment still needs to be approved at a government meeting.
The Likud and New Right parties also agreed to run as a joint faction in the current Knesset and if it is dissolved to run as a joint list in a possible third general election.
Netanyahu’s decision to hand Bennett the defense portfolio is a major reversal from November 2018. Then Bennett demanded the defense ministry after Avigdor Liberman, chairman of the Israel Beiteinu party, quit the post.
Bennett, who was then education minister, and Ayelet Shaked, then-justice minister, eventually backed down from their demand.
Netanyahu said at the time, “I told them not to bring down the government, especially at such a sensitive time from a security perspective.”
“I told them they must not repeat the mistake of 1992 when a Likud government was brought down and replaced with a government that brought us the Oslo disaster. I told them that they must not repeat the mistake of 1999 when factions within the government brought it down and it was replaced with a government that brought us the Intifada,” the prime minister said.
19. HELLAS JOURNAL.COM
Ο πρόεδρος των ΗΠΑ Ντόναλντ Τράμπ προειδοποίησε τον Τούρκο ομόλογό του Ρετζέπ Ταγίπ Ερντογάν σε νέα επιστολή του ότι σύντομα θα χρειαστεί να επιβάλει κυρώσεις στην Τουρκία για την αγορά των ρωσικής κατασκευής πυραυλικών αμυντικών συστημάτων (S-400), αν η Άγκυρα δεν αποδεχθεί τους όρους που της προτείνει η Ουάσιγκτον, αναφέρει η ιστοσελίδα “Middle East Eye” (MEE). Για το θέμα δεν υπάρχει ακόμα ανακοίνωση επιβεβαίωσης (ή διάψευσης) από τον Λευκό Οίκο. Χθες ο σύμβουλος Εθνικής Ασφάλειας του Λευκού Οίκου δήλωσε ότι ο πρόεδρος Τραμπ είναι θυμωμένος με τον Ερντογάν για την υπόθεση των S-400 (ΕΔΩ). Σύμφωνα με τις πηγές του MEE, ο κ. Τραμπ φέρεται να είπε στους Τούρκους ότι θα τους επιτρέψει να επιστρέψουν στο πρόγραμμα κατασκευής των αεροσκαφών της πέμπτης γενιάς, F-35 αν συμφωνήσουν να μην ενεργοποιήσουν τα συστήματα S-400 και δεσμευθούν ότι δεν θα αγοράσουν άλλα ρωσικά οπλικά συστήματα στο μέλλον. Ο Ερντογάν έχει προγραμματιστεί να συναντηθεί με τον κ. Τραμπ την Τετάρτη στην Ουάσιγκτον με το θέμα των S-400 που αγόρασε η Τουρκία από τη Ρωσία να είναι το κύριο θέμα της συζήτησης. Θα συζητηθούν ακόμα μία σειρά θεμάτων που θα περιλαμβάνουν την εισβολή της Άγκυρας στη βόρεια Συρία και τις επιθέσεις της εναντίον των κουρδικών δυνάμεων, που πρόδωσε ο Πρόεδρος Τραμπ.
Πηγή:
20.
Karargahta yeni mesai… YAŞ’ın yapısı tekrar mı değişiyor?
Yüksek Askeri Şura’nın yapısı yeniden mi değişiyor? Veryansın Tv, çok tartışılacak konuda çarpıcı bilgilere ulaştı. Buna göre, Milli Savunma Bakanlığı, Genelkurmay Başkanlığı ve kuvvet komutanlıklarına ‘YAŞ yapısında değişiklik’ önerisiyle ilgili görüş sordu. Soru kısaca şu: Yüksek Askeri Şura’ya Cumhurbaşkanı Yardımcısı başkanlık etsin mi?
ERDEM ATAY / VERYANSIN TV
Yaklaşık 1 ay önce gönderilen önerinin Milli Savunma Bakanı Hulusi Akar tarafından talep edildiği belirtilirken, Genelkurmay Başkanlığı ve kuvvet komutanlıklarından henüz bir yanıt gelmediği öğrenildi.
NE YANIT VERİLECEK?
Veryansın Tv’nin edindiği bilgilere göre, hem Genelkurmay hem de kuvvet komutanlıkları bu konuda “olumsuz” görüş belirtmek istiyor. Ancak böyle bir yanıt verilmesi durumunda bunun bir sıkıntı doğuracağı da konuşuluyor. Bu nedenle, verilecek yanıtların “olumlu” olabileceği ihtimalinin yüksek olduğu düşünülüyor.
Yüksek Askeri Şura yapısı, 15 Temmuz 2018 günü çıkan Cumhurbaşkanlığı Kararnamesi ile tamamen değiştirilmişti. Askerlerin azaltıldığı ve gücünün çok zayıflatıldığı Şura’da sivillerin karar almadaki gücü oldukça artırıldı.
YAŞ’A GÖRE BAŞKAN CUMHURBAŞKANI
Yeni oluşturulan yapıya göre, Cumhurbaşkanı gerekli gördüğü hallerde Yüksek Askeri Şura toplantılarına katılıp başkanlık ediyor. Cumhurbaşkanının katılmadığında durumlarda toplantıya görevlendireceği yardımcısı başkanlık yapıyor. MSB tarafından fikri sorulan konu ise, Cumhurbaşkanının görevinin yerini yardımcısının alıp almayacağı.
ASKER YAŞ’IN DEĞİŞMESİNİ İSTİYOR AMA…
Edinilen bilgilere göre, asker YAŞ’taki son değişiklikten memnun değil. Yapının değişmesi görüşündeler. Ancak değişim talebi şûranın temsiliyle ilgili değil, asker sayısının artılırması yönünde. Askerlerin, yapının mevcut durumunun sıkıntı oluşturduğunu düşündüğü öğrenildi.
Yeni yapıya göre 4 asker, 8 sivilden oluşan YAŞ’ın doğru kararlar veremeyeceğini düşünen askerlerden konuyla ilgili daha önce de benzer tepkiler gelmişti.
SONER POLAT UYARMIŞTI
Tepkilerden biri yakın bir zamanda kaybettiğimiz emekli Amiral Soner Polat’tan gelmişti. Polat, yeni yapıyı, “Tarih böyle bir çarpıklığı yazmamıştır” demiş, “Askerin olmadığı bir Yüksek Askeri Şura ile karşı karşıyayız” açıklaması yapmıştı.
Kararların salt çoğunlukla alınmasına kararına ilişkin Polat şöyle devam etmişti:
“Bu şu anlama geliyor, askerin dediği olmayacak. Milli Askeri Stratejik Konsept’in nihai kararın verilmesinde asker belirleyici değil. Askerler somut olarak bakarsa sadece görüş bildirecekler. Karar mercilerinde artık yoklar. Kişisel olarak değerlendirdiğimde ortada Yüksek Askeri Şura diye bir şey yok. Askerlerin en ufak ağırlığı ve fonksiyonları yok. Sivillerin göstereceği irade ile kararlar alınacak. Çoğunluk kimdeyse güç de ondadır. Askerlerin olmadığı askeri şura… Siz hiç doktorların olmadığı bir doktor şurası toplayabilir misiniz?”
21. makeleio.gr
«Εδώ είναι Ελλάδα δεν είναι χαλιφάτο του ISIS». Αστραπές και βροντές! Στάθηκε στο πλευρό των πατριωτών του Μπάρμπεκιου! Να σε έχει καλά ο Αλλάχ Γ.Γ. των Σύρων Ελλαδας…
Μηνύματα προς ΣΥΡΙΖΑ, βουλευτής του οποίου έσπευσε να χαρακτηρίσει ως «σαδιστές» τους Έλληνες που οργάνωσαν το δρώμενο, (Χρ.Γιαννούλης), αλλά και προς κυβέρνηση ΝΔ η οποία έσπευσε να υπερασπιστεί τον Γιαννούλη έδωσε ο Α.Μπακρί.
Ο κ. Μπακρί ήταν αποκαλυπτικός και έκανε δηλώσεις,για τον ρόλο της Ύπατης Αρμοστείας – «Αρπαχτίας», όπως την αποκαλεί – του ΟΗΕ, των ΜΚΟ, τις οποίες απεκάλεσε γκάνγκστερ και της σατανικής υπηρεσίας ασύλου, η οποία παρακρατά τα νομιμοποιητικά έγγραφα των πραγματικών προσφύγων.
Επιπλέον, ο κ. Μπακρί ανακοίνωσε ότι τις επόμενες ημέρες έχει κληθεί από τους «Αδιάφθορους» της Ελληνικής Αστυνομίας για να καταθέσει τα όσα επανειλημμένως έχει καταγγείλει για περιπτώσεις διαφθοράς στην Υπηρεσία Ασύλου.
Πιο συγκεκριμένα, ο κ. Μπακρί είπε:
«Έχει πέσει κατάρα στην πατρίδα μας τη Συρία. Ο Θεός να βάλει το χέρι του. Ευχαριστούμε πάρα πολύ τον ελληνικό λαό, που μας φιλοξενεί και θα πρέπει να σεβαστούμε την Ελλάδα και τα έθιμα της Ελλάδος. Εδώ δεν είναι ισλαμικό κράτος. Εδώ δεν είναι το χαλιφάτο του ISIS. Εδώ, όποιος θέλει πίνει τη μπίρα του κι όποιος δε θέλει δεν την πίνει.
Όποιος θέλει να φάει χοιρινό το τρώει κι όποιος θέλει δεν το τρώει. Όποια θέλει να βάλει μαντίλα, συμπατριώτισσά μου, τη βάζει κι όποια δε θέλει δεν τη βάζει. Και τελειώνει η ιστορία. Αυτή είναι η ελευθερία.
»Και επαναλαμβάνω:
Πρέπει να τελειώνουμε με το Μεσαίωνα.
Είτε για τη Συρία είτε για την Ελλάδα να τελειώνουμε πλέον. Γιατί όπως είπε και εδώ ο αγαπητός Έλληνας πατριώτης (δείχνει έναν εκ των διοργανωτών του μπάρμπεκιου), εδώ γίνεται μεγάλη μπίζνα. Παίζονται δισεκατομμύρια μ’ αυτούς του γκάνγκστερ. Γκάνγκστερ είναι οι ΜΚΟ.
Μιλάμε για γκάνγκστερ. (χειροκρότημα) Γιατί αυτές και η Ύπατη Αρμοστεία – τάχα Αρμοστεία – του ΟΗΕ, που εμείς οι Σύριοι την ονομάζουμε Ύπατη Αρπαχτεία του ΟΗΕ…
Μιλάμε για πολύ χρήμα, για κλέψιμο, για απάτες! Μεθαύριο με έχουν καλέσει οι αδιάφθοροι της Ελληνικής Αστυνομίας για να καταθέσω γι’ αυτά που γίνονται. Για τα Σόδομα και τα Γόμορα που γίνονται στην υπηρεσία ασύλου. Αυτήν την σατανική υπηρεσία ασύλου. Πολύ χρήμα, πολύ χρήμα! Δε δίνουν τα ντοκουμέντα στους πρόσφυγες. Γιατί ξέρετε, η Ελλάδα είναι ένα πέρασμα… Οι πρόσφυγες θέλουν να πάνε στο σταθμό του Μονάχου…»
22.
Erdogan says Turkey will not withdraw troops from Syria until other countries pull out
Iran Press TV
Fri Nov 8, 2019 11:17PM
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says his country’s troops will not leave Syria until other countries pull out, insisting that Ankara will continue its cross-border offensive against Kurdish militants in northeastern parts of the Arab country until every one of them has left the region.
Turkish army forces and militants of the so-called Free Syrian Army (FSA), who enjoy Ankara’s patronage, on October 9 launched a cross-border offensive into northeastern Syria in a declared attempt to clear members of the so-called People’s Protection Units (YPG), a Kurdish militant group, from border areas.
Ankara regards the US-backed YPG as a terrorist organization tied to the homegrown Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militant group, which has been seeking an autonomous Kurdish region in the Anatolian country since 1984.
Ankara is seeking the establishment of a 32-kilometer “safe zone” totally clear from the presence of Kurdish militants in northeastern Syria. Turkey wants the area to be used for the relocation of two million Syrian refugees living in Turkey.
“We won’t quit before the last terrorist leaves the region. This is one dimension of the issue. Secondly, we will not quit before other countries leave. We are in favor of Syria’s unity and solidarity. We never want it disintegrated,” Erdogan told reporters on Friday, when he was asked whether Ankara’s “Operation Peace Spring” would continue.
After seizing a 120-km swathe of land along the border, Turkey struck deals with the US and Russia to keep the Kurdish militants out of that so-called buffer zone.
On October 22, Erdogan and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin signed a memorandum of understanding that asserted YPG militants must withdraw from the Turkish-controlled “safe zone” within 150 hours, after which Ankara and Moscow would run joint patrols within the area.
The agreement was reached hours before a US-brokered five-day truce between Turkish and Kurdish-led forces was due to expire.
The Turkish president further said if other states deployed troops in Syria to defend the integrity of the Arab country, “they have to prove it.” He emphasized that other countries, “neither Russia, nor the US or Iran,” do not even share borders with Syria.
Erdogan’s remarks come as the Syrian government has repeatedly condemned the Turkish offensive as an act of aggression.
But Iran provides military advisory assistance to Syrian government forces in the fight against foreign-backed Takfiri terrorists at the formal request of Damascus,.
Russian jets have also been carrying out air raids against militants in Syria at the Damascus government’s formal request since September 2015.
However, the US has been conducting airstrikes inside Syria since September 2014 without any authorization from Damascus or a UN mandate. Washington has repeatedly been accused of targeting and killing civilians. There are also about 1,000 US troops mostly taking positions near Syria’s oil fields after President Donald Trump’s recent order.
Furthermore, Iran, Russia and Turkey act as the guarantors of an all-out ceasefire regime in Syria. Senior diplomats from the three countries have held several rounds of consultations with the Astana format amid efforts to find a political solution to the crisis in the Arab country.
The Turkish military has previously launched two cross-border incursions in northern Syria, namely the Euphrates Shield in August 2016 and the Olive Branch in January 2018, with the declared aim of eradicating Kurdish militants and Daesh Takfiri terrorists near Turkey’s borders.
23.
Tehran Begins Uranium Enrichment at Fordow Facility – Iran Atomic Energy Organisation
23:56 06.11.2019(updated 00:27 07.11.2019)
Spokesman for the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), Behrouz Kamalvandi, said Wednesday that preparations for the fourth stage of a reduction in Iran’s commitments to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also known as Iran nuclear deal, have begun.
According to Kamalvandi, cited by the Tasnim news agency, a shipment of nuclear materials has been sent to the Fordow nuclear site and uranium hexafluoride (UF6) will be injected into centrifuge machines.
Kamalvandi stressed that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has also been informed about the shipment of nuclear materials to the Fordow facility, adding that Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium – now around 500 kilograms – would increase by some 6 kilograms per day as soon as the centrifuges of Fordow start working.
“It is necessary to say that everything is being carried out under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency”, the AEOI said in the press release.
On 8 May, the first anniversary of the United States’ unilateral withdrawal from the 2015 JCPOA, Iran announced a gradual reduction of its nuclear obligations. Tehran then announced that it would start abandoning some parts of its nuclear obligations every 60 days unless European signatories to the deal ensured Iran’s interests amid Washington’s reinstated sanctions.
Under the JCPOA, Iran was supposed to have repurposed its Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant as a centre for the production of stable isotopes, avoiding enriching uranium and leaving Natanz as the only uranium enrichment facility.
On Tuesday, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said that Tehran would start injecting gas into centrifuges at the Fordow facility. Rouhani stressed, however, that the decision was reversible and Iran would suspend gasification as soon as the JCPOA signatories complied with their commitments.
According to the US Department of State, Iran’s assertions that its uranium enrichment work is reversible are false. Washington has pointed out that Iran’s research and development work on new centrifuge designs is irreversible learning that could enhance the country’s development of a nuclear weapon if Tehran decided to pursue one.
© Sputnik
24.
Two Individuals Plead Guilty for Working on Behalf of Iran
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Wednesday, November 6, 2019
Ahmadreza Mohammadi-Doostdar, 39, a dual U.S.-Iranian citizen, and Majid Ghorbani, 60, an Iranian citizen and resident of California, have entered pleas of guilty to charges stemming from their conduct conducting surveillance of and collecting identifying information about American citizens and U.S. nationals who are members of the Iranian dissident group Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK).
On Oct. 8, 2019, Doostdar entered a guilty plea to one count of acting as an agent of the Government of Iran without notifying the Attorney General, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 951, and one count of conspiring to violate that statute, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 371. On November 4, 2019, Ghorbani entered a guilty plea to one count of violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, 50 U.S.C. § 1705, and the Iranian Transactions and Sanctions Regulations, 31 C.F.R. Part 560.
“The defendants both have admitted to conducting surveillance and collecting identifying information for the Government of Iran about Americans, and in particular, individuals who were exercising their First Amendment rights to oppose the Iranian government,” said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John C. Demers. “The Department of Justice is committed to holding accountable governments like Iran that would threaten and intimidate Americans who criticize them.”
“The Iranian government thought it could get away with conducting surveillance on individuals in the United States by sending one of its agents here to task a permanent resident with conducting and collecting that surveillance,” said Jessie K. Liu, United States Attorney for the District of Columbia. “This case highlights our efforts to pursue those who threaten national security and disrupt foreign governments that target U.S. persons.”
“These individuals admitted to breaking the law and acting on behalf of the government of Iran by collecting information about the activities of Iranian dissidents in our country. The FBI’s actions in this case illustrate how seriously we take our mission of protecting the American people and upholding the Constitution,” said Executive Assistant Director Jay Tabb. “The FBI will continue to aggressively investigate illegal activity that threatens our fellow citizens and their constitutionally protected rights, and we will not tolerate any such activity conducted by the government of Iran or its agents.”
As part of his plea, Doostdar admitted under oath that he traveled to the United States from Iran on three occasions in order to meet with Ghorbani and to convey directions for Ghorbani’s activities on behalf of the Government of Iran. Prior to Doostdar’s first trip to the United States, his handler with the Government of Iran identified Ghorbani by name, showed Doostdar a photograph of Ghorbani, and told him where Ghorbani worked.
During Doostdar’s first trip to the United States in July 2017, Doostdar met Ghorbani at Ghorbani’s workplace. Doostdar admitted that during a subsequent conversation, Ghorbani told Doostdar that he was willing to work for the Government of Iran in the United States.
On Sept. 20, 2017, Ghorbani attended an MEK rally in New York City. The rally consisted of constitutionally protected activity, including U.S. citizens denouncing the Iranian regime. At the rally, Ghorbani photographed rally attendees, including MEK leaders.
During Doostdar’s second trip to the United States as part of the conspiracy, in December 2017, Doostdar met with Ghorbani and collected the rally photographs from Ghorbani. The photographs depicted MEK leaders, and included hand-written notes identifying the individuals and listing their positions in the group. Ghorbani and Doostdar also discussed Ghorbani’s planned travel to Iran in March 2018, and Ghorbani offered to provide an in-person briefing on rally attendees during this trip. Under oath, Ghorbani admitted to attending the September 2017 MEK rally and to photographing and gathering information on rally attendees to provide to Doostdar and ultimately to individuals in Iran.
In December 2017, Doostdar departed the United States for Iran with the photographs and the handwritten notes provided by Ghorbani. Doostdar paid Ghorbani $2,000 for his work, which Doostdar admitted had been provided by Doostdar’s Government of Iran handler.
In May 2018, Ghorbani traveled to another MEK rally in Washington, D.C., where he again collected information on participants critical of the Iranian regime. Following that rally, Doostdar admitted that he and Ghorbani spoke by telephone and discussed the methods that Ghorbani could use to provide information collected at that rally to Doostdar in Iran.
Doostdar further admitted that during his travel to the United States to task Ghorbani with collecting information on U.S. persons on behalf of the Iranian regime, he communicated with his Government of Iran handler through another co-conspirator. Doostdar’s handler relayed instructions and encouragement, and answered Doostdar’s questions that came up during his mission to the United States.
Doostdar is scheduled to be sentenced on Dec. 17, 2019, at 2:00 p.m., before the Honorable Paul L. Friedman of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Ghorbani is scheduled to be sentenced before Judge Friedman on Jan. 15, 2020, at 10:00 a.m.
The maximum penalty for conspiracy is five years; the maximum penalty for acting as an agent of a foreign power is 10 years; and the maximum penalty for violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act is 20 years. The maximum statutory sentence is prescribed by Congress and is provided here for informational purposes. Each defendant’s sentence will be determined by the court based on the advisory U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.
The investigation into this matter was conducted by the FBI’s Washington Field Office and Los Angeles Field Office. The case is being prosecuted by the National Security Section of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia and the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section of the National Security Division of the Department of Justice.
Topic(s):
Counterintelligence and Export Control
National Security
Component(s):
National Security Division (NSD)
USAO – District of Columbia
Press Release Number: 19-1197
25.
Israeli woman jailed in Russia is ‘losing it, can’t take it anymore’
“My mom saw her a couple of days ago and she’s losing it. She can’t really take it anymore,” said Issachar’s sister.
By World Israel News Staff
In an interview with JTA on Monday, Liad Goldberg recalled the visit she had with her sister Naama Issachar in the Russian prison where she is being held.
During the interview, Goldberg said that during her visit in August she could only speak to Issachar through a glass partition, and that she personally witnessed her sister being led to the courtroom for a hearing.
According to Goldberg, her sister’s emotional well-being is very bad, and their mother who visited Issachar a few days ago feels the same.
Goldberg’s account of her sister’s emotional breakdown is in sharp contrast to an earlier Russian media report that said she is doing well.
RT, a Russian news outlet, claimed that Issachar is in good spirits, enjoying yoga and gets along well with her fellow inmates.
Issachar’s sister was quick to dismiss the report.
“That’s not true,” Goldberg said. “She later said that she felt very pressured, that she had no idea that these reporters were coming to speak to her. A lot of that stuff is false information.”
Goldberg emphasized that the family is doing everything they can to get Issachar extradited back to Israel.
In April, Issachar was heading back to Tel Aviv after a three-month vacation in India. She was arrested before her connecting flight in Moscow for possession of drugs after Russian authorities discovered 9.2 ounces of marijuana in her luggage.
Despite denying she knew anything of the drugs, Issachar was taken from the airport to a detention center in Moscow.
She was then charged with drug possession which often entails one month of detention, a fine and a ban on entering the country. However, shortly afterward, the public prosecutor changed the charge from drug possession to drug smuggling.
On October 11, Issachar was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison.
26.
Netanyahu: ‘Israel Will Never Allow Iran to Get a Nuclear Bomb’
By TPS
Israel will never allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons “for the future of the Middle East and the world,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated, hours after Tehran announced it was again acting to breach the 2015 nuclear deal.
Speaking at an event in Jerusalem on Tuesday night, Netanyahu stated that “given Iran’s efforts to expand its nuclear weapons program, expand its enrichment of uranium for making atomic bombs, I repeat here once again: We will never let Iran develop nuclear weapons.”
“This is not only for our security and our future; it’s for the future of the Middle East and the world,” he underscored.
There are some 1,000 centrifuges installed at the underground Fordo Fuel Enrichment Plant. Light water reactors require uranium to be enriched from 0.7% to 3-5% to make it suitable for fuel.
While the US has withdrawn from the agreement, four European countries are still committed to it. This is the fourth time Iran has announced it is taking action to scale back the nuclear deal.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said that Tehran’s step is a response to “disloyalt[y] shown by the US and the European states” towards the agreement.
“Our response to US economic terrorism and blackmail is opposite of what Donald Trump was led to believe,” Zarif said on Twitter on Tuesday, adding that it was as “a remedy to US+E3 violations.”
A US State Department spokesperson stated that Iran has no credible reason to expand its uranium enrichment program, other than a clear attempt at nuclear extortion that will only deepen its political and economic isolation.”
“We will continue to impose maximum pressure on the regime until it abandons its destabilizing behavior, including proliferation-sensitive work,” the statement said.
27.
Surprise! Israeli Natural Gas Fields Much Larger than Expected!..
Natural gas fields off the coast of Israel were recently revealed as containing far greater reserves than previously expected.
By United with Israel Staff
Energean Oil and Gas PLC, a British-Greek gas producer focused on the Mediterranean, said Monday in a press release, that its Karish North and Tanin fields revealed “significantly” larger than expected natural gas supplies.
“This is an excellent result from the Karish North appraisal sidetrack, confirming in place volumes in the top half of pre-drill estimates and increasing our recoverable volumes in Israel by 0.9 Tcf (25 BCM) of gas plus 34 million barrels of light oil or condensate,” Energean CEO Mathios Rigas said, according to the press release.
“Today’s news delivers upon another commitment that we had made to our shareholders, and the successful results allow us to continue our gas marketing efforts in the region with a goal to fully utilize the capacity of our 8 BCMA FPSO. Our focus now remains on closing the Edison E&P acquisition, in parallel with progressing the Karish development,” he continued.
Israel is pegged to deliver natural gas to Jordan and Egypt, valued at $26 billion. It is also planning to construct a 2,000-km pipeline to supply Eastern Mediterranean gas to Europe.
In April, when additional quantities of natural gas were discovered around Israel’s waters about 90 kilometers offshore following delays in exploration, the country’s Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz said, “I congratulate Energean on the large amount of natural gas that has appeared in Karish North. This is a prelude, which I am sure will herald further discoveries in the future. If you will it, it is no dream, and Israel will become a regional energy power,” reported The Jerusalem Post.
At that time, Rigas said, “We are delighted to be announcing this significant new gas discovery at Karish North, which further demonstrates the attractiveness of our acreage offshore Israel. We have already signed a contingent contract to sell 5.5 bcm of this new resource, and our strategy is now to secure the offtake for remaining volumes. We continue to see strong demand for our gas, which we believe will be supported by today’s announcement.”
The latest discovery follows exploratory drilling 700 meters north of the original Karish North penetration that took place between mid-March and April and cost $25 million.
Energean is listed on both the London and Tel Aviv stock exchanges. Following the report, stocks rose almost 2 percent on Monday.
According to the Post, “The Karish North field will be developed via a connection to Energean’s floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) unit, located 5.4 km. away and built with capacity to produce 8 billion cubic meters of gas per year. Gas flow is expected to commence in 2021.”
28.
Serbia To Receive Russian Antiaircraft Missiles Despite U.S. Sanctions Risk
By RFE/RL November 07, 2019
Russia will deliver a sophisticated short-range air-defense missile system to Serbia despite U.S. warnings of possible sanctions against the Balkan country if the transaction goes through.
Russian state TASS news agency reported on November 6 that the Pantsir-S system will be delivered to Serbia “in the next few months in accordance with the signed contract.”
Last week, Matthew Palmer, the U.S. special envoy for the Western Balkans, said Belgrade could be subject to sanctions if Russian weapons are purchased.
“We hope that our Serbian partners will be careful about any transactions of this kind,” Palmer said in an interview with Macedonian television Alsat M, as cited by AP.
Last month, Serbia held joint air military exercises with Russia in which the Russian-made long-range S-400 and Pantsir-S systems were deployed.
It was the first time that an S-400 battalion and a Pantsir-S battery had appeared in military drills outside Russia, the Russian Defense Ministry stated.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic on November 5 said that Serbia is purchasing defensive weapons from the Russians and that he wants to avoid any U.S. sanctions “or confrontation with America,” AP reported.
Serbia maintains strong political and economic relations with Russia despite a proclaimed goal of joining the European Union. Belgrade has pledged to stay out of NATO and refused to impose sanctions against Russia over Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Russia has sold Serbia fighter jets, attack helicopters, and battle tanks over the years, raising concerns in the Balkan region that has experienced bloody wars over the past three decades.
“Serbia is arming itself because it is a free country surrounded by NATO-member states with which we want to be friends,” Vucic said.
Another purpose for beefing up Serbia’s military was to not allow the country to “be as weak as it was in the 1990s,” Vucic added.
NATO bombed Serbia in 1999 to stop a gory clampdown on Kosovar Albanians. Neither Serbia nor Russia recognize Kosovo’s 2008 declaration of independence.
With reporting by AP and TASS
Copyright (c) 2019. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.
29.
Gantz’s Party Ready to Annex Jordan Valley, Agrees with Likud
NATO Drills with Israeli Navy, Sees Israel as Key Partner; | ||||||||
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31.
WILL NAFTALI BENNETT MAKE A GOOD MINISTER OF DEFENSE?
Israel may not have a new government after the last round of elections, but it does have a new defense minister. Netanyahu has selected controversial right-wing politician Naftali Bennett for the coveted position. Is he up for the challenge?
This appointment, however, may provide important lessons for Bennett, a right-wing politician, who has hitherto believed that the complex situations we face have straightforward answers.
While Bennett may not have much time in his seat as defense minister on the 14th floor of the IDF Military Headquarters – he’s agreed that the role of defense minister will be filled by someone else in the next government – he will likely present a challenge for the military’s top brass… Kochavi will now have to sweat a bit in order to get things approved. Bennett is not the type of minister to rubber stamp every paper that comes across his desk.
Bennett wiill likely be thrown in at the deep end much faster than he can imagine, and that includes making important decisions without proper on-the-job training or detailed orientation. Bennett is taking up the position at a very crucial time for Israel, when all fronts are bubbling and threatening to blow up.
32.
£2.8bn armoured vehicle contract secured for British Army
A contract worth £2.8 billion has been signed to provide state-of-the-art armoured fighting vehicles to the British Army.
5 November 2019
The Defence Secretary has announced that the army will receive more than 500 Boxer 8×8 high mobility, network-enabled armoured vehicles to transport troops onto the frontline.
Defence Secretary, Ben Wallace, said:
“Our men and women of the Armed Forces deserve to have the best equipment to do their job.”
“The Boxer vehicle is a leader in its field and I look forward to it arriving in units from 2023.”
The vehicles will form part of the Army’s Strike brigades, new units set up to deploy rapidly over long distances across varied terrains.
Boxer is modular by design to meet these requirements – the same vehicle base can be rapidly reconfigured to fill different roles on the battlefield, from carrying troops across deserts to treating severely injured service personnel on the journey to hospital.
Initially the Army will buy a mixture of the troop-carrying variant, ambulances, command vehicles, and specialist designs to carry military equipment.
Sir Simon Bollom, Chief Executive of Defence, Equipment and Support (DE&S), said:
“This is excellent news for the Army and I’m delighted that we can now move forward with a contract for the Mechanised Infantry Vehicle.”
“We are looking forward to continuing to work closely with the Army and our partners across industry to deliver the best equipment and support for our troops.”
The UK announced in 2018 that it would re-join the Boxer programme within the Organisation for Joint Armament Cooperation (OCCAR) and explore options to modernise its vehicle fleet and meet the Army’s Mechanised Infantry Vehicle requirement.
The UK played a central role in the original design, development and testing of the Boxer. In re-joining the programme last year, the UK reassumed the rights it had as a project partner.
Major General Simon Hamilton, Mechanised Infantry Vehicle Programme lead for the British Army, said:
“I am delighted that we have committed to delivering the Mechanised Infantry capability through the purchase of around 500 battle-winning Boxer vehicles for the British Army. Boxer completes the suite of platforms to equip our new state-of-the-art STRIKE brigade where, alongside Ajax, Boxer’s low logistic need, extended reach, high-mobility, and advanced digitisation will ensure STRIKE is ready for any global scenario.”
This contract was signed ahead of the pre-election period due to the strong value-for-money agreement reached with industry and other OCCAR nations, which expires on December 31st 2019, and announced today due to expected market implications. It would be possible for a new Government to take a different position.
The MOD Permanent Secretary, as the Accounting Officer, considered the value for money implications and, on this basis, determined the most appropriate course of action is to proceed with the contract award ahead of the election.”
33.
Iran starts injecting gas into advanced IR-6 centrifuges
Iran Press TV
Mon Nov 4, 2019
Iran has officially started injecting gas into advanced IR-6 centrifuges through a ceremony at Natanz Nuclear Facility, which was attended by Head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) Ali Akbar Salehi.
Addressing reporters following the Monday ceremony, Salehi said, “Today, we will have three symbolic inaugurations, one of which is making operational a 30-machine cascade of IR-6 centrifuges,” which are used to enrich uranium.
Noting that Iran had already launched a 20-machine cascade on April 9, Salehi added, “At the present time, we have 60 IR-6 centrifuge machines, every one of which has a capacity of 10 SWU (separative work units) that increased the existing [uranium enrichment] capacity by a total capacity of 600 SWU.”
“This is a place for research and development. The number of centrifuges installed at this place in a matter of two months is 15 new-generation centrifuges, which is a great achievement… Our colleagues at the AEOI have been always active and if they had slowed down their activities, we would not have been able to add 2,600 SWU [of enrichment capacity] to the capacity that we already had,” the Iranian nuclear chief added.
He noted that Iran started manufacturing IR-6 machines in 2009 and unveiled the first sample a year later, saying, “About nine years have passed since the first machine of this type was unveiled and we worked for five years on this machine before the conclusion of the JCPOA (the nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action).”
US President Donald Trump is a stern critic of the nuclear accord, which was clinched by Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany in 2015. Under the agreement, nuclear-related sanctions against Iran were lifted in exchange for curbs on Tehran’s nuclear program.
Trump unilaterally withdrew the US from the deal in May 2018 and unleashed the “toughest ever” sanctions against the Islamic Republic in defiance of global criticism in a bid to strangle the Iranian oil trade.
In response to the White House, Tehran has so far rowed back on its nuclear commitments three times in compliance with Articles 26 and 36 of the JCPOA, stressing that its retaliatory measures will be reversible as soon as Europe finds practical ways to shield the mutual trade from the US sanctions.
Elsewhere in his remarks, the AEOI head said, “At present, our [enrichment] capacity stands at 8,600 SWU and our uranium production has increased from about 450 grams before we took the third step [to reduce our commitments under the JCPOA] to more than 5,000 grams per day.”
Salehi said before the conclusion of the JCPOA, Iran’s operational capacity stood at 11,000 SWU, noting, “After taking the third step, it took us only two months to reach the capacity of 8,600 SWU.”
He added that Iran currently possesses about 500 kg of enriched uranium, which is not limited to 4.2-percent enriched uranium and “we are currently adding 5,000 grams to it per day.”
In June 2018, Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei ordered the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran to make preparations for enrichment of uranium up to a level of 190,000SWU without any delay.
“It seems from what they say that some European governments expect the Iranian nation to both put up with sanctions and give up its nuclear activities and continue to observe limitations [on its nuclear program]. I tell those governments that this bad dream will never come true,” the Leader said.
EU urges Iran to reverse increased nuclear activity
The European Union said on Monday it will remain committed to the nuclear deal as long as Iran fulfills its commitments, urging Tehran to reverse the steps it has taken.
Maja Kocijancic, spokesperson for the European Commission, said that the 28-nation bloc “took note” of Iran’s announcement about increasing its enriched uranium production but would wait for confirmation by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) before responding.
“We have continued to urge Iran to reverse such steps without delay and to refrain from other measures that would undermine the nuclear deal,” Kocijancic told reporters in Brussels, saying the EU “remained committed” to the nuclear deal.
“But we have also been consistent in saying that our commitment to the nuclear deal depends on full compliance by Iran,” she added.
“We have been consistently expressing our concerns since we believe that the JCPOA should be preserved, it’s a matter of our security, not just the region or Europe but globally,” she pointed out.
Germany also reacted to Iran’s announcement on Monday, with the country’s foreign minister urging Tehran to return to the original accord.
“Iran has built very advanced centrifuges, which do not comply with the agreement,” Foreign Minister Heiko Maas was quoted by Reuters as telling a news conference in response to a question about the announcement.
“They have announced in early September that they would not comply with the nuclear accord and we think this is unacceptable,” he added.
34.
Netanyahu: Arab Countries See Israel as ‘Indispensable Ally’ Against Iran
By Noa Amouyal, JNS via Israel Hayom
The Arab world’s perception of Israel is undergoing a seismic shift, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday.
Addressing a 200-strong crowd in Jerusalem at the kick-off event of the Christian Media Summit and inauguration of the Friends of Zion Museum’s new media center, Netanyahu said Israel has gone from being perceived as an enemy in the region to being seen as an “indispensable ally.”
“Something very big is happening: the transformation of Israel in the minds of many in the Middle East. It’s no longer being perceived as an enemy. We’ve become an indispensable ally against the enemy of militant Islam,” he said.
“People said there would be a tremendous convulsion. But what happened? Nothing,” said Netanyahu.
The Friends of Zion Museum in Jerusalem is an interactive facility that harnesses Christian support to combat BDS and anti-Semitism.
The impetus behind the Arab world beginning to band together with Israel, said Netanyahu, was Iran. Israel’s goal, he said, was “to make sure that Iran does not develop nuclear weapons and that its march toward an empire and conquest has stopped.”
Netanyahu praised U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to impose hefty economic sanctions on Iran to curb its nuclear program, but said that “if Israel was not here, Iran would already have nuclear weapons.”
Normalization Beyond Security and Diplomacy
This normalization, he said, has spilled over to areas that go beyond security and diplomacy, seeping into technological and economic collaboration. The prime minister said this marked a “clear shift,” and added that “this is the way peace will ultimately be achieved.”
Netanyahu cautioned, however, that common goals don’t translate to common values.
“These aren’t Western democracies,” he said, “but they also understand that unless we cooperate we could be threatened by a great, evil power.”
To find common values, he said, Israel looked to the evangelical Christian community, of which there was a large delegation present at the event. He hailed them as “great believers in the Judeo-Christian tradition,” and said Israel had “no better friends in the world than our Christian friends.”
Netanyahu further vowed that Israel would continue to be a bastion of religious freedom in the region.
“We have a common cause to protect Christians, Yazidis, Muslims and Jews everywhere, and to protect our view of civilization, which protects individual rights and guarantees freedom,” he said.
Turning to the “new anti-Semitism,” Netanyahu said the best way to combat it was not merely to fight it, but to “expose these delegitimizers.”
“Who do they stand with? They stand with Hamas—who shoot people in the back of the head … in Gaza. They stand with [Islamic State], who beheads people. They stand with Iran, the ‘great protector of human rights.’ This is who they stand for, and this too needs to be exposed.”
This article first appeared in Israel Hayom.
35.
Netanyahu: ‘We have no better friends in the world than our Christian friends’
By Aryeh Savir, TPS
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara on Sunday evening attended the Christian Media Summit at the Friends of Zion Museum in Jerusalem, during which he lauded the support for Israel coming from Christian groups around the world.
An international media center was launched at the Friends of Zion Museum to strengthen Israel’s ties with the world and the struggle against pro-BDS organizations. Netanyahu participated in a ceremony to affix a mezuzah at its entrance.
He underscored that “it’s no accident that in Israel that’s the only place in the Middle East where Christians are free to practice their faith, complete religious freedom for all, and especially for Christians who are constantly under attack in the Middle East.”
For instance, before Hamas took over the Gaza strip in 2007, the Christian population there numbered over 3,000. Today, only 1,000 Christians remain.
Once a sizable community, the survey’s numbers show that today the Christian community numbers only 45,000 in the PA, with 4,000 living in Jerusalem.
Jifnah, one of six Christian villages in the Ramallah area under the control of the PA, is home to some 2,000 Christians, 400 of whom have immigrated to other countries.
Similarly, Christians in Egypt, in Syria and in Iraq, have endured several years of terrorist attacks by Islamist groups.
IDF officer reveals: If we followed ‘open-fire’ rules, we’d kill 10-20 terrorists a day
By World Israel News Staff
Lt. Col. Yoav Schneider, commander of Israeli Army’s 82nd Tank Battalion, 7th Brigade, made a revelation that will be startling to some. In an interview with the Ynet news site conducted last month and published on Monday, he says that the Army waits for Hamas terrorists to evacuate their positions before opening fire.
This, despite the fact that they’d be well within the Army’s rules of engagement if they did open fire, he said.
This explains why, when Palestinian terrorists launched 10 rockets into southern Israel late on Friday, four hours passed before the IDF responded.
Asked what he tells his soldiers, and whether or not they feel frustrated, Lt. Col. Schneider said, “I explain to them that there is a difference between the policy and the open-fire instructions…
However, Schneider says that his men are permitted to open fire at terrorists, even if they’re not fired on first. Such was the case in mid-August, when a tankist from his battalion fired on a group of terrorists attempting to cut the border fence.
“This is the only place where an enemy is being shot. There is no hysteria around every investigation,” he said. “In combat situations, sometimes things aren’t the desired results, but it’s not a sterile [situation],” he said.
Anti-government Protests Escalate in Iraq
Anti-government protesters in Baghdad shut down roads and government offices in the Iraqi capital on Sunday, escalating a month-long string of rallies demanding political change.
Tens of thousands of demonstrators have gathered in recent days in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square and across southern Iraq, shutting down markets, factories, schools and universities in protest of the political system in place since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that toppled dictator Saddam Hussein.
Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi called for the shuttered places to be reopened, contending that the threat to oil facilities and closure of roads had cost Iraq “millions” of dollars and contributed to consumer price increases in the country.
“It’s time for life to return to normal,” the Iraqi leader said.
Thousands of students have skipped classes to join the protests, blaming the country’s leaders for rampant corruption, high unemployment and poor public services. Syndicates of engineers, doctors and lawyers have all backed the protests.
The protesters on Sunday blocked roads around the main protest site with burning tires and barbed wire. At one roadblock, the demonstrators unfurled a banner saying, “Roads closed by order of the people.”
Since early October, security forces have fired military-grade tear gas, rubber bullets and live ammunition at the protesters, killing at least 256 people. After a brief hiatus, the protests restarted again Oct. 25, with frequent clashes on two bridges leading to the heavily-fortified Green Zone, the headquarters of the government and home to several foreign embassies.
The government has proposed a string of reforms, including more jobs and social welfare plans, along with early elections once a new voting law is adopted.
But the protesters have continued to challenge the government.
“We decided on this campaign of civil disobedience because we have had it up to here with the government’s lies and promises of so-called reform,” Mohammad al-Assadi, a government employee on strike in the southern city of Nasiriyah, told Agence France Presse.
The protests are leaderless, without an organizational structure, and they are not unified.
However, they have drawn a wide swath of the population from across the country’s sectarian and ethnic divides.
A move in Iraq’s parliament to approve a bill to cancel privileges and bonuses for senior politicians, including the president, prime minister and Cabinet ministers, has done little to calm the marchers.
38.
Opinion: Britain, Brexit and the ripple effect on identity politics and anti-Semitism
In Britain, the crisis so long dreaded by many British Jews is finally upon them. The general election that has been called for December raises the possibility that hard-left Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn might come to power.
The election was made inevitable by political paralysis over Brexit, with the Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson effectively held hostage by a parliament dominated by Remainer MPs determined to prevent the United Kingdom from making a clean break with the European Union.
This Brexit election is being described as the most important in Britain over the whole post-war period. Not only may it finally determine whether or not the United Kingdom leaves the European Union, but it may also usher in a revolutionary left-wing government that would change the country profoundly.
Many outside Britain have looked on with astonishment and perplexity as parliament tied itself and the government in knots rather than honoring the 2016 referendum result and taking the country out of the European Union.
This titanic three-year battle, however, is of critical importance far beyond British shores. It’s the outrider of the fundamental issue splitting apart the Western world from the Beltway to Budapest to Berlin.
That issue is whether the independent Western nation-state based on democratic structures reflecting its own particular identity, history and cultural traditions deserves to survive. How this is finally resolved in Britain will affect the rest of the West.
For many British Jews, however, the most important consideration is whether they will wake up after the election to a Labour government led by a prime minister who is a friend of Islamic terrorists and extremists, and has refused to acknowledge, let alone address, his party’s shocking descent into the sewer of institutional anti-Semitism.
They are right to be worried.
True, Labour is currently trailing dismally in the opinion polls. That’s due to a widespread fear of Corbyn’s extremism, confusion over the party’s ambiguous position on Brexit and recoil from its epidemic anti-Semitism.
Nevertheless, in this unprecedentedly fractured and chaotic political scene, the election result is impossible to predict. For the Brexit issue means both Labour and Conservative parties face splits in their vote.
Stop Corbyn
In its attempt to straddle the division between Brexiteers and Remainers, the Labour Party has fallen into the crevasse between them. As a result, Remainers who previously voted for it may defect en masse to the uncompromisingly Remainer Liberal Democrats, while Brexiteers who previously voted for it may migrate to Nigel Farage’s uncompromising Brexit Party.
Any such Labour split, however, may be mirrored by an equivalent calamity for the Conservatives. Boris Johnson hopes to win an overwhelming victory on the basis that he’s the leader who will “get Brexit done” in a heroic stand defending the sovereignty of the people against a Remainer establishment striving to reverse the referendum result.
But he also runs the risk not only of losing Remainer votes to the LibDems, but Brexiteers to the Brexit Party. For Farage maintains, with good reason, that Johnson’s E.U. deal isn’t Brexit at all; it would leave the United Kingdom still tied to Brussels, crippled in any future trade deal by being forced to conform even then to the rules and regulations of the European Union from which it had just departed.
Given the extreme volatility of this political and cultural meltdown, a minority Labour government or a Labour-led coalition certainly cannot be ruled out.
For Brexit supporters, this threatens to present an agonizing dilemma. Those who believe the Johnson deal is BRINO—Brexit-in-name-only—may be tempted to vote for Farage’s Brexit Party. But doing so may let in Corbyn by the back door.
Most British Jews, however, don’t have this dilemma. Understandably, their first priority is to stop Corbyn. But they’ll have no tactical problem voting for the LibDems because most British Jews also oppose Brexit.
They want the United Kingdom to remain in the European Union because they are frightened that restoring Britain’s particular national identity will give rise to nationalism, which they believe spells fascism and anti-Semitism.
Like many Jews in America who are also fearful of national pride, they’ve got this issue the wrong way round. As Yoram Hazony has so powerfully explained in his book The Virtue of Nationalism, a strong national identity provides the single greatest protection against tyranny. Nationalists don’t threaten other countries; they defend their own.
Nationalism became a dirty word after World War II, when it was blamed for the rise of Hitler. But Hitler despised nationalism. He was instead an imperialist; he wanted to invade other countries in order to recreate another Holy Roman Empire.
If Britain hadn’t had a strong, indeed passionate attachment to the idea of itself as a nation standing for a particular and cherished set of values and traditions, it would never have fought Hitler so heroically, and freedom would have been extinguished on both sides of the English Channel.
Jews, above all, should understand the value of the nation. The ancient kingdom of Israel was in fact the template of the nation-state, composed of a particular people in their own land bound by their own laws which expressed the history, traditions and principles that formed their shared identity and purpose.
Diaspora Jews, however, don’t like thinking of themselves as a nation. They fear this will provoke accusations of dual loyalty. So they tell themselves that their identity is formed by their host nation, whether Britain or America.
But the core of Jewish identity is membership of the Jewish people.
Moreover, the idea that dissolving national boundaries produces a decline in anti-Semitism is an illusion. Anti-Semitism gets out of control when a country loses pride in its identity or no longer even understands what has created that identity.
With the loss of a shared national project, it’s everyone out for themselves. And in their fury and frustration, they turn on the weakest elements of their society, who are always the Jews.
This is one reason why in Britain and mainland Europe anti-Semitism is roaring out of control. It’s one reason why tiny, permanently embattled Israel has become the Jew among nations, the unique target of a campaign of defamation and annihilation.
And it’s one reason why, after Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders falsely called Israel “racist” and proposed that some of the money the United States provides Israel to defend it against genocidal slaughter should be sent instead to those bent upon that genocidal slaughter, his fellow Democrats didn’t denounce this moral bankruptcy and remained silent.
The terrible divisions now roiling Britain, America and mainland Europe take different forms but rest upon the same fault line. These are countries in which large sections of the population fear their shared national culture is being destroyed—and who now find themselves involved in a desperate struggle against those who have devoted the past half-century to achieving precisely that.
Which is why Brexit is so important.
If a true, clean-break Brexit actually happens, it will not only give Britain a chance to become itself again. It will be a shot in the arm for all who yearn for the freedom to decide their own fate as a community of shared values and historic traditions, and to express that culture through laws they make themselves in a land they call home.
If the battle for Brexit is lost, the result isn’t likely to be the arrival of the brotherhood of man on earth. It will instead spell yet more division and tribalism and rancor—and much more danger for the Jews.
Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for “The Times of London,” her personal and political memoir, “Guardian Angel,” has been published by Bombardier, which also published her first novel, “The Legacy,” in 2018.
39. “ΞΕΛΑΜΠΙΚΑΖ”! Ο “ΑΡΚΑΣ” ΜΕ ΤΗΝ… ΝΔ ΠΙΑ!..
40. ΓΙΑΤΙ … şaşırtan ΡΕ ΤΟΥΡΚΟΙ, ΔΕΝ ΣΑΣ ΤΑ ΛΕΓΑΜΕ ΑΠ’ ΕΔΩ;
ABD’den şaşırtan Türkiye açıklaması! Önce yaptırım dedi sonra…
ABD Türkiye’nin NATO’dan çıkarılması halinde hem ABD’nin hem de AB’nin büyük yara alacağını belirtti.
O’Brien, Türkiye’nin Rusya’dan S-400 satın aldığı ve bunun için de yaptırımların olacağı uyarısında bulundu.
‘NE AVRUPA NE DE ABD İÇİN İYİ BİR ŞEY DEĞİL’
41.
Rusya ajan dedi İstanbul’da öldü! BBC’den iddia, Türkiye’den açıklama
Gelen son dakika haberine göre, Suriye’de faaliyet gösteren Beyaz Miğferliler’in (White Helmets) kurucusu ve İngiliz istihbarat teşkilatı MI6’in eski ajanı James Gustaf Edward Le Mesurier, Türkiye’de ölü bulundu. İngilizlerin haber kanalı BBC, yaşanan olay ile alakalı şok bir iddia ortaya atarken, İstanbul Valiliği’nden de açıklama yapıldı. Rusya günler önce Jemes Le Mesurier için “ajan” çıkışı yapmıştı.
SIR PERDESİ ARALANDI
POLİS EŞİNİN İFADESİNE BAŞVURDU
Le Mesurier’in eşiyle kaldığı eve giden polis ekipleri, eşinin ifadesine başvurdu. İlk ifadesinde kocasının uyku ilacı kullandığı ve olayın sabaha karşı kendisi uyurken gerçekleştiğini anlatan eşinin, eve yabancı bir kişinin girip çıkmadığını anlattığı öğrenildi.
“BALKONDAN DÜŞÜP ÖLDÜ” İDDİASI
Binanın güvenlik kameralarını inceleyen polis ekipleri, binaya yabancı kimsenin giriş çıkış yapmadığını da tespit etti. Düşmeye bağlı ölüm şüphesi üzerinde duran polis ekipleri, olayla ilgili çalışmasını çok yönlü sürdürüyor.
BBC: İNGİLİZ DEVLETİ ÖLDÜRMÜŞ OLABİLİR
İngilizlerin en önemli haber kanalı BBC’nin diplomasi editörü Mark Urban Twitter‘dan, eski bir arkadaşının James Le Mesurier’in kaldığı evi çok iyi bildiğini ve düşerek ölmesinin mümkün olmadığını yazdı. Urban mesajında, İngiliz devletin öldürmüş olabileceğini söyledi.
BBC muhabiri mesajının devamında, son dönemlerde Rusya ve Esed rejiminin Beyaz Miğferliler hakkındaki haberlerine dikkat çekti. Mark Urban, James Le Mesurier’in MI6 ajanı olup olmadığını bilmediğini, kendisiyle daha önce hiç konuşmadığını ifade ederek, “Ancak olayda devletin bir parmağının olup olmadığını açıklamak, kapsamlı soruşturmayı yönetecek olan Türkiye’ye düşecek” dedi.
URBAN AÇIKLAMALARINI DEĞİŞTİRDİ
Urban, dakikalar sonra tweetlerini silip “açıklanamayan ölümle” ilgili iki yeni açıklamaya yer verdi. “Devlet dışı aktörler” tarafından Le Mesurier’in hedef alınmış olabileceğini veya intihar etmiş olabileceğini yazdı.
VALİLİKTEN AÇIKLAMA
İstanbul Valiliği’nden yapılan açıklamada, “Beyoğlu’nda İngiliz uyruklu James Gustaf Edward Lemesurier’in ölümüyle ilgili geniş kapsamlı idari ve adli tahkikat başlatılmıştır” denildi.
RUSYA AJAN DEMİŞTİ
Le Mesurier’in ölüm haberi, eski İngiliz istihbarat subayının Rusya Dışişleri tarafından casuslukla suçlanmasının ardından geldi. Rusya Dışişler Bakanlığı Sözcüsü Maria Zaharova, Cuma günü Le Mesurier’den “dünyanın değişik köşelerinde ortaya çıkan eski bir MI6 ajanı” diye bahsetmişti. Zaharova, Rusya Dışişleri’nin Twitter hesabından paylaştığı yorumunda, Le Mesurier’i Balkanlar ve Orta Doğu‘da ajanlık yapmakla itham etmişti.
BEYAZ MİĞFERLİLERE SUÇLAMA
Suriye‘de muhaliflerin ve Türkiye’nin kontrolündeki alanlarda sivil savunma faaliyeti gösterdiğini savunan Beyaz Miğferliler, Rusya, İran ve Şam rejimi tarafından dezenformasyon yaymakla suçlanıyor.
42.
Doğu Akdeniz’e özel olarak indirdiler! Türkiye’ye karşı hareket edecek
Suriye krizinin gölgesinde kalan Akdeniz’deki sondaj geriliminde tansiyon Rum yönetiminin yeni adımlarıyla yeniden yükseliyor. Türkiye’nin sondaj gemilerinin güvenliği için İHA’larla yaptığı denetime Rum yönetimi de aynı yöntemle karşılık verdi. İsrail’den 4 İnsansız Hava Aracı alan Rumlar, 24 saat boyunca Türk gemilerini izliyor. Rumlara verilen İHA’nın tipi Aeronautics şirketinin Aerostar Tactical UAS modeli.
İHA SAVAŞLARI DOĞU AKDENİZ’E SIÇRADI
Günümüzde birçok devlet tarafından orduların vazgeçilmezi durumuna gelen İHA’lar bu teknolojiyi üretebilen ülkelerin askeri gücüne büyük katkı sağlıyor. Yemen’deki İran destekli Husiler‘in Eylül ayında Suudi Arabistan‘ın en önemli petrol tesislerine silahlı insansız hava araçları ve seyir füzeleri ile düzenlediği saldırı, dikkatlerin bir kez daha bu hava araçlarına çevrilmesine yol açmıştı. Doğu Akdeniz’de de İHA’ların kullanıldığı bir sessiz savaş var. Burada İHA’lar çatışma için değil casusluk ve gözetleme için kullanılıyor.
İSRAİL’DEN ALINAN İHA’LARLA TÜRKİYE’Yİ İZLİYORLAR
Yunanistan ve Kıbrıs Rum yönetimi ile istihbarat ve askeri işbirliği anlaşmaları imzalayan, tatbikatlar yapan İsrail, geçen ay Türkiye ve KKTC‘nin tüm itirazlarına rağmen Kıbrıs adasının güneyini tek yanlı parselleyen Kıbrıs Rum yönetimine 13 milyon Euro karşılığında yüksek irtifa gözlem görevi yapan 4 adet İHA sattı. Güney Kıbrıs böylece tarihinde ilk kez bu meblağda hava aracı satın almış oldu. İsrail ordusuna da İHA üreten Aeronautics şirketinin Rumlara verdiği Aerostar Tactical UAS modeli insansız hava araçlarının yer kontrol istasyonunda, İsrailli teknik destek ekipleri faaliyet gösteriyor. İsrail ayrıca, Yunanistan ve Kıbrıs Rum yönetimine uydu desteği de veriyor. Sat-intl adlı İsrail şirketi, doğu Akdeniz üzerinde bulunan Eros-B ve Eros-C adlı iki uyduyla bölgedeki Türk gemilerinin yakın çekimlerini Rum ve Yunanlılara aktarıyor. Rum tarafı bu hamleyi Türkiye’nin bölgeye sondaj gemilerini korumak için savaş gemilerini yollaması sonrası yapmıştı. Doğu Akdeniz’de donanma bulunduran ABD, Rusya, İngiltere ve Fransa da bölgeyi İHA’larla takip ediyor.
ÇOK SAYIDA ÜLKENİN İHA’SI BÖLGEDE
Doğu Akdeniz’deki Türk sondaj gemileri ve savaş gemilerini, yerli üretim silahlı ve silahsız hava araçları koruyor. Türk donanmasına ait İHA ve SİHA’lar, Ege ve Akdeniz’i Çanakkale ve Muğla Dalaman’daki üslerinden kontrol ediyor. Türk F-16’ları da bölgede sürekli devriye uçuşları gerçekleştiriyor. Bölgede deniz de sondaj savaşı yaşanırken havada da ABD, Rusya, Fransa ve İngiltere dahil pek çok ülkenin İHA savaşları yaşanıyor.
RUMLAR SONDAJ CEPHESİNİ GENİŞLETİYOR
Türkiye’nin Doğu Akdeniz’deki sondaj faaliyetleri nedeniyle yaşanan gerginlik sürerken Kıbrıs Rum yönetimi, İtalya ve Fransız şirketlerin ardından ABD, İsrail, İngiliz ve Hollandalı firmalarla ilk doğal gaz anlaşması imzaladı. Anlaşmanın büyüklüğü ise 9.3 milyar dolar. Rum yönetiminin Enerji Bakanı Yorgos Lakkotripis “Noble Enerji, Shell ve Dalek şu anda Kıbrıs Cumhuriyeti tarafından verilen ilk işletme ruhsatına sahipler” dedi ve ticarete onay verdiklerini duyurdu. Lakkotripis anlaşmanın gereği konsorsiyumun 2025 yılına kadar doğal gaz çıkarmak zorunda olduğunu belirtti. Anlaşmaya göre Rum yönetim, 18 yıllık süre boyunca yılda ortalama 520 milyon dolar gelir elde edecek. İtalyan ENI şirketi ile Fransız Total de bölgedeki gazla yakından ilgileniyor. Rumlar böylece Türkiye’nin bölgedeki faaliyetlerine karşı çıkan Fransa, ABD ve İtalya’dan sonra cepheye İngiltere, Hollanda ve İsrail’i de katmış oldu.
CHP, Türkiye’nin stratejisinin temel direğini terörist ilan etti
Haber7 yazarı Taha Dağlı “CHP neden her operasyonda ÖSO’yu diline doluyor?” adlı köşesinde, ÖSO’nun Suriye stratejisindeki önemini yazdı. CHP’nin ÖSO’yu “terörist” olarak gördüğünü belirten Dağlı, bu durumun karşı cephenin işine yaradığını belirtti ve şunları kaydetti: Karşı taraf Türkiye’nin kontrolündeki bu yapıların tasfiye edilmesini, Esed’i muhatap almasını istiyor. Böylelikle Türkiye’nin kozu elinden alınacak.
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Dışişleri Bakanlığı’ndan AB’ye Doğu Akdeniz tepkisi
Dışişleri Bakanlığı, AB Dış İlişkiler Konseyi’nin Doğu Akdeniz ile ilgili aldığı kararlara sert tepki gösterdi. Bakanlık, “Ülkemizin tehditlere boyun eğerek, Doğu Akdeniz’deki haklarından geri adım atmasını ummak beyhude bir beklentidir” açıklaması yaptı.
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Türkiye sınır dışı etti, Yunanistan kabul etmeyince…
TÜRKİYE’nin Suriye’de sürdürdüğü Barış Pınarı Harekatı’nda yakaladığı DEAŞ’lı terörist, bugün Edirne Pazarkule Sınır Kapısı’ndan sınır dışı edildi. Yunanlıların kabul etmeyip geri gönderdiği DEAŞ’lı, Türkiye de kabul etmeyince iki ülke arasındaki tampon bölgede beklemeye başladı.
Amerika Birleşik Devletleri (ABD) vatandaşı olduğu iddia edilen DEAŞ’lı Türkiye‘den sınır dışı (deport) edilmek üzere Pazarkule Sınır Kapısı’na getirildi.
Pazarkule’den Yunanistan‘a sınır dışı edilen terörist, Pazarkule Sınır Kapısı karşısındaki Kastanies Sınır Kapısı’ndaki Yunanlı görevliler tarafından kabul edilmedi.
Yunanlılar, DEAŞ’lı teröristi yeniden Türkiye’ye yaya olarak geri gönderdi. Türkiye’nin de kabul etmediği DEAŞ’lı iki ülke arasındaki tampon bölgede beklemeye başladı. İki ülkenin de kabul etmediği terörist, tampon bölgede bekleyişini sürdürüyor.
46.
Türkiye’nin hamlesi sonrası AB’den skandal karar! Anlaştılar
AB Konseyi, AB Dışişleri Bakanlarının Kıbrıs açıklarındaki sondaj faaliyetleri nedeniyle Türkiye’ye yaptırım uygulanması konusunda anlaşmaya vardığını duyurdu.
Söz konusu tedbirlerin seyahat yasağı ile kurum ve kişilerin mal varlıklarının dondurulmasını kapsayacağı kaydedilirken yaptırım listesinde yer alan kişi ve kurumlara AB tarafından fon aktarılmayacağı vurgulandı.
Bu arada Reuters’a konuşan iki AB’li diplomat, yaptırımların sondaj gemilerindeki kaptanları ve TSK mensuplarını da hedef alabileceğini söyledi.
47.
Rusya’dan şaşırtan açıklama: 169 milyon dolarımız çalındı
Kremlin Sözcüsü Dmitriy Peskov, Rusya’nın doğusundaki Vostoçniy Uzay Üssü’nün inşaatına ayrılan 1,4 milyar doların 169 milyon dolarlık bölümünün çalındığını açıkladı.
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50. makeleio.gr
ΤΟ ΜΕΓΑΛΟ ΜΥΣΤΙΚΟ ΠΟΥ ΚΡΑΤΟΥΣΑΝ ΕΠΤΑΣΦΡΑΓΙΣΤΟ ΓΙΑ ΝΑ ΜΗΝ ΞΕΣΗΚΩΘΕΙ ΚΑΙ Ο ΤΕΛΕΥΤΑΙΟΣ ΕΛΛΗΝΑΣ! ΤΟ ΕΓΓΡΑΦΟ-ΑΠΟΔΕΙΞΗ ΓΙΑ ΤΟΥΣ Λ@ΘΡΟΜΕΤΑΝΑΣΤΕΣ ΠΟΥ ΘΑ ΣΕ ΚΑΝΕΙ ΝΑ ΣΠΑΣΕΙΣ ΤΗΝ ΟΘΟΝΗ! (ΦΩΤΟ ΕΓΓΡΑΦΟ)
Αυτό το «ψάρι» βρωμάει από παντού, από που να ξεκινήσεις και που να τελειώσεις όταν πρόκειται για την λαθρομετανάστευση στην χώρα μας.
Μας παραμύθιαζαν, για να μην ξεσηκωθεί και ο τελευταίος Έλληνας, ότι τα έξοδα που κάνει το ελληνικό κράτος για τους λαθρομετανάστες, προέρχονται από ευρωπαϊκά και άλλα ξένα κονδύλια.
Το έγγραφο που ακολουθεί αποδεικνύει αυτό που όλοι υποψιαζόμασταν, ότι δλδ όλες οι δαπάνες που γίνονται από το ελληνικό κράτος για τους λαθρομετανάστες πληρώνονται από την τσέπη μας, από το αίμα μας, τον ιδρώτα μας και την καθημερινή μας αγωνία για επιβίωση σε μια χώρα που βρίσκεται ουσιαστικά σε πόλεμο από το 2010…
Ακόμα και τα ποσά που λέγονται ότι προέρχονται από ξένα κονδύλια, ουσιαστικά εμείς τα πληρώνουμε, αν όχι όλα, έστω ένα μέρος τους το οποίο ποτέ δεν έμαθε ο ελληνικός λαός ποιο ακριβώς είναι…
Με λίγα λόγια… είμαστε «μ@λ@κες» και με την βούλα, δείτε το έγγραφο:
Ο “ΣΚΛΗΡΟΣ” ΔΑΣΚΑΛΟΣ ΤΟΥ “ΝΕΟ-ΔΙΕΘΝΙΣΜΟΥ” (ΔΥΤΙΚΟΥ) ΤΟΥ ΣΟΡΟΣ ΣΤΗΝ ΕΛΛΑΔΑ ΡΗΓΑΣ!
Και μετά από αυτά προκύπτει το ερώτημα προς την τωρινή κυβέρνηση, ποια ποσά δαπανάει για την εξυπηρέτηση λ@θρομεταναστών;
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Η ΕΛ.ΑΣ το απόγευμα της Δευτέρας (11-11-2019) έδωσε στη δημοσιότητα τις φωτογραφίες των τριών μελών της «Επαναστατικής Αυτοάμυνας».
Πρόκειται για τους:
1. ΣΤΑΘΟΠΟΥΛΟΣ Ευάγγελος του Κωνσταντίνου και της Αγγελικής, που γεννήθηκε την 09-10-1978 στην Αθήνα Αττικής.
2. ΜΠΑΚΑΣ Διονύσιος του Χρήστου και της Ελένης, που γεννήθηκε την 11-05-1974 στην Αθήνα Αττικής.
3. ΧΑΤΖΗΒΑΣΙΛΕΙΑΔΗΣ Δημήτριος του Βίκτωρα και της Νίκης, που γεννήθηκε την 14-02-1973 στην Αθήνα Αττικής, ο οποίος αναζητείται για την ίδια υπόθεση.
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“ΧΑΙΡΕΤΕ”
“ΕΛΛΗΝΑΣ“
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