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Germany’s Merkel to Voters: “No Change to Migration Policy”

March 18, 2016

Germany’s Merkel to Voters: “No Change to Migration Policy” Gatestone Institute, Soeren Kern, March 18, 2016

♦ Chancellor Angela Merkel ‘s migration policy is causing security mayhem in Germany, where mostly Muslim migts are raping and assaulting women and children with virtual impunity.

♦ Merkel’s party was defeated in two out of the three federal states voting in March 13 regional elections. By contrast, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) — an upstart anti-establishment party campaigning against Merkel’s liberal migration policy — surged to double-digit results in all three states.

♦ Political and media elites are ramping up a months-long campaign to delegitimize AfD voters as agitators, arsonists, far-right extremists, fascists, Nazis, populists and xenophobes.

♦ Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel has called on German intelligence to begin monitoring the AfD, presumably in an effort to silence critics of the government’s migration policy. Gabriel has called for Germany to take in even more migrants by airlifting them into the country directly from the Middle East.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has vowed to continue her open-door migration policy — despite heavy losses in regional elections that were widely regarded as a referendum on that very policy.

Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) was defeated in two out of the three federal states voting on March 13. By contrast, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) — an upstart anti-establishment party campaigning against Merkel’s liberal migration policy — surged to double-digit results in all three states: Baden-Württemberg, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saxony-Anhalt.

In a press conference after the election results were in, Merkel remained defiant. She reprimanded German voters for questioning her handling of the migration crisis: “There are people who did not listen to us at all and simply cast protest votes. We need to solve this [migrant] problem, not through theoretical debates, but by finding a [European] solution to the problem.”

The elections were the most important in Germany since Merkel allowed more than one million migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East to enter the country in 2015. Merkel’s migration policy is causing security mayhem in Germany, where mostly Muslim migrants are raping and assaulting women and children with virtual impunity.

With immigration now the dominant issue in German politics, Merkel’s refusal to reverse her open-door migration policy has alienated many of her traditional supporters, scores of whom are flocking to the AfD to protest Germany’s pro-immigration, pro-EU political establishment.

The AfD was founded as a Eurosceptic party in 2013 by German economists advocating the abolition of the European single currency, the euro, and opposing financial bailouts of profligate eurozone countries such as Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain.

At the time, the AfD was widely ridiculed by Germany’s mainstream media. In July 2013, for example, the Rheinische Post published an “analysis” which referred to the AfD as the “unlucky professor’s party” that “does not have many chances” as a political party. Nevertheless, in 2014 and 2015, the AfD secured seats in five of Germany’s 16 regional parliaments, and seven seats in the European Parliament.

After an internal power struggle, Frauke Petry — a 40-year-old chemist, entrepreneur and mother of four who hails from the former East Germany — assumed leadership of the AfD in July 2015. Since then, Petry has broadened the party’s initial focus on economics to immigration.

The AfD — now the third-largest party in Germany — poses a significant challenge to the political status quo in Germany. If its momentum holds, the AfD is on track to cross the 5% threshold in general elections in 2017 to qualify for seats in the national legislature, the Bundestag.

1515In recent regional elections, the CDU party of German Chancellor Angela Merkel (left) suffered heavy losses to the upstart anti-establishment party Alternative for Germany, led by Frauke Petry (right).

The left-leaning German newsmagazine, Der Spiegel, long hostile toward the AfD, acknowledged that the party has achieved a “breakthrough” and called the election result “Black Sunday” for Merkel:

“For a long time she had hoped, despite considerable popular opposition to her refugee policy, to win two chancelleries in the southwest of the country. This has come to nothing. Merkel will now have to live with the accusation that she has allowed the AfD finally to establish itself [as a democratic alternative] to the right of the CDU.”

The leader of the AfD, Frauke Petry, said the fact that her party won big in two states in western Germany — Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate — showed that “the AFD is an all-German party and that citizens in all regions of Germany want a change of politics.” In a Facebook post, she added:

“Yesterday we made a first important step in the right direction to break the cartels of consensus parties. Already, it has been indicated that they [mainstream parties] will not accept the will of the people. We will probably see the most colorful combination of political coalitions, just so they can continue to stay in power and further marginalize voters of the AfD.”

Petry was referring to Merkel’s spokesman, Steffen Seibert, who said that despite her electoral drubbing, Merkel will not reverse course on migration:

“The Federal Government will continue to pursue its refugee policy, with full determination, at home and abroad. At home, we will ease the path to integrate those people who have sought and found protection here. At European level, the goal must be a common, sustainable European solution that leads to a reduction in the number of refugees in all member states of the European Union.”

The CDU’s general secretary, Peter Tauber, echoed the view that there is no alternative to Merkel’s migration policy: “Considering what we have already achieved, I recommend that we continue on the path we are on.”

Some German commentators have tried to downplay the AfD’s gains by arguing that although Merkel lost the election, she actually won the election because the majority of Germans voted for mainstream parties. Bernd Ulrich, editor of Die Zeit, wrote:

“These three elections, which were in fact a plebiscite on the refugee policy, sent an encouraging message of approval. On average, two-thirds of voters cast ballots for parties that support the relatively liberal refugee policies of Angela Merkel.”

Writing in Der Spiegel, columnist Jakob Augstein argued:

“On Sunday Angela Merkel achieved an unlikely feat: her party was trounced, but her refugee policy was confirmed and strengthened… How did the chancellor do on Election Day? In truth, she has been strengthened. The fact is: a large majority of voters support the chancellor.”

According to Augstein, Merkel is “the right woman in the wrong party” because she has moved the center-right CDU to the left on so many issues, including migration policy, that the party is now virtually indistinguishable from its coalition partner, the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD). What Augstein failed to mention is that Merkel’s move to the left is responsible for creating a political vacuum to the right of the CDU — a vacuum that is now being filled by the AfD.

Other political and media elites are ramping up a months-long campaign to delegitimize AfD voters as agitators, arsonists, far-right extremists, fascists, Nazis, populists and xenophobes.

German media are also churning out stories — many of which are based on hearsay — aimed at discrediting the AfD. The magazine, Stern, published this headline: “Reports of Nazi Songs at AfD-Election Party.” The Berliner Kurier: “Former Teacher Calls AfD Leader Frauke Petry a Liar.”Die Welt: “AfD Candidate Accused of Running Escort Service.” Berliner Morgenpost: “After AfD Coup, Saxony-Anhalt’s Hoteliers Are Anxious.” Stern: “AfD and Donald Trump: Hate is the Main Issue.” Die Zeit: “AfD Principles: Not So Important.”

On Election Day, Die Zeit ridiculed the AfD’s 70-point political platform by using the following bullet points:

“More popular referendums, more monitoring of citizens, stiffer penalties for criminals, dissolve the EU, shrink the state, lower taxes, cut social spending, put women back in the kitchen, ban employment quotas for women, make it harder to file for divorce, abolish abortion, close borders, harass Muslims, ruin the climate, expand nuclear power, expand the military, more private weapons, etc.”

Taxpayer-funded ZDF public television broadcast an interview with Thomas Kliche, a German psychologist, who compared AfD voters to “children who are stubborn and unreasonable.” The only way to deal with such people, he said, is “just have patience, ignore the stupidity, and confront it with rationalism.”

According to Kliche, AfD voters are suffering from “macro-social stress” induced by globalization (i.e., mass migration):

“People react with various forms of shock management. This begins with retrograde, regressive, childish fantasies that everything can be as it was before. Some believe that by shouting ‘We are the People!’ [the main slogan of anti-government demonstrators in East Germany in 1989-1990, reminding their leaders that Germany should be ruled by the people, not by an undemocratic party claiming to represent them], the migrants will disappear…. They have no solutions, just fantasies. Building a fence — this is a fantasy. Separate yourself from the world — that is a fantasy.”

Meanwhile, Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel has called on German intelligence to begin monitoring the AfD, presumably in an effort to silence critics of the government’s migration policy. Gabriel — who leads the SPD, which also suffered significant losses on March 13 — has called the AfD a party of “right-wing extremists” who “use the language of the Nazis.” At the same time, Gabriel has called for Germany to take in even more migrants by airlifting them into the country directly from the Middle East.

By contrast, Horst Seehofer, the head of the Christian Socialist Union (CSU), the CDU’s sister party in Bavaria, said the rise of the AfD amounts to a “tectonic shift in the political landscape of Germany.” He warned that tectonic shifts trigger earthquakes that cause irreversible changes. Seehofer demanded that Merkel reverse course: “It cannot be that after such an election result, the answer to the electorate is: everything will go on as before.”

CSU politician Hans-Peter Uhl summed it up this way: “I expect the chancellor clearly to admit: ‘Yes, we have understood. We are going to return to the voters. Politics must move toward the voter, not the other way around. This is called democracy.'”

Merkel has not said if she plans to run for a fourth term in 2017.

Categories: Germany, Islam - submission, Islam and girls, Islam and Jews, Islam and women, Islamic culture, Islamic invasion, Islamic perversions, Islamisation, Islamophobia, Merkel
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Obama Admin Stalling Investigation Into Iran ‘Ransom Payment’

March 18, 2016

Obama Admin Stalling Investigation Into U.S. ‘Ransom Payment’ to Iran Congress in dark as admin ignores questions about taxpayer money for Tehran

BY:
March 17, 2016 11:00 am

Source: Obama Admin Stalling Investigation Into Iran ‘Ransom Payment’

The Obama administration is being accused of stalling a congressional investigation into a purported $1.7 billion taxpayer-funded “ransom payment” to Iran in exchange for the release of several U.S. prisoners, according to documents and information provided to the Washington Free Beacon by sources familiar with the matter.

The administration initially came under fire from congressional critics in January, when it was announced that the United States had settled a longstanding legal dispute with Iran over the breakdown in a decades-old arms sale.

Under the terms of the settlement, Iran was to be paid a $400 million balance and an additional $1.3 billion in interest from a taxpayer fund maintained by the Treasury Department, a State Department official confirmed to the Free Beacon in January.

The settlement was reached outside of the recently implemented nuclear deal and is separate from the $150 billion in unfrozen cash assets the United States is obligated to give to Iran under that agreement, the official said.

The $1.7 billion payment was announced just prior to the release of five U.S. prisoners who had been held in Iran, leading to accusations that the deal is tantamount to a ransom payment. Iranian officials, at the time, independently described the transaction as a form of ransom.

While the Obama administration immediately denied that the two issues were linked, lawmakers remained skeptical and pushed for more answers.

Rep. Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.) reached out to Secretary of State John Kerry on Jan. 21 to outline his concerns and request further disclosures about what he called a “ransom payment” to Iran, according to a letter sent by the lawmaker and obtained by the Free Beacon.

The State Department has not responded and is said to have ignored multiple follow-up requests from Pompeo’s office, according to sources familiar with the situation.

When asked Thursday whether a response is in the works, a State Department official told the Free Beacon, “We take seriously all correspondence from Congress and respond accordingly.”

The administration’s delay is causing frustration on Capitol Hill and prompting accusations that the State Department is stalling congressional efforts to investigate how the settlement with Iran was reached.

“The State Department likes to drag its feet on responding to Congress, particularly on issues related to the Iran nuclear deal,” one source familiar with the situation said. “This stonewalling is reminiscent of recent testimony by a senior Department of Homeland Security official who would not answer members’ questions on refugees and visas.”

“Congress is only trying to do its job of holding President Obama accountable and ensuring taxpayer dollars are spent wisely,” the source added. “The Obama administration’s refusal to answer legitimate questions leaves the American people to wonder what they are hiding.”

In Pompeo’s case, the State Department initially confirmed its receipt of the letter in January but did not provide information as to when officials might respond. The administration subsequently failed to respond to further requests for a response issued over the following months, sources said.

Pompeo’s investigation surrounds “the timing and details” of the cash transfer to Iran of $1.7 billion, according to his letter.

The administration’s behavior “indicates it might be a ransom payment and it is likely interpreted as such by our adversaries,” he wrote. “We may be seeing a dangerous precedent in action as three Americans, reportedly kidnapped by Iranian-backed Shia militias in Baghdad, remain missing.”

“Many find this timing suspicious,” he said. “I fear this payment is the latest incident that is establishing a dangerous precedent that will lead to more Americans being captured abroad.”

The lawmaker sought further information on “the relationship” between the $1.7 billion settlement and the release of the five American prisoners. He also wants to determine whether the lawsuit was ever discussed in “conversations with the Iranians about the release of American hostages.”

“Did you secure an assurance from the Iranians that they will not use this $1.7 billion to fund terrorism?” he asked.

Pompeo goes on to request details about additional legal claims by Iran, asking: “How much money does Iran assert we still owe them? How many more billions can we expect the Obama administration to hand to the Ayatollah?”

Other sources familiar with the matter also chastised the administration for dragging its feet.

“This is one of the main ways the Obama administration hides its Iran foreign policy,” said one foreign policy consultant who works intimately with Congress on the Iran portfolio. “Sometimes they over-classify information to keep it secret, sometimes they mislead lawmakers about their intentions, but a lot of the time they engage in this kind of sandbagging.”

“By the time anyone gets any answers, whatever catastrophic policy they were hiding has become the new normal,” the source said.

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President Obama Is a Political Narcissist

March 18, 2016

President Obama Is a Political Narcissist, Washington Free Beacon, Matthew Continetti, March 18, 2016

(Shocking! I had thought his name was Barack Humble Obama. — DM)

President Barack Obama smiles as he listens to Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny speak during their meeting in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, March 15, 2016. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

President Barack Obama smiles as he listens to Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny speak during their meeting in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, March 15, 2016. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

Confidence is one thing. But Obama is more than confident. He’s narcissistic. He looks at the world and sees nothing but his reflection: rational, cool, unmoved, and always right. When reality surprises him, it’s not because he’s in error. It’s because Putin or Assad or the mullahs have failed to live up to the standards he’s set for them. Forget about them being true to themselves. They’re not being true to Barack Obama. And Barack Obama, lest we forget, is all that matters.

***********************

Russia announces the withdrawal of its forces from Syria. The decision is a surprise—President Obama is shocked. This is a feeling he experiences often.

He was astonished when Vladimir Putin intervened in the Syrian conflict in 2015. He was startled when ISIS conquered a fair portion of Mesopotamia in 2014. He was jarred when Putin invaded Crimea, and launched a proxy war in eastern Ukraine that same year. Rogue states pursue policies contrary to what Obama the Wise sees as their self-interest, and the presidential response never varies. He is stunned. He is saddened. He is sanguine.

Bewilderment happens when reality dispels illusions. I used to think President Obama’s illusions were simply the product of his ideology, of his faith in the universality of human reason, in the idea of historical progress, of his ambivalence toward American power. But after reading Jeffrey Goldberg’s epic, absorbing, revealing interview with the president in The Atlantic, I have come to a different conclusion. It’s not just ideology that drives Obama’s cluelessness. It’s narcissism.

If there is a theme to Goldberg’s article, it is this: Barack Obama knows better. He knows better than the “foreign policy establishment” that his team snidely dismisses as controlled by Jewish and Arab money. He knows better than the elected leaders of Great Britain, France, and Israel, and the monarchs of Saudi Arabia and Jordan, of whom he is so contemptuous. (Angela Merkel of Germany, Goldberg reports, is “one of the few foreign leaders Obama respects.”) And he knows better than his critics, whose arguments he pores over in obsessive detail, coming up with explanations, rebuttals, and straw men to dismiss them.

Why does Obama know better? Not out of any intense study of or reflection on diplomatic and world history and international relations theory. Not because he served in the military or in the diplomatic corps or held senior posts in government prior to election as president. What graces Obama with superior insight and prudence is the simple fact of his own existence. He is his own proof of his superiority.

Goldberg tells us about one of Benjamin Netanyahu’s visits to the states. “The Israeli prime minister launched into something of a lecture about the dangers of the brutal region in which he lives, and Obama felt that Netanyahu was behaving in a condescending fashion, and was also avoiding the subject at hand: peace negotiations.” So Obama interrupted him.

“Bibi, you have to understand something,” Obama said. “I’m the African-American son of a single mother, and I live here, in this house. I live in the White House. I managed to get elected president of the United States. You think I don’t understand what you’re talking about, but I do.”

Now, Barack Obama is a tremendously accomplished man. He is clearly very intelligent and well read, he graduated from Columbia and Harvard, he is the author of two highly praised books and will no doubt write many more in the years to come, he went from nothing to president of the United States in less than a decade, he has outfoxed his Republican opponents at nearly every turn. But his reply to Netanyahu is a colossal non sequitur, a category error of enormous proportions. It makes absolutely no sense.

In what mental universe other than the president’s does being raised in Hawaii and Indonesia and spending adulthood rising through the academy and U.S. political institutions grant someone a deep (or even superficial!) understanding of Zionism, of the Holocaust, of four wars for survival over 25 years, of unending terrorist violence directed toward civilians, of hijackings and kidnappings and bombings and stabbings, of SCUD attacks from Iraq, rockets from Lebanon and Gaza, incitement and de-legitimization campaigns from Tehran? Conversely, what in President Obama’s life story leads him to comprehend the Palestinians, addicted to enmity and resentment and violence, victims of institutional collapse and official corruption, awash and adrift in the worst movements of the last 100 years from nationalism to socialism to pan-Arabism to Islamic fundamentalism?

Note the reverse snobbery when Obama tells Netanyahu, “You think I don’t understand what you’re talking about, but I do.” (My emphasis.) Maybe the elected leader of an American ally was doing nothing more than trying to explain his view of his region and the source of his reluctance to comply with the president’s demands. Or does Obama actually believe that buried in every disagreement with him is an assumption of his inferiority, disrespect for his heritage and upbringing? If that were the case, then it would be next to impossible to challenge his authority. One would be acting always in bad faith. Which is exactly what he so often accuses his opponents of doing.

This idea of Barack Obama’s existential power, this notion that his very being is what gives him empathy with and moral authority over the world, has gripped the president and his supporters from the beginning. “What does he offer?” asked Andrew Sullivan in December 2007. “First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential rebranding of the United States since Reagan.” His international background, son of a Kenyan and a Kansan, who spent time in Indonesia and Pakistan, is why Obama declared himself a “citizen of the world” in his 2008 Berlin speech. And his personal familiarity with Islam inspired him to deliver the Cairo speech in 2009, when as Goldberg puts it, “he spoke about Muslims in his own family, and his childhood years in Indonesia, and confessed America’s sins even as he criticized those in the Muslim world who demonized the U.S.”

Seven years later, the Greater Middle East that Obama sought to reshape by his mere appearance and oratory is a dumpster fire. State collapse, sectarian war, slavery, crucifixion, beheadings, chemical warfare, genocide characterize the region. The foreign leader who has most consistently outwitted him, Vladimir Putin, enjoys free rein in Eastern Europe and Syria. And the region of the world to which Obama hoped to “pivot”—here too for partly biographical reasons—is engulfed in a deepening territorial dispute between China and the nations it bullies.

Confidence is one thing. But Obama is more than confident. He’s narcissistic. He looks at the world and sees nothing but his reflection: rational, cool, unmoved, and always right. When reality surprises him, it’s not because he’s in error. It’s because Putin or Assad or the mullahs have failed to live up to the standards he’s set for them. Forget about them being true to themselves. They’re not being true to Barack Obama. And Barack Obama, lest we forget, is all that matters.

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Jewish Leaders: Comparing Trump To Hitler Is ‘Deeply Offensive’

March 18, 2016

Jewish Leaders: Comparing Trump To Hitler Is ‘Deeply Offensive’ “There is simply no place for this kind of sickening distortion in our public discourse”

Steve Watson | Infowars.com – March 18, 2016

Source: Jewish Leaders: Comparing Trump To Hitler Is ‘Deeply Offensive’ » Alex Jones’ Infowars: There’s a war on for your mind!

Prominent Jewish leaders have spoken out against ignorant comparisons being made between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler, calling them “deeply offensive”.

In what has quickly become a trend, everyone from NBA players, to Glenn Beck to the President of Mexico and the communist Chinese state media is saying that Donald Trump is “like Hitler.”

At the extreme end of the scale, many people are taking to social media to declare that Trump is LITERALLY Hitler.

Comedian Louis CK was one such person, recently writing a 1400-word letter to fans which stated “It was funny for a little while [but] the guy is Hitler.”

Now Jewish leaders are speaking out against the trend, declaring it to be “deeply offensive”.

Dr Dvir Abramovich, Chairman of the Australian arm of the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission (ADC), the longest running Jewish service organization in the world, told reporters“once again we see celebrities using appalling comparisons to Hitler to attack others”.

“There is simply no place for this kind of sickening distortion in our public discourse,” Abramovich urged.

“Hitler and his genocidal actions should never form part of the discussion about the American presidential elections and no candidate should ever be compared to Hitler”, Dr Abramovich added.

Abramovich declared that the millions of victims of mass genocide during the holocaust “deserve better and should not be used for political point sloganeering”.

“It bears repeating again that these types of historically inaccurate comparisons diminish the profound tragedy of the Holocaust and are deeply offensive to the victims, to survivors and to their families,” he said, adding that “Such ignorant posts only fuel the gross trivialisation of the Holocaust.”

The Director of another prominent Jewish group, the Australia-Israel and Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), also weighed in, noting “generally we find it very unhelpful when people make these sorts of historical comparisons”.

“One, it doesn’t help people understand the contemporary phenomenon, and two, the historical circumstances [of the Holocaust] had particular and unique features which tend to be brushed under the surface [when such comparisons are made],” he said.

Peter Wertheim, Executive Director of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), declined to comment on the politics of another country but pointed to the ECAJ’s policy platform, which references “inappropriate Holocaust rhetoric”.

The Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) also issued a statement which read “the Holocaust is generally recognised as the benchmark of the most extreme case of human evil” and that the group “deplores the inappropriate use of analogies to the Nazi Genocide in public debate”.

Australian MP Josh Frydenberg also weighed in on the issue, stating “Donald Trump has his detractors, and many for good reason, but to compare him with the evil Adolf Hitler responsible as he was for the deaths of millions of innocents is ridiculous in the extreme.”

“It diminishes the Holocaust and a shameful chapter in the history of the world.” Frydenberg noted.

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Russia backs self-ruling Kurdish buffer state at Turkey’s back door

March 18, 2016

Source: Russia backs self-ruling Kurdish buffer state at Turkey’s back door


Just four days after drawing down the bulk of Russian forces in Syria, President Vladimir Putin was quietly redrawing the Syrian map on federal lines, and planting Russian influence in its first semiautonomous region. debkafile’s intelligence sources report that the Russian leader’s hand was behind the establishment of the Syrian Kurdish federal region on March 17, at a meeting of Kurdish Democratic Union Party leaders in the Syrian town of Rmeilan.

The new self-ruling entity covers three Kurdish-controlled enclaves:: Jazira, Hassakeh and Qamishli and the two cities of Kobani and Afrin, They include areas captured in battle from the Islamic State.

One of the DUP leaders, Nawaf Khalil, noted the presence at the ceremony of representatives of the three enclaves, some parts of which are still controlled either by the Syrian army, Syrian rebel groups or ISIS.

The Syrian Kurds are expected next to fight, with Russian backing, to connect the three enclaves into a contiguous self-ruled territory 500-kilometer long, adjacent to the Turkish border.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has warned repeatedly that Ankara would not tolerate the establishment of Kurdish self-rule in Syria and would send his army across the border to prevent it. Our sources report that Putin has assured Kurdish leaders that the Russian air force would be there to defend the new region if Turkey invaded.

Erdogan tried to enlist the Obama administration for action to deter the Kurds from its step.
But the State Department only responded to the Kurdish initiative after the event. “We don’t support self-ruled, semiautonomous zones inside Syria,” said State Department spokesman John Kirby Thursday night. “Whole, unified, nonsectarian Syria — that’s the goal.”

The new Kurdish federal region turns out to be the first no-fly zone over northern Syria, which the US, Turkey and Saudi Arabia long advocated, but which has finally comes into being under the Russian aegis.
President Bashar Assad, Moscow’s ally, strongly opposes the Kurdish move, as the first step in the country’s breakup into ethnic or religious federal entities. But Assad is helpless to fight back or bomb the Kurdish enclaves when Moscow stands behind them and some Russian warplanes remain in Syria for any contingencies.

debkafile’s military and intelligence sources find significance in the location of the Kurds’ ceremonial declaration of their semiautonomous region: The only US base in Syria is located outside Rmeilan. It houses US and allied special operations forces with helicopters for fighting the Islamic State.

Clearly, Putin was perfectly willing to show the Americans what he was about.

In any case, US officials, such as Secretary of State John Kerry, have been talking freely to Middle East leaders about a federal solution for Syria as Washington’s Plan B, should the current talks between the warning sides in Geneva fail to reach an accord on a political solution for ending the calamitous five-year war.

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Suspicious Letter Containing White Powder Sent to Donald Trump’s Son

March 18, 2016

Suspicious Letter Containing White Powder Sent to Donald Trump’s Son

By DAVID CAPLAN

Mar 18, 2016, 12:18 AM ET

Source: Suspicious Letter Containing White Powder Sent to Donald Trump’s Son – ABC News

Gerald Herbert/AP Photo

A suspicious piece of mail containing white powder was sent to Eric Trump’s New York City apartment Thursday, a Trump Organization source tells ABC News.

The NYPD confirmed to ABC News it responded to a call at Trump Parc East, a high-end residential building located on Central Park South, but it did not identify the recipient of the mail as Donald Trump’s 32-year-old son. The Trump Organization source confirmed the letter was indeed sent to the Trump offspring’s 14th floor apartment.

The NYPD told ABC News, “At approximately 7:15 p.m., the NYPD responded to a residential building at 100 Central Park South to investigate a report of a suspicious letter received by a tenant. The letter has been removed and is being examined by law enforcement authorities. No injuries have been reported in connection with this incident.”

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How Trump Rebranded the GOP

March 18, 2016

How Trump Rebranded the GOP He’s the greatest brander of his time, but he can’t take all the credit for this one: The party had to destroy its old brand first.

By Michael Hirsh March 17, 2016

Source: How Trump Rebranded the GOP – POLITICO Magazine

AP Images

Whatever else you might say about him, Donald Trump is one of the great branders of our age. And what he’s accomplished over the past 10 months since he took that now-notorious ride down the Trump Tower escalator is plainly his life’s masterwork: his rebranding of the GOP in his own image.

The Trump Organization is a global trademarking factory; among the 515 corporations, trusts, limited liability companies and other entities listed on Trump’s Federal Election Commission disclosure are scores of buildings, golf courses, product and other things from Baku to Dubai listed as “Trump Marks” (as in trademarks) entities. For example: Trump Ice LLC; Trump Marks Mattress LLC; Trump Pageants, Inc. And my favorite: The Trump Follies LLC.

After Tuesday’s primaries, it’s looking like we can add one more entity to the Trump Marks list: the Trumpublican Party, LLC.

Trump accomplished this rebranding so fast that Republicans still don’t seem to understand what happened to them. We’ve heard him say it many times in recent months—he’s defined the race, whether the issue is immigration or trade or corporate tax inversions, which even Hillary Clinton has taken up as a cause. Trump’s favorite locution: “If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t even be talking about [fill in the blank].” Or as his daughter Ivanka put it recently to Breitbart: “From Day One, my father set the agenda for what the whole party is talking about.”

But in truth the Trump takeover of the GOP occurred, to quote an old line from Hemingway, “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” What had to happen first, before Donald could step in and slap on his own brand in a short period of time, was the gradual “de-branding” of the party at the hands of its own leaders, especially over the past 7½ years since Barack Obama entered the White House. That’s when the party decided to abandon any ideas about governing in favor of one singular idea: “No to Obama.”

The events of this week supply an apt illustration. You might think there wasn’t much connection between the Republicans’ insistence on Wednesday that they wouldn’t even talk to Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland and Trump’s humiliation of his Republican rivals the night before. In fact, both events help explain why this strange outsider from New York now basically owns one of America’s political parties. Trump could succeed only because the GOP rendered itself so incoherent that no one knew what the party really stood for anymore, except for something negative—the party of No. No, we won’t talk to him. No, we won’t listen to you. No, we can’t even agree on what we disagree about. No. No. NO.

Trump was the perfect candidate to come along, kick in what was left of the party’s empty ideological husk and then rebrand it as only he, the master, can do. First, of course, Trump earned his bona fides with the Obama-hating base by being the most negative Obama candidate of all—the loudest voice in the “birther” movement. But then he quickly won over the base by forming some positive, if rather crude, platform ideas that were welcomed, perhaps, largely because no one else had any ideas other than the old tax-cutting, trickle-down bromides. Those had been the lingering core of the Republican brand, but had lost much of their political traction as the party’s base of angry, undereducated whites watched their fortunes dim as the rich enjoyed their tax relief. The same Republican leaders and pundits who have been complaining that Trump’s simplistic notions about immigration (“build a wall”) or trade (“start winning again”) are unworkable and unRepublican haven’t had the courage to spell out any clear new ideas of their own.

Think about it: Before Trump came along, and the party’s neocons and quasi-isolationists squabbled endlessly about U.S. involvement in Syria or Ukraine; and various conservative think tanks and pundits put forward 10 different plans for changing the tax code; and no one could agree on education reform or immigration reform (recall the many incomprehensible exchanges between Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio at the debates over this issue), was there anything identifiable any longer as a party platform?

And clarity is key. Rob Frankel, who has been called “the best branding expert on the planet” by StrikingItRich.com, says Trump took his tactics “right out of my playbook, and I’m really proud of the way he did it. I wish my clients could execute that well. He did exactly what everybody else should be doing for their brand. To be effective you have clear, credible, authoritative. And then there’s my prime directive: for a brand to work it has to be perceived as the only solution. If I can create the perception of being the only game in town, you’re going to stop shopping. That’s what he did.”

***

Republican voters have stopped shopping, perhaps, because there isn’t much else on offer. This process of GOP brand destruction has been going on at least since the era of George W. Bush, who many conservatives feel betrayed them with his runaway spending habits and neocon war, but it’s especially true since Obama was elected and the party was, well, driven basically mad with Obama enmity. Beginning with Mitch McConnell’s blunt declaration in 2010—“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president “—the GOP simply became identified as the anti-Obama party and little else.

What ensued was so ugly and neck-wrenching that Republicans kept having to remind themselves they were still the party of Lincoln and Reagan, because there was no obvious way to track where they were going, much less what positive ideas they stood for any longer. House tea party members kept hijacking fairly routine congressional votes and threatening to send the United States into first-time default to fight a proxy war over their singular agenda (though no one quite knew what that was either; was it libertarian or redistributive?). An actual government shutdown occurred, and another almost did. What began as an outlandish threat—sequester—became policy through more party paralysis. Every Republican from Rubio to John Boehner who tried to make a deal with Obama and the Democrats and stand for something, anything, other than “no” was humiliated and declared a traitor to the cause. What cause? Good question.

Thus the reaction to Garland, a perfectly credible and even outstanding prospect for the Supreme Court, is all of a piece with what’s been going on for the past seven years. Now, with the exception of a few Republican senators like Kelly Ayotte and Mark Kirk who face tough reelection challenges in purplish states, a flat “no” is the order of the day once again. On Wednesday, we heard even a formerly reasonable conservative like Orrin Hatch declare nonsensically that the Garland nomination—that is, a person to fill a meaningful vacancy on the nation’s highest court—“shouldn’t be brought up when people are screaming and shouting.”

What Hatch said, of course, was gibberish, not least because it’s almost entirely the Republicans who have been doing the screaming and shouting all this time. Even Trump makes more sense than that—which is exactly the point. Trump fortuitously entered the fray and began repeating his nationalist-populist mantra at a time when no one else had a mantra, and when the party’s greatest need was for leadership, which in turn requires clarity, which in turn requires a brand. What could be a more perfect and poetic piece of justice than a fatally incomprehensible party, one whose brand no longer stood for an identifiable set of ideas other than to thwart the president, leaving itself open to a takeover by the greatest brand-maker of the age?

Hence the spectacle of John Kasich—who moved from being a firebrand House conservative in the ’90s to a more practical governor of Ohio—looking like a stranger in a strange land upon his return to national politics. On the state and local level, thankfully, ideology still swiftly gives way to the necessity to govern, which is one reason why so many Republicans such as Kasich are still successful at those levels. But Kasich has found he might as well be speaking another language with his endless stump speech about such accomplishments as turning Ohio’s deficit into a surplus and adding 400,000 jobs. What’s his mantra? What’s his brand?

This was also the subtext, perhaps, of Rubio’s sad withdrawal speech on Tuesday night, when he appeared to blame both the GOP establishment and the tea party for his faded career. “That we find ourselves at this point is not surprising, for the warning signs have been here for close to a decade,” Rubio said. “In 2010, the tea party wave carried me and others into office because not enough was happening, and that tea party wave gave Republicans a majority in the House, but nothing changed. In 2014, those same voters gave Republicans a majority in the Senate and, still, nothing changed. And I blame some of that on the conservative movement, a movement that is supposed to be about our principles and our ideas. But I blame most of it on our political establishment.”

Blame it instead on the failure of your brand, Marco.

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Shock: Video shows Breaking the Silence ‘spying’

March 18, 2016

Shock: Video shows Breaking the Silence apparently spying on IDF PM: security forces investigating incriminating videos filmed by undercover nationalist agents in ultra-leftist group.

Source: Shock: Video shows Breaking the Silence ‘spying’ – Defense/Security – News – Arutz Sheva

IDF forces near Gaza.
Hadas Parush / Flash 90

Channel 2 news broadcast highly incriminating video evidence Thursday evening filmed with hidden cameras by nationalist group Ad Kan, which shows ultra-leftist group Breaking the Silence engaged in what appears like espionage activity against the IDF.

‘Breaking the Silence has crossed another red line,” Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said after the report was aired. “The investigative security forces are looking into the matter.”

The videos were gathered by Ad Kan’s undercover agents who infiltrated Breaking the Silence over a three-year period.

They show Breaking the Silence activists questioning ex-IDF soldiers – who are, in fact, Ad Kan agents – about details of the IDF’s security operations and equipment along the border with Gaza. The questions relate to how Hamas tunnels were discovered, what special forces were deployed and when, what kind of gun is deployed atop an IDF robot vehicle and more.

None of these questions have anything to do with allegedly immoral activities by the military in Judea and Samaria, which Breaking the Silence claims to be interested in exposing. Instead, they appear to be aimed at gathering intelligence about sensitive IDF operations along the border with Hamas.

In addition, a female Breaking the Silence activist revealed to an agent that she enlisted into the IDF’s Civil Administration in Judea and Samaria with the express purpose of gathering information about it, since she had been in touch with Breaking the Silence before she enlisted.

Channel 2 showed the videos to former high ranking security officials including MK Avi Dichter, a former head of the ISA (Shabak). Dichter appeared to be shocked by the materials and said that they look and sound like espionage.

According to NGO Monitor, between the years 2008 and 2014, the New Israel Fund approved $699,310 in grants to Breaking the Silence. This raises the question, are donors to the NIF unwittingly funding espionage against the IDF?

It remains to be determined whether Breaking the Silence passed on the information it gathered to enemy forces, or to European governments, from whom it also receives some of its funding. In any case, the act of obtaining and holding on to classified military information by unauthorized individuals is also a crime.

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