Archive for March 2017
Here’s How ISIS’ Female Enemies Celebrated International Women’s Day
March 10, 2017Here’s How ISIS’ Female Enemies Celebrated International Women’s Day, Clarion Project, Ryan Mauro, March 9, 2017
Female fighters from the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI), including the oldest and youngest soldiers. (Photo: Courtesy)
The Iraqi and Syrian Christians who stare daily into the darkness of genocide have, after a long and bloody period of patience and non-violence, formed self-defense forces, including an all-female force in Syria.
The Beth Nahrin Women Protection Forces is a branch of the 2,000-strong Syriac Military Council, a Christian militia that says it includes Assyrians, Chaldeans and Syriacs. The Christian force is part of a U.S.-backed coalition named the Syrian Democratic Forces that includes Kurds and Sunni Arabs and is marching on Raqqa, the “capitol” of ISIS’ “caliphate.”
International Women’s Day would have been better honored by broadcasting those words and telling these stories than by skipping work, politicizing the day or getting arrested for blocking traffic as the radical Muslim-American activist and left-wing star Linda Sarsour was.
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In America, some attention-seeking activists purposely got arrested by blocking traffic outside the Trump International Hotel so they could later become the face of so-called gender oppression.
Their PR stunt stole attention from the most powerful symbols of feminism: women in the Middle East—Christians, Kurds, Arabs, Yazidis—risking their lives to vanquish Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) as a step towards starting a new era for women in the region.
The Iraqi and Syrian Christians who stare daily into the darkness of genocide have, after a long and bloody period of patience and non-violence, formed self-defense forces, including an all-female force in Syria.
The Beth Nahrin Women Protection Forces is a branch of the 2,000-strong Syriac Military Council, a Christian militia that says it includes Assyrians, Chaldeans and Syriacs. The Christian force is part of a U.S.-backed coalition named the Syrian Democratic Forces that includes Kurds and Sunni Arabs and is marching on Raqqa, the “capitol” of ISIS’ “caliphate.”
Watch a video about this force titled “Meet the Christian Women Fighting ISIS,” which shows a camp with 50 female recruits in the Kurdish area of northern Syria:
SIS is believed to still be holding many Yazidi women and girls as sex slaves and the other female Yazidis are determined to put an end to it. The Kurdish Peshmerga in Iraq has trained at least two female Yazidi forces, the 1,700-strong Sun Ladies and the Sinjar Women’s Units.
The Iraqi Kurdistan government is proud of how its Peshmerga forces put men and women on equal footing. The same goes for other Kurdish groups in Iraq that are fighting both ISIS and the Iranian regime, like the Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK) and the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI).
Clarion Project’s National Security Analyst Prof. Ryan Mauro in Iraq with female fighters from the Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK)
The Syrian Democratic Forces include the Kurdish YPG group, with a female component known as the YPJ Women’s Defense Units. The Kurdish YPG is accused of being a branch of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which is designated as a terrorist group by the U.S., E.U. and Turkey. The U.S. government nonetheless backs the YPG, disputing the claim that YPG and PKK are synonymous.
A Twitter posting from ANF News shows female Kurdish fighters purportedly handing out flowers to women in villages freed from ISIS and is accompanied with a quote: “We’ll liberate women from slavery, atrocity and make every day March 8 [International Women’s Day].”
Sunni Arab women are also in on the action. The U.S. military has proudly distributed pictures showing female fighters who belong to the Syrian Arab Coalition, another component of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), being trained and armed ahead of the planned attack on Raqqa.
For the female Kurdish commanders, they are not only risking their lives to defeat ISIS but for the sake of the next generation of girls.
The commander of the female Kurdish forces in Syria, Rojda Felat, has vowed to free the Yazidi women enslaved by ISIS as part of a broader struggle for women’s rights. She said, “Wherever a man is threatening a woman, our forces will struggle against this,” according to a report referenced in a PJ Media article.
In an interview published on International Women’s Day, Felat spoke words that should stiffen the spine and inspire every women’s right activist:
“In the Middle East women are assigned traditional roles such as wife, mother, house-worker. With the establishment of the SDF, however, this has changed and traditional roles have been turned upside down … With the SDF, the women of our region have taken developments by the scruff of the neck and left their imprint on the direction of the battle. As a result, women have re-established themselves in every sphere of life.”
International Women’s Day would have been better honored by broadcasting those words and telling these stories than by skipping work, politicizing the day or getting arrested for blocking traffic as the radical Muslim-American activist and left-wing star Linda Sarsour was.
Memo to U.S. Mission in Vienna: Obama No Longer President
March 10, 2017Memo to U.S. Mission in Vienna: Obama No Longer President, PJ Media, Claudia Rosett, March 9, 2017
(Image courtesy of Shutterstock)
Haley deserves applause for deflecting the pressures to start bargaining with Kim. Deals with North Korea do not work, and will not work while Kim remains in power. The long record of U.S. talks, deals and attempted talks with North Korea is one of humiliation and failure for the U.S., as North Korea’s dynastic Kim regime has repeatedly pocketed any gains, milked every concession, cheated on every agreement, and carried on with its atrocities and its nuclear missile projects.
Schofer’s words did not quite mesh with Haley’s polite dismissal of pressure for “talks and negotiations.” Rather, Schofer repeated what was for years the refrain of the Obama administration — and of former Secretary of State John Kerry, in particular — offering Pyongyang, under conditions North Korea had previously agreed to, and then violated, the option of returning to the bargaining table:
We have consistently communicated to Pyongyang that we remain open to meaningful negotiations based on the understandings reached by all members of the Six-Party Talks in the 2005 Joint Statement.
As the Trump administration now toils to reduce the threats and clean up the mess bequeathed by Obama’s “global approaches” — including Obama’s gross failure to block North Korea’s prolific nuclear-weapons advances of recent years — perhaps it’s not too much to ask that America’s Mission to the UN in Vienna get entirely on board with the new administration, even if that entails updating its web site to reflect in full that Trump, not Obama, is now the president.
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Quite likely you don’t spend a lot of time following the doings of Andrew J. Schofer, a career State Department officer who is currently the Charge d’Affaires at the U.S. Mission to International Organizations in Vienna (UNVIE). Nor was Schofer anywhere high on my radar until this week, when he delivered a statement on North Korea that seemed to me slightly at odds with what Ambassador Nikki Haley was saying at the United Nations in New York. Which sent me to the web site for his legation in Vienna … but before I get ahead of myself on that, here’s a bit more background.
Haley, at a UN press stakeout in New York, following a Security Council meeting this Wednesday on North Korea, said that while the U.S. reevaluates how to handle North Korea, “all options are on the table.” But Haley also went out of her way to imply that the Trump administration is far from eager to accede to pressures, such as those from China, to default to talks or deals with North Korea. Referring to North Korea’s tyrant, Kim Jong Un, Haley told reporters:
I appreciate all of my counterparts wanting to talk about talks and negotiations. We are not dealing with a rational person.
To my mind, Haley may be wrong in her assessment of Kim Jong Un as irrational. We can debate whether Kim is actually a madman incapable of rational calculation, or a wily thug, who in the interest of maintaining his hereditary totalitarian throne has been proving adept, like his forebears, at calibrating what he can get away with in the way of threats, hostage-taking, assassinations, executions, extortion rackets, and nuclear missile projects — all in the interest of consolidating his grip on power and expanding his reach.
But wherever one comes down on the crazy-Kim question, Haley deserves applause for deflecting the pressures to start bargaining with Kim. Deals with North Korea do not work, and will not work while Kim remains in power. The long record of U.S. talks, deals and attempted talks with North Korea is one of humiliation and failure for the U.S., as North Korea’s dynastic Kim regime has repeatedly pocketed any gains, milked every concession, cheated on every agreement, and carried on with its atrocities and its nuclear missile projects.
Which brings me to the statement delivered this Wednesday in Vienna by U.S. Charge D’Affaires Schofer, at a meeting of the board of governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. Schofer’s words did not quite mesh with Haley’s polite dismissal of pressure for “talks and negotiations.” Rather, Schofer repeated what was for years the refrain of the Obama administration — and of former Secretary of State John Kerry, in particular — offering Pyongyang, under conditions North Korea had previously agreed to, and then violated, the option of returning to the bargaining table:
We have consistently communicated to Pyongyang that we remain open to meaningful negotiations based on the understandings reached by all members of the Six-Party Talks in the 2005 Joint Statement.
Whether Schofer on matters involving North Korea is genuinely out of sync with Haley, or with the Trump administration generally, I don’t know. But I do know this: Schofer’s statement was different enough from Haley’s, and similar enough to those of the Obama administration, that after reading it I went looking for more information on the web site of the U.S. Mission currently run by Schofer in Vienna — an important legation, not least, because it represents the U.S. at the IAEA.
It is also, as it turns out, a legation that is in some respects almost two months out of date on a major change at the White House — meaning the inauguration on Jan. 20 of a new president. Perhaps someone at the State Department should remind Schofer that Obama has left office? Here’s an excerpt from the web site of the U.S. Mission in Vienna (boldface is mine):
UNVIE’s mission is to conduct effective multilateral diplomacy with International Organizations in Vienna to advance President Obama’s commitment to design and implement global approaches to reduce global threats and seize global opportunities.
Yes, this is small stuff, in its way — that seven weeks after Trump’s inauguration, the U.S. Mission to International Organizations in Vienna has not gotten around to fully updating its web site. (Surely the problem here is one of carelessness, not political bias among career foreign service officers.) But details matter, especially in the symbolically freighted realms of diplomacy.
As the Trump administration now toils to reduce the threats and clean up the mess bequeathed by Obama’s “global approaches” — including Obama’s gross failure to block North Korea’s prolific nuclear-weapons advances of recent years — perhaps it’s not to much to ask that America’s Mission to the UN in Vienna get entirely on board with the new administration, even if that entails updating its web site to reflect in full that Trump, not Obama, is now the president.
Jihadis Living on Support Payments from the Europe They Vowed to Destroy
March 10, 2017Al Harith’s story reveals the depth of one of Europe’s biggest scandals: the jihadis’ use of European cradle-to-grave entitlements to fund their “holy war”. Europe gave them everything: jobs, homes, public assistance, unemployment benefits, relief
by Giulio Meotti
March 10, 2017 at 5:00 am
Source: Jihadis Living on Support Payments from the Europe They Vowed to Destroy
- Al Harith’s story reveals the depth of one of Europe’s biggest scandals: the jihadis’ use of European cradle-to-grave entitlements to fund their “holy war”.
- Europe gave them everything: jobs, homes, public assistance, unemployment benefits, relief payments, child benefits, disability payments, cash support. These Muslim extremists, however, do not see this “Dependistan”, as Mark Steyn called the welfare state, as a sign of generosity, but of weakness. They understand that Europe is ready to be destroyed.
- Filled with religious certainty and ideological hatred for the West, not required to assimilate to Europe’s values and norms, many of European Muslims seem to feel as if they are destined to devour an exhausted civilization.
- Public policy goals instead need to be to move people off welfare — shown to be basically a disincentive to looking for work — and toward personal responsibility. There need to be legal limits on the uses to which welfare funds can be put — for example, welfare funds should not to be used for purchasing illegal drugs, gambling, terrorism or, as there is no free speech in Europe anyway, for promoting terrorism. One could create and fine-tune such a list. Disregarding the limitations could result in losing benefits. This would help fight the ghettoization and Islamization of Europe’s Muslims. The cycle of welfare and jihad needs to be stopped.
Four years ago, the British liberal newspaper, The Guardian, ran a story about the “survivors of Guantanamo“, the “victims of America’s ‘icon of lawlessness'”, “Britain’s survivors of the detention centre that has been called the ‘gulag of our times'”. The article featured a photograph of Jamal al Harith.
Al Harith, born Ronald Fiddler, a Christian convert to Islam, returned to Manchester from detention at Guantanamo Bay thanks to activism of David Blunkett, Home Secretary of then-Prime Minister Tony Blair. Al Harith was immediately welcomed in England as a hero, the innocent victim of the unjust “war on terror” after September 11. The Mirror and ITV gave him £60,000 ($73,000) for an exclusive interview about his experience at Guantanamo. Al Harith was also compensated with one million pounds by the British authorities. The victim of the “gulag of our times” bought a very nice house with the taxpayers’ cash.
A few weeks ago, al Harith made his last “journey”: he was blown up in Mosul, Iraq, on behalf of the Islamic State. Al Harith had also been recruited by the non-governmental organization “CAGE” (formerly known as “Cageprisoners”) as part of its testimony advocating the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.
Celebrities such as Vanessa Redgrave, Victoria Brittain, Peter Oborne and Sadiq Khan appeared at CAGE’s fundraising events. The NGO has been funded by the Joseph Rowntree Trust, a fund created by the chocolate magnate, and by the Roddick Foundation, the charity of Anita Roddick. Al Harith was also invited to the Council of Europe, to give testimony against retaining Guantanamo.
Al Harith’s story reveals the depth of one of Europe’s biggest scandals: the jihadis’ use of European cradle-to-grave entitlements to fund their “holy war”. Europe gave them everything: jobs, homes, public assistance, unemployment benefits, relief payments, child benefits, disability payments, cash support. These Muslim extremists, however, do not see this “Dependistan”, as Mark Steyn called the welfare state, as a sign of generosity, but of weakness. They understand that Europe is ready to be destroyed. They have no respect for it. From Marseille to Malmö, many Muslim children have been raised to despise the societies that have made them so comfortable. Most Islamists in Europe are now living on support payments from the nations they had vowed to destroy.
A few days ago, the Danish press revealed that the Danish government has been paying sickness and disability benefits to Muslim extremists fighting in Syria for the Islamic State. “It is a huge scandal that we disburse money from the welfare fund in Denmark for people who go to Syria,” said Employment Minister Troels Lund Poulsen. The terrorists who struck Paris and Brussels have also used the generous British welfare system to fund their jihad. It is emerging from a trial in the UK that Mohamed Abrini, known as “the man with the hat” after the deadly attack at Brussels airport, received £3,000 in benefits before flying to Paris and disappearing.
It is not the first time that the role of the welfare state emerges in the Islamic infrastructure of terror:
- The family of Omar Abdel Hamid el Hussein, the terrorist behind the attack in Copenhagen in February 2015, which killed two people, received money from Danish social programs.
- British Islamist Anjem Choudary, convicted of encouraging people to join the Islamic State, urged the faithful to leave work and to seek unemployment benefits to devote full-time to war against the “infidels”. Choudary himself pocketed £25,000 a year in benefits.
- In Germany, when the newspaper Bild ran an analysis of the 450 German jihadists fighting in Syria, it found that more than 20% of them have received benefits from the German state.
- In the Netherlands, a jihadist named Khalid Abdurahman appeared in a video of the Islamic State in front of five heads just cut off. The Dutch newspaper Volkskrant revealed that he had been declared “unfit for work” and was paid for a treatment of claustrophobia.
Europe’s welfare system has created a cultural toxin for many in a sullen, unproductive Muslim underclass who live in the segregated enclaves such as the banlieues of Paris or “Londonistan”. Filled with religious certainty and ideological hatred for the West, not required to assimilate to Europe’s values and norms, certain of these European Muslims seem to feel as if they are destined to devour an exhausted civilization.
 Muhammad Shamsuddin, a 39-year-old London-based Islamist, was featured in a documentary called “The Jihadis Next Door.” Shamsuddin, a divorced father of five who lives on state handouts and claims he cannot work because he has “chronic fatigue syndrome,” was filmed preaching hate against non-Muslims on British streets. (Image source: Channel 4 video screenshot) |
Public policy goals instead need to be to move people off welfare — shown to be basically a disincentive to looking for work — except in extraordinary cases, and toward personal responsibility. There need to be legal limits on the uses to which welfare funds can be put — for example, welfare funds should not to be used for purchasing illegal drugs, for gambling, for terrorism or, as there is no free speech in Europe anyway, for promoting terrorism. One could create and fine-tune such a list. Disregarding the limitations could result in losing the benefits. Measures such as that would will help fight against the ghettoization and Islamization of Europe’s Muslims.
Who is winning here? Democracy or Islamic extremism? The cycle of welfare and jihad needs to be stopped. Now.
Trump vs Obama
March 10, 2017Trump vs Obama, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, March 10, 2017
Trump and Obama are two very different men. Their personalities, as much as their politics, will define this conflict. The media routinely accuses Trump of having totalitarian instincts. But the true totalitarians are men like Obama those who hypocritically use the machinery of government to go after their opponents while pretending to be virtuous. President Trump has always fought his fights directly.
And the battle for America has only begun.
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Obama is a coward.
Trump will call someone a name while Obama will anonymously source a smear through three levels of staffers, political allies and reporters.
Trump called CNN “Fake News” on camera. Obama sourced Operation Rushbo, targeting Rush Limbaugh, through a variety of White House people and left-wing allies. Trump will boot reporters he doesn’t like. Obama authorized secretly hacking the emails of a FOX News reporter. Trump had an openly hostile conversation with the Prime Minister of Australia. When Obama wanted to call Netanyahu “chickens__t”, he did it by having one of his people anonymously plant it with a reliable media sycophant, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, before later having a spokesman disavow it.
Poultry ordure doesn’t smell any worse than that.
But Obama is very careful to launch dirty attacks without getting any on his hands. The insults are anonymously sourced. The retaliation comes out of the bowels of the bureaucracy. And he only finds out about it from the media. That allows him to retain what he cares about most: his popularity.
Obama and his people like to think that their dishonesty is a superpower. They pat themselves on the back for stabbing everyone else in theirs. Sometimes their smugness over how well they use the media to lie and smear gets out of control. Like the time Obama’s Goebbels, Ben Rhodes, boasted to the New York Times about how easy it was to fool everyone about the deal to protect Iran’s nuclear program.
After Trump won, it was business as usual.
Obama put on his best imitation of decency while his people went on preparing to undermine Trump at every turn by smearing him, wiretapping him and doing everything possible, legally and illegally, to bring him down. It was the same phony act that he had pulled for eight years, bemoaning the lack of bipartisanship while ruling unilaterally as a dictator, destroying the Constitution while hectoring us about our values, denouncing racism while organizing race riots, complaining about the echo chamber while constructing one and lecturing us on civility while smearing anyone who disagreed.
Trump’s killer instinct lies in understanding that hypocrisy conceals weakness. That is what powered him through the primaries and then through an election. His instinct is to grapple directly with a target. That is also the source of his popularity. Meanwhile the source of Obama’s popularity is his hollow likability. He’s likable only because he is almost always too cowardly to say what he really thinks.
Americans have seen the real Trump: because he is, in his own way, always real. Obama is always unreal. When Trump and Obama have appeared together, Obama seemed less real. He is a brand wrapped in all sorts of images that have nothing to do with who he really is.
Trump has always understood that Obama’s bravado was hollow. Obama boasted that he would have defeated Trump. Then he went on to try to do that with attacks from behind the scenes routed through government loyalists and media operatives while pretending that he had nothing to do with any of it.
But Obama and his people had learned nothing from how Trump had won the election. When Trump is attacked, his response is to go directly for the attacker, no matter what the argument is or how it’s sourced. Trump doesn’t get bogged down in debates or befuddled by media echo chambers that are so totally enveloping that they resemble reality. He just smashes past them to the source of the smear.
That is exactly what he did by calling out Obama’s eavesdropping. He bypassed all the layers that Obama had put in place to insulate himself from involvement in the attack, the media echo chamber, the staffers who handed information to the media and the government loyalists who provided the information to the staffers, to strike at the wizard behind the curtain.
And, in doing so, he made a mockery of Obama’s bravado.
When Obama boasted that he could have beaten Trump, he meant that he could have done so using the same tactics that worked so well against McCain and Romney. Like most of the media, he had failed to understand that these tactics don’t work against Trump because he is a moving target.
Trump created his own brand. Unlike most presidential candidates, he doesn’t need consultants, and unlike most Republicans, he isn’t worried at all about likability. That’s why he won an election and still has majority support for his policies, including the most controversial ones, despite poor likability.
Obama is obsessed with being liked. In the media space, effective messaging depends on likability. But Trump upended the same formula that had ruled presidential politics since Nixon vs. Kennedy. Instead he casually tosses likability aside to grapple with opponents, rivals and enemies. Trump won this election by forcing opponent after opponent to either fight him on his own terms or back away.
This includes the media, which has tried to grapple directly with him, with disastrous results.
The Obama machine, a massive propaganda matrix that alternates between lying and gaslighting, is not built to handle Trump. And Obama isn’t built to handle Trump either. Obama’s hipster transgressiveness made him seem cool when up against Romney or McCain, but everything Trump does embodies real transgressiveness. The machine is built on limiting the freedom of action of Republicans by intimidating them with political correctness and potential smears. But Trump doesn’t care about any of that.
Trump is willing to throw everything into an attack. Obama’s people build complicated traps that he walks through without thinking twice. Obama plays chess. Trump overturns the board.
Obama’s strategy was to create so much chaos that the White House wouldn’t be able to get anything done. Instead it would ricochet from scandal to scandal. Similar tactics had proven quite effective in the second terms of Reagan and Bush. But Trump thrives on chaos. Many of his supporters want him to be a disrupter. Chaos translates to effectiveness. The more noise he makes, the more he’s changing things.
President Trump has made it clear that in response to these attacks, he will directly challenge Obama. And that breaks down Obama’s entire plan of using proxies to do his dirty work while he gives inspiring speeches. Trump will not let Obama get away with attacking him and then hiding behind phony idealism. And he intends to make the Obama machine into the issue in these attacks.
Obama’s plan involved a gradual emergence to deliver more sanctimonious lectures about “who we are”. It did not involve getting directly into a fight with Trump. But, as his other opponents discovered, Trump doesn’t give you a choice.
The favorite quote of Clinton’s damage control man Chris Lehane came from Mike Tyson. “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Obama’s people like to think that this is what they’ve done to Republicans, Iran Deal opponents, police officers and even President Trump. But Trump is showing them what the expression really means.
Obama had a plan. Then Trump punched him in the mouth.
The plan to entangle key Trump people in scandals hit a roadblock. Instead the wiretapping accusations have become the issue. And Obama’s people have been forced to come out and offer cautious denials.
And Obama and his dirty tricks have been dragged out from behind the curtain.
Trump and Obama are two very different men. Their personalities, as much as their politics, will define this conflict. The media routinely accuses Trump of having totalitarian instincts. But the true totalitarians are men like Obama those who hypocritically use the machinery of government to go after their opponents while pretending to be virtuous. President Trump has always fought his fights directly.
And the battle for America has only begun.
In Media, Iranian Foreign Minister, Majlis Member Clash Over Iran-U.S. Relationship
March 10, 2017In Media, Iranian Foreign Minister, Majlis Member Clash Over Iran-U.S. Relationship, MEMRI, March 9, 2017
(If we send Kerry, will they keep him?
–DM)
Recently, Iranian Majlis member and National Security and Foreign Policy Committee member Javad Karimi Ghodosi, from the ideological camp that is critical of the JCPOA and of Iranian ties to the U.S. made accusations against Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. In a February 28, 2017 interview, Ghodosi told the YJC website, which belongs to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), that Zarif had sent a letter to his U.S. counterpart Secretary of State Rex Tillerson requesting, inter alia, that former secretary of state John Kerry be appointed special JCPOA representative. Ghodosi also noted: “[I]t is unclear whether the letter was sent in coordination with regime officials in Iran.”
The Iranian Foreign Ministry immediately denied Ghodosi’s allegations, attributing ulterior motives to him and saying that he was attempting to defame Iran’s diplomatic officials.
These statements must be viewed in the context of the Iranian leadership’s apprehensions about what the Trump administration will do next, after President Trump tweeted, on February 2, that “Iran has been formally PUT ON NOTICE for firing a ballistic missile” and added that the JCPOA was a “terrible deal.” They must also be viewed against the backdrop of the disagreement within the Iranian leadership over what its strategic response to the U.S. should be – whether to work with it, in line with the pragmatic camp’s approach, or to strengthen strategic ties with Russia, in line with the IRGC’s position.
Ghodosi, Zarif. Source: YJC, February 28, 2017
Following is the translation of the YJC interview with Ghodosi and of the Foreign Ministry’s rebuttal:
Majlis Member Ghodosi: Foreign Minister Zarif Asked Secretary Of State Tillerson To Appoint John Kerry As JCPOA Representative Because Of His Ties With The Iranians
“The Foreign Minister [Zarif] has sent a letter to [U.S. Secretary of State] Rex Tillerson with four requests. I hope the foreign minister will not deny this, because everything I say is true.
“One of the requests that Zarif presented to the American secretary of state is that America not take steps to cancel the JCPOA, and that if it did, Iran would submit a complaint to the [UN] Security Council regarding American violations of the JCPOA.
“Zarif’s most important request to the American secretary of state is that the U.S. State Department appoint a special JCPOA representative. The letter stated that John Kerry should be selected for this position, because he has a good and transparent relationship with the [Iranian] negotiating team.
“In this letter, Zarif [also] proposed to the new American secretary of state that he conduct a secret bilateral meeting in Istanbul, Turkey.
“Additionally, Zarif also requested that a direct emergency line be set up for special cases between the two countries’ foreign ministries.
“Thus far, no response from the new American secretary of state to the Iranian foreign minister’s letter has been received, and it is unclear whether the letter was sent in coordination with regime officials in Iran. However, since Iran does not approve of such ties [with the U.S.], we must question [whether it was coordinated with regime officials].
“Additionally, the Iranian foreign minister sent three letters to [EU Representative for Foreign Affairs Federica] Mogherini presenting [Iranian allegations of U.S.] JCPOA violations. This is an excellent revolutionary letter.
“Regime officials stressed to the Iranian foreign minister that the public must be kept up to date regarding such letters and JCPOA violations. In any case, even Zarif’s fourth letter, [which was] to [Iran’s] National Security Committee, mentioned no such JCPOA violations.
“In light of the increasing severity of the sanctions, which keeps rising, the government, and especially [President] Rohani and [Foreign Minister] Zarif, must be more transparent with public opinion on nuclear matters.”
Foreign Ministry Vehemently Denies Ghodosi’s Claims
The Iranian Foreign Ministry announcement stated that “this new, untrue, and unfounded claim by Karimi Ghodosi on the matter of letters by Zarif to the American secretary of state is strongly denied.
“The Foreign Ministry is shocked and saddened by the improper and bizarre thought process of Karimi Ghodosi, who insists on continuing to make false and unfounded allegations about the senior echelon of the Iranian diplomatic corps. The aim of this appears to be disruption of public opinion and self-aggrandizement. As in the past, these claims will not benefit his specific goals.
“The wise and diligent Majlis members are well informed about all of Iran’s foreign policy, and will not be influenced by these false statements.
“Such deviant issues will [also] not influence the continuation of the principled path of the Foreign Ministry, or its general operating frameworks. Measures that disrupt public opinion are against national security and can be dealt with by legal means.”[1]
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[1] YJC (Iran), February 28, 2017.
Tehran Relies on Propaganda to Make up For Misallocation of Funds to Foreign Conflicts
March 10, 2017Tehran Relies on Propaganda to Make up For Misallocation of Funds to Foreign Conflicts, Iran News Update, March 10, 2017
(Please see also, Time to Call Iran’s Revolutionary Guards What They Are: Terrorists. — DM)
[R]ecently released intelligence strongly suggests that the supreme leader and hardline authorities like the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps bear a great deal of responsibility for the economic struggles of Iranian citizens, as a result of the systematic misappropriation both of budgetary funds and financial resources earned through Iran’s private sector. On Wednesday, the National Council of Resistance of Iran held a panel discussion coinciding with the release of an e-book titled, The Rise of the Revolutionary Guards’ Financial Empire.
In both the discussion and the document, the leading Iranian opposition group explained that a recent push toward widespread privatization of the Iranian economy has actually resulted in the private acquisition of more than half of the country’s gross domestic product by front companies and other affiliates of the IRGC and the supreme leader himself.
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On Friday, Reuters picked up on reporting in Iranian state media which noted that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had once again voiced criticism of President Hassan Rouhani’s handling of the nation’s economy following the nuclear agreement that went into effect at the beginning of last year. The supreme leader’s remarks appeared to specifically highlight the ongoing struggles of the Iranian people, who are experiencing poverty at a rate of at least nine percent and likely much higher.
“Of course the government has taken remarkable steps but if the resistance economy had been implemented fully and widely, we could witness a tangible difference in people’s lives,” Khamenei was quoted as saying. In previous months, he had already called for the renewal of his own “resistance economy” plan, which involves domestic development aimed at making the nation more capable of weather the storm of international economic sanctions, as distinguished from Rouhani’s plan of reaching out to Western powers in order to alleviate those sanctions.
Khamenei’s recommendations thus serve a dual purpose. In the first place, they further undermine the prospects for further rapprochement between the Islamic Republic and the West. And secondly, they defray blame for economic woes away from the supreme leader’s office and its hardline affiliates, putting it instead onto the Rouhani administration, which faces a contentious reelection bid in May.
But recently released intelligence strongly suggests that the supreme leader and hardline authorities like the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps bear a great deal of responsibility for the economic struggles of Iranian citizens, as a result of the systematic misappropriation both of budgetary funds and financial resources earned through Iran’s private sector. On Wednesday, the National Council of Resistance of Iran held a panel discussion coinciding with the release of an e-book titled, The Rise of the Revolutionary Guards’ Financial Empire.
In both the discussion and the document, the leading Iranian opposition group explained that a recent push toward widespread privatization of the Iranian economy has actually resulted in the private acquisition of more than half of the country’s gross domestic product by front companies and other affiliates of the IRGC and the supreme leader himself.
The Washington Times reported upon some of the findings presented in that document, emphasizing the fact that the regime is using these privately acquired assets to channel billions of dollars into regional terrorism, paramilitary activities, and weapons development. The article notes that the intelligence gathered by the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran found that approximately 100 billion dollars was being spent annually just on salaries for militant fighters in the Syrian Civil War.
The Washington Times credits the NCRI with presenting a clear warning to Western businesses and policymakers. And the document itself says, “Foreign investors cannot in practical terms avoid entanglement by affiliation in the Iranian regime’s behavior, including its support for terrorism, continued aggressive policies towards regional countries, manufacture and testing of ballistic missiles, and systematic egregious human rights violations inside Iran.”
To critics of Iran’s clerical regime, this entanglement is worrying in its own right because of Tehran’s traditional behavior. And it is made more worrying by the fact that the above-mentioned ballistic missile program is being used alongside other types of weapons as a tool of explicit anti-Western propaganda.
This fact was highlighted once again on Friday when the Associated Press reported that General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the head of the IRGC’s aerospace division, had boasted of the successful testing of another ballistic missile. The launch was aimed at naval targets and took place amidst three days of large-scale training exercises by the Iranian Navy, which is separate from the naval forces of the IRGC.
The IRGC conducted its own naval operations the previous week, and both demonstrations were accompanied by boastful rhetoric about readiness for war with proclaimed enemies including the United States. In a separate example of the same propaganda trends, Iran also premiered an animated film depicting a military officer modeled after IRGC Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani leading a small number of Iranian vessels in destroying a much larger American fleet.
In January, the IRGC conducted the test launch of a nuclear-capable ballistic missile barely a week after the inauguration of US President Donald Trump. Such tests take place in defiance of a UN Security Council resolution calling on Iran to refrain from work on weapons that could carry a nuclear warhead, but a half dozen other such launches had been carried out before Trump was inaugurated but after the conclusion of nuclear negotiations between Iran and the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany.
The January incident was apparently the immediate impetus for a statement by the Trump administration putting Iran on notice over its provocative behavior. But various observers including US Navy officers have declared that that behavior remains unchanged, and that the IRGC continues to act unprofessionally and confrontationally in the region. Last weekend, for instance, several fast-attack vessels belonging to the IRGC positioned themselves about 600 yards away from a US Navy surveillance ship and three British vessels, compelling them to change course.
The AP reported on Friday that Iranian officials had since made exactly the opposite claim about the incident: that the American and British vessels had changed course specifically to approach the Iranian boats. But considering that this is at odds with the accounts of various other Iranian-initiated close-encounters, it seems to suggest an effort on Tehran’s part to justify its missile tests and defiant rhetoric, by suggesting that the US is the more aggressive party.
Assuming that this particular Iranian claim is indeed a deceptive one, it is certainly not the only one of its kind. The ongoing propaganda campaign also appears to involve an effort to present Iran as being much better positioned than it is for global conflict. This is suggested by the aforementioned film and the statements accompanying military demonstrations and missile tests. But the tendency is perhaps much more clearly on display in allegedly false Iranian claims of advanced weapons development.
The National Interest recently pointed to this phenomenon as it concerns the Qaher F-313 fighter jet, which is supposedly equivalent to an American F-35 stealth fighter, and which Iranian Defense Minister Hossein Dehqan claimed was ready for operational testing. In fact, independent analyses of photographs of the craft are broadly in agreement that it is merely a non-functional mockup, and a poorly structured one, at that.
Similar claims have been made about other Iranian weapons and equipment, including drones supposedly cloned from captured American technology. Other military hardware unveiled by the Iranian Army and the Revolutionary Guards has been shown to be little more than outmoded technology affixed with purely cosmetic upgrades. But to the extent that the regime is able to use its tightly controlled state media to present these so-called developments to a domestic audience, it may evoke a more war-ready image of Iran than is defensible in reality.
What’s more, this messaging dovetails with Supreme Leader Khamenei’s statements on the Iranian economy, insofar as it suggests Iran is capable of greater-than-expected domestic military development, while also concealing the fact that much of the country’s military allotment is being spent in foreign territory like Syria and Yemen instead of on advanced domestic development, whether military or civilian.
Time to Call Iran’s Revolutionary Guards What They Are: Terrorists
March 10, 2017Time to Call Iran’s Revolutionary Guards What They Are: Terrorists, American Thinker, Reza Shafiee, March 10, 2017
What is missing in all the talks and arguments made in Washington as to what is an effective remedy to counter the mullahs in Iran is the role of Iranian people. Iran is boiling with popular discontent, now. According to Brigadier General Hossein Ashtari, the Iranian regime’s chief of police: “On average 20 to 30 protest gatherings take place around the country by citizens who have lost their life savings to the banks,” These citizens are mainly retired with very limited savings and were scammed out of their lifetime savings by various government-owned financial institutions. Such protests are but a drop in the ocean when we add the teachers, nurses, factory workers, and an army of college graduates with no prospects of finding decent jobs to the discontent. This amounts to tens of thousands of people, in large numbers of gatherings each year. According to a BBC report, more than 11 million or Iran’s 83 million people are unemployed in the country.
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Ever since signs emerged that Trump administration is considering a long-overdue classification of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization, the ruling mullahs have gone to work. They put into place a well-known strategy of intimidation and deception aboard, coupled with an absolute iron fist at home. They do this because they know the value of controlling a terrorist organization. The problem is in the harm it means for everyone else.
In the past, the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khomeini, would brandish the former by reminding Western governments that if they chose to cross Tehran then they must be prepared to pay dearly. But that was decades ago. One fact is undisputable now: The Iranian regime has long passed its prime revolutionary and glory days when Khomeini rode in on the tides of millions who were sadly unaware of what was to come. In those days, people tasted a short-lived period of high expectations, at the time wildly called “spring of freedom.”
At the same time, hostage-taking by IRGC’s protégés, such as nascent Lebanese Hezbollah, of foreign nationals, preferably Americans, was routine. The ayatollahs were behind it even though it often took place in Lebanon. After each kidnapping, IRGC’s proteges then engaged hostages’ governments in a lengthy and humiliating process of hostage negotiations and sometimes hostage swaps in the 1980s.
Today the IRGC has made it much more convenient to reach the same ends by taking the hostages among dual citizens who take the risk of traveling to Iran. Case in point was hostages released just after Iranian regime struck the nuclear deal with the U.S. and five other world powers. IRGC’s deputy chief, Brigadier General Hossein Nejat, in a speech in Bushehr (south of Iran), said: “The Iranian-American journalist of the Washington Post, Jason Rezaian, who had formed an espionage network was identified and arrested by the IRGC.”
Hossein Nejat stated: “The former Secretary of State, John Kerry with his intelligence forces urged the Iranian Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif to release Jason Rezaian. Consequently, the U.S. government in return paid 1 billion and 400 million dollars ransom to Iran for the release of Jason Rezaian.”
Other IRGC officials, on different occasions after the hostages were released, have bragged that the Obama administration released Iranian prisoners in the United States and on top of that paid a hefty sum as ransom money.
In past few weeks, despite attempts by regime officials, such as Zarif, to keep a low profile while anxiously monitoring Donald Trump’s every move, IRGC is actively scheming. It raised the prize on Salman Rushdie’s head, showcased and glorified old terrorists such as Anis-Alnaghash on state-run television and openly threatened the U.S.
CNC News revealed on Feb. 28 that an IRGC strategist, Hassan Abbasi renewed threats that the force has planned to unleash terror cells on U.S. soil. He has elaborated plans to sabotage nuclear plants in the United States among other things. Ironically, at the same time, IRGC has claimed that it is fighting terrorism in neighboring countries.
Javad Zarif has recently said: “the world at large agrees that the IRGC has extended the utmost support for neighboring countries in their fight against terrorism.”
Zarif seemingly refers to IRGC’s destructive and brutal role in Syria and is trying to sell it as constrictive. According to IRGC’s own figures, more than 1,000 members of its rank and file have been killed in cities around the war-torn country. Many were veteran IRGC officers. The Iranian regime claims that it has only an advisory role in Syria, however it has recruited and dispatched thousands of Afghani and Pakistani nationals to Syrian fronts. Not one has fought ISIS.
On March 2, Brigadier General Ismail Ghaani, who is deputy Quds Force commander, speaking in the northeastern city of Mashhad, told a group from the Fatemiyoun Division, an offshoot of the force fighting in Syria: “Fatemiyoun proved that it is a capable force ready to operate not only in Syria but anywhere else on the planet when Islam requires it.” Fatemiyoun was formed of Afghani recruits, along with its sibling organization Zenabiyoun Division of Pakistanis.
The Iranian regime today makes it no secret that it is heavily involved in Syria and Iraq. It sugarcoats its involvement with the illusion that IRGC and its armed wing, the Quds Force, are fighting ISIS. But it’s not true. After almost six years of involvement in the bloody civil war in Syria, it is out in the open that the regime has no quarrel with ISIS. Former Secretary of State John Kerry said in an interview with Fox News: “Assad facilitated the release of 1,500 prisoners, parallel to 1,000 by Maliki in Iraq, leading to the foundation of ISIS.” Former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, James Jeffrey, said that Americans knew what Prime Minister Maliki was up to, but chose not to take any action.
It is also a hard fact that Maliki was in every way a puppet of the Iranian regime. He was trained by the IRGC and fought alongside its forces during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war.
What is missing in all the talks and arguments made in Washington as to what is an effective remedy to counter the mullahs in Iran is the role of Iranian people. Iran is boiling with popular discontent, now. According to Brigadier General Hossein Ashtari, the Iranian regime’s chief of police: “On average 20 to 30 protest gatherings take place around the country by citizens who have lost their life savings to the banks,” These citizens are mainly retired with very limited savings and were scammed out of their lifetime savings by various government-owned financial institutions. Such protests are but a drop in the ocean when we add the teachers, nurses, factory workers, and an army of college graduates with no prospects of finding decent jobs to the discontent. This amounts to tens of thousands of people, in large numbers of gatherings each year. According to a BBC report, more than 11 million or Iran’s 83 million people are unemployed in the country.
When it comes to Iran, the decision-makers in Washington have two options: One is to follow the status quo and tolerate a regime which is the number one state sponsor of terrorism in the world, a stirrer of sectarian violence in the region, and engaged in two wars in Iraq and Syria. It’s a nation that secretly supplies weapons to Yemen’s Houthis which has also cost American servicemen’s lives. If the Trump administration chooses this option, it will make the same mistakes the Obama administration made.
The other, and better, option is to stand with Iranian people and their resistance, to let them shape their own future. All they asked of U.S. in 2009 was for the U.S. to stand with them. At the time, they chanted: “Obama are you with us or with them.” They clearly hoped the U.S. would not placate mullahs with concessions, nor turn a blind eye to regime’s terrorism.
One such good signal in the right direction would be to designate IRGC as a terrorist organization. In light of all it has done and its growing strength, in designating the IRGC as a terrorist group, we are doing ourselves a favor.
Reza Shafiee is a member of Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI)
The rise of the networked Left
March 10, 2017Source: Column One: The rise of the networked Left – Opinion – Jerusalem Post
Milo Yiannopoulos. (photo credit:WIKIMEDIA)
An acrid stench of repression is spreading through America.
Last Thursday, conservative political scientist Charles Murray from the American Enterprise Institute was attacked by a leftist mob at Middlebury College.
Murry was invited to Middlebury by the college’s AEI club. He was to discuss his new book, Coming Apart, which discusses the plight of white working class Americans. Middlebury’s liberal political science professor Allison Stanger was set to ask him questions about his work.
As has been widely reported, a mob of leftist students prevented Murray from speaking. They shouted him down with a stream of epithets that went on without interruption, until Murray and Stanger were spirited out of the lecture hall.
They were brought to another location where they carried out their conversation in front of a camera that was livestreaming to students blocked by the mob from hearing them in person. The mob followed them to the new location and rioted outside the room as they spoke.
The rioters assaulted them as they made their way from the second location to their car. They hurt Stanger in the neck.
The assault continued after the professors entered their getaway car and at the restaurant where they tried to dine at with students.
In the end Murray and his companions were forced to leave town in order to have dinner away from the rioters. Stanger was later treated for her wounds at a local hospital.
The riot against Murray at Middlebury occurred barely a month after right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulis was blocked from speaking at the University of California at Berkeley by a similarly violent mob. The Berkeley rioters caused more than $100,000 in property damage. They beat up students who came to hear Yiannopoulis speak.
The riots against Murray and Yiannopoulis both received wide media coverage. The basic narrative of the stories regarding both is that the shouting down of speakers and mob assaults by leftist students and professors is a new phenomenon.
To Jewish ears, this storyline is deeply unsettling.
Jewish speakers and students have been subjected to identical, and often worse, campaigns of repressions for nearly 20 years at universities and colleges throughout the US.
What is new about the riots against Murray and Yiannopoulis is that they were shouted down despite the fact that they weren’t talking about Israel.
Since the PLO rejected statehood and peace with Israel in 2000 and launched a multipronged political and terrorist war against Israel instead, the climate on US campuses has become progressively worse for pro-Israel students, faculty and visiting speakers.
Perhaps the moment that signaled open season for Jews on campuses occurred on May 7, 2002, at San Francisco State University. That day, Muslim students and their leftist supporters launched a mini-pogrom against pro-Israel Jewish students.
As Laurie Zoloth, who served at the time as the director of SFSU’s Jewish Studies Department, and was present on the scene, wrote in a letter published shortly after the events, that day some 400 Jewish students participated in a pro-Israel, pro-peace rally on the campus’s central thoroughfare.
After the rally ended, several dozen Jewish students remained on hand to clean up the area. As they gathered up their posters, they were beset by an antisemitic mob.
“They screamed at us to ‘go back to Russia,’ and they screamed… ‘Get out or we’ll kill you,’ and ‘Hitler didn’t finish the job,’” Zoloth wrote.
When Zoloth asked the police at the scene to arrest the rioters, they refused, explaining they had been ordered to take no action. Arrests, they explained, “would cause a riot.”
After a week of silence, SFSU’s then-president Robert Corrigan posted a statement condemning the incident and referring it to the district attorney to assign to his hate crimes unit.
The pogrom at SFSU and the administration’s belated condemnation of the crime set in motion what became a pattern of ever-escalating violence and intimidation of pro-Israel voices on college campuses accompanied by half-hearted and short-lived denunciations of the assaults by campus authorities.
Today, the situation is even worse. If SFSU felt the need to condemn the Muslim students who called for their Jewish counterparts to be killed 15 years ago, today they stand openly with those calling for Jews to be killed against those who protest the calls.
In 2014, SFSU signed a memorandum of understanding with An-Najah University in Nablus. The MoU was organized by the leaders of the BDS campaign on campus and the General Union of Palestine Students on campus. An-Najah is a hotbed of terrorism in the PA. Its alumni include terrorism masters and terrorist murderers.
In 2013, then-president of the GUPS Mohammad Hammad posted a video of himself holding a machete and expressing his desire to murder IDF soldiers.
In 2015, SFSU president Leslie Wong praised the GUPS saying, “GUPS is the very purpose of this great university.”
In May 2016, GUPS members led protesters in silencing Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat when he tried to address students during a visit to campus.
When the David Horowitz Freedom Center launched a campaign to expose the Jew-hatred at SFSU which involved putting up posters on campus decrying antisemitism, school authorities and the local media were quick to condemn the Freedom Center and accuse it of repressing free speech and fomenting racism. Wong called the posters an act of “vandalism.”
SFSU is not unique. The often violent repression of pro-Israel voices is now the rule rather than exception at campuses around the US.
Two factors account for the fact that the same means that have been used for years to repress pro-Israel voices on campuses are now being used against non-leftists who speak on subjects unrelated to Israel.
First, the tactics are being used more broadly because they have been successful. Pro-Israel voices have been largely silenced on campus. Indeed, Jews themselves now join those who repress them.
For instance, last year SFSU’s Hillel and its Jewish Studies Department condemned the Horowitz Center’s campaign to highlight the antisemitism and support for terrorism endemic on their campus.
The second reason that the Left has expanded its assault on freedom of speech and inquiry beyond Israel and the Jews is that the Left today is no longer a collection of issue specific organizations and causes. Today the Left is a network of interlinked organizations, largely funded from the same sources and run by the same people.
It might have been hoped that once antisemites merged into a larger network, their voices and power would be diminished. But the opposite has happened. The antisemites who pioneered the intimidation tactics now being employed against non-leftists who speak on issues unrelated to Israel, are now the leaders of the leftist network. The network includes African-Americans, Latinos, LGBTQs, feminists and Communists.
The move by antisemitic organizers into the center of the newly networked Left was first exposed with the rise of the Black Lives Matter group. Although BLM arose to protest what its members claim is excessive police violence against African-Americans, from the outset, antisemitic groups pounced on the movement as a means to take over the rising network of leftist groups. In cities across the US, BLM protesters’ signs opposing law enforcement authorities were accompanied by signs calling for Israel to be destroyed.
When BLM published a platform last year, the group explicitly linked the movement with the cause of Israel’s destruction. BLM’s platform accused Israel of committing “genocide” against Palestinians and claimed that Israel is an “apartheid” state.
In their work with the BLM activists, anti-Jewish operatives exploited a campaign that was launched independently of their anti-Jewish efforts. Today, the anti-Jewish operatives are themselves initiating and organizing the actions of other groups and so directing the course of the political Left in the US in general.
Case in point is the new group organizing women’s marches throughout the US. The “International Women’s Strike” group organized the women’s protests against President Donald Trump on January 21, the day after his inauguration. The group also organized this week’s protests which took place on International Women’s Day. Among the organizers of January’s protests was Linda Sarsour, an anti-Israel, antisemitic operative who has repeatedly praised Hamas terrorists and condemned “Zionism,” in her public statements.
This week, Sarsour was joined by the convicted terrorist Rasmeah Odeh. In 1970, Odeh, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, participated in a terrorist attack at a Jerusalem supermarket in which two Israeli college students were murdered.
With Hamas supporting operatives and actual Palestinian terrorist murderers serving as leaders of the organization behind the women’s marches, it is no surprise that the International Women’s Strike group is anti-Israel. The group’s published platform makes destroying Israel, or the “decolonization of Palestine,” its goal no less than free abortions on demand.
In other words, the feminist movement in the US is run by antisemites who use the feminists to advance their anti-Jewish agenda.
The core justification that the networked Left uses to defend its actions – first and foremost its goon squads on campuses – is that its actions are protected speech.
The claim of course, is ridiculous. There is a world of difference between freedom of expression and freedom of action. When students harass and shout down speakers with whom they disagree, they are not exercising freedom of speech. They are denying the freedom of speech of others.
When BDS operatives coerce university administrations and corporations to divest from Israel and ban Israelis from campuses, they are not exercising free speech. They are engaging in economic and cultural warfare against Israel.
Rather than recognize the distinction, major Jewish groups have embraced the antisemites’ false defense, internalizing the notion that opposing the onslaught against the community is tantamount to opposing freedom of speech.
So for instance, two major American Jewish groups harshly criticized the Knesset’s recently passed law banning BDS operatives from entering Israel. The American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League issued statements claiming the move is a blow to free speech.
The riots against Murray and Yiannopoulis alerted non-Jewish Americans to the intellectual and moral decay of their campuses. It is possible that in moving beyond the safe confines of antisemitism – now largely accepted on campuses – the Left has gone too far. Perhaps its wings will be clipped.
But given the Jewish community’s inability to understand, let alone defend against, the campaign being waged against it, it is likely that even if the networked Left curbs its assaults on non-Jewish non-leftists, it will continue and escalate its campaign against Jews and the Jewish state.
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