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December 16, 2017Tillerson Walks Back Offer of Unconditional Talks With North Korea, Says Regime ‘Must Earn Its Way Back to the Table’
December 16, 2017Tillerson Walks Back Offer of Unconditional Talks With North Korea, Says Regime ‘Must Earn Its Way Back to the Table’, Washington Free Beacon, Jack Heretik, December 15, 2017
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Friday walked back his offer from earlier this week to have unconditional talks with North Korea, telling the United Nations Security Council that Pyongyang must “earn” the right to negotiate with Washington.
“As I said earlier this week, a sustained cessation of North Korea’s threatening behavior must occur before talks can begin. North Korea must earn its way back to the table,” Tillerson said at a special ministerial meeting at the U.N. Security Council. “The pressure campaign must and will continue until denuclearization is achieved. We will in the meantime keep our channels of communication open.”
Tillerson’s words were a noticeable shift from Tuesday, when he said at the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C. that the U.S. is “ready to have the first meeting without precondition.”
“Let’s just meet, and we can talk about the weather if you want,” Tillerson said at the think-tank event. “Talk about whether it’s going to be a square table or a round table, if that’s what you are excited about. But can we at least sit down and see each other face to face, and then we can begin to lay out a map, a road map of what we might be willing to work towards.”
Those comments received instant blowback from the White House.
Tillerson also reemphasized on Friday that the U.S. wants a diplomatic solution to the North Korean issue rather than a military one.
“We have been clear that all options remain on the table in the defense of our nation, but we do not seek nor do we want war with North Korea,” Tillerson said. “The United States will use all necessary measures to defend itself against North Korea aggression, but our hope remains that diplomacy will produce a resolution.”
America’s top diplomat said that North Korea remains the “greatest national security threat” to the U.S. and called on China and Russia to put greater pressure on Pyongyang.
“Upon taking office, President Trump identified North Korea as the United States’ greatest national security threat,” Tillerson said. “That judgment remains the same today.”
“Each U.N. member state must fully implement all existing U.N. Security Council resolutions,” Tillerson added. “For those nations who have not done so or who have been slow to enforce Security Council resolutions, your hesitation calls into question whether your vote is a commitment to words only, but not actions.”
Tillerson specifically called out Russia and China for cooperating with the North Korean regime.
“We particularly call on Russia and China to increase pressure, including going beyond full implementation of the U.N. Security Council resolutions,” Tillerson said. “Continuing to allow North Korean laborers to toil in slave-like conditions inside Russia in exchange for wages used to fund nuclear weapons programs calls into question Russia’s dedication as a partner for peace.”
“Similarly, as Chinese crude oil flows to North Korean refineries, the United States questions China’s commitment to solving an issue that has serious implications for the security of its own citizens,” he said.
Trump Has Made Our Government More Moral
December 16, 2017Trump Has Made Our Government More Moral, PJ Media, Andrew Klavan, December 15, 2017
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Trump has delivered conservatives an astoundingly successful year and made the government more moral in the process. You don’t have to like him, to salute him. I salute him. Well done.
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Here is a funny thing about the human mind: when we didn’t see something coming, we often can’t see it came. There’s a good reason for this. Wrong predictions are an indication that there is something off or unrealistic about your worldview. When your predictions are vastly incorrect, you have to choose: will I paper over my mistakes and pretend to myself I was actually right in some way, or will I admit the error and adjust the way I look at life?
People almost never adjust the way they look at life. It would mean risking their sense of their own wisdom and virtue.
This is why so many pundits both on the left and right are completely blind to what happened this year in politics.
Donald Trump — a political neophyte, a New York loudmouth who plays fast and loose with the truth, a massive egotist and a not altogether pleasant human being — has delivered conservatives one of the greatest years in living memory and has made our government more moral in the process. The left and many on the right didn’t see it coming because they hate the man. And because they didn’t see it coming, they won’t see that it’s come.
The first assertion is easily proven. After a year of Trump, the economy is in high gear, stocks are up, unemployment is down, energy production is up, business expansion is up and so on; ISIS — which took more than 23,000 square miles of territory after Obama left Iraq and refused to intervene in Syria — is now in control of a Port-o-San and a book of matches; 19 constitutionalist judges have been appointed and 40 more nominated; the biggest regulatory rollback in American history has been launched (boring but yugely important); the rule of law has been re-established at the border; we’re out of the absurd and costly Paris Accord; net neutrality, the most cleverly named government power grab ever, is gone; our foreign policy is righted and revitalized; and a mainstream news media that had become little more than the information arm of the Democratic Party is in self-destructive disarray. If the tax bill passes before Christmas, it will cap an unbelievable string of conservative successes.
Now you can tie yourself in knots explaining why none of this is Trump’s doing or how it’s all just a big accident or the result of cynical motives or whatever. Knock yourself out, cutes. For me, I’ll say this. I hated Trump. I thought he’d be a disaster or, at best, a mediocrity. I was wrong. He’s done an unbelievably great job so far.
But even more important is my second assertion. Our government is more moral now. How is this possible when Trump has sex with Vladimir Putin disguised as a Russian prostitute, when he kills and eats black people in his spare time, when he hates women and goes into insane temper tantrums fueled by 48 cans of Diet Coke a day? Okay, even leaving Maggie Haberman’s fantasy life aside, Trump is not always statesman-like, not always nice to people and not always strictly honest.
But Trump’s outsized New York personality and the feeling it evokes in us only obscure what he has done to the government he leads. As Aristotle knew, a thing can only be good if it fulfills its purpose. What is the moral purpose of government? We know the answer because our Founders told us in no uncertain terms.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men…”
That’s right. Government does not exist to make us equal, but to treat us equally. It does not exist to make life fair, but to treat us fairly. Most importantly, it exists to secure our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Only in liberty can we treat each other ethically, because only in liberty can we make the choices that are the necessary condition for ethical life.
Trump has made our government more moral by making less of it: fewer regulations, fewer judges who will write law instead of obeying the law, fewer bureaucrats seeking to expand the power of their agencies, less money for the government to spend on itself. He has made government treat us more fairly and equally by ceasing to use the IRS and Justice Department for political ends like silencing enemies and skewing elections.
This is what moral government looks like. And if every male senator in America is grabbing the buttocks of some unsuspecting female while, at the same time, voting for more limited and less corrupt government, the senators are immoral, yes, but the government is more moral. That is why we should never let the leftist press game us with scandal hysteria, but should keep focused on voting in those who will help fulfill government’s moral ends.
Trump has delivered conservatives an astoundingly successful year and made the government more moral in the process. You don’t have to like him, to salute him. I salute him. Well done.
Another Errant Anti-Trump Hit Piece From The Washington Post
December 16, 2017Another Errant Anti-Trump Hit Piece From The Washington Post Power Line,
(WaPo jointed the “resistance” and abandoned whatever “honest journalism” it may once have published well before President Trump was elected. — DM)
Clearly, the Post is grasping at straws. That’s what one does when one abandons honest journalism and joins “the resistance.”
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Fresh off of its triumph in the Alabama Senate race, the Washington Post returns to its primary mission — taking down the President of the United States. It does so in a piece called (in the paper edition) “How Trump’s pursuit of Putin has left the U.S. vulnerable to the Russia threat.”
The hit piece, by Greg Miller, Greg Jaffe, and Phillip Rucker, takes up five pages in the front section of today’s Post. One searches in vain through the authors’ gossip and distortions for evidence of the article’s two themes: (1) that Trump is leaving the U.S. vulnerable to the Russian threat in question, cyber-attacks on our election process and (2) that Trump’s policies tilt in favor of Russia.
In support of its first theme, the Post notes that Trump hasn’t formed a task force to focus on election hacking or convened a Cabinet-level meeting on the subject. From this, it wants us to infer that little or nothing is being done to make such hacking more difficult. The inference is unreasonable. Task forces and Cabinet-level meetings are not the sine qua non of an effective approach to a problem.
The only other evidence the Post presents is this:
In congressional testimony in October, Attorney General Jeff Sessions was pressed on whether the administration had done enough to prevent Russian interference in the future. “Probably not,” Sessions said. “And the matter is so complex that for most of us we are not able to fully grasp the technical dangers that are out there.”
But the fact that this very complex technical set of problems has not been solved, or fully grasped in all of its dimensions, doesn’t mean that it’s being ignored or being given short shrift. I doubt we can ever prevent any sophisticated foreign power from interfering in our elections. In any event, the Post cites no technical danger our government is ignoring.
Instead, it talks about the need to sanction Russia in the hope of deterring future interference. But Russia has been sanctioned — once by Congress, with the president’s reluctant consent, and then by Trump himself when Russia retaliated for the sanctions. If there is anything more to be done on the sanctions front to “prevent Russian interference in the future,” the Post doesn’t describe it.
The Post cites intelligence reports that the Russians consider their efforts to interfere in our presidential election as “a resounding, if incomplete, success.” “U.S. officials” tell the Post that the Kremlin believes it got “a staggering return” on an operative thought to have cost less than $500,000 to execute.
Of course they believe this, and they are right. The “staggering return” consists of (1) the discrediting of our democracy caused by widespread claims that Trump and Putin stole the election from Hillary Clinton and (2) the enormous disruption caused by investigation of alleged collusion between Trump and Russia. The Washington Post has played a substantial role in both victories for Russia
The Post wants its readers to believe that the “return” for Russia also consists of a pro-Russia tilt in U.S. foreign policy. This is the second theme of the article.
It’s a non-starter. The Post concedes:
The annexation of Crimea from Ukraine has not been recognized. Sanctions imposed for Russian intervention in Ukraine remain in place. Additional penalties have been mandated by Congress. And a wave of diplomatic retaliation [note: by Trump] has cost Russia access to additional diplomatic facilities, including its San Francisco consulate.
Against all of this, the Post moans that Trump has discussed the possibility of returning property to the Russians. But nothing has been returned. If anything is, surely it will be in exchange for Russian concessions. At that time, if it comes, we can assess who got the better of the deal.
The Post, though, seems unhappy that Trump wants to deal with the Russians at all. I believe Trump’s quest for Russian cooperation in solving world problems is misguided — a fool’s errand.
However, dealing with Russia isn’t the same thing as making concessions. The deals Trump reaches with Putin, if and when they occur, must be analyzed on their merits before Trump’s Russia policy can be condemned.
Moreover, Trump’s desire to make deals with Russia cannot fairly be attributed to “collusion” or to excess regard for Putin. Trump’s predecessors also wanted to make deals. The Obama administration made doing so a core element of its foreign policy, even though Putin had already invaded Georgia.
Obama’s conciliatory policy towards Russia drew fire from critics in the U.S. Obama shrugged it off by telling Russia’s president he could be more flexible after the 2012 election. He was.
Russia is probably the second most powerful nation in the world. Misguided or not, it’s natural for an American president to seek to improve relations with it.
Once the “Russia reset” exploded in his face, President Obama made dealing with Iran the centerpiece of his foreign policy. He received applause from the Washington Post and other stalwarts of the present anti-Trump resistance for doing so. At the time, no state was more hostile to the U.S. than Iran and none has inflicted more harm on us.
Why, in the Post’s view, was it okay for Obama to strike a major deal with Iran, but not okay for Trump to pursue major deals with Russia? Given all of Iran’s bad acts, including killing American soldiers in Iraq, the Post’s answer better not be that Putin was mean to Hillary Clinton.
It’s never surprising when the Washington Post resorts to dishonesty and distortion. Given the thinness of today’s five-page expose, dishonesty and distortion were almost inevitable.
Let’s take the two worst examples. The Post says that during the 2016 campaign, Trump “prodded the Kremlin to double down on its operation and unearth additional Clinton emails.” It’s referring to when Trump remarked that maybe the Russians could locate Hillary’s 30,000 missing emails. This was obviously sarcasm –a joke — not an invitation. No fair-minded person who heard the comment could conclude otherwise (you can listen to ithere). It’s no accident that the Post strips it of all context.
In the same vein, there is this:
Rather than voice any support for the dozens of State Department and CIA employees being forced back to Washington [when Russia expelled them], Trump expressed gratitude to Putin.
“I want to thank him because we’re trying to cut down on payroll,” Trump told reporters during an outing at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J. — remarks his aides would later claim were meant as a joke. “We’ll save a lot of money.”
Again, no fair-minded person could believe that Trump’s remark was anything but sarcasm. As we noted at the time:
[W]e know [Trump] didn’t want our diplomatic presence in Russia slashed because (1) he could have cut it himself but didn’t and (2) following his election, he expressed satisfaction when Putin decided not to retaliate for Obama’s expulsion of Russian diplomats and seizure of property.
Clearly, the Post is grasping at straws. That’s what one does when one abandons honest journalism and joins “the resistance.”
White House ‘cannot envision situation’ where Western Wall is not part of Israel
December 15, 2017White House ‘cannot envision situation’ where Western Wall is not part of Israel, Times of Israel, Eric Cortellessa, December 15, 2017
US President Donald Trump visits the Western Wall, May 22, 2017, in Jerusalem. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Friday’s statements marked an abrupt shift from US comments ahead of Trump’s visit to the Wall, when a US official was reported to have angrily rejected a request that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accompany the president, and then sniped at his Israeli counterparts that the Western Wall is “not your territory. It’s part of the West Bank.”
The Western Wall, part of the retaining walls of the Second Temple compound, is the closest point of prayer for Jews to the site of the Temple itself and thus the Jewish people’s holiest place of prayer. It was captured along with the rest of the Old City and East Jerusalem in the 1967 war, and annexed by Israel as part of its united capital — a move not recognized internationally.
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WASHINGTON — A senior administration official told reporters on Friday that the White House “envisions” the Western Wall will remain part of Israel under any accord with the Palestinians.
The comments follow US President Donald Trump’s December 6 declaration that recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. They are certain to delight Israeli leaders — the Western Wall is the holiest place where Jews are allowed to pray — and infuriate the Palestinians, who claim East Jerusalem, including the Old City, as the capital of their intended independent state.
“We cannot envision any situation under which the Western Wall would not be part of Israel,” the official said, speaking ahead of US Vice President Mike Pence’s visit to Israel next week.
“But as the president said [in his speech last week on Jerusalem], the specific boundaries of sovereignty of Israel are going to be part of the final status agreement,” the official said.
Furthermore, the official added, “We note that we cannot imagine Israel would sign a peace agreement that didn’t include the Western Wall.”
The Israeli Foreign Ministry declined to comment on the remarks and there was no immediate reaction from the Palestinians.
Pence is due to arrive in Israel on Wednesday. His trip was delayed so that he could help push a tax reform bill through Congress that Trump heavily supports.
US Vice President Mike Pence speaks as he attends a Permanent Mission of Israel to the United Nations event celebrating the 70th anniversary of the UN vote calling for ‘the establishment of a Jewish State in the Land of Israel,’ at Queens Museum on November 28, 2017 in New York. (AFP/Timothy A. Clary)
While in Israel for three days, Pence will speak at the Knesset, visit Yad Vashem, and is slated to light a menorah at the Western Wall, which stands adjacent to the Temple Mount, the holiest place in Judaism and site of Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third holiest shrine.
Pence is likely to visit the Western Wall without accompanying Israeli officials, just as Trump did in May. Trump, who became the first ever serving president to go to the Wall, said that part of his trip to Israel was a private visit.
White House senior advisor Jared Kushner (L) watches as US President Donald Trump visits the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City on May 22, 2017. (AFP Photo/Mandel Ngan)
Friday’s statements marked an abrupt shift from US comments ahead of Trump’s visit to the Wall, when a US official was reported to have angrily rejected a request that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accompany the president, and then sniped at his Israeli counterparts that the Western Wall is “not your territory. It’s part of the West Bank.”
The Western Wall, part of the retaining walls of the Second Temple compound, is the closest point of prayer for Jews to the site of the Temple itself and thus the Jewish people’s holiest place of prayer. It was captured along with the rest of the Old City and East Jerusalem in the 1967 war, and annexed by Israel as part of its united capital — a move not recognized internationally.
Ivanka Trump, the daughter of US President Donald Trump, visits the Western Wall, the holiest site where Jews can pray, in Jerusalem’s Old City on May 22, 2017. (AFP/Pool/Ronen Zvulun)
Before Trump’s visit to the Wall, no serving US president had ever visited the Western Wall, because US policy has been that the final status of Jerusalem has yet to be resolved in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
Pence will not meet with Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas or Palestinian officials on his visit — since they refused to see him in protest over Trump’s recent decision.
In his address from the White House last week, Trump defied worldwide warnings and insisted that after repeated failures to achieve peace, a new approach was long overdue, describing his move as a “recognition of reality” — based on Jerusalem’s status as the seat of Israel’s government.
His declaration, welcomed by Netanyahu and Israeli leaders across most of the political spectrum, prompted widespread violent protests in the region; four Palestinians died on Friday during clashes with Israeli forces in the West Bank and Gaza, including one who was shot after stabbing an Israeli Border Police officer.
Amid these developments, the White House also announced on Friday that it would deploy its top peace envoy Jason Greenblatt to the region next week to try and advance the administration’s peace efforts.
“As we have said since the Jerusalem announcement, we anticipated reactions like the ones going on in the region but are going to remain hard at work on our peace plan,” a senior administration official told The Times of Israel.
The Muslim Terrorist Who Hated Christmas
December 15, 2017The Muslim Terrorist Who Hated Christmas, FrontPage Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, December 15, 2017
(Please see also, NYPD: Fighting Terrorism on Three Sides. – DM)
Ullah came to this country in 2011. Three years later, he had already been ‘radicalized’. The Bangladeshi terrorist had come here on a chain migration link that began with a diversity lottery visa. But Ullah didn’t actually like diversity. He didn’t want to share a city or country with Christians.
And so he set out to kill them.
We’ve been told often enough that a common sense travel ban would violate religious freedom. But the greatest violation of religious freedom isn’t a selective immigration policy, it’s being murdered for your religion. That’s not just the reality in Bangladesh. It’s now the reality in America and Europe.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, the lefty pol who dismantled the NYPD’s counterterrorism programs at the behest of Islamist pressure groups, insisted at the post-attack press conference that, “We actually show that society of many faiths and many backgrounds can work.”
A society of many faiths can work. As long as all of them practice mutual tolerance.
The diversity visa lottery has brought us the wrong kind of diversity. Our cities have become a diverse assortment of immigrants who will and won’t kill you over your religion. There isn’t much religious diversity in Bangladesh, Pakistan or Afghanistan. If we want to preserve our own religious diversity from going the same way, we have to exclude those immigrants who would kill anyone who is different.
And we need to hurry because the Ullahs of tomorrow are applying for their visas today.
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Akayed Ullah, a Bangladeshi Muslim living in Brooklyn, really hated Christmas. He hated Christmas so much that he used Christmas tree lights (along with a battery and some wire) as a trigger for a pipe bomb. He filled the pipe bomb with screws so that when it went off, metal shrapnel would tear bloody holes through morning commuters in Manhattan.
Wearing a hooded jacket and a backpack to cover the pipe bomb strapped to his body, Ullah got on the F Train at the 18th Avenue elevated subway station off Little Bangladesh. Like the Duke Ellington song says, he switched over to the A Train at Jay Street. It was early morning, but there were plenty of people riding the train. Jay Street is a major transit hub. But Ullah was waiting to blow up somewhere else.
He got off in the crush at the 42nd-St. Port Authority station. Here a whole lot of people can be found rushing up and down crowded staircases and shoving their way through cramped corridors.
Ullah took the long underground corridor that runs between the Port Authority station and Times Square. He strode past movie and beauty ads. He walked under the discouraging poem, “Overslept, So tired, If late, Get fired, Why bother? Why the pain? Just go home. Do it again.” But he wasn’t going home. And there would be no opportunities to do it again. The Muslim terrorist was right on time.
Rush hour was just getting started in the city that never sleeps. The Muslim terrorist probably passed hundreds of people: not to mention a saxophonist or drummer trying out his act on tired commuters.
But he was waiting for something else. Finally he saw it. A Christmas poster.
That’s when he detonated the pipe bomb using a Christmas tree light near a Christmas poster. Because if there was one thing that Akayed Ullah, like his ISIS masters truly hated, it was Christmas.
Last month, ISIS supporters had circulated a poorly photoshopped poster of Santa next to a box of dynamite overlooking Times Square. “We meet at Christmas in New York… soon,” it read.
As he walked toward Times Square, Ullah appeared determined to carry out the ISIS threat. Using a Christmas tree light in his bomb and detonating near a Christmas poster was a clear statement.
Ullah came to this country in 2011. Three years later, he had already been ‘radicalized’. The Bangladeshi terrorist had come here on a chain migration link that began with a diversity lottery visa. But Ullah didn’t actually like diversity. He didn’t want to share a city or country with Christians.
And so he set out to kill them.
In Ullah’s native Bangladesh, Christian churches have shut down midnight mass before due to threats of violence.
“This is the first time in my life that I find Christians celebrating Christmas with such panic and fear,” the Bangladesh Christian Association secretary general had said.
But with the diversity visa lottery, you don’t have to be a Christian living in Bangladesh to be terrorized by Bangladeshi Muslim violence.
And maybe that’s a diversity we could do without.
That same year, Bangladeshi authorities stopped a Christmas Day plot that involves a suicide bomb vest. But this year, America had its very own Bangladeshi suicide bomber. Christians are readying to celebrate Christmas in Bangladeshi churches this year with metal detectors and thousands of security personnel.
But these days that’s not just Christmas in Bangladesh. It’s Christmas in Europe.
Muslim Christmas violence spread terror across Europe last year. These ranged from the ‘Kindergarten bomber’, a 12-year-old Iraqi who planted a nail bomb in a German Christmas market to the Tunisian refugee who rammed a truck into another German Christmas market killing 12 people and wounding 68. These days, German Christmas markets come with car barriers that are gift wrapped with bows.
An estimated 29 ‘lone wolves’ were arrested last year in Christmas terror plots in the UK, France, Brussels and Australia. A number of these plots targeted Christmas markets, carnivals and cathedrals.
The year before, a Pakistani married couple had opened fire at a Christmas party at the Department of Public Health in San Bernardino. The worst half of the couple had groused about the Christmas decorations. Previous attack plots had included the Christmas Day bomber (the Nigerian terrorist also known as the underwear bomber) and Portland’s Somali Christmas tree lighting bomb plot.
This is what a religious war looks like.
Muslim violence spikes around Ramadan, and around Christian and Jewish holidays, because Islamic violence is inherently religious in nature. Islamic Supremacist terrorists like Ullah are lashing out at non-Islamic religions in order to clear the way for the imposition of Islamic rule.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, the lefty pol who dismantled the NYPD’s counterterrorism programs at the behest of Islamist pressure groups, insisted at the post-attack press conference that, “We actually show that society of many faiths and many backgrounds can work.”
A society of many faiths can work. As long as all of them practice mutual tolerance.
When a society includes Akayed Ullah, Sayfullo Saipov, the Uzbeki Muslim who ran over tourists on a Manhattan bike path in October, Ahmad Khan Rahimi, the Afghan who set off bombs in New York and New Jersey last year, Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani who tried to detonate a car bomb in Times Square, Talha Haroon, another Pakistani who wanted to massacre New Yorkers in Times Square, Quazi Mohammad, another Bangladeshi who wanted to bomb the Federal Reserve and Raees Qazi, another Pakistani who scouted Times Square for an attack, that society can’t and won’t work.
You can’t coexist with people who refuse to coexist with you. They’re just ticking time bombs. Like Ullah riding the F Train and then the A Train while the passengers around him unthinkingly played games or clicked through Trump headlines not knowing that he could have detonated the bomb at any moment.
There are plenty of Ullahs all around us. Sometimes they wait years before blowing up. Other times hours and minutes. If we’re unlucky, it’s seconds. But the bombs, real and metaphorical, are there.
This is life in a society that has opened its borders to migrants from Islamic states where terrorism isn’t a horrifying aberration, but an ancient religious tradition to which the penitent sinner may turn to when his life no longer seems to have purpose or meaning. This is how we live now. And it will get worse.
Our politicians tout diversity after every attack. They tell us how much it enriches and improves us.
Akayed Ullah was a livery cab driver. His predecessor, Sayfullo Saipov, was an Uber driver. Do we really need two cab drivers so badly that we have to accept eight deaths and sixteen injuries in exchange?
Could we get our cab drivers from somewhere beyond Bangladesh and Uzbekistan?
We don’t have to live like this. We’re only living like this because we’ve been told that it would be mean and unfair of us to actually have a common sense immigration policy that keeps Islamic terrorists out.
The question is would we rather be mean to the Uber drivers of tomorrow or sit next to a ticking time bomb waiting to detonate at the first sight of a Christmas poster?
We’ve been told often enough that a common sense travel ban would violate religious freedom. But the greatest violation of religious freedom isn’t a selective immigration policy, it’s being murdered for your religion. That’s not just the reality in Bangladesh. It’s now the reality in America and Europe.
The diversity visa lottery has brought us the wrong kind of diversity. Our cities have become a diverse assortment of immigrants who will and won’t kill you over your religion. There isn’t much religious diversity in Bangladesh, Pakistan or Afghanistan. If we want to preserve our own religious diversity from going the same way, we have to exclude those immigrants who would kill anyone who is different.
And we need to hurry because the Ullahs of tomorrow are applying for their visas today.
Jerusalem, Israel’s Capital: Watch the Masks Fall
December 15, 2017Jerusalem, Israel’s Capital: Watch the Masks Fall, Gatestone Institute, Najat AlSaied, December 15, 2017
(Please see also, Kredo: State Department using ‘pretzel logic’ in defiance of recognizing Jerusalem as Israel capital. — DM)
Even with all this controversy and a complete change in Arab attitudes on social media towards the Palestinian cause, both Western and traditional Arab media still keep regurgitating the same anti-Israel slogans and rhetoric, and pumping out the same Palestinian propaganda. Most comments on social media have come from intellectuals, assuring the general public that the main reason for this never-ending Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a corrupt Palestinian Authority, run by Fatah and Hamas. The Palestinian Authority, they seem to believe, has traded on the Palestinian cause, which has garnered them millions, but none of that is ever discussed in the mainstream media.
The world has followed a course that has gotten this peace process nowhere. The fact that this conflict has been ongoing for 70 years demonstrates that there is something at fault. The main reasons for this stalled progress are a lack of transparency, hypocritical opportunists with hidden personal agendas, a biased mainstream media and ineffective diplomatic missions. It is not an exaggeration to say that moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem is the best decision that has been taken by any American President because it lays bare a rotten reality. This is exactly what is needed to galvanize the peace process toward a two-state solution. It will also put pressure on the corrupt Palestinian Authority either to reform or change its leadership. Who knows, it might even stop opportunists from perpetuating this conflict for their own ends.
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When the actual announcement came, nothing happened. Those who were exploiting sensitivities related to Jerusalem — especially political Islamists, such as Hamas and Hezbollah — come mainly from the axis of resistance, led by Iran.
While mainstream media shows the oppressor to be Israel and the oppressed to be the Palestinians, the polls tell a different story.
The US Department of State is no less culpable than the mainstream media in failing to play a more vital role in revealing these realities, which could also mitigate the anger and hatred felt towards the US. This Department needs to be reformed from top to bottom to ensure that all diplomats are truly working for US interests. I am sure that it is the Department of State itself that will be the most reluctant to move its embassy to Jerusalem. It is not an exaggeration to say that moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem is the best decision that has been taken by any American President because it lays bare a rotten reality.
Many analysts say that US President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital is a campaign promise to evangelical Christian and right-wing Jewish voters, but there is another way of looking at it. Trump’s recognition might be a golden opportunity for two-faced opportunists to be unmasked — a shot of reality that might eventually help the peace process and solve this long-lasting conflict.
Since the declaration of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, many Arab observers, intellectuals and academics have started to question the veracity of those jihadists who claim they are sacrificing themselves to defend Jerusalem, because when the actual announcement came — nothing happened. Those who were exploiting sensitivities related to Jerusalem — especially political Islamists, such as Hamas and Hezbollah — come mainly from the axis of resistance, led by Iran.
Other opportunists are the two-faced countries in the region, such as Qatar and Turkey. While publicly hostile towards Israel, behind closed doors they support it. Further opportunists are the Western and Arab media, who for decades have been promoting the idea that the problem is the Israeli occupation, but never mention the Palestinian Authority corruption.
Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital has also revealed the shortcomings of the US Department of State. It has not played any role in clarifying the above-mentioned points and, by this negativity and bureaucracy, only generated further hatred towards the US.
Trump’s recognition has exposed the hypocrisy of the armed militia Hezbollah which always claims it will never disarm because of its fight against Israel. Now after the recognition of Jerusalem, many Arabs are questioning Hezbollah’s motivations regarding Israel. Lebanese and other Arabs are questioning why Hezbollah has not sent its armed militia to fight in Israel as it did in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Dr. Hadi El Amine, a Lebanese researcher in political science and governmental studies, tweeted, “The axis of resistance’s words are aimed against Israel, but their missiles are pointed at the Arabs.”
Adhwan Alahmari, a Saudi journalist based in London for Asharq al-Awsat also tweeted:
“The soldiers, rockets and suicide bombers of Hezbollah are at Israel’s borders yet they did not support Jerusalem after Trump’s declaration, instead supporting the Wilayat al-Faqih [Iranian Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist] to fight in Syria to displace and annihilate its people to protect the shrine.”
Yet another opportunist is Hamas and its supporters who have succeeded in turning Arabs against the Palestinians. This time, the Palestinians’ anger was not turned only towards Israel and the US, but mainly at Saudi Arabia. Hamas and its followers attacked the Saudi flag and insulted King Salman of Saudi Arabia. These Palestinians seem to think that Trump did not make this announcement without a wink of approval from Saudi Arabia. Their reaction has angered countless Saudis, who consider this attack a demonstration of ingratitude from the unappreciative Palestinians, to whom they have given billions of dollars.
In response, the Saudis started several hashtags on Twitter such as #hellwithyouand your issue, and #Saudis are angry for their king. Many Saudis behind these hashtags regret every penny that has been given to defend the Palestinians, especially after they saw these Palestinian traitors, as they put it, insulting Saudi Arabia, which has enriched them and channeled exorbitant financing into Palestinian development projects. Salman Al-Ansari, a Saudi writer and political commentator based in Washington DC, tweeted:
“We want to make everyone aware that the salaries of Palestinian diplomats around the world come from Riyadh-Saudi Arabia; salaries which are 30% higher than that of Saudi diplomats. What did Doha and Ankara do for them other than offer empty slogans and stab Jerusalem in the back?”
If you now ask the Saudis, the one of their main supporters and funders, about this conflict, the majority will say, “It is none of our business”. The Saudis would rather, it seems, focus on their own internal affairs and save their money rather than pay ungrateful Palestinians.
A large numbers of Saudis additionally seem surprised by the attitude of Palestinians, who support Qatar and Turkey, countries which have diplomatic relationships with Israel. As a result, many Saudis think the Palestinians are not serious about defending their cause.
The President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, after Trump’s declaration, tweeted that he will turn the whole Muslim world against Washington. This kind of posturing does not influence the Arab public or intellectuals any more. As Yousef Al Kowaileet, a Saudi deputy editor-in-chief of the newspaper Al Riyadh put it in a tweet, “Most Muslim countries have ties with Israel. People are not stupid and they know that these interests supersede any creed.”
Arab people cannot even believe Erdoğan’s tweets, when they see that the day after his outburst on Twitter, Turkey, amid political turmoil, signed a deal worth 18.6 million euros with Israel.
Arabs also shared pictures of Turkish Cultural Day celebrations in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Several Saudi intellectuals responded to Erdoğan’s rhetoric against Israel by saying, “If you are honest, the Muslim world wants you to cut diplomatic relations and stop military cooperation with Israel.”
Qatar is playing the same two-faced role as the Turks, but with more of a focus on attacking Saudi Arabia. Qatar, through its news outlet Al Jazeera, apparently now wants to galvanize the Muslim world into embarrassing Saudi Arabia because of its relationship with Trump since his announcement.
Ostensibly this response is to defend the Palestinian cause, but its real objective seems rather to pressure Saudi Arabia into ending its relationship with the US administration. Qatar will never stop dreaming of Trump’s impeachment; the rulers doubtless think that a Democratic President, like Obama, would again support Qatar in its Muslim Brotherhood project. Mohamed Krishan, a news anchor on Al Jazeera, tweeted:
“Jerusalem is the first of the two Qibla [the direction faced during salahprayers] and the third of the two Holy Mosques that is given to the Israelis as their capital by Trump after he got billions from the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques.”
Ahmad Al-Faraj, a Saudi academic and researcher, tweeted back to him:
“If you leave your television channel of intelligence #Al Jazeera and go to your house in Doha, you will see on your right the Israeli representative building 600 meters from your house. People there… will tell you about the role of your channel in the betrayals and conspiracies that destroyed the Arab world and they will tell you who sold Jerusalem.”
Saudis have also started to tweet interviews with Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, the former foreign minister of Qatar, and Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the former Emir of Qatar, about supporting Israel, to reveal their hypocrisy to the wider public. In the interview with Hamad bin Jassim on Qatar’s Al Jazeera television on October 25, 2017, he mentioned that close Qatari-Israeli relations were to get closer to America so that Israel could open doors for Qatar in America.
Qatar is also trying to gain favor in the US through Saudi dissidents, such as Jamal Khashoggi. He previously held a number of positions in several newspapers in Saudi Arabia, served as a political adviser, and now, entirely backed by Qatar, is a columnist for The New York Times and based in Washington DC. Nowadays, Khashoggi takes every opportunity to attack Saudi Arabia in different US and European newspapers.
Anyone who can read Arabic can tell you Twitter account of Jamal Khashoggi is full of anti-Semitic tweets and retweets; it looks as if the New York Times allows him to write in its newspaper only because he attacks Saudi Arabia.
Khashoggi tweeted:
“Feel angry and shout out even if you do so among your own people and inside your frightened houses, it’s #Jerusalem. Allah suffices me, for He is the best disposer of affairs. I feel distressed.”
Saudis recognize that his real intention was not to defend Jerusalem or the Palestinians, but to galvanize people on the streets of Saudi Arabia to rise up against their own government. Ahmad Al-Faraj tweeted:
“If you feel that angry, why do you not leave this damned country of America, whose President is moving its embassy to Jerusalem?”
Other Saudi writers and others simply ridiculed him. “Go and drink a glass of wine to calm down”, wrote Hani Al Dahri, a Saudi journalist, inserting Kashoggi’s tweet above along a photograph of him celebrating Thanksgiving in the US with bottles of wine on the table:
Even with all this controversy and a complete change in Arab attitudes on social media towards the Palestinian cause, both Western and traditional Arab media still keep regurgitating the same anti-Israel slogans and rhetoric, and pumping out the same Palestinian propaganda. Most comments on social media have come from intellectuals, assuring the general public that the main reason for this never-ending Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a corrupt Palestinian Authority, run by Fatah and Hamas. The Palestinian Authority, they seem to believe, has traded on the Palestinian cause, which has garnered them millions, but none of that is ever discussed in the mainstream media.
While the mainstream media still shows the oppressor to be Israel and the oppressed to be the Palestinians, Palestinian polls tell a different story[1]:
- In a June 2015 poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion (based in Beit Sahour, the West Bank), 52% of Palestinians living in Israeli-ruled East Jerusalem said they would prefer to be citizens of Israel with equal rights, compared to just 42% who would choose to be citizens of a Palestinian state.
- More Palestinians in Jerusalem seek Israeli citizenship.
- According to polls conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip between 14 and 16 September, 2017, the majority of Palestinians are unhappy with President Mahmoud Abbas’s performance. 67% of the public want him to resign while 27% want him to remain in office. The demand for Abbas’s resignation stands at 60% in the West Bank and 80% in the Gaza Strip.
- If new legislative elections were held today, 63% of the Palestinians surveyedsaid they would vote. Of those who would participate, 29% said they would vote for Hamas; 36% said they would vote for Fatah; 10% would vote for all other parties combined, and 25% were undecided.
- Only 38% of the Palestinian public polled said West Bankers could criticize the Palestinian Authority (PA) without fear of reprisal; 59% said that people could not freely criticize the PA. Half of the public (50%) viewed the PA as a burden on the Palestinians. 77% perceived the PA as corrupt.
- Most of Hamas leaders, who portray themselves as jihadists against Israel, are millionaires. A senior official in Hamas, for example, Khaled Mashaal, who is worth US $2.6 billion according to global estimates, while Arab commentators put his worth at between US $2 and $5 billion, saying he “invested in Egyptian banks and Gulf countries, some in real estate projects.” Next on the list is Ismail Haniyeh, who, until the recent signing of a unity deal between Hamas and Fatah, was the Prime Minister of Gaza. “His fortune is estimated at US $4 million, and most of his assets in the Strip are registered in the name of his son-in-law Nabil, and a dozen children of his and other less well-known Hamas officials. The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank appears no less corrupt than leaders in Gaza. Abbas and other leaders in the PLO have stolen millions of dollars from international funding meant for the Palestinian people. This corruption is the mistake of international donors who never hold these leaders to account.
Why is all this data absent from the mainstream media, which shows images of burning flags and other displays of anger only from the point of view of the Palestinian Authority and its supporters?
The US Department of State is no less culpable than the mainstream media in failing to play a more vital role in revealing these realities. Exposing this corruption would go a long way to mitigating the anger and hatred felt towards the US. The Department of State is always passive and bureaucratic, functioning mostly like a third-world country governmental body.
The Harry S Truman Building in Washington, DC, headquarters of the US Department of State. (Image source: Loren/Wikimedia Commons)
During my time working in the US Consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, I met some diplomats who do not hold the US Government’s views. On the contrary, some of them held political views that were totally different to those of their administration, and some were even anti-Semitic. In addition, the expertise of the diplomats was not of the high standard that you would expect from a powerful country such as the US. A lot of these diplomats are sent to Arab countries like Saudi Arabia with no knowledge of the Arabic language and not much more of the region — in sharp contrast to diplomats in the British Embassy. I was surprised to work with a diplomat who, instead of supporting his country in liberating Iraq from the most brutal dictatorship in history, was calling it “an invasion” to Saudi intellectuals and academics. He was also against the peace process. He insisted on calling Israel an “occupier” and complained that I was reading “right-wing websites” such as the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). The organization mainly translates material meticulously from the Arabic, but the diplomat calls it pro-Israel.
So, I was hoping that after Trump became President, the Department of State might be reformed to avoid the same mistakes made under George Bush – mainly that he did not confront the US Department of State about its incompetence. President Trump should be firm and alert avoid the same mistake. Currently, it is ineffective.
This Department needs to be reformed from top to bottom to ensure that all diplomats are truly working for US interests. I am sure that it is the Department of State itself that will be the most reluctant to move its embassy to Jerusalem.
The world has followed a course that has gotten this peace process nowhere. The fact that this conflict has been ongoing for 70 years demonstrates that there is something at fault. The main reasons for this stalled progress are a lack of transparency, hypocritical opportunists with hidden personal agendas, a biased mainstream media and ineffective diplomatic missions. It is not an exaggeration to say that moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem is the best decision that has been taken by any American President because it lays bare a rotten reality. This is exactly what is needed to galvanize the peace process toward a two-state solution. It will also put pressure on the corrupt Palestinian Authority either to reform or change its leadership. Who knows, it might even stop opportunists from perpetuating this conflict for their own ends.
Najat AlSaied is a Saudi American academic and the author of “Screens of Influence: Arab Satellite Television & Social Development”. She is an Assistant Professor at Zayed University in the College of Communication and Media Sciences in Dubai-UAE.
[1] Polling data were all kindly provided by Dr. Michael Sharnoff, Associate Professor of Middle East Studies at Daniel Morgan Graduate School
Canada: Muslim students spread virulent Jew-hatred at McMaster University
December 15, 2017Canada: Muslim students spread virulent Jew-hatred at McMaster University, Jihad Watch,
Anti-Israel students at McMaster University in (Hamilton) Ontario, Canada have published multiple social media posts praising Adolf Hitler, demonizing Jews, and glorifying terrorist organizations….Dozens of individuals affiliated with the campus group Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) published incendiary comments on Jews and Israel in recent years
Three years ago, McMaster’s “Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights” group (aka Students for Justice in Palestine) ran a loathsome event on the campus in Hamilton called “’Hug a Terrorist,” right after the jihad attack on Parliament that killed 24-year-old Cpl. Nathan Cirillo, who was from Hamilton. Cirillo was gunned down and murdered as he stood guard at the National War Memorial in Ottawa. The SPHR also “gained notoriety after instigating a riot at Concordia, that forced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to cancel a speech scheduled for September 9, 2002.”
The hatred against Jews now being demonstrated at McMaster University in Hamilton by members affiliated with the SPHR is shocking and appalling.
Tweets included:
- “I honestly wish I was born at the time of the second world war just to see the genius, Hitler, at work.”
- “everytime I read about Hitler, I fall in love all over again.”
- “The only Religion I respect is Islam. The only prophet I admire is the Prophet Muhammad…..Where is hitler when u need one?’ I literally ask this every day…..hitler did more than just kill. He was also a great leader & role model to many. And all governments kill innocent people everyday.”
- “hitler should have took you all….Arabs and Muslims who refer to our enemies as ‘Jews’ rather than ZIONISTS make a bad image for the rest of us
- “Palestine is occupied by the most despicable nation on the face of the Earth.”
This is not by any stretch “free speech.” It is blatant incitement to violence. This degree of hatred and celebration of mass murder of the Jewish people would not be tolerated by McMaster administrators had it been toward Muslims or blacks — and should not be — so the SPHR should be shut down on campus, as any KKK group or Nazi group would likely be. McMaster university administration released a statement about “equity and inclusion,” condemned the anti-semitic statements, and announced that it was reviewing them.
To watch “Jew Hate at McMaster” video, click HERE.
A followup article was then published by the Algemeiner “that included a statement from the McMaster chapter of Hillel and one from B’nai Brith Canada, decrying the hateful posts and calling on the university to take action.”
SPHR member Nadera Masad was unrepentant and resolute in her hate as she responded:
“The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist. Add that to my profile…. I keep saying, we need to cleanse the world of creatures such as these dirty white Americans…..Add this to my canary profile.”
She then deleted her Twitter account.
For far too long, virulent Islamic anti-semitism has been tolerated on certain university campuses. This serves to embolden and strengthen hate groups. To condemn them may be good for optics, but without appropriate followup action, it is ineffective. Such groups should be disbanded.
“Anti-Israel Students Spread Jew Hatred at McMaster University: ‘Hitler Should Have Took You All’”, by Shiri Moshe, Algemiener, December 12, 2017:
Anti-Israel students at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada have published multiple social media posts praising Adolf Hitler, demonizing Jews, and glorifying terrorist organizations, The Algemeiner has learned.
Dozens of individuals affiliated with the campus group Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) published incendiary comments on Jews and Israel in recent years — among them the “openly anti-Semitic Mac SPHR students” Rawan Qaddoura, Esra Bengizi and Nadera Masad, the anonymous watchdog group Canary Mission charged in a new report.
According to screenshots obtained by Canary Mission, Qaddoura — a political science and economics major who unsuccessfully ran for the SPHR presidency in 2016 — tweeted in September 2012, “i just don’t like jews lol #sorrynotsorry”
On August 2013, she wrote, “‘@judeZAdude: The whole world is controlled by Zionist Jews and until you understand that, life will never make sense.’”
Qaddoura also repeatedly praised Hitler, tweeting in January 2012, “I honestly wish I was born at the time of the second world war just to see the genius, Hitler, at work.”
She doubled down on these sentiments in June 2013, writing, “everytime I read about Hitler, I fall in love all over again.”
Qaddoura’s invective against Jews and admiration of Hitler — which extended to tweets demonizing Israel and Zionism — echoed that of fellow McMaster student Bengizi, who identified herself in August 2016 as a fourth year “double majoring in English & French.”
On July 2015, Bengizi tweeted a photo of Hitler — captioned with heart emojis — alongside the fake quote, “The only Religion I respect is Islam. The only prophet I admire is the Prophet Muhammad.”
A year earlier, she wrote, “‘@KMKurd: Where is hitler when u need one?’ I literally ask this every day.” On the same Twitter thread, she added, “hitler did more than just kill. He was also a great leader & role model to many. And all governments kill innocent people everyday.”
Bengizi’s admiration of Hitler sometimes accompanied tweets that were explicitly antagonistic towards Jews. “I’m actually going to the rule the world and get rid of anyone who doesn’t have basic common sense or if you’re yahoodi [Jewish] #QueenE,” she tweeted on May 2014. Bengizi praised Hitler as “so intelligent” later on the same thread.
A tweet published by Esra Bengizi in May 2014. Photo: Canary Mission.
These sentiments were shared by SPHR activist Masad, who tweets under the handle “ArabHummus.”
“Hitler was on to something… #SorryNotSorry,” she tweeted in April 2012. A year earlier, Masad wrote, “the reason i kept some jews alive is so i can show you why i killed them in the first place. –Hitler.”
“hitler should have took you all,” she tweeted in November 2011.
Masad has argued that she only hates Zionists, rather than all Jews, claiming in October 2015, “Arabs and Muslims who refer to our enemies as ‘Jews’ rather than ZIONISTS make a bad image for the rest of us. We’re not racist, stop.”Yet Masad — who in April proclaimed, “Death to America and white people” — has shared dozens of tweets containing explicitly antisemitic rhetoric. As recently as March, she wrote, “‘Gods chosen people’ lmfaoooo oh you mean god chose you to kindle hell fire with.. Tru.”
In May 2012, Masad tweeted, “I suspect my french teacher of being a jew cause I saw her picking up a penny off the floor yesterday.” That August, she prayed, “Yel3an il yahood [Curse the Jews]-amen.”
A tweet published by Nadera Masad in March. Photo: Canary Mission.
“#icanttrustyouif you’re a jew,” she charged on May 2011. A month earlier, she wrote, “#pleaseshutupif you’re an israeli jew. Your opinion does not matter nor count and you belong in a cave.”
She also frequently expressed her desire to violently harm Jews and Zionists.
“@mindohmarmatter looool it’s okay I’ll kill yahood [jews] with it, it’s all good :D,” she tweeted in April 2013.
“#ICantGoOneDayWithout having the urge to punch a zionist in the face,” she wrote on May 2012, days after tweeting, “#IfOnlyICould beat the s**t out of every zionist I see.”
Masad has accordingly praised Palestinian terrorists, sharing a picture of hijacker Leila Khaled — a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — with a machine gun in March 2016. “This is THE Queen of all Queens,” Masad wrote.
The PFLP is a terrorist organization blacklisted by Canada, the United States, Israel, and the European Union, among others. The group has claimed credit for multiple lethal attacks against civilians, including a 2014 massacre at a Jerusalem synagogue in which six Israelis were killed.
Khaled and the PFLP have similarly been idolized by 2017 SPHR president Lina Assi.
Assi, a self-described Marxist-Leninist majoring in labor studies and political science, tweeted a photo in May of PFLP members aiming assault rifles at an effigy of President Donald Trump, with the caption, “PFLP! This is how we Palestinian Marxist-Leninists do, folks!”…….
The following day, Assi posted a screenshot from a sermon delivered by a member of the Gaza-based terrorist group Hamas, who claimed that “Palestine is occupied by the most despicable nation on the face of the Earth.”
In December, she emphasized the importance of giving “credit to Hezbollah, Syria, [North Korea] and Iran in providing material support, military training and safe havens for PFLP organizing.”
A tweet published by Lina Assi in July 2014. Photo: Canary Mission.
SPHR is an autonomous chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine — a leading anti-Zionist group that promotes the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel at North American universities. At McMaster, SPHR organizes “Israeli Apartheid Week” and spearheaded the passage of a BDS resolution by the school’s student union in 2015.
Canary Mission said that the result of its investigation into McMaster SPHR “comes as no shock,” considering it’s “the same sort of anti-Semitic invective we have come to expect from SJP chapters across the United States.”
“We believe the only right thing for McMaster U administration to do,” the group added, “is to condemn, investigate and take action against these students and against SPHR, in order to show that McMaster is in fact a safe environment for Jewish students on campus.”
McMaster SPHR and university spokespersons did not immediately respond to The Algemeiner‘s requests for comments.
Decision Time on Iran
December 15, 2017Decision Time on Iran, Washinton Free Beacon, Matthew Continetti, December 15, 2017
(Please see also, Congress ignores Trump’s deadline on Iran nuclear deal. — DM)
President Hassan Rouhani in front of a portrait of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei / Getty Images
Very soon, President Trump will have to decide whether America should remain a bystander to Iranian expansionism or take steps to confront this menace to international security and sponsor of global terrorism.
In October, when the president failed to certify Iranian compliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), aka the Iran nuclear deal, he began a process that is almost certain to force him to make controversial decisions in the coming months.
The Congress has had 60 days to propose measures that would punish Iran for its misbehavior and strengthen the JCPOA. It has not done so. The issue will therefore wind up once again in the Oval Office in January, when President Trump will choose between maintaining an agreement with a noncompliant signatory and re-imposing sanctions on Iran.
The pressure will be great from Democrats, Europeans, realists, and the remnants of the Obama echo chamber to persist in the fiction that a bad deal is better than no deal at all. Relenting to such pressure would signal to Iran that America is comfortable with a terrible status quo, and would bolster the impression among our allies that we are willing to cede the region to the Russian-Turkish-Iranian axis. Which would be a mistake.
To date, President Trump’s Iran policy has been mostly rhetorical. Other than decertification and shooting down two Iranian drones over Syria, the United States, writes Middle East analyst Tony Badran, “has relied on an indirect approach, premised on avoiding direct confrontation with Iran and its instruments,” such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, Shiite militias in Iraq, and Houthi rebels in Yemen. But, adds Badran, “this indirect, long-term approach has proven futile and counterproductive.” Iranian proxies have used the opportunity to consolidate their positions and expand their reach.
That has led to an Iranian presence on the border of Israel, inflamed sectarian tensions in Iraq, and missiles fired at Riyadh from the portions of Yemen under Houthi control. And all the while the mullahs in Tehran and their Revolutionary Guard Corps continue to benefit from the economic opportunities realized in the JCPOA.
The Trump administration seems to have recognized that Iran has the upper hand and started to resist. In recent days H.R. McMaster and Mike Pompeo have warned against Iranian influence in Syria, the administration has said that American forces will remain in Syria in the aftermath of the ISIS campaign, and Nikki Haley has denounced Iran’s illegal transfer of weaponry and technology to the Houthis. Monday brings the release of the president’s national security strategy, which is sure to have similar harsh language.
What has been missing is direct action against either Iran or its proxies. Instead we have a patchwork policy of containment that does not contain. Reuel Marc Gerecht describes it this way: “The White House annoys Tehran with minor sanctions, sells more weaponry to Gulf Arabs, occasionally has a second-tier official—the secretary of state—give a speech on Iranian oppression, leaves some troops in Syria and Iraq, and calls it progress.” Gerecht’s language is illustrative of the limits on American power that we have imposed on ourselves. A gnat annoys. A superpower overwhelms.
Having already to deal with tensions on the Korean peninsula, war in Afghanistan, and a global counterterrorism campaign, the temptation must be strong for the president to use the Sunni powers as U.S. subcontractors in the fight against Iran. He of all people should know that subcontractors are sometimes unreliable. But the cost of enhanced Iranian power in the Middle East and Persian Gulf is not printed on an invoice that the United States can refuse to pay.
Last week the president ignored received opinion and acted on the common sense notion that reality is indeed as it seems, that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, and that willful ignorance is no escape from that fact. The conflagration that his internal and external critics predicted would follow this assertion of truth failed to materialize. Is it too much to hope that in 2018 he will follow his instincts once more, and act upon a concrete appraisal of the situation despite the insistence of elite opinion to the contrary?
For the JCPOA really is, as the president has said, a terrible deal. Iran does not have the interests of either the United States or our allies in mind. And speeches are no substitute for the unapologetic assertion of might in the right.
Exodus: Jews Flee Paris Suburbs over Rising Tide of Anti-Semitism
December 15, 2017Exodus: Jews Flee Paris Suburbs over Rising Tide of Anti-Semitism, Breitbart, Simon Kent, December 15, 2017
AP/Jeffrey Schaeffer
In total, 40,000 French Jews have emigrated since 2006, according to figures cited by AFP.
On the evidence, that number will not be falling anytime soon.
***********************************
French-Jewish families are being forced from their homes in Paris suburbs as Europe continues to be convulsed by levels of anti-Semitism not seen since the end of the Second World War.
The Paris commuter newspaper 20 Minutes documents an “internal exodus” during 2017 of Jews from the Seine-Saint-Denis department, saying it is emblematic of broader concerns that French Jews, like their brothers and sisters across Europe, are finding it increasingly difficult to reconcile their faith with the changing demographics of the continent.
The paper reports that Jews are leaving their homes on the northeastern fringe of Paris to escape the open hostility that French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe on Sunday condemned as “well-rooted.” The newspaper reports:
This ‘internal exodus’ is difficult to quantify, but it is clear that many synagogues of Seine-Saint-Denis have closed, for lack of people. In Pierrefitte, the rabbi has recorded a 50 percent decline in the congregations since his arrival thirteen years ago. A similar story is told in (nearby) Bondy, where attendance on Yom Kippur (the holiest day of the Jewish calendar) has fallen from about 800 to 400 in the last decade.
The Bondy synagogue president saw a “deteriorating climate” of the last 15 years as driving the exodus, “It’s hard to explain, it’s provocations, it’s looks,” he lamented. “There are places where we do not feel welcome.”
His observations mimic those made 12 months before in nearby Raincy, where local Rabbi Moshe Lewin said he feared he could be one of the last Jewish leaders in Seine-Saint-Denis.
“What upsets me is that in some areas of France, Jews can no longer live peacefully, and that just five minutes from my home, some are forced to hide their kippas (skullcaps) or their Star of David,” he said.
The sensation of “not feeling welcome” is nothing new to French Jews. In 2015, journalist Zvika Klein recorded the reaction to his taking to the streets of Paris wearing a traditional kippa. See the result for yourself below:
Klein later points out the irony that Paris today is a city “where keffiyeh-wearing men and veiled women speak Arabic on every street corner” but where “soldiers are walking every street that houses a Jewish institution.”
Sammy Ghozlan, the president of the Jewish communal security organization BNCVA, told 20 Minutes that it was vital “not to underestimate the antisemitism we experience on a daily basis.”
“For a long time, Jews were targeted through their symbols — today, people themselves are targeted directly,” Ghozlan said.
As Breitbart Jerusalem has reported, the experience of Jews in Paris is much the same across the rest of the country. More and more are feeling so unsafe that they now feel they have no other choice but to move to Israel for safety.
They are continuing a trend that has seen tens of thousands of Jews quit the country in the past decade.
More than 5,000 departures were recorded in 2016 on top of the record 7,900 who left in 2015 and 7,231 in 2014. In total, 40,000 French Jews have emigrated since 2006, according to figures cited by AFP.
On the evidence, that number will not be falling anytime soon.
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