Eric Trump questions Clintons’ enormous wealth: ‘What product were they selling?’

Posted September 2, 2016 by danmillerinpanama
Categories: Bill Clinton, Clinton character, Clinton Foundation, Corruption, Department of State, Hillary Clinton
Tags: , , , ,

Eric Trump questions Clintons’ enormous wealth: ‘What product were they selling?’ Washington Times, S.A. Miller, September 2, 2016

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s son Eric Trump questioned Friday how Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton became enormously wealthy running a charity, which has become the focus of the campaign’s allegation of pay-to-play corruption while she was secretary of state.

“The question I always ask is, what product were they selling? If we make a buck, we sold a bottle of wine or an apartment, or we sold a hotel room. What product were they selling to make $150 million,” Mr. Trump said on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends.”

Host Ainsley Earhardt suggested: “Favors? The government?”

“Of course,” responded Mr. Trump, who works on the campaign for his billionaire businessman father.

“This is the leadership we have in this country. Somebody sets up a foundation. They pocket hundreds of millions of dollars. They say they come out of the White House ‘dead broke.’ Now they are worth $150 million,” he said.

Mrs. Clinton famously claimed that they were “dead broke” when they left the White House in 2001.

Mr. Trump was citing a high estimation of the Clinton’s wealth. Other estimates peg their net worth at a combined $111 million, with Mr. Clinton worth approximately $80 million and Mrs. Clinton worth just over $30 million.

“It’s just so so sad,” Mr. Trump said. “People in this country work so hard and sometimes they are not able to achieve because of the policies that these politicians put in place and look what they do.”

The Clinton Foundation has become a focus of questions about potential conflicts of interest while Mrs. Clinton served as secretary of state. The charity accepted donations from foreign entities with interests in State Department policy.

The lines between Mrs. Clinton’s agency staff and the work of the Clinton Foundation also were sometimes blurred.

Some of Clintons’ wealth came from generous speaking fees paid to Mr. Clinton by foreign entities while his wife was secretary of state. His usual fee of $150,000 climbed higher while his wife was in office, including a $500,000 fee paid by a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin and a $550,000 fee paid by a Chinese business group for a speech in Shanghai.

After she left the State Department in 2013, Mrs. Clinton started collecting $200,000 speaking fees, mostly from trade groups and Wall Street banks, according to an analysis by the Associated Press.

Financial disclosures showed that the post-State Department speeches earned Mrs. Clinton nearly $22 million.

As secretary of state, she earned $186,600 a year. In her prior role as a U.S. senator from New York, her annual salary started as $145,100 in 2001 and rose to $169,300 in her final year in 2008.

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The Obama Narrative Goes to Midway

Posted September 2, 2016 by danmillerinpanama
Categories: Battle of Midway, Climate change, Obama and climate change, Obama visits Midway
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The Obama Narrative Goes to Midway, PJ Media, Claudia Rosett, September 2, 2016

midway on golf cartPresident Barack Obama tours Midway Atoll in the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument, Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, on a golf cart with Marine National Monuments Superintendent Matt Brown, Thursday, Sept. 1, 2016. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Before we get to this latest frolic in the Obama Narrative, let’s take a moment to remember the Battle of Midway, fought from June 4-7, 1942. It was a huge World War II naval victory over Japan that tipped the advantage decisively toward America in the Pacific.

World War II naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison, in his book “The Two Ocean War,” described Midway as “a victory not only of courage, determination and excellent bombing technique, but of intelligence, bravely and wisely applied.” That victory came at a terrible cost. Morison describes the bravery of American dive-bomber pilots, the initial squadrons massacred by anti-aircraft fire before the rest succeeded in destroying four Japanese carriers. Morison reminds us of “the threescore young aviators who met flaming death that day in reversing the verdict of battle” and urges, “Think of them, reader, every Fourth of June. They and their comrades who survived changed the whole course of the Pacific War.”

That was Midway.

Now comes President Obama, who enroute to a G-20 summit in China stopped Thursday on the Midway Atoll for some climate-change grandstanding, a golf-cart motorcade tour and some snorkeling.

According to the New York Times, Obama did make brief mention of the Americans who died defending Midway in World War II, praising their “courage and bravery” and calling Midway “hallowed ground.” But that part of the visit was apparently so perfunctory that the Associated Press reporter missed the message (or did he?), and instead described Obama’s mention of “hallowed ground” as a reference to the place Midway Atoll occupies “in Native Hawaiian tradition.”

Obama’s main purpose in traveling to Midway, according to a White House fact sheet, was to “mark the significance” of his own “historic conservation action” (has Obama done anything during his presidency that the White House has not described as “historic”?) in creating, off the coast of Hawaii, “the world’s largest marine protected area” — and to “highlight firsthand how the threat of climate change makes protecting our public lands and waters more important than ever.”

By all means let’s do our part to clean up crud on land and sea. But what in the name of Solyndra does that actually have to do with “climate change”? What Obama’s really highlighting firsthand is his own extravagant diktat that the climate change debate “is settled” (which it is not); and his dictum that man-made climate change is both “a fact” and a threat so monumental that it towers over all others (never mind a disintegrating post-World War II order, a rotten Iran nuclear deal, global proliferation of Islamic terrorist attacks, an expansionist Russia and China, and North Korea’s preparations for a fifth nuclear test).

In the world of the Obama narrative, it follows that almost any government controls, regulations, caps, licenses, subsidies and other instruments of state planning are richly justified by promises that the result will be to fine-tune the climate of the planet. On such grounds did Obama last December subordinate the U.S. Constitution to the United Nations-fostered climate change agenda, by entering into the Paris climate accord via “executive agreement,” without submitting it as a treaty for ratification by the Senate. During Obama’s visit to China this weekend, we can expect plenty of “climate change” common cause with Chinese President Xi Jinping, whose ecological projects include transforming reefs in the South China Sea into military installations.

When American men fought and died for victory at Midway in 1942, they were defending America, a free country — a place of free speech and free markets. That system is the best hope of adapting to whatever change of climate might come along, man-made or otherwise. Capitalist democracy leaves room for innovation and offers incentives for inventions that genuinely work and are wanted. That is not true of intricate and overbearing climate deals, ginned up by governments, imposed by bureaucrats and endowed with no mechanism that ensures the link Obama loves to proclaim between climate-change central planning and economic growth.

In other words, Obama’s choice of Midway as a poster atoll for his latest climate-change riff was not just a snub to the heroes of World War II or the freedom they fought for. It was a travesty.

Of course, Obama did invite us all to appreciate the natural beauty of Midway, where he said he looks forward “to knowing that 20 years from now, 40 years from now, 100 years from now, this is a place where people can still come to and see what a place like this looks like when it’s not overcrowded and destroyed by human populations.”

That’s nice, except what it seems to mean right now (and presumably for the next century) is that unless you’re the president, or a government employee with work that takes you to Midway, you probably can’t visit the atoll at all. Under the management of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Midway has become a place where visitor services are “reduced.” According to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office, they’ve actually been suspended since 2012.

According to this blog site, what was once a well-tended atoll maintained by a private outfit in cooperation with the Department of the Interior has fallen into ruin since the government bureaucracy took over all services. I don’t know how much credence to give that story, but it would hardly be the first time that government has set out to improve something, and instead managed to wreck it. The GAO report says the Fish and Wildlife service has been accelerating the ruin by tearing down historic properties without giving any public notice.

Not that the local scene is utterly off-limits to the likes of ordinary Americans — whose presence, unlike Obama’s golfcart motorcade, would spoil the magic of these islands. The Fish and Wildlife service offers a virtual, historical tour. If Obama wants to reduce carbon emissions, maybe he should have set us all an example by settling for that.

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Muslim Reformist to Sally Kohn: Stop Working Against Us

Posted September 2, 2016 by danmillerinpanama
Categories: Sharia law
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Muslim Reformist to Sally Kohn: Stop Working Against Us, Truth Revolt, Tiffany Gabbay, September 1, 2016

raza

Muslim reformist Raheel Raza has a few choice words for CNN commentator Sally Kohn: do us a favor and stop defending sharia law. 

Raza’s response came after Kohn recently pretended to be an Islamic theologian and lectured the public on how “progressive” sharia law allegedly is:

“There is a difference between personal, spiritual Sharia and the political incorporation of Sharia into law,” Kohn stated. “And within both, there are progressive interpretations as well as more fundamentalist conservative interpretations. So the word Sharia doesn’t mean one thing.”

Kohn then blasted Donald Trump for “not knowing” what sharia law really stands for. This is likely when Raza’s radar went up, considering that the Muslim activist has first-hand knowledge about sharia law and the threat it poses.

Raza, who at great personal risk travels the world to educate people on the dangers of sharia law and who has worked for decades to wrestle her faith from the hands of extremists, thinks it odd that a progressive would defend the very Islamic tenets that promote homophobia, anti-Semitism, and the subjugation of women.

In an open letter to Kohn published on the Huffington Post, Raza writes:

Political commentator Sally Kohn has made several statements regarding sharia law, which were not only offensive but dangerous. In using her voice to propagate this liberal apologist position, she is doing a great disservice to progressive reform-minded Muslims like myself. Her words are an affront to me, a female Muslim activist, as I have made it my life’s mission to educate others on this topic and to wrestle back my religion from the clutches of extremists who wish to make sharia the law of the land. And I would be happy to debate her on this topic.

As an openly gay woman, Ms. Kohn would be killed, jailed or persecuted under sharia law. As a devout Muslim woman, I – along with many true progressive Muslims – rightly view sharia, as it is practiced today, as an archaic distortion of Islamic law.

In a very diplomatic way, Raza suggests that perhaps Kohn doesn’t know as much about Islamic law as she thinks she does, and then offered up the following “brief lesson in sharia”:

What many sharia laws and statutes have in common are the following. They are:

· Homophobic
· Anti-semitic
· Anti-women
· Advocate amputations and stoning
· Preach killing of apostates
· Uphold the Blasphemy Law (which could get me killed)

“This homophobic, anti-woman, repressive sharia is no longer confined to the mosque or to majority Muslim nations,” Raza writes before providing the example of England’s 100 sharia councils that have been allowed to harm women in the West.

“As a woman, and as someone who enjoys the freedoms and liberties that are systematically assaulted by sharia law, Sally Kohn needs to think twice before defending this oppressive, perverse practice.”

“Words are powerful — so Sally, I beg you and others to stop defending the indefensible and to stand with us, not them,” the Muslim activists concluded.

It is typical of progressives, so willfully blind, that they hurt the very people they claim to champion. Sadly, progressives like Kohn would rather propagate left-wing lies about Islam without regard to how many people get hurt in the process, than actually learn from the people who know best.

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Serving Muslim Interests with American Foreign Policy

Posted September 2, 2016 by danmillerinpanama
Categories: Foreign policy, Hillary Clinton and Islamists, Islamist "democracy", Obama and Islamist tyranny
Tags: , , ,

Serving Muslim Interests with American Foreign Policy, Front Page Magazine, Joseph Klein, September 2, 2016

see my hands

A Hillary Clinton presidency would likely continue along the pro-Islamist foreign policy arc that both her husband’s administration and the Obama administration have developed.

President Bill Clinton committed U.S. military resources to help Muslims during the so-called “humanitarian” intervention in Bosnia. However, he chose to turn a blind eye to the genocide that swamped Rwanda during his administration. As G. Murphy Donovan wrote in his American Thinker article “How the Clintons Gave American Foreign Policy its Muslim Tilt,” “Muslim lives matter, Black Africans, not so much.” Noting that “it was Muslim unrest that precipitated Serb pushback, civil war, and the eventual collapse of Yugoslavia,” Donovan added, “Bosnians are, for the most part, Muslims with a bloody fascist pedigree.” Nevertheless, with no strategic U.S. national interest at stake, Bill Clinton tilted American foreign policy in favor of the Muslim side in the Bosnia conflict. We are now reaping the lethal consequences of that tilt. Donovan points out in his article that, on a per capita basis, Bosnia Herzegovina is the leading source of ISIS volunteers in all of Europe.

President Obama, along with then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, took the side of Islamist “rebels” against the secular authoritarian regimes in Egypt, Libya and Syria that had managed to keep the lid on jihadist terrorism for many years. These Islamists included members of al Qaeda as well as the Muslim Brotherhood.

In Libya, Hillary Clinton was the leading voice pressing for military intervention against Col. Muammar el- Qaddafi’s regime. She did so, even though, according to sources cited in a State Department memo passed on to Hillary by her deputy at the time, Jake Sullivan, in an e-mail dated April 1, 2011, “we just don’t know enough about the make-up or leadership of the rebel forces.”  In fact, as subsequently reported by the New York Times, the only organized opposition to the Qaddafi regime that had developed underground during Qaddafi’s rule were the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a terrorist group, and the Muslim Brotherhood.  The author of the State Department memo had acknowledged the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group’s terrorist past but said they “express a newfound keenness for peaceful politics.” Was Hillary Clinton relying on such assurances of a reformed “peaceful” Islamic group fighting against Qaddafi, even though it had been on the State Department’s terrorist list since 2004 and one of its leaders, Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi,  praised al Qaeda members as “good Muslims” in a March 2011 interview?  If so, that is just another indication of her bad judgment.

As for Egypt, Hillary was informed by her outside adviser and confidante Sid Blumenthal, in an e-mail dated December 16, 2011, that the Muslim Brotherhood’s intention was to create an Islamic state. Moreover, the relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda and other radical groups was “complicated,” Blumenthal quoted a source “with access to the highest levels of the MB” as saying. Blumenthal also reported, based on a confidential source, that Mohamed Morsi, who was then leader of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, believed that “it will be difficult for this new, Islamic government to control the rise of al Qa’ida and other radical/terrorist groups.”

Nevertheless, the Obama administration supported the Muslim Brotherhood in its bid to seek power in Egypt through a shaky electoral process. After Morsi’s election to the presidency, Hillary visited Egypt where Morsi warmly welcomed her and she expressed strong support for Egypt’s “democratic transition.” However, the only real transition Morsi had in mind was to impose sharia law on the Egyptian people, the very antithesis of true democratic pluralism. Yet the Obama–Clinton gravy train of military aid to the Muslim Brotherhood-backed Islamist regime continued without any preconditions. Hillary Clinton herself and her State Department referred to the importance of the U.S.’s “partnership” with the Muslim Brotherhood-backed regime.

When Morsi was removed from power, after millions of Egyptians had taken to the streets to protest the increasingly theocratic regime, the Obama administration decided to suspend aid to the more secular successor military regime. The “partnership” was no more once the Islamists were swept out of office.

While Morsi was still president, the Clinton Foundation, which has taken millions of dollars in donations from Muslim majority governments and affiliated groups and individuals, invited Morsi to deliver a major address at the Clinton Global Initiative. This invitation was extended just a month after an individual named Gehad el-Haddad, who was working simultaneously for the Muslim Brotherhood and the Clinton Foundation in Cairo, left his Clinton Foundation job to work for Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood full time. Fortunes changed for this individual, however, when, after Morsi was overthrown, Haddad was arrested for inciting violence and given a life sentence.

The Obama administration, while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, also cooperated with the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to pass and implement a United Nations resolution that was intended to curb speech considered Islamophobic. Clinton, in full spin mode, insisted that the new UN resolution was totally consistent with the free speech protections of the First Amendment, as opposed to the “defamation of religions” resolutions that the OIC had sponsored in the past but was willing to have replaced. The truth, however, is that all we were seeing was old wine in new bottles. To make sure that the OIC was comfortable regarding the Obama administration’s intentions, Clinton assured the OIC that she was perfectly on board with using “some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to do what we abhor.” She was trying to publicly assure American citizens that their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and press were safe, while working behind the scenes with her OIC partners to find acceptable ways to stifle speech offensive to Muslims.

The signs of Hillary Clinton’s Islamist tilt as she runs for president include the sweepingly general and demonstrably false assertion in her tweet last November that Muslims “have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.”  She has obviously learned nothing from her disastrous tenure as Secretary of State. Neither is she willing to acknowledge that the terrorists whom she has called a “determined enemy” are jihadists animated by an ideology rooted in core Muslim teachings of the Koran and the Hadith (Prophet Muhammad’s sayings and actions).  Is there something about the word “Muslim” in the Muslim Brotherhood and “Islamic” in the Islamic State that she is having problems understanding?

Perhaps, it is Hillary’s close association with Huma Abedin, her top campaign aide and confidante, who has had questionable links to Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated organizations, which explains Hillary’s denial of the truth. If someone as close to Hillary as Huma Abedin, whom she apparently trusts with her life, is a Muslim, then how could any Muslim possibly have anything to do with terrorism?

Then again, perhaps Hillary’s willingness to give Islamists the benefit of the doubt is all the money that the Clintons have received over the years from foreign donors in Muslim majority countries, including the Saudi government and affiliated groups and individuals. Hillary Clinton has also reached out for campaign donations from a pro-Iranian lobby group, the National Iranian American Council. Whatever human rights abuses are inflicted on people in these countries, it would be counterproductive to bite the hand that feeds you, in the Clintons’ way of thinking.

Finally, the Democratic Party itself has moved much further to the Left since the days of Bill Clinton’s presidency, which has led to the broadening out of the pro-Islamist bias that began to take shape with Bill Clinton’s intervention in Bosnia. As David Horowitz wrote in a January 8, 2016 article published by National Review:

“Leftists and Democrats have also joined the Islamist propaganda campaign to represent Muslims — whose co-religionists have killed hundreds of thousands of innocents since 9/11 in the name of their religion — as victims of anti-Muslim prejudice, denouncing critics of Islamist terror and proponents of security measures as ‘Islamophobes’ and bigots. Led by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Democrats have enabled the Islamist assault on free speech, which is a central component of the Islamist campaign to create a worldwide religious theocracy.”

For a variety of reasons, Hillary Clinton as president can be expected to move the United States towards an even more accommodative stance than her predecessors with Islamists who mean to do us harm.

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Germany says Armenia genocide resolution ‘non-binding’ after reports Berlin keen to ‘satisfy’ Turkey

Posted September 2, 2016 by Peter Hofman
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: , ,

Germany says Armenia genocide resolution ‘non-binding’ after reports Berlin keen to ‘satisfy’ Turkey

Published time: 2 Sep, 2016 09:02 Edited time: 2 Sep, 2016 11:38

Source: Germany says Armenia genocide resolution ‘non-binding’ after reports Berlin keen to ‘satisfy’ Turkey — RT News

FILE PHOTO: The year 1915 is formed with candles during a memorial march by Armenians in front of the Brandenburg Gate © Fabrizio Bensch / Reuters

Germany’s foreign minister has said the Bundestag resolution recognizing the 1915 massacre of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as genocide is “non-binding,” following media reports the German cabinet would disavow the resolution so as to continue using Turkey’s Incirlik airbase.

“The German parliament naturally has the right and the freedom to pass any resolution it likes, but the Bundestag itself has said that not every resolution is legally binding,” Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier was quoted by Reuters as saying on Friday.

Earlier in the day, Spiegel said in an unsourced report that the Foreign Ministry and the Chancellery are likely to give cabinet spokesman Steffen Seibert the green light to make a public statement distancing the government from the resolution.

“There can be no talk of the German government distancing itself from the Armenia resolution,” Seibert told reporters at a planned news conference shortly after the magazine broke the news. He also said the resolution is not legally binding.

The resolution, adopted by German MPs on June 2, formally calls the 1915 massacre of ethnic Armenians by the Ottoman Turkish forces “genocide.” The vote was almost unanimous, and was met with delight by Armenian communities worldwide.

Ankara responded with a threat of retaliatory measures and denied German MPs access to Incirlik Airbase, used by Germany for the US-led campaign against the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL).

In June, the Bundeswehr, Germany’s military, was seeking an alternative airbase in Cyprus or Jordan, while Social Democrats, the junior members of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition government, demanded the jets and troops to be withdrawn by the end of the year.

As ties between Ankara and Berlin deteriorated rapidly, German MPs of Turkish origin who voted for the resolution reportedly began to receive death threats and were advised not to travel to Turkey for safety reasons.

Read more

A military aircraft is pictured on the runway at Incirlik Air Base, in the outskirts of the city of Adana, southeastern Turkey. © AFP German lawmakers’ Incirlik visit hinges on Armenian ‘genocide’ stance – Turkish FM

According to the Spiegel report, Martin Ederer, the Foreign Ministry’s state secretary, and Andreas Michaelis, chief of the ministry’s political staff, have negotiated with the Turkish government in Ankara over the past few weeks to “find solution” to the crisis.

They have been told by the Turks that Ankara expects the resolution on Armenian genocide to be disavowed publicly.

To comply with the controversial deal, government spokesman Seibert would state that the parliament’s resolution is “non-binding for the German government…being a political declaration, not a legal document,” according to the magazine.

Seibert has been chosen as an appropriate second-tier figure after domestic debates on who would make the controversial statement on behalf of the government. The candidacies of Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Chancellor Merkel were not considered at all, because that could be viewed as “servility” by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Disavowing the recognition of Armenian genocide would become a “political gesture” enough to “satisfy” the Turkish government, Spiegel wrote, citing internal negotiations in Ankara.

In the meantime, the alleged statement would mean no change to Berlin’s attitude towards the Armenian genocide as Merkel and Steinmeier have always viewed the adoption of the resolution as a bad idea, the magazine stated.

Later on Friday, Chancellor Merkel told German MPs that she has not distanced herself from the resolution on Armenian genocide, according to Reuters.

Volker Kauder, the head of the CDU faction in the parliament, told his fellow party members that he had spoken with Merkel and she had emphasized her position, Reuters cited sources who attended the meeting.

Kauder said that Merkel noted that she had voted to support the resolution during a party meeting before the June vote, although she was not present when the resolution was adopted by the parliament.

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Muslim Terrorists and Jewish Anti-Semites Against Trump

Posted September 2, 2016 by danmillerinpanama
Categories: 2016 elections, Democrat Party, Donald Trump and Israel, Hillary Clinton and Israel, Hillary Clinton and Palestinians, Leftist perspectives, Middle East, Obama and Israel, Obama and Palestinians
Tags: , , , , , , ,

Muslim Terrorists and Jewish Anti-Semites Against Trump, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, September 2, 2016

donald-trump-wikimedia-commons_xmo4y6

“I was often the ‘designated yeller.’”

That’s how Hillary Clinton described her relationship with the Israeli prime minister. Yelling and cursing was her particular specialty.

One marathon Hillary yelling session allegedly lasted 45 minutes. Afterward the Israeli ambassador said that relations between the United States and Israel had reached their lowest point.

Her favorite name for Netanyahu was, “F____ Bibi.”

But it wasn’t just about her hatred of any particular Israeli leader. The same year that Hillary was yelling herself hoarse at a man who had fought terrorists on the battlefield, she addressed the American Task Force on Palestine, a leading terror lobby, and blasted Israel and praised Islamic terrorists.

Hillary told the terror lobby, “I may have been the first person ever associated with an American administration to call for a Palestinian state.” She praised Mahmoud Abbas, the PA terror dictator who had boasted, “There is no difference between our policies and those of Hamas.”

She celebrated Naomi Shihab Nye who had written of the Hamas rocket attacks on Israeli cities, “Oppression makes people do desperate things.” Echoing her, Hillary denounced the “indignity of occupation”.  A few years later she accused Israelis of a lack of “empathy” in understanding “the pain of an oppressed people.”

Perhaps they were too busy mourning their dead to emphasize with the terrorists who were killing them.

But fighting for her political life, Hillary and Huma dug through her closet and threw on a blue and white pantsuit. Her campaign placed an editorial in the Forward headlined, “How I Would Reaffirm Unbreakable Bond With Israel — and Benjamin Netanyahu.”

Probably by yelling “F___ Bibi” at him for another 45 minutes.

When Hillary Clinton promised to reaffirm her “Unbreakable Bond With Israel — and Benjamin Netanyahu” it was in the pages of The Forward. And, striving to sell a rotten radical to skeptical Jews, the left-wing paper has decided to run a piece claiming that “Trump Would Be Israel’s Worst Nightmare”. As if anyone in Israel goes to bed dreaming of eight years of Hillary.

The Forward shares Hillary’s view of Netanyahu. And it violently loathes Israel.

Its quick costume change from denouncing anything and everything about the Jewish State to a sudden bout of concern for Israel is as unconvincing as Hillary Clinton’s southern accent.

Jay Michaelson, the author of the editorial warning us how bad Trump would be for Israel, followed that up with another piece accusing Israel of being an apartheid state. During Passover, Michaelson’s seething hatred for the Jewish State had pushed him to declare, “I’m Seeking Freedom From the Organized Jewish Community This Passover.”

Should American Jews take their cues on how dangerous Trump would be for Israel from a guy who hates Israel? Who hates Israel so much that he can’t even stand the Jewish community?

The Forward, like Hillary, hates Israel. Its pages are dedicated to rationalizing, justifying and defending the Muslim hatred of Israel and Jews. There’s Lisa Goldman explaining that the Muslim anti-Semitism displayed at the Rio Olympics was really a “Jewish persecution complex” that lacked “nuance.” It’s not an outlier. The Forward’s view of Israel is as hostile and negative as any white supremacist website.

Or Hillary Clinton’s inbox where the likes of Max Blumenthal regularly made appearances.

Do the Forward or Hillary Clinton actually care about Israel? All they’re trying to do is keep the American Jews who don’t believe that Israel is an apartheid state or that Muslim anti-Semitism is the fault of the Jews on the Democratic reservation by scaring them with bedtime stories about Trump.

Michaelson warns us that Trump would destabilize the Middle East and endanger Israel. It’s hard to imagine how he could do so more than Hillary’s Arab Spring which turned Egypt over to the Muslim Brotherhood, sowed terrorist dragon’s teeth across the region, including an ISIS affiliate in the Sinai.

Trump would destroy American credibility, he tells us. What credibility? Nobody thinks we have any credibility now. Not on Syria, Iran, Libya, China, Russia or anything else. And much of that took place under Hillary Clinton.

Then we are told that Trump is an “extremist” because “moderate Saudi businessmen” don’t like him.

Whom should American Jews better take their guidance from than “moderate Saudi businessmen”? Perhaps Jay Michaelson, Hillary Clinton and the Forward. It’s hard to tell who in that gruesome bunch hates Israel more.

The “moderate” Saudi businessman whom Michaelson quotes is Saudi Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. Alaweed had his post 9/11 donation thrown back in his face after blaming America for the attack. And Moussaoui, the 20th hijacker, claimed that he was an Al Qaeda supporter.

He had also donated $27 million to terrorism against Israel at a telethon whose host declared on television, “Do not have any mercy, neither compassion on the Jews, their blood, their money, their flesh. Their women are yours to take, legitimately. Allah made them yours. Why don’t you enslave their women? Why don’t you wage jihad? Why don’t you pillage them?”

The Forward and Jay Michaelson would like American Jews to heed this warning about Trump’s extremism from a “moderate Saudi” who donated to the mass murder and rape of Jews.

Also, Jay Michaelson and the Forward warn American Jews not to vote for Trump because he “famously promised to “bomb the s___ out of ISIS.” This, according to Jay, ”would entail the murder of thousands of innocent people.” Some of whom might even be “moderate Saudi businessmen.”

Finally, we are warned that under Trump, “Egypt and Syria will soon resemble Hamas and Hezbollah: extremist, Islamist and violent.” This was formerly known as Obama and Hillary’s Arab Spring.

Michaelson contends that Republicans are voting from “that part of the brain that sends out constant ‘fight or flight’ messages based on threats and fear.” That’s an odd lack of self-awareness from a man who just desperately tried to hammer together some “fight or flight” messages on Trump.

But attacking Trump is easier than defending Hillary. And so we get this pathetic showing of Muslim terrorist financiers and Jewish anti-Semites against Trump. It’s as meaningful as Hillary’s pro-Israel pandering.

The real Hillary, the one caught with an inbox full of attacks on Israel, including approval for the bigotry of Max Blumenthal whose work was cited by the Kansas City Jewish Community Center gunman, is quite a different creature from the public Hillary who suddenly loves Israel.

The real Hillary, the one who kissed Arafat’s wife and listened placidly to her rant about Israeli poison gas, has a long anti-Israel history. Her time as Secretary of State has already given us a preview of her policies. She will continue demanding apartheid segregation for Jews living in ’67 Israel and she will go on pushing for more concessions to Islamic terrorists. She will back the Iran deal that she championed.

Hillary will go on financing Iran’s wave of Islamic terrorism while ignoring its nuclear violations.

But there is nothing extraordinary about any of this. Hillary is not a radical in a party of moderates. The Democratic Party has drifted so far into the fever swamps of the radical left that opposition to Israel is mainstream. The only reason that Hillary reserves her fulminations for phone calls and private emails is that even though her inner circle of advisers is vocally anti-Israel, some in her outer circle of donors are pro-Israel. And she still needs their support. At least while the election is still going on.

Israel has ceased to be a bipartisan issue. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton reversed JFK and LBJ’s pro-Israel policies. This rejection has been cloaked in euphemisms about “two states for two people”, but that really means championing the creation of Islamic terror states inside Israel.

This policy, which has until recently been bipartisan, represents the greatest threat to Israel.

Donald Trump is the first Republican presidential nominee to firmly break with it. Unlike Hillary, Trump hasn’t kissed Arafat’s wife or spent an hour on the phone yelling at the Prime Minister of Israel. Instead he has said that Jews should be able to keep on living and building houses in ’67 Israel.

Jews living as a free people in their own land is the essence of Zionism. And it’s a rejection of the hateful ravings of Hillary Clinton, the Forward and the “moderate” Saudi businessmen of Islamic terror.

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Iran and the future of the Middle East

Posted September 2, 2016 by danmillerinpanama
Categories: Iran - Green Revolution, Iran - Middle East, Iran - sanctions relief, Iran scam, Obama and Iran
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Iran and the future of the Middle East, Israel Hayom, Clifford D. May, September 2, 2016

U.S. President Richard Nixon went to China. President Barack Obama will not be going to Iran.

Nixon’s 1972 visit to the people’s republic included meetings with both Chairman Mao Zedong, the communist revolutionary leader, and Premier Zhou Enlai, the pragmatic head of the government. Detente and normalization of relations followed.

By stark contrast, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Islamic republic’s revolutionary supreme leader, and Hassan Rouhani, the pragmatic president of the theocratic regime, will not deign even to share a bottle of pomegranate juice with Obama, president of “satanic” America, their avowed enemy.

Obama appears unperturbed, confident that detente and normalization of relations — not to mention a more stable Middle East — lie at the end of the road he began to pave with his 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, a nuclear deal that garnered neither Congress’ endorsement nor the public’s approval.

The fraught controversy over how we got to this point and where we’re heading is the subject of a new book: “The Iran Wars: Spy Games, Bank Battles, and the Secret Deals that Reshaped the Middle East,” by Jay Solomon, chief foreign affairs correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.

What I found striking in this first draft of contemporary history: the opportunities Obama missed — or, more precisely, dismissed. In 2009, the brutish Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner of presidential elections that were not just manipulated by Khamenei — that’s standard procedure — but almost certainly falsified as well. Iranians went out into the streets chanting “Death to the dictators!” and “President Obama, are you with us or against us?”

According to Solomon, not only did Obama refuse to support them, he ended programs to document Iranian human rights abuses and ordered the CIA to turn its back on the Green Movement. “The agency has contingency plans for supporting democratic uprisings anywhere in the world,” Solomon writes. “This includes providing dissidents with communications, money, and in extreme cases even arms. But in this case the White House ordered it to stand down.”

Obama also was unenthusiastic about sanctions. He and Secretary of State John Kerry believed that showing Iran’s rulers respect and engaging them in dialogue would be sufficient to mitigate their animosity and bellicosity. “So many wars have been fought over misunderstandings, misinterpretations, lack of effective diplomacy,” Kerry told Solomon in a 2016 interview. “War is the failure of diplomacy.”

I suspect Clausewitz and Sun Tzu would beg to differ. More to the point, quite a few members of Congress, including such Republicans as Mark Kirk, Ed Royce and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, and such Democrats as Bob Menendez, Eliot Engel and Howard Berman, were convinced that talking softly was not enough, that when dealing with Iran’s rulers it was necessary to carry a sizeable stick. Solomon notes that congressional staffers partnered with several Washington think tanks to find “new ways to squeeze Iran’s oil profits and ability to conduct financial transactions.”

In particular, he adds, a “lethal weapon” came from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (the think tank I founded after 9/11/01 and where I serve as president) which “focuses on combating Middle East extremism and, in particular, promoting the security of the United States, Israel and other democracies threatened by radical Islam.” FDD’s executive director, Mark Dubowitz, and his Farsi-speaking research team “provided a constant stream of reports to U.S. lawmakers on Iranian companies and individuals that they believed should be sanctioned for their roles in developing Iran’s nuclear program.”

Eventually, Dubowitz, working with Senator Kirk’s then deputy chief of staff Richard Goldberg, came up with a “financial bomb”: a Belgium-based financial firm called SWIFT “which hosts the international computer network that facilitates virtually every banking transaction in the world through an extensive messaging and financial tracking system.” The Obama administration opposed expelling Iran from SWIFT but “Congress once again overrode the White House’s concerns and unanimously passed” legislation in 2012 that “de-SWIFTed” Tehran.

By 2013, such measures, “were crippling Iran’s economy.” Had the pressure been intensified — or even just maintained — who knows what concessions Iran’s rulers might have made to avoid economic crisis and collapse? But Obama eased up on Iran in exchange for an interim agreement. After that, few if any Iranian concessions were forthcoming. Khamenei insisted that his red lines be observed while those laid down by Obama were transgressed — one after another.

In the end, Iran would not even have to acknowledge that it ever had a nuclear weapons program, much less reveal how far that program had progressed. Nevertheless, the Obama administration would agree that Iran “be allowed to build an industrial-scale nuclear program, with hundreds of thousands of machines, after a ten year period of restraint.”

“I have no doubt we avoided a war,” Kerry told the author in an interview early this year. He could be right. Alternatively, what he sees as avoidance could turn out to be only postponement.

Based on faith rather than evidence, Kerry and Obama believe that the Islamic republic will moderate; that it will give up its ambition of establishing a vast new Islamic empire; that it will no longer dream of bringing “death” to America, Israel, Saudi Arabia and other “infidel” nations; that it will not evolve into a more formidable and lethal adversary.

“Obama has wagered that Khamenei and his revolutionary allies won’t outlast the terms of the nuclear agreement,” Solomon concludes. “If they do, the United States risks unleashing an even larger nuclear cascade on the Middle East.” Yes, that’s the wager. Seems like a long shot to me.

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New Emails Show Clinton Foundation Donors Lobbied Huma For Diplomatic Passports

Posted September 1, 2016 by danmillerinpanama
Categories: Clinton Foundation, Department of State, Diplomatic passports, Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin
Tags: , , ,

New Emails Show Clinton Foundation Donors Lobbied Huma For Diplomatic Passports, Daily Caller, Kevin Daley, September 1, 2016

New emails released by Judicial Watch in connection with its probe of the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation indicate Clinton Foundation donors lobbied senior Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin for diplomatic passports.

Abedin responded positively to the donor inquiries, according to the email.

The donors in question include Doug Band and Justin Cooper. The email indicates that Band reached out to Abedin in 2009, when she served as deputy chief of staff at the U.S. Department of State, and asked for her help in obtaining diplomatic passports for him, Cooper, and a third individual identified only by their initials.

“We had them years ago but they lapsed and we didn’t bother getting them,” Band wrote.

“Ok will figure it out,” Abedin replied.

Band was an aide to former President Bill Clinton before founding Teneo Holdings, a global advisory firm with extensive ties to the Clinton orbit.

Former President Clinton was both a client of the firm and a paid consultant. Abedin served simultaneously at posts in the State Department and Teneo. Cooper was also an aide to former President Clinton. (RELATED: Exclusive: State Department Won’t Release Clinton Foundation Emails For 27 Months)

Band previously lobbied Department of State officials on behalf of Gilbert Chagoury, another Clinton Foundation donor who was eventually denied entry to the U.S. due to possible connections to Hamas, the Palestinian terror group.

Diplomatic passports are a prized asset, as significant benefits accrue to their holders. They are almost exclusively issued to government employees representing the United States in an official capacity. The Department of State requires applicants to present their official orders when procuring such documents.

Individuals with diplomatic passports enjoy easy passage at international borders, access to special lines at airports, no tax liability on certain sources of income, and relaxed visa restrictions.

The Clinton campaign has not yet responded to inquiries.

 

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Iran: Anti-American Propaganda

Posted September 1, 2016 by danmillerinpanama
Categories: Iranian media, Iranian military, Iranian navy, Iranian Threats
Tags: , , ,

Iran: Anti-American Propaganda, MEMRI-TV via YouTube

(H/t LS for the video link. — DM)

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Who killed Al-Adnani? US, Russia or maybe ISIS?

Posted September 1, 2016 by danmillerinpanama
Categories: Al-Adani, Islamic State, Obama and Syria, Russia - Syrian war, Syria war, U.S. Military, U.S. Syria war
Tags: , , , , , ,

Who killed Al-Adnani? US, Russia or maybe ISIS? DEBKAfile, September 1, 2016

Adnani

While the US has frequently claimed to have liquidated an Islamic terrorist leader, Russia put in its first claim on Aug. 31, when the defense ministry in Moscow announced for the first time that the day before, an SU-34 bomber had killed ISIS senior terrorist mastermind Mohammed Al-Adnani during a high-profile gathering at Maaratat-Umm Khaush near Aleppo.

The claim was worded so as to indicate that Russian intelligence had pulled off a major feat by a hit that took out 40 high-profile operatives.

This claim came 24 hours after a US official said that a Predator drone rocket had hit a car believed to be carrying Adnani near Al-Bab, and that the results were “being assessed” – even though ISIS itself reported that the terrorist leader, tagged as senior spokesman, “was martyred while surveying the operations to repel the military campaigns against Aleppo.”

The Pentagon sources called the Russian version “lies” and “a joke.”

The distance between al-Bab and Maaratat-Umm Khaush is only 28km, but the gap between the American and Russian claims is less immeasurable.

Fighting has escalated around the city in recent weeks, with rebels breaking a siege by government forces and Syrian and Russian warplanes bombing rebel-held areas.

The competing Russian and American claims of a successful aerial-cum-intelligence action against a high-profile ISIS founder-member break new ground in the war on Islamic terror.

Al-Adnani, who was born in 1977 in the northern Syrian town of Banash, was responsible in the past two years for orchestrating terrorist atrocities in Tunisia, Paris, Brussels, Orlando, Nice, Sinai Peninsula and Istanbul, as well as suicide bombings in Baghdad.

Far from being a joke, the cold war dividing Moscow and Washington appears to have spread to the war on Islamist terror and infected the Syrian arena.

The early collaboration between the two powers in the Syrian conflict has broken down. This was admitted on Aug. 26 in Geneva, after US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov failed to agree on further military and intelligence cooperation.

Ironically, it is noted by DEBKAfile’s intelligence and counterterrorism sources, that both powers’ clandestine services received intelligence on their target’s movements from the same source.

IsisSpokesman480

That is another first; never before has any Islamic terrorist organization fed the same piece of intelligence to the US and Russia. If that is what happened, it could mean only one thing: that someone in ISIS had decided it was time for Al-Adani to go.

This would be par for the course in the harsh world of jihadist terror organizations, such as Al Qaeda from which ISIS sprung.

When Osama bin Laden, whom US special forces killed in 2011, felt the need to cull the Al-Qaeda leadership of high-profile operatives who had outlived their usefulness or were suffering from fatigue, he would get rid of them by arranging for US intelligence to be tipped off about their whereabouts.

In one notable instance of this purge, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, senior planner of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, was turned in to the CIA in 2003.

If this is what happened to Al-Adani, DEBKAfile’s counterterrorism sources link it to the recent reappearance on the Islamist terrorist scene in Syria three weeks ago of the veteran Al-Qaeda master-terrorist Saif al-Adel with a group of followers.

Al-Adel is rated one of the world’s most dangerous terrorists, with long experience of planning and executing mass-casualty operations stretching back to the 1980s. He is “credited” with the large-scale assaults on the East African US embassies in 1998 and a string of murderous strikes in Saudi Arabia in 2003, some of which hit US targets.

It is not yet known how Al-Adel and his gang reached Syria and for what purpose. They are only known to have crossed the border from Iraq. It is presumed by intelligence watchers of terrorist insider politics that, after deciding that Al-Adnan was a spent asset, ISIS leaders found his replacement.

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