Erdoğan's 'quiet jihad'
By Nadav Shragai
Israel Hayom
January 6, 2020
Palestinian Authority officials are calling the gift the Turkish government gave them a few years ago "the treasure." The trove contains 140,000 pages of carefully arranged microfilm that could have a dramatic effect on Israel's ability to hold onto a number of assets – land and structures – throughout Israel, in the West Bank, and east Jerusalem.
The "treasure" is actually a copy of the Ottoman Archive and includes thousands of documents of land registration under the Ottoman Empire, which ruled what is now Israel from 1517-1917. The Palestinians see these documents as a game-changer in their battle with Israel over land. They have already used the archive to challenge Israeli ownership of land and real estate in various parts of the country.
The first complete copy of the valuable archive was placed in the building of the PA consulate in Ankara for fear that the Israelis would get their hands on it. In March of last year, a formal celebration marked the transfer of part of the archive to Bethlehem. The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center documented the event, as well as the transfer of the archive in its entirety. But for some reason – even though the Palestinians now have a tool that could shake up the Israeli real estate market – the story has stayed under the radar.
To illustrate the possible ramifications of the Turkish move, we could compare it to a better-known incident in which the Greek Orthodox Church refused to extend leases on its extensive land holdings in Jerusalem. As a result, thousands of Jewish families in the capital are now living under the threat of being evicted from their homes.
A key figure at the ceremony in Bethlehem was Yousef Adais, minister of religious endowments in the PA, who was given the files that have to do with the Waqf's properties in Bethlehem and Jerusalem. At the event, the Palestinians talked about the Israeli government's so-called "attempts to falsify" history, and now, lawyers in east Jerusalem regularly consult the Ottoman Archive to determine property and land ownership. The documents help them in the legal battles they are waging over the ownership of land, especially in east Jerusalem.
One obvious example are the properties and plots in the Old City of Jerusalem that Jews and Arabs are battling over. The most famous is the Western Wall plaza, where the Mughrabi neighborhood used to stand. Israel evacuated and demolished it to lay down the broad plaza. That was land that Israel confiscated, but at least in terms of propaganda, brandishing the deeds to it could be a big embarrassment for Israel.
Saeed al-Haj, a Palestinian researcher and expert on the Turkish matter, reported back in 2015 on a giant project carried out by an organization called the "Turkish-Palestinian Forum." As part of the project, hundreds of thousands of document from the Ottoman Archive are being transferred so that Palestinians can pick and choose those that are relevant to the Palestinian issue. Al-Haj thinks that this will give the Palestinians ground to file hundreds of lawsuits against Israel, here and abroad.
Working with the mufti
The PA isn't losing any time. Judge Musa Shakarna, chairman of the Palestinian Land Authority, is already registering land in the tabu for Judea and Samaria as well as Jerusalem, with help from Turkey and its archive. In an interview to the Wafa news agency, Shakarna made it clear that the process has started and no one can stop it. He defined the move as strategic and explained that by registering the lands of Palestinians who live outside the country, he is implementing their right of return. Shakarna assesses that by 2023, all of the land in the West Bank will be legally registered. PA President Mahmoud Abbas is involved, as is Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the people from TIKA, a Turkish development NGO. TIKA is active across the globe in the name of the Turkish government, including in the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem, where it invests some $1.3 million annually.
Erdoğan, it turns out, does not limit himself to ideology. The president of Turkey, who sees himself as the patron of the Muslim Brotherhood and a knife of the Ottoman Caliphate that will one day return to Jerusalem, has decided to take action to implement his vision of restoring Islam's glory throughout "Palestine" as a whole and Jerusalem in particular. The story of the archive is the crowning achievement of his recent moves, but he is also promoting a Turkish national awakening in the capital through cultural events, Turkish flags, and especially dawa – known as the "quiet jihad." Dawa is by definition activity that focuses on charity, education, and social assistance in an attempt to bring people closer to Islam. In Israel, dozens of dawa groups are active and receive funding from Turkey. They help the Arab population with religious, cultural, community, and social matters, thus strengthening Turkey's influence in Israel, with special emphasis on Jerusalem.
We reported on the activity of some of these groups about two and a half years ago. Most are still busy, and more have popped up. One central organization is the "Turkish Cultural Center," which focuses on developing and spreading the Ottoman legacy and the dream of reviving the empire in the areas it ruled until 1917.
Only a few weeks ago, the center signed an agreement to cooperate with the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf. The center provides encouragement and assistance in funding Turkish language programs in east Jerusalem schools and in universities such as Bir Zeit and Al Quds. At the signing ceremony, the Waqf was represented by Sheikh Ekrima Sa'id Sabri, the former mufti of Jerusalem.
A few years ago, Sabri rolled out a campaign to rebuild terrorists' homes that Israel has demolished and even called suicide bombings "legitimate." He is identified with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as the Islamic Movement in Israel. Sabri is a close associate of both Sheikh Raed Salah, head of the outlawed Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement, and Erdoğan. Two years ago, Erdoğan conferred on him the "Defender of Jerusalem" medal.
The Turkish Culture Center is located on Al Zahara Street in Jerusalem but deals with matters beyond culture. Last year, the center was a partner in a conference that featured calls rejecting Jewish ties to Jerusalem, and on the Palestinians' independence day it celebrated the "29th year since the declaration of a Palestinian state."
Who remembers the governor's house?
Until not long ago, Israeli-Turkish cultural relations were different. It was none other than right-wing politician Rehavam Zeevi who initiated a program to rebuild the Saraya in Jaffa, the former home of the Turkish governor. It was a different time; Erdoğan hadn't been elected, and Zeevi was working with the Turks. Even after Zeevi was murdered in 2001, the Turks and the Israeli Tourism Ministry, along with the Tel Aviv-Jaffa Municipality, continued to promote the project and invested millions of shekels in it. The historic structure, which was bombed by the Lehi in 1948 and stood derelict until 2002, was refurbished.
Architect Eyal Ziv cooperated fully with the Turkish architect. He recalls that the Turks were responsible for rebuilding the interior of the governor's house, and says the project was "free from religious or national zealotry. We focused on preserving the building culture, within the framework of a larger plan to rebuild Old Jaffa, but Operation Cast Lead in December 2008 threw a wrench in the works."
Ziv says that the building's rededication had been planned down to the smallest detail: "The furniture that was brought in was a copy of the furniture in the Topkapi Palace, the seat of the sultans in Istanbul. Erdoğan, who had just been elected prime minister, was supposed to come to Israel and Shimon Peres, as president, was to welcome him. But then came the Mavi Marmara incident. Erdoğan became more extremist and relations with Turkey deteriorated. In effect, the plan was frozen. Today, the Turkish Embassy is renting the building, and it's usually closed," he says.
Now everything has changed. The owners of souvenir shops in the Old City sell keychains with pendants that show the Western Wall on one side, and the Turkish flag on the other. In the past two years, the Turks have funded not only a replacement for the gold crescent that tops the Dome of the Rock, but also the reconstruction of other Islamic monuments like the Dome of the Chain in the center of the Temple Mount and parts of the eastern wall of the Old City.
The Turks' position on the Temple Mount is clear. It fits in well with the blood libel "Al-Aqsa is in danger" that is repeatedly used against Israel. A new computer game, "Guardians of Al-Aqsa" – which is aimed at young children – places a "guard" in the center whose job it is to "save Al-Aqsa from the Zionists" and "fight the Judaization of Jerusalem." Players look for the "lost treasure." On the way, they are asked to answer questions about Al-Aqsa's past and present and the winner is called the "liberator of Jerusalem."
The game was invented by the organization Burj al-Laklak, which is supported by the Turkish group "Reading Time." Another NGO, Al Bustan, sent delegations of student athletes from Jerusalem to competitions in Turkey last August. The mayor of the host city, Kayseri, spoke to them, and the students had their pictures taken with Palestinian and Turkish flags.
'You poisoned me'
While the Turks' main focus is Jerusalem, they are active throughout the country and their interest in Jaffa and other Arab population centers goes beyond considerations of tourism or culture. According to Mehmet Damarg, the head of the Turkish organization "Our Legacy," the group allocated funds to rebuild the Hassen Bek and Sea (Al-Bahr) mosques in Jaffa, as well as the Al Jarina Mosque in Haifa.
"We can say that 'Our Legacy' created an important historic change to the Turkish worldview and their interaction with the issue of Palestine," Damarg explained in one of his many online interviews. "Today, thanks be to God, 'Our Legacy' has links to our Arab and Muslim peoples in many countries."
Our Legacy, which is headquartered in Istanbul, was in contact with Raed Salah. One of its main sources of funding is TIKA, and its goals include "protecting Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Ottoman legacy in Jerusalem."
There are other Turkish organizations that maintain contact with Sabri, who recently led the Waqf's campaign to take control of the area in front of the Gate of Mercy, and Archbishop of Sebastia Atallah Hanna, who accused Israel of poisoning him. Only a few weeks ago, Hanna took part in a conference in Turkey titled "Apartheid in Israel." Hanna has a long history of anti-Israeli stances. He has visited the homes of suicide bombers, and even met with Syrian President Bashar Assad.
Other Turkish targets include the mixed Jewish-Arab cities of Acre, Ramla, and Lod. In Acre, the Turks have tried to plant their flag, but without success. In Ramla, they are trying to buy influence in the White Mosque. In Lod, the Great Mosque (Al-Omari Mosque) was allocated 620,000 shekels ($180,000) for renovations from the NGO "Hand in Hand." Israel Hayom reporter Akiva Bigman has reported on the organization's activity on the website Mida. "Hand in Hand" was established in Ankara in 2012 to "make things easier for the residents of the territory Israel occupied in 1948."
Since then, Hand in Hand has busied itself rebuilding mosques and Muslim cemeteries that were damaged in the "catastrophe of 1948" and places that have "been transferred to Israel's filthy hands." The group has paid the salaries of dozens of imams throughout Israel, funded Quran study, funded student groups at Israeli universities, and even helped facilitate Muslim visits to Al-Aqsa. In the past few years, Hand in Hand has turned its attention to the Negev and fostered ties with the Bedouin population. It worked with the Islamic Movement and helped outfit illegal Bedouin villages with water and solar energy, all while inculcating the narrative of the "Nakba" among Israeli Arabs. Recently, representatives of Hand in Hand took part in an event in Turkey alongside activists from IHH, which Israel has declared a terrorist organization.
Turkish organizations and money are filtering through Israel, but particularly Jerusalem, where a total of 130 buildings have been restored thus far thanks to Turkish money. According to Israeli security officials, some 4,300 homes and 70 mosques in east Jerusalem have been marked for renovations to be funded by Turkish NGOs. A few members of the Southern Branch of the Islamic Movement have their fingers in the pie and recommend community and religious projects they believe worth of Turkish funding, and Turkey listens to what they have to say.
Israel, which is taking out Hamas cells that were handled from Turkey, is finding it hard to handle the Turkish civil activity, which should be an easier task. In only one case has the government outlawed one of these organizations after it managed to prove that it had links to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. According to the security establishment, the group functioned as a conduit for projects Hamas was executing in Jerusalem.
In another case, the National Security Council recommending putting limits on the activity of a large Turkish organization. In another instance, the Jerusalem Municipality approved a request for a building permit for a sports center for the charity organization Women of Zur Baher, which is linked to Hamas and has received money from Turkey.
'Embracing Jerusalem'
Maor Tzemach, head of the group Lach, Yerushalayim ["For you, Jerusalem"], which has been tracking Turkish activity in Jerusalem for years, claims that the extensive Turkish activity harms Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem, and that it is time for Israel to draw clear boundaries for Turkish involvement in the city and the rest of the country. Tzemach and his organization continually supply Israeli authorities with relevant information, but don't think Israel has taken any significant action to stop it.
Tzemach's group has spent the last few months documenting anti-Israel and anti-Semitic conferences in Turkey that functioned as platforms for meetings between people from Hamas, the Jerusalem Waqf, heads of Turkish organizations active in Israel, and Erdoğan himself.
"It should have set off warning lights for the policymakers in Israel a long time ago," Tzemach says.
Asa Ofir, an analyst on Turkey and a doctoral candidate in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at Bar-Ilan University, has been plowing through Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter and documenting some of the Jerusalem-themed conferences taking place in Turkey. Three examples of the many available include a conference titled "Embracing Jerusalem," which was held in the town of Tekirdağ; "Time for Jerusalem," a play that was put on with sponsorship from Erdoğan's office; and a special panel marking 50 years since the "occupation" of Jerusalem that was organized by the city of Esenler.
"If we lose Jerusalem, we lose Mecca," Erdoğan recently declared. He is continuing his efforts to not only avoid losing Jerusalem, but also to conquer it.
Tuesday, January 07, 2020
WHAT WAS ISRAEL’S ROLE IN KILLINF SOLEIMANI?
Washington tips its hat to unnamed Middle East partners who helped take out Iran’s most powerful general
By Yochanan Visser
Israel Today
January 6, 2020
The year 2020 was only three days old when an event happened that could be the most important for Israel in years and that has the potential to set alight the whole Middle East.
Early Friday morning, an American MQ-9 Reaper drone killed the second most powerful Iranian official Qassem Soleimani the commander of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis the commander of the Kata’ib Hezbollah militia and the deputy commander of the al-Hashd al-Shaabi umbrella organization of Shiite militias in Iraq.
Soleimani and al-Muhandis were targeted with Hellfire missiles after the Kata’ib Hezbollah militia killed an American engineer and wounded a number of US soldiers during an attack on a military facility near the city of Kirkuk in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Thereafter, the US military launched five missile strikes on Kata’ib Hezbollah bases in both Syria and Iraq after which Soleimani ordered the ransacking of the US embassy in the so-called Green Zone in Baghdad.
By ordering the attack on the US embassy Soleimani clearly overplayed his hand since the US is still traumatized by earlier attacks on its diplomatic missions in both Iran (1979 hostage crisis) and Benghazi in Libya when in September 2012 an angry mob ransacked the US mission in the city and killed the American ambassador and three other US citizens.
The Quds commander apparently became intoxicated by the successes he scored in the attempt to create a Shiite Crescent that would ultimately threaten Israel’s existence, and the admiration he received by Iranians and Shiite leaders outside Iran.
Israeli politicians and officials saw Soleimani as the architect of the emerging new Persian empire which now includes Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and to a lesser degree Yemen.
The Mossad had Soleimani on its hit list after earlier Israeli plots to kill Soleimani were called off at last moment or were discovered such as the attempt last year to assassinate the Quds commander when he was scheduled to visit the shrine in memory of his father and the Iranian authorities discovered a 500 kg bomb that was hidden beneath his chair.
Earlier in January 2008, the Mossad had Soleimani in its sights when he met Hezbollah terror-chief Imad Mugniyeh who after meeting with the Iranian commander in Damascus was assassinated by a small explosive device that blew up his car.
Soleimani was admired by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei who treated the Quds commander as his own son, and appointed him a special adviser. The Iranian leader last year praised Soleimani for his strategic successes and called him “a living martyr.”
The threat that Soleimani posed to Israel cannot be underestimated.
Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu repeatedly warned the Iranian general to be careful in his statements and actions against the Jewish state but it didn’t prevent Soleimani from building up strong ties with Israel’s Palestinian adversaries Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad while also supplying Hezbollah in Lebanon with advanced weaponry such as the Kornet anti-tank missile.
Qassem Soleimani was one of the IRGC officers who founded Hezbollah and more recently was behind the formation of the Golan Liberation Brigade an all-Shiite force which was founded with the goal of eliminating Israel via a multi-front war.
Soleimani was spotted during the battles against ISIS in Tikrit, Ramadi, Fallujah, and Mosul in Iraq which was retaken from the Islamic State Jihadist terror organization in the middle of 2017.
The Quds commander has also overseen the major battle against rebels in Aleppo, Syria and the Qalamoun offensive where Iran reportedly is running an underground nuclear facility in the vicinity of the town of Qusayr.
In Iraq Soleimani became increasingly active after the popular unrest started to threaten Iranian influence over the country and caused the resignation of Prime Minister Adil Abdul al-Mahdi an Iranian puppet.
It was Soleimani who advised the Iraqi government to use snipers against the protesters and this resulted in the deaths of 500 of them.
He later again intervened in Iraq to secure a pro-Iranian politician would be appointed the new Iraqi Prime Minister and reportedly ordered al-Hashd al-Shaabi to attack US facilities in the country such as the American embassy in Baghdad that was earlier struck by missiles and mortars.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed after Soleimani’s assassination that the Quds commander was actively plotting an imminent attack “that could have killed dozens or hundreds of Americans.”
That could be true but the fact of the matter is that Soleimani flew to Baghdad after visiting Beirut and Damascus according to Israeli media.
Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu at least knew in advance that Soleimani was scheduled to be assassinated.
During a speech to the Israeli nation, last week about his legal troubles Netanyahu hinted that something big was about to happen considering Iran. He said that “very, very dramatic things were happening in the region” and later repeated this warning in a Tweet.
The Israeli leader also spoke on the phone with Pompeo at least three times over the past ten days while Netanyahu earlier suddenly traveled to Portugal where he discussed Iran with the Secretary of State.
Pompeo said after the Soleimani assassination that unspecified partners in the Middle East had been “fantastic” in the preparations for the attack on the Quds Commander.
It could be that the two decided that the US military would take out Soleimani to prevent Iran from getting an alibi for attacking Israel.
In this respect, it was remarkable that Netanyahu sufficed with a short statement in which he said that the US, just like Israel, had the right to defend itself.
The Israeli PM, furthermore, ordered his ministers not to comment on the assassination of Soleimani.
IRGC commanders now threaten “Israeli cities”could be subject to revenge attacks and this explains why the IDF has raised it’s level of alertness and ordered the temporary closure of the Ski-site on Mount Hermon the scene of earlier Iranian missile attacks.
Some pundits now claim that the situation in the Middle East could end-up in a new World War after the assassination of Soleimani. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran could indeed lead to a very serious escalation in the current war between Iran, Israel and the United States and drag other countries into the conflict.
By Yochanan Visser
Israel Today
January 6, 2020
The year 2020 was only three days old when an event happened that could be the most important for Israel in years and that has the potential to set alight the whole Middle East.
Early Friday morning, an American MQ-9 Reaper drone killed the second most powerful Iranian official Qassem Soleimani the commander of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis the commander of the Kata’ib Hezbollah militia and the deputy commander of the al-Hashd al-Shaabi umbrella organization of Shiite militias in Iraq.
Soleimani and al-Muhandis were targeted with Hellfire missiles after the Kata’ib Hezbollah militia killed an American engineer and wounded a number of US soldiers during an attack on a military facility near the city of Kirkuk in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Thereafter, the US military launched five missile strikes on Kata’ib Hezbollah bases in both Syria and Iraq after which Soleimani ordered the ransacking of the US embassy in the so-called Green Zone in Baghdad.
By ordering the attack on the US embassy Soleimani clearly overplayed his hand since the US is still traumatized by earlier attacks on its diplomatic missions in both Iran (1979 hostage crisis) and Benghazi in Libya when in September 2012 an angry mob ransacked the US mission in the city and killed the American ambassador and three other US citizens.
The Quds commander apparently became intoxicated by the successes he scored in the attempt to create a Shiite Crescent that would ultimately threaten Israel’s existence, and the admiration he received by Iranians and Shiite leaders outside Iran.
Israeli politicians and officials saw Soleimani as the architect of the emerging new Persian empire which now includes Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and to a lesser degree Yemen.
The Mossad had Soleimani on its hit list after earlier Israeli plots to kill Soleimani were called off at last moment or were discovered such as the attempt last year to assassinate the Quds commander when he was scheduled to visit the shrine in memory of his father and the Iranian authorities discovered a 500 kg bomb that was hidden beneath his chair.
Earlier in January 2008, the Mossad had Soleimani in its sights when he met Hezbollah terror-chief Imad Mugniyeh who after meeting with the Iranian commander in Damascus was assassinated by a small explosive device that blew up his car.
Soleimani was admired by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei who treated the Quds commander as his own son, and appointed him a special adviser. The Iranian leader last year praised Soleimani for his strategic successes and called him “a living martyr.”
The threat that Soleimani posed to Israel cannot be underestimated.
Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu repeatedly warned the Iranian general to be careful in his statements and actions against the Jewish state but it didn’t prevent Soleimani from building up strong ties with Israel’s Palestinian adversaries Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad while also supplying Hezbollah in Lebanon with advanced weaponry such as the Kornet anti-tank missile.
Qassem Soleimani was one of the IRGC officers who founded Hezbollah and more recently was behind the formation of the Golan Liberation Brigade an all-Shiite force which was founded with the goal of eliminating Israel via a multi-front war.
Soleimani was spotted during the battles against ISIS in Tikrit, Ramadi, Fallujah, and Mosul in Iraq which was retaken from the Islamic State Jihadist terror organization in the middle of 2017.
The Quds commander has also overseen the major battle against rebels in Aleppo, Syria and the Qalamoun offensive where Iran reportedly is running an underground nuclear facility in the vicinity of the town of Qusayr.
In Iraq Soleimani became increasingly active after the popular unrest started to threaten Iranian influence over the country and caused the resignation of Prime Minister Adil Abdul al-Mahdi an Iranian puppet.
It was Soleimani who advised the Iraqi government to use snipers against the protesters and this resulted in the deaths of 500 of them.
He later again intervened in Iraq to secure a pro-Iranian politician would be appointed the new Iraqi Prime Minister and reportedly ordered al-Hashd al-Shaabi to attack US facilities in the country such as the American embassy in Baghdad that was earlier struck by missiles and mortars.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed after Soleimani’s assassination that the Quds commander was actively plotting an imminent attack “that could have killed dozens or hundreds of Americans.”
That could be true but the fact of the matter is that Soleimani flew to Baghdad after visiting Beirut and Damascus according to Israeli media.
Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu at least knew in advance that Soleimani was scheduled to be assassinated.
During a speech to the Israeli nation, last week about his legal troubles Netanyahu hinted that something big was about to happen considering Iran. He said that “very, very dramatic things were happening in the region” and later repeated this warning in a Tweet.
The Israeli leader also spoke on the phone with Pompeo at least three times over the past ten days while Netanyahu earlier suddenly traveled to Portugal where he discussed Iran with the Secretary of State.
Pompeo said after the Soleimani assassination that unspecified partners in the Middle East had been “fantastic” in the preparations for the attack on the Quds Commander.
It could be that the two decided that the US military would take out Soleimani to prevent Iran from getting an alibi for attacking Israel.
In this respect, it was remarkable that Netanyahu sufficed with a short statement in which he said that the US, just like Israel, had the right to defend itself.
The Israeli PM, furthermore, ordered his ministers not to comment on the assassination of Soleimani.
IRGC commanders now threaten “Israeli cities”could be subject to revenge attacks and this explains why the IDF has raised it’s level of alertness and ordered the temporary closure of the Ski-site on Mount Hermon the scene of earlier Iranian missile attacks.
Some pundits now claim that the situation in the Middle East could end-up in a new World War after the assassination of Soleimani. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran could indeed lead to a very serious escalation in the current war between Iran, Israel and the United States and drag other countries into the conflict.
YALE, AL SHARPTON AND THE ATTACKS ON NEW YORK’S JEWS
Disdain for the ultra-Orthodox leads the elites to tolerate hatred, which turns into violence
By Abigail Shrier
The Wall Street Journal
January 3, 2020
My entering class at Yale Law School in 2002 had one Jew who might be called “ultra-Orthodox.” He traveled some two hours to campus each Monday from Brooklyn, N.Y., and before the weekend, as far as I knew, he headed back. On Fridays when Sabbath came in early and he needed to get home, he could be seen racing white-faced for the exit, one hand pinning a velvet yarmulke to his head, the wheels of his tagalong briefcase crying out.
Yale Law School was about as secular a place as I had ever been—an institution where God seemed not only absent but strangely irrelevant. I sympathized with his need to chase spiritual renewal somewhere else. But the open snickers of our classmates surprised me. They imitated how he raised his hand in class (palm a little too rigid and tilted slightly forward). They joked that it looked like a Nazi salute. They rolled their eyes whenever someone mentioned his name.
In an institution pledged to champion the downtrodden, contempt coalesced happily on his head. Most surprising to me was how readily and wordlessly our classmates seemed to have agreed on their target. How did they know whom to kick around? Their defense of minorities stopped at his feet. So many unspoken rules of communication arranged themselves in a target on his back.
I thought of him this week, and the week before, and for many weeks before that, as the frequency of assaults in the New York area targeting ultra-Orthodox Jews rises from alarming to commonplace. The beatings in Brooklyn; threats hurled at ultra-Orthodox Jews on all manner of public transport; the brick bludgeoning in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood; the machete attack in Monsey, N.Y., north of the city; the shooting in a Jersey City, N.J., supermarket meant for the yeshiva upstairs filled with children.
Videos of the Brooklyn assaults seem borrowed from another time and place: of Jews attempting to mind their own business in black hats and dark suits, beaten by street thugs. The black hats and dark suits, provocation enough. The ghastly silence of the elites—or worse, intimations that the Jews themselves are responsible.
The AP tutted in a tweet that has since been removed: “The expansion of Hasidic communities around New York City has led to predictable civic sparring, but also flare-ups of what some call anti-Semitic rhetoric.” This came days after a madman charged the home of a Hasidic rabbi, hacking at Jewish heads with a machete. NBC New York tweeted from the same script: “With the expansion of Orthodox communities outside NYC has come civic sparring, and some fear the recent violence may be an outgrowth of that conflict.” Some fear . . . what exactly? That the Jews got what they deserved? That the attacks are a logical response to gentrification? Good people on both sides, is it?
This is Bill de Blasio’s New York, but it could just as easily be David Dinkins’s . And perhaps that is why we are seeing this again: the demon of hate, never exorcised, floats freely around. Our sin was to have whitewashed the Crown Heights pogrom of 1991 and lavished its instigator Al Sharpton with respectability.
After a car crash involving a Hasidic driver resulted in the death of Gavin Cato, the 7-year-old son of Guyanese immigrants, Mr. Sharpton led a three-day riot in Crown Heights. He blamed the accident on “diamond merchants,” and his followers chanted, “Kill the Jew.” They did. The Jew they killed was Yankel Rosenbaum, 29, a doctoral candidate from Australia. Nearly 200 more were injured in the melee.
The political and media elites forgave Mr. Sharpton. Democrats called no harm, no foul. The ultra-Orthodox vote Republican anyway. Mr. Sharpton rose to the Democratic debate stage in 2004 and now hosts a show on MSNBC. This year’s Democratic candidates for president have kissed his ring.
And so the ultra-Orthodox Jews find themselves sitting ducks again in a New York hostile or indifferent to their fate. Their values have never been so out of step with the city where they live. They have many children in a time when most Americans have few. Global warming doesn’t rate on their lists of top concerns. They lead traditional lives, directed toward God, and maintain traditional families. They don’t know the meaning of “genderqueer.”
They are, in other words, of increasingly little use to the Democrats in charge of the city, who now withhold law-enforcement protection. Perpetrators of anti-Semitic assaults have been quickly released on bail, or not arrested, or have had their verbal assaults deemed “not a hate crime.”
And this is what Martin Niemöller got wrong in his famous poem we can all recite from memory: “Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.” Other people don’t worry that they are next when ultra-Orthodox Jews are beaten each week—because they aren’t. There is no practical, selfish impetus to protect these Jews.
But there is a moral imperative. Because an America that allows its religious minorities to be harassed, assaulted and murdered in the streets is not a free country at all. If religious liberty means anything today, then it must be something we afford those peaceful minorities whose political views have become unfashionable, whose customs appear to be throwbacks, who remind us more of another place and time, where they were hunted and killed in unspeakable numbers. At stake isn’t merely the lives of these Jews, but the soul of a nation that once welcomed and embraced them.
By Abigail Shrier
The Wall Street Journal
January 3, 2020
My entering class at Yale Law School in 2002 had one Jew who might be called “ultra-Orthodox.” He traveled some two hours to campus each Monday from Brooklyn, N.Y., and before the weekend, as far as I knew, he headed back. On Fridays when Sabbath came in early and he needed to get home, he could be seen racing white-faced for the exit, one hand pinning a velvet yarmulke to his head, the wheels of his tagalong briefcase crying out.
Yale Law School was about as secular a place as I had ever been—an institution where God seemed not only absent but strangely irrelevant. I sympathized with his need to chase spiritual renewal somewhere else. But the open snickers of our classmates surprised me. They imitated how he raised his hand in class (palm a little too rigid and tilted slightly forward). They joked that it looked like a Nazi salute. They rolled their eyes whenever someone mentioned his name.
In an institution pledged to champion the downtrodden, contempt coalesced happily on his head. Most surprising to me was how readily and wordlessly our classmates seemed to have agreed on their target. How did they know whom to kick around? Their defense of minorities stopped at his feet. So many unspoken rules of communication arranged themselves in a target on his back.
I thought of him this week, and the week before, and for many weeks before that, as the frequency of assaults in the New York area targeting ultra-Orthodox Jews rises from alarming to commonplace. The beatings in Brooklyn; threats hurled at ultra-Orthodox Jews on all manner of public transport; the brick bludgeoning in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood; the machete attack in Monsey, N.Y., north of the city; the shooting in a Jersey City, N.J., supermarket meant for the yeshiva upstairs filled with children.
Videos of the Brooklyn assaults seem borrowed from another time and place: of Jews attempting to mind their own business in black hats and dark suits, beaten by street thugs. The black hats and dark suits, provocation enough. The ghastly silence of the elites—or worse, intimations that the Jews themselves are responsible.
The AP tutted in a tweet that has since been removed: “The expansion of Hasidic communities around New York City has led to predictable civic sparring, but also flare-ups of what some call anti-Semitic rhetoric.” This came days after a madman charged the home of a Hasidic rabbi, hacking at Jewish heads with a machete. NBC New York tweeted from the same script: “With the expansion of Orthodox communities outside NYC has come civic sparring, and some fear the recent violence may be an outgrowth of that conflict.” Some fear . . . what exactly? That the Jews got what they deserved? That the attacks are a logical response to gentrification? Good people on both sides, is it?
This is Bill de Blasio’s New York, but it could just as easily be David Dinkins’s . And perhaps that is why we are seeing this again: the demon of hate, never exorcised, floats freely around. Our sin was to have whitewashed the Crown Heights pogrom of 1991 and lavished its instigator Al Sharpton with respectability.
After a car crash involving a Hasidic driver resulted in the death of Gavin Cato, the 7-year-old son of Guyanese immigrants, Mr. Sharpton led a three-day riot in Crown Heights. He blamed the accident on “diamond merchants,” and his followers chanted, “Kill the Jew.” They did. The Jew they killed was Yankel Rosenbaum, 29, a doctoral candidate from Australia. Nearly 200 more were injured in the melee.
The political and media elites forgave Mr. Sharpton. Democrats called no harm, no foul. The ultra-Orthodox vote Republican anyway. Mr. Sharpton rose to the Democratic debate stage in 2004 and now hosts a show on MSNBC. This year’s Democratic candidates for president have kissed his ring.
And so the ultra-Orthodox Jews find themselves sitting ducks again in a New York hostile or indifferent to their fate. Their values have never been so out of step with the city where they live. They have many children in a time when most Americans have few. Global warming doesn’t rate on their lists of top concerns. They lead traditional lives, directed toward God, and maintain traditional families. They don’t know the meaning of “genderqueer.”
They are, in other words, of increasingly little use to the Democrats in charge of the city, who now withhold law-enforcement protection. Perpetrators of anti-Semitic assaults have been quickly released on bail, or not arrested, or have had their verbal assaults deemed “not a hate crime.”
And this is what Martin Niemöller got wrong in his famous poem we can all recite from memory: “Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.” Other people don’t worry that they are next when ultra-Orthodox Jews are beaten each week—because they aren’t. There is no practical, selfish impetus to protect these Jews.
But there is a moral imperative. Because an America that allows its religious minorities to be harassed, assaulted and murdered in the streets is not a free country at all. If religious liberty means anything today, then it must be something we afford those peaceful minorities whose political views have become unfashionable, whose customs appear to be throwbacks, who remind us more of another place and time, where they were hunted and killed in unspeakable numbers. At stake isn’t merely the lives of these Jews, but the soul of a nation that once welcomed and embraced them.
Monday, January 06, 2020
THE NEW QUDS FORCE COMMANDER
Who is Esmail Ghaani, the new head of Iran's formidable Quds Force?
Israel Hayom
January 5, 2020
A new Iranian general has stepped out of the shadows to lead the country's expeditionary Quds Force, becoming responsible for Tehran's proxies across the Mideast as the Islamic republic threatens the US with "harsh revenge" for killing its previous head, Qassem Soleimani.
The Quds Force is part of the 125,000-strong Revolutionary Guard, a paramilitary organization that answers only to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Guard oversees Iran's ballistic missile program, has its naval forces shadow the US Navy in the Persian Gulf and includes an all-volunteer Basij force.
Like his predecessor, Ghaani faced the carnage of Iran's eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s and later joined the newly founded Quds, or Jerusalem, Force.
While much still remains unknown about Ghaani, 62, Western sanctions suggest he's long been in a position of power in the organization. And likely one of his first duties will be to oversee whatever revenge Iran intends to seek for the US airstrike early Friday that killed his longtime friend Soleimani.
"We are children of war," Ghaani once said of his relationship with Soleimani, according to Iran's state-run IRNA news agency. "We are comrades on the battlefield and we have become friends in battle."
The IRGC has seen its influence grow ever-stronger both militarily and politically in recent decades. Iran's conventional military was decimated by the execution of its old officer class during the 1979 Islamic Revolution and later by sanctions.
A key driver of that influence comes from the Quds Force, which directs the activities of Tehran's proxies worldwide, which include Iraqi militiamen, Lebanon's Hezbollah and Yemen's Houthi rebels.
In announcing Ghaani as Soleimani's replacement, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called him "one of the most prominent commanders" in service to Iran.
The Quds Force "will be unchanged from the time of his predecessor," Khamenei said.
Soleimani had long been the face of the Quds Force, but while Soleimani's exploits in Iraq and Syria launched a thousand analyses, Ghaani has remained in the shadows. He has only occasionally come up in the Western or even Iranian media. But his personal story broadly mirrors that of Soleimani.
Born Aug. 8, 1957 in the northeastern Iranian city of Mashhad, Ghaani grew up during the last decade of monarchy. He joined the IRGC a year after the 1979 Revolution. Like Soleimani, he first deployed to put down the Kurdish uprising in Iran that followed the shah's downfall.
Iraq then invaded Iran, launching an eight-year war that would see a million people killed. Many of the dead were lightly armed members of the IRGC, some of whom were young boys killed in human-wave assaults on Iraqi positions.
He survived the war to join the Quds Force shortly after its creation. He worked with Soleimani, as well as led counterintelligence efforts at the IRGC. Western analysts believe while Soleimani focused on nations to Iran's west, Ghaani's remit was those to the east like Afghanistan and Pakistan. However, Iranian state media has not elaborated on his time in the Guard.
In 2012, the US Treasury sanctioned Ghaani, describing him as having authority over "financial disbursements" to proxies affiliated to the Quds Force. The sanctions particularly tied Ghaani to an intercepted shipment of weapons seized at a port in 2010 in Nigeria's most-populous city, Lagos.
Also in 2012, Ghaani drew criticism from the US State Department after reportedly saying that "if the Islamic republic was not present in Syria, the massacre of people would have happened on a much larger scale." That comment came just after gunmen backing Syrian President Bashar Assad killed over 100 people in Houla in the country's Homs province.
"We had the deputy head of the Quds Force saying publicly that they were proud of the role that they had played in training and assisting the Syrian forces – and look what this has wrought," then-State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nunland said at the time.
In January 2015, Ghaani indirectly said that Iran sends missiles and weapons to Palestinians to fight Israel.
"The US and Israel are too small to consider themselves in line with Iran's military power," Ghaani said at the time. "This power has now appeared alongside the oppressed people of Palestine and Gaza in the form of missiles and weapons."
Now, Ghaani is firmly in control of the Quds Force. While Iran's leaders say they have a plan to avenge Soleimani's death, no plan has been announced as the country prepares for funerals for the general starting Sunday.
Whatever that plan is, Ghaani likely will be involved.
On Friday Ghaani was quick to make threats of revenge against the US: "Be patient, and you will see the bodies of Americans all over the Middle East," he said.
Israel Hayom
January 5, 2020
A new Iranian general has stepped out of the shadows to lead the country's expeditionary Quds Force, becoming responsible for Tehran's proxies across the Mideast as the Islamic republic threatens the US with "harsh revenge" for killing its previous head, Qassem Soleimani.
The Quds Force is part of the 125,000-strong Revolutionary Guard, a paramilitary organization that answers only to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Guard oversees Iran's ballistic missile program, has its naval forces shadow the US Navy in the Persian Gulf and includes an all-volunteer Basij force.
Like his predecessor, Ghaani faced the carnage of Iran's eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s and later joined the newly founded Quds, or Jerusalem, Force.
While much still remains unknown about Ghaani, 62, Western sanctions suggest he's long been in a position of power in the organization. And likely one of his first duties will be to oversee whatever revenge Iran intends to seek for the US airstrike early Friday that killed his longtime friend Soleimani.
"We are children of war," Ghaani once said of his relationship with Soleimani, according to Iran's state-run IRNA news agency. "We are comrades on the battlefield and we have become friends in battle."
The IRGC has seen its influence grow ever-stronger both militarily and politically in recent decades. Iran's conventional military was decimated by the execution of its old officer class during the 1979 Islamic Revolution and later by sanctions.
A key driver of that influence comes from the Quds Force, which directs the activities of Tehran's proxies worldwide, which include Iraqi militiamen, Lebanon's Hezbollah and Yemen's Houthi rebels.
In announcing Ghaani as Soleimani's replacement, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called him "one of the most prominent commanders" in service to Iran.
The Quds Force "will be unchanged from the time of his predecessor," Khamenei said.
Soleimani had long been the face of the Quds Force, but while Soleimani's exploits in Iraq and Syria launched a thousand analyses, Ghaani has remained in the shadows. He has only occasionally come up in the Western or even Iranian media. But his personal story broadly mirrors that of Soleimani.
Born Aug. 8, 1957 in the northeastern Iranian city of Mashhad, Ghaani grew up during the last decade of monarchy. He joined the IRGC a year after the 1979 Revolution. Like Soleimani, he first deployed to put down the Kurdish uprising in Iran that followed the shah's downfall.
Iraq then invaded Iran, launching an eight-year war that would see a million people killed. Many of the dead were lightly armed members of the IRGC, some of whom were young boys killed in human-wave assaults on Iraqi positions.
He survived the war to join the Quds Force shortly after its creation. He worked with Soleimani, as well as led counterintelligence efforts at the IRGC. Western analysts believe while Soleimani focused on nations to Iran's west, Ghaani's remit was those to the east like Afghanistan and Pakistan. However, Iranian state media has not elaborated on his time in the Guard.
In 2012, the US Treasury sanctioned Ghaani, describing him as having authority over "financial disbursements" to proxies affiliated to the Quds Force. The sanctions particularly tied Ghaani to an intercepted shipment of weapons seized at a port in 2010 in Nigeria's most-populous city, Lagos.
Also in 2012, Ghaani drew criticism from the US State Department after reportedly saying that "if the Islamic republic was not present in Syria, the massacre of people would have happened on a much larger scale." That comment came just after gunmen backing Syrian President Bashar Assad killed over 100 people in Houla in the country's Homs province.
"We had the deputy head of the Quds Force saying publicly that they were proud of the role that they had played in training and assisting the Syrian forces – and look what this has wrought," then-State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nunland said at the time.
In January 2015, Ghaani indirectly said that Iran sends missiles and weapons to Palestinians to fight Israel.
"The US and Israel are too small to consider themselves in line with Iran's military power," Ghaani said at the time. "This power has now appeared alongside the oppressed people of Palestine and Gaza in the form of missiles and weapons."
Now, Ghaani is firmly in control of the Quds Force. While Iran's leaders say they have a plan to avenge Soleimani's death, no plan has been announced as the country prepares for funerals for the general starting Sunday.
Whatever that plan is, Ghaani likely will be involved.
On Friday Ghaani was quick to make threats of revenge against the US: "Be patient, and you will see the bodies of Americans all over the Middle East," he said.
SOME LEADING DEMOCRATS AND TRUMP-HATING HOLLYWOOD ACTORS WOULD PROBABLY CONTRIBUTE TO THE $80 MILLION BOUNTY
Iran puts an $80million BOUNTY on Trump's head, threatens to attack the White House and announce they will no longer abide by the 2015 nuclear deal after top military leader called the president a 'terrorist in a suit'
Daily Mail
January 5, 2020
Iran has reportedly placed an $80million bounty on Trump's head and threatened to attack the White House in response to the president's warning that any strike on American interests in the region will bring massive retaliation.
An organizer for the funeral procession for Gen Qassem Soleimani called on all Iranians to donate $1 each 'in order to gather an $80million bounty on President Trump's head'. The organizer is said to have made the remarks during a funeral procession in Mashad.
Iran has also announced that they will no longer abide by any of the limits of its 2015 nuclear deal. Local news outlets cited a statement from Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's administration saying the country will not observe limitations on its enrichment, the amount of stockpiled enriched uranium as well as research and development in its nuclear activities.
Earlier on Sunday, Iranian MP Abolfazl Abutorabi threatened to launch an attack on American soil. Abutorabi said: 'We can attack the White House itself, we can respond to them on the American soil. We have the power, and God willing we will respond in an appropriate time.' Abutorabi went on to say that 'this is a declaration of war, which means if you hesitate you lose'.
Abutorabi came during an open session of parliament in Tehran, Iran, just days after Soleimani was killed on Friday in a US drone strike on his convoy at Baghdad airport.
Trump warned Congress Sunday that he would 'strike back' harder at Iran if it retaliates against the U.S. for taking out military leader Qasem Soleimani.
'These Media Posts will serve as notification to the United States Congress that should Iran strike any U.S. person or target, the United States will quickly & fully strike back, & perhaps in a disproportionate manner,' Trump tweeted Sunday afternoon. 'Such legal notice is not required, but is given nevertheless!' he continued.
Daily Mail
January 5, 2020
Iran has reportedly placed an $80million bounty on Trump's head and threatened to attack the White House in response to the president's warning that any strike on American interests in the region will bring massive retaliation.
An organizer for the funeral procession for Gen Qassem Soleimani called on all Iranians to donate $1 each 'in order to gather an $80million bounty on President Trump's head'. The organizer is said to have made the remarks during a funeral procession in Mashad.
Iran has also announced that they will no longer abide by any of the limits of its 2015 nuclear deal. Local news outlets cited a statement from Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's administration saying the country will not observe limitations on its enrichment, the amount of stockpiled enriched uranium as well as research and development in its nuclear activities.
Earlier on Sunday, Iranian MP Abolfazl Abutorabi threatened to launch an attack on American soil. Abutorabi said: 'We can attack the White House itself, we can respond to them on the American soil. We have the power, and God willing we will respond in an appropriate time.' Abutorabi went on to say that 'this is a declaration of war, which means if you hesitate you lose'.
Abutorabi came during an open session of parliament in Tehran, Iran, just days after Soleimani was killed on Friday in a US drone strike on his convoy at Baghdad airport.
Trump warned Congress Sunday that he would 'strike back' harder at Iran if it retaliates against the U.S. for taking out military leader Qasem Soleimani.
'These Media Posts will serve as notification to the United States Congress that should Iran strike any U.S. person or target, the United States will quickly & fully strike back, & perhaps in a disproportionate manner,' Trump tweeted Sunday afternoon. 'Such legal notice is not required, but is given nevertheless!' he continued.
DEMOCRATS PILE ON TRUMP WITH AOC CALLING HIM A MONSTER
Elizabeth Warren says Donald Trump ordered strikes on Iran to distract from his impeachment trial as Democrats brand the president a 'monster' for plotting 'war crimes'
Daily Mail
January 5, 2020
Speaking on Meet the Press Sunday morning, Elizabeth Warren said Trump may be driving the US into a war in a rage over his impending impeachment trial.
Democratic contenders like Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden are also decrying Donald Trump for potentially plotting war crimes after he tweeted that he's planning to target 52 Iranian sites, many of them culturally important, in response to potential retaliation over the U.S. killing of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani.
On Saturday Warren condemned the president's threat amid escalating tensions with Tehran, saying 'You are threatening to commit war crimes. We are not at war with Iran. The American people do not want a war with Iran,' she said.
'The more the walls close in on this guy, the more irrational he becomes,' Biden tweeted Saturday evening.
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez branded Trump a ‘monster’ for his threat.
Trump's incendiary tweet Saturday evening warned Iran that Washington would target 52 Iranian sites 'some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture', if any Americans or American assets are hit.
__________
MIKE POMPEO BLAMES OBAMA FOR THE IRAN CRISIS
Trump's Secretary of State says US is trying to restore deterrence because the previous administration's 'appeasement' left us in a 'terrible place'
Daily Mail
January 5, 2020
The Secretary of State made the rounds on Sunday morning political news shows after President Dondald Trump ordered an attack on an Iraqi airport in Baghdad that killed top Iranian military general Soleimani on Friday.
He said the U.S. 'will no longer behave the way it did under the Obama administration'.'We will no longer appease, we will no longer tolerate,' he said.
Daily Mail
January 5, 2020
Speaking on Meet the Press Sunday morning, Elizabeth Warren said Trump may be driving the US into a war in a rage over his impending impeachment trial.
Democratic contenders like Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden are also decrying Donald Trump for potentially plotting war crimes after he tweeted that he's planning to target 52 Iranian sites, many of them culturally important, in response to potential retaliation over the U.S. killing of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani.
On Saturday Warren condemned the president's threat amid escalating tensions with Tehran, saying 'You are threatening to commit war crimes. We are not at war with Iran. The American people do not want a war with Iran,' she said.
'The more the walls close in on this guy, the more irrational he becomes,' Biden tweeted Saturday evening.
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez branded Trump a ‘monster’ for his threat.
Trump's incendiary tweet Saturday evening warned Iran that Washington would target 52 Iranian sites 'some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture', if any Americans or American assets are hit.
__________
MIKE POMPEO BLAMES OBAMA FOR THE IRAN CRISIS
Trump's Secretary of State says US is trying to restore deterrence because the previous administration's 'appeasement' left us in a 'terrible place'
Daily Mail
January 5, 2020
The Secretary of State made the rounds on Sunday morning political news shows after President Dondald Trump ordered an attack on an Iraqi airport in Baghdad that killed top Iranian military general Soleimani on Friday.
He said the U.S. 'will no longer behave the way it did under the Obama administration'.'We will no longer appease, we will no longer tolerate,' he said.
GLOBAL WARMING WAS NOT AN ISSUE IN THIS CASE
Another defeat for climate change con artists
Our View
SE Texas Record
December 19, 2019
Well, that was a gigantic waste of time and money, and New York Attorney General Letitia James should be held accountable for it.
James not only squandered the taxpayer-provided resources of her state in a politically-motivated, factless, and illogical lawsuit designed to shake down ExxonMobil, she also forced the energy giant to waste its own resources defending itself against the sham – and, by generating bad press for the company in the court of public opinion, possibly caused financial injury to the Exxon shareholders whose investments she was purportedly trying to protect.
Concluding that Exxon had not misled investors about the impact of climate change or the company’s alleged contribution to it, New York Supreme Court Judge Barry Ostrager rejected all of James’s dubious claims, including the fraud charges that her team withdrew at trial’s end.
The question of whether or not global warming is actually occurring, man-made, or harmful was not an issue in the case.
“Nothing in this opinion is intended to absolve ExxonMobil from responsibility for contributing to climate change through the emission of greenhouse gases in the production of its fossil fuel products,” Ostrager emphasized. “ExxonMobil does not dispute either that its operations produce greenhouse gases or that greenhouse gases contribute to climate change. But ExxonMobil is in the business of producing energy, and this is a securities fraud case, not a climate change case.”
Despite its resounding victory against James, Exxon and other energy companies will continue to be targeted by ambitious and greedy public officials pretending to offer solutions to a projected global warming apocalypse.
As Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton observed two years ago, “The City of New York, along with liberal mayors and trial lawyers across the country, want to extract billions of dollars from a handful of oil and natural gas companies based on the entirely unproven claim that those companies are responsible for climate change and global warming.”
Thus, the scam will continue – until voters realize there is no scientific basis for it and demand reprisals for the scammers.
EDITOR’S NOTE: East Texas is where cops and justices of the peace believe the Miranda Warning is something Santa Ana yelled at the Texans just before his troops charged the Alamo. Some of the local yokels there actually believe that John Wayne died defending the Alamo.
The title of this article is deliberately misleading. Global warming is no scam. How much man contributes to it by his use of fossil fuels is the only question. The real con artists here are the editor’s of the SE Texas Record.
Our View
SE Texas Record
December 19, 2019
Well, that was a gigantic waste of time and money, and New York Attorney General Letitia James should be held accountable for it.
James not only squandered the taxpayer-provided resources of her state in a politically-motivated, factless, and illogical lawsuit designed to shake down ExxonMobil, she also forced the energy giant to waste its own resources defending itself against the sham – and, by generating bad press for the company in the court of public opinion, possibly caused financial injury to the Exxon shareholders whose investments she was purportedly trying to protect.
Concluding that Exxon had not misled investors about the impact of climate change or the company’s alleged contribution to it, New York Supreme Court Judge Barry Ostrager rejected all of James’s dubious claims, including the fraud charges that her team withdrew at trial’s end.
The question of whether or not global warming is actually occurring, man-made, or harmful was not an issue in the case.
“Nothing in this opinion is intended to absolve ExxonMobil from responsibility for contributing to climate change through the emission of greenhouse gases in the production of its fossil fuel products,” Ostrager emphasized. “ExxonMobil does not dispute either that its operations produce greenhouse gases or that greenhouse gases contribute to climate change. But ExxonMobil is in the business of producing energy, and this is a securities fraud case, not a climate change case.”
Despite its resounding victory against James, Exxon and other energy companies will continue to be targeted by ambitious and greedy public officials pretending to offer solutions to a projected global warming apocalypse.
As Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton observed two years ago, “The City of New York, along with liberal mayors and trial lawyers across the country, want to extract billions of dollars from a handful of oil and natural gas companies based on the entirely unproven claim that those companies are responsible for climate change and global warming.”
Thus, the scam will continue – until voters realize there is no scientific basis for it and demand reprisals for the scammers.
EDITOR’S NOTE: East Texas is where cops and justices of the peace believe the Miranda Warning is something Santa Ana yelled at the Texans just before his troops charged the Alamo. Some of the local yokels there actually believe that John Wayne died defending the Alamo.
The title of this article is deliberately misleading. Global warming is no scam. How much man contributes to it by his use of fossil fuels is the only question. The real con artists here are the editor’s of the SE Texas Record.
FOR JEWS THE HOLOCAUST IS NOT A HOAX
Holocaust survivor's book reveals horrifying reality of Auschwitz’s 'privileged' Family Camp - including mothers being raped, floggings and being shot for going to the toilet
By Claire Toureille
Daily Mail
January 5, 2020
A book that recounts the horrors of the Nazi' 'Family Camp' and its 'Children's Block' at Auschwitz-Birkenau - including rapes, floggings and being shot for going to the toilet - has been published to a wider audience for the first time.
The Children's Block, originally published in Czech, as a book called 'The Painted Wall' in 1993, tells the true story of 500 Jewish children held in special areas of the Nazi death camps constructed to deceive the Red Cross about horrifying conditions for Czech families captured by the Germans.
Although fictional, it was written by survivor Otto B Kraus who served as a child counsellor in the family camp, which existed from September 1943 to December 1944, and documents largely autobiographical experiences.
Kraus' account offers distressing insights into how the young inhabitants suffered, despite them being labelled as 'SB,' 'Sonderbehandlung' - part of a ploy to fool the Red Cross Commission, which was permitted to visit the ghetto-turned-concentration camp, Tezerin, in former Czechoslovakia, where many of the families came from.
The Jewish residents of Tezerin were kept in healthier conditions to mask the reality of Nazi cruelty.
When it became too full, inhabitants would be sent to the 'Family Camp' and its 'Children's Block' at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The camps served to disprove that Jews were being exterminated at the Polish camp - and the reason why the prisoners appeared to be being treated more favourably was only discovered at the Second World War's end.
The first Tezerin residents to arrive at Auschwitz-Birkenau got to keep their old clothes - not the striped uniform most were forced to wear; their heads weren't shaved and they received better meals. Children would spend time in the Children's Block in the day and return to the Family Camp in the evening.
In reality, the children would be brutally killed - in the gas chambers - six months after the day of their arrival in the camp. In total, more than 17,500 Jews entered the Family Camp, with more than 15,000 perishing from execution, disease or hunger.
The characters that Kraus, who died in 2000, creates represent people he met while there, with the narrative based on the diary of fictitious Children's Block teacher Alex Ehren, who shields the children he encounters from the terror around them.
The book's foreword was written by Kraus' librarian wife Dita, whose real-life story was the basis for Antonio Iturbe's best-selling book The Librarian of Auschwitz.
She explains how a friend of Kraus', also an instructor on the Children's Block, urged him to write about their experiences, saying: 'There was nothing like it in the entire Nazi machinery of the extermination of the Jews.'
During his research, Kraus discovered more of the adults who worked on the Children's Block remained alive than those who were sent to other camps, coming to the conclusion that it was the sense of duty they felt towards the children motivated them to stay alive.
The book evokes the terror and ultra-violence Jewish prisoners were subjected to in the camps. Kraus depicts harrowing scenes based on true stories.
Upon arriving at the camp, Alex is horrified to discover that SS guards would shoot Jewish people who needed the toilet if they strayed from the group they were in to empty their bladder.
A couple caught being intimate were flogged in front of all prisoners, a scene with is witnessed by the children in the book. And Kraus reveals mothers of children in the block, and many other women, were raped on a nightly basis by other prisoners.
The novel's main protagonist, Alex, comes from the Tezerin ghetto, as Kraus did. A poet, he gets enrolled as a worker in the Children's Block after his deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau in December 1943.
The story sees him in charge of eight unruly children, boys and girls, from dawn until dusk. 'Teachers' were actually forbidden to teach the children, Kraus explains, but says they would a find way to educate clandestinely from the SS guards.
When he's not handling the children, making sure they shower, get fed and answer roll call, Alex dreams of an uprising and fleeing the horrors of the camp.
The children were not told about the 'chimney' or death, and lived relatively sheltered from the horrifying scenes of the camp. The 'school' of the Children's Block seemed completely different to the usual representation of concentration camps.
Unlike the French or German children or Jewish children from other countries, the Czech children could play, visit their parents, and put on shows attended by SS officers.
They also had stronger rations of food, while many around them died of starvation. Loots from death prisoners, whilst they mainly went to the SS, were also sometimes given to the Children's Block.
Yet six months after their arrival at Auschwitz, each cohort would be exterminated.
The first group of Tezerin residents sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, 3,800 people, died in the night between the 7th and 8th March 1944 and the second contingent, of more than 10,000, on the 11th and 12th July 1944.
A further 2,750 inmates were sent to Germany and, of these, only 1,167 were still alive in various slave-labour camps at the end of the war.
The Family Camp had a survival rate of about 6.6 percent, according to Kraus' research, but, astonishingly, most of the adults who worked on the Children's Block survived.
The Children's Block, by Otto B Kraus, is published by Penguin Random House.
By Claire Toureille
Daily Mail
January 5, 2020
A book that recounts the horrors of the Nazi' 'Family Camp' and its 'Children's Block' at Auschwitz-Birkenau - including rapes, floggings and being shot for going to the toilet - has been published to a wider audience for the first time.
The Children's Block, originally published in Czech, as a book called 'The Painted Wall' in 1993, tells the true story of 500 Jewish children held in special areas of the Nazi death camps constructed to deceive the Red Cross about horrifying conditions for Czech families captured by the Germans.
Although fictional, it was written by survivor Otto B Kraus who served as a child counsellor in the family camp, which existed from September 1943 to December 1944, and documents largely autobiographical experiences.
Kraus' account offers distressing insights into how the young inhabitants suffered, despite them being labelled as 'SB,' 'Sonderbehandlung' - part of a ploy to fool the Red Cross Commission, which was permitted to visit the ghetto-turned-concentration camp, Tezerin, in former Czechoslovakia, where many of the families came from.
The Jewish residents of Tezerin were kept in healthier conditions to mask the reality of Nazi cruelty.
When it became too full, inhabitants would be sent to the 'Family Camp' and its 'Children's Block' at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The camps served to disprove that Jews were being exterminated at the Polish camp - and the reason why the prisoners appeared to be being treated more favourably was only discovered at the Second World War's end.
The first Tezerin residents to arrive at Auschwitz-Birkenau got to keep their old clothes - not the striped uniform most were forced to wear; their heads weren't shaved and they received better meals. Children would spend time in the Children's Block in the day and return to the Family Camp in the evening.
In reality, the children would be brutally killed - in the gas chambers - six months after the day of their arrival in the camp. In total, more than 17,500 Jews entered the Family Camp, with more than 15,000 perishing from execution, disease or hunger.
The characters that Kraus, who died in 2000, creates represent people he met while there, with the narrative based on the diary of fictitious Children's Block teacher Alex Ehren, who shields the children he encounters from the terror around them.
The book's foreword was written by Kraus' librarian wife Dita, whose real-life story was the basis for Antonio Iturbe's best-selling book The Librarian of Auschwitz.
She explains how a friend of Kraus', also an instructor on the Children's Block, urged him to write about their experiences, saying: 'There was nothing like it in the entire Nazi machinery of the extermination of the Jews.'
During his research, Kraus discovered more of the adults who worked on the Children's Block remained alive than those who were sent to other camps, coming to the conclusion that it was the sense of duty they felt towards the children motivated them to stay alive.
The book evokes the terror and ultra-violence Jewish prisoners were subjected to in the camps. Kraus depicts harrowing scenes based on true stories.
Upon arriving at the camp, Alex is horrified to discover that SS guards would shoot Jewish people who needed the toilet if they strayed from the group they were in to empty their bladder.
A couple caught being intimate were flogged in front of all prisoners, a scene with is witnessed by the children in the book. And Kraus reveals mothers of children in the block, and many other women, were raped on a nightly basis by other prisoners.
The novel's main protagonist, Alex, comes from the Tezerin ghetto, as Kraus did. A poet, he gets enrolled as a worker in the Children's Block after his deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau in December 1943.
The story sees him in charge of eight unruly children, boys and girls, from dawn until dusk. 'Teachers' were actually forbidden to teach the children, Kraus explains, but says they would a find way to educate clandestinely from the SS guards.
When he's not handling the children, making sure they shower, get fed and answer roll call, Alex dreams of an uprising and fleeing the horrors of the camp.
The children were not told about the 'chimney' or death, and lived relatively sheltered from the horrifying scenes of the camp. The 'school' of the Children's Block seemed completely different to the usual representation of concentration camps.
Unlike the French or German children or Jewish children from other countries, the Czech children could play, visit their parents, and put on shows attended by SS officers.
They also had stronger rations of food, while many around them died of starvation. Loots from death prisoners, whilst they mainly went to the SS, were also sometimes given to the Children's Block.
Yet six months after their arrival at Auschwitz, each cohort would be exterminated.
The first group of Tezerin residents sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, 3,800 people, died in the night between the 7th and 8th March 1944 and the second contingent, of more than 10,000, on the 11th and 12th July 1944.
A further 2,750 inmates were sent to Germany and, of these, only 1,167 were still alive in various slave-labour camps at the end of the war.
The Family Camp had a survival rate of about 6.6 percent, according to Kraus' research, but, astonishingly, most of the adults who worked on the Children's Block survived.
The Children's Block, by Otto B Kraus, is published by Penguin Random House.
THE TURKISH TYRANT IS TRYING TO RESCUE AN ISLAMIST GOVERNMENT IN TRIPOLI
Erdoğan's desperate gambit in Libya
By Oded Granot
Israel Hayom
January 2, 2020
In just a short while – perhaps a matter of days – Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, with approval from the Turkish parliament, plans to deploy troops to Tripoli, Libya. It is an exceedingly desperate attempt by Turkey to shift the balance of power in the war-torn country in favor of one of the sides.
Turkish navy units will patrol the oil-rich North African country's coast. Almost immediately following the demise of former Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi in October 2011, Libya has been mired in a bloody civil war. In Tripoli, in the country's west, the overtly Islamist government and parliament want to establish a constitution based on Shariah law. In the country's east, retired Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, who fought Gaddafi back in the day, has established his own army and a secular parliament.
In an effort to seize control of Libya, both camps are using outside help. Haftar has allied himself to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates in the Persian Gulf; the government in Tripoli is allied with Turkey and Qatar. All these players, in gross violation of UN resolutions, are providing the respective sides with weapons, ammunition, training, and vast sums of money, only prolonging the suffering of the miserable Libyan people.
Putin recognized an opportunity
It stands to reason that the battle experience of Haftar's army, the larger sums of money the Saudis have given him, the close assistance he is getting from the other side of Libya's shared border with Egypt, and the drones he has received from the UAE (which have proven more effective than the ones Tripoli has received from Turkey) – have helped Haftar seize almost all of Libya in recent years.
But what has spurred the field marshal's army to the southern outskirts of Tripoli in recent months, ahead of a final push to conquer the entire city, is the military aid from Russia. Identical to Syria, Russian President Vladimir Putin correctly interpreted US ambivalence and jumped on the rare opportunity to carve out a second strategic enclave, after Syria, in the Mediterranean Basin; and perhaps also advance the construction of a Russian naval port.
And precisely as he did in Syria, Putin sent more than 1,000 of his mercenaries from the "Wagner Group" to assist Haftar. These mercenaries are hardened fighters and excellent marksmen and have inflicted heavy casualties on the defenders of Tripoli.
In its hour of need, the government in Tripoli, under the leadership of Fayez al-Sarraj, turned to the Turks, asking them to send troops to help halt Haftar in his tracks. Erdoğan, ever the sly fox, quickly signed al-Sarraj to two agreements. One pertains to military and defense cooperation; the other, unprecedented in nature, pertains to the demarcation of the maritime borders between the two countries.
The maritime agreement, which demarcates the maritime border between the city of Dalaman in southwestern Turkey and the city of Derna in northeastern Libya (which, incidentally, the Tripoli government doesn't control), garnered widespread international condemnation. The deal was denounced as a violation of international law, while also sparking the anger of at least four countries in the Mediterranean Basin: Greece, Cyprus, Egypt, and Israel – because, according to Erdoğan, it prevents them from moving ahead with their joint project to build an underwater gas pipeline from the eastern Mediterranean to Europe.
A feeling of power? Just the opposite
It's very possible that Erdoğan is mistaken. Although the EastMed project is still far from fruition with many obstacles still remaining, and despite the warnings from Ankara, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was expected to depart for a leadership summit in Greece on Thursday to sign the pipeline deal with the Greek and Cypriot governments. This, in addition to the memorandum of understandings the sides already signed in 2017 after an initial feasibility survey was conducted. Israel hopes Egypt will also attend the summit.
Erdoğan recently described the alliance with Tripoli as a historic achievement, and as an evocation of the Ottoman Empire's past glory; a coming-full-circle of sorts from the day, almost 100 years ago, that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, one of the most revered commanders of the Turkish army and later the founder of modern Turkey, was dispatched to Derna to help repel the Italian invasion.
The truth, however, is that the Turkish-Libyan alliance isn't an indication of Erdoğan's power, rather the exact opposite – it is a reflection of his desire to ease his sense of isolation in the Eastern Mediterranean Basin, and his desire to buy another friend, aside from Turkish Cyprus, which is his only other ally in the sector.
In the fight for the natural gas reservoirs in the eastern Mediterranean, the Turkish tyrant finds himself pitted against a strategic coalition of old and new enemies: Greece and Cyprus, Egypt and Israel. Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, who hasn't forgotten Erdoğan's support for the Muslim Brotherhood during its battle for control of Egypt, has since 2015 held joint military maneuvers with the Greeks on the island of Rhodes, just 12 miles from the Turkish coast. The Cypriots started participating in the joint drill two years ago.
And now, after failing to reshape his neighbor to the south, Syria, by deposing Bashar Assad (who the Russians saved), Erdoğan could – again due to Russian intervention – fail to rescue an Islamist government, this time in Tripoli.
With that, Russia and Turkey aren't necessarily on a collision course on Libyan soil. Firstly, because both leaders have learned to find common ground even in the midst of harsh conflict; and secondly, because similar to the Russians, Erdoğan also intends to send mercenaries to Libya instead of regular Turkish conscripts – to help cloud actual casualty figures.
Israel, at least officially, hasn't taken sides in the Libyan civil war, but it won't mourn the fall of Tripoli if Haftar takes it. His victory would unquestionably annul the agreements with Turkey and put the sultan in his place.
__________
Airstrike on Libyan military school kills at least 28 and leaves dozens injured after missile hits cadets lined up on parade ground
Daily Mail
January 5, 2020
At least 28 people were killed and dozens injured on Saturday in an air strike on a military school in the Libyan capital Tripoli. At the time of the strike cadets were gathered on a parade ground.
The southern part of Tripoli has seen fierce fighting since last April, when military strongman Khalifa Haftar began an offensive against the GNA.
GNA forces accused those loyal to Haftar of the strike.
By Oded Granot
Israel Hayom
January 2, 2020
In just a short while – perhaps a matter of days – Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, with approval from the Turkish parliament, plans to deploy troops to Tripoli, Libya. It is an exceedingly desperate attempt by Turkey to shift the balance of power in the war-torn country in favor of one of the sides.
Turkish navy units will patrol the oil-rich North African country's coast. Almost immediately following the demise of former Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi in October 2011, Libya has been mired in a bloody civil war. In Tripoli, in the country's west, the overtly Islamist government and parliament want to establish a constitution based on Shariah law. In the country's east, retired Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, who fought Gaddafi back in the day, has established his own army and a secular parliament.
In an effort to seize control of Libya, both camps are using outside help. Haftar has allied himself to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates in the Persian Gulf; the government in Tripoli is allied with Turkey and Qatar. All these players, in gross violation of UN resolutions, are providing the respective sides with weapons, ammunition, training, and vast sums of money, only prolonging the suffering of the miserable Libyan people.
Putin recognized an opportunity
It stands to reason that the battle experience of Haftar's army, the larger sums of money the Saudis have given him, the close assistance he is getting from the other side of Libya's shared border with Egypt, and the drones he has received from the UAE (which have proven more effective than the ones Tripoli has received from Turkey) – have helped Haftar seize almost all of Libya in recent years.
But what has spurred the field marshal's army to the southern outskirts of Tripoli in recent months, ahead of a final push to conquer the entire city, is the military aid from Russia. Identical to Syria, Russian President Vladimir Putin correctly interpreted US ambivalence and jumped on the rare opportunity to carve out a second strategic enclave, after Syria, in the Mediterranean Basin; and perhaps also advance the construction of a Russian naval port.
And precisely as he did in Syria, Putin sent more than 1,000 of his mercenaries from the "Wagner Group" to assist Haftar. These mercenaries are hardened fighters and excellent marksmen and have inflicted heavy casualties on the defenders of Tripoli.
In its hour of need, the government in Tripoli, under the leadership of Fayez al-Sarraj, turned to the Turks, asking them to send troops to help halt Haftar in his tracks. Erdoğan, ever the sly fox, quickly signed al-Sarraj to two agreements. One pertains to military and defense cooperation; the other, unprecedented in nature, pertains to the demarcation of the maritime borders between the two countries.
The maritime agreement, which demarcates the maritime border between the city of Dalaman in southwestern Turkey and the city of Derna in northeastern Libya (which, incidentally, the Tripoli government doesn't control), garnered widespread international condemnation. The deal was denounced as a violation of international law, while also sparking the anger of at least four countries in the Mediterranean Basin: Greece, Cyprus, Egypt, and Israel – because, according to Erdoğan, it prevents them from moving ahead with their joint project to build an underwater gas pipeline from the eastern Mediterranean to Europe.
A feeling of power? Just the opposite
It's very possible that Erdoğan is mistaken. Although the EastMed project is still far from fruition with many obstacles still remaining, and despite the warnings from Ankara, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was expected to depart for a leadership summit in Greece on Thursday to sign the pipeline deal with the Greek and Cypriot governments. This, in addition to the memorandum of understandings the sides already signed in 2017 after an initial feasibility survey was conducted. Israel hopes Egypt will also attend the summit.
Erdoğan recently described the alliance with Tripoli as a historic achievement, and as an evocation of the Ottoman Empire's past glory; a coming-full-circle of sorts from the day, almost 100 years ago, that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, one of the most revered commanders of the Turkish army and later the founder of modern Turkey, was dispatched to Derna to help repel the Italian invasion.
The truth, however, is that the Turkish-Libyan alliance isn't an indication of Erdoğan's power, rather the exact opposite – it is a reflection of his desire to ease his sense of isolation in the Eastern Mediterranean Basin, and his desire to buy another friend, aside from Turkish Cyprus, which is his only other ally in the sector.
In the fight for the natural gas reservoirs in the eastern Mediterranean, the Turkish tyrant finds himself pitted against a strategic coalition of old and new enemies: Greece and Cyprus, Egypt and Israel. Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, who hasn't forgotten Erdoğan's support for the Muslim Brotherhood during its battle for control of Egypt, has since 2015 held joint military maneuvers with the Greeks on the island of Rhodes, just 12 miles from the Turkish coast. The Cypriots started participating in the joint drill two years ago.
And now, after failing to reshape his neighbor to the south, Syria, by deposing Bashar Assad (who the Russians saved), Erdoğan could – again due to Russian intervention – fail to rescue an Islamist government, this time in Tripoli.
With that, Russia and Turkey aren't necessarily on a collision course on Libyan soil. Firstly, because both leaders have learned to find common ground even in the midst of harsh conflict; and secondly, because similar to the Russians, Erdoğan also intends to send mercenaries to Libya instead of regular Turkish conscripts – to help cloud actual casualty figures.
Israel, at least officially, hasn't taken sides in the Libyan civil war, but it won't mourn the fall of Tripoli if Haftar takes it. His victory would unquestionably annul the agreements with Turkey and put the sultan in his place.
__________
Airstrike on Libyan military school kills at least 28 and leaves dozens injured after missile hits cadets lined up on parade ground
Daily Mail
January 5, 2020
At least 28 people were killed and dozens injured on Saturday in an air strike on a military school in the Libyan capital Tripoli. At the time of the strike cadets were gathered on a parade ground.
The southern part of Tripoli has seen fierce fighting since last April, when military strongman Khalifa Haftar began an offensive against the GNA.
GNA forces accused those loyal to Haftar of the strike.
HOW EL CHAPO'S BROTHER WAS ASSASSINATED IN PRISON
The saddest New Year for El Chapo: a murder, a loss and a betrayal
By Chivis Martinez from Infobae
Borderland Beat
January 4, 2020
It was in August 2001 that Joaquín Guzmán Loera's brother, was arrested in Mexico City.
Better known as “El Pollo”, Arturo Guzmán Loera, had assumed the baton of the Sinaloa Cartel, starting in 1995, the year in which his brother was arrested. [correct year of arrest 1993]
Drug trafficking in its modality of collaboration to the promotion, production, traffic, and extraction of cocaine and amphetamines from the country to the United States, were the charges for which Arturo Guzmán was to be prosecuted. He was also accused of being a material author of the 60-meter narco-tunnel built for drug trafficking on the border between Tijuana and San Ysidro.
“El Chapo” escaped on January 19, 2001 from the maximum security prison in Puente Grande , Jalisco and it was not until September of that same year that the federal government got its first strong blow against the boss through the detention of Arturo Guzmán.
After his capture, Joaquín Guzmán looked for different ways for Arturo to be released as soon as possible and even devised a plan that was risky and implausible.
The plan was to fly over a helicopter through the courtyard of the prison where "El Pollo" was located, then lower a steel box so that would elevate Arturo to the helicopter for his escape.
El Chapo’s thinking is the steel box would serve to protect his brother from possible bullets that prison guards would potentially fire.
At the beginning of 2019 and as a key piece in the drug trafficking trial of “El Chapo”, it was Vicente Zambada aka “El Vicentillo” and son of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, who reported to the Federal Court of the Eastern District of New York how Joaquín Guzmán managed to escape from the maximum security prison in Puente Grande hidden in a laundry cart.
He also narrated the escape plan that El Chapo had for his brother before Judge Brian Cogan at the Guzmán Loera trial, as he once confessed it in confidence.
However, the plan could never be carried out, since Arturo was killed with seven shots in the maximum security prison in La Palma, the murder of which José Ramírez Villanueva was reported as responsible, who was imprisoned there since 2002.
It was the Attorney General's Office of the State of Mexico who reported on the shooting of "El Pollo”, with the addition of three murders among the inmates of the prison, which at that time was considered as one of the safest in the country.
The brother of "El Chapo" was shot with a 9 mm caliber weapon from which fragments were found in his chest, abdomen and spine.
On December 31, 2004, Arturo Guzmán Loera, “El Pollo” died around 7:00 p.m. while he was talking to his attorney.
The case was turned to the former Attorney General's Office (PGR), being a fact that was perpetrated in a maximum security prison; therefore, the autopsy also occurred within it.
At that time, the prison in which "El Pollo" was located was one of the prisons that housed 500 of the most dangerous men in the country.
In order to determine how it was that the weapon that was used to kill Guzmán Loera entered the facilities of the penitentiary center, the Decentralized Administrative Body for Prevention and Social Readaptation, initiated an investigation in which it was confirmed that it was José Ramírez Villanueva who committed the murder against "El Pollo".
Arturo was considered a high-level criminal, primarily because he was alleged leader of the Sinaloa Cartel and his brother's liaison, "El Chapo", while he was in prison.
He was also considered dangerous because he was a participant in his brother's escape on January 19, 2001: and considered a “high-level assassin” by the United States authorities.
During his stay in La Palma, Arturo was segregated in a special detention area, which is why he participated in a collective hunger strike and after that, the authorities in charge of the detention center received an anonymous message that betrayed his escape plan.
His freedom was denied previously by the Unitary Court of Toluca when he was not allowed an amparo to be granted in 2002, which was against his formal prison order decreed by the Third District Court for violations of Federal Law in opposition to Organized Crime.
As for the fate of his murderer, José Ramírez Villanueva, he was sentenced to 42 years and three months in prison. He was found criminally responsible for the crimes of homicide and carrying an illegal firearm weapon for the exclusive use of the armed forces.
It is said that Ramirez Villanueva went to the bathrooms and took out the gun he had hidden in the bathroom and then went to the cells where the brother of one of the most dangerous capos in Mexico was and gunned him down.
One of the hypotheses about the murder of "El Pollo" rests with an alleged order of Osiel Cárdenas, who ordered his rivals to be executed, even while in prison and in order to continue to command the Gulf cartel.
[According to the information in the case, José Ramírez Villanueva was forced - through letters and direct threats against him and his family - to kill the younger brother of El Chapo Guzmán, and who was designated as the leader of the Sinaloa cartel during the time that his brother was imprisoned in the prison of Puente Grande, Jalisco, until he escaped in January 2001, when he left the leadership in the hands of El Chapo and became one of the main operators in Jalisco.]
Thanks to the site where Ramírez Villanueva murdered Arturo Guzmán, acts of corruption and coexistence were discovered between inmates of La Palma and prison authorities.
While this December 3, 2019 marked the 15th anniversary of the murder of his brother Arturo , Joaquin is isolated for life in a United States prison, after being convicted of 10 charges related to drug trafficking and organized crime, among other sentences.
As "El Ratón", Ovidio Guzmán López, son of Joaquín, enjoys freedom while remaining as leader of the Sinaloa Cartel , even after the operation of last October 17 in which he was arrested and then released "To avoid a major tragedy" after a series of mobilizations that took place by their allies.
By Chivis Martinez from Infobae
Borderland Beat
January 4, 2020
It was in August 2001 that Joaquín Guzmán Loera's brother, was arrested in Mexico City.
Better known as “El Pollo”, Arturo Guzmán Loera, had assumed the baton of the Sinaloa Cartel, starting in 1995, the year in which his brother was arrested. [correct year of arrest 1993]
Drug trafficking in its modality of collaboration to the promotion, production, traffic, and extraction of cocaine and amphetamines from the country to the United States, were the charges for which Arturo Guzmán was to be prosecuted. He was also accused of being a material author of the 60-meter narco-tunnel built for drug trafficking on the border between Tijuana and San Ysidro.
“El Chapo” escaped on January 19, 2001 from the maximum security prison in Puente Grande , Jalisco and it was not until September of that same year that the federal government got its first strong blow against the boss through the detention of Arturo Guzmán.
After his capture, Joaquín Guzmán looked for different ways for Arturo to be released as soon as possible and even devised a plan that was risky and implausible.
The plan was to fly over a helicopter through the courtyard of the prison where "El Pollo" was located, then lower a steel box so that would elevate Arturo to the helicopter for his escape.
El Chapo’s thinking is the steel box would serve to protect his brother from possible bullets that prison guards would potentially fire.
At the beginning of 2019 and as a key piece in the drug trafficking trial of “El Chapo”, it was Vicente Zambada aka “El Vicentillo” and son of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, who reported to the Federal Court of the Eastern District of New York how Joaquín Guzmán managed to escape from the maximum security prison in Puente Grande hidden in a laundry cart.
He also narrated the escape plan that El Chapo had for his brother before Judge Brian Cogan at the Guzmán Loera trial, as he once confessed it in confidence.
However, the plan could never be carried out, since Arturo was killed with seven shots in the maximum security prison in La Palma, the murder of which José Ramírez Villanueva was reported as responsible, who was imprisoned there since 2002.
It was the Attorney General's Office of the State of Mexico who reported on the shooting of "El Pollo”, with the addition of three murders among the inmates of the prison, which at that time was considered as one of the safest in the country.
The brother of "El Chapo" was shot with a 9 mm caliber weapon from which fragments were found in his chest, abdomen and spine.
On December 31, 2004, Arturo Guzmán Loera, “El Pollo” died around 7:00 p.m. while he was talking to his attorney.
The case was turned to the former Attorney General's Office (PGR), being a fact that was perpetrated in a maximum security prison; therefore, the autopsy also occurred within it.
At that time, the prison in which "El Pollo" was located was one of the prisons that housed 500 of the most dangerous men in the country.
In order to determine how it was that the weapon that was used to kill Guzmán Loera entered the facilities of the penitentiary center, the Decentralized Administrative Body for Prevention and Social Readaptation, initiated an investigation in which it was confirmed that it was José Ramírez Villanueva who committed the murder against "El Pollo".
Arturo was considered a high-level criminal, primarily because he was alleged leader of the Sinaloa Cartel and his brother's liaison, "El Chapo", while he was in prison.
He was also considered dangerous because he was a participant in his brother's escape on January 19, 2001: and considered a “high-level assassin” by the United States authorities.
During his stay in La Palma, Arturo was segregated in a special detention area, which is why he participated in a collective hunger strike and after that, the authorities in charge of the detention center received an anonymous message that betrayed his escape plan.
His freedom was denied previously by the Unitary Court of Toluca when he was not allowed an amparo to be granted in 2002, which was against his formal prison order decreed by the Third District Court for violations of Federal Law in opposition to Organized Crime.
As for the fate of his murderer, José Ramírez Villanueva, he was sentenced to 42 years and three months in prison. He was found criminally responsible for the crimes of homicide and carrying an illegal firearm weapon for the exclusive use of the armed forces.
It is said that Ramirez Villanueva went to the bathrooms and took out the gun he had hidden in the bathroom and then went to the cells where the brother of one of the most dangerous capos in Mexico was and gunned him down.
One of the hypotheses about the murder of "El Pollo" rests with an alleged order of Osiel Cárdenas, who ordered his rivals to be executed, even while in prison and in order to continue to command the Gulf cartel.
[According to the information in the case, José Ramírez Villanueva was forced - through letters and direct threats against him and his family - to kill the younger brother of El Chapo Guzmán, and who was designated as the leader of the Sinaloa cartel during the time that his brother was imprisoned in the prison of Puente Grande, Jalisco, until he escaped in January 2001, when he left the leadership in the hands of El Chapo and became one of the main operators in Jalisco.]
Thanks to the site where Ramírez Villanueva murdered Arturo Guzmán, acts of corruption and coexistence were discovered between inmates of La Palma and prison authorities.
While this December 3, 2019 marked the 15th anniversary of the murder of his brother Arturo , Joaquin is isolated for life in a United States prison, after being convicted of 10 charges related to drug trafficking and organized crime, among other sentences.
As "El Ratón", Ovidio Guzmán López, son of Joaquín, enjoys freedom while remaining as leader of the Sinaloa Cartel , even after the operation of last October 17 in which he was arrested and then released "To avoid a major tragedy" after a series of mobilizations that took place by their allies.
Sunday, January 05, 2020
TRUMP IS NO OBAMA ….. THANK GOD!
Iran is warned not to attack us or our interests
“Let this serve as a WARNING that if Iran strikes any Americans, or American assets, we have targeted 52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago), some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD. The USA wants no more threats! Iran is talking very boldly about targeting certain USA assets as revenge for our ridding the world of their terrorist leader who had just killed an American, & badly wounded many others, not to mention all of the people he had killed over his lifetime, including recently hundreds of Iranian protesters. He was already attacking our Embassy, and preparing for additional hits in other locations. Iran has been nothing but problems for many years.”
Thus, Trump tweeted on Saturday.
Can you imagine Obama telling Iran off? Not if you look at how he and Hilary reacted to the killing of our State Department officials and US soldiers in Benghazi, Libya.
Trump is no Obama! As Israeli PM Netanyahu said, “President Trump deserves all the credit for acting swiftly, forcefully and decisively.”
Here’s hoping Trump carries out his threat If the Iranians retaliate for our assassination of Quds commander Qassem Soleimani.
__________
Former US Marine and Benghazi survivor slams Susan Rice for accusing Trump of lying over reasons for Soleimani killing and calls it out as 'typical Democrat tactics'
Daily Mail
January 4, 2020
A former US Marine who also served as part of the Bengazi Annex Security team during the fatal 2012 embassy attacks that left four dead slammed former US National Security Advisor Susan Rice for saying she can't trust President Donald Trump's reasons for his recent drone attack on Iran.
Rice appeared in a CNN interview Friday saying Trump's explanation for the strike cannot be trusted. The administration's track record for 'telling falsehoods about issues big and very small' made it 'hard to have confidence on the face at their representation,' she said.
However, Mark Geist, a former US Marine Bengazi vet, fired back at Rice, saying Rice 'pretty much has zero integrity in my book,' and that her comment was partisan.
He recalled how she blamed an offensive internet video for triggering the deadly violence, when in fact it was terrorism and requests for increased security from the Obama administration went unheeded.
“Let this serve as a WARNING that if Iran strikes any Americans, or American assets, we have targeted 52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago), some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD. The USA wants no more threats! Iran is talking very boldly about targeting certain USA assets as revenge for our ridding the world of their terrorist leader who had just killed an American, & badly wounded many others, not to mention all of the people he had killed over his lifetime, including recently hundreds of Iranian protesters. He was already attacking our Embassy, and preparing for additional hits in other locations. Iran has been nothing but problems for many years.”
Thus, Trump tweeted on Saturday.
Can you imagine Obama telling Iran off? Not if you look at how he and Hilary reacted to the killing of our State Department officials and US soldiers in Benghazi, Libya.
Trump is no Obama! As Israeli PM Netanyahu said, “President Trump deserves all the credit for acting swiftly, forcefully and decisively.”
Here’s hoping Trump carries out his threat If the Iranians retaliate for our assassination of Quds commander Qassem Soleimani.
__________
Former US Marine and Benghazi survivor slams Susan Rice for accusing Trump of lying over reasons for Soleimani killing and calls it out as 'typical Democrat tactics'
Daily Mail
January 4, 2020
A former US Marine who also served as part of the Bengazi Annex Security team during the fatal 2012 embassy attacks that left four dead slammed former US National Security Advisor Susan Rice for saying she can't trust President Donald Trump's reasons for his recent drone attack on Iran.
Rice appeared in a CNN interview Friday saying Trump's explanation for the strike cannot be trusted. The administration's track record for 'telling falsehoods about issues big and very small' made it 'hard to have confidence on the face at their representation,' she said.
However, Mark Geist, a former US Marine Bengazi vet, fired back at Rice, saying Rice 'pretty much has zero integrity in my book,' and that her comment was partisan.
He recalled how she blamed an offensive internet video for triggering the deadly violence, when in fact it was terrorism and requests for increased security from the Obama administration went unheeded.
HIGHER EDUCATION IS DANGEROUS
by Bob Walsh
Shuo Zeng, 34, used to be a physicist. He is now a corpse. He was sitting in a Starbucks in Montclair (the sort-of good part of Oakland) when a guy grabbed his laptop and ran. Zeng pursued. The thief jumped into a waiting getaway car. Zeng was hit and killed by the getaway car.
There was plenty of good surveillance. The cops arrested Byron O. J. Reed, 22, and Javon Eugene Lee, 21, for murder during a robbery, involuntary manslaughter, second degree robbery and mopery. Reed was out on parole at the time.
Both the newspaper and the broadcast news showed Reed's sister crying and telling him how much she loved him at court. Nobody seemed to give a shit about the dead guy. He's ethnic Chinese, so that seems reasonable. If he was Chinese and Jewish the cops might not even have bothered to arrest anybody.
Reed's sister Shaquila claims her brother was with her at her home during the robbery. They haven't arrested her for obstruction of justice. Yet.
Both men have priors for robbery. Huge surprise there.
Shuo Zeng, 34, used to be a physicist. He is now a corpse. He was sitting in a Starbucks in Montclair (the sort-of good part of Oakland) when a guy grabbed his laptop and ran. Zeng pursued. The thief jumped into a waiting getaway car. Zeng was hit and killed by the getaway car.
There was plenty of good surveillance. The cops arrested Byron O. J. Reed, 22, and Javon Eugene Lee, 21, for murder during a robbery, involuntary manslaughter, second degree robbery and mopery. Reed was out on parole at the time.
Both the newspaper and the broadcast news showed Reed's sister crying and telling him how much she loved him at court. Nobody seemed to give a shit about the dead guy. He's ethnic Chinese, so that seems reasonable. If he was Chinese and Jewish the cops might not even have bothered to arrest anybody.
Reed's sister Shaquila claims her brother was with her at her home during the robbery. They haven't arrested her for obstruction of justice. Yet.
Both men have priors for robbery. Huge surprise there.
I KNOW HOW TO FIX IT. PUT A LAWYER IN CHARGE
by Bob Walsh
A "reform minded" lawyer is going to be the new HMFIC at juvenile probation in the city and county of San Francisco. His announced intention is to shut down the system completely over the next two years.
Presumably criminal law will no longer apply to persons under the age of 18 by then so there will be zero criminal activity by juveniles. Problem solved.
It currently costs about $500,000 per year to keep a baby criminal in custody in SF.
The newbie, Katy Weinstein Miller, is from Yale so clearly it's all good.
A "reform minded" lawyer is going to be the new HMFIC at juvenile probation in the city and county of San Francisco. His announced intention is to shut down the system completely over the next two years.
Presumably criminal law will no longer apply to persons under the age of 18 by then so there will be zero criminal activity by juveniles. Problem solved.
It currently costs about $500,000 per year to keep a baby criminal in custody in SF.
The newbie, Katy Weinstein Miller, is from Yale so clearly it's all good.
MISSISSIPPI PRISONS SUCK ASS
by Bob Walsh
There has been sort of an ongoing riot at the Parchman state prison in old Miss. Five prisoners have been killed in the last week in disturbances throughout their system. The whole system is on lockdown. I wouldn't be surprised if the guests of the state prefer it that way.
There has been sort of an ongoing riot at the Parchman state prison in old Miss. Five prisoners have been killed in the last week in disturbances throughout their system. The whole system is on lockdown. I wouldn't be surprised if the guests of the state prefer it that way.
SCHISM
by Bob Walsh
The United Methodist Church, the second largest Protestant denomination church in the U. S., has announced that they are planning to split the church along ideological lines. The tilting points are same-sex marriage and ordinate of homosexual clergy.
The new denomination would be designated "traditional." It is unsure how much of the 13 million member congregation will go which way, but the church and lay leaders went 53% AGAINST gay marriage and gay ordination last year at the general conference.
The United Methodist Church, the second largest Protestant denomination church in the U. S., has announced that they are planning to split the church along ideological lines. The tilting points are same-sex marriage and ordinate of homosexual clergy.
The new denomination would be designated "traditional." It is unsure how much of the 13 million member congregation will go which way, but the church and lay leaders went 53% AGAINST gay marriage and gay ordination last year at the general conference.
KICK KAEPERNICK OUT OF THE COUNTRY HE SO DESPISES
Colin Kaepernick sparks backlash after accusing the US of 'imperialism' and targeting minority groups as he slams 'American terrorist attacks against black and brown people' in Twitter rant following strike that killed Iran's Soleimani
Daily Mail
January 4, 2020
Former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick tweeted that 'There is nothing new about American terrorist attacks' just a day after it was revealed that a US airstrike had killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani.
'There is nothing new about American terrorist attacks against Black and Brown people for the expansion of American imperialism,' Kaepernick tweeted Saturday.
Although he didn't specifically refer to Soleimani's death early Friday morning in Baghdad, it's assumed that the incident is what prompted him to tweet for the first time in 2020.
President Donald Trump has said that he ordered the killing of Soleimani to prevent war, adding that the commander was plotting 'imminent and sinister' attacks against Americans.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Kick that America-hating Kaepernick out of the country … even though it is not legal.
Daily Mail
January 4, 2020
Former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick tweeted that 'There is nothing new about American terrorist attacks' just a day after it was revealed that a US airstrike had killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani.
'There is nothing new about American terrorist attacks against Black and Brown people for the expansion of American imperialism,' Kaepernick tweeted Saturday.
Although he didn't specifically refer to Soleimani's death early Friday morning in Baghdad, it's assumed that the incident is what prompted him to tweet for the first time in 2020.
President Donald Trump has said that he ordered the killing of Soleimani to prevent war, adding that the commander was plotting 'imminent and sinister' attacks against Americans.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Kick that America-hating Kaepernick out of the country … even though it is not legal.
WHY DON’T THEY JUST GO AHEAD AND LEGALIZE ALL DRUGS FOR RECREATIONAL USE?
Lab Says Its Marijuana Breath Analyzer Will Hit The Market In 2020
LAPPL Nrws Watch
January 3, 2020
Testing a driver for alcohol impairment is relatively easy. Decades of research show drunken driving equals bad driving. Standardized tests mark various levels of impairment. And because alcohol passes through the system quickly, detecting its presence indicates recent use.
But determining whether someone is too high to drive is a lot more complicated. Despite marijuana’s growing acceptance nationwide and its legality for recreational use in California, there is no consensus on how THC, its psychoactive ingredient, affects drivers or what levels constitute driving under the influence.
That has left lawmakers, police and users grappling with a critical question: If you’re using marijuana, when is it safe to get behind the wheel?
An Oakland company believes it’s solved one piece of that puzzle. By mid-2020, Hound Laboratories plans to begin selling what it says is the world’s first dual alcohol-marijuana breath analyzer, which founder Dr. Mike Lynn says can test whether a user has ingested THC of any kind in the past two to three hours.
“We’re allowed to have this in our bodies,” Lynn said of marijuana, which became legal to use recreationally in California in 2018. “But the tools to differentiate somebody who’s impaired from somebody who’s not don’t exist.”
LAPPL Nrws Watch
January 3, 2020
Testing a driver for alcohol impairment is relatively easy. Decades of research show drunken driving equals bad driving. Standardized tests mark various levels of impairment. And because alcohol passes through the system quickly, detecting its presence indicates recent use.
But determining whether someone is too high to drive is a lot more complicated. Despite marijuana’s growing acceptance nationwide and its legality for recreational use in California, there is no consensus on how THC, its psychoactive ingredient, affects drivers or what levels constitute driving under the influence.
That has left lawmakers, police and users grappling with a critical question: If you’re using marijuana, when is it safe to get behind the wheel?
An Oakland company believes it’s solved one piece of that puzzle. By mid-2020, Hound Laboratories plans to begin selling what it says is the world’s first dual alcohol-marijuana breath analyzer, which founder Dr. Mike Lynn says can test whether a user has ingested THC of any kind in the past two to three hours.
“We’re allowed to have this in our bodies,” Lynn said of marijuana, which became legal to use recreationally in California in 2018. “But the tools to differentiate somebody who’s impaired from somebody who’s not don’t exist.”
ANOTHER ROUND IN THE MIDDLE EAST?
by Peter Zeihan
Zeihan On Geopolitics
January 3, 2019
In the middle of the night January 3-4 an American air strike in Baghdad killed Qassem Soleimani, senior General of Iran's Qud's Force, arguably the second most important man in the Iranian state.
The Americans blame Soleimani for masterminding hundreds of attacks on American forces.
Soleimani was not simply a "terrorist," but instead a very rare bird. He was a strategic mastermind who also knew enough about the nuts and bolts of military and paramilitary operations to actually direct them on the ground.
The common folk in Iran getting uppity? Battlefield losses in Syria? Pro-Iran forces in Iraq facing popular uprisings? Tehran's answer was always the same: send in Soleimani to take control and use his command of the nexus of guns and protests and RPGs and politics and culture to rework the field of competition. He has been the Iranian fixer since the early 1990s. The "spontaneous, popular" assault on the American Embassy in Baghdad this past week was exactly his sort of operation.
And with that assault, to be blunt, the Iranians went too far. The American force profile in the Middle East region has already dropped by more than 80%, and was well on its way to zero. Consider what has happened specifically during the presidency of Donald Trump:
The Iranians shot down a $200ish million dollar recon drone. The Iranians doubled down on their Syrian and Yemeni operations. The Iranians threw a bunch of ordinance at Saudi oil infrastructure, taking more daily oil supply offline than any attack at any time in history. The Iranians deployed forces to crack down on anti-Iranian protests in Iraq.
The American response to all of it was the same: nothing.
But when it comes to embassies, the Americans get twitchy. In the aftermath of Iran’s 1979 Revolution, the Iranians seized control of the American embassy in Tehran and held its staff for over a year. In the American mind that singular event is what set the United States and Iran off on their half-century of mutual recrimination and loathing. (The Iranians’ “singular event” occurred somewhat earlier.) In throwing an attack at the Embassy, the Iranians resurrected a bogeyman from America's past, all but forcing a response.
If the goal was to force the Americans to the negotiating table or speed their pullout, this move was seeped in unfettered stupidity.
The Americans have proven that they’ve had active tabs on someone who really mattered. Now the Iranians have to wonder who else the Americans have eyes on.
The "smart" Iranian play at this point would be to suck up the loss of Soleimani and wait for the Americans to resume their drawdown. It is not clear ego will allow that. Iran’s near-immediate pledge of “severe revenge” would certainly argue that Tehran isn’t going to quit while they’re ahead.
Should Iran wish to engage in a “constructive” conflict, there really are not good options.
US forces are mostly out of Syria, so there's no vulnerability for the Americans there. America’s Qatar deployment is their regional HQ, making it the very definition of a hard target. The only place US forces remain in a meaningful concentration is Saudi Arabia, where the Americans have put in a few thousand extra troops to protect Saudi oil fields. But if the Iranians attack those assets, the Americans are more than capable of using their naval forces in the Persian Gulf to return the favor, something that US Senator Lindsey Graham has opined is the likely next step.
Specifically, Graham fingered Iranian refineries. (No one speaks for Trump but Trump, but Graham is the closest thing humanity has to a Trump whisperer.) And while Saudi Arabia has the cash and staff necessary to rebuild quickly, Iran does not. That just leaves Iraq, where attacking what’s left of the American garrisons is a great way to invite more firepower in – firepower that will all be aimed at you - rather than escorting it out.
None of which means the US can “win” either. That would take more troops. A LOT more. Keep in mind the American attempt at just Iraq took 100,000 soldiers and ultimately ended in failure. Troops in-country are now only about 5000.
America's withdrawal from the region means the Iranians can make the Americans bleed, but only at the edges.
The Americans can't win, but between satellites and drones and naval forces they’d have no problems making the Iranians lose, even if that loss would be far shy of regime change. And at the end of the day, the Americans are leaving anyway. (Which based on your point of view might be kind of a win?)
Two thoughts from this:
First, if the Iranians refuse to just let this go and strike out with the intent of killing US troops, this all goes in a direction pretty horrible for most of the region. The United States no longer has an interest in regional stability. It already has one foot out the door. In any broad anti-Iranian action the US would become the region’s primary cause of instability. Similarly, the Iranians (being an island of Shia in a sea of Sunni) see themselves as the odd men out and have no problem smashing anything that is not theirs. Most everyone would be in the crossfire with Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, and especially Iraq suffering the most.
Second, so long as the Americans are gallivanting around sledgehammering all things Iranian, Saudi Arabia is pleased as punch because it means they don't have to do as much. It would enable Saudi to build up their regional terror networks under the cover of American power. That would get ugly fast, and much uglier later. Never forget that groups like ISIS are de facto Saudi creations designed to first and foremost counter Iranian power. We just got that chapter closed, and we may be about to open another one.
Best guess? Odds are that’s not how this will go. Iran lacks immediate retaliation options and so will have a chance to cool off a bit. Add in the clerical elites’ newfound concerns for their personal hides and most factors point to Iran not egregiously poking the Americans soon. And the Americans still. Want. Out. With every month that passes with no sticks in eyes, more US forces will have redeployed to less sandy pastures.
But if we were talking about a perfect world, we wouldn’t be talking about this region.
You don’t have to be an outsider to miscalculate in the Middle East.
Zeihan On Geopolitics
January 3, 2019
In the middle of the night January 3-4 an American air strike in Baghdad killed Qassem Soleimani, senior General of Iran's Qud's Force, arguably the second most important man in the Iranian state.
The Americans blame Soleimani for masterminding hundreds of attacks on American forces.
Soleimani was not simply a "terrorist," but instead a very rare bird. He was a strategic mastermind who also knew enough about the nuts and bolts of military and paramilitary operations to actually direct them on the ground.
The common folk in Iran getting uppity? Battlefield losses in Syria? Pro-Iran forces in Iraq facing popular uprisings? Tehran's answer was always the same: send in Soleimani to take control and use his command of the nexus of guns and protests and RPGs and politics and culture to rework the field of competition. He has been the Iranian fixer since the early 1990s. The "spontaneous, popular" assault on the American Embassy in Baghdad this past week was exactly his sort of operation.
And with that assault, to be blunt, the Iranians went too far. The American force profile in the Middle East region has already dropped by more than 80%, and was well on its way to zero. Consider what has happened specifically during the presidency of Donald Trump:
The Iranians shot down a $200ish million dollar recon drone. The Iranians doubled down on their Syrian and Yemeni operations. The Iranians threw a bunch of ordinance at Saudi oil infrastructure, taking more daily oil supply offline than any attack at any time in history. The Iranians deployed forces to crack down on anti-Iranian protests in Iraq.
The American response to all of it was the same: nothing.
But when it comes to embassies, the Americans get twitchy. In the aftermath of Iran’s 1979 Revolution, the Iranians seized control of the American embassy in Tehran and held its staff for over a year. In the American mind that singular event is what set the United States and Iran off on their half-century of mutual recrimination and loathing. (The Iranians’ “singular event” occurred somewhat earlier.) In throwing an attack at the Embassy, the Iranians resurrected a bogeyman from America's past, all but forcing a response.
If the goal was to force the Americans to the negotiating table or speed their pullout, this move was seeped in unfettered stupidity.
The Americans have proven that they’ve had active tabs on someone who really mattered. Now the Iranians have to wonder who else the Americans have eyes on.
The "smart" Iranian play at this point would be to suck up the loss of Soleimani and wait for the Americans to resume their drawdown. It is not clear ego will allow that. Iran’s near-immediate pledge of “severe revenge” would certainly argue that Tehran isn’t going to quit while they’re ahead.
Should Iran wish to engage in a “constructive” conflict, there really are not good options.
US forces are mostly out of Syria, so there's no vulnerability for the Americans there. America’s Qatar deployment is their regional HQ, making it the very definition of a hard target. The only place US forces remain in a meaningful concentration is Saudi Arabia, where the Americans have put in a few thousand extra troops to protect Saudi oil fields. But if the Iranians attack those assets, the Americans are more than capable of using their naval forces in the Persian Gulf to return the favor, something that US Senator Lindsey Graham has opined is the likely next step.
Specifically, Graham fingered Iranian refineries. (No one speaks for Trump but Trump, but Graham is the closest thing humanity has to a Trump whisperer.) And while Saudi Arabia has the cash and staff necessary to rebuild quickly, Iran does not. That just leaves Iraq, where attacking what’s left of the American garrisons is a great way to invite more firepower in – firepower that will all be aimed at you - rather than escorting it out.
None of which means the US can “win” either. That would take more troops. A LOT more. Keep in mind the American attempt at just Iraq took 100,000 soldiers and ultimately ended in failure. Troops in-country are now only about 5000.
America's withdrawal from the region means the Iranians can make the Americans bleed, but only at the edges.
The Americans can't win, but between satellites and drones and naval forces they’d have no problems making the Iranians lose, even if that loss would be far shy of regime change. And at the end of the day, the Americans are leaving anyway. (Which based on your point of view might be kind of a win?)
Two thoughts from this:
First, if the Iranians refuse to just let this go and strike out with the intent of killing US troops, this all goes in a direction pretty horrible for most of the region. The United States no longer has an interest in regional stability. It already has one foot out the door. In any broad anti-Iranian action the US would become the region’s primary cause of instability. Similarly, the Iranians (being an island of Shia in a sea of Sunni) see themselves as the odd men out and have no problem smashing anything that is not theirs. Most everyone would be in the crossfire with Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, and especially Iraq suffering the most.
Second, so long as the Americans are gallivanting around sledgehammering all things Iranian, Saudi Arabia is pleased as punch because it means they don't have to do as much. It would enable Saudi to build up their regional terror networks under the cover of American power. That would get ugly fast, and much uglier later. Never forget that groups like ISIS are de facto Saudi creations designed to first and foremost counter Iranian power. We just got that chapter closed, and we may be about to open another one.
Best guess? Odds are that’s not how this will go. Iran lacks immediate retaliation options and so will have a chance to cool off a bit. Add in the clerical elites’ newfound concerns for their personal hides and most factors point to Iran not egregiously poking the Americans soon. And the Americans still. Want. Out. With every month that passes with no sticks in eyes, more US forces will have redeployed to less sandy pastures.
But if we were talking about a perfect world, we wouldn’t be talking about this region.
You don’t have to be an outsider to miscalculate in the Middle East.
DON’T REPEAT THE LAST TWO DECADES OF FOREIGN POLICY IDIOCIES WITH IRAN
The best way to neutralize Iran is to have them overstretch. An older, forgotten grand strategy where adversaries bleed each other is in the Western interest
By Sumantra Maitra
The Federalist
January 3, 2020
Here’s all one needs to know about what is happening in Iraq: As France 24 reported, “Iraqi security forces made no effort to stop the protesters as they marched to the heavily-fortified Green Zone after a funeral held for those killed in the US air strikes, letting them pass through a security checkpoint leading to the area.” Consider that for a moment, and let the anger surge through your veins.
These are the same people who begged for Western help during the Islamic State (ISIS) surge. Cynics argue that they didn’t even make an effort to stop ISIS from getting close to Baghdad. A lot of them are closet ISIS sympathizers, and the rest are Iranian-funded members of Shia militia. If you think the thousands marching to the U.S. embassy are all Iranian agents, and otherwise both Sunni and Shia Iraqis have a deep-seated appreciation for all things related to James Madison, my name is Ahmed Chalabi, and I have a nation to sell to you for rebuilding.
The same people who have repeatedly betrayed the generosity of Western tax-funded development projects now resort to violence. As the new year and new decade start, one can
realize that nothing, absolutely nothing, has changed in Mesopotamia in the last two decades, with $1 trillion wasted and more than 20,000 killed or maimed and scarred for life.
The decade ends how it began, with American-funded, camo-wearing specially trained Iraqi troopers smashing U.S. embassy walls with a sledgehammer and ripping off the American seal. Meanwhile, Sen. Lindsay Graham ended up begging and pleading “Iraqi allies” to understand that Americans are friends. From “we’d be greeted as liberators” to this, it was a hell of a civilizing mission, except the only ones who got chastised were on this side.
This won’t be discussed much in political circles or mainstream news, as the discussion on Iraq is still exactly what we have endured for two decades. Attempting to liberalize an entire swathe of land against the wishes of the majority of its populace can be attributed to two causal variables: Delusional idealism, and faith in the intrinsic goodness of human nature. The first one is a symptom of our flawed education system, which, like Star Wars, considers democracy a natural state of affairs; and the second one is based on a flawed, Whiggish interpretation of history. It results in an undying optimism.
A new paper in Foreign Affairs, for example, asks, if there’s a chance of a Westphalian peace in the Middle East, like one that happened in Europe after the collapse of the Roman Empire and centuries of religious warfare. This natural equilibrium developed as the warring groups realized the best way to save mutual bloodshed is through a policy of non-interference in each other’s internal affairs. That led to the rise of the nation-state system, which forms the basis of international relations now. Yet the conclusion was depressing.
Since the collapse of the Ottomans, the Middle East has been under the hegemonic protection of the West — initially the British and the French, subsequently the Soviets and the Americans. Natural equilibrium needs a natural re-alignment of social, cultural, and religious forces, which comes inevitably after heavy bloodshed.
For any such “grand bargain” to appear, there needs to be an amoral compromise, based on relative gains. Fenrir needs to chain himself, so to speak. Ideologues and media pundits with no sense of history, and used to a quarter-century of hegemony, are not taught the art of any “grand bargain.” It is us who think we can only help those who are in need, and everyone is in need of a good-intentioned guidance, when it is not our battle to join in the first place.
The common arguments will always be common. Don’t we have to fight the war there, so it doesn’t come here? Don’t we have to promote democracy so there’s no civil war? No, we don’t. This is not 2001, and forward deployment isn’t needed on a mass scale to maintain a wary eye on a volatile region.
Technological advancements like drones, with a carefully drafted foreign policy that lets local actors balance each other, is sufficient, and the money spent on building bathrooms in Basra could be spent on intelligence and surveillance from within Western borders. In any case, small-scale terror attacks can never be completely eradicated, but they can be minimized with vigilance.
Large-scale threats like ISIS would invite balancing coalitions with ground troops mostly provided by local Shia and Kurdish forces. Power begs to be balanced. By all means, sell weapons to every side, but there’s no need for nation-building. As for democracy promotion in Middle East, the idea is so juvenile, especially in 2020, it borders on insanity.
That leaves us with Iran. Iranian influence will never be completely eradicated from its neighboring country with an overwhelming Shia majority. But Iran is also an adversary, albeit with a very limited area of influence. However, one way to stop Iran, which has not been tried, is a very old, forgotten art of bloodletting. It’s a grand strategy that was once taught to every rookie foreign policy wonk, when schools still focused on teaching amoral history instead of an ideological supposed end of history.
Let Iran bleed. Let Iran overstretch, from Tehran to Tartous. Let them spend their own blood and treasure and impoverish their wealth maintaining security trying to dominate the massive Sunni population of Western Iraq and Northern Syria. Persians and Ottomans were the natural balancers of the Middle East up until 1919. Why not have that back 100 years later?
We can already see the Turks are busy securing Libya and Northern Syria. Why not let Iran do that on their Western front? With the Iranian Quds force leader dead, Iran would look to escalate in asymmetric ways, like it did during President Reagan’s time, by bombing Americans in Lebanon.
President Donald Trump was not elected to civilize the Middle East. He was elected to secure his own borders, and focus on China. As Defense Priorities research shows, this new problem in Iraq is not a cause of concern but an opportunity to disconnect from a cancerous region for good. To rephrase Napoleon, never interrupt your adversary when he is bleeding himself dry.
Amoral, dry, cynical realpolitik was once in Western sinews. The 1920s saw the rise of Wilsonian internationalism. One can only hope this coming decade, a hundred years since, proves to be its final death knell and sees a return of a much older, and far more intelligent form of conducting foreign policy. Let’s finally stop going abroad to search for monsters to destroy. And let’s avoid permanent alliances and entanglements everywhere.
By Sumantra Maitra
The Federalist
January 3, 2020
Here’s all one needs to know about what is happening in Iraq: As France 24 reported, “Iraqi security forces made no effort to stop the protesters as they marched to the heavily-fortified Green Zone after a funeral held for those killed in the US air strikes, letting them pass through a security checkpoint leading to the area.” Consider that for a moment, and let the anger surge through your veins.
These are the same people who begged for Western help during the Islamic State (ISIS) surge. Cynics argue that they didn’t even make an effort to stop ISIS from getting close to Baghdad. A lot of them are closet ISIS sympathizers, and the rest are Iranian-funded members of Shia militia. If you think the thousands marching to the U.S. embassy are all Iranian agents, and otherwise both Sunni and Shia Iraqis have a deep-seated appreciation for all things related to James Madison, my name is Ahmed Chalabi, and I have a nation to sell to you for rebuilding.
The same people who have repeatedly betrayed the generosity of Western tax-funded development projects now resort to violence. As the new year and new decade start, one can
realize that nothing, absolutely nothing, has changed in Mesopotamia in the last two decades, with $1 trillion wasted and more than 20,000 killed or maimed and scarred for life.
The decade ends how it began, with American-funded, camo-wearing specially trained Iraqi troopers smashing U.S. embassy walls with a sledgehammer and ripping off the American seal. Meanwhile, Sen. Lindsay Graham ended up begging and pleading “Iraqi allies” to understand that Americans are friends. From “we’d be greeted as liberators” to this, it was a hell of a civilizing mission, except the only ones who got chastised were on this side.
This won’t be discussed much in political circles or mainstream news, as the discussion on Iraq is still exactly what we have endured for two decades. Attempting to liberalize an entire swathe of land against the wishes of the majority of its populace can be attributed to two causal variables: Delusional idealism, and faith in the intrinsic goodness of human nature. The first one is a symptom of our flawed education system, which, like Star Wars, considers democracy a natural state of affairs; and the second one is based on a flawed, Whiggish interpretation of history. It results in an undying optimism.
A new paper in Foreign Affairs, for example, asks, if there’s a chance of a Westphalian peace in the Middle East, like one that happened in Europe after the collapse of the Roman Empire and centuries of religious warfare. This natural equilibrium developed as the warring groups realized the best way to save mutual bloodshed is through a policy of non-interference in each other’s internal affairs. That led to the rise of the nation-state system, which forms the basis of international relations now. Yet the conclusion was depressing.
Since the collapse of the Ottomans, the Middle East has been under the hegemonic protection of the West — initially the British and the French, subsequently the Soviets and the Americans. Natural equilibrium needs a natural re-alignment of social, cultural, and religious forces, which comes inevitably after heavy bloodshed.
For any such “grand bargain” to appear, there needs to be an amoral compromise, based on relative gains. Fenrir needs to chain himself, so to speak. Ideologues and media pundits with no sense of history, and used to a quarter-century of hegemony, are not taught the art of any “grand bargain.” It is us who think we can only help those who are in need, and everyone is in need of a good-intentioned guidance, when it is not our battle to join in the first place.
The common arguments will always be common. Don’t we have to fight the war there, so it doesn’t come here? Don’t we have to promote democracy so there’s no civil war? No, we don’t. This is not 2001, and forward deployment isn’t needed on a mass scale to maintain a wary eye on a volatile region.
Technological advancements like drones, with a carefully drafted foreign policy that lets local actors balance each other, is sufficient, and the money spent on building bathrooms in Basra could be spent on intelligence and surveillance from within Western borders. In any case, small-scale terror attacks can never be completely eradicated, but they can be minimized with vigilance.
Large-scale threats like ISIS would invite balancing coalitions with ground troops mostly provided by local Shia and Kurdish forces. Power begs to be balanced. By all means, sell weapons to every side, but there’s no need for nation-building. As for democracy promotion in Middle East, the idea is so juvenile, especially in 2020, it borders on insanity.
That leaves us with Iran. Iranian influence will never be completely eradicated from its neighboring country with an overwhelming Shia majority. But Iran is also an adversary, albeit with a very limited area of influence. However, one way to stop Iran, which has not been tried, is a very old, forgotten art of bloodletting. It’s a grand strategy that was once taught to every rookie foreign policy wonk, when schools still focused on teaching amoral history instead of an ideological supposed end of history.
Let Iran bleed. Let Iran overstretch, from Tehran to Tartous. Let them spend their own blood and treasure and impoverish their wealth maintaining security trying to dominate the massive Sunni population of Western Iraq and Northern Syria. Persians and Ottomans were the natural balancers of the Middle East up until 1919. Why not have that back 100 years later?
We can already see the Turks are busy securing Libya and Northern Syria. Why not let Iran do that on their Western front? With the Iranian Quds force leader dead, Iran would look to escalate in asymmetric ways, like it did during President Reagan’s time, by bombing Americans in Lebanon.
President Donald Trump was not elected to civilize the Middle East. He was elected to secure his own borders, and focus on China. As Defense Priorities research shows, this new problem in Iraq is not a cause of concern but an opportunity to disconnect from a cancerous region for good. To rephrase Napoleon, never interrupt your adversary when he is bleeding himself dry.
Amoral, dry, cynical realpolitik was once in Western sinews. The 1920s saw the rise of Wilsonian internationalism. One can only hope this coming decade, a hundred years since, proves to be its final death knell and sees a return of a much older, and far more intelligent form of conducting foreign policy. Let’s finally stop going abroad to search for monsters to destroy. And let’s avoid permanent alliances and entanglements everywhere.
Saturday, January 04, 2020
INSTEAD OF CONDEMNING TRUMP FOR BEING RECKLESS, DEMONCRATS SHOULD PRAISE HIM FOR A VERY SUCCESSFUL AND WARRANTED STRIKE
Reaper drone missiles kill Qassem Soleimani, two Iranian Revolutionary Guard generals, a colonel and six others in Baghdad International airport attack ordered by Trump
Daily Mail
January 3, 2020
American guided missiles slammed into a convoy carrying Iranian Quds commander Qassem Soleimani, killing him along with four other high-ranking figures.
Brigadier General Hussein Jafari Nia and Major-General Hadi Taremi were named by Iran's Fars news agency as among five Islamic Revolutionary Guards figures killed in the US strike on Baghdad airport.
Also killed were Colonel of the Guards Shahroud Mozaffari Nia and Captain Waheed Zamanian, according to Fars.
Another five Iraqis were also listed among the dead, including Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy-commander of the Iraqi-based pro-Iran People's Mobilization Forces who led protests at the American embassy in Baghdad just days earlier. Mohammad al-Shibani, Muhandis's son-in-law, Heydar Ali, Muhammed Reza al-Jaberi and Hassan Abdul Hadi, all senior PMF figures, were also said to have died.
It comes as Iran's Ayatollah Khamenei vowed 'crushing revenge' and 'jihad' against America over Soleimani's death, as thousands took to the streets in his home-state of Kerman to mourn.
Meanwhile protesters on the streets of Tehran also burned US flags and chanted 'death to America'
The attack unfolded early on Friday local time in a precision strike on two cars that were carrying Soleimani and Iraq-based PMF militiamen who were picking him up from the airport. Soleimani had reportedly just arrived to Baghdad on a flight from Syria.
Four precision missiles struck the two black Hyundai cars carrying Soleimani and his entourage, according to U.S. officials. The cars were struck on an access road near the Baghdad airport.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schitt, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and a horde of other Demoncrats condemned Trump for being reckless and for ordering the attack on Soleimani without congressional authorization.
Since when did an attack on those responsible for attacks against Americans require congressional approval?
Israeli PM Netanyahu praised Trump, telling reporters: “Qasem Soleimani is responsible for the death of American citizens and many other innocent people. He was planning more such attacks. President Trump deserves all the credit for acting swiftly, forcefully and decisively.”
The Europeans and the UN condemned Trump. As expected, so did China and Russia.
Hollywood was not about to be left out in the condemnation of Trump. In a tweet, Coke sniffing Crazy Rose McGowan apologized to Iran, saying “We are being held hostage by a terrorist regime” and begging, “Please don’t kill us.” In another tweet, Crazy Rose tweeted “Thanks a lot dickhead @realDonaldTrump.”
John Cusack, Alyssa Milano, Debra Messing and Michael Moore also blasted Trump. Cusack tweeted “Trump in full fascist 101 mode-,steal and lie - until there's nothing left and start a war - He's so idiotic he doesn't know he just attacked Iran And that's not like anywhere else.”
Who are the real dickheads here? I'ts Crazy Rose McGowan, John Cusack and their ilk!
What really pisses me off is that when Obama had Osama bin Laden assassinated, both Democrats and Republicans as well as the Europeans buried him in a heap of praise. But when Trump assassinates a terrorist far more dangerous than bin Laden, except for Republicans and the Israelis, everyone else accuses him of being reckless and leading us to war.
Fuck the Demoncrats, Hollywood and the foreign leaders who attack Trump when they should be praising him.
Daily Mail
January 3, 2020
American guided missiles slammed into a convoy carrying Iranian Quds commander Qassem Soleimani, killing him along with four other high-ranking figures.
Brigadier General Hussein Jafari Nia and Major-General Hadi Taremi were named by Iran's Fars news agency as among five Islamic Revolutionary Guards figures killed in the US strike on Baghdad airport.
Also killed were Colonel of the Guards Shahroud Mozaffari Nia and Captain Waheed Zamanian, according to Fars.
Another five Iraqis were also listed among the dead, including Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy-commander of the Iraqi-based pro-Iran People's Mobilization Forces who led protests at the American embassy in Baghdad just days earlier. Mohammad al-Shibani, Muhandis's son-in-law, Heydar Ali, Muhammed Reza al-Jaberi and Hassan Abdul Hadi, all senior PMF figures, were also said to have died.
It comes as Iran's Ayatollah Khamenei vowed 'crushing revenge' and 'jihad' against America over Soleimani's death, as thousands took to the streets in his home-state of Kerman to mourn.
Meanwhile protesters on the streets of Tehran also burned US flags and chanted 'death to America'
The attack unfolded early on Friday local time in a precision strike on two cars that were carrying Soleimani and Iraq-based PMF militiamen who were picking him up from the airport. Soleimani had reportedly just arrived to Baghdad on a flight from Syria.
Four precision missiles struck the two black Hyundai cars carrying Soleimani and his entourage, according to U.S. officials. The cars were struck on an access road near the Baghdad airport.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schitt, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and a horde of other Demoncrats condemned Trump for being reckless and for ordering the attack on Soleimani without congressional authorization.
Since when did an attack on those responsible for attacks against Americans require congressional approval?
Israeli PM Netanyahu praised Trump, telling reporters: “Qasem Soleimani is responsible for the death of American citizens and many other innocent people. He was planning more such attacks. President Trump deserves all the credit for acting swiftly, forcefully and decisively.”
The Europeans and the UN condemned Trump. As expected, so did China and Russia.
Hollywood was not about to be left out in the condemnation of Trump. In a tweet, Coke sniffing Crazy Rose McGowan apologized to Iran, saying “We are being held hostage by a terrorist regime” and begging, “Please don’t kill us.” In another tweet, Crazy Rose tweeted “Thanks a lot dickhead @realDonaldTrump.”
John Cusack, Alyssa Milano, Debra Messing and Michael Moore also blasted Trump. Cusack tweeted “Trump in full fascist 101 mode-,steal and lie - until there's nothing left and start a war - He's so idiotic he doesn't know he just attacked Iran And that's not like anywhere else.”
Who are the real dickheads here? I'ts Crazy Rose McGowan, John Cusack and their ilk!
What really pisses me off is that when Obama had Osama bin Laden assassinated, both Democrats and Republicans as well as the Europeans buried him in a heap of praise. But when Trump assassinates a terrorist far more dangerous than bin Laden, except for Republicans and the Israelis, everyone else accuses him of being reckless and leading us to war.
Fuck the Demoncrats, Hollywood and the foreign leaders who attack Trump when they should be praising him.
THIS IS REALLY TACKY
by Bob Walsh
Carlos Ghosn used to be the HMFIC of Nissan. He was facing trial in Japan for financial misconduct. He just jumped bail ($14 million U.S.) and fled the country. He surfaced in his native Lebanon. There is serious doubt as to whether or no Lebanon will extradite him. They note that he entered the country on a valid passport and has committed no crime in Lebanon.
There is a "red notice" out on him thru Interpol, but that is not the same as a formal arrest warrant. He traveled thru Turkey and the Turks have arrested several people on suspicion of complicity in his travel to Lebanon.
Ghosn also holds valid passports from France and Brazil.
Ghosn had some unkind things to say about the Japanese criminal justice system. His comments might be warranted. Their criminal court system has a conviction rate of slightly over 99%.
Carlos Ghosn used to be the HMFIC of Nissan. He was facing trial in Japan for financial misconduct. He just jumped bail ($14 million U.S.) and fled the country. He surfaced in his native Lebanon. There is serious doubt as to whether or no Lebanon will extradite him. They note that he entered the country on a valid passport and has committed no crime in Lebanon.
There is a "red notice" out on him thru Interpol, but that is not the same as a formal arrest warrant. He traveled thru Turkey and the Turks have arrested several people on suspicion of complicity in his travel to Lebanon.
Ghosn also holds valid passports from France and Brazil.
Ghosn had some unkind things to say about the Japanese criminal justice system. His comments might be warranted. Their criminal court system has a conviction rate of slightly over 99%.
HOW THE HELL DOES THIS HAPPEN?
by Bob Walsh
I may be the wrong person to comment. I have never hunted large game other than bipeds, so I have no personal information base to work from.
On New Years Day Kim Drawdy, 30, and his 9-year old daughter, Lauren, were hunting in South Carolina near Waterboro. They were both "mistaken" for deer and shot to death by other hunters.
The Colleton County Coroner has not yet released a cause or manner of death. The Dept. of Natural Resources is investigating. In my limited experience in looking at reports of such things it usually turns out that consumption of alcohol was involved or the shooting was not as accidental as the shooters would have you believe. I have no idea what regulations, if any, S. C. has on hunter safety clothing but most states require that hunters wear so many square inches of high-visibility color while hunting just to prevent this sort of tragedy. Also, it helps if the hunters don't have their heads up their butts and actually identify their target rather than shooting at movement in the brush.
I may be the wrong person to comment. I have never hunted large game other than bipeds, so I have no personal information base to work from.
On New Years Day Kim Drawdy, 30, and his 9-year old daughter, Lauren, were hunting in South Carolina near Waterboro. They were both "mistaken" for deer and shot to death by other hunters.
The Colleton County Coroner has not yet released a cause or manner of death. The Dept. of Natural Resources is investigating. In my limited experience in looking at reports of such things it usually turns out that consumption of alcohol was involved or the shooting was not as accidental as the shooters would have you believe. I have no idea what regulations, if any, S. C. has on hunter safety clothing but most states require that hunters wear so many square inches of high-visibility color while hunting just to prevent this sort of tragedy. Also, it helps if the hunters don't have their heads up their butts and actually identify their target rather than shooting at movement in the brush.
ITS GETTING REALLY, REALLY NASTY DOWN UNDER
by Bob Walsh
The fires ravaging Australia are truly something to behold. Whole communities in the south west of the country have been evacuated to beaches where they will be safe from the fires and can be evacuated by their navy. Entire cities have been burnt to the ground. I didn't know that there was enough flora down there to create truly massive wildfires. Obviously I was ignorant of the situation.
The fires ravaging Australia are truly something to behold. Whole communities in the south west of the country have been evacuated to beaches where they will be safe from the fires and can be evacuated by their navy. Entire cities have been burnt to the ground. I didn't know that there was enough flora down there to create truly massive wildfires. Obviously I was ignorant of the situation.
IS WW3 IMMINENT?
Could Iran crisis lead to World War Three? Fears Tehran may hit back with cyber or terror attacks on US forces or Israel and force Trump to retaliate in tit for tat that could drag in Russia, China and Turkey
Daily Mail
January 3, 2020
Iran has vowed to exact a 'crushing revenge' on American forces in retaliation for the killing of Quds commander Qassem Soleimani - leaving the Middle East on the brink of a conflict that could quickly spiral into World War 3.
The Iranian National Security Council is currently meeting in Tehran - chaired by Ayatollah Khamenei himself for the first time ever - to consider its response.
At their disposal is the world's 13th most powerful military, a host of militia groups spread across the Middle East, proxy-forces such as Lebanon's Hezbollah and Yemen's Houthi rebels, and allies like Syria's Bashar al-Assad.
Targets in their crosshairs are likely to include US troops and military bases in Iraq and Syria, Israeli forces in the Golan Heights, tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, and Saudi Arabia's oil infrastructure.
While initial strikes are likely to be limited, they could herald a tit-for-tat series of events - drawing in Russian forces stationed in Syria defending a key Iranian ally in Bashar al-Assad, and Turkish forces fighting in the country's north.
China also has ships stationed in the Gulf of Oman and recently carried out joint naval drill with both Iran and Russia, raising the prospect that they could also become involved.
The US, China, Russia and Israel all have nuclear weapons - with at least three of those possessing next-generation hypersonic missiles capable of breaching all defense systems.
Daily Mail
January 3, 2020
Iran has vowed to exact a 'crushing revenge' on American forces in retaliation for the killing of Quds commander Qassem Soleimani - leaving the Middle East on the brink of a conflict that could quickly spiral into World War 3.
The Iranian National Security Council is currently meeting in Tehran - chaired by Ayatollah Khamenei himself for the first time ever - to consider its response.
At their disposal is the world's 13th most powerful military, a host of militia groups spread across the Middle East, proxy-forces such as Lebanon's Hezbollah and Yemen's Houthi rebels, and allies like Syria's Bashar al-Assad.
Targets in their crosshairs are likely to include US troops and military bases in Iraq and Syria, Israeli forces in the Golan Heights, tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, and Saudi Arabia's oil infrastructure.
While initial strikes are likely to be limited, they could herald a tit-for-tat series of events - drawing in Russian forces stationed in Syria defending a key Iranian ally in Bashar al-Assad, and Turkish forces fighting in the country's north.
China also has ships stationed in the Gulf of Oman and recently carried out joint naval drill with both Iran and Russia, raising the prospect that they could also become involved.
The US, China, Russia and Israel all have nuclear weapons - with at least three of those possessing next-generation hypersonic missiles capable of breaching all defense systems.
THE LIVING MARTYR IS NO LONGER LIVING
The head of the snake: Who was Qassem Soleimani?
By Neta Bar
Israel Hayom
January 3, 2020
The targeted killing of Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds Force and one of the most influential people in Iran’s top leadership echelon, was an unprecedented blow to Tehran’s aspirations and an American declaration of war on the spread of the Islamic Republic throughout the Middle East.
In the past 10 years, the Quds Force leader has created a corridor controlled by Iran that extends through Baghdad, Damascus, and Beirut and was a key element in Iran’s plan to become a regional superpower.
Working thoroughly, carefully, and with plenty of personal charisma, Soleimani – the son of a poor farmer from western Iran – built a network of political alliances and won the main proxy wars in the Middle East to which he sent his fighters. Soleimani started his career as a young officer in the IRGC during the Iran-Iraq War. His heroism on the battlefield and his commitment made him a rising star.
In 1998, he was named commander of the Quds Force, the long arm of the IRGC that operates outside Iran. Under Soleimani, the forces became a prominent factor is nearly every conflict in the Middle East. In the past decade, Soleimani has organized and armed a successful rebellion by the Houthis in Yemen. When Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates invaded Yemen, the rebels held the capital of Sanaa and even fired Iranian-made missiles at Saudi cities.
In Iraq, Soleimani’s people turned the Shiite government into a puppet of Tehran after the militias founded by the Quds Force helped the Iraqi army beat the Islamic State and push it out of Iraq. In Lebanon, Tehran’s support for Hezbollah allowed Iran to entrench itself as a leading political force and pose a threat to Israel.
Because of Soleimani’s achievements, devotion, and willingness to position himself in the heart of a battle, he became known among the Iraqi Shiites as "the living shahid [martyr]." Many in Iran saw him as the best choice to replace the reformist Hassan Rouhani as president.
While Soleimani’s legacy will continue to inspire Iran in its battle against the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia for dominance in the Middle East, Iran has lost the man who symbolized its struggle and encapsulated its spirit.
By Neta Bar
Israel Hayom
January 3, 2020
The targeted killing of Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds Force and one of the most influential people in Iran’s top leadership echelon, was an unprecedented blow to Tehran’s aspirations and an American declaration of war on the spread of the Islamic Republic throughout the Middle East.
In the past 10 years, the Quds Force leader has created a corridor controlled by Iran that extends through Baghdad, Damascus, and Beirut and was a key element in Iran’s plan to become a regional superpower.
Working thoroughly, carefully, and with plenty of personal charisma, Soleimani – the son of a poor farmer from western Iran – built a network of political alliances and won the main proxy wars in the Middle East to which he sent his fighters. Soleimani started his career as a young officer in the IRGC during the Iran-Iraq War. His heroism on the battlefield and his commitment made him a rising star.
In 1998, he was named commander of the Quds Force, the long arm of the IRGC that operates outside Iran. Under Soleimani, the forces became a prominent factor is nearly every conflict in the Middle East. In the past decade, Soleimani has organized and armed a successful rebellion by the Houthis in Yemen. When Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates invaded Yemen, the rebels held the capital of Sanaa and even fired Iranian-made missiles at Saudi cities.
In Iraq, Soleimani’s people turned the Shiite government into a puppet of Tehran after the militias founded by the Quds Force helped the Iraqi army beat the Islamic State and push it out of Iraq. In Lebanon, Tehran’s support for Hezbollah allowed Iran to entrench itself as a leading political force and pose a threat to Israel.
Because of Soleimani’s achievements, devotion, and willingness to position himself in the heart of a battle, he became known among the Iraqi Shiites as "the living shahid [martyr]." Many in Iran saw him as the best choice to replace the reformist Hassan Rouhani as president.
While Soleimani’s legacy will continue to inspire Iran in its battle against the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia for dominance in the Middle East, Iran has lost the man who symbolized its struggle and encapsulated its spirit.
CAROLINE SOCKS IT TO AMERICA'S LIBERAL JEWS … AGAIN
When will American Jewry wake up?
By Caroline B. Glick
Israel Hayom
January 3, 2020
Was the machete attack at Rabbi Chaim Rottenburg’s home in Monsey, NY last Saturday night wake-up call enough?
Are liberal American Jews ready to accept the truth about anti-Semitism in America?
Following the December 10 massacre at the kosher supermarket in Jersey City, Chris Gadsen, a local high school principal shared an op-ed calling for dialogue between the city’s Jewish and black communities on his Facebook page.
Joan Terrell-Paige, an elected member of the Jersey City school board responded angrily. She began her response to Gadsen’s post by vilifying the city’s Jews as "brutes" who oppressed blacks by buying apartments from them.
Then she accused "6 rabbis," of "selling body parts."
Then she accused Jews of planting "drugs and guns" in the black community.
In closing, Terrell-Paige paid homage to the shooters.
"Mr. Anderson and Ms. Graham went directly to the kosher supermarket. I believe they knew they would come out in body bags. What is the message they were sending? Are we brave enough to explore the answer to their message? Are we brave enough to stop the assault on the Black communities in America?"
Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop and New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy both demanded that Terrell Paige resign. The Board of Education was expected to censure her and call for her to resign at a meeting scheduled for December 19. That meeting was canceled. So were subsequent meetings scheduled for December 23 and December 30. A fourth meeting was scheduled for January 2.
As the board dithered, Terrell-Paige began racking up support. On December 18, the Hudson County Democratic Organization’s Black Caucus issued a statement saying, "While we do not agree with the delivery of the statement made by Ms. Terrell-Paige, we believe that her statement has heightened awareness around issues that must be addressed and that should be a topic of a larger conversation by two communities that have already and must always continue to coexist harmoniously."
On December 29, John Flora, a Democratic Congressional primary candidate said, "Rather than hastily demanding her resignation this was an ideal moment for our locally elected to sit down with Mrs. Terrell, clarify her statements, and be prepared to demonstrate empathy."
Terrell-Paige’s supporters scheduled a public vigil on her behalf to take place an hour before the January 2 meeting.
There is a rolling pogrom going on in the New York metropolitan area against Orthodox Jews. It involves continuous harassment and attacks against Jews in the streets of New York punctuated by deadly assaults. "Mr. Anderson and Ms. Graham" carried out the first lethal assault. Last Saturday night Grafton Thomas carried out another particularly violent attack with his machete at Rabbi Rottenburg’s home in Monsey.
There are three types of active anti-Semitism playing out today in America. The first is white nationalist anti-Semitism. It is practiced by white individuals and groups ideologically aligned with the Nazis. We saw its handiwork in the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and the deadly shooting at the Chabad house in at Powey, CA.
The second anti-Semitism is leftist anti-Semitism. Leftist anti-Semites get their ideological inspiration from the Soviet Union and the PLO/Hamas. Like the Soviets and Palestinian terrorists, they reject the existence of Jewish civilization. They deny the right of Jews to Jewish history, to the Jewish homeland, to Jewish nationalism, and to Jewish peoplehood. They demonize and attack Jews who don’t won’t accept the status of second-class citizens denied their right to their own identity and heritage.
The third type of active anti-Semitism in the US today is black anti-Semitism. Black anti-Semitism became a salient form of Jew-hatred in America in the wake of the 1967 Six-Day War when Saudi Arabia began funding and proselytizing to black communities. Today the Nation of Islam, under the genocidally anti-Semitic Louis Farrakhan is arguably the most powerful and influential engine for propagating and legitimizing Jew-hatred in America.
Over the past 15 years, black anti-Semitism began cohabitating with leftist anti-Semitism. The initiative to merge the two forms of Jew-hatred came from leftist anti-Semites. Under the banner of "intersectionality," they linked "Nazi" Israel to African American allegations of police brutality and institutional racism. Black Lives Matter’s adoption of a leftist anti-Semitic platform that rejects Israel’s right to exist speaks to the success of the left’s campaign. Reports that Thomas searched for "Zionist temples" before he barged into Rabbi Rottenburg’s home show the lethal consequence of their merger.
According to the New York Police Department, by last September, anti-Semitic attacks in New York City had increased 63 percent from 2018. The final 2019 numbers will certainly be even worse. The attacks in Brooklyn have been carried out by non-whites.
To fight the onslaught of bigotry being unleashed against its members, America’s overwhelmingly Democratic and deeply liberal Jewish community needs to recognize two hard truths.
First, liberal American Jews need to realize their local and national leaders have been lying to them. For years American Jewish leaders at the national and local levels have been peddling the claim that the ideological and political right poses the greatest threat to the American Jewish community. Not only does the rolling pogrom in New York put paid this lie, but the raw data, collected since the start of the century, also shows this is incorrect.
Repeated surveys by the Anti-Defamation League show that African Americans are on average around twice as likely to be anti-Semitic as the general population.
Repeated Pew and Gallup surveys show that liberals and Democrats are increasingly anti-Israel and hostile to Jews and conservatives and Republicans are increasingly pro-Israel and hostile to anti-Semites.
Instead of accepting these facts, liberal Jews make excuses for leftist and black anti-Semites.
Almost every major American Jewish organization –from AIPAC to the Reform and Conservative movements clings to the "two-state" paradigm as an article of faith. This despite the fact that like the Palestinians, anti-Israel activists and groups reject Israel’s right to exist.
The apparent thinking is that the American Jewish community’s support for Palestinian statehood will convince leftist anti-Semites to accept that Jews have the right to support Israel’s existence. In other words, the Jewish community treats leftist anti-Semitism as a policy dispute rather than a bigotry whose goal is to oppress them. This denial has prevented the community from taking adequate action against leftist anti-Semitic aggression on US campuses.
Rather than demand an accounting of black politicians and communal leaders for black anti-Semitism, liberal Jewish leaders accuse the Jewish community of racism.
Last month, as Jewish blood was being spilled every day in Brooklyn, the Reform Movement held its annual convention in Chicago and voted to support reparations to African Americans for the crime of slavery.
One of the leaders of the Reform movement, Rabbi Jonah Pesner explained the decision in an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune. Pesner insisted that American Jews must take action, "against the racism still lingering in our congregations and communities."
Several liberal Jewish writers claimed the Jersey City Jewish community itself brought on the attack on the kosher supermarket. Hassidic Jews had no business buying homes in black neighborhoods, they wrote.
Contrast the stunning forbearance liberal Jews extend to leftist and black anti-Semites to their intolerance for white nationalism. Every liberal rabbi can give detailed sermons about the dangers of white nationalists and insist that President Donald Trump is the greatest threat to American Jews. They angrily dismiss as irrelevant all mention Trump’s Jewish grandchildren, his record as the most pro-Israel president in history and the unprecedented measures he has implemented to fight anti-Semitism in American academia. He opposes open borders, so he hates Jews, they insist.
The second inconvenient truth the American Jewish community needs to get its head around is that the Democratic Party has become fully Corbyized. Like Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party today’s Democratic Party abets anti-Semites and anti-Semitism in America.
In 2018, running unopposed, Arthur Jones won the Republican primary in Illinois 3rd Congressional District. Jones was the sole candidate because the district is overwhelmingly Democrat. When it came out that Jones is a Nazi, not only did the Republican party denounce him. The state party called on Republicans in the 3rd district to vote for the Democratic candidate.
The Republican House leadership censured Iowa Congressman Steven King and removed him from all committees after he spoke favorably about white nationalists in a newspaper interview.
Whereas the GOP denounces and works against its anti-Semitic members, the Democratic party rewards and defends its anti-Semites. Terrell-Paige’s story is far from unique.
The Democratic House majority refused to censure Cong. Ilhan Omar after she made a series of anti-Semitic statements.
In August, the Democrats rallied against Israel in support of Omar and her fellow anti-Semite Cong. Rashida Tlaib. The two intended to lead a tour in Israel that month. Once Israeli authorities realized the purpose of the trip was to delegitimize Israel’s right to exist, in accordance with its immigration law, Israel denied them entry visas.
Rather than condemn their colleagues for working towards the annihilation of the world’s largest Jewish community, Democratic leaders condemned Israel for standing up to them.
One of the most powerful caucuses in the House is the Congressional Black Caucus. Its leading members publicly support Farrakhan despite his role in propagating anti-Jewish bigotry in the black community.
In the 2016 presidential race, Trump faced near-daily demands – which he met – to reject the endorsement of former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke and denounce him. The liberal Jewish establishment refused to accept Trump’s repeated renunciations of his support as genuine.
In the 2008 presidential race, then-Senator Barack Obama was asked once to reject Farrakhan’s endorsement. He refused. 88 percent of American Jews voted for him, and declared him "the first Jewish president."
New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio passed radical bail reform policies that give thugs get-out-of-jail-free cards. Accordingly, last Saturday a woman arrested after violently assaulting three Jewish women in Brooklyn was released from jail without bail. She was arrested again Sunday after attacking a fourth woman, and promptly released again.
DeBlasio blamed the Monsey attack on Trump.
As far as progressive Jewish activists are concerned, DeBlasio’s policies are anti-black. Last week they criticized DeBlasio’s announcement that he was augmenting police patrols in Jewish neighborhoods claiming, "This is what dividing vulnerable communities looks like."
This sort of crazy talk is not cost-free. It is dangerous. Inconvenient truths will not go away just because they are unpleasant.
It is a fact that leftist and black anti-Semites are just as great a threat, if not greater threats to the Jewish community than white nationalist anti-Semites.
It is a fact that the Republican Party rejects anti-Semitism in all its forms and expels anti-Semites found in its ranks, and the Democratic Party enables and advances leftist and black anti-Semites and anti-Semitism.
So long as the liberal Jewish establishment and its members refuse to accept these facts, the attacks against America’s Jews can be expected to increase in frequency and violence.
By Caroline B. Glick
Israel Hayom
January 3, 2020
Was the machete attack at Rabbi Chaim Rottenburg’s home in Monsey, NY last Saturday night wake-up call enough?
Are liberal American Jews ready to accept the truth about anti-Semitism in America?
Following the December 10 massacre at the kosher supermarket in Jersey City, Chris Gadsen, a local high school principal shared an op-ed calling for dialogue between the city’s Jewish and black communities on his Facebook page.
Joan Terrell-Paige, an elected member of the Jersey City school board responded angrily. She began her response to Gadsen’s post by vilifying the city’s Jews as "brutes" who oppressed blacks by buying apartments from them.
Then she accused "6 rabbis," of "selling body parts."
Then she accused Jews of planting "drugs and guns" in the black community.
In closing, Terrell-Paige paid homage to the shooters.
"Mr. Anderson and Ms. Graham went directly to the kosher supermarket. I believe they knew they would come out in body bags. What is the message they were sending? Are we brave enough to explore the answer to their message? Are we brave enough to stop the assault on the Black communities in America?"
Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop and New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy both demanded that Terrell Paige resign. The Board of Education was expected to censure her and call for her to resign at a meeting scheduled for December 19. That meeting was canceled. So were subsequent meetings scheduled for December 23 and December 30. A fourth meeting was scheduled for January 2.
As the board dithered, Terrell-Paige began racking up support. On December 18, the Hudson County Democratic Organization’s Black Caucus issued a statement saying, "While we do not agree with the delivery of the statement made by Ms. Terrell-Paige, we believe that her statement has heightened awareness around issues that must be addressed and that should be a topic of a larger conversation by two communities that have already and must always continue to coexist harmoniously."
On December 29, John Flora, a Democratic Congressional primary candidate said, "Rather than hastily demanding her resignation this was an ideal moment for our locally elected to sit down with Mrs. Terrell, clarify her statements, and be prepared to demonstrate empathy."
Terrell-Paige’s supporters scheduled a public vigil on her behalf to take place an hour before the January 2 meeting.
There is a rolling pogrom going on in the New York metropolitan area against Orthodox Jews. It involves continuous harassment and attacks against Jews in the streets of New York punctuated by deadly assaults. "Mr. Anderson and Ms. Graham" carried out the first lethal assault. Last Saturday night Grafton Thomas carried out another particularly violent attack with his machete at Rabbi Rottenburg’s home in Monsey.
There are three types of active anti-Semitism playing out today in America. The first is white nationalist anti-Semitism. It is practiced by white individuals and groups ideologically aligned with the Nazis. We saw its handiwork in the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and the deadly shooting at the Chabad house in at Powey, CA.
The second anti-Semitism is leftist anti-Semitism. Leftist anti-Semites get their ideological inspiration from the Soviet Union and the PLO/Hamas. Like the Soviets and Palestinian terrorists, they reject the existence of Jewish civilization. They deny the right of Jews to Jewish history, to the Jewish homeland, to Jewish nationalism, and to Jewish peoplehood. They demonize and attack Jews who don’t won’t accept the status of second-class citizens denied their right to their own identity and heritage.
The third type of active anti-Semitism in the US today is black anti-Semitism. Black anti-Semitism became a salient form of Jew-hatred in America in the wake of the 1967 Six-Day War when Saudi Arabia began funding and proselytizing to black communities. Today the Nation of Islam, under the genocidally anti-Semitic Louis Farrakhan is arguably the most powerful and influential engine for propagating and legitimizing Jew-hatred in America.
Over the past 15 years, black anti-Semitism began cohabitating with leftist anti-Semitism. The initiative to merge the two forms of Jew-hatred came from leftist anti-Semites. Under the banner of "intersectionality," they linked "Nazi" Israel to African American allegations of police brutality and institutional racism. Black Lives Matter’s adoption of a leftist anti-Semitic platform that rejects Israel’s right to exist speaks to the success of the left’s campaign. Reports that Thomas searched for "Zionist temples" before he barged into Rabbi Rottenburg’s home show the lethal consequence of their merger.
According to the New York Police Department, by last September, anti-Semitic attacks in New York City had increased 63 percent from 2018. The final 2019 numbers will certainly be even worse. The attacks in Brooklyn have been carried out by non-whites.
To fight the onslaught of bigotry being unleashed against its members, America’s overwhelmingly Democratic and deeply liberal Jewish community needs to recognize two hard truths.
First, liberal American Jews need to realize their local and national leaders have been lying to them. For years American Jewish leaders at the national and local levels have been peddling the claim that the ideological and political right poses the greatest threat to the American Jewish community. Not only does the rolling pogrom in New York put paid this lie, but the raw data, collected since the start of the century, also shows this is incorrect.
Repeated surveys by the Anti-Defamation League show that African Americans are on average around twice as likely to be anti-Semitic as the general population.
Repeated Pew and Gallup surveys show that liberals and Democrats are increasingly anti-Israel and hostile to Jews and conservatives and Republicans are increasingly pro-Israel and hostile to anti-Semites.
Instead of accepting these facts, liberal Jews make excuses for leftist and black anti-Semites.
Almost every major American Jewish organization –from AIPAC to the Reform and Conservative movements clings to the "two-state" paradigm as an article of faith. This despite the fact that like the Palestinians, anti-Israel activists and groups reject Israel’s right to exist.
The apparent thinking is that the American Jewish community’s support for Palestinian statehood will convince leftist anti-Semites to accept that Jews have the right to support Israel’s existence. In other words, the Jewish community treats leftist anti-Semitism as a policy dispute rather than a bigotry whose goal is to oppress them. This denial has prevented the community from taking adequate action against leftist anti-Semitic aggression on US campuses.
Rather than demand an accounting of black politicians and communal leaders for black anti-Semitism, liberal Jewish leaders accuse the Jewish community of racism.
Last month, as Jewish blood was being spilled every day in Brooklyn, the Reform Movement held its annual convention in Chicago and voted to support reparations to African Americans for the crime of slavery.
One of the leaders of the Reform movement, Rabbi Jonah Pesner explained the decision in an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune. Pesner insisted that American Jews must take action, "against the racism still lingering in our congregations and communities."
Several liberal Jewish writers claimed the Jersey City Jewish community itself brought on the attack on the kosher supermarket. Hassidic Jews had no business buying homes in black neighborhoods, they wrote.
Contrast the stunning forbearance liberal Jews extend to leftist and black anti-Semites to their intolerance for white nationalism. Every liberal rabbi can give detailed sermons about the dangers of white nationalists and insist that President Donald Trump is the greatest threat to American Jews. They angrily dismiss as irrelevant all mention Trump’s Jewish grandchildren, his record as the most pro-Israel president in history and the unprecedented measures he has implemented to fight anti-Semitism in American academia. He opposes open borders, so he hates Jews, they insist.
The second inconvenient truth the American Jewish community needs to get its head around is that the Democratic Party has become fully Corbyized. Like Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party today’s Democratic Party abets anti-Semites and anti-Semitism in America.
In 2018, running unopposed, Arthur Jones won the Republican primary in Illinois 3rd Congressional District. Jones was the sole candidate because the district is overwhelmingly Democrat. When it came out that Jones is a Nazi, not only did the Republican party denounce him. The state party called on Republicans in the 3rd district to vote for the Democratic candidate.
The Republican House leadership censured Iowa Congressman Steven King and removed him from all committees after he spoke favorably about white nationalists in a newspaper interview.
Whereas the GOP denounces and works against its anti-Semitic members, the Democratic party rewards and defends its anti-Semites. Terrell-Paige’s story is far from unique.
The Democratic House majority refused to censure Cong. Ilhan Omar after she made a series of anti-Semitic statements.
In August, the Democrats rallied against Israel in support of Omar and her fellow anti-Semite Cong. Rashida Tlaib. The two intended to lead a tour in Israel that month. Once Israeli authorities realized the purpose of the trip was to delegitimize Israel’s right to exist, in accordance with its immigration law, Israel denied them entry visas.
Rather than condemn their colleagues for working towards the annihilation of the world’s largest Jewish community, Democratic leaders condemned Israel for standing up to them.
One of the most powerful caucuses in the House is the Congressional Black Caucus. Its leading members publicly support Farrakhan despite his role in propagating anti-Jewish bigotry in the black community.
In the 2016 presidential race, Trump faced near-daily demands – which he met – to reject the endorsement of former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke and denounce him. The liberal Jewish establishment refused to accept Trump’s repeated renunciations of his support as genuine.
In the 2008 presidential race, then-Senator Barack Obama was asked once to reject Farrakhan’s endorsement. He refused. 88 percent of American Jews voted for him, and declared him "the first Jewish president."
New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio passed radical bail reform policies that give thugs get-out-of-jail-free cards. Accordingly, last Saturday a woman arrested after violently assaulting three Jewish women in Brooklyn was released from jail without bail. She was arrested again Sunday after attacking a fourth woman, and promptly released again.
DeBlasio blamed the Monsey attack on Trump.
As far as progressive Jewish activists are concerned, DeBlasio’s policies are anti-black. Last week they criticized DeBlasio’s announcement that he was augmenting police patrols in Jewish neighborhoods claiming, "This is what dividing vulnerable communities looks like."
This sort of crazy talk is not cost-free. It is dangerous. Inconvenient truths will not go away just because they are unpleasant.
It is a fact that leftist and black anti-Semites are just as great a threat, if not greater threats to the Jewish community than white nationalist anti-Semites.
It is a fact that the Republican Party rejects anti-Semitism in all its forms and expels anti-Semites found in its ranks, and the Democratic Party enables and advances leftist and black anti-Semites and anti-Semitism.
So long as the liberal Jewish establishment and its members refuse to accept these facts, the attacks against America’s Jews can be expected to increase in frequency and violence.
Friday, January 03, 2020
TRUMP MUST HAVE HAD A TERRIBLE NIGHT
Early morning explosive tweet sounds like Melania may have locked her husband out of her bedroom
“A lot of very good people were taken down by a small group of Dirty (Filthy) Cops, politicians, government officials, and an investigation that was illegally started & that SPIED on my campaign A lot of very good people were taken down by a small group of Dirty (Filthy) Cops, politicians, government officials, and an investigation that was illegally started & that SPIED on my campaign. The Witch Hunt is sputtering badly, but still going on (Ukraine Hoax!). If this had happened to a Presidential candidate, or President, who was a Democrat, everybody involved would long ago be in jail for treason (and more), and it would be considered the CRIME OF THE CENTURY, far bigger and more sinister than Watergate!”
That’s the explosive tweet Trump sent out early Thursday morning from his Mar-A-Lago resort.
Wow, that’s quite a rant. Trump must have had a terrible night. Could it be that Melania locked him out of her bedroom Wednesday night?
By politicians he must have meant Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schitt, Jerry Nadler, Maxine Waters, Rashida Tlaib, Al Green, Sheila Jackson Lee and all the other low-down Democrats who want to dump Trump. And he probably included James Comey among the filthy cops.
In defense of Trump, let’s not forget that he has been under daily attack by the Demoncrats and the media, not since he took office in January 2017, but since he beat the Hildebeast in November 2016. That would entitle even the most mentally fit person to fly off the handle from time to time.
But just in case … Melania, please have pity on the poor bastard and don’t lock him out of your bedroom anymore.
“A lot of very good people were taken down by a small group of Dirty (Filthy) Cops, politicians, government officials, and an investigation that was illegally started & that SPIED on my campaign A lot of very good people were taken down by a small group of Dirty (Filthy) Cops, politicians, government officials, and an investigation that was illegally started & that SPIED on my campaign. The Witch Hunt is sputtering badly, but still going on (Ukraine Hoax!). If this had happened to a Presidential candidate, or President, who was a Democrat, everybody involved would long ago be in jail for treason (and more), and it would be considered the CRIME OF THE CENTURY, far bigger and more sinister than Watergate!”
That’s the explosive tweet Trump sent out early Thursday morning from his Mar-A-Lago resort.
Wow, that’s quite a rant. Trump must have had a terrible night. Could it be that Melania locked him out of her bedroom Wednesday night?
By politicians he must have meant Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schitt, Jerry Nadler, Maxine Waters, Rashida Tlaib, Al Green, Sheila Jackson Lee and all the other low-down Democrats who want to dump Trump. And he probably included James Comey among the filthy cops.
In defense of Trump, let’s not forget that he has been under daily attack by the Demoncrats and the media, not since he took office in January 2017, but since he beat the Hildebeast in November 2016. That would entitle even the most mentally fit person to fly off the handle from time to time.
But just in case … Melania, please have pity on the poor bastard and don’t lock him out of your bedroom anymore.
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