Act 2 of Trump clampdown on Iran: Re-imposing sanctions lifted under nuclear accord - debkaFile

by debkaFile

These steps are components of the drawn-out, staged war of attrition the Trump administration has begun orchestrating against the revolutionary Shiite regime in Tehran for the year of 2018.

On the heels of the first protests to hit the Iranian regime, Washington will turn the screw by negating financial benefits afforded by the nuclear deal.  To this end, President Donald Trump will use the deadlines he faces as of next week for certifying the Iranian nuclear deal and approving sanctions waivers. This intent was indicated by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in an AP interview Friday, Jan. 5.

Since the president had demanded that the 2015 nuclear accord with Iran be either “fixed or cancelled,” Tillerson said the administration was working with lawmakers on legislation for making it more acceptable to the president. Last October, Trump reluctantly waived sanctions for another three months. However, since sanctions relief was not incorporated in the nuclear deal, which Iran signed with six world nations three years ago, the US may set them aside without being accused of non-compliance. The US may therefore certify the framework while emptying it of the economic benefits the Obama administration granted, which funneled hundreds of billions of dollars to the Iranian treasury.

This is what Tillerson meant by “fixing” rather than “cancelling” the nuclear accord. He is charged with reformulating the deal, while upholding the Trump policy for countering Iran’s regional aggression and continuing support for anti-regime protests. These steps are components of the drawn-out, staged war of attrition the Trump administration has begun orchestrating against the revolutionary Shiite regime in Tehran for the year of 2018.

The following steps are already in the pipeline, DEBKAfile reports:

1. President Trump may refrain this time from signing on to the sanction waivers, but may re-certify Iran’s compliance with the accord.
2. The US Treasury Department has meanwhile announced new sanctions targeting banks, financial entities and officials – whether involved in Iran’s missile program or propping up the Revolutionary Guard Corps and its actions to suppress popular dissent.
3. Washington will likewise target entities in the Middle East and beyond that serve Tehran and receive Iranian financial assistance and weapons. Examples are Lebanon, Hizballah, the Iraqi Shiite militias under Iranian command, Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and others.
4. A broad US strategy is now in place for halting or slashing American aid programs to entities and governments which refuse to cooperate with the administration’s policy objectives.
5. Donald Trump’s original plan was to work closely with the Europeans on his drive against Iran. Since the European governments have not only opted out of cooperation but are flatly opposed to US support for the Iranian protesters, Washington is forging ahead on its own, without reference to any European capital.
   Trump has thus scrapped one of the basic principles which gave birth to the nuclear accord, close cooperation between the US, Russia and the leading European powers.
6. The breakup of this transatlantic partnership confronts Russia’s Vladimir Putin with a dilemma. Lining up with Europe on Iran would place Moscow on a collision course with the Trump administration. That Moscow knows exactly what is at stake was evident in the remarks made by Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov on Jan. 4, in response to Washington’s call for a UN Security Council to discuss repression in Iran: “We warn the US against attempts to interfere in the internal affairs of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” He also cautioned Washington against being “tempted to use the moment to raise new issues with regard to the JCPOA (the 2015 nuclear accord.)

debkaFile

Source: https://www.debka.com/act-2-trump-clampdown-iran-re-imposing-sanctions-lifted-nuclear-accord/

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American Islamist Charity Openly Partners with Designated Terrorists - Sam Westrop

by Sam Westrop

Islamist groups often use noble causes to advance their agenda.

In December, the Muslim American charity, Helping Hand for Relief and Development (HHRD), organized a conference to honor 'World Disability Day' at a government-managed college in the Pakistani city of Timergara.

This seems like a noble cause. But Islamist groups often use noble causes to advance their agenda. And HHRD is one such Islamist group.

Sponsors of the HHRD event in Pakistan included the Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation (FIF), the charitable wing of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the terrorist organization responsible for the 2008 Mumbai attacks. In 2016, FIF itself was designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. Treasury Department.

Another organization present at the HHRD conference was the Milli Muslim League, a political party recently launched by Lashkar-e-Taiba founder, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, on whom the U.S. government has placed a $10 million bounty.

But HHRD didn't stop at Pakistan's most infamous terrorist network. Its conference also included Al Khidmat, the charitable arm of the South Asian Islamist movement Jamaat-e-Islami. In 1971, during the Bangladeshi Liberation War, Jamaat-e-Islami fighters murdered thousands of Bangladeshis in cold blood. In 2006, JI's own website announced that Al Khidmat had transferred $100,000 to the Palestinian terror group Hamas for their "just Jihad."

HHRD does not merely invite Al Khidmat to its conferences. Al Khidmat openly boasts of the support it receives from HHRD.

In fact, HHRD appears to have been working with both Al Khidmat and Hafiz Saeed's designated terrorist group, the Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation, for many years. A 2009 HHRD report mentions both organizations, and a Pakistani newspaper report reveals both HHRD and the Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation were working on the same projects.

Founded in 2005, HHRD reports receiving funding from the British government, the World Health Organization and prominent American charitable foundations such as Microsoft, Cisco, PepsiCo, and Dell.

HHRD operates as a self-described "sister organization" of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), a prominent American Islamist group that has publicly identified itself as a Jamaat-e-Islami organization. HHRD and ICNA even share the same logo.

ICNA's conferences, the largest in the American Muslim calendar, include prominent Jamaat-e-Islami officials such as Yusuf Islahi, who reportedly claims that Jews were responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

Counter-terrorism analyst Abha Shankar recently noted that HHRD is working with ICNA and Al Khidmat to establish a hospital in the Pakistani city of Karachi. Shankar discovered that the Al Khidmat official leading the project is "closely tied to the U.S.-designated Kashmiri terrorist organization, Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) and its leader Syed Salahuddin."

HHRD's dalliances with these violent Islamist networks are not limited to Pakistan. For many years, HHRD has regularly organized fundraising evenings and events at the Islamic Center of New England (ICNE), which is notorious for its regular promotion of extremist clerics. The former imam of ICNE was Hafiz Masood, the brother of the very same Lashkar-e-Taiba leader, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed. Today, Masood serves as a spokesperson for one of his brother's terrorist organizations in Pakistan.

Ten years ago, federal investigators uncovered an enormous network of terrorism-financing organizations centered around a Hamas group named the Holy Land Foundation. That led to the last major federal prosecution of terror finance networks in America.

Today, Islamist charities, flush with money from international bodies and American charitable foundations, operate with impunity, openly working with designated terrorist organizations and prominent extremists. The Trump administration must take the threat posed by these American Islamist charities seriously. Just how many terrorist connections must be uncovered before groups such as HHRD are shut down?

Sam Westrop is the Director of Islamist Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum

Source: http://www.islamist-watch.org/28214/american-islamist-charity-openly-partners-with

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Sexual Harassment East and West - Denis MacEoin

by Denis MacEoin

"I say that when a girl walks about like that, it is a patriotic duty to sexually harass her and a national duty to rape her." — Nabih Wahsh, Islamist lawyer, on Egypt's al-Assema TV, October 19, 2017.

• "I say that when a girl walks about like that, it is a patriotic duty to sexually harass her and a national duty to rape her." — Nabih Wahsh, Islamist lawyer, on Egypt's al-Assema TV, October 19, 2017.
• The Iranian Revolution of 1979 sparked off increasingly revolutionary movements across the Islamic world, and in the process saw women in many countries denied the freedoms they had started to acquire under earlier regimes. The veil returned widely, notably in Turkey, following the growing power of authoritarian and fundamentalist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with women's rights being increasingly denied.
• We urgently need to drop our unwillingness to contrast Western and Islamic values -- whether regarding violence, treatment of religious minorities, anti-Semitism, or treatment of women. There are also growing numbers of Muslims, as we are seeing today in Iran, who find wider Islamic attitudes abhorrent and work hard, mostly against the odds, to bring their faith closer to modern values.

For a time, one could not open a newspaper or visit an online news site without finding yet another scandal about sexual harassment. Lawyers are presumably going to have a field day for years to come. In the UK, a further wave of accusations has shaken an already shaky parliament and the Government, whose Cabinet is increasingly in disarray. In the US Congress, Hollywood and elsewhere, similar claims are still being made, with #MeToo stories being shared by women, while there is an unknown number of accusations in US statehouses.

Sex scandals in the West are far from new.[1] The irony is that this brings us face to face with attitudes to the same problem in the Islamic world.

For many years in the West, it was common practice for sexual harassment and rape among celebrities and public figures to be hushed up. To secure silence, abusers often used bribes or threats. Young women feared the loss of their careers or reputations; in many instances, the police would reject claims of abuse. This happened more than once in the UK, when young victims of "Asian" grooming gangs were not believed by social workers and police; in Europe authorities tried -- and still try (see here, here and here) -- to cover up harassment and rape committed by Muslim migrants. There will be a lot of work to do to protect women and children from the excesses of so many men.

Just watch and marvel at this short clip from a debate on Egypt's al-Assema TV, aired on October 19, 2017, or read an English transcript. The Director-General of al-Assema is Brigadier-General Muhammad Samir, a former spokesman for the Egyptian armed forces. His appointment has been criticized on the grounds that it is "a miserable attempt by the military regime authorities to nationalize the media, unify its message, and block any opposing voices against the government". In that sense, al-Assema represents a semi-official voice.

The debate on Egypt's al-Assema TV included a lawyer, Nabih [el] Wahsh, an Islamist who has filed countless hesba [2] cases against intellectuals, artists, religious leaders and government ministers for acts he deems immoral or blasphemous. With Wahsh on air were three women: Shadia Thabet, a member of the Egyptian parliament, Abeer Soleiman, a women's rights activist, and Ashgaan Nabil, a life coach.

Wahsh began by stressing that, regardless of Egypt being a civil state, it had to conform to Islamic religious rules and norms. On that basis, he engages in an argument which leads him to the following confrontation with Soleiman, whom he effectively silences by bullying her:

Nabih Wahsh: "Are you happy when you see a girl walking down the street with half of her behind showing?"
Abeer Suleiman: "Do you think that we don't care about our girls?"
Nabih Wahsh: "I say that when a girl walks about like that, it is a patriotic duty to sexually harass her and a national duty to rape her."
Abeer Suleiman: "No, no, no, no! I totally oppose this kind of talk. This is sexual harassment live on air..."
Nabih Wahsh: "It is a national duty to rape such a girl! What she allows herself to do constitutes depravity."

Egyptian lawyer Nabih Wahsh recently advocated on television for sexual harassment and rape in retaliation for the temptation caused by uncovered women. (Image source: MEMRI)

This open espousal by a lawyer of sexual harassment and rape in retaliation for the temptation caused by uncovered women was backed by a heavily-covered member of parliament and followed by a "life coach" urging ten-year prison terms for homosexuals -- all during a television broadcast -- would, of course, finish their careers anywhere in the Western world within minutes. Men behave badly in Europe and the United States, and some very badly indeed; but to boast publicly about wishing to do so would be unthinkable.[3]

In the West, however, women have been fighting back for generations. The rise of sane feminism (as distinct from its shrill and politically-correct cousin)[4] has elevated the status of women in all the democracies and given courage to the many women who now find themselves empowered to call out powerful men who have sexually abused, groped and raped them.

There are feminists in the Islamic world. Countless books have been written about them and the growth of feminism in countries from Egypt and Iran to Indonesia. During the twentieth century, progress in establishing women's rights was made in several places: the veil was abandoned, more women moved into professional life and even into politics -- notably, the assassinated Benazir Bhutto, the first Muslim woman democratically elected (twice) as Prime Minister of Pakistan.

Real advances, nevertheless, have been slow. Even as things were starting to improve for women, religious minorities, and others in some countries, such as Turkey, the Salafi style of fundamentalist Islam, based on a demand to return to the practices of the Islamic prophet Muhammad and the first three generations of his followers (salaf means "predecessors"), was already underway from the early years of the twentieth century, notably through the work of the Egyptian writer Rashid Rida. For Rida, and later for Salafis down to the Islamic State enterprise, reform meant turning away from the Western models that had inspired new legislation, and back to the earliest days of Islam as embodied in the Qur'an, the ahadith (sayings and acts of the prophet), and the biographies of Muhammad. In 1928, another Egyptian, the schoolteacher Hasan al-Banna, established the Muslim Brotherhood, the leading revivalist movement in Islam since the 1920s, which remains to this day a major international force for reviving fundamentalist Islam.

Ironically, one prominent individual to have been caught up in the current wave of harassment revelations is Tariq Ramadan, Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford University. Ramadan's grandfather was none other than Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Masquerading as the respectable voice of modern Islamic thought and practice, Ramadan has been exposed by several writers as a front for the Brotherhood and its anti-Western values. French journalist Caroline Fourest published an exposé, Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan, in which she shows how he says one thing to his Western audience and quite another to Muslims in France and abroad.

The American author Paul Berman wrote clearly of this in a long article about Tariq Ramadan in New Republic:

Ramadan's harsher critics would argue that in speaking... the way he did on these abstract and historical questions, not to mention on his grandfather's ideals, he was cagily deploying a "double discourse" — a language intended to deceive Western liberals about the grain of his own thought. An accusation of "double discourse" has dogged Ramadan for many years in France. It is a chief complaint against him, and a big source of anxiety among his critics. Fourest, in Brother Tariq, documents what appears to be rather a lot of "double discourse," instances in which Ramadan appears to have said one thing to the general public and something else to his Muslim audiences.

In his many books and lectures, Ramadan has promoted the worldview of the hardline Brotherhood while posing as a Western-style philosopher in tune with modern liberal values. That is the basis for his duplicity: the Islam he promulgates in carefully phrased and disingenuous terms has nothing in common with Western values at all. It is this ability to pull the wool over the eyes of thinkers and politicians, a deception that has given him a professorship at Oxford University, that makes him a truly dangerous individual.

In addition to Caroline Fourest's series of articles in the French journal Marianne, detailing Ramadan's use of sexual harassment, rape, and general misogynist practices, he has also been accused by the American academic Phyllis Chesler "of having violently raped, battered, humiliated, confined, and death threatened them [his victims] if they talked".

In response to these claims, Oxford University acted promptly, placing him on leave while his predations are investigated and, as seems likely, subjected to criminal charges. Not surprisingly, as the journalist Abigail Esman has pointed out:

Tariq Ramadan's many fans – more than 600,000 people follow him on Twitter and he has more than 2 million Facebook followers – have had plenty to say. He is innocent, they are certain. In their comments on both social media sites, they assure him that Allah will protect him. The women are liars, or part of a conspiracy: against Muslims, against the Muslim leader himself, against Islam – all the insidious, but entirely predictable, work of the world's Jews.

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 sparked off increasingly more revolutionary movements across the Islamic world, and in the process saw women in many countries, across the Islamic world, denied the freedoms they had started to acquire under earlier regimes. The veil returned widely, notably in Turkey, following the growing power of authoritarian and fundamentalist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with women's rights being increasingly denied. Erdogan recently condemned Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad ibn Salman's vow to engender a "moderate Islam," calling it a fake Islam supposedly imposed by the West.

Men in Western democracies certainly have much to be ashamed of; the women who call out predators are right to do so. If identifying powerful figures who manipulate vulnerable women will help create a more level playing field for both sexes in countries that have worked hard to put all citizens on a basis of equality, it cannot but be a boon for democracy. Whatever we have done wrong, we have also done much to rectify distortions in our societies. The very fact that in the West, such men are considered shameful and contrary to our better values is itself a sign of how far things have changed.

The Islamic world in general remains enmeshed in ancient attitudes, going backwards rather than forwards, despite sterling efforts by various reformers to confront patriarchy in several Muslim countries, efforts backed by many Muslim women.[5] Those attitudes are rooted in a wide range of assaults on women and their lives: female genital mutilation (FGM) sanctioned by religious tradition; honor killings even for girls who have been raped; legally-enforced marriage to a woman's rapist; floggings and stonings for women suspected of marital or pre-marital adultery, or even who have been raped; veiling; marital rape; and denial of independence (a woman must always be subject to a male guardian – father, brother, uncle, male cousin -- whose permission is needed for most things). Beyond this, it has always been permissible for Muslim men to capture or buy non-Muslim women as sex slaves, as we have seen recently with Boko Haram and Islamic State, and in Saudi Arabia, Mauritania, Singapore, Sudan, Mauritius, Libya, the United States and Europe.

Muslim men, however, have enormous freedoms. They may marry four women; they can divorce a wife by merely pronouncing "I divorce you"; if they are Shi'is, they can take temporary wives through nikah mut'a,[6] ("pleasure marriage"), that can be contracted for hours or months or years, and as easily terminated. If they are Sunnis, they can take temporary wives through nikah misyar, ("traveller's marriage"), used in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf to allow men to keep wives in towns they visit from time to time or, more widely, by married men who seek legal mistresses.

Polygamy continues to be popular, even for Muslim men living in the West. A website set up by British businessman Azad Chaiwala, "Secondwife.com", which enables men to find further wives in the way non-Muslims use dating sites, has over 100,000 members, including 25,000 in the UK. Although polygamy in Britain carries a seven-year prison term for men, the Muslim version is seemingly exempt as it is considered a religious arrangement. Muslim men in Britain and on the Continent are never prosecuted as polygamists, even though Islamic marriage laws place women in jeopardy in respect of divorce and child custody. The government has even encouraged polygamous marriages to be contracted abroad, and at one point offered £10,000 in benefits for families with four wives.

We urgently need to drop our unwillingness to contrast Western and Islamic values -- whether regarding violence, treatment of religious minorities, anti-Semitism, or treatment of women. It is not only non-Muslim Westerners who are entitled to make such comparisons -- there are also growing numbers of Muslims, as we are seeing today in Iran, who find wider Islamic attitudes abhorrent and work hard, mostly against the odds, to bring their faith closer to modern values.

Many Western politicians, churchmen and sundry do-gooders choose to find no fault in Islam and describe any form of criticism as "Islamophobia" -- even punishing honest critics of the religion or the actions of some of its followers for daring to breach the code of silence and multicultural acquiescence. These would-be moralists do no favours to us, to Muslim women and children, or to Muslim reformers. Ours is not a perfect civilization. But crying mea culpa, while passing over the problems of a civilization that also has faults, does not seem the way to assuage a communal guilt.

Dr. Denis MacEoin taught Islamic Studies at a UK university, has published books and articles on Islamic themes, and contributed to academic encyclopedias dealing with the subject, such as the second edition of the massive Encyclopedia of Islam. He is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.

---

[1] The harm they do has been dissected by Northwestern University professor Laura Kipniss, in her study How to Become a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behavior, New York, 2010, and in her recent exposure of witch hunts in US colleges, Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, New York, 2017.
[2] Hesba or hisba is the duty to identify and prevent or punish contraventions of Islamic law in Muslim states.
[3] To give credit to the Egyptian government, Wahsh was arrested for these remarks and is currently serving a three-year prison term. See here.
[4] For an intelligent discussion of the differences, see Christina Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women, New York, 1995.
[5] Note, in particular, Ida Lichter, Muslim Women Reformers: Inspiring Voices against Oppression, Amherst, NY, 2009. See here.
[6] For a full academic account, see Shahla Haeri, Law of Desire: Temporary Marriage in Shi'i Iran, rev. ed., Syracuse University Press, 2014; and see Sachiko Murata, Temporary Marriage in Islamic Law, privately published, 2017.

Denis MacEoin

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/11673/sexual-harassment-east-west

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Prof Caught Preaching Violent Overthrow Of American Democracy - Jack Kerwick

by Jack Kerwick

A professor, students and videotape.

What I have frequently referred to as the Academic-Industrial-Complex (AIC) really is an organ of sorts of what I call the Racism-Industrial-Complex (RIC).

One of the more recent illustrations of this point is Albert Ponce, a professor of political science at Diablo Valley College.  One of Ponce’s lectures was recently video recorded by one of his students.  The student released it to The Red Elephants—an on-line organization that has launched a campaign encouraging students to record their “Marxist professors—who in turn shared it with the campus watchdog publication, Campus Reform.

Ponce is captured on video assuring his students that since America’s is a system of “white supremacy,” the flag “is not really representative of everybody [.]” 

“We are taught to get up and to pledge allegiance to the flag every single day.”  However, the “flag is not really representative of everybody who is standing up in that room.  Maybe that’s the way it should be taught.  All those who this flag represents stand up, and maybe 50 percent of this room, you remain seated because this is not for you” (emphasis added).   

To be fair, the Albert Ponces of the contemporary academic world are a dime-a-dozen.  While the drivel that he espouses is obnoxious, and while it can’t fail to jolt the sensibilities of many to see and hear a professor at a taxpayer-subsidized institution engage in educational malpractice by substituting anti-American preaching for teaching in the liberal arts, the tragic truth of the matter is that Ponce, in these respects, is indistinguishable from the vast majority of his colleagues in academia in these respects.

Nevertheless, it is good and just that this video is going viral, there has been a backlash, and that parents of current and prospective DVC students can discover for themselves the depths of the cesspool to which radical leftist academics have reduced our institutions of higher learning.

The United States Constitution, Ponce says, “should be called a white man’s constitution.”
So, the “white supremacy” that is America is in the proverbial DNA of the country. On this score, Ponce is unequivocal:

“And there were people here, the indigenous people, who were part—who paid a price, a very heavy price, for this project that is unfolding of white supremacy.”

Ponce also labels the American system “white democracy.” While supplying a slide presentation with this title, Ponce expresses his disdain toward President Trump and Attorney General Session:  “So it is fitting that a white supremacist of old with a white supremacist of today exists and sit—they are smiling in the White House.”

Yet the Ponce video is especially valuable insofar as it reveals the logic of his ideology, the inescapable implication of his conviction—to repeat, a conviction shared by the overwhelming majority of his colleagues—that America is a thoroughly oppressive place.

It isn’t just that America is a “system” of “white supremacy,” though it is, of course, this.  Ponce insists that in addition to being “white supremacist,” the American system is also “patriarchal, heteronormative, [and] capitalist[.]”

Thus, with a system so oppressive to women, gays, the transgendered, and nonwhites, there can be no negotiation.  There can be no “reform.”

There can only be “abolition.”

“What does abolition mean? Abolition means we must destroy it, not reform it.  No voting is going to help.  No writing your congressperson.”

Ponce declares: “We need to smash white supremacy” (emphasis mine).

And how exactly does Ponce propose “the oppressed” go about “smashing” “white supremacy”?  His answer is blunt:

Laws must be violated.

Those who “write” the law—the “oppressors”—have “convince[d] all of us to follow it,” Ponce asserts.  Yet “you shouldn’t,” he continues, for “the laws existing,” at least “many” of them, “we should be violating[.]”

This is activism, radical leftist activism.  This is not teaching.  To put it another way, Ponce represents as clearly as anyone the prevailing impulse among academics to forego the education of their students in favor of training them in the ideology of their instructors, an ideology that entails relentless activism against the very civilization that both birthed the institutions of higher learning of which these students and their professors avail themselves as well as bestowed upon them every other privilege and blessing.

Why would any parent who is remotely concerned with the intellectual and moral well-being of his or her children pay big bucks to place them at the mercies of academics, like Professor Ponce, who despise the institutions, traditions, and, by implication, most of the people of the West and America? 

How can taxpayers sit idly by why their hard-earned dollars are siphoned off by bureaucrats and channeled to subsidize the rantings of the Albert Ponces?

To be sure, the ideal of a liberal arts education remains a beautiful one. And there remain talented, capable, and dedicated academics—some of whom are on the liberal-left—who labor diligently to realize that ideal for themselves and, importantly, their students.  Regrettably, though, they are in the minority, outflanked on all sides by folks like Albert Ponce.

Besides the fact that Ponce deprived students of the education to which they are entitled, there is another tragedy in all of this.

Ponce and his far-left, activist colleagues are, in a very real sense, the victims of their own ideology. Blinded, they fail to recognize that the conceptual resources that they draw upon to condemn “white supremacy” and all of the rest are the self-same moral ideas that distinguish from all others the civilization that they condemn as “white supremacist,” “sexist,” “homophobic,” etc.  Most saliently, these anti-American, anti-Western professors presuppose the truth of the distinctively—no, the uniquely—Western, Christian concept of the Individual, for only if the person assumes moral importance over considerations of race, gender, sexual orientation, class, and so forth can it be immoral to regard people in terms of these ostensibly morally irrelevant categories.    

Notably, these anti-American, anti-Western professors organize their worldview around their readings of Karl Marx, who Ponce refers to as “one of the most profound thinkers in the history of Western philosophy.” Yet Marx was a 19^th century German white man who was every bit as much a product of the “white supremacist” civilization against which 21^st century “oppressed” professor rails.

It isn’t only the students of these activist professors who are in need of a genuine education. The professors themselves need it just as badly.    


Jack Kerwick

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/268931/prof-caught-preaching-violent-overthrow-american-jack-kerwick

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The Evil that Must Not Be Named on Campus - George Harbison

by George Harbison

The Evil that Must Not Be Named on Campus George Harbison Leopoldo López, leader of the Venezuelan opposition, and his alma mater Kenyon College's whitewash of socialism.

Academia turns a blind eye to the reality of actual socialism, the ideology practiced by Marxists while they sought the perfection of communism...someday. Socialism is ruining Venezuela today, and the whitewash pervades elite culture, even when the evil strikes close to home for an elite American small college.

I attended Kenyon College (Gambier, Ohio) in the mid-1970s. I enjoyed my time there, made some great lifelong friends, and graduated with a sincere appreciation of the benefits of having a liberal arts education as it was practiced at the time.

Over the years, my political perspective has moved well away from the liberal orthodoxy that now prevails at Kenyon. As a result, I have had a somewhat strained relationship with my alma mater, accentuated by three events that led to dust-ups with the college's administration:

1. an embarrassingly inappropriate "welcome back to campus" speech/diatribe at a class dinner by a leftist professor on the occasion of my tenth class reunion;
2. Kenyon virtually ignoring the 2005 death of matriculate William Rehnquist, while simultaneously displaying his name on its list of "Notable Alumni" on its website; and
3. an absurd and offensive assertion by a member of the Religious Studies department, published in Kenyon's alumni bulletin, that "[w]e have fundamentalist Christians in the United States who are just as exclusionary as the more radical Muslims."

With this as a backdrop, I have been watching with great interest Kenyon's reporting of the plight of one of our own, Leopoldo López (Class of 1993). López has led, for many years, the political opposition against Venezuela's repressive governing regime.

Leopoldo López addresses a crowd, July 10, 2012 (photo: zfigueroa).

In response to his opposition efforts, López was jailed by the Venezuelan government in February 2014. This imprisonment lasted for three-plus years (until July 2017), when he was transferred to house arrest. In August 2017, López was imprisoned yet again by the Venezuelan government and remains imprisoned to this day.

Kenyon's reporting on López's struggle has been voluminous. By my count, since 2014, Kenyon's website and alumni bulletin have published ten articles chronicling his plight, covering over twenty pages and consisting of roughly 10,000 words. But there is one big problem consistent within the entirety of this reporting: it virtually ignores that fact that the evil government that is cruelly persecuting López (and thousands of other Venezuelans) is a socialist regime. The words "socialist" and "socialism" appear in only two of the ten articles. The words are used only three times (combined) in these two articles.

This whitewashing by Kenyon of the ideological nature of López's tormenters continues unabated. On December 18, Kenyon's president, Sean Decatur, posted this item on Kenyon's website:

Venezuelan opposition leader and @KenyonCollege alum @leopoldolopez has a piece in the @TheAtlantic proposing solutions to Venezuela's economic troubles: https://t.co/dvx8mELppS

The link included in this post takes the reader to an article, published on The Atlantic's website, which is described as an adapted excerpt from a forthcoming book co-written by Leopoldo López. The article, presumably adapted by the editors of The Atlantic, spends over five pages and roughly 1,750 words describing the catastrophic economic and humanitarian collapse suffered by Venezuela over the past decade without once using or referencing the words "socialist" and "socialism."

Kenyon is not alone among academic institutions in its whitewashing of socialism. Over the course of the past two years, I have delivered a lecture titled "The Victims of Socialism" at nine colleges and universities across the country and in Canada. This lecture series, sponsored by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, highlights the death and destruction inflicted upon the populations of the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia by the brutal imposition of socialism in those countries. Reference is also made in the lecture to the cumulative (and consistent) socialist death toll of 94 million people, suffered in dozens of countries dotting the timeline of the 20th century, as painstakingly documented in The Black Book of Communism (Harvard University Press, 1999).

The response to these lectures was eye-opening. Flyers advertising it were torn down or defaced at almost every campus where I spoke. The last several lectures required the presence of armed guards due to rumblings of threatened disruption by Antifa. 

As to the content, many student-attendees are shocked that they are hearing about these incontrovertible facts for the first time. This intellectual blind spot is especially telling because these students are well versed in Nazi atrocities, the tragic history of slavery, and the sad treatment of American Indians.

Then there are the students who are aware of what happened in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia but who claim that socialism has moved past those bloody chapters and has been perfected in Scandinavian countries. Despite this claim's utter absurdity (all Scandinavian countries have market economies, and all have high levels of economic freedom), it reflects the prevailing mindset on most campuses in the age of Bernie Sanders. These students become agitated and defensive when their academic and intellectual echo chamber is pierced and their inaccurate worldview challenged.

Finally, there are those students who believe that true socialism or communism has never really been correctly implemented and that there can be a disconnect between authoritarianism and properly implemented socialism. My response to these students has been a recitation of the definition of insanity.

The bottom line: the true, evil nature of socialism is not being taught at most of America's colleges and universities. To the contrary, socialism is promulgated as a positive force for "social justice," "income equality," and "environmental preservation." As such, when the true nature of socialism rears its ugly head (as in present-day Venezuela), the horrific reality must be suppressed.

By all rights, the terms "Nazism" and "socialism" ought to have the same, profoundly hideous connotation. Both ideologies are brutal totalitarian systems. Both killed millions of innocent people (socialism far more than Nazism, actually). Both demand total allegiance to an all-powerful state. Both extinguish basic human rights. Both foster state-sanctioned hatred and terror (Nazis toward non-Aryans, socialists against class enemies). Both are devoid of open political dialogue.

That academics and administrations at Kenyon and other elite colleges and universities across the country continue to whitewash the true nature of socialism or prop it up as a legitimate alternative to our republican form of government and capitalistic economic system is a national disgrace. In November 2017, a survey conducted by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation showed that a majority (51%) of Millennials would prefer to live in a communist or socialist country. This statistic is proof positive that what has been taught on college campuses about socialism for the past several decades constitutes nothing short of abject academic malpractice and intellectual dishonesty.

George Harbison

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/01/the_evil_that_must_not_be_named_on_campus.html

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Iranian Theocracy on the Brink? - Joseph Klein

by Joseph Klein

The Islamic Republic alienates its own base.

After several days of protests in Iran that have spread throughout the country, costing at least 21 lives, the head of Iran's Revolutionary Guards is claiming victory over the “sedition” after the Revolutionary Guards intervened. It is not clear yet whether his claim of victory is premature. The situation remains fluid, but the regime appears concerned enough by the extent of the unrest that it tried to show support for its leaders through organized pro-government rallies broadcast on national television.

True to form, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Tuesday blamed Iran's "enemies" for the protests. “All those who are against the Islamic Republic -- those who have money, those who have the politics, those who have the weapons, those who have the intelligence -- they have all joined forces in order to create problems for the Islamic Republic and the Islamic Revolution," he charged.
However, Khamenei and his henchmen doeth protest too much. Whether or not they prevail in the short term, as they probably will since there have been no known significant defections of security or military personnel to the anti-government demonstrators' side, the regime's leaders are certainly aware of the deep currents of discontent in the country that are causing serious fissures in the regime’s conservative base of support.

The current protests are not led by students and the urban middle class, as was the case during the failed Green Movement in 2009. Nor are today's protests about the legitimacy of a single presidential election, or a battle between so-called “reformers” and hardliners. These are populist protests, initially fueled by economic discontent amongst young people in rural areas, towns and small cities, who have come to despise the entire theocratic establishment. They are calling into question the legitimacy, not of one particular leader or another, but of the very foundation of a corrupt, self-serving clerical hierarchy out of touch with the needs of ordinary people.

Iran’s figurehead president, Hassan Rouhani, ran for a second term in 2017 as a “reformer” who promised to clean up corruption. He also promised to use the benefits accruing from the lifting of sanctions following the completion of the nuclear deal to improve economic conditions for the Iranian people. Of course, Rouhani, an integral part of the establishment swamp himself, did not deliver. He is under the thumb of Ayatollah Khamenei and the corrupt Revolutionary Guards, and lacks any control over the bulk of the national budget. Now Rouhani will likely become a scapegoat, following his apparent face-saving leak last month of a proposed government budget that, according to the New York Times, exposed “details of the country’s religious institutes” and the fact that “billions of dollars were going to hardline organizations, the military, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp, and religious foundations that enrich the clerical elite.” Meanwhile, millions of ordinary citizens are being asked to pay the price. The Iranian people “living in Iran’s provincial towns and villages,” reports the Times, who “were regarded as the backbone of the country’s Islamic regime” are staring at cuts in cash subsidies, increased fuel prices, and unemployment of around 40 percent among young people, who constitute half the population. Their anger will not be mollified by more empty promises and phony pretenses of “democracy.”

The regime’s only alternative to maintain order is to use as much force as necessary to prevent any further unrest from turning into a full-fledged uprising that could get out of control. That is what the regime did in 2009, while Obama watched and did nothing.

Khamenei and his hardline supporters will use the faltering economy as an excuse to purge ineffectual “reformers,” further consolidate power into their own hands and “finally impose their vision of pristine Islamist rule,” predicts Ray Takeyh, a senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations, in an article for Politico Magazine. “Iran will move into one of its darker ages, with escalating repression, censorship and the imposition of onerous cultural strictures,” he added. The regime will continue its expansionist export of its “revolution” throughout the Middle East and beyond, as costly as that may be. However, as all self-styled “Republics of Virtue” come to an end, so will the Islamic Republic of Iran, writes Mr. Takeyh, because the financial burden will overwhelm the regime, sparking further waves of deep-seated discontent. Time, demographics and social media are not on the regime’s side.

“In the end, Iran’s revolution is an impossible one, as it created a theocracy that cannot reform itself and accommodate the aspirations of its restless and youthful citizens,” writes Mr. Takeyh. “The tragedy of Ali Khamenei is that in consolidating his revolution, he is ensuring the eventual demise of his regime.”

President Trump and his administration are following the right course in demonstrating U.S. support for the Iranian people in their struggle against the regime. Addressing reporters at UN headquarters on January 2^nd, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley called for emergency meetings of the UN Security Council and Human Rights Council. "The U.N. must speak out," Ambassador Haley said. "We must not be silent. The people of Iran are crying out for freedom.  All freedom-loving people must stand with their cause. The international community made the mistake of failing to do that in 2009. We must not make that mistake again."

Instead of learning from their mistakes, senior members of Obama’s administration are doubling down. Former UN Ambassador and National Security Adviser Susan Rice, for example, is counseling a repeat of Obama’s vow of silence in 2009 when he turned his back on the Green Revolution protesters. Rice tweeted out a New York Times op-ed by another former Obama aide, Philip Gordon, who was an assistant Secretary of State, headlined “How Can Trump Help Iran’s Protesters? Be Quiet.” Philip Gordon claimed in his article that, while he wanted to see the government of Iran “weakened, moderated or even removed,” he was offering President Trump some “unsolicited” advice: “Keep quiet and do nothing.” Susan Rice is all in and advises the same cowardly course.

As Edmund Burke said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

An individual claiming to be in Iran at the time of Rice’s tweet pushed back strongly: “They are shooting at us. Shame on you Susan Rice!”

The reason that Obama apologists give for counseling silence is that Iran’s leaders will use U.S. expressions of support for the protesters, in Gordon's words, “to depict the protesters as American lackeys, giving the security services more of a pretext to crack down violently.” That is essentially what Khamenei has done. However, this theocratic dictator, who revels in chants of “Death to America,” would have engaged in the same blame game to divert attention from the failings of his own regime no matter what President Trump and his administration had said or done. Even the concessions Obama gave to the Iranian regime as the price for reaching the disastrous nuclear deal did not temper Khamenei’s anti-American vile. Just three days after completion of the deal, Khamenei posted a tweet with what appears to be an image of a silhouette of Obama holding a gun to his head. Khamenei and his henchmen hate the United States and the democratic values that it stands for. He does need any more excuses to blame the U.S. for all of his regime's ills.
Ambassador Haley, in her remarks to the press, refuted allegations that the U.S. is behind the current demonstrations. Calling such allegations "complete nonsense," she described the demonstrations as “completely spontaneous." She added, "They are virtually in every city in Iran. This is the precise picture of a long-oppressed people rising up against their dictators.”

There is more the Trump administration can do, besides expressions of support for the protesters, to place pressure on Iran’s leaders and hopefully hasten the regime’s demise. President Trump tweeted on Wednesday that “great” U.S. support for the protesters would be coming “at the appropriate time.” He did not specify what such support might look like. Here are a few suggestions.
First, immediately mobilize government and private sector resources to provide tools usable by Iranians to circumvent government controls on messaging applications and the Internet. This would allow people unhappy with the regime to communicate with each other as well as to provide documentation to the world of the regime’s human rights abuses.

Second, continue to refuse to certify Iran’s compliance with the nuclear deal when the next deadline approaches in mid-January.

Third, refuse to sign yet another Iran sanctions waiver later this month. Ambassador Haley laid out the predicate for such an action last month in her presentation of alleged Iranian violations of the UN Security Council Resolution 2231 endorsing the nuclear deal. President Trump may already be leaning in this direction. "In terms of signing a waiver later in January, the President hasn't made a final decision on that," White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said. "He's going to keep every option on the table."

In an article appearing in the New York Post on Wednesday, co-authored by Richard Goldberg, an architect of congressional sanctions against Iran and senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Jamie Fly, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the US, the authors suggested the prime target for specific sanctions that the Trump administration should impose as soon as possible. That target is Iran’s Central Bank, which the authors explained serves as “the regime’s financial hub for terrorism, missiles and human-rights abuse.”

Such direct sanctions on Iran’s Central Bank, reinforced by secondary sanctions against non-U.S. financial institutions engaging in transactions with the Central Bank, would help cut off money flowing to the Revolutionary Guards, the military, religious institutions, and the regime’s corrupt business enterprises. Starving the theocracy, its apparatchiks and its enforcers of resources to keep their Islamic “revolution” alive can at least put a damper on the regime’s expansionist activities and funding of terrorism. Hopefully, it will do much more, bringing the day closer to the regime’s demise and to freedom for the Iranian people.

Joseph Klein is a Harvard-trained lawyer and the author of Global Deception: The UN’s Stealth Assault on America’s Freedom and Lethal Engagement: Barack Hussein Obama, the United Nations & Radical Islam.

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/268920/iranian-theocracy-brink-joseph-klein

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