Wednesday, March 22, 2023

America’s Drug Trade is ‘Made in China’ - Daniel Greenfield

 

​ by Daniel Greenfield

"Roughly 75 percent are linked to China."

 


This isn’t news to anyone who has been following the pot business in California. Not the “legal one” which proved to be a mostly worthless boom up there with cryptocurrency. Just ask Med Men which wanted to be the Apple of drugs. The illegal one though is increasingly looking like it’s Made in China even when it’s grown in America.

Mexican cartels have a long history of importing, growing and redistributing illicit cannabis in the United States. But Chinese investors, owners and workers have emerged in recent years as a new source of funding and labor for illegal marijuana production.

What is known — from interviews with state law enforcement officials, experts on the international drug trade, economists and lawmakers — is that the number of farms funded by sources traceable back to Chinese investors or owners has skyrocketed. Chinese owners and workers have become a larger presence at illegal grows in Oklahoma, California and Oregon, they say.

In Oklahoma, close to 3,000 of the state’s nearly 7,000 licensed marijuana farms have been flagged for suspicious activity by law enforcement over the last year… The agency believes that 2,000 of those farms have a Chinese connection — supplying workers, funding or both. Of the more than 800 farms the OBN has shut down in the last two years for operating illegally, Woodward said roughly 75 percent are linked to China.

“I would comfortably say over 600 of those we’ve linked to Chinese investors and Chinese organized crime; some sort of a nexus to back to China,” he said.

Law enforcement in southern Oregon in 2021 reported as many as 20 different nationalities linked to illegal grows. But the increasing amount of Chinese funding — and what lawmakers and some experts say is the potential influence of the Chinese Communist Party — has caught the attention of legislators and law enforcement alike.

Give the PRC credit, they’ve found plenty of ways to profit from waging total war against us. But that’s mainly because we let them do it. Every single one of the deaths of a thousand cuts is a weapon we’ve given to our enemies to use against us.


Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/americas-drug-trade-is-made-in-china/

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The World Economic Forum and the West's Next Act? - J. B. Shurk

 

​ by J. B. Shurk

If Western politicians seem just as second-rate these days as what customers all too often find in stores, there may be a simple reason why: International financial titans make, sell, and own both... and may be planning to own you, too.

  • [E]conomic writer Charles Hugh Smith has repeatedly warned [about] the "crapification" of the U.S. economy.... customers with scant other buying options are forced to accept that few purchases will last.

  • Politicians seem to be heading in a similar direction.... Western governments are filled to the brim with people entirely lacking in real-world experience or specialized knowledge.

  • In recent decades, a noticeable trend in the West has been to elevate politicians, as young and inexperienced as possible, into offices as high as possible.... Such a system -- in which those who have proven themselves the least are given responsibilities that would test even those who have proven themselves time and again -- hardly looks ideal.

  • If Western politicians seem just as second-rate these days as what customers all too often find in stores, there may be a simple reason why: International financial titans make, sell, and own both... and may be planning to own you, too.

Western governments are filled to the brim with people entirely lacking in real-world experience or specialized knowledge. In recent decades, a noticeable trend in the West has been to elevate politicians, as young and inexperienced as possible, into offices as high as possible. Pictured: National leaders, including US President Joe Biden, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Spanish PM Pedro Sanchez and Canadian PM Justin Trudeau strike a deep, contemplative pose at the G20 summit on November 16, 2022 in Nusa Dua, Indonesia. (Photo by Hebestreit/Bundesregierung via Getty Images)

If you are a consumer today, inflation is only one of the problems harming you. As prices go up, quality continues to go down. What most stores have to offer you might crassly be called "cheap crap." In fact, economic writer Charles Hugh Smith has repeatedly warned that the "crapification" of the U.S. economy is the natural result of a "neoliberal-hyper-financialization-hyper-globalization model," in which quasi-monopolist manufacturers mass-produce goods with the cheapest possible components, while customers with scant other buying options are forced to accept that few purchases will last.

"Planned obsolescence," combined with a free market "in name only," creates a rigged system in which downstream consumers are forced to pay more over time, while owning little that will maintain value for long. Appliances that used to work for decades now barely make it through legally required warranty periods. Metal tools that could be passed from one generation to the next now tend to rust before they can be used on more than a handful of jobs. When expensive electronic devices survive more than two years, cash-strapped households breathe a sigh of relief. Just about anybody who is old enough to remember the 9/11 terrorist attacks can tell a story about some product that was so much cheaper, yet so much more reliable, when it was purchased long ago.

Likewise, customer service is more pitiful than it has ever been. Try to speak with a real human on the phone. It is nearly impossible. Automated assistance has eliminated personal interaction from most buying experiences. Gas stations, fast-food restaurants, and convenience stores have replaced human cashiers with camera-equipped machines designed for self-service. Even a visit to a grocery or home goods store now routinely requires the use of a self-checkout kiosk when making a purchases. It has become entirely normal to witness people struggling through the routine of lifting everything out of their shopping carts, scanning each item, and placing the load into bags, before throwing everything back onto carts, paying, and shuffling away. It is somewhat perplexing to consider that not so long ago, helpful, smiling employees worked hard to take care of all those services as part of the ordinary relationship maintained between a business and its customers.

Cutting out the cost of extra employees whose hourly wages have been pushed higher and higher by minimum wage laws that try to keep workers aligned with the rising cost of everything might help prevent already inflated prices from rising even further, but it is difficult to watch shoppers performing jobs once done by paid workers without concluding that "progress" has taken the market experience to a place that feels closer to "regress."

Politicians seem to be heading in a similar direction. Politics, as a profession, has always been known to attract at least as many ambitious "empty suits" as it does leaders of substance. Still, the great writers, orators, and thinkers that occasionally rose to political prominence in the past seem to have left the stage for good.

Winston Churchill not only led the United Kingdom to victory during WWII but also won the 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values."

Daniel Patrick Moynihan not only represented New York as a U.S. Senator but also drew on his own sociological expertise while serving in the Labor Department to produce a thorough report on the endemic causes of, and potential remedies for, systemic poverty in America.

President Abraham Lincoln not only was instrumental in preserving the Union but also a dedicated student all his life; he kept the works of William Shakespeare on his White House desk.

In contrast, few deep thinkers rise to high office today. There are no great statesmen whom the broader public see as towering above the herd of self-centered and cynical political lemmings. Few professional politicians, especially those in the United States, are even capable of speaking extemporaneously before an audience for any stretch of time. Too many rely on the assistance of teleprompters or similar devices to provide an exact script for every publicly spoken utterance, no matter how trivial or informal — suggesting that either they or their staffs cannot trust just what might otherwise escape their lips.

Rather than pursuing political office after having accomplished great things in other fields, the vast majority of today's officeholders choose politics as a vocation for life. The end result is that Western governments are filled to the brim with people entirely lacking in real-world experience or specialized knowledge.

In recent decades, a noticeable trend in the West has been to elevate politicians, as young and inexperienced as possible, into offices as high as possible.

Many of the most famous politicians today no sooner secure a single election victory than their colleagues began pushing them into government roles at the top of the political hierarchy. Former U.S. President Barack Obama, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, French President Emmanuel Macron, U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin, former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, and her successor Chris Hipkins all ascended to the zeniths of national power exceptionally early in their careers.

Looking around at the legislators, presidents, and prime ministers today who are leading Western nations on the world stage, you could be forgiven for extrapolating that the quickest path to political power is to accomplish little in the real world, while scrambling up the political pyramid before there is time to make or learn from mistakes. Such a system -- in which those who have proven themselves the least are given responsibilities that would test even those who have proven themselves time and again -- hardly looks ideal.

On the flip side is someone such as U.S. President Joe Biden, the oldest to have ever held the office. Whereas Biden's near half-century in national elected office has surely afforded him the chance to make and remedy many mistakes, he is now so "seasoned" that few weeks go by when some publication does not question either his mental competency, ability to keep up with the rigors of such a demanding job, or the wear and tear on the "influence" possibly peddled.

Two stories, embodying the "crapification" of products, recently emerged, concerning the authenticity of a presidential speech. In the first, a fake video created through the use of artificial intelligence showed Biden announcing the implementation of the Selective Service Act and the imminent drafting of young Americans born on a certain date into military service. Amid heightening tensions with Russia and China, many Americans who came across the video mistakenly assumed that the United States had officially gone to war.

In the other video, Biden's quite real but somewhat confusing and meandering storytelling during a speech about health care was mistakenly labeled as "doctored" or "fake" by enough viewers that Twitter actually added a certification label attesting, "This is in fact unedited legitimate footage from a Joe Biden speech which took place on 2/28/23." Clearly, in a world where fake videos have become remarkably easy to construct, everyone's credibility and reputation are now at risk.

Chintzy products and tinpot politicians are nothing new. Whether spending money or casting votes, the same caveat emptor principle applies: Let the buyer beware. Still, it is worth considering whether the political and economic knockoffs flooding Western markets today have something in common.

A Nigerian proverb warns against small singing birds with loud voices, because they almost always have much stronger protectors hidden behind thicker leaves. What today's Western political leaders might lack in lengthy experience or trustworthy rhetoric, they certainly make up with bombastic pronouncement.

Ever since the dawn of COVID, "Build Back Better" has been repeated by "young global leaders" flocking to Klaus Schwab's World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. When Schwab and his WEF companions turned COVID tragedy into an opportunity for unleashing a "Great Reset" that would transform global markets, governance and power, nearly every Western political leader agreed. The synchronicity is enough to make you wonder whether it is your nation or the World Economic Forum that actually leads. Perhaps as the Nigerian proverb warns, today's Western political leaders chirp about "Build Back Better" so loudly because Klaus Schwab's financial predators stand directly behind them in the bush.

If so, then the West has become an oligarchy of financial "elites," no matter how many times its political leaders extol the virtues of "democracy." A financial oligarchy over political power is like a manufacturing monopoly over economic power: In both markets, goods are mass-produced with the cheapest possible components. The end result is that things break easily, and systems do not last. If Western politicians seem just as second-rate these days as what customers all too often find in stores, there may be a simple reason why: International financial titans make, sell, and own both... and may be planning to own you, too.


J. B. Shurk writes about politics and society.

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19512/world-economic-forum-crap

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Weaponization panel blasts DOJ 'anti-parent' memo, says no legal basis for it - Ben Whedon

 

​ by Ben Whedon

"After surveying local law enforcement, U.S. Attorney’s offices around the country reported back to Main Justice that there was no legitimate law-enforcement basis for the Attorney General’s directive," the report reads.

 

The House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released an interim staff report Monday deriding the Department of Justice's issuance of a so-called "anti-parent" memo ordering law enforcement to monitor the events of school board meetings.

At issue is an October 2021 memo that Attorney General Merrick Garland issued to the FBI and the offices of U.S. Attorneys directing them to explore the threat that parents at school board meetings might pose.

The report derided the memo as baseless and asserted that "[f]rom the initial set of material produced in response to the subpoenas, it is apparent that the Biden Administration misused federal law-enforcement and counterterrorism resources for political purposes."

In early March, Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan issued subpoenas in relation to the October 2021 memo to former interim Executive Director and CEO of the National School Boards Association Chip Slaven and National Assessment Governing Board Trustee Viola Garcia.

Thus far in the investigation, the panel determined that "[t]he Justice Department’s own documents demonstrate that there was no compelling nationwide law-enforcement justification for the Attorney General’s directive or the Department components’ execution thereof."

The report included reports from U.S. Attorney's offices made to the national DOJ indicating that the order lacked a strong basis.

"After surveying local law enforcement, U.S. Attorney’s offices around the country reported back to Main Justice that there was no legitimate law-enforcement basis for the Attorney General’s directive to use federal law-enforcement and counterterrorism resources to investigate school board-related threats," the panel wrote.

"It appears, from these documents and the information received previously, that the Administration’s actions were a political offensive meant to quell swelling discord over controversial education curricula and unpopular school board decisions," they declared, noting that the directive was released in the final weeks of a contentious Virginia gubernatorial race in which now-Gov. Glenn Youngkin ultimately triumphed over his Democratic opponent after campaigning heavily on education issues.


Ben Whedon is an editor and reporter for Just the News. Follow him on Twitter.

Source: https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/weaponization-panel-blasts-doj-anti-parent-memo-says-no-legal-basis-it

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Judge impressed by evidence of Biden administration coercion in social media censorship case - Greg Piper

 

​ by Greg Piper

More like Rhode Island commission that warned distributors about obscene books than California elections office that flagged social media posts with no implied threat, ruling says.

 

The Biden administration is facing an existential threat to the government-wide regime it set up to curtail purported misinformation about COVID-19, elections and Hunter Biden's laptop, as a federal judge knocked down all but one challenge to a censorship lawsuit by Louisiana, Missouri and doctors.

Not only have the plaintiffs established standing to sue and sufficiently alleged that federal coercion is responsible for the suppression of their comments on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube, but it's likely to keep happening without intervention, U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty wrote in a 77-page ruling that clears the way for a trial.

"Their allegations are more than complaints of past wrongs," the Monroe, La.-based judge said, referring to the non-state plaintiffs, including epidemiologists Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, coauthors of the anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration, and psychiatrist Aaron Kheriaty, fired by the University of California Irvine for refusing its COVID vaccine mandate.

"The threat of future censorship is substantial, and the history of past censorship is strong evidence that the threat of further censorship is not illusory or merely speculative," Doughty wrote.

 


 

The states have plausibly alleged the administration trampled on their "quasi-sovereign interests" in "protecting the freedom of expression of their residents" and enjoying "the benefits that are to flow from participation in the federal system," namely First Amendment rights, the judge said.

The defendants got only a single win, and not cleanly. Doughty dismissed the sought injunction against President Biden but said it's an open question whether he's subject to declaratory relief that resolves the legal rights of the parties, due to uncertain case law.

Unlike previous failed censorship lawsuits led by COVID analyst Justin Hart and theoretical cognitive scientist Mark Changizi, the states and doctors have thoroughly fleshed out "the full picture," the ruling says, finding that statements by federal officials were "tied temporally" and "directly coincide[d] with the deboosting, shadow-banning, and account suspensions" cited in the lawsuit.

The plaintiffs alleged a "full scheme of coordination" that went beyond "a few sporadic statements by a single congressman," he wrote, referring to the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons' failed lawsuit against then-House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) for pressuring social media companies to censor purported vaccine misinformation.

The states can also credibly claim to have suffered direct censorship, Doughty concluded. Soon after a raft of public censorship demands, including President Biden's "killing people" accusation, YouTube censored the Louisiana Department of Justice's videos of its residents "criticizing mask mandates and COVID-19 lockdown measures." It also pulled down St. Louis County public meetings where residents challenged the evidence for mask mandates.

 

The plaintiffs got their ammunition from extensive legal discovery, including depositions by then-National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, CDC public affairs official Carol Crawford and FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan, among others.

"The ruse that it was just a coincidence that all the tech companies silenced the same people saying the same things at the same time has been exposed for the canard it is," New Civil Liberties Alliance Senior Litigation Counsel John Vecchione, who is representing the doctors, said in a press release.

Doughty wasn't impressed with the feds' reasoning that they can't be sued due to sovereign immunity. Many of the "central claims" by the plaintiffs are based on stopping the Biden administration from violating the First Amendment or dozens of officials across agencies from acting outside their powers by demanding "de facto prior restraints," he said.

The plaintiffs also "have the better argument" that the feds violated the Administrative Procedure Act through "discrete agency action in the form of targeted censorship," even if coercing and colluding with social media to censor "disfavored speakers and viewpoints" doesn't constitute "final agency action," according to Doughty.

The judge compared the feds' alleged actions to those of a "legislatively-created" Rhode Island commission that sent official notices to distributors that certain books and magazines "had been declared objectionable for sale or distribution," constituting state censorship attempts.

He cited then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki's public demand to censor the "Disinformation Dozen," which includes anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy's request for information from social media companies, which is plausibly "an implied threat of future regulation."

 

The Department of Homeland Security's repeated bulletins identifying misinformation and disinformation as "domestic terror threats" are arguably state actions that "social-media companies would not lightly disregard," the judge said. So are the voluminous records of "significant encouragement" to censor that federal officials gave social media privately.

These are distinct from the California Office of Elections Cybersecurity's practice of flagging Facebook and Twitter posts as "erroneous or misleading," which the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently deemed "attempts to convince" because they didn't come with "any threat or attempt at coercion," Doughty said.

The feds have not come close to distinguishing their alleged actions, especially threatening antitrust enforcement against resistant tech platforms and revoking their Section 230 liability immunity, from the conduct that courts have repeatedly deemed state action, he found.

This threat plausibly became "more forceful" when Democrats took control of the White House and Congress and President Biden appointed Merrick Garland as attorney general, giving him power to "unilaterally institute antitrust actions against social-media companies," the ruling says.

 

It's more than the "arms-length" relationship between the California elections office and social media companies, which constituted "a single message from an unidentified member of a state agency to Twitter," Doughty said.

Fauci and officials from the CDC, FBI, DHS and State Department allegedly participated in "a formal government-created system" comprising meetings to discuss censorship, "privileged reporting channels" and "funding and establishing federal-private partnership to procure censorship of disfavored viewpoints," the ruling says.

It's irrelevant that the plaintiffs aren't challenging the constitutionality of Section 230, whose liability shield for tech platforms is worth "billions of dollars per year," Doughty told the feds.

They allege that using the liability shield "as a metaphorical carrot-and-stick combined with the alleged back-room meetings, hands-on approach to online censorship, and other factors" turns the private censorship into state action, which plausibly qualifies as "joint participation, entwinement ... subsidization, authorization, and encouragement."

These clearly constitute "viewpoint discrimination and prior restraints" in violation of the First Amendment and APA if proven, Doughty said.

 

Greg Piper

Source: https://justthenews.com/government/white-house/judge-impressed-wealth-evidence-biden-administration-coerced-social-media

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ACLU promises to sue if Kemp signs bill banning gender surgeries on children - The Center Square Staff

 

​ by The Center Square Staff

Threat came after Georgia Senate passed bill that would restrict certain surgical procedures on minors for gender dysphoria.

 

The Georgia Senate passed a modified version of a bill that would restrict certain surgical procedures on minors for gender dysphoria on Tuesday.

The American Civil Liberties Union is promising to sue if Gov. Brian Kemp signs it into law.

Senate Bill 140 would ban any gender dysphoria-related surgical procedures and hormone replacement therapies for those under the age of 18. State Sen. Carden Summers, R-Cordele, is the bill's author.

In a news release, the ACLU said, "courts around the country have already stopped similar laws from going into effect on constitutional grounds, and we expect Georgia courts would do the same."

The amended bill, which House lawmakers passed on March 16 by a 97-34 vote, passed with a 31-21 vote in the Senate. A Democrat-led motion to table the bill failed on a party-line vote. Republicans hold a 10-seat majority in the upper chamber.

The main change made by the House was to strip out a provision that gave physicians immunity from civil suits if they complied with the law.

Democrats blasted the bill on the floor as contrary to current science and possibly harming transgender youth.

"The Georgia Legislature has once again chosen to place politics before patient care. The politicians who passed SB 140 are interfering with the rights of Georgia parents to get life-saving medical treatment for their children and preventing physicians from properly caring for their patients," said Cory Isaacson, ACLU of Georgia legal director, in a news release. "The ACLU of Georgia and our partners will now consider all available legal options in order to protect the rights of parents, young people, and medical providers in our state."

If enacted, the measure would take effect on July 1.


The Center Square Staff

Source: https://justthenews.com/nation/states/center-square/aclu-promises-sue-if-kemp-signs-bill-banning-gender-surgeries-children

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Orchestrated chaos - Anne P. Levin

 

​ by Anne P. Levin

Hat tip: Dr. Carolyn Tal 

It is an orchestrated game, from criminalizing the leader, preventing MKs from going to vote, calls for civil war and boycotts.

 

The unrelenting mass protests and violence flashing across our screens traumatize and intimidate the silent majority of all law-abiding Israeli voters across the political and religious spectrum. Yet, none of this is original. It comes straight from the playbook of the leadership of the Democratic Party of the United States, complete with marching handmaids in red hoods.

It is so familiar, one wonders if the current Israeli malcontents got training and money from the administration in Washington, now hell-bent on ousting an Israeli government that wants to put Israel first.

In 1971, a self described communist named Saul Alinsky from Chicago penned a book called Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals containing 13 rules to destabilize, and intimidate political opponents. Barack Obama studied this book during his community organizing days in Chicago, and Hillary Clinton wrote a 92 page thesis on it.

Alinsky wrote the book for the disadvantaged urban poor in America who had no access to the levers of power within political and corporate America.

Today in Israel, the wealthy, privileged elites of the country are masquerading as an oppressed minority to wrest back power from those who have suffered for over 30 years under the boot of their handmaids, the Israeli Supreme Court and the Attorney General. This is deceitful and diabolical, but it is not original.

Those flooding the streets now and crying “victim” were never ejected from their homes and greenhouses for the mere crime of living where Jews are verboten by a hostile world. They never had their graves exhumed without legal recourse from the “enlightened” Israeli Supreme Court.

  • The current noisemakers are not the poor of South Tel-Aviv who had to endure endless crime waves by illegal aliens who the Israeli Supreme Court insisted had a right to penetrate Israel’s border.
  • The demonstrators do not represent small Israeli businesses whose contracts face ad hoc changes by a court who can substitute its interpretation of contracts for the parties’ intentions.

The protests in our faces are orchestrated by the failed politicians of the Left, the Israel Bar Association and Judges vested in the current system, as well as woke high tech barons who want the whole highway of power to themselves. They refuse to stay in their lane and share power with the legislative and executive branches of the government. In short, they do not want We the People telling them what to do, for we are just a mob of ignorant dupes who do not know how to vote correctly. That is why they do not trust the legislature and ministries, and the court must reign supreme.

Here are some of Saul Alinsky’s rules now being deployed against the Israeli public:

  • “Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.”

The activists blocking access to Ben Gurion Airport and the Ayalon Highway, and harming all voters, including their own, lost the general election not too long ago. They are no longer in the ruling coalition, despite overtures to include them. They cannot accept this, so they use money from sources such as the New Israel Fund, the Movement for Quality Government, and other deep pockets to stage massive, expensive public spectacles to frighten the Israeli public with their clout. They use their potent allies in the biased Israeli and foreign media to give their voices a constant platform. They hope that the silent majority of Israelis question the legitimacy of the last elections.

  • Keep the pressure on. Never let up. Keep trying new things to keep the opposition off balance. As the opposition masters one approach, hit them from the flank with something new.”

Here is the logic of the Israeli opposition and their foreign allies: First, try to criminalize the leader of the Likud party. If your case implodes due to lack of evidence, call him a tyrant during an election. If that does not work, and you lose the election, refuse to join the coalition. When that strategy fails, flood the streets with massive protests tying up police resources even though terrorists are murdering your fellow Jews.

Next, physically prevent coalition MKs from attending the Knesset to vote, even if you have to terrify their special needs child. If the other side has not yet capitulated, call for civil war and threaten to pull your money out of the Israeli economy. Convince military personnel to abandon vital military duties. If that does not work, vandalize the right wing think tank that created the despised judicial reform proposal.

The goal is to keep your activists in the news cycle with disturbing images to whip up the public into a false hysteria.

  • “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.”
  • Note that the coalition is trying to reform institutions like the courts and the AG’s office.. The opposition viciously attacks people, Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben Gvir.

BDS is the acronym for Boycott Divestment and Sanctions, the economic tool of anti-Zionists to dry up the Jewish State. It also stands for Bibi Derangement Syndrome. Not since Menachem Begin won the first election against Israeli Left, has it launched such a sustained and widespread ad hominem attack against an Israeli politician.

This circle of hate is now expanding to other coalition partners who they demonize as intolerant fanatics poised to take away religious and expressive rights from secular Israelis. This screed is far from the truth, and is impossible, given the dynamics of the Knesset. Nothing in the coalition’s proposed judicial reform will allow such an infringement of secular civil liberties.

  • “Accuse your opponent of what you are doing, to create confusion and to inculcate voters against evidence of your own guilt.”

A recurring mantra of the mass manipulators is that the coalition is “destroying democracy” and that the demonstrators are “fighting for democracy”. This is cynical inversion at its best.

-These are the same people that rammed the Oslo Accords through the Knesset by a razor-thin majority of one vote, causing endless financial and diplomatic harm to the State of Israel. We have lost much innocent Jewish blood and treasure over this dangerous accord.

-Today’s chest thumpers are the same people who just gave away huge natural gas resources to the Hezbollah on the eve of their political collapse without the democratic due process of the Knesset.

Despite these affronts to republican rule, the media have enabled them to point to the newborn government as “tyrants” with astounding success. We the People must wise up, and fast.

It is natural to feel demoralized and anxious in the face of strong, sustained, organized forces trying to take down the State. Law-abiding voters of all parties feel shocked and hopeless after the normal transition of power is violently disrupted.

The remedy is to understand that we, all Israeli voters across the spectrum, are being manipulated. We must see the psychological tactics for what they are; a last ditch effort to circumvent the ballot box and put other governments’ puppets back in power to weaken Israel just at the hour when it must take decisive action against Iran.

Once you recognize these tactics, you can immunize yourself against them.

As Gregory Peck once quipped, “Tough times don’t last, tough people do, remember?”

We will get through this.

 

Ann P. Levin is the author of Burning But Never Consumed. Her next book on legal writing for non-native English speakers will be published later this year.

Source: https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/368927

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US: Smotrich's comments 'offensive,' Palestinians have rich history - Tovah Lazaroff Jerusalem Post Staff

 

​ by Tovah Lazaroff Jerusalem Post Staff

"The Palestinians have a rich history and culture, and the US highly appreciates our partnership with the Palestinian people," said Ned Price.

 

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich's claim that "there is no such thing as a Palestinian people" is "offensive," US State Department Spokesperson Ned Price told Amman-based public broadcaster Al-Mamlaka overnight on Tuesday.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich's claim that "there is no such thing as a Palestinian people" is "offensive," US State Department deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel told reporters in Washington on Tuesday.

"The Palestinians have a rich history and culture, and the United States greatly values our partnership with the Palestinian people,” Patel said.

He recalled the statement President Joe Biden made when he traveled to the Palestinian territories last summer and visited Bethlehem, explaining that “the US remains committed to two states for two people, both of whom have deep ancient roots in the land, living side‑by‑side in peace and security.”

National Missions Minister Orit Struck spoke out on Wednesday in support of Smotrich, telling Israel radio that his comments were historically accurate and reflected those already made by former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir that there was no such thing as a Palestinian people.

“He took it straight from Golda Meir,” she said. If a Palestinian people did not exist in the 1970s, then “I don’t see how they were born at some point between the 1970s and now.”

 Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich holds a press conference in Jerusalem, on February 28, 2023. (credit: YONATAN SINDEL/FLASH90) Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich holds a press conference in Jerusalem, on February 28, 2023. (credit: YONATAN SINDEL/FLASH90)

“There is no Palestinian people, that is just a historical fact,” she said adding that historically the state of Israel was built on territory that had been part of the ancient biblical state.

She didn’t address the presence of the Palestinian people on the land, before their national awakening in the late 19th century.

Smotrich has not rescinded his words nor has Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned them

The Foreign Ministry, has, however, taken issue with a second controversy with Smotrich’s speech that sparked a crisis with Jordan.

Smotrich made his comments at a private event in Paris, in which he stood at a podium adorned with a graphic, which looked like a map with extended Israeli borders to include Jordan, Gaza and the West Bank and denied the existence of the Palestinian people.

Jordan has warned that it considers this to be a violation of its 1994 peace treaty with Israel.

The Foreign Ministry stated support for the treaty emphasizing that it supported Jordan’s territorial integrity. National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi also personally assured Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi that this was Israel's position.

Patel takes issue with the map

Patel also took issue with the graphic of the map in denouncing Smotrich’s words.

“The latest comments by Mr. Smotrich, which were delivered at a podium adorned with an inaccurate and provocative map, are offensive, they are deeply concerning, and, candidly, they’re dangerous.”

“We underscore the importance of the US strategic relationship with the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, the second Arab state to take the courageous step of making peace with Israel. And we welcome Israel’s reaffirmation of the 1994 peace treaty with Jordan,” Patel said.

"We also affirmed that two states along the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps remain the best way to achieve equal measures of security, prosperity, and freedom and democracy for Palestinians and Israelis alike."

However, Patel stopped short of saying the US would declare Smotrich persona non grata when asked by Al Quds Washington bureau chief Said Arikat if it was willing to do so.

"This Israeli minister was here only ten days ago. Is this administration willing to declare him a persona non grata, for instance?" Arikat asked.

"We’re taking a strong statement now, and I’m not going to get into hypotheticals about what we would do if another government official in another country did something hypothetical," Patel replied.

Smotrich had already angered the Biden administration by calling for the IDF to wipe out the West Bank Palestinian town of Huwara. He later clarified he meant for his words to be interpreted as a call for the IDF to route out terrorists in Huwara. 

He walked back his words both in a Facebook post and in a speech he delivered in the US. 


Tovah Lazaroff Jerusalem Post Staff

Source: https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-734953

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Palestinians ‘Peoplehood’ Based on a Big Lie - Eli E. Hertz

 

​ by Eli E. Hertz

Most Arabs living west of the Jordan River in Israel, the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and Gaza are newcomers who came from surrounding Arab lands after the turn of the 20th century because they were attracted to the relative economic prosperity brought about by the Zionist Movement and the British in the 1920s and 1930s.

The Palestinians claim that they are an ancient and indigenous people fails to stand up to historic scrutiny. Most Palestinian Arabs were newcomers to British Mandate Palestine. Until the 1967 Six-Day War made it expedient for Arabs to create a Palestinian peoplehood, local Arabs simply considered themselves part of the ‘great Arab nation’ or ‘southern Syrians.’

“Repeat a lie often enough and people will begin to believe it.”
Nazi propaganda master Joseph Goebbels

“All [that Palestinians] can agree on as a community is what they
want to destroy, not what they want to build.”
New York Times
columnist Thomas Friedman

There is no age-old Palestinian people. Most so-called Palestinians are relative newcomers to the Land of Israel

Like a mantra, Arabs repeatedly claim that the Palestinians are a native people. The concept of a ‘Stateless Palestinian people’ is not based on fact. It is a fabrication.

Palestinian Arabs cast themselves as a native people in “Palestine” – like the Aborigines in Australia or Native Americans in America. They portray the Jews as European imperialists and colonizers. This is simply untrue.

Until the Jews began returning to the Land of Israel in increasing numbers from the late 19th century to the turn of the 20th, the area called Palestine was a God-forsaken backwash that belonged to the Ottoman Empire, based in Turkey.

The land’s fragile ecology had been laid waste in the wake of the Arabs’ 7th-century conquest. In 1799, the population was at it lowest and estimated to be no more than 250,000 to 300,000 inhabitants in all the land.

At the turn of the 20th century, the Arab population west of the Jordan River (today, Israel and the West Bank) was about half a million inhabitants and east of the Jordan River perhaps 200,000.

The collapse of the agricultural system with the influx of nomadic tribes after the Arab conquest that created malarial swamps and denuded the ancient terrace system eroding the soil, was coupled by a tyrannous regime, a crippling tax system and absentee landowners that further decimated the population. Much of the indigenous population had long since migrated or disappeared. Very few Jews or Arabs lived in the region before the arrival of the first Zionists in the 1880s and most of those that did lived in abject poverty.

Most Arabs living west of the Jordan River in Israel, the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and Gaza are newcomers who came from surrounding Arab lands after the turn of the 20th century because they were attracted to the relative economic prosperity brought about by the Zionist Movement and the British in the 1920s and 1930s.

This is substantiated by eyewitness reports of a deserted country – including 18th-century reports from the British archaeologist Thomas Shaw, French author and historian Count Constantine Volney (Travels through Syria and Egypt, 1798); the mid-19th-century writings of Alphonse de Lamartine (Recollections of the East, 1835); Mark Twain (Innocents Abroad, 1867); and reports from the British Consul in Jerusalem (1857) that were sent back to London.

The Ottoman Turks’ census (1882) recorded only 141,000 Muslims in the Land of Israel. The real number is probably closer to 350,000 to 425,000, since many hid to avoid taxes. The British census in 1922 reported 650,000 Muslims.

Aerial photographs taken by German aviators during World War I show an underdeveloped country composed mainly of primitive hamlets. Ashdod, for instance, was a cluster of mud dwellings, Haifa a fishing village. In 1934 alone, 30,000 Syrian Arabs from the Hauran moved across the northern frontier into Mandate Palestine, attracted by work in and around the newly built British port and the construction of other infrastructure projects. They even dubbed Haifa Um el-Amal (‘the city of work’).

The fallacy of Arab claims that most Palestinians were indigenous to Palestine – not newcomers - is also bolstered by a 1909 vintage photograph of Nablus, today an Arab city on the West Bank with over 121,000 residents. Based on the number of buildings in the photo taken from the base of Mount Gerizim, the population in 1909 – Muslim Arabs and Jewish Samaritans – could not have been greater than 2,000 residents.

Family names of many Palestinians attest to their non-Palestinian origins. Just as Jews bear names like Berliner, Warsaw and Toledano, modern phone books in the Territories are filled with families named Elmisri (Egyptian), Chalabi (Syrian), Mugrabi (North Africa). Even George Habash – the arch-terrorist and head of Black September – bears a name with origins in Abyssinia or Ethiopia, Habash in both Arabic and Hebrew.


Palestinian nationality is an entity defined by its opposition to Zionism, and not its national aspirations.

What unites Palestinians has been their opposition to Jewish nationalism and the desire to stamp it out, not aspirations for their own state. Local patriotic feelings are generated only when a non-Islamic entity takes charge – such as Israel did after the 1967 Six-Day War. It dissipates under Arab rule, no matter how distant or despotic.

A Palestinian identity did not exist until an opposing force created it – primarily anti-Zionism. Opposition to a non-Muslim nationalism on what local Arabs, and the entire Arab world, view as their own turf, was the only expression of ‘Palestinian peoplehood.’

The Grand Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini, a charismatic religious leader and radical anti-Zionist was the moving force behind opposition to Jewish immigration in the 1920s and 1930s. The two-pronged approach of the “Diplomacy of Rejection” (of Zionism) and the violence the Mufti incited occurred at the same time Lebanon, Syria, Transjordan and Iraq became countries in the post-Ottoman reshuffling of territories established by the British and the French under the League of Nation’s mandate system.

The tiny educated class among the Arabs of Palestine was more politically aware than the rest of Arab society, with the inklings of a separate national identity. However, for decades, the primary frame of reference for most local Arabs was the clan or tribe, religion and sect, and village of origin. If Arabs in Palestine defined themselves politically, it was as “southern Syrians.” Under Ottoman rule, Syria referred to a region much larger than the Syrian Arab Republic of today, with borders established by France and England in 1920.

In his book Greater Syria: The History of an Ambition, Daniel Pipes explains:

        “Syria was a region that stretched from the borders of Anatolia to those of Egypt, from the edge of Iraq to the Mediterranean Sea. In terms of today’s states, the Syria of old comprised Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan, plus the Gaza Strip and Alexandria.”

Syrian maps in the 21st century still co-opt most of Greater Syria, including Israel.

The Grand Mufti Al-Husseini’s aspirations slowly shifted from pan-Arabism – the dream of uniting all Arabs into one polity, whereby Arabs in Palestine would unite with their brethren in Syria - to winning a separate Palestinian entity, with himself at the helm. Al-Husseini was the moving force behind the 1929 riots against the Jews and the 1936-1939 Arab Revolt against two non-Muslim entities in Palestine – the British and the Jews. He gathered a large following by playing on fears that the Jews had come to dispossess, or at least dominate the Arabs.  

Much like Yasser Arafat, the Grand Mufti’s ingrained all-or-nothing extremism, fanaticism and even an inability to cooperate with his own compatriots made him totally ineffective. He led the Palestinian Arabs nowhere.

The ‘Palestinian’ cause became a key rallying point for Arab nationalism throughout the Middle East, according to Oxford historian Avi Shlaim. The countries the British and French created in 1918-1922 were based largely on meridians on the map, as is evident in the borders that delineate the Arab states today. Because these states lack ethnic logic or a sense of community, their opposition to the national aspirations of the Jews has come to fuel that fires Arab nationalism as the ‘glue’ of national identity. (see details on the ramifications of British and French policy, which plague the Middle East to this day in the chapter “The European Union.”)

From the 1920s, rejection of Jewish nationalism, attempts to prevent the establishment of a Jewish homeland by violence, and rejection of any form of Jewish political power, including any plans to share stewardship with Arabs, crystallized into the expression of Palestinianism. No other positive definition of an Arab-Palestinian people has surfaced. This point is admirably illustrated in the following historic incident:

    “In 1926, Lord Plumer was appointed as the second High Commissioner of Palestine. The Arabs within the Mandate were infuriated when Plumer stood up for the Zionists’ national anthem Hatikva during ceremonies held in his honor when Plumer first visited Tel Aviv. When a delegation of Palestinian Arabs protested Plumer’s ‘Zionist bias,’ the High Commissioner asked the Arabs if he remained seated when their national anthem was played, ‘wouldn’t you regard my behavior as most unmannerly?’ Met by silence, Plumer asked: ‘By the way, have you got a national anthem?’ When the delegation replied with chagrin that they did not, he snapped back, “I think you had better get one as soon as possible.”

But it took the Palestinians more than 60 years to heed Plumer’s advice, adopting Anthem of the Intifada two decades after Israel took over the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 – at the beginning of the 1987 Intifada.

Under the Mandate, local Arabs also refused to establish an ‘Arab Agency’ to develop the Arab sector, parallel to the Jewish Agency that directed development of the Jewish sector (see the Chapter “Rejectionism”).

In fact, the so-called patriotism of indigenous Muslims has flourished only when non-Muslim entities (the Crusaders, the British, the Jews) have taken charge of the Holy Land. When political control returns to Muslim hands, the ardent patriotism of the Arabs of Palestine magically wanes, no matter how distant or how despotic the government. One Turkish pasha who ruled Acco (Acre) between 1775 and 1804 was labeled Al Jazzar, The Butcher, by locals.

Why hasn’t Arab representative government ever been established in Palestine, either in 1948 or during the next 19 years of Arab rule? Because other Arabs co-opted the Palestinian cause as a rallying point that would advance the concept that the territory was up for grabs. “The Arab invasion of Palestine was not a means for achieving an independent Palestine, but rather the result of a lack of consensus on the part of the Arab states regarding such independence,” summed up one historian. Adherents to a separate Palestinian identity were a mute minority on the West Bank and Gaza during the 19 years of Jordanian and Egyptian rule - until Israel took control from the Jordanians and the Egyptians in 1967. Suddenly a separate Palestinian peoplehood appeared and claimed it deserved nationhood - and 21 other Arab states went along with it.

Palestinianism in and of itself lacks any substance of its own. Arab society on the West Bank and Gaza suffers from deep social cleavages created by a host of rivalries based on divergent geographic, historical, geographical, sociological and familial allegiances. What glues Palestinians together is a carefully nurtured hatred of Israel and the rejection of Jewish nationhood.


Eli E. Hertz

Source: http://www.mythsandfacts.org/article_view.asp?articleID=53&order_id=1

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US summons Israeli envoy, Netanyahu says 'we won’t rebuild settlements' - Tovah Lazaroff

 

​ by Tovah Lazaroff

Deputy Secretary of State Sherman met with Herzog at the State Department and conveyed the US's concern about the repeal of the 2005 Disengagement Law.

 

 Ambassador to the US Mike Herzog speaks at the Museum of the Bible. (photo credit: SHMULIK ALMANI)
Ambassador to the US Mike Herzog speaks at the Museum of the Bible.
(photo credit: SHMULIK ALMANI)

Israel won’t rebuild the four northern Samaria settlements that were destroyed during the 2005 Disengagement, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said after the United States summoned the country’s Ambassador Mike Herzog to the State Department to clarify the matter.

“The government has no intention of establishing new settlements in these areas,” Netanyahu said on Wednesday.

He made no reference to the illegally constructed Homesh yeshiva at the site, which the coalition has already promised to authorize.

The Biden administration has accused Israel of violating two promises it made to the US after the Knesset voted to lift its ban on the entry of Israelis to the sites of the four evacuated settlements.

It’s the first step necessary toward rebuilding those communities. Samaria Regional Council head Yossi Dagan has already begun to do the preparation work for such a step. Many of the preparatory moves would actually need only the approval of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. Bureaucratic work could move forward for a long time before it ever went to the government for approval.

 Israel's settlers and right-wing activists gather at the abandoned Jewish settlement of Homesh, northern West Bank, June 12, 2007. (credit: YONATHAN WEITZMAN / REUTERS) Israel's settlers and right-wing activists gather at the abandoned Jewish settlement of Homesh, northern West Bank, June 12, 2007. (credit: YONATHAN WEITZMAN / REUTERS)

Netanyahu did speak in support of the vote itself, which he said “brings an end to a discriminatory and humiliating law that prohibited Jews from living in the areas of northern Samaria, part of our historical homeland. It is no coincidence that senior members of the opposition supported this law along the way.”

Deputy Secretary of State Wendy R. Sherman met with Herzog at the State Department and conveyed US “concern regarding legislation passed by the Israeli Knesset rescinding important aspects of the 2005 Disengagement Law, including the prohibition on establishing settlements in the northern West Bank.” 

“They also discussed the importance of all parties refraining from actions or rhetoric that could further inflame tensions leading into the Ramadan, Passover, and Easter holidays,” the State Department said.

Netanyahu’s government believes that the repeal corrects the historic injustice of the plan, under which Israel also withdrew from Gaza.

It has argued that the withdrawal has only led to increased terror against Israel, with Hamas taking over Gaza to use as a launching pad for rockets and with West Bank terror cells strengthening their presence in northern Samaria.

The US views the repeal as a direct violation of the letters of understanding passed between former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and former US President George Bush in 2004.

Israeli reactions

The Prime Minister's Office clarified the position of the Israeli government in a statement on Wednesday, saying: "The Knesset's decision to repeal parts of the disengagement law brings an end to a discriminatory and humiliating law that prohibited Jews from living in the areas of northern Samaria, part of our historical homeland. It is no coincidence that senior members of the opposition supported this law along the way."

"However, the government has no intention of establishing new settlements in these areas," the statement concluded.

Opposition leader and former Prime Minister Yair Lapid accused Netanyahu of destroying Israel's relationship with the US.

His government "managed to eliminate Washington's support. They are doing the things that we all always knew should not be done and if Netanyahu was not so weak he would not have let them do it either."

Likud MK Dan Illouz disagreed. “We have no problem clarifying to the United States in every conversation in which we are invited that the Land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people."

“They are welcome to invite us to clarify this at any time. We are available and happy to do so,” he added.

"The last summoning of an Israeli ambassador for clarification was many, many years ago, as far as I know," National Unity Party MK Gadi Eizenkot said in a Wednesday morning interview to 103FM. "This indicates the magnitude of the government's violation as perceived by the Americans."

"We again see weakness by the government and decisions that are a political conjecture, resulting in damage to Israel's national interests. I hope this hasty decision doesn't result in blood. It will take a very long time to rebuild and restore the damage to the relations and trust between Israel and the US," Eizenkot added.


Tovah Lazaroff

Source: https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/politics-and-diplomacy/article-735052

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The Gulf War: 20 Years Later - Kenneth R. Timmerman

 

​ by Kenneth R. Timmerman

Was the war worth the blood and treasure we spent on it? Here's whom to ask.

 


Monday marked the twentieth anniversary of the second Gulf war, which detractors call the invasion of Iraq. I have always looked at it as the liberation, as do many Iraqis.

But most Americans have been taught a history of lies, a history forged by left-wing political activists and their allies in the media and rarely contradicted by those who knew the truth.

Even Britannica, the once authoritative encyclopedia, has bowed to the political orthodoxy, referring to Saddam Hussein’s “alleged” possession and manufacture of weapons of mass destruction.

That is the founding myth of the “Bush lied, people died” Democrats and the media.

So were there weapons of mass destruction in Iraq at the time of the U.S. invasion?

Absolutely. We know that because the United States and its coalition partners assembled a team of over 1,400 special forces operators, scientists and intelligence analysts to scour Iraq for the evidence. And what they reported has been wildly mischaracterized – at times, even by the leaders of that very effort.

David Kay, a former IAEA inspector who became famous for his parking lot “standoff” with Saddam’s goons, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on January 23, 2004, that WMD stockpiles would not be found in Iraq. “I don’t think they existed,” Kay said.

“Stockpiles” quickly became the defining term. But in Kay’s interim report to the House intelligence committee, just four months earlier, he painted a very different picture. “We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002,” he said.

This included:

*  A prison laboratory complex that may have been used for human testing of BW agents and “that Iraqi officials working to prepare the U.N. inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the U.N.” Why was Saddam interested in testing biological-warfare agents on humans if he didn’t have a biological weapons program?

*    New research on BW agents, brucella and Congo-Crimean hemorrhagic fever, and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin that were not declared to the United Nations.

*    “Continuing covert capability to manufacture fuel propellant useful only for prohibited Scud-variant missiles, a capability that was maintained at least until the end of 2001 and that cooperating Iraqi scientists have said they were told to conceal from the U.N.”

*    “Plans and advanced design work for new long-range missiles with ranges up to at least 1,000 kilometers [621 miles] – well beyond the 150-kilometer-range limit [93 miles] imposed by the U.N.”

*    “[C]landestine attempts between late 1999 and 2002 to obtain from North Korea technology related to 1,300-kilometer-range [807 miles] ballistic missiles… antiship cruise missiles and other prohibited military equipment,” Kay reported.

But guess what? The media largely ignored that testimony, focusing instead on the single word, “stockpiles.”

In testimony before Congress on March 30, 2004, Kay’s successor, Charles Duelfer, revealed that the ISG had found evidence of a “crash program” to construct new plants capable of making chemical and biological warfare agents. The ISG also found a previously undeclared program to build a “high-speed rail gun,” a device apparently designed for testing nuclear-weapons materials. That came in addition to 500 tons of natural uranium stockpiled at Iraq’s main declared nuclear site south of Baghdad, which the International Atomic Energy Agency told me had been intended for “a clandestine nuclear-weapons program.”

The Pentagon ultimately spent $70 million to quietly ship that natural uranium stockpile to Canada in 2007. But no one ever talks about that.

The inspectors also found hundreds of tons of agricultural chemicals used to make pesticides – and nerve gas. These were, in fact, stockpiles of binary chemical weapons.

In a summary of his three volume report to the CIA, Duelfer concluded that “Saddam was directing resources to sustain the capacity to recommence producing WMD once UN sanctions and international scrutiny collapsed” – a collapse that was only forestalled by the U.S. invasion.

But to the Democrats who voted to approve the Iraq war and who were desperately seeking to walk back that vote, no stockpiles meant “Bush lied, people died.”

Several White House advisors later acknowledged that Karl Rove instructed them to ignore new evidence of WMD in Iraq after the war. “Let these sleeping dogs lie; we have lost that fight so better not to remind anyone of it,” David Wurmser recalled.

In an oped in the Wall Street Journal in 2010, Rove admitted that failing to push back against the lies told about WMD in Iraq was his “biggest mistake” while in the White House. It was also a betrayal of the Americans who laid down their lives to defend us and a travesty of the truth.

So was the war worth the blood and treasure we spent on it?

Don’t ask the media, the Democrats, or Saddam Hussein supporters among Iraq’s Sunni population. Ask the gold star families.

And then ask those Iraqis who were the victims of Saddam’s Republic of Fear.

Ask the Kurds who earlier this month commemorated the thirty-fifth anniversary of the mass poison gas attack against the Iraqi city of Halabja that killed more than 5,000 civilians.

Ask the families of the more than 100,000 Iraqi Kurds who were massacred during Saddam’s genocidal Anfal campaign in 1988.

Ask the Shia in Basra, Karbala, or in Baghdad itself, who lived in constant fear of Saddam’s goons.

Saddam’s apologists – who still live and speak publicly in Iraq and in the Arabic media – want you to believe that “millions” of Iraqis died in the war and that the United States decimated Iraq’s infrastructure so that even today they don’t have clean water or reliable electricity.

Iraqis have had twenty years and hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer aid to rebuild their infrastructure. If there are still gaps, blame the corrupt Iraqi politicians.

But Iraqis of all backgrounds today have one thing they could only dream about in 2003, and it is the most precious thing of all: their freedom. Americans purchased that freedom for them at great cost. What they do with it will be the legacy they leave their children.

 

Ken Timmerman’s latest book, And the Rest is History: Tales of Hostages, Arms Dealers, Dirty Tricks, and Spies, includes detailed accounts of his encounters with the heads of Saddam Hussein’s WMD programs.

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-gulf-war-20-years-later/

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