Saturday, November 3, 2018

A rude awakening for the Palestinian dream - Dr. Mordechai Kedar


by Dr. Mordechai Kedar

The invented national ethos of the Palestinian Authority is about to collapse, now that the PA has cancelled the two agreements that allow its tottering government to survive.

When something is built on an unstable foundation, it is only natural for its long term survival to be at risk. It is also natural for it to be in need of constant support just to keep from falling. The belief that it will eventually be able to stand on its own two feet causes people to lend their support, but only egregious fools continue to so if there is no hope of its ever being independent, because in that case, everythiing those supporters have invested is doomed to be irretrievably lost.

The Palestinian Authority is in exactly that position today and this article will expound on the reasons it has no hope of every being able to become a viable and independent entity. 

The prime reason for this situation is the very reason the PA was founded. In 1993, the Israeli government tried to find someone who would accept responsibility for eliminating the terror network created by the Hamas and Islamic Jihad movements in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, someone willing to be rewarded for anti-terrorist activity by being granted the authority to rule the area and administer the lives of the Arabs living there. This was the "deal" concocted by the Israelis, and the "contractor" who accepted the challenge was the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) headed by arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat. The Israeli government actually believed that Arafat was serious about eliminating terror and establishing an autonomous administrative system for running those territories.

Of course, this deal was doomed to failure from the start due to the residents of Judea, Samaria and Gaza and also the government of Israel. The Arab residents considered  the Palestinian Authority (PA), the governing arm of the PLO, to be the operative arm of Israeli policy, an organization collaorating with Israel by means of the coordinated security system that exists up until this very day.

"Security coordination" to the Palestinian Arabs is a laundered word for cooperation, meaning PA security forces attempt to apprehend the terrorists that belong to organizations other than their own and hand them over to Israel. Many of the Arab residents of Judea, Samaria and Gaza see this as no less than treason. 

In order to cover up the betrayal and silence its critics, the PA employs thousands in both real and artificial jobs (the kind where the worker does not have to do anything in order to be paid) . For the sake of earning a livng, people are willing to shut their mouths and utter not a word about what they really think of the PA and the reasons for its existence.

No matter, members of the PA know exactly in what esteem the authority is held by the public. To combat this and in order to create legitimacy for themselves and the PA,  they invented a national ethos whose purpose was establishing a state under conditions to which Israel could never agree: the "right" of return for millions of "refugees" to Israel and insistence on Israel's relinquishing of Jerusalem. These impossible demands were raised knowing full well that Israel would never agree to them, and that there would never be a Palestinian Arab state, so that Israel could continue to remain the eternal enemy.  Anyone who tinks that a Palestinian Arab state adjoining Israel would live in peace with it does not comprehend the basic tenet of the Palestinian dream - which is basically fanning the flames of Israel-hatred, encouraging terror against it and blaming it for all the ills of Arab society.

That is why - according to the PA media - Israel is the result of a European colonialist venture originating in Europe's desrie to rid itself of the Jews, the Jews are nothing but cosmopolitan communities with no homeland, Judaism is a dead, not living religion, the Jews have no history in the lands belonging to "Falestin." In addition, the Palestinian Arabs are victims of a Euroean conspiracy and their legitimate goal is to free all of "Falestin" from the river to the sea. Therefore "peace" with Israel can never be more than a temporary ceasefire, with the final goal the destruction of the Jewish state.

Over the past 25 years, more and more Israelis have begun to understand the failed "Oslo Accords" deal their government signed, and that is why the Israeli left, which engineered this fatal mistake, has gradually lost much of the public support it had during the initial euphoric period after the agreements were signed. The "Arab Spring" - which is more reminiscent of a wintery swamp filled with fire, blood and tears - helped the Israelis awaken from the dream of "a new Middle East" described utopically by Oslo Accords master architect, the late Shimon Peres.  

Today, it is clear that all Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas wanted and Abbas still desires is the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state on the ruins of the Jewish one. It is hard to find any enthusiasm among Israelis for continuing to pump oxygen into the artificial entity known as the Palestinian Authority, whose only source of life is the money its gets from other countries and pours into salaries for its employees and the murderous terrorists serving sentences in Israeli prisons.

The second reason for the PA's failure is its lack of success in establishing a political entity with acceptable administrative norms whose existence is suported by the people's recognition of the significance of keeping the rules governing the political game, commonly known as "the rule of law."

The PA created various systems and bodies meant for outside consumption, while their actual existence lacks any substance whatsover. For example: The PA has a voting system, and in 2006 it elected a legislature and president, both for four year terms. If the PA would keep its own laws, there would have been new elections in 2010, 2014, and 2018, every four years, and we would have observed political parties acting to build a power base during those four years - and possibly even witness a change of leadership. None of this ever happened. There were elections, Hamas won most of the seats in the legislature, but all that body';s authority was stripped from it by the PLO, so that Hamas would not succeed in attaining any chance of control in the Palestinian Authority.  

In September of this year, the Hamas members elected to the PA legislature sent a letter to the UN Secretary General in which they demanded he not allow Mahmoud Abbas to speak before the General Assembly due to his not being the chairman of the PA anymore, since his term expired years ago, in 2010, and he was never reelected. Abbas heard of the letter and was enraged, accused the Hamas movement of pulling the rug from under his feet and then blaming the poor attendance at his speech in the General Assemly on it. To teach Hamas a lesson, he dissoved the PA legislature.

The elected chairman's term ended almost nine years ago, but PA leader Mahmoud Abbas extends his own presidential term annually by administrative decree. Do you get it? This is the system established by the "nascent state" because Israel, Europe and the US are in favor of it and will do anything - including stomping on the rules of the game - to keep Hamas from running the show. Is there any way for the public to accept this as a legitimate way to play the game of running a government? Not a chance, so the PA, with its ridiculous rules and laws is seen as an illegitimate entity by the vast majority of the Arab public residing in Judea and Samaria. Most of this public hates Mahmoud Abbas anyway, because his birthplace was Safed, a city not located in Judea or Samaria, and his two sons, Yasser and Tarik spend their time stealing vast sums from the PA's dwindling public purse.  

The Hamas movement realized where the PA was headed back in 2007 and decided to take matters into its own hands by means of a violent takeover of the Gaza Strip. Hamas refuses to collaborate with Israel and continues the Jihad against it because without the anti-Israel Jihad, Hamas has no raison d'etre.

The fact that Hamas runs the Gaza Strip prevents the PLO from realizing its dream  because Israel rightly fears that complete independence for the PA in Judea and Samaria means a Hamas takeover there on the lines of what occurred in Gaza. That is what lies behind Mahmoud Abbas' efforts to put down Hamas: he refrains from giving them the rehabilitation funding for Gaza granted them by various world donors, does not cover their fuel and electricity bills, and holds onto the salaries of PLO members in Gaza in order to keep the taxes on them out of the hands of Hamas.  Is this not a betrayal of over one and a half million subjects suffering in Gaza under Hamas rule? 

The PLO is on the verge of ideological bankruptcy. On the one hand, it cannot control Hamas and force that Islamist movement to accept its agenda, while on the other hand, Israel is not exactly enthusiastic about helping it establish a state that will threaten the Jewish one. Accordingly, the PA Central Committee came out with a recommendation to cancel PA recognition of Israel and end security cooperation with Israel. This week the Central Committee repeated its demand to end all cooperation with Israel on matters of security and to cancel the economic agreements the PLO and Israel signed - those allowing the PA to function. 

These recommendations were designed to end the accusation hurled repeatedly by Hamas at the PLO, that of cooperation with the Zionist enemy, except that without security and economic cooperation with Israel, the PA is set to collapse within a few days. This no-way-out situation is about to bring the PLO and PA to a state of economic and ideoogical collapse, showing the world the utter failure that constitutes the Palestinian dream.

What is the alternative? The Emirate Plan, as we have previously expounded on from this very podium. 

Written for Arutz Sheva, translated from Hebrew by Rochel Sylvetsky, Op-ed and Judaism Editor.

Dr. Mordechai Kedar is a senior lecturer in the Department of Arabic at Bar-Ilan University. He served in IDF Military Intelligence for 25 years, specializing in Arab political discourse, Arab mass media, Islamic groups and the Syrian domestic arena. Thoroughly familiar with Arab media in real time, he is frequently interviewed on the various news programs in Israel.

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/22949

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"Don't Ever Repeat This": Beto Aides Busted Funneling Caravan Funds In Undercover Sting - Tyler Durden


by Tyler Durden

Hat tip: Dr. Jean-Charles Bensoussan
 

For video evidence of the following claims, go to the original source for this post

James O'Keefe's undercover operatives at Project Veritas have done it again; this time filming campaign staffers for Congressman and US Senate candidate Robert Francis "Beto" O'Rourke, seemingly engaging in the illegal use of campaign resources to help transport Honduran nationals traveling in the Central American caravan headed towards the southern US border. 

O'Rourke staffers Dominic Chacon and AnaPaula Themann admit to facilitating transportation to airports and bus stations.

Via Project Veritas
Chacon: “The Hondurans, yeah… I’m going to go get some food right now, like just some stuff to drop off…”
Themann: “How did they get through?”
Chacon: “Well I think they accepted them as like asylum-seekers… So, I’m going to get some groceries and some blankets…”
Themann: “Don’t ever repeat this and stuff but like if we just say that we’re buying food for a campaign event, like the Halloween events…
Chacon: “That’s not a horrible idea, but I didn’t hear anything. Umm, we can wait until tomorrow for that.
Themann: “Well that’s exactly the food we need. And I will just mark it as, I do have dozens of block walkers.”
“Don’t ever repeat this”

Featured in this report are campaign staffers who work on Congressman O’Rourke’s US Senate campaign discussing how they use campaign resources to help Honduran aliens and transport them to airports and bus stations. Said Dominic Chacon and AnaPaula Themann, who work on O’Rourke’s campaign:
Chacon: “The Hondurans, yeah… I’m going to go get some food right now, like just some stuff to drop off…”
Themann: “How did they get through?”
Chacon: “Well I think they accepted them as like asylum-seekers… So, I’m going to get some groceries and some blankets…”
Themann: “Don’t ever repeat this and stuff but like if we just say that we’re buying food for a campaign event, like the Halloween events…”
Chacon: “That’s not a horrible idea, but I didn’t hear anything. Umm, we can wait until tomorrow for that.”
Themann: “Well that’s exactly the food we need. And I will just mark it as, I do have dozens of block walkers.”
Using “pre-paid credit cards” … “some sort of violation”

A Project Veritas Action attorney reviewed the footage and assessed:
“The material Project Veritas Action Fund captured shows campaign workers covering up the true nature of spending of campaign funds and intentionally misreporting them. This violates the FEC’s rules against personal use and misreporting. It also violates Section 1001, making a false statement to the federal government. The FEC violations impose civil penalties, including fines of up to $10,000 or 200 percent of the funds involved. Violations of Section 1001 are criminal and include imprisonment of up to five years.”
Chacon and Themann also explain how they go about concealing their use of campaign funds for alien support purposes:
Themann: “There’s actually stores that just mark it as ‘food’ they don’t mark different types… at Albertsons, on the receipts, it marks it just based off of brand…”
Chacon: “I think we can use that with those [campaign pre-paid] cards to buy some food, all that s**t can be totally masked like, oh we just wanted a healthy breakfast!”
Themann says that she doesn’t “want to make it seem like all of us are from [the O’Rourke campaign]” when going to distribute supplies to the Honduran aliens. She adds, “I just hope nobody that’s the wrong person finds out about this.”

Chacon elaborates on the usage of pre-paid campaign cards, saying, “We’re going to use more of those cards to get them more supplies too. So it’s all going to work out. I’m done being nice. I’m done being professional. [Be]cause nothing is professional. None of this is like s**t there is a rule book for, you know?”

Later in the report, Chacon also reveals “there’s not really an approval process” regarding the usage of the pre-paid cards, and that “we can just go and get the food and we can come up with a BS excuse like as to why we needed to get this stuff.” He adds, “Under the table just sort of do it.”

“Nobody needs to know”

Chacon explains that Jody Casey, the campaign manager for the O’Rourke campaign, was happy to hear about their efforts supporting aliens with campaign funds:
Chacon: “She texted us afterward and was like, I’m so happy that we have a staff that gets it and was there, I was so happy to see y’all there, still working, still contributing, we have the best team ever… she was good about it.”
Journalist: “So, Jody knows?”
Chacon: “Well, she doesn’t know we used the pre-paid card, but she doesn’t need to know.”
Added Chacon, when discussing the possibility for using campaign vans to help the Honduran aliens, “we could probably get away with using the vans… Nobody needs to know.” Chacon also says, “For me, I can just ignore the rules and I’m like f**k it.”

When asked about using campaign resources to help the Honduran aliens, Casey said “don’t worry”:
Journalist: “It just made me really concerned, like, you know, because I know that we’re using some of the campaign resources to help with the migrants and like, I just didn’t want anybody to get in trouble with that…”
Journalist: “Like I didn’t want them to ask me any questions about people using resources…”
Jody Casey: “Don’t worry.”
Andrea Reyes, who also works on the O’Rourke campaign, revealed that she has text messages showing she received approval for using the pre-paid cards:
Reyes: “The thing is yeah, as long as we’re not advertising it. I mean yeah, I don’t really know. They said it was fine sooo *throws hands up* I mean I don’t know, okay. I told you about it! I have the text messages to prove it, sooo…”
Journalist: “So you told Jody?”
Reyes: “Yeah. I told Jody and I told my director.”
When asked about using campaign vans to assist the Honduran aliens, Chacon reveals that they are going to transport the aliens to airports and bus stations:
Chacon: “… we’re going to give rides to some of the immigrants too. Like to the airport, to the bus station, like why not, you know?”

Tyler Durden

Source: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-11-01/dont-ever-repeat-beto-aides-busted-funneling-caravan-funds-undercover-sting

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Election Day: The Clear-Cut Choice Americans Face - Bruce Thornton


by Bruce Thornton

The stark contrast between the two parties.




This year’s midterm election offers the starkest contrast between the two parties in recent memory, making the choice of which to vote for obvious. We have reached a critical point in the long-developing transformation of our country from a democratic republic to the concentrated power and “soft despotism” of a technocratic elite. This year’s vote will determine whether Donald Trump’s pushback against that transformation will continue, or whether it will stall.

Democrats, of course, have been the main engine of that transformation. For over a century their politics and policies have relentlessly shifted further and further toward the progressive left. They have embraced and institutionalized the doctrines of technocracy based on a rejection of the Constitutional order and its philosophical assumptions that common sense, practical experience, virtue, and traditional wisdom are sufficient to make people capable of self-rule.

Democrats also rejected the Founders’ deep-seated fear of concentrated and centralized power, a lesson taught on every page of political history for 2500 years: No amount of technical training or knowledge can change a flawed human nature and its permanent vulnerability to the lust for power that always ends in tyranny. Hence the Founders’ separation and dispersal of power among the sovereign states and the three branches of the federal government. Protected by divided powers, the liberty of self-reliant and self-governing citizens became the bulwark against the self-aggrandizement of power by elites, and the tyranny that follows.

The more the Democrat Party moved toward progressive technocracy, the more it abandoned ordered liberty as the most important reason for government to exist in the first place. Instead it endorsed the grand narrative of modernity: The inevitable progress and improvement of people and society, based on “human sciences” presumably as successful as physics and mathematics at effecting improving changes, would create the brave new world that avoided the miseries and sufferings of the benighted past. Technological progress became the model for this dream, its success in the material world now to be achieved in the human, social, and political realm. Of course, such a regime required “experts” to be installed in the centralized bureaus and agencies of the federal government, and to be given the power over policy once the purview of the representatives elected by the sovereign people and accountable to them at the ballot box. Now divided and balanced power was scorned as an 18th century anachronism and systematically degraded.

Accelerating under Franklin D. Roosevelt, this ideological program relentlessly moved forward, bringing along many Republicans who accepted the inevitability of the technocratic, redistributive state, and found that the centralization of power and privilege served their own interests as well. They embraced the Democrats’ underlying technocratic assumptions, and ceded their legislative authority to the cadres of unelected, unaccountable federal workers, and to the federal courts, especially the Supreme Court, which now essentially legislate laws, enforce them, and determine their legitimacy.

Eventually, this bipartisan progressive paradigm provided the foundations of the “ruling center” in which Democrats set the bounds of acceptable policy and political discourse, and Republicans practice the “preemptive cringe” in the face of Democrat overreach. This dynamic is lauded as “bipartisanship,” the preferred method of progressive rule by political technicians, who see citizens as their wards and clients, and dismiss the Constitution’s separation and balancing of power and factions as inefficient “partisanship” that keep us from “solving problems.”

What accelerated this long-developing transformation of the political order and brought us to this momentous choice was Barack Obama. Exploiting our dysfunctional racial narrative of indelible white racism and guilt, Obama was twice elected on the hope of racial redemption on the cheap, and the promise of technocratic expertise and “science-based” government. All voters had to do was ignore his public record of leftist progressivism, and whites would be forgiven. Then the races could start coexisting like human beings in a world with “no white Americans, no black Americans,” rather than remain trapped in an eternal racial melodrama in which whites always have to pay.

But the Democrats’ true intensions soon became clear. Racial reconciliation was a pipe-dream, as Obama and his Attorney General interfered in racial conflicts and stoked the fires. Policies like Obamacare well beyond the progressive-lite center began to emerge. Crackpot ideas of the cultural left escaped from the universities and began an all-out assault on the Bill of Rights in service to an illiberal identity politics. Political correctness, imposed on the country and enforced by the technocratic federal overlords, grew ever more intrusive and totalitarian. Citizens who resisted their patronizing tutelage were insulted as “bitter clingers to guns and religion,” “deplorables,” or “wacko-birds,” as the Dems’ favorite conservative John McCain called them. Protesting the admission of nearly two million poorly vetted immigrants a year was decried as “xenophobia” and “racism.” Patriotism and national pride were demonized, and American sovereignty subordinated to the global technocratic elite and its “rules-based order” alleged to be superior to a toxic American exceptionalism.


But typical of all tyrants, the Democrats overreached. Obamacare, growth-killing regulations, and higher taxes at home; and a foreign policy of retreat, “leading from behind,” and apology for America’s sins abroad marked the progressives’ hubristic certainty that they could ride roughshod over the bipartisan consensus that at least had checked some of the left’s ambitions by reminding them––in 1968 1972, and 1980–– that the US remained a center-right country most of whose citizens self-identified as conservatives or moderates. The political success of “New Democrat” Bill Clinton followed his recognition of this truth, which he brilliantly exploited as a “Third Way” and more cynically, as “triangulation.”

The Dems’ arrogance at ignoring Clinton’s strategy during the Obama years was punished with the loss of the House and then the Senate, along with most of the state governments. A sluggish recovery and foreign policy debacles like Benghazi, the rise of ISIS, and the catastrophic Iran deal showed starkly the failure of the technocratic elite when its utopian delusions and ideological pretensions met the stern taskmaster of a world of hard, cruel men who respected only brutal force. The wages of progressive statism––more intrusive federal power, illiberal policies backed by executive fiat and the courts, the corruption of federal agencies by partisan interests, and a worsening of race relations­­–– had earlier fueled the Tea Party, which galvanized the discontent and helped the Republicans take the House in 2010.

Then came Donald Trump.

Trump launched an all-fronts assault on the bipartisan consensus. The establishment Republicans, who used the Tea Party for electoral gain but didn’t address the larger discontents it gave voice to, revealed with some exceptions their fealty to the social and cultural shibboleths that marked the elite apart from the middling classes and non-college educated working class of flyover country. In contrast, Trump spoke in the direct, earthy, and at times vulgar idiom that has been part of American folkways since the Republic’s beginning. His disdain both for totalitarian censorship by politically correct commissars, and for the illiberal neo-tribalism of identity politics, captured the citizens’ anger at the double-standards and hypocrisy of the holier-than-thou nomenklatura virtue-signaling as it grubbed for more privilege and power. The progressives helped stoke the anger even more with their eternal media savaging of the president that culminated in the still festering Russia collusion show-trial and the shameful slandering of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Equally important, on issues such as hyper-regulation of the economy, the relentlessly metastasizing federal bureaucracy, the addiction to high taxes, the excesses of activist federal courts, and the dysfunctions of our immigration policies, Trump expressed the common sense that many ordinary people used to understand just how much our government has failed the people.

And, so far, his policies have worked. Trump is reshaping the courts, appointing 84 federal judges, including two Supreme Court Justices, who promise to rein in for decades the judicial activism the progressives have relied on to implement their policy preference without having to face the voting citizens. On the economic front, wages and salaries have the highest year-to-year gain, 3.1%, in a decade. Economic growth has reached 3.5% this quarter, a rise that progressive economic savants had announced impossible. Unemployment is the lowest in decades, and more new jobs have been created than people available to fill them. Consumer confidence is at an 18-year high. Tax reform has put more money in people’s pockets. Repatriated corporate taxes have fueled investment in the domestic economy rather than abroad.

Finally, Trump has returned common sense to our foreign policy. He has backed out of multinational treaties like the Paris Climate Accords, and the disastrous agreement to bribe Iran into delaying for less than a decade its development of nuclear weapons. Both were manifestations of the long failure of the decrepit “rules-based international order” that served mainly the transnational global elites at the expense of national sovereignty and the people. He has moved our country closer to the traditional mission of foreign policy, which is to serve the interests and security of American citizens and put them first, not the interests of some fantasy “global community” or the “cosmopolitan” functionaries of transnational institutions. This credo of putting America first, and his full-throated expression of this sentiment has revived and celebrated the patriotism and national pride that progressives and Davos Man have long scorned and slandered as the nursery of fascism rather than of democratic freedom for distinct and diverse national identities.

On Tuesday we will face the choice: continue to push back against the progressive agenda to “fundamentally transform America,” or continue to feed the progressive Leviathan at the cost of our freedom, autonomy, sovereignty, and national identity of a people who have never been perfect, but have advanced and inspired prosperity and freedom more than any other country in history.

Common sense tells us the choice is obvious. Vote for freedom, and vote for America.


Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, a Research Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, and a Professor of Classics and Humanities at the California State University. He is the author of nine books and numerous essays on classical culture and its influence on Western Civilization. His most recent book, Democracy's Dangers and Discontents (Hoover Institution Press), is now available for purchase.

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271820/election-day-clear-cut-choice-americans-face-bruce-thornton

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Beware Turkey's Dangerous New Refugee Role - Uzay Bulut


by Uzay Bulut

Those Europeans who defend mass, unfettered immigration in the name of "multiculturalism" and "diversity" are ignoring the nature of the Muslim-majority countries from which the immigrants hail.

  • "Turkish 'police' are now openly patrolling 'Turkish areas' in Berlin... Cars bearing the logo of an elite Turkish police unit have been spotted on the streets of Berlin – but the German authorities say they are powerless to stop them." — The Sun.
  • In spite of the fantasy still harbored by some Europeans that the immigrants eventually will integrate into the societies of their host countries, the opposite has been the case.
  • Those Europeans who defend mass, unfettered immigration in the name of "multiculturalism" and "diversity" are ignoring the nature of the Muslim-majority countries from which the immigrants hail. The lack of human rights and free speech, the abuse of women and gays, honor killings, anti-Semitism, and violence against non-Muslims and Muslim "apostates" are characteristic of those countries. Rather than escaping the shackles of those countries, many immigrants are simply transporting them to Europe.
  • "Sharia law has been recognized by a British court for the first time after a judge made a landmark divorce ruling... that an estranged couple's Islamic faith marriage, conducted in a ceremony called a nikah, falls under British matrimonial law despite it not being legally recognized as such." — The Telegraph.

Turkey, thanks to the United Nations, will now officially be in charge of deciding not only who is a refugee but also where he or she will be placed or transferred. Turkish state authorities have repeatedly threatened to flood Europe with refugees. Pictured: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan addresses the UN General Assembly. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

Turkey, thanks to the United Nations, will now officially be in charge of deciding not only who is a refugee but also where he or she will be placed or transferred. Turkish state authorities have repeatedly threatened to flood Europe with refugees, such as President Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan's message to Europe in 2016:
"You cried out when 50,000 refugees were at the Kapikule border. You started asking what you would do if Turkey would open the gates. Look at me -- if you go further, those border gates will be open. You should know that."
Given the Turkish threats, this new official position for Turkey should be of concern.
The pro-government Turkish newspaper Daily Sabah recently reported:
"The U.N. refugee agency has handed over the management of registration procedures for the refugees in Turkey to the country's migration authority. Turkey's Directorate General of Migration Management itself will now oversee the registration of refugees and determine their status. Any foreigner seeking international protection in Turkey will now have to apply to the local offices of the Turkish migration authority."
The concern exists for three key reasons.

Terrorism

In March, ErdoÄŸan slammed French President Emmanuel Macron for his offer to mediate between Ankara and Syrian Kurds. He warned:
"With this attitude, France has no right to complain about any terrorist organization, any terrorist, any terrorist attack. Those who sleep with terrorists, welcome them in their palaces, will understand sooner or later the mistake that they made."
In April, hours after a man ploughed his van into pedestrians in Münster, Germany, Erdoğan verbally attacked France again, calling it a "stooge":
"... providing support to terrorism...hosting terrorists at the Elysée Palace... You see what is happening in Germany, right? The same will happen in France. The West will not able to free itself from terror. The West will sink as it feeds these terrorists."
It is not merely threats from Erdoğan that should cause Europe to re-think its lax immigration policies. In recent years, European cities -- such as Manchester, Paris, Brussels, Nice, Copenhagen, London, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Toulouse, Trèbes, Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, Berlin and Stockholm -- have been shaken by deadly jihadist attacks. Since many of the terrorists involved in these attacks were radicalized and recruited by jihadist groups, both in the Middle East and in Europe, unchecked immigration from Muslim-majority countries seems risky.

This is not just speculation. Opinion polls indicate that a large number of Muslims worldwide support terrorism or violence on behalf of Islam. There are also reports that ISIS has been infiltrating operatives into Europe via Greece, by disguising them as migrants among the masses. According to a recent Deutsche Welle documentary, "Terror at the Moria Refugee Camp":
"A group of IS [ISIS] followers are said to be terrorizing people in the Moria refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos. On the pretext of religious propriety, they brutally punish whoever [sic] they deem criminal.
"Recently more and more refugees from Deir ez-Zor, one of the last strongholds of Islamic State in Syria, have been arriving in the camp. Since then, it seems that crime in the camp has taken on a new quality. A group of Syrians is said to be controlling most of the illegal activities. Anyone who doesn't toe the line or is in the way can expect physical violence or even death threats. The perpetrators often cite Sharia law as their justification. More and more graffiti glorify IS."

Demography

Among the countries most at risk of becoming "demographic time bombs," according to a Business Insider report in August, are Spain, Italy, Bulgaria, Latvia and the United Kingdom. A low birth rate among Europeans is reportedly one motivation on the part of EU officials for bringing in large numbers of Muslim migrants – to compensate for shrinking European populations. Another motivation has been linked to Europe's aging population. A 2017 opinion piece in Forbes asserted:
"If Western Europe wants to keep its social benefits, the countries of the E.U. are going to need more workers. No place in the world has an older population that's not into baby making than Europe. No wonder policy planners are doing what they can to encourage immigration. Eastern Europe is old."
Such ideas, however, have already been put to the test. Germany, for example, to "fill the demand for cheap labor in a booming post-war economy," took in Turkish laborers. Although the original plan was for these workers to be temporary "to prevent the Turkish guests from becoming immigrants," the policy changed, and the workers were allowed to stay for long periods and bring their families.

As of the end of 2011, according to Deutsche Welle, "around 2.5 million people with a Turkish background live in Germany, meaning either they or their parents were born in Turkey, making them the largest migrant group in the country."

The result became clear in June, when nearly two-thirds of the Turkish community in Germany supported ErdoÄŸan in the presidential election. Ironically, this is far more than the support he received in Turkey itself.

Three months before the election, MP Alparslan Kavaklıoğlu, a member of Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), and the head of the parliament's Security and Intelligence Commission, declared that the demography of Europe was changing in favor of Muslims:
"The fortune and wealth of the world is moving from the West to the East. Europe is going through a time that is out of the ordinary. Its population is declining and aging.... But Europe has this problem. All of the newcomers are Muslim. From Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey.... It is now at such a level that the most popular name in Brussels, Belgium is Mohammed. The second most popular name is Melih [Malih] and the third one is AyÅŸe [Aisha]."
If this trend continues, Kavaklıoğlu said:
"The Muslim population will outnumber the Christian population in Europe... there is no remedy for it. Europe will be Muslim. We will be effective there, Allah willing. I am sure of that."
In 2017, ErdoÄŸan called on Turks residing in Europe to multiply:
"The places where you work and live are your homelands and new countries now... Make five children -- not just three. For you are the future of Europe."
Judging by recent reports, this future does not look so bright for Europeans. According to The Sun,
"Turkish 'police' are now openly patrolling 'Turkish areas' in Berlin... Cars bearing the logo of an elite Turkish police unit have been spotted on the streets of Berlin – but the German authorities say they are powerless to stop them.
"The vehicles have the words Özel Harekat [Special Operation] written on the side and the unit's logo and were seen cruising around areas of German capital with large Turkish populations."

Culture

The influx of mass numbers of both refugees and migrants from Islamic dictatorships -- especially when global jihad is on the rise -- has had a profound effect on European culture. In spite of the fantasy still harbored by some Europeans that the immigrants eventually will integrate into the societies of their host countries, the opposite has been the case. Those Europeans who defend mass, unfettered immigration in the name of "multiculturalism" and "diversity" are ignoring the nature of the Muslim-majority countries from which the immigrants hail. The lack of human rights and free speech, the abuse of women and gays, honor killings, anti-Semitism, and violence against non-Muslims and Muslim "apostates" are characteristic of those countries. Rather than escaping the shackles of those countries, many immigrants are simply transporting them to Europe. In addition, instead of demanding that immigrants comply with European customs and law, much of Europe is simply capitulating to the new reality.

According to a recent report in The Telegraph, for instance:
"Sharia law has been recognized by a British court for the first time after a judge made a landmark divorce ruling... that an estranged couple's Islamic faith marriage, conducted in a ceremony called a nikah, falls under British matrimonial law despite it not being legally recognized as such."
In 2006, Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi proclaimed that Islam would conquer Europe "without firing a shot." Today, a mere 12 years later, ErdoÄŸan appears to be acting on the same principle. This makes it all the more shattering that the United Nations has given his government the authority to vet refugees. Europe must beware and elect leaders who grasp the danger of losing the battle for the continent's heart, soul and democracy.

Uzay Bulut, a journalist from Turkey, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Gatestone Institute. She is currently based in Washington D.C.

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13210/turkey-refugee-role

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American Jewry’s false prophets - Caroline Glick


by Caroline Glick

- let us consider what Trump has done and said and compare his actions and statements with those of his immediate predecessor, Barack Obama


tree of life realtime

Just hours after the largest massacre of Jews in America in US history, the Atlantic Monthly posted a piece by Franklin Foer. In his “Prayer for Squirrel Hill, and for American Jewry,” Foer wrote, “Any strategy for enhancing the security of American Jewry should involve shunning [President Donald] Trump’s Jewish enablers. Their money should be refused, their presence in synagogues not welcome. They have placed our community in danger.”

That is, in the shadow of the blood drenched synagogue, Foer declared war on his fellow Jews.

Between a quarter and 30% of American Jews voted for Trump. A quarter of American Jews intend to vote Republican in next week’s election.

Foer wants them all to be ostracized because, he says, they are dangerous.

Taken to its logical conclusion, Foer’s statement was also a declaration of war against the Jews of Israel. For as much as Foer and his totalitarian comrades hate Trump, Israeli Jews support him. More than 75% of Israeli Jews consider Trump a great friend.

Foer’s comrade Julia Ioffe from GQ magazine made clear the animosity these leftist/anti-Trump American Jewish media figures harbor toward Israel. In a post on Twitter that was at least as incendiary as Foer’s essay, Ioffe wrote, “And a word to my fellow American Jews: This president makes this [massacre] possible. Here. Where you live. I hope the embassy move over there, where you don’t live was worth it.”

In other words, Trump’s support for Israel enables him to persecute American Jews. By supporting Trump for supporting Israel, Israeli Jews and Republican Jews enabled the massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue.

Are they right? Do Israeli Jews and politically conservative American Jews facilitate antisemitism in America by supporting Trump? Is Trump an antisemite who covers his malign intentions toward American Jewry by supporting Israel?

Although these questions are absurd on their face, now that The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank feels comfortable claiming that Jews are not safe in Donald Trump’s America, it is important to consider them.

So let us consider what Trump has done and said and compare his actions and statements with those of his immediate predecessor, Barack Obama, who most of the American Jews who now blame Trump and his Jewish supporters for the massacre in Pittsburgh supported.

The first question we need to address is, what are Israel’s interests in its relations with the US and how do those interests impact American Jews?

Israel has an interest in working in alliance with the United States to counter common threats.

Trump shares this interest, and has acted to advance it on multiple fronts.

Trump’s decision to abandon his predecessor’s policy of appeasing Iran in favor of a policy of working with Israel and the Sunni Arab states to counter Iran’s regional aggression and power, and block the regime’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons, represents a fundamental shift in US foreign policy. It was welcomed by Israel as well as by the Sunni Arab states of the Middle East.

Is this a good or bad thing for American Jewry?

Obama’s nuclear deal gave Iran a guaranteed path to nuclear armament within a decade. Since the Iranian regime has repeatedly pledged to annihilate Israel, the deal posed an existential threat to Israel.

To secure Senate approval – or rather, to avoid Senate disapproval – of his scandalous deal, the Obama White House directed a media and political strategy of intimidation of lawmakers and American Jewish leaders, abounding with antisemitic demonology. Democratic senators that opposed the deal were under the influence of nefarious “foreign money.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was transformed in Obama’s media echo chamber into the enemy of America. AIPAC lobbyists who campaigned against the deal were branded as agents of a foreign power – that is, traitors – seeking to undermine US interests for the benefit of a hostile foreign power – that is, Israel.

The Obama administration’s aggression against Jewish Americans exercising their lawful right to petition their government was unprecedented. The fight it waged against the American Jewish community left the community weakened and vulnerable to attack from the Left as never before.

By disavowing the nuclear deal and endorsing the view of the Jewish community, Trump delegitimized Obama’s bigoted assault against American Jews.

Obviously, this is a good thing for American Jews.

Israel has an interest in securing its position in the world and ending its second-class status in the international community. That second-class status was long emblemized in the US’s abject refusal to locate the US Embassy in Israel to Israel’s capital city Jerusalem. That longstanding American refusal to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the City of David legitimized the systematic persecution of Israel at the UN and in other international arenas.

Since Jerusalem has been the center of Jewish life and faith for 3,000 years, it is concrete proof that Israel is not a colonial implant and that Jews are the native people of the land. By refusing to recognize Israel’s sovereignty in Jerusalem, the US joined the rest of the world in calling into question its very right to exist and lend credence to the antisemitic claim that Jews are foreigners in their historic homeland.

Trump’s decision to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem and his subsequent decision to subordinate the American Consulate in Jerusalem to the US Embassy was a total renunciation of this long-standing bigotry against the Jewish people.

Trump’s action was self-evidently a good thing for American Jews. No longer do American Jews need to justify their attachment to Israel. No longer do American Jews need to come on bended knee to the White House and entreat the president to recognize the historical record.

Contrast Trump’s actions with Obama’s actions. Not only did Obama refuse to transfer the US Embassy to Jerusalem, he rejected even symbolic acceptance of Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem. The Obama State Department erased all the captions on archival photos of American dignitaries in Jerusalem that referred to the location as Jerusalem, Israel. This petty act demonstrated a deep-seated hostility to the history of the Jewish people and was nothing if not bigoted.

Yet, by the lights of Foer, Ioffe, Milbank and their fellow American Jewish Trump-haters, Obama was a friend of American Jews, and Trump and his Jewish supporters are their enemies.

Likewise, Trump’s decision to remove the US from the congenitally antisemitic UN Human Rights Council which Obama joined despite its open bigotry against Jews; his ending of funding to the genocidal, antisemitic UN Refugee Works Agency for the Palestinians (UNRWA), which Obama expanded; and his decision to cut funding to the terrorist-financing Palestinian Authority – which Obama increased – and close the PLO diplomatic mission in Washington – which Obama upgraded, were moves of historic significance in the fight against antisemitism and for Jewish rights. Trump is the first president in a quarter century to make the Palestinians and their international enablers pay a price for their rejection of peace and facilitation of terrorism and armed aggression against Israel and Israeli Jews.

Are these actions bad for American Jewry? When Trump says that Israel has a right to defeat its enemies and respond to aggression, is he harming American Jewry?

Of course not.


TRUMP’S JEWISH antagonists in the US media and their partner, ADL executive director and former Obama White House official Jonathan Greenblatt, insist that under Trump, antisemitic incidents in the US have risen 57%. But as David Bernstein demonstrated this week at Tablet magazine, the ADL data everyone is citing tells the exact opposite story. The claim that antisemitic incidents have risen under Trump is not supported by the ADL data.

What the data do show is that violent antisemitic attacks in the US have decreased significantly since Trump took office, while they increased significantly during Obama’s presidency. And as the blogger Elder of Zion noted this week, the data show no causative relationship between either administration and the level of antisemitism.

What is clear is that Trump has spoken far more seriously about antisemitism and the need to combat it than Obama ever has.

In January 2015, an Islamic terrorist massacred and held Jews hostage at the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket in Paris. Obama refused to acknowledge that it was an antisemitic attack and that the victims were killed because they were Jews. Instead he referred to them as “a bunch of folks in a deli.”


Following Saturday’s massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Obama issued a statement that once again made no mention of the fact that the victims were Jews, and that they were killed because they were Jews.

“All of us have to fight the rise of antisemitism and hateful rhetoric against those who love, love or pray differently. And we have to stop making it so easy for those who want to harm the innocent to get their hands on a gun,” he emptily tweeted.

Obama notably also said nothing after Louis Farrakhan called Jews “termites” last month.
Trump in contrast, couldn’t be clearer in his condemnation of antisemitism and his willingness to defend Jews from bigotry and violence.

Saturday, after calling the synagogue massacre “an antisemitic act,” Trump said, “Antisemitism and the widespread persecution of Jews represents one of the ugliest and darkest features of human history. The vile, hate-filled poison of antisemitism must be condemned and confronted everywhere and anywhere it appears. There must be no tolerance for antisemitism in America or for any form of religious or racial hatred or prejudice.”

Later Saturday, Trump stated the point even more sharply.

“This evil antisemitic attack is an assault on all of us. It’s an assault on humanity. It will require all of us working together to extract the hateful poison of antisemitism from the world. The scourge of antisemitism cannot be ignored, cannot be tolerated and cannot be allowed to continue.”

As Prime Minister Netanyahu noted, no non-Israeli leader has ever made such a strong commitment to fight Jew-hatred.

This then brings us back to Foer and his fellow Jewish American Trump-haters.


What are they trying to protect as Jews when they call for Trump to be shunned and his Jewish supporters to be kicked out of Jewish life in America?

The answer is blindingly clear.

No Jewish interest is served by standing against the friendliest president American Jews have had. No Jewish interest is served by weakening the president most supportive of Israel in the history of US-Israel relations. Indeed, far from serving the American Jewish community, these Jewish Trump-haters are harming the community and endangering its future.

After watching these powerful American Jews abuse Trump for standing with Israel and standing up to the antisemites at home and abroad, no future president will have any impetus to even pay lip service to the US alliance with the Jewish state and the fight against Jew-hatred.

Originally published at The Jerusalem Post. 


Caroline Glick

Source: http://carolineglick.com/american-jewrys-false-prophets/

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One Big Election – And the Curious Anti-Trump Crusade - Michael Ledeen


by Michael Ledeen


Do the American people want to undo what our president has achieved?




We all know that the midterm elections are different this time around.  They are usually like “all politics,” namely local.  But this time around they’re different.  They are all presidential, all about Trump, as most everything is.  And for the anti-Trump crowd -- I’m talking about the political commentators and “analysts” -- any and all things bad are held to be Trump’s fault.  This is presumably because they believe that their condemnations of Trump will result in a Democrat takeover of the House of Representatives.

This pattern covers a wide variety of events.  If a pro-Trump nut case mails out (maybe) dangerous packages to a bunch of Democrats, that’s held to be Trump’s fault.  Ditto for the anti-Trump lunatic who slaughtered Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue.  He was somehow inspired to do it by Trump.

The question is whether the voters believe the same thing.  I certainly haven’t been converted to Never Trumpism, although I have read a lot of it.  I really don’t care what pundits think about the president, and I don’t need them to instruct me about the Middle East or Italy or federal income taxes.  As for next Tuesday, I know enough about the (local) candidates to make up my own mind, so the smarties don’t affect me much.

I don’t have any trouble recognizing that a man who opens fire in the Tree of Life Synagogue and yells “All Jews must die.” isn’t reflecting the president’s views.  I think that most voters know that.  I also think that even the most rabid Never Trumpers do not believe that Trump’s personal inclinations include directing death threats at the rabbi in Pittsburgh, now in full swing.

But many pundits say they do believe such accusations.  Even Bill Kristol:

When asked about Trump’s rhetoric, Kristol said, “Against the news media, against the refugees, the caravan of refugees, which was really the inciting I think rhetoric that he used, that Fox and others used, which provoked apparently this man who was, in any case, an anti-Semite obviously…”
He continued, “That’s what sort of came together you know his hatred of Jews and his hatred of immigrants and refugees. And that hatred of immigrants and refugees even more than the hatred of Jews I would say. The president has to take some responsibility for that. It’s been him whipping up a frenzy about this caravan 2,000 miles away for the last two or three weeks.”

I don’t get this.  The Pittsburgh killer didn’t enter the shul shouting “all the immigrants must die.”  So far as I know, he wasn’t in a frenzy about “the caravan,”  So I’m at a loss to explain Kristol’s deconstruction of why eleven Jews were gunned down.  It makes no sense, unless you’re committed to the crazy proposition that all bad things should be blamed on Trump. Especially if you believe that the November vote is a giant referendum on Trump.

Indeed, for these pundits, everything must be seen as either good for Trump or bad for him.  Take the awful campaign against Judge Kavanaugh, for example.  Mollie Hemingway says it best:

Any reporter who was able to verify the claims against Kavanaugh would be an instant hero and awarded all the journalism prizes. Is anyone even attempting to do so? Democrats took the claims so seriously that they charged Kavanaugh with the crimes in Senate hearings. Did they mean what they said? If they’re telling the truth, he should be impeached and imprisoned.
Conversely, if Kavanaugh was falsely accused, had his reputation obliterated, and nearly had his life destroyed in the process, his accusers should be held accountable. If the Justice Department responds to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s criminal referral of Avenatti and Swetnick, some will be. But what about the rest? What’s going on with this story?

The minute Kavanaugh was confirmed, the pundits shut down (and up).  Proving, I would say, that their crusade against him was never based on real evidence, but rather on a desire to thwart Trump.

Will the crusade work?  A couple of months ago I wrote that the 2018 campaign looks a lot like McGovern’s failed effort to win the presidency, and it seemed to me likely to produce the same result:  a stinging rebuff of extreme leftism. 

I’m not very good at predicting election results, and most of the smart people I know say the same thing:  Dems take the House, GOP holds the Senate, maybe even gains some.   I don’t believe it.  This isn’t a collection of local elections.  It’s one big national vote.  And I don’t think the American people want to undo what Trump has achieved. 


Michael Ledeen

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271814/one-big-election-%E2%80%93-and-curious-anti-trump-crusade-michael-ledeen

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