Report: Hezbollah to store weapons at sites Israel likely won't strike - Daniel Siryoti

by Daniel Siryoti

Shiite terrorist group has purchased over 100 acres of land in largely Druze area near Chouf Mountains in Lebanon to store missiles and weapons, reports Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Jarida.

A Hezbollah position in Lebanon
Photo: JINI
Shiite terrorist group Hezbollah has recently purchased over 100 acres of land adjacent to Lebanon's Chouf Mountains for the purpose of storing missiles and weapons it has amassed with Iranian and Syrian assistance in special fortified compounds there, according to a report in Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Jarida on Sunday.

Senior Arab officials told the newspaper the lands purchased by Hezbollah are located in an overwhelmingly Druze area of Lebanon, which Hezbollah believes the Israel Air Force would be wary of attacking.

According to U.N. Resolution 1701, passed in 2006, Hezbollah is prohibited from engaging in any type of military activity south of the Litani River, including storing ammunition in the Shiite villages its controls in the country's south. The Chouf Mountains are north of the river and so technically the weapons buildup there is not in violation of the resolution.

In recent years, Israel has avoided attacking Hezbollah weapons convoys inside Lebanon so as not to provide the organization with an excuse to attack Israel.

The newspaper also reported that,during their most recent meeting in Moscow, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked Russian President Vladmir Putin to relay a message to Hezbollah and Iran that Israel would not allow Iran to establish itself militarily in southern Lebanon near the border or construct missile factories and weapons storage sites north or south of the Litani River.

Daniel Siryoti

Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/2018/02/05/report-hezbollah-to-store-weapons-in-druze-villages-to-avoid-israeli-strikes/

Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Islamic London: "Run, Hide, Tell" - Daniel Pipes

by Daniel Pipes

What makes the English capital unique is the intense Muslim presence in the very most central and expensive parts of the city, where Muslims do not constitute a majority.

• Muslim-majority areas typically consist of poor, unattractive housing projects, remote from the city center, which long ago were abandoned by their original indigenous, working-class populations. They often feature men sitting around cafes and women cooped up at home. They suffer from a range of social pathologies, including unemployment, criminal gangs, and drug-trafficking.
• In some instances, store names are only in Arabic.
• The Muslim presence is implicit in the intense, pervasive, and depressing security measures installed against jihadi threats of violence. These range from signs urging "Run, Hide, Tell" to bollards, barriers, and gates.

To understand the development of Islam in Western countries, I make a habit of visiting Muslim-majority areas such as Lakemba in Australia, Lodi in California, and Lunel in France. But London, England, is unique in the extent of its Islamic impress.

Muslim-majority areas typically consist of poor, unattractive housing projects, remote from the city center, which long ago were abandoned by their original indigenous, working-class populations. They often feature men sitting around cafes and women cooped up at home. They suffer from a range of social pathologies, including unemployment, criminal gangs, and drug-trafficking.

London too has such areas, and they are very large; but what makes the English capital unique is the intense Muslim presence in the very most central and expensive parts of the city, where Muslims do not constitute a majority. This presence takes two main forms.
First, there's the posh Muslim element. According to a CBRE study, Middle Easterners invested over $4.2 billion in London commercial real estate in 2015 (the most recent full year with statistics); this money tends to go into high-profile properties such as the Shard, the city's tallest building; Harrods, its most glamorous department store; Claridge's, its most luxurious hotel; and purchasing the former U.S. embassy building.

Middle Easterners own some of London's most prominent buildings.

In sometimes obvious ways, Muslim proprietors make their ownership felt. Harrods, for example, prominently features halal signs in the food hall and mannequins wearing hijabs.

Harrods Food Hall prominently marks its halal food.

Some mannequins in Harrods wear hijabs.

Middle Eastern restaurants, clothing stores, and hair salons abound, of course, but more surprising are the Arabic-, Persian- and Urdu-signed stores that have no special connection to Muslims, such as a pharmacy, a spa, a clinic with Chinese medicine, and an airport transfer company.

Even the American chain Cinnabon sports an Arabic sign.

In some cases, the name of the store is only in Arabic.

"Sawt was-Sura," ("Voice and Picture").

Second, the Muslim presence is implicit in the intense, pervasive, and depressing security measures installed against jihadi threats of violence. These range from signs urging "Run, Hide, Tell," to bollards, barriers, and gates.

Especially evident are the many protective measures installed in March 2017, immediately after a violent Islamist, Khalid Masood, killed five people on Westminster Bridge. During a recent visit to central London, I puzzled over one of these installations, a metal barrier that completely surrounds Green Park.

The barrier surrounding Green Park.

The barrier is continuous, interrupted only by occasional narrow gates, either yellow or grey, which allow pedestrians to enter the park. No one checks bags at these gates, so the security perimeter prevents only cars and trucks from barging into the park. But why would anyone drive a vehicle into this park? Granted Buckingham Palace is nearby, but across a wide street, so surrounding Green Park with a barrier does nothing to protect it. The barrier seemingly protects grass and trees.

An entrance into Green Park.

Perhaps the saddest aspect of this security is the glorious blue Devonshire Gate obstructed by the ugly grey barrier.

The seventeenth-century Devonshire Gate, designed by famed architect Inigo Jones.

Nor are bollards, barriers, and gates unique to London. In Birmingham, for instance, the Christmas Market featured the familiar yellow gates (complete with helpful entrance and exit markers).

An entrance to Birmingham's Christmas Market.

This security extended even to the smallest alleyway.

An alleyway approaching Birmingham's Christmas Market.

More than any other major Western city, London bears an Arabic, Middle Eastern, and Islamic impress, from its mayor to its commercial real estate market. I wish I were optimistic about the outcome of this experiment, as the majority of the English population remain even today.

• Follow Daniel Pipes on Twitter and Facebook

Daniel Pipes (DanielPipes.org, @DanielPipes) is president of the Middle East Forum. © 2018 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved.

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/11839/islamic-london

Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

The Cost of Illegal Immigration - Ruthie Blum

by Ruthie Blum

"Undocumented immigrants are at least 142% more likely to be convicted of a crime than other Arizonans. They also tend to commit more serious crimes..." — John R. Lott.

• "At the federal, state, and local levels, taxpayers shell out approximately $134.9 billion to cover the costs incurred by the presence of more than 12.5 million illegal aliens, and about 4.2 million citizen children of illegal aliens." — Matt O'Brien and Spencer Raley.
• It is also rather more than the single payment of $25 billion that it will cost to build a wall -- five and a half times more, and every year.
• "Undocumented immigrants are at least 142% more likely to be convicted of a crime than other Arizonans. They also tend to commit more serious crimes..." — John R. Lott.
• In 2015, included in the DEA's drug-threat assessment was the fact that drug overdoses killed more people in the United States than car accidents or guns. Many of these drugs [were] smuggled in large volumes by drug cartels."

In his State of the Union address on January 30, US President Donald J. Trump referred to the brutal murder of two 16-year-old girls from Long Island in December 2016 by members of the "savage MS-13 gang," responsible for a spate of other gruesome killings in the area, as well.

Many of these gang members, he explained, had entered the United States illegally. "For decades, open borders have allowed drugs and gangs to pour into our most vulnerable communities," he said.

Calling on Congress "to finally close the deadly loopholes that have allowed... criminal gangs to break into our country," he listed the four pillars of his immigration-reform proposal:

• A path to citizenship for 1.8 million illegal immigrants who were brought to America by their parents.
• The construction of a "great wall on the southern border" and enforcement by agents patrolling and securing the border.
• Ending the visa lottery, "a program that randomly plans out green cards without regard for skill, merit, for the safety of American people."
• Ending the "current, broken system" of chain migration of distant relatives, and limiting sponsorships to spouses and minor children.

Although he did not specify this in his speech, Trump reportedly is seeking $25 billion from Congress to fund the wall. Opponents of the wall have been arguing that illegal immigrants do not commit crimes at a higher rate than legal immigrants or native-born Americans; that illegal immigration has been a boon to the economy, rather than a drain on it; and that the cost both of deportation and a wall far exceeds the benefits of both. These claims are repeatedly voiced by the Trump administration's detractors, as part of their campaign to accuse the president of racism; but what are the facts?

To set the record straight, let us take a look at a number of those that have been obscured or ignored by the media.

As far as the cost of the wall is concerned, a study released in September 2017 by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) reveals that, "At the federal, state, and local levels, taxpayers shell out approximately $134.9 billion to cover the costs incurred by the presence of more than 12.5 million illegal aliens, and about 4.2 million citizen children of illegal aliens." This, the report says, is a nearly $3 billion increase in the cost since 2013. It is also rather more than the single payment of $25 billion that it will cost to build a wall – five and a half times more, and every year.

Pictured: The US-Mexico border fence near San Diego, California. (Image source: US Customs and Border Protection)

The same goes for the cost of deporting illegal immigrants. According to Steven A. Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies,

"...The average cost of a deportation is much smaller than the net fiscal drain created by the average illegal immigrant," in part due to the fact that "illegal immigrants overwhelmingly have modest levels of education — most have not completed high school or have only a high school education...creating more in costs for government than they pay in taxes."

The question of the rates of criminality among illegal aliens vs. those of legal immigrants and American-born citizens has been examined by John R. Lott, Jr., president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, using Arizona's prison population as a microcosm for study. According to Lott, the ability to measure the crime-rate among illegal immigrants in the U.S. has been difficult, due to many factors, including the lack of a national data base and "primitive" methodology – such as "simple, cross-sectional analysis to see whether areas with higher immigrant populations have higher crime rates," and "a purely time series approach... look at the United States as a whole and note that crime has decreased since 1990 as immigration has increased." The advantage of the Arizona Department of Corrections study, Lott says, is that

"over our 32.5-year period, we know each prisoner who entered the prison system, their criminal convictions history, and whether he is a documented or undocumented immigrant. The only mystery is why this type of data has not been utilized until now."

Peter Kirsanow wryly solved the mystery in National Review, writing:

"Unfortunately, almost every public official not named Jeff Sessions guards against disclosure of illegal-immigrant crime data more tenaciously than disclosure of nuclear launch codes."

According to Lott, whose research spans 1985-2017:

"Arizona's prison population data allow us to compare undocumented immigrants' share of the prison population with their estimated share of the state population...For the first time, we break down the data to examine differences between US citizens, undocumented immigrants, and legal permanent residents. One advantage of using convictions rather than just reported crimes is that convictions depend on a 'beyond a reasonable doubt' standard of evidence and thus are much less likely to count innocent people."

The findings are unequivocal, as the following summary illustrates:

"Undocumented immigrants are at least 142% more likely to be convicted of a crime than other Arizonans. They also tend to commit more serious crimes and serve 10.5% longer sentences, more likely to be classified as dangerous, and 45% more likely to be gang members than U.S. citizens...There are dramatic differences between in the criminal histories of convicts who are U.S. citizens and undocumented immigrants...
"[Y]oung undocumented immigrants commit crime at twice the rate of young U.S. citizens. These undocumented immigrants also tend to commit more serious crimes. If undocumented immigrants committed crime nationally as they do in Arizona, in 2016 they would have been responsible for over 1,000 more murders, 5,200 rapes, 8,900 robberies, 25,300 aggravated assaults, and 26,900 burglaries."

These numbers do not even include the cost to American taxpayers of the toll taken on America's children by illegally imported drugs. Although available information on this is at best spotty, the key finding from the DEA's 2017 National Drug Threat Assessment is that the "most commonly reported greatest drug threat was heroin, at 44.1 percent of law enforcement responses... This was followed by 29.8 percent of respondents indicating methamphetamine was their greatest drug threat, 9.3 percent reporting controlled prescription drugs..."

This tells us something about the extent of the problem, but not enough. The 2010 drug-threat assessment, released a year after the previous administration took office, revealed that,

"From January through November 2009, U.S. seizures of illegal drugs in transit exceeded 1,626 metric tons, indicating that DTOs succeed in moving several thousand tons of cocaine, methamphetamine, marijuana, heroin, and MDMA into the United States annually. There are unique smuggling and transportation methods..."

In 2015, included in the DEA's drug-threat assessment was the fact that drug overdoses killed more people in the United States than car accidents or guns. As was noted by the BBC at the time, "Many of these drugs are smuggled in large volumes by drug cartels..."

The late Democrat Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts." His successors in Congress would do well to remember this while debating the issue of illegal immigration. They certainly need to keep it in mind when voting on the administration's proposed plan.

Ruthie Blum is the author of "To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the 'Arab Spring.'"

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/11829/illegal-immigration-cost

Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Here Comes the Dems’ Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown - Bruce Thornton

by Bruce Thornton

After FISA memo, are leftists fearful of an approaching political reckoning?

To paraphrase a more recent song, it’s hard out there on a Dem. Staggered by Donald Trump’s unthinkable victory in the presidential election, Democrats have continued to be pummeled by the Trump’s tax reform, the supercharged economy, his withering tweet-scorn for them and their media flunkeys, their own failed government shut-down, and a rousing State of the Union address that raised his poll numbers and made the Democrat Congressmen in the audience look like pouting prom wallflowers. 

And now comes the “Memo,” the House Intelligence Committee’s exposure of the slow-motion coup engineered by partisan FBI and DOJ functionaries, and other deep-state members of the “resistance.” Now it’s up to “we the people” to demand accountability from these abusers of the public trust and violators of the Constitution.

The intensity of the hysterical spin before and after the memo’s release has revealed the depths of anxiety over the chickens of corruption coming home to roost. Shrieks of “nuance” and “context” are desperate attempts to drown out the bad news. “How dare you!” protestations of the “professional integrity” and “sterling character” of political appointees and rank careerists in the intelligence agencies are pleas to the voters to pay no attention to the blue-state man behind the curtain. 

Equally duplicitous as the Dems’ desperate misdirection is the squealing about damaging national security or intelligence gathering methods or vulnerable spies or the Constitution. But we know the FBI wanted to redact the names only to shield the possibly guilty men and women. None of the contents of the memo exposed intelligence-gathering techniques or undercover agents. And since when have progressives cared about the integrity of the Constitution? Where were they when their Messiah Obama, an alleged Constitutional scholar, trashed the Constitutional separation of powers and used an executive order to legislate the DACA program––something he said several times he couldn’t do because it was un-Constitutional?

All this caterwauling and bluster are an obvious misdirection away from the what the memo has revealed: compelling evidence that a cabal in the FBI and the DOJ––anxious to ensure a Hillary victory, and then determined to derail Trump’s presidency––used a flimsy, unverified Russian-manufactured “dossier” financed by Hillary Clinton and the DNC to get a FISA warrant to spy on a fringe member of the Trump campaign preposterously suspected of being an agent of a foreign government. They didn’t inform the court that the dossier was paid for by the political party opposed to Trump, nor did they tell the judge that their other pretext for a warrant comprised leaks to the media engineered by the same fabulist who created the dossier in the first place. 

But larger issues are at stake here than the abuse by some in the intelligence agencies to serve partisan or careerist interests. This whole sordid business is a deep and dangerous attack on the foundations of our political order. The Constitution is based on a healthy fear of human nature and its subjection to the corruption of power that is known as tyranny–– “arbitrary power . . . which is responsible to no one, and governs all alike, whether equals or betters, with a view to its own advantage, not to that of its subjects, and therefore against their will. No freeman willingly endures such a government,” as Aristotle defined it. This classic definition of tyranny lay behind the indictment of George III in the Declaration of Independence, which accused the king of “repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.” 

Fearful of tyranny and its assault on political freedom, then, the Founders dispersed political power among the three branches of government, and between the federal government and the states. The scope of power is reduced, and checked by countervailing powers, all subject to accountability to the sovereign people through their elected officials. This is the structure that progressives starting in the late 19^th century sought to dismantle, and that the current scandal undermines to serve ideology and personal interests at the expense of the sovereign people.

Take a further step back, and we see that the arrogance and power of the government agencies multiplied and expanded by progressives have created the opportunity for the abuse evident in the current scandal. It’s bad enough when the IRS or EPA––their mostly anonymous bureaucrats shielded from accountability to the people––usurp the political power of all three branches of government. Just ask the conservative groups whose tax-exempt status was delayed and subject to arbitrary barriers by IRS functionaries who were opposed to their politics.

But intelligence and law-enforcement government agencies can wield much greater power much more directly on private citizens. The power to surveil secretly American citizens, and to interrogate and indict them based on the secret intelligence the agencies have gathered, lends itself to even worse tyranny. We may not be at risk of torture, death, or endless incarceration, but our lives can be destroyed by the expense of defending ourselves, and our reputations ruined by indictments and convictions not for crimes, but for procedural missteps engineered by zealous prosecutors who, as the cliché goes, can indict a ham sandwich. Soft despotism is still despotism, an assault on our foundational freedoms.

Take the case of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who was Dick Cheney’s assistant during the George Bush administration. He was caught in the ginned up “scandal” over the alleged outing of CIA analyst Valerie Plame, whose husband was a vocal critic of Bush’s rationale for the Iraq War, and hence a darling of the progressive media. Libby wasn’t convicted of revealing Plame’s name after a two-year investigation, but of questionable charges of “perjury” and “obstruction of justice.” Libby was punished even though the man who revealed Plame’s identity, and was known to the prosecutor, went free. Such injustice should infuriate anyone who prizes freedom.

Such prosecutorial abuse is the embodiment of tyranny as defined by Aristotle and the Founders. Hidden behind veils of secrecy, such inquisitions can use a power that is “arbitrary” and “responsible to no one.” Often the tool of partisan interests, given that so many wielders of this power are political appointees, this power is used “with a view to its own advantage, not to that of its subjects.” The abuse of the FISA court unveiled by the House’s memo, and the investigation of “collusion” with Russia by Robert Mueller, both fit the paradigm of tyranny.

The Constitution, however, has given us our defense against this tyrannical power. Currently Congress is holding investigations to expose those responsible. The memo is just the first step in this process, and we are told it will be followed by others. And there are many more abuses to expose: Uranium One, the rapacious Clinton Foundation, Hillary’s private server and exposure of classified information, her pay-to-play State Department, the Obama administration’s blatant lies about the Benghazi attacks, James Comey and Loretta Lynch’s torpedoing of the investigation into Hillary’s server, Comey’s perjury and leaking of classified information––all need the disinfectant of sunlight provided by the sovereign people’s representatives in Congress.

More important, the abusers of power must be held to account. The DOJ must indict and prosecute all those responsible. We cannot continue to go through year after year of hearings that never end up punishing the guilty. The politicizing and weaponizing of the intrusive power of our intelligence agencies for partisan ends must be stopped, and the deterrence of prosecution created to concentrate the minds of those inclined to continue such abuses. It is intolerable to see a politician as corrupt as Hillary Clinton has been for over two decades profiting from her abuses, or an arrogant partisan careerist like James Comey issuing self-serving tweets, or a disappointed office-seeker like Robert Mueller assembling a partisan staff to weaken a duly elected president with rumor and innuendo. 

In the end, though, it is “we the people” who must demand that their rights to equality under the law, and to accountability from those given such power, be respected. We must make it clear to the Attorney General, the President, and Congress that we hold the sovereignty, that we are the “guards of the guardian,” and that we will not let stand such abuse of their sovereignty. In short, we all must act in such a way that shows we are worthy of political freedom, and that as free men and women, we will not “willingly endure such a government.”

The Dems’ current nervous breakdown suggests that the reckoning may be getting closer, that the people will punish them in November for their shameless rationalizations for these abuses of power. So far, their desperate pleas to “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” haven’t worked. Thanks to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes––who has doggedly weathered the calumny and sabotage of the two-bit Iago Adam Schiff and his media flying monkeys––we can see blue-state political and media minions twirling the dials and pulling the levers of their lies and misdirection. We may see that voters in November will not allow them to redraw the curtain.


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/269225/here-comes-dems-nineteenth-nervous-breakdown-bruce-thornton

Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

The 'Constitutional Crisis' the Fourth Estate Birthed - Clarice Feldman

by Clarice Feldman

Wheels within wheels within wheels within...

As the “Russian Collusion” story disintegrates, it takes with it any reason to rely on the Fourth Estate, which in large part assisted in Obama administration wrongdoing. It has proven to be a handmaiden of those who concocted a big lie to bring down a political opponent. Like Josephus said of Haman -- Antiq., 50:2, c. 6,) “without a remark upon the almighty power, and admirable justice of the wisdom of God; not only in bringing Haman to his deserved punishment, but in trapping him in the very snare which he had laid for another, and turning a malicious invention upon the head of the inventor.” This time, it’s not only Haman -- the FBI and DOJ officials involved in lying to the FISC and unmasking what they learned -- but their hangers-on in the press that are trapped as well.

1. Prelude to the Devin Nunes Memo’s Release

As she so often does, Kimberley Strassel nailed it:

Kimberley Strassel‏Verified account @KimStrassel
1) I've covered politics a long time. I've never -- never -- seen anything approaching the desperations Ds have to keep this memo quiet. And as we know that worry about law enforcement (Snowden/Manning) is not their biggest worry, this memo must be damning to the core.
2) Have been in journalism all my life. Have never -- never -- seen the press corps fight so hard against transparency. Same media that after election wondered if it was out of touch with avg Americans, now ignoring the legit worries so many have about govt. accountability.
3) Every journo should be asked if they'd be fighting this hard against disclosure if it was a Bush DOJ/FBI accused of wiretapping abuses. Of course not. They'd be leading the charge to put it all out. 4th estate is supposed to enlighten the people. Not cover for govt. officials

Others took up the same tack. Notable among them was Mark Penn, a long-time Clinton pollster. He notes the shocking calls by the NY Times and Washington Post for prior restraint -- blocking the release of the memo House Intelligence Chairman Nunes prepared based on what witnesses told the committee and official documentation about the spying on the Trump campaign. The hypocrisy of their efforts are astonishing -- these are some of the same people who argued successfully that the public was entitled to see (and then to publish) the “Pentagon Papers.” Penn observes, as we must, that the dossier is nonsense, and has been discredited -- not as the press is wont to say, “unverified.”

So mainstream journalism today tells us we should see the dossier, even if it’s filled with junk, and read the Comey memos, even if they have no verification -- and, yet, be prevented from reading the report of the House Intelligence Committee based on documents that it took the committee six months to pry out of the FBI and Justice Department.
I believe in the First Amendment, and I thought that mainstream media did too. I did not see it as a doctrine of convenience that applied only to documents that buttress one side but then not applied if it might conceivably help the other side.

The effect of this, he concludes, is to keep the public seriously in the dark about what shocking things have occurred -- something to remember when some of your friends and family seem to be on a different planet than you are:

So it’s a fact that six senior leaders of the FBI or Justice Department have been either reassigned or fired based on facts that have come out largely from the work of this committee and of the inspector general of the Justice Department. Yet, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) is being branded almost as a lunatic. The hypocrisy here is not confined to newspaper editorial pages. We have seen a veritable news blockade on information coming out of these investigations on the front pages.
In the last Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll, we read people a list of recent facts that have come out and almost all of them were unknown to the public, even when prompted. A majority did know that Comey had drafted the memo on the Clinton investigation long before the investigation was over. But most people did not know who paid for the dossier, and most had not heard about the text messages and their reference to an “insurance policy” in case Trump was elected. After hearing this information, 75 percent said it was significant and 63 percent said the FBI needs to be investigated.

2. Panic and Hypocrisy on the Left

Lacking any coherent policies, the Democrats have pinned their hopes on persuading Americans that Trump is Hitler, Stalin, a usurper and a traitor who must be impeached. Their reaction to the release of the memo underscored their fright at this last remaining hope -- impeachment -- slips away. A prominent voice on that end has been Congressman Adam Schiff, who claimed falsely that the memo was inaccurate. Other Dems claimed it would reveal sources and methods that would endanger national security. (It didn’t, by the way.) The Wall Street Journal’s “Best of the Web” took hard aim at Schiff:

In March of 2007, a very libertarian sort of Congressman announced that he was “deeply troubled” by what he called “abuses of authority” by the FBI in acquiring personal information on U.S. citizens. Over the years, he urged various restrictions on the ability of the executive branch to get information on Americans’ phone calls. In order “to protect privacy and increase transparency” he sought in various ways to reform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court -- the very court that approved the electronic surveillance of a Trump associate for reasons that are still not entirely clear.
Way ahead of the news, he specifically introduced the “Ending Secret Law Act” which according to a press release from his office, “would require the Attorney General to declassify significant Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) opinions, allowing Americans to know how the Court has interpreted” its legal authorities.
He said that his legislation “will help ensure we have true checks and balances when it comes to the judges who are given the responsibility of overseeing our most sensitive intelligence gathering and national security programs.”
His name is Adam Schiff, and he is now the ranking member on House Intelligence. But oddly he doesn’t seem to want to take credit for his early concern for civil liberties.

Some on the left are continuing this line. Others, predictably, have changed their tune now that it’s been released: now, it’s a nothingburger.

It isn’t.

Adam Schiff, Dianne Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi, among seemingly dozens of Democrats, not to mention half the mainstream media, had been warning us for days that the release of the memo authored by Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee would place our national security at grave risk. "Sources and methods" would be revealed.
Now that we have seen the memo, it's clear that was an absolutely bald-faced lie of the most obvious sort. Nothing in it impacts national security in the slightest. There's no mention whatsoever of any "sources and methods." [snip]
So what was up here below the surface? It can't just be the "evil party" trying to live up to its nickname, although that certainly happened.
It seems this particular lie was a last line of defense -- for now -- against a coming potential Armageddon for their party. This memo, bad as it is, is apparently only the first of many, a small percentage of what is to come. And the Democrats know it. Fear is operative. Maybe panic. An entire weltanschauung is under threat, jobs, friends, self-image, who knows what. If this goes on much longer and much more comes out, some Democrats -- not apparatchik Schiff, needless to say, but others -- might have to face reality and say something.

3.The Nunes Memo

The whinge that releasing the memo would reveal sources and methods, thereby endangering national security, proved as false as all the other claims about the memo. “The details of Friday’s memo also rebut most of the criticisms of its release. The details betray no intelligence sources and methods. As to the claim that the release tarnishes the FBI and FISA court, exposing abuses is the essence of accountability in a democracy.” 

Here’s the memo in easy to read format.

Here’s the short form version.

The NRO zeroed in on the dossier:

The Obama Justice Department and the FBI used the unverified Steele dossier to convince a federal court to issue a warrant authorizing surveillance of a Trump campaign adviser [Carter Page]. Confirmation came in the much-anticipated memorandum released today by the Republican-controlled House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The memo states that the Obama administration concealed from the court that the dossier was commissioned and paid for by the political campaign of Donald Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. Nor was the court informed that the dossier’s author, former British spy Christopher Steele, told a senior Justice Department official that he was “desperate” to prevent Trump from being elected president. Moreover, despite presenting dossier information as probable cause on four separate occasions — for the initial FISA warrant in October 2016, and three times in the ensuing months — the FBI failed to verify the dossier’s explosive allegations and failed to inform the court that its efforts to corroborate the allegations had been unavailing. Indeed, the memo relates that the government once presented a news story to the court as corroboration for Steele’s claims, apparently unaware that Steele himself was the source for the news story. The dossier was a compilation of Steele’s reports, based on anonymous Russian sources. His informants provided information based on accounts that were multiple levels of hearsay removed from the events they purported to describe. The FISA court warrant targeted Carter Page, who had volunteered to serve as a Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser. The memo relates that the warrant was originally issued on October 21, 2016, and re-authorized three times thereafter. Under FISA, warrants targeting American citizens lapse after 90 days. If you’re keeping score that means a warrant based on claims that Trump was corruptly aligned with the Kremlin was renewed twice after Donald Trump became president. According to the committee testimony of former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, the information in the dossier was necessary to the probable-cause showing required to justify issuance of a FISA warrant. That is, the warrant would not have been issued without the dossier information.

The pretext for the warrants was that an obscure minor figure in the campaign, Carter Page, was an alleged agent of Russia. Michael “Spikey” Isikoff, who got it from Steele, first floated that claim on Yahoo. It was that story that the FBI absurdly offered up to the Court as corroboration for their suspicions. Steele then peddled the story to David Corn of Mother Jones, and when the FBI found out, they fired Steele as an agency informant. (Isikoff and Corn might be familiar to readers as the promoters of the fairytale that Plame was a covert agent whose identity had been revealed out of vengeance against her husband for telling tales about Iraq.) In any event, after years of surveillance and providing cover for the unprecedented snooping by the FBI and DOJ, Page has never been charged with espionage or criminal activity at all, He has sued Yahoo and the Huffington Post for slander.

Why was Page selected? The FBI apparently had him under observation since 2013 and it was clear he was neither a Russian agent nor any danger of becoming one. In fact, he was a businessman who frequently traveled to Russia and may even have been an FBI asset who in 2013 helped them nab a Russian agent Victor Podobny. Byron York offers up a rationale: “Put it all together, and Page was the easiest guy to go after. Plus, the wiretap would allow the FBI not just to listen to Page's phone calls but to read his emails, not only going forward from the date of the warrant, but going backward for as long as Page had kept them. If Page truly were the beating heart of a Trump-Russia conspiracy, then there would likely be email evidence the FBI could use.”

The memo discloses a sordid tale of “state corruption,” says Mark Steyn.

In the "national security" sphere, the entire system is ex parte. Carter Page, the peripheral Trump campaign volunteer who was the target of the surveillance, was not represented in court. In fact, he did not even know he was on "trial". A year and a half after he attracted the attentions of Deputy Director McCabe and his chums, Mr. Page has not been charged with a single crime, never mind (to be old-fashioned about these things) convicted of one. Indeed, the only reason he is even aware that he is/was under 24/7 surveillance by the panopticon state is because McCabe's FBI found it politic to leak that fact to the newspapers -- via the coy disclosure that he briefly came under FISA surveillance as "Male-1" five years earlier.
Mr. Page has committed no crime and been charged with none, but is routinely spoken of in the press as if he has been. In it is interesting to contrast his treatment with, say, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), whom the Department of Justice designated as "unindicted co-conspirators" in a major terrorism-funding case, but which designation is apparently no obstacle to their continued respectability in the media, their invitations to speak at small-town libraries, churches and schools (for example, a CAIR operative will be spreading the word at Firelands College in Huron, Ohio next month), and even their influence upon Robert Mueller's FBI. [snip]
The DoJ/FBI did not "inform the tribunal of all material facts" but misled the judge, seriously, on fundamental matters necessary to "enable the tribunal to make an informed decision". They misled him/her as to the nature of the document, its provenance, its credibility, the motivations of its author, and his financial ties to the Clinton camp. They did, however, argue that the dossier had been independently "corroborated" by a September 2016 story in Yahoo News -- even though that Yahoo story came from the same guy who authored the dossier: in effect, the Government got its surveillance warrant by arguing that its fake-news dossier from Christopher Steele had been independently corroborated by a fake-news story from Christopher Steele. Either the FBI is exceedingly stupid, which would be disturbing, given their lavish budget. Or the same tight group of FBI/DoJ officials knew very well what they were doing in presenting such drivel to the FISA court.
They're really the two choices here: either "the world's premier law enforcement agency" was manipulated by one freaky Brit spook, or "the world's premier law enforcement agency" conspired with the freaky Brit spook to manipulate the judge.

How serious was the misuse of the FISA procedure? So serious, to my mind, that Congress must interrogate the judges involved and find out how the Court allowed itself to be so misled. Perhaps the law needs to be revised.

Streetwise Professor compares the actions of the DOJ and FBI officials to Russian Siloviki (security forces who came to power in Russia). 

There is a constitutional crisis, he argues -- though it’s not, as Leon Panetta and other Democrats claimed, caused by the memo having been made public.

[quote] Disclosing information about the misbehavior of executive branch officials does not represent a Constitutional crisis: if anything, it is the misbehavior of those officials during a presidential election that raise the issue of such a crisis.
Some of the reporting and commentary on this issue has been utterly incredible (in many senses of the word). For example, Trump overruled current-FBI director Wray’s objection to releasing the memo. The WaPo framed this as “Trump defies Wray.” Um, who the hell works for whom? If there is defiance going on, it is Wray’s going public with his objections to the actions of his Constitutional superior. Wray should have raised his objections in private to Trump, and if overruled (as he was, in the event), kept his mouth shut in public, or resigned -- and then kept his mouth shut. To lobby publicly (and disingenuously, by raising national security concerns) in an attempt to pressure his superior into doing something is beyond the pale.
Or should be, anyways. But one thing that this entire sordid episode has demonstrated is that the bureaucracy generally, and the intelligence and federal law enforcement agencies in particular, consider themselves an independent power, a co-equal -- superior actually -- branch of government, the Constitution be damned. Trump is deemed the usurper. Indeed, it is clear that many senior members of the FBI, DOJ, and the intelligence community considered it their right to intervene in the election in order to prevent Trump’s election, and failing that, to kneecap his presidency. And virtually all of the political class in the US is on their side. This is the real Constitutional crisis.
You should view this as a Constitutional danger regardless of your partisan leanings. For ask yourself: would you like the same to be done to your guy (or gal)?
It is also disgustingly ironic that in a fervid controversy about the alleged intervention of the Russian siloviki into an American election reveals that high-ranking American officials in control of the vast powers of US law enforcement and intelligence used siloviki methods (including most likely disinformation planted by Russian siloviki!) in an attempt to influence an American election and then to cripple the winner of that election when their original plotting failed.

4. Upcoming

 
Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley is about to release his report on Steele, the FBI, and the dossier. 

The Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General is about to release his report on the FBI and DOJ handling of the Clinton investigation. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has referred the allegations about the DOJ and FBI officials to the Inspector General for further investigation. 

Clarice Feldman

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/02/the_constitutional_crisis_the_fourth_estate_birthed.html

Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

We Must Never Forget - Michael Curtis

by Michael Curtis

Is antisemitism spreading in Europe?

The often-quoted phrase, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing," paraphrasing a passage from Edmund Burke, is pertinent to the problem of the persistence of anti-Semitism. Sinning by silence, a cowardly act, instead of protesting, allows the cancer to persist and metastasize. European countries are still confronted by the disease and lack a cure.

The problem, concern with the disease and attempts to deal with it can be examined in three countries.

In Britain, according to a survey by the Community Security Trust, anti-Semitic hate crimes reached a record level in 2017. These incidents can be defined as malicious acts aimed at Jewish people, organizations, and property, targeted because the victim is believed to be Jewish. With members of the Jewish community targeted at a rate of nearly four times a day, there were 1,382 recorded incidents, three-quarters of which were in Greater London and Greater Manchester.

It does not appear these incidents were caused by reactions to specific trigger events. The most common type of incident involved verbal abuse randomly directed against visibly Jewish people, distinguished by religious clothing, school uniforms, or jewelry bearing Jewish symbols. Those responsible come from various groups, the far right, the far left and also part of the Labour party, and Islamists. Despite efforts they have not been sufficiently confronted by government and legal authorities. Interestingly, the number of incidents involving social media fell in 2017, possibly as a result of the efforts of social media companies to deal with on-line hate speech.

German leaders are aware of the problem. On January 27, 2017 Chancellor Angela Merkel said, "it is inconceivable and shameful that no Jewish institution can exist without police protection, whether it is a school, a kindergarten, or a synagogue." Chancellor Merkel, who was the first German leader to address the Israeli Knesset, is considering the appointment of a government commissioner on anti-Semitism.

Despite the actions of Merkel, some signs suggest the situation in Germany is getting worse. Recent polls indicate that about 10% of Germans express classic anti-Semitic feelings, and many more have mild anti-Semitic prejudices.

Demonstrations in Berlin against the decision of President Donald Trump on December 7, 2017 to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital might be considered a political action. But protestors chanted anti-Semitic slogans as well as torching Israeli flags. Another disturbing incident is that memorial plaques outside the homes of Holocaust victims were dug out of the ground and stolen.

More troubling is the rise of the far-right political party AfD, only four years old, which at the 2017 Federal parliamentary election got 12.6% of the vote and 94 seats and is presently the third largest party in the Bundestag. The AfD is a xenophobic, nationalist, and populist party though it does not declare itself anti-Semitic or Nazi. Nevertheless, utterances by some of the prominent people in the party are troubling. One of the founders, Bjorn Hocke, is critical of the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, designed by Peter Eisenman and inaugurated in 2005. "We Germans are the only people in the world who have planted a memorial of shame in the heart of their capital." Another member of AfD has dismissed the Holocaust as merely "certain misdeeds" and argued, contrary to German law, that Holocaust denial is legitimate.

Curiously, Austrian authorities are acting against the virus. Chancellor Sebastian Kurz on January 31, 2018, said he was preparing to dissolve a student fraternity, Germania, which has links to the far-right Freedom party FPO, a junior partner in the governing coalition, because of the fraternity songbook mocking victims of the Holocaust. The former vice chair of the fraternity ran as a candidate for an Austrian state election. Lines in the song included "Step on the gas, you ancient Germanic peoples, we'll manage the seventh million", a direct reference to the six million murdered by Nazis. The issue is doubly troubling, partly because a large number of FPO politicians have ties to student fraternities, and partly because the FPO in the October 2017 legislative election gained support, coming in third and winning 20.5% of the vote and 51 seats.

France has tried to deal with the disease in different ways. Two actions illustrate the problem. One is the quick response of President Emmanuel Macron to the physical attack on January 29, 2018 in Sarcelles on an eight-year-old Jewish boy wearing a kippa. The Republic as a whole, Macron said, is assaulted: the Republic stands alongside the French people of Jewish faith to fight these vile acts.

The second, a more controversial question, is the decision of leading Paris publisher Gallimard to shelve plans to reissue a collection of anti-Semitic pamphlets by Louis-Ferdinand Celine written in the late 1930s. For some French people, Celine is regarded not only as a prominent writer but even as a cultural icon. But he was an obsessive anti-Semite whose pamphlets are virulent and bigoted. Celine fled France in 1944, was later convicted in absentia of collaboration with Nazi Germany, but was granted amnesty and returned to France. On him, opinions differ widely. French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe thought his collection should be published with a critical and contextual commentary because Celine has a central position in French literature. The indefatigable hunter of anti-Semites, Serge Klarsfeld, threatened legal action if the collection was published. Gallimard, even if reluctantly, made the right decision.

The Preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed by the UN General Assembly on December 10, 1948 spoke of the need for recognition of equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family. Sadly, this hope and promise has not been fulfilled, as world disasters and tragedies have shown around the world, in Cambodia, Kosovo, Darfur, Syria, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Iraq. Above all, the disease of anti-Semitism still spreads. Medical research has made unbelievable progress in curing illness. If only there were some form of social cauterization that could destroy the anti-Semitic disease. The cure is Never Again.

Michael Curtis

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/02/we_must_never_forget.html

Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Taking aim at Iran, US hits Hezbollah with new sanctions - News Agencies and Israel Hayom Staff

by News Agencies and Israel Hayom Staff 

Six people and seven entities linked to the Shiite terrorist group's financial network face aggressive Treasury Department sanctions as part of U.S. effort to crack down on Iran's largest Mideast proxy

U.S.Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin

Photo: Reuters

The Trump administration targeted Hezbollah's financial network on Friday by imposing sanctions on six people and seven entities in an effort to crack down on Iran's influence in the Middle East and beyond.

"The administration is determined to expose and disrupt Hezbollah's networks, including those across the Middle East and West Africa, used to fund their illicit operations," Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in announcing the penalties under financial regulations targeting the Lebanon-based Hezbollah terrorist group.

The six sanctioned individuals included five Lebanese and one Iraqi, most of them linked to Al-Inmaa Engineering and Contracting, the Treasury Department said. The seven entities were firms based in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Lebanon and Ghana, the statement said.

Senior Trump administration officials said the sanctions were part of an aggressive move against Hezbollah to try to limit the influence of Iran, which gives the group about $700 million a year to help finance its operations.

The officials said the Trump administration was working to reverse what it considers a more lackadaisical approach toward Hezbollah by Democratic President Barack Obama after the 2015 Iran nuclear deal went into effect.

More such targeted sanctions are expected in the months ahead, they said.

The officials said Hezbollah was already under financial strain as it continued to pay for costly operations in Syria and Yemen. The goal was to get European allies to join the United States in increasing pressure on the group, they said.

As a result of the Treasury designations, all their assets subject to U.S. jurisdiction are blocked and Americans are prohibited from engaging in transactions with them.

The six individuals were targeted because they are linked to financier Adham Tabaja and his company, Al-Inmaa Engineering and Contracting. The officials described Tabaja as among the top five Hezbollah financiers at the moment.

News Agencies and Israel Hayom Staff

Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/2018/02/04/taking-aim-at-iran-us-hits-hezbollah-with-new-sanctions/

Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.