Operation Northern Shield Deprives Hezbollah of Major Strategic Asset - Ari Lieberman

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by Ari Lieberman

Israel’s anti-tunneling initiative wreaks havoc on Hezbollah’s subterranean infrastructure.

[Editor's note: since this article was written, at least one more Hizb'Allah terror tunnel was uncovered]
 
On November 14, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu left many scratching their heads in bewilderment when he unexpectedly agreed to a ceasefire with the Gazan-based terror group, Hamas. In a two-day spate of cross-border violence, sparked by an intelligence operation in Gaza, the terrorist group fired an unprecedented 460 rockets and mortars into Israel, the highest ever for the terror group in such a brief period.

Of course, the fact that no Israelis were killed during the bombardment (a Palestinian living in Israel was killed) made Netanyahu’s announcement more palatable to the Israeli public but there was another more pressing matter that was dogging the prime minister. At an event hosted in honor of Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, He made a cryptic reference to other “considerations that must be hidden from the enemy,” which “the public can’t always be privy to.”

Two weeks later, on November 29, Israel struck multiple enemy positions near Damascus and southern Syria. The target bank included pro-Iran militias as well as weapons bound for Hezbollah. It was the first reported Israeli strike in Syria since the September 18 downing of a Russian IL-20 “Coot” surveillance aircraft by inept Syrian anti-aircraft crews.

At the time, some speculated that Netanyahu was referring to this operation since it carried with it the potential of conflict with the Russians. Within days however, it became clear that Netanyahu was referencing a more sinister development on the Israel-Lebanon border. On December 4, Netanyahu announced that Israel had undertaken Operation Northern Shield, an undertaking aimed at uncovering and destroying Hezbollah tunnels penetrating Israel from Lebanon.

The task of detecting and uncovering subterranean Hezbollah infrastructure is painstaking and difficult but the operation, which is ongoing, is yielding significant positive results. Using sophisticated equipment which detects seismic and subterranean anomalies, the Israelis have thus far uncovered at least three terror tunnels. An Israel Defense Forces spokesman indicated that there were more tunnels but the IDF has remained mute about this due to security considerations.

The first and most extensive tunnel was uncovered near the northeastern Israeli border town of Metula. This tunnel was more than 80 ft beneath the surface, was 6ft wide and 6ft tall and penetrated 130 ft into Israeli territory. It was large enough to accommodate swarms of Hezbollah operatives equipped with ATVs and motorcycles. The tunnel originated from the Lebanese village of Kafr Kela beneath civilian infrastructure and was constructed right under the noses of UN forces operating in the area. It is also likely that the Lebanese Army (also known as the Lebanese Armed Forces) was aware of its existence. The LAF, having lost all vestiges of independence, is subordinate to Hezbollah and acts as its auxiliary arm.

Israel believes that Hezbollah intended to use the Metula tunnel to cut the town off from the rest of the country and engage in a mass murder-kidnapping spree. The second tunnel was found in northwestern Galilee near the small town of Zar’it. The IDF announced the existence of a third tunnel but has not disclosed its location.

During the operation, Israeli combat engineers lowered a camera-equipped robot into the Metula tunnel and shortly thereafter, it filmed two Hezbollah terrorists operating within its confines. One of the operatives caught sight of the robot and moved in for closer look, whereupon the robot detonated a charge sending both terrorists scurrying like frightened rabbits. One of them was identified as Imad “Azaladin” Fahs. According to I24, Azaladin has a PhD in mechanical engineering from Tehran's University of Technology and also has ties to Mexican drug cartels, having trained with them near the border with the United States. Hezbollah’s ties to narco-terror are well known. The group has deep roots in Venezuela and Mexico and the US Justice Department recently designated Hezbollah a transnational criminal organization.

During Israel’s 2014 counter-insurgency campaign against Hamas, known as Operation Protective Edge, the IDF uncovered a network of some three dozen, Hamas-constructed tunnels leading into Israel. This shocking development prompted the IDF to re-think its strategy vis-à-vis Hezbollah to the north. Despite religious differences, one being Sunni and the other Shia, Hamas and Hezbollah maintain similar radical Islamist ideologies and are allies who share information. It would therefore be logical to assume that Hezbollah, whose capabilities are far greater than its southern cousins, were digging tunnels as well.

The challenges for Hezbollah are far greater, however. The subterranean soil around Gaza is soft making construction of tunnels easier. In Lebanon, Hezbollah must dig through solid rock. It is a virtual certainty that Hezbollah embarked on its tunnel-digging initiative with the assistance of Iran and North Korea, the latter being expert in the practice of tunnel-digging.

Both Hamas and Hezbollah attempted to use tunnels to execute mega attacks. In 2014 however, Hamas prematurely played its hand and unwisely attacked Israel before most of the tunnels were ready for use. Accordingly, Israel deprived Hamas of a major strategic asset. Hezbollah too suffered from Israel’s southern coup. Israel began to invest heavily in anti-tunneling technologies and its combat engineers became proficient in tunnel detection, causing many to collapse and transforming Hamas tunnels into giant burial chambers for its Islamist operatives. This expertise was transferred northward culminating in the current Northern Shield initiative.

Hezbollah intended to use its tunnels in conjunction with a massive rocket barrage as part of an opening salvo against Israel. Had it succeeded, Hezbollah could have surprised Israel with swarms of heavily armed operatives roaming northern Galilee, perhaps even capturing a small community or two and sowing fear and chaos throughout. Just as frightening is the prospect of Hezbollah capturing dozens of Israelis – civilians and soldiers – in a surprise attack from areas deemed secure and shuffling them at gunpoint back into the tunnels and straight into Lebanon for future use as bargaining chips.

But Northern Shield has robbed Hezbollah of the initiative and deprived it of a major strategic asset. All Hezbollah can do now is sit, wait and watch as Israel systematically dismantles and destroys what took Hezbollah years to construct. Israel 1, Hezbollah zero.

Ari Lieberman  is an attorney and former prosecutor who has authored numerous articles and publications on matters concerning the Middle East and is considered an authority on geo-political and military developments affecting the region.

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272237/operation-northern-shield-deprives-hezbollah-major-ari-lieberman

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The price of withdrawal - Meir Indor

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by Meir Indor

Handing over territory is inappropriate and does not pay off from a security perspective. Any territory we cede will necessarily become a staging area for our enemies in their future efforts against us.

Opponents of Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon were right to warn the vacuum left by the Israel Defense Forces would be filled by Hezbollah. But even they could not foresee the vast amount of long-range missiles and short-range mortars that now fill the South Lebanon buffer zone. Lebanon's southern border became a staging area and a springboard for Hezbollah terrorists on their path to "conquer Tel Aviv" and the Upper Galilee on Iran's behalf. Nor could opponents of the withdrawal have possibly predicted the sophisticated tunnels aimed at moving Hezbollah's commando units into Israeli territory.

No, not even opponents of then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Justice Minister Yossi Beilin, the architects of the escape-withdrawal, could have guessed that Hezbollah would have plans to conquer parts of Israel. At most, they thought it would lead to a resumption of shelling on Kiryat Shmona and the Upper Galilee. That was the debate between the hawks and the doves, who expected international recognition of the Israeli Golan Heights in return for Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon.

Brig. Gen. (res.) Effi Eitam fought Hezbollah from 1997 to 1999, when he commanded the IDF's 91st Division, which was responsible for Israeli army forces in southern Lebanon. He was a vocal opponent of the withdrawal from the buffer zone just one year after he ended his role as commander.

Reflecting on his time in Lebanon, Eitam would say, "When I left the 91st Division, I was actually the last commander to see the IDF fight Hezbollah, the flight followed. For a long time, we succeeded, through intensive activity by special and regular units and the use of special means out in the field, to prevent Hezbollah from achieving its goals. The daily contact, the fact that we had a constant presence in the field, that there were forces who sometimes spent 90 hours in the bushes, the fact that we were always in contact with them, kept them from doing what they would do later on; establish themselves in the field and build this terror monster. They only did that after we vacated the area."

The decision to withdraw from Lebanon in May 1999 was not made for security or political reasons, but as a result of a propaganda campaign by the now-defunct Four Mothers anti-war movement and its supporters in the media, who caused others to loathe our presence in southern Lebanon through the tendentiousness use of the numbers of IDF casualties. True, fewer Israeli soldiers died following the withdrawal: Between 1993 and 1997, an average of two soldiers were killed per month as compared to one per month in 1999. But we paid for this decrease with compound interest in the 2006 Second Lebanon War when 165 people, among them 44 civilians and 121 soldiers, lost their lives. Furthermore, all of the north, including Haifa, was subject to shelling.

We are now at the outset of another stage. Has the lesson been learned? Do we finally understand that we need permanent buffer zones on our volatile borders? Handing over parts of the country is not only inappropriate in principle but does not pay off from a security standpoint. Any territory we cede will become a staging area for our enemies to use against us.

Today, there can be no doubt: By running from Lebanon, we brought the Second Lebanon War upon ourselves and created an ongoing strategic threat, sponsored by Iran. Instead of protecting ourselves with concrete walls both above and below ground, we must return to a policy that sees us retake control of the buffer zone in the north, in order to rid the territory of the tens of thousands of launching pads threatening Israel's north and center.

Lt. Col. (ret.) Meir Indor is the head of the Almagor Terror Victims Association.

Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/the-price-of-retreat/

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Student Says He Loves White People; Columbia University Explodes - Robert Oscar Lopez

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by Robert Oscar Lopez

Columbia University is a joke, and the joke is on us.

Columbia University is no longer a legitimate university. It is simply a joke. One recent event – the "Julian von Abele Affair" – has shown that this organization no longer serves the common good, advances learning, or contributes anything to society.

Sadly, this joke is on the American people. The tragedy here consists of the fact that Julian von Abele's good name has been dragged into one of the most embarrassing campus imbroglios I have seen in twenty years in higher education. More on what has happened to von Abele a little later. For now, suffice it to say, I stand with this young man because I think what has happened to him is horrendous. Nonetheless, I think he needs to do something else with his life other than attend Columbia. The institution clearly hates him and blames him for vicious attacks against his own person that he didn't deserve. He should not attend this university, because it should not exist.

Why Columbia University Is an Utter Disgrace to Our Nation

Consider this. The framers of the Constitution studied the great works of antiquity, such as Plato's Republic. They feared the rise of timocracies (Plato's term). Hence, in Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution, they noted that the United States could not give titles of nobility at any level.

They knew that a society that falls too much into the veneration of titles and honors quickly finds the pursuit of prestige more important than the pursuit of what is good for citizens.

The rule against noble titles becomes complicated in ways few have noticed. The United States government does not grant people honors that border on nobility. Yet many institutions do. Universities give degrees unrelated to an immediate trade or profession. They and other such organizations incorporate by registering with the state. Most often, they claim tax-exempt status as "non-profit" charities. To qualify as a non-profit, they have to police themselves for conflicts of interest and prove that they serve the "public good" as opposed to the selfish interests of one clique.

Sadly, universities like Columbia become enormous hubs of financial corruption and obscurantism as people park assets there without paying taxes on them. Why? Such colleges qualify as non-profits. This happens even if they make secret and arbitrary tenure decisions, refuse admissions to people who want to attend, hold enormous endowments, maintain exclusive and powerful alumni networks, grant legacy privileges to graduates' children, and charge repugnantly high tuition. Not only do they skip out on taxes that the general taxpayers have to foot the bill for, but such non-profits receive huge grants and benefits such as student loan guarantees.

Indirectly, the government acts as accomplice in the very timocracy the Constitution sought to thwart. Commissions such as WASC grant a limited monopoly to established schools by accrediting them while they block competitors from jumping into the game. (It is not uncommon for administrators active in running colleges to serve as commissioners despite a serious potential for graft.) 

The king of England founded Columbia in 1754 and affiliated it with the Church of England, prior to the American Revolution. Then the colonies were under the monarch, who had no obligation to observe a separation between church and state. Technically, Columbia should have been abolished, but like Harvard, Yale, the College of William and Mary, and others, Columbia managed to rebrand itself under the post-revolutionary regulatory regime.

Complex tax laws and agency regulations exist as a supposed safeguard against entities like Columbia skirting the "no titles of nobility" clause and creating an unconstitutional aristocracy. Civic institutions chartered to serve the common good – such as non-profit universities with tax exemptions – have to follow their written charter. They must advance a good outside their members' own narrow self-interests or pet fascinations.

If civic institutions stray from their mission and fall away from objective standards of truth and the common good, they become foolish timocracies. The framers knew this. In a progression described in Book VIII of Republic, timocracies collapse into oligarchies, then ochlocracies, then ultimately tyranny.

The framers had this in mind, but Columbia University, which produces much of America's ruling class, has other ideas entirely. Its elite status has only accelerated due to its ties to two popular two-term presidents: Dwight D. Eisenhower (Columbia president, 1948-53) and Barack Obama (undergraduate class of 1983). Columbia's current president, Lee Bollinger, has served on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The university's ties to Wall Street are unmistakable. Judith Butler, grandmother to the vexed transgender movement and unofficial Jeanne d'Arc of the anti-Semitic BDS movement, serves as a Columbia professor and as the president of the Modern Language Association, arguably the most powerful single faculty organization due to the massive size of writing, literature, and language faculties across the country. Due to its proximity to Wall Street as well as New York mass media, more power networks crisscross at Columbia than anywhere else.

Racial ironies stagger the mind. Columbia University sits in Harlem. The college has displaced historic black communities through gentrification, eminent domain, and property seizures (connections to government sure come in handy). The famous 125th Street of urban lore is no longer a landscape of black city life and storefront churches – one would have to travel uptown many blocks to see that. Due to Columbia, the bustling stretch of western Manhattan from 96th Street past 125th Street has been transformed into a chic, expensive, and not predominantly black section of the "Upper West Side." 

A College in Harlem Should Be Able to Discuss Race

If we need to have frank dialogue about race, Columbia ought to be the place where that happens. It produced the only black president in U.S. history and stands as a testament to racial inequality, urban displacement, and tough social justice questions.

We need a dialogue about race, we hear. I agree, as long as we actually talk about it honestly, rather than showcase superficial issues and only let one side shout down the other while the big and ugly conundrums go unresolved (like why not dissolve Columbia and give all this back to the American people?).

The United States has always had a problem with race. We should give ourselves a break, since it is not really our fault. It all began with a man who gave Columbia University its name.

Columbia's namesake, Christopher Columbus, landed in the West Indies at the end of the fifteenth century. Right about then, Queen Isabella, having emerged from a civil war in Spain, chose to escalate the Spanish Inquisition.

Shortly thereafter, a Protestant revolution and Catholic response would explode, leaving England and Spain as belligerents in a religiously charged rivalry to shape the globe for centuries. While Protestants and Catholics dueled, Jewish dispersion across Europe intensified. Also, Muslims encroached from the Ottoman Empire in the East and butted against the Habsburgs, paving the historical pathway to World Wars I and II, the Holocaust and founding of modern Israel, the East-West politics of the Cold War era, and current tensions with the Middle East.

Bartolomé de las Casas, a Spanish priest, defended the rights of Indians vigorously in the sixteenth century. His accounts of Spanish and Catholic cruelty against the Indians boosted an English Protestant public relations war against Spanish barbarism in the New World. Perhaps without intending to, Las Casas also boosted the African slave trade by saying Indians deserved freedom without rebuking his contemporaries who thought black slaves imported by the Portuguese from Africa should replace the Indians as the captive labor force in America.

The English would thereafter claim that their colonization was kinder and gentler than Spain's. This affirmed Anglo-Saxon identity as rooted in human rights and the Magna Carta. Much of the Spanish-speaking world would thereafter play the victim and call gringos meanies. Blacks in both realms got a raw deal and have grown to be blunt about how they feel about it.

What an incredible mess. But that's America's history in a nutshell. Columbia University stands in Harlem, a historically black neighborhood. If Columbia cannot help people – at the very least its own students – make sense of all this, it does not deserve to exist. It should cease to operate.

Columbia Is a Joke

On a brisk night on Columbia's campus, one skinny white youth wanders into the bottomless pit of American racial psychosis. See this video.

In what appears to most people a typical folly of drunken youth, the boy (I say "boy" because this white youth seems too young to call a man yet) declares that he loves white people, he loves being white, white people have done amazing things like medicine and industry and science, and "white people are the best thing that ever happened to the world." It is not clear whether he is also coming out as gay, since he cries out, "I love my white men." I hope he means in the agape sense.

He never speaks ill of any black people, Muslims, Latinos, or Asians. He says he hates nobody (and I believe him when he says that). If, at his least inhibited, being filmed by a social justice warrior desperate to catch him in "racism," he avoids saying anything negative at all about the many races in the world that are not white, he should cut a positive figure.

His unguarded heart shows no hatred of other races. He probably has no hidden agenda other than what he showed the world – which consists of, it seems, a facetious nature and joyful perception of his own whiteness as nothing to be ashamed of. But the West has descended into a superstition based on "dog whistles," supposed innuendos that only those blessed with an oppressed identity can hear.

At four in the morning, loosened up with a little bit of alcohol, passing time with peers, this young person in question – Julian von Abele – voiced an opinion with all the passionate honesty one comes to expect from youth.

Somebody captured fifty-two seconds of Julian von Abele's drunken postulations on a camera phone. The ensuing history played out on Twitter. By 7:24 AM, roughly three and a half hours after von Abele spoke, his name and identity would be revealed to millions of people in an absurd "racism" and "white supremacy" controversy that would end up spilling onto NBC, the Daily Beast, dozens of major national news outlets, and ultimately a coalition of outraged Columbia deans.

By 8:00 A.M., people around the world called for von Abele to be expelled, arrested, and utterly banished from society, with one journalist, Tim Wise, calling on his Twitter following to "wreck him" for life.

How did this happen? A fellow Columbia student named Aala Nasir had posted the video on Twitter with the loaded message, "Twitter, do your thing." Nasir's profile pic not too subtly shows her wearing a hijab. Her Twitter timeline makes clear that she opposes Columbia's curriculum for being too Eurocentric. One would surmise that her posting of von Abele's video stems from some desire to blame Columbia's academic programming for his "disappointing but not surprising" tirade.

Nasir does not seem to have directly outed von Abele's name at first. Another Twitter account named "Black Girl Culture" posted a photo naming von Abele and making him easy to locate at Columbia. Black Girl Culture falsely accused von Abele of "assaulting" black students. Most newspapers covered the story calling von Abele's statements racist, white supremacist, and an attack on people of color.

I have published copious evidence that United States universities have fallen into the hands of "wackos, thugs, and perverts," as I explained in the subtly titled Wackos Thugs & Perverts. I have criticized not only liberals, but also conservatives for how they have mishandled universities in recent decades. But the Julian von Abele case surpasses anything I have seen in the past.

Here is why. He didn't do anything wrong. Nobody can show any signs that anyone had reason to be afraid or hurt. Yet Columbia administrators have stated in writing that they must mobilize counselors to deal with an epidemic of students of color feeling unsafe. Von Abele never insulted any race. He did not assault, accost, or attack anyone. The video shows him retreating from a group of students and reacting nonviolently as they stab at his face with their fingers and crowd around him. In a subsequent interview with the Daily Beast, von Abele says the other crowd of students started berating him first for supporting Trump. I believe him. So do many others, since he opened a Twitter account and in one day had 11,000 followers. Clearly, a huge crowd of people fed up with racial animus has rallied around him.

The students who doxxed and targeted him have done what supporters of the Tyler Clementi Act demonized as harassment as recently as 2017. In the Tyler Clementi case, a group of minority students ganged up on a white student and posted video of him online. Clementi killed himself. Because he was gay, the sympathy fell entirely on his side.

With this event, Columbia University has crossed the line into an existential paradox. The faculty, students, and administration of this organization find common cause in a delusional and exceedingly destructive – even cruel – vision of humanity. They cannot look at a minute of video and draw anything resembling an objective conclusion. They are incompetent. They are dangerously manipulative. They are, perhaps, insane. And they are sitting on untold reserves of wealth and political power.

I stand with Julian von Abele but feel that he should leave the university. Certainly, the minority students who have committed a grave injustice against their white classmate should withdraw from Columbia out of protest over the institution's racism. Otherwise, their public personae will be remembered for nothing other than heartless abuse of a peer and galling hypocrisy.

One might infer that the administrators and trustees have used this event to forge a fake alliance between the university that has exploited Harlem and the minority students who should quit the college in protest. They unite against an easy scapegoat. By deflecting rage onto a thin and vulnerable young boy who did nothing wrong, they present themselves as white knights, evade scrutiny for their corruption, and misdirect everyone's attention from the deep crisis afflicting higher education.

This boy named Julian will come out okay. He seems smart and talented – too good for a place like this. But Columbia is a microcosm of the Deep State ruining America. Whether we laugh or vomit when we see fiascoes like this, we have to stop pretending this is okay. Places like this university need to be shut down.


Robert Oscar Lopez can be followed at English Manif.

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/12/student_says_he_loves_white_people_columbia_university_explodes.html

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“Experts”: U.S. Will Never Beat Jihadis Unless They Give Them Money and Power - Robert Spencer

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by Robert Spencer

Failed analysts keep pushing failed policies.

 
AFP reported Saturday that “experts” say “Western powers fighting Islamist groups around the globe are condemned to a never-ending battle if they only tackle the symptoms and not the underlying causes of jihadist insurgency.” That is true, but these establishment “experts” have no idea of the actual underlying causes, and are recommending the same counterterror remedies that have failed again and again.

“The West is on the road to winning all the battles and losing the war,” warns Katherine Zimmerman, who wrote a recent report for the American Enterprise Institute. On that, Zimmerman is actually right. But she and her fellow analysts are clueless about how to win it. They demonstrate in this AFP article that they haven’t the first foggiest clue as to what those underlying causes of “jihadist insurgency” really are, and have learned nothing over the last seventeen years of failed analysis, failed policies, and failed foreign misadventures.

Katherine Zimmerman, who wrote a recent report for the American Enterprise Institute, says: “It’s easy to say, ‘We’re going to kill the person responsible for making the bomb.’ It is much more difficult to say that our partner government has disenfranchised this group and it’s one of the reasons why this person joins the terrorist group. And now he is the bomb maker.”

So the problem, you see, according to the “expert” Zimmerman, is that “our partner government has disenfranchised this group,” and these disenfranchised Muslims turn to jihad. If only we stopped disenfranchising Muslims, they wouldn’t turn to jihad. Zimmerman likely doesn’t know it, but in Islamic law the goal of jihad is to establish the rule of Sharia. So what she is recommending is that we give them their goal, the rule of Islamic law, so that they won’t have to fight for it.

Yes, it’s absurd, but it’s exactly what we did in both Afghanistan and Iraq: we fought wars to install Sharia Constitutions in both countries, ignoring the fact that Sharia directs Muslims to wage war against and subjugate non-Muslims. Did it lessen the jihad? Obviously not. The Sharia Constitutions ensured that neither country would or could ever be a reliable ally of the United States, and planted the seeds for the eventual disruption of the relationships in which the U.S. has invested so many trillions of dollars.

But John Allen, who heads the Brookings Institution, wants us to spend still more. He said that the problem is “a development issue, much more than a counter-terrorism issue.”

“A development issue,” i.e., we have to help Muslim countries develop, that is, give them money, and that will end the jihad.

But jihad activity doesn’t actually arise from poverty. The New York Times reported that “not long after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001…Alan B. Krueger, the Princeton economist, tested the widespread assumption that poverty was a key factor in the making of a terrorist. Mr. Krueger’s analysis of economic figures, polls, and data on suicide bombers and hate groups found no link between economic distress and terrorism.”

CNS News noted in September 2013 that “according to a Rand Corporation report on counterterrorism, prepared for the Office of the Secretary of Defense in 2009, ‘Terrorists are not particularly impoverished, uneducated, or afflicted by mental disease. Demographically, their most important characteristic is normalcy (within their environment). Terrorist leaders actually tend to come from relatively privileged backgrounds.’ One of the authors of the RAND report, Darcy Noricks, also found that according to a number of academic studies, ‘Terrorists turn out to be more rather than less educated than the general population.’”

Said AFP: “If those grievances were not taken into account, they warned, the jihadist groups were sure to be back.” And the jihadists will be back, but largely because the “experts” have no idea how to counter them.

The fact that these “experts” are so far off track is not really a surprise. The American Enterprise Institute has always been clueless, and the Brookings Institution is thoroughly compromised and Qatar-funded. Yet these are the voices that are heeded and studied at the highest levels, while I am derided and dismissed. The only thing is, I am right and they are wrong, but by the time anyone in any position of authority realizes that, it is likely to be far too late.

Robert Spencer

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272258/experts-us-will-never-beat-jihadis-unless-they-robert-spencer

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Russia warns Lebanon against violations of ‎Israeli territory - Israel Hayom Staff

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by Israel Hayom Staff

Moscow demands that the Lebanese army destroy terror tunnels in its territory regardless of Hezbollah's culpability in their construction

IDF troops near the Israel-Lebanon border during Operation Northern Shield
Photo: IDF Spokesperson's Unit 

Russia has demanded that Lebanon take action against ‎the network of Hezbollah terror tunnels revealed by ‎Israel under the two countries' shared border, the ‎London-based Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper reported ‎Monday.‎

So far, four Hezbollah tunnels snaking under the ‎Israel-Lebanon border have been unearthed by the ‎IDF as part of an extensive operation to neutralize ‎the underground passageways. ‎

According to the report, Moscow has made it clear to ‎Beirut that the tunnels violate U.N. Security ‎Council Resolution 1701, adopted to end the 2006 war ‎between Lebanon and Israel, and the Kremlin has ‎further demanded that the Lebanese army deal with ‎the tunnels on its territory.‎

Israel's counter-tunnel operation, launched on Dec. ‎‎4, has so far been very careful not to infringe on ‎Lebanese sovereignty while exposing the tunnels.‎ The reported Russian demand followed a visit to ‎Moscow last week by an Israeli military delegation. ‎

Russian sources told the British publication that ‎the demand was made regardless of Hezbollah's culpability in digging the underground grid, adding that Russia backs ‎the Israeli operation, known as Operation Northern ‎Shield. ‎

Lebanese President Michel Aoun and Prime Minister ‎Saad Hariri have both downplayed the chances of the ‎Israeli operation leading to any escalation on the ‎border, saying that as long as Israel does not ‎violate Lebanese sovereignty, there would be no ‎reason for fresh hostilities in the sector. ‎

Meanwhile, the U.N. Security Council is poised to ‎discuss Hezbollah's terror tunnels during its next ‎session, set for Wednesday. ‎

Israel Hayom Staff

Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/2018/12/17/russia-warns-lebanon-against-violations-of-%e2%80%8eisraeli-territory/

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Time to investigate the investigators? - Elad Hakim

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by Elad Hakim

Mueller and his crew have crossed the legal line.

Many in the mainstream media and on the left have been salivating since the Mueller memos were released last week. They believe that the information in the memos has brought them one step closer to achieving their ultimate goal(s), whereby President Trump is impeached and/or incarcerated. As they see it, information from various individuals is slowly trickling in and those on the left and their media sidekicks are predicting a very ominous future for the president. However, if the media and those on the left want to critique the information that is allegedly being disclosed, perhaps they should use the same lens and look at some of the allegations that have been made about the investigation and/or how it was conducted before rendering judgment. 

For example, Jerome Corsi recently filed a lawsuit against Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team. According to Fox News, Corsi filed a “criminal and ethics complaint” against Mueller’s team in which he accused investigators of trying to bully him into giving “false testimony” against the president. Pursuant to Corsi’s complaint, “they wanted him to demonstrate that he acted as a liaison between [Roger] Stone and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on one side and the Trump campaign on the other, regarding the release of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee.” Corsi further alleged that Robert Mueller’s office threatened to charge him with making/providing a false statement unless he provided “false testimony” against Trump and others.

In addition to Corsi’s allegations, former national security advisor Michael Flynn, who pled guilty to criminal charges, alleged that he was mistreated by agents and/or investigators during a 2017 interview which ultimately led to those charges. On Wednesday, Flynn appeared before U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan (Flynn is expected to be sentenced this week). At the hearing, Flynn’s legal team made several concerning allegations:

FBI agents in his case did not instruct Flynn that any false statements he made could constitute a crime and decided not to "confront" him directly about anything he said that contradicted their knowledge of his wiretapped communications with Kislyak.
Earlier this week, Flynn's legal team also made the allegation that the FBI had pushed him not to bring a lawyer to his interview with agents at the White House.

As a result, Sullivan ordered Mueller to turn over all documents and memos related to Flynn’s questioning. This is a significant development.

The allegations and/or claims made by these two men are serious and should be investigated. Together, if true, they begin to paint a picture of an investigation that is marred by deception, lies, and questionable conduct. Sadly, many prominent Democrats and their media mouthpieces are so obsessed with bringing down the president that they are willing to overlook these “trickles of information,” deeming them irrelevant and not newsworthy. In reality, these allegations are very important and should be given the same weight even if they don’t align with the Democrats’ stated goals and/or the media’s distorted narrative. After all, when Justice Kavanaugh was accused, many prominent Democrats and news outlets demanded a full FBI investigation (and to delay the hearing) despite the fact that the allegations were uncorroborated. Shouldn’t these allegations justify similar calls for the sake of transparency? 

While many media outlets and prominent Democrats appear happy to unequivocally accept Mueller’s “findings,” the recent allegations must be viewed with objectivity and with the same lens. The charges are serious and compel further investigation. While everyone is busy looking at the accused, maybe it is also time to critique the accusers and investigators in light of these new revelations.


Mr. Hakim is a political writer and commentator and an attorney. His articles have been published in The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, The Western Journal, American Thinker and other online publications.
https://thoughtfullyconservative.wordpress.com
Twitter: @ThoughtfulGOP

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/12/time_to_investigate_the_investigators.html

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Report: Airbnb in discussions with Israeli Tourism Ministry - Gary Willig

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by Gary Willig

Tourism Minister meets delegates from Airbnb to discuss company's boycott of Jews in Judea and Samaria.

Reuters

A delegation of Airbnb officials arrived in Israel to discuss with the Minister of Tourism the controversy surrounding the company's decision to boycott all Jewish homes in Judea and Samaria, Monday, according to Channel 10 News' Barak Ben David.

A notice is expected to be issued when the meeting is concluded.

Last month, the online rental marketplace announced that it will no longer list homes in Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria. About 200 homes in Judea and Samaria had been listed on Airbnb prior to the announcement.

Airbnb justified the decision by stating that it had developed a new five point checklist for handling listings in "occupied territories." and had "concluded that we should remove listings in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank that are at the core of the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians."

Critics have accused Airbnb of discrimination against Jews as it continues to list properties in Judea and Samaria that are not owned by Jews and has not delisted any properties in any other conflict zone, including Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus, Russian-occupied Crimea, or Chinese occupied Tibet, among others.


Gary Willig

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/256300

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Nuclear Energy: Saudi Arabia’s Impending Battle with Washington - Dr. James M. Dorsey

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by Dr. James M. Dorsey

Several factors are likely to strengthen efforts to thwart an agreement that honors Saudi insistence on producing its own nuclear fuel, even though it can buy it more cheaply abroad.

Nuclear power plant cooling towers, image via Wikimedia Commons

BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,038, December 17, 2018

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: While making assurances about solely peaceable nuclear intentions, Saudi Arabia continues to show interest in retaining the option of developing nuclear weapons capabilities – an interest that could put it on a collision course with the US. 

Saudi General Khalid bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, a son of the late Saudi crown prince and defense minister Sultan bin Abdul Aziz al Saud and commander of the US-led international alliance that forced Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait in 1991, recounted in his memoir that it was “my task to negotiate the deal, devise an appropriate deception plan, choose a team of Saudi officers and men and arrange for their training in both Saudi Arabia and China, build and defend operation bases and storage facilities in different parts of the kingdom, arrange for the shipment of the missiles from China and, at every stage, be ready to defend the project against sabotage or any form of attack.”

The incident, coupled with more recent Saudi statements and the kingdom’s inability to present a credible and sustainable version of events surrounding the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi on the premises of its Istanbul consulate, is complicating its negotiations with the US for the acquisition of designs for nuclear power plants in a deal valued at up to $80 billion depending on how many Saudi Arabia ultimately decides to build.

Prospects of a massive deal go to the heart of President Donald Trump’s America First policy, which is focused on jobs and deals. But growing criticism and distrust of Saudi Arabia in the US Congress and intelligence community as a result of the Khashoggi crisis, as well as of the kingdom’s handling of the Yemen war, which has sparked the world’s worst humanitarian crisis since WWII, are likely to strengthen efforts to thwart an agreement that honors Saudi insistence on producing its own nuclear fuel, even though it can buy it more cheaply abroad.

The kingdom’s insistence on this has fueled concerns that it may divert nuclear fuel for military purposes. Similar fears coupled with Iran’s ballistic missile program drove world powers to first sanction Iran and then conclude a 2015 international agreement that curbed Iran’s nuclear program. Trump withdrew from that agreement earlier this year, charging that it did not provide sufficient guarantees that Iran would not be able to develop a nuclear weapon.

Congressional Democrats have described refusing to sell Saudi Arabia nuclear technology as  proper punishment for the killing of Khashoggi, which the kingdom insists was done without the knowledge of Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman.

While the Trump administration has as yet not abandoned longstanding strict US nuclear export safeguards to secure a deal with Saudi Arabia, it has also not unambiguously said it would uphold them.

As he did in his rejection of hard-hitting sanctions in the wake of the Khashoggi killing, Trump is likely to argue that if the US does not conclude a nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, countries like China, Russia, and South Korea, which have less strict controls, will step in. The argument essentially is that the US must commit a wrong because if it doesn’t, someone else will.

Saudi officials have repeatedly insisted that the kingdom is developing nuclear capabilities for peaceful purposes such as medicine, electricity generation, and desalination of sea water. They say Saudi Arabia is committed to putting its future facilities under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

However, with a $56 billion military budget for 2018, Saudi Arabia is stepping up the development of a domestic military industry. The kingdom aims to source 50% of its military procurement domestically by 2030, up from its current 2%.

Speaking to CBS earlier this year, Prince Muhammad appeared to put conditions on Saudi nuclear assurances by warning that “Saudi Arabia does not want to acquire any nuclear bomb, but without a doubt, if Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible.”

In putting forward  demands for parity with Iran by getting the right to controlled enrichment of uranium and the reprocessing of spent fuel into plutonium, potential building blocks for nuclear weapons, Saudi Arabia was also seen as potentially backing away from a 2009 memorandum of understanding with the US in which it pledged to acquire nuclear fuel from international markets.

Nuclear energy cooperation was one of a host of agreements concluded last year by Saudi Arabia and China during a visit to Beijing by Saudi King Salman. The agreement included a feasibility study for the construction of high-temperature gas-cooled (HTGR) nuclear power plants in the kingdom as well as cooperation on intellectual property and the development of a domestic industrial supply chain for HTGRs built in Saudi Arabia. The HTGR agreement built on an accord signed in 2012 that involved maintenance and development of nuclear power plants and research reactors, as well as the provision of Chinese nuclear fuel.

A report by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) released shortly after the king’s visit warned that the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement had “not eliminated the kingdom’s desire for nuclear weapons capabilities and even nuclear weapons.”

As they were in the era of General bin Sultan, potential Chinese sales to Saudi Arabia of ballistic missiles and cruise missiles remain one of the murkier areas of Sino-Saudi military cooperation.

Military experts say that satellite imagery of missile bases in Saudi Arabia in recent years and other open-source circumstantial evidence, including Saudi press coverage of graduation ceremonies at the kingdom’s Strategic Missile Force school in Wadi ad-Dawasir, attest to ongoing transfers.

In 2014, Saudi Arabia showcased Chinese-made Dongfeng-3 missiles that have a range of up to 5,000 km. Media reports said the missiles had been purchased in 2007, possibly with US acquiescence.

“Saudi Arabia has invested heavily in conventional ballistic and cruise missiles to provide the kingdom a shot of strategic deterrence,” said non-proliferation expert Jeffrey Lewis. His conclusion was confirmed by Anwar Eshqi, a retired Saudi major general and advisor to the Saudi military.

“The Saudi military did indeed receive DF-21 missiles from China and the integration of the missiles, including a full maintenance check and upgraded facilities, is complete,“ Eshqi said, referring to the People’s Republic’s East Wind solid-fuel, medium-range ballistic missile.

View PDF

BESA Center Perspectives Papers are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family

Dr. James M. Dorsey, a non-resident Senior Associate at the BESA Center, is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University and co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture.

Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/nuclear-energy-saudi-arabia/

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Democracy, Deliberation, and the Internet - Bruce Thornton

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by Bruce Thornton

The insidious power of the sophist and demagogue in our 24/7 virtual world.

For 2500 years a consistent criticism of giving political power to the masses has been the question of competence. To critics like Socrates and Plato, the knowledge of history, philosophy, and facts necessary for governing are beyond the abilities of the average citizen. Hoi polloi had to spend their time making a living rather than studying these disciplines, or they were by nature driven more by their self-interest, appetites, and passions than by the rational search for knowledge of the true and good. Thus from Plato’s Republic to today’s progressive technocrats, some form of technocracy has been preferable to rule by the “low-information” voting masses.

In the last few decades, the explosion of information instantly available on the internet has made this fear of giving political power to the uninformed more urgent in an age of “fake news.” Has the availability of an astonishing volume of information worsened the dangers of ignorance to governing, or has it provided a means of correcting it?

Plato’s student Aristotle, in his critique of his old teacher, points toward one answer to this perennial discomfort with mass democracy and voter ignorance. Responding to Plato’s complaint of the lack of technical and philosophical skills among the people, Aristotle pointed out that what we now call “crowd-sourcing” can still make democratic deliberation effective:

For the many, of whom each individual is not a good man, when they meet together may be better than the few good, if regarded not individually but collectively . . . For each individual among them has a share of excellence and practical wisdom, and when they meet together, just as they become in a manner one man, with many feet, and hands, and senses, so too with regard to their character and thought.” Thus, “although individually they [the masses] may be worse judges than those who have special knowledge, as a body they are as good or better.

In some respects, the internet provides ample evidence of the mechanism at work. A trivial, some might say, example is the P.C. police’s complaints about the Christmas classic “Baby it’s Cold Outside.” This postwar hit, whose lyrics comprise a back-and-forth between a man and woman in which he’s trying to convince her not to leave, has been condemned by progressives for promoting “date rape,” and for being a “trigger” for women who have been sexually assaulted. The comments from the online Wall Street Journal article on the controversy illustrate how the “wisdom of crowds” can be manifested and consumed by millions of people, and come to conclusions superior to those who fancy themselves superior thinkers.

The commentators quickly identified the obvious problems with those advocating for banning the song. One quoted some obscene and vulgar lyrics from a Jay Z song––“Gosh, no misogyny or risk for a woman in this song,” he observed, exposing the usual incoherent politically correct double standard by which innocuous popular songs from 70 years ago are condemned and banned while gangsta-rap lyrics replete with misogyny, violence, and copious amounts of vulgarities like “bitch” and slurs like the so-called “n-word” pass unnoticed. Someone else also hit the hypocrisy of the left’s complaints: “Remember when the left had to remind VP Dan Quayle that Murphy Brown was just a fictional character?” Another respondent pointed out the obvious fact of changes in tastes and standards through time: “All manner of lyrics, books, and television shows won’t pass muster with modern taste and values.” Yet they are historical artifacts that open a window into an earlier time, which can be a learning experience for the open-minded.

Another points out, “Just because you’re offended doesn’t mean you are right.” A necessary reminder of moral common sense. Still another reminds us that each of us has the power to turn off the radio if we’re offended by the lyrics: “Turn the knob on the radio. Free speech trumps offensiveness. You have no right not to be offended. Get over it.” Then there’s the point that “there are more important problems around that will affect more people’s well being [sic] that we should be worried about.” Or we’re provided information that the reporter missed: “The song is sung on the movie [E]lf . . . Really cute, no thought of rape, i think” [sic]. And don’t forget usual comments-section waggery: “Size of mind inversely proportional to size of mouth. And these people can be very LOUD.”

Now, one can fault taking examples from The Wall Street Journal since it represents a more affluent, educated, or conservative sample of readers. But that’s not an issue when you have hundreds of thousands of venues where such conversations take place non-stop. That’s what the internet has brought to the media in this country––enough variety to make sure every demographic has numerous niches that appeal to each, a big improvement over just a few decades ago.

Before cable news, the internet, social media, and talk radio, a large and diverse citizenry had to get its news and editorials from a greatly reduced number of newspapers, AM radio, and three television networks. Unsurprisingly, the creators and deliverers of content became more and more homogenized by class, region, education, and political point of view. We all know what the consequences of that have been: the colonizing of establishment media by an increasingly left-wing Democrat Party, a change evident over forty years ago in the partisan coverage of Vietnam and Watergate.

Cable news, talk radio, and especially the internet weakened that monopoly by restoring and exponentially magnifying the diverse sources that earlier only television, daily newspapers and radio provided. Now millions and millions of people are providing information and opinion, and working as watchdogs subjecting information to scrutiny and analysis. The iconic example of this function took place during the 2004 presidential campaign, when the forged documents Dan Rather and CBS’ used to attack George Bush were exposed within hours of the broadcast by internet sleuths who showed the documents had been created on a word processor unavailable at the time the documents was allegedly composed. The ruin of Rather’s career showed that establishment media’s monopoly on information, and our faith in their skills and integrity, had been broken.

We also may be tempted to find these comments obvious or banal, and so of little value. But as George Orwell said, “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” What ordinary people find “obvious” is usually common sense, or what Aristotle above calls “practical wisdom,” the knowledge and understanding required for all to successfully manage their daily lives and interactions with others.  But we often discount common sense, for we have turned philosophical conflicts–– over human nature and behavior, or how people should live in order to fulfill their potential as rational human beings, or what social and political orders create the most freedom, justice, and happiness for the most people––into “sciences” that only an elite of credentialed “experts” can master, to whose authority we should defer and not even challenge, lest we expose ourselves as “anti-science.”

This category error of thinking that deliberating and talking about people and their social behavior can be a “science,” or that all policies can be “science-based,” as progressives claim, lies at the heart of modern progressivism’s dream of a technocracy. But when we consider the extent of the surreal lunacy of many of the ideas embraced and promoted today by formally educated people–– such as denying the scientific fact that sex identity is biological–– we can see that of many issues our progressive “brights” think that science supports, in fact are mere bad philosophical ideas reflecting personal or ideological preference rather than a reality supported by empirical evidence. Indeed, traditional wisdom and common sense are frequently a better guide to human reality than the thousands of “studies” turned out by think tanks and universities, significant numbers of which cannot be replicated by other researchers. The crowd-sourcing of the internet has become a useful and efficient way for fulfilling that “first duty” of those who still have their common sense and practical wisdom to counter the pretensions of scientism.

A more serious criticism of the internet wild west of information is the lack of filters (other than Google and social media censors) on raw content that can reach the reader instantly. Yet this problem is essentially similar to another complaint about democracy that arose with its origins. Critics like Plato and Thucydides decried the average citizen’s susceptibility to orators and rhetoricians schooled in the duplicitous arts of persuasion, the power through language to make the bad and false appear the good and true. Those trained in such rhetorical skills will seduce the citizens with appeals to their passions and appetites. Their passions roused by sophists, as Plato says in the Republic, the citizens will get swept up in the excitement, and few will be able “to stand firm against the overwhelming flood of popular opinion,” or will be “carried away by the stream,” and soon “have the notions of good and evil which the public in general––he will do as they do, and as they are, such will he be.”

If these are the dangers of listening to public debates among a few thousand citizens occurring face-to-face in real time, how much more insidious and threatening is our vast virtual world of 24/7 and anonymous abundance not just of words and texts, but of images both real and imaginary, all of which magnify exponentially the power of the sophist and demagogue to shape opinions.

Yet in the end, the responsibility for consuming critically the information available to us lies with the free citizen, in whose hands the success of democratic governments with universal voting rights have always lain. It is as much up to us to use that freedom and resource carefully and responsibly, as it was up to the Athenian citizen to listen warily to the smooth-talking orators.

The larger point is either we are capable of self-rule or we are not. America for over two centuries has been an experiment on the answer to that question. The democratizing and decentralizing of information of the last few decades should improve our ability to engage in political discourse more effectively by loosening controls over who produces or provide information. If it doesn’t, the fault will lie with ourselves, not the internet.


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/272235/democracy-deliberation-and-internet-bruce-thornton

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Do Americans really worry about the non-shutdown ‘government shutdown’? - Thomas Lifson

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by Thomas Lifson

Chuck Schumer doesn't seem to realize that he is re-staging a famous scene in the movie Blazing Saddles

Chuck Schumer clearly thinks that he’s got a winning issue with blaming President Trump for a prospective “government shutdown” Friday, if no budget bill is passed that includes $5 billion for border wall improvements. Since he promises that no such money will be forthcoming from the Senate, he obviously anticipates the public reacting in horror over the Christmas holidays as federal employees labeled “non-essential” stay home.

But Rep. Thomas Massey, a libertarian-leaning GOP House member from Kentucky, has published an amazing graph that shows how meaningless this “disaster” really is for almost everybody:

Clarice Feldman yesterday nailed it on who really fears a “shutdown”

So, nonessential federal employees (mostly Democrats) will be out of work because the Democrats choose illegal immigration over national security. Since voters overwhelmingly want a check on illegal immigration and aren’t enamored of an overreaching, often utterly incompetent and often corrupt federal labor force, how do you imagine this will play out?

Schumer threatening disaster if the “shutdown” occurs reminds me of a classic scene in Blazing Saddles (a movie that could not be made today, because we have lost so much of our freedom of speech), in which Sheriff Bart takes himself hostage. (snowflake warning: the n-word is used)




Thomas Lifson

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/12/do_americans_really_worry_about_the_nonshutdown_government_shutdown.html

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