THE TRUE-STATE SOLUTION Daniel J. Arbess WALL STREET JOURNAL Jan. 2, 2019 https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-true-state-solution-11546473263 Follow the map the British drew in 1922, which put Arab and Jewish Palestine across the Jordan River. The Trump administration has offered tantalizing clues about its forthcoming “Deal of the Century” for Mideast peace. It could be a bold new concept—replacing the failed “two-state solution” with a Jordan-Israel confederacy, in which Jordan would be recognized as the Palestinian state. Call it the true-state solution. Palestinians have always been the majority in Jordan, though they haven’t been treated as such since its creation as a British-appointed Hashemite monarchy in 1921. The true-state solution would enfranchise the Palestinians. Jordan would extend citizenship to, and assume administrative responsibility for, Arabs now living on the West Bank of the Jordan River—including the cities of Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah, Bethlehem and Jericho—which would be Israeli territory. West Bank Jordanians could receive financial support to relocate across the river to Jordan itself if they wish, or remain as permanent residents (but not citizens) of Israel. Israelis would be free to live anywhere west of the Jordan River. Variations of this “Jordan option” have received increasing attention across the region in recent years. Why would King Abdullah II accept such an arrangement? To be blunt, it would be his best option. His rule—and his family’s security and fortune—already teeters under pressure of regional migration and domestic Palestinian discontent. The king’s acquiescence—or possibly U.S.-guided abdication—would probably buy his family’s protection. Trump administration officials have promised their plan will take advantage of Israel’s recent unprecedented collaboration with its Arab neighbors and other developments that suggest “things can be done today that were previously unthinkable,” as then-Ambassador Nikki Haley said last month. The administration promises a new approach based on practical realities. Start with a truthful foundation of history. Britain inherited all of present-day Jordan and Israel when the Ottoman Empire dissolved after World War I. The Palestinian Mandate of 1922 divided the area into Arab Palestine (Transjordan), comprising 78% of the territory, and Jewish Palestine (Israel), the remaining 22%. Britain later tried to accommodate Arab opposition by further dividing Israel’s 22% in what became the United Nations Partition Plan of 1947. The Jewish Agency for Palestine immediately accepted that plan. But when the General Assembly passed the resolution recognizing Israel’s independence, the Arab states immediately launched a war, which squandered the Partition Plan’s window for an Arab state on the West Bank. Jordan, encouraged by Britain, annexed the West Bank in 1950—a move the Arab League bitterly opposed and almost no state recognized. That arguably left Israel with the legal right under the original British Mandate to claim sovereignty over the entire 22% of Palestine outside modern Jordan. Israel’s claim was further consolidated by its victory in the 1967 war. Jordan later disavowed its claim on the West Bank and severed administrative ties in 1988, leaving the status of its former citizens further in limbo. Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization had tried to win Palestinian control of Jordan, repeatedly attempting to assassinate King Hussein in the 1960s. After the PLO was evicted to Syria by Jordanian troops in “Black September” 1970, the PLO’s narrative shifted entirely to painting Israel as the Palestinians’ “occupier.” Despite underwriting a two-state settlement in the 1993 Oslo Accords, Arafat’s launching of the second intifada seven years later revealed that the PLO’s paramount goal was still rejection and delegitimation of Israel, not coexistence. West Bank Palestinians have been fortunate to remain in territory under Israeli protection and administration since the 1967 war. They have been unwanted by the Hashemite Kingdom or other Arab nations—then and since. Little wonder that polls suggest a large majority of West Bank Palestinians would prefer life in Israel to being governed by the Palestinian Authority. They seek normal lives, jobs they can travel to and other basic human liberties. This would be possible with a Palestinian role in Jordan’s leadership that not only accepts the Jewish state’s legitimacy and mutual security responsibilities with Israel, as the Hashemite Kingdom already does, but also restores the Palestinians’ Jordanian citizenship and coordinates with Israel in civilly administering the West Bank. There are Palestinians who would support such a move. Mudar Zahran, 45, is a Jordanian Palestinian who describes himself leader of the Jordanian Opposition Coalition. He lives in Britain under asylum, having been convicted in 2014 in absentia for “inciting hatred against the regime, sectarian strife and insulting the king as well as security services” to show for it. Mr. Zahran told the European Parliament in September that what holds back the Palestinian people from enjoying Israel’s economic prosperity is the corruption of the Palestinian Authority and the Hashemite family’s exploitation of Jordan’s Palestinian majority. “Let our people go,” he implored, “both peoples, Jordanians and Israelis.” A true-state solution would let them end the futile refrain of resisting and defending and get on pursuing common interests as they have been for decades in Jerusalem’s Old City. A Palestinian capital in Amman would have no use for the Palestinian Authority, much less its corrupt, illegitimate and unpopular leaders and their incitement. Would King Abdullah make room for more-representative governance in Jordan? Or might some forward-looking Palestinian emerge, with U.S., Israeli and Arab support, to advance his citizens’ economic prospects and human rights? And what about Gaza? U.S. officials have said they see that as a separate problem and its resolution as a prerequisite for success. It seems logical that Palestinians there could also enjoy a confederacy option, with either Jordan or Egypt. The true-state solution would be innovative and elegant—worthy of “Deal of the Century” designation. If it materializes, Barack Obama will ironically deserve some of the credit. His cultivation of Iran’s Ayatollahs stimulated the Arab states’ recent cooperation with Israel. And Donald Trump will have proved instrumental in helping Israel fully attain its potential as a “light unto nations,” for all its cultures and inhabitants—Christians, Druze, Muslims and Jews—and as a beacon of democracy, prosperity, peace and stability in the Middle East and beyond. Mr. Arbess is CEO of Xerion Investments.

REPORT: CHINA, RUSSIA, OTHERS DEVELOPING SUPER-EMP BOMBS

REPORT: CHINA, RUSSIA, OTHERS DEVELOPING SUPER-EMP BOMBS https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/emp-attack-electromagnetic-pulse-nuclear-weapons/2019/01/24/id/899705/?ns_mail_uid=3ad9e824-f245-4f23-a61f-efd18c731702&ns_mail_job=DM13884_01262019&s=acs&dkt_nbr=010502nj7f7o A new Congressional report claims China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran are making nuclear bombs powerful enough to create super-electromagnetic pulse (EMP) waves that can destroy electronics over wide swaths of land. According to The Washington Free Beacon, the countries have nuclear EMP weapons built into their military plans. "Nuclear EMP attack is part of the military doctrines, plans, and exercises of Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran for a revolutionary new way of warfare against military forces and civilian critical infrastructures by cyber, sabotage, and EMP," reads the report from the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from EMP Attack. "This new way of warfare is called many things by many nations: In Russia, China, and Iran it is called Sixth Generation Warfare, Non-Contact Warfare, Electronic Warfare, Total Information Warfare, and Cyber Warfare." The nuclear bombs being developed, according to the report, could take out all electronics, ranging from computers and cell phones to entire electric grids, over several hundred miles. The EMP attacks would involve detonating nuclear weapons far above the ground, which would then send EMP pulses to the Earth and knock offline all electronics in their path. "A single nuclear weapon can potentially make an EMP attack against a target the size of North America," the report reads. "Any nuclear weapon detonated at an altitude of 30 kilometers or higher will generate a potentially catastrophic EMP."

HERE IS THE DEFINITIVE TIMELINE FOR THE COVINGTON CATHOLIC RUN IN AT THE LINCOLN MEMORIAL This is compelling, complete account of what actually happened. it is also an indictment of the media which created the frenzied atmosphere and false account which crucified the innocent high school students . It was Friday afternoon at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Three separate groups would clash, but only one would take the blame: a group of predominantly white kids (some wearing red MAGA hats), a group of Native Americans, and some black street preachers. Now in today’s media and social climate, just based off of that description… who do you think would wind up getting assigned the blame? And the reasonable answer should be, after watching a 60-second video of a kid smiling at a Native American banging a drum in his face, is… I’ve got NO CLUE what the heck that was. Sixty seconds doesn’t provide a whole lot of context. Here is the rest of the story. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1470&v=da1Wy4O2shc

WHAT IF THE FBI HAD PROBED OBAMA?

WHAT IF THE FBI HAD PROBED OBAMA? Lee Smith Jan. 23, 2019 https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-if-the-fbi-had-probed-obama-11548287966?emailToken=0cf1d599ad774bc59d34fed020f8a81fZNVZ3aW/jUO+avbyjbdwtPPqpqa7QgdaqaxSmPvZTWf+TUhNpNFNR643XhpqePin+LNlafpiI1t3mlj+iEVWvg%3D%3D&reflink=article_gmail_share By the bureau’s Trump standard, he looked like an agent of Iran. Counterintelligence agents would have examined the target’s personal and professional networks. The FBI investigated at least four Trump campaign figures for supposed ties to Russia. Only one, Mike Flynn, worked in the administration, and for less than a month. The Obama administration had a few senior officials with personal ties to Iran. Obama confidant Valerie Jarrett was born in the Iranian city of Shiraz and reportedly led back-channel talks with the Iranians in 2012. Secretary of State John Kerry’s daughter quashed right-wing rumors that her Iranian-American husband’s best man was the son of Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif. But under the FBI’s Trump procedures, that denial might have made her suspect. A month after Trump adviser Carter Page publicly asked then-Director James Comey for an interview to clear his name, the FBI obtained a warrant to wiretap him. As Mr. Trump’s desire for improved relations with Russia raised eyebrows at the bureau, a 2008 article written by John Brennan—who went on to serve as White House counterterrorism adviser and Central Intelligence Agency director—advocated a grand bargain with Iran. In 2009 the Obama White House conducted secret negotiations with Tehran. Mr. Obama later sidelined Project Cassandra, an investigation of illicit trafficking networks employed by Hezbollah, Iran’s Lebanese franchise. Launched in 2008, the investigation was run by a multiagency task force, including the FBI itself. Then for 18 months in 2014-15, the Obama White House gave the Iranians $700 million a month in sanctions relief. In January 2016, Mr. Obama sent Iran another $1.7 billion in cash. The administration also had a habit of leaking news of Israeli strikes on Iranian arms convoys and depots in Syria. All these Obama actions are easily explained: Inducing Iran to sign a nuclear agreement was the former president’s top foreign-policy priority. I believe this pro-Iran policy was disastrous. But it wasn’t collusion or treason or any of the other crimes of which Democrats and their media allies have accused Mr. Trump. The FBI’s suspicions about Mr. Trump’s relationship with the Kremlin were reportedly piqued by, among other things, a May 2017 television interview in which he said he fired Mr. Comey for the “Russia thing.” He’s also staged a series of brazenly public events where he professed his hopes of warmer ties with Vladimir Putin. Like Mr. Obama’s pro-Iran policies, Mr. Trump’s hope for better relations with Russia was anything but clandestine. Yet critics of the Russia investigations are wrong to suggest the attacks on the president and his associates reflect the increasing tendency to criminalize policy differences. It has nothing to do with policy, for Mr. Trump’s Russia policy has been as hard-line as that of any post-Cold War administration, including Mr. Obama’s. The FBI’s motive for investigating Mr. Trump looks more like pure politics. Mr. Smith is a media columnist for Tablet magazine..

MIL-ED supports Prager University... PragerU Content Silenced Once Again!

PragerU Content Silenced Once Again! PragerU Content Silenced Once Again! BREAKING: After only a few weeks of advertising PragerU content on Spotify, they have made the decision to "stop all existing ads and not approve any new ads coming through in the future." We still have not received any explanation from Spotify as to which specific policy we didn't comply with. Given the ongoing pattern of censorship of conservative voices online, it's clear that we are being silenced because we have a conservative point of view. Here is the email we received from Spotify: [Photo of the email notification from Spotify was reproduced – – – it is nonspecific and gives no reason for their summary decision. We can only conclude that Dennis Prager is 100% correct. This is part of a campaign to suppress conservative voices. As a nonpartisan, nonpolitical, publication we find that any attempt to to the supress free speech is also an attempt to amplify those elements that seek to demonize and emasculate America's military capability and to spread violence and division among America's very diverse population. Thus we join in publicizing the situation as being completely unacceptable to the spirit of American democracy, under which nearly all Americans have made considerable progress ] We will not back down from this latest attempt to silence our ideas and we will continue to fight back! We can't do this alone. Join us NOW and become a critical piece in this fight by donating today. Every day, PragerU is changing culture with online content that teaches the values that make America the freest and most prosperous nation on earth. Millions of Americans are watching our videos, and minds are changing. We cannot let that stop. The Left knows how effective we are. That's why they want to censor us. PragerU continues to fight online suppression of conservative ideas. Over the past year, we have led the charge in bringing public awareness to the issue of online censorship. Our case has been mentioned in nearly every article on the issue, and has been covered by several media giants, including the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and Buzzfeed. Over 500,000 Americans have signed our online petition urging Google and YouTube to end its censorship of conservative ideas. Our goal is to reach 1 million signatures by the time we meet Google in court. We need your support now more than ever. Please consider making a donation today.

RE: OMAHA ELDER NATHAN PHILLIPS AND HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT NICK SANDMANN GIVE THEIR VERSIONS OF VIRAL MOMENT ON THE STEPS OF THE LINCOLN MEMORIAL. [By  Michael E. Miller   Washington Post   January 21, 2019 ]

The Washington Post and  Michael E. Miller are guilty of knowingly and willfully peddling false news in their attempt to ignite racial and religious conflict and to demonize political opponents.

THEIR ACTIVITIES ARE A DANGER TO THE BLACK, JEWISH AND OTHER MINORITY COMMUNITIES IN THE UNITED STATES.

Instead of telling you to watch the  full video and determine for yourself that the "Hebrew Israelites" are a vicious anti-white, anti-semitic hate group who were actively shouting racial and religious obscenities at the high school students. Also  they did not tell you is that the "Indian elder" (Nathan Phillips) has long anti-white history and that Phillips went out of his way to approach
 Nick Sandmann (who was waiting with his group board return buses} and that  then Phillips held his drum up and pounded the drum just inches from Sandmann’s face while, Phillips chanted at him,
repeating over and over, "go back to Europe, white man, this is our land."

There was nothing confusing or ambiguous and what happened.

There is nothing confusing or ambiguous in the Washington Post mishandling of the story.

False reporting is an abomination and the Washington Post and Michael E Miller have betrayed our trust.

Again, "Their activities are a danger to the black, Jewish and other minority communities in the United States.” Democracy dies in darkness…. Unfortunately democracy fairness, and honesty have been murdered at the Washington Post.

******



OMAHA ELDER NATHAN PHILLIPS AND HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT NICK SANDMANN GIVE THEIR VERSIONS OF VIRAL MOMENT ON THE STEPS OF THE LINCOLN MEMORIAL.

By  Michael E. Miller   Washington Post   January 21, 2019



https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/picture-of-the-conflict-on-the-mall-comes-into-clearer-focus/2019/01/20/c078f092-1ceb-11e9-9145-3f74070bbdb9_story.html?utm_term=.143637403c09&wpisrc=al_trending_now__alert-national&wpmk=1

The three groups that met Friday in the cold shadow of the Lincoln Memorial could hardly have been more different. They were indigenous rights activists from Michigan, Catholic schoolboys from Kentucky — some wearing Make America Great Again hats — and Hebrew Israelites from the nation’s capital.

They were Native American, Caucasian and African American; old, young and middle-aged.

And there, beneath the fallen president’s promise to work “with malice toward none, with charity for all,” they came together in an incident that would echo nationwide for its ugliness.

The Israelites and students exchanged taunts, videos show. The Native Americans and Hebrew Israelites say some students shouted, “Build the wall!” But the chant is not heard on the widely circulated videos, and the Cincinnati Enquirer quotes Nick Sandmann, the student at the center of the confrontation, saying he did not hear anyone utter the phrase.

When a Native American elder intervened, singing and playing a prayer song, scores of students around him seem to mimic and mock him, a video posted Monday shows. At one point, he found himself face to face with Sandman, whose frozen smile struck some as nervousness and others as arrogance.

Neither budged.


Tribal elder Nathan Phillips, 64, stands before Nick Sandmann, a high school student from Covington Catholic High School in Park Hills, Ky., near the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. (Jon Stegenga/Humanizing Through Story)
Video footage of the tense confrontation quickly went viral, stirring outrage across the political spectrum. The Kentucky teens’ church apologized on Saturday, condemning the students’ actions. By Sunday, however, conservative commenters on social media were saying it was the students who had been wronged, and the organizers of the March for Life, the event that drew the teens to Washington, rescinded their initial criticism of the youths.

Sandmann, an 11th-grader, said in a statement provided to the Enquirer that he and his classmates had been called “racists,” “bigots” and worse. He said he was “remaining motionless and calm” in hopes that things would not “get out of hand.”

The Native American elder said he was caught in the middle.

“When I took that drum and hit that first beat . . . it was a supplication to God,” said Nathan Phillips, a member of the Omaha tribe and a Marine veteran. “Look at us, God, look at what is going on here; my America is being torn apart by racism, hatred, bigotry.”

The incident, and the finger-pointing that followed, seemed to capture the worst of America at a moment of extreme political polarization, as discourse once again gave way to division, and people drew conclusions on social media before all the facts were known.


High school students from Covington Catholic High School chant before a crowd of Native American activists Friday on the Mall. (Jon Stegenga/Humanizing Through Story)
[Meet the segregationist’s granddaughter trying to get rid of the Stars and Bars]

'Did I provoke that?'
The students, from Covington Catholic High School in Park Hills, Ky., were one school group among scores bused to the annual March for Life.

The Native American activists were there for the Indigenous Peoples March.

So were the Hebrew Israelites, who believe African Americans are God’s chosen people and the real descendants of the Hebrews of the Bible.

“We were there to teach, to teach the truth of the Bible, to show them our real history,” said Shar Yaqataz Banyamyan, one of five Hebrew Israelites on the Mall that day.

The group has militant members and “a long, strange list of enemies” that includes whites, Jews, Asians, members of the LGBTQ community, abortion rights advocates and continental Africans, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Banyamyan said he and those with him Friday believe in using blunt language, but not violence. A video he posted to social media shows them insulting other marchers.

“Where’s your husband?” one Hebrew Israelite asked a woman who had stopped to argue with the group. “Bring your husband. Let me speak to him.”

At one point, the Hebrew Israelites began arguing with Native American activists, telling them the word “Indian” means “savage,” according to the video.

While the groups argued, some students laughed and mocked them, according to Banyamyan and another Hebrew Israelite, Ephraim Israel, who came from New York for the event. As tension grew, the Hebrew Israelites started insulting the students.

“Tell them to come over in the lion’s den instead of mocking from over there,” Banyamyan can be heard saying in the video. “Y’all dirty ass little crackers, your day is coming.”

“They were sitting there, mocking me as I was trying to teach my brothers, so, yes, the attention turned to them,” Israel told The Washington Post. “I explained to them, you want to build the wall for Mexicans and other indigenous people, but you’ve never seen a black or a Mexican shoot up a school.”

[Kentucky diocese condemn teens’ conduct at March for Life]

Phillips said he and his fellow Native American activists also had issues with the students throughout the day.

“Before they got centered on the black Israelites, they would walk through and say things to each other, like, ‘Oh, the Indians in my state are drunks or thieves,’” the 64-year-old said.

Phillips said he heard students shout, “Go back to Africa!”

Sandmann said in his statement that he “did not witness or hear any students chant ‘build that wall’ or anything hateful or racist at any time. Assertions to the contrary are simply false.”

He said he and his classmates were shouting cheers they knew from school, with permission from their chaperones, “to drown out the hateful comments that were being shouted at us by the protesters.”

By 5 p.m., the light was fading on the Mall and both marches had mostly petered out. A group of about 100 Covington students had gathered on the stairs of the Lincoln Memorial, where they had been told to meet before catching their buses home.

The Hebrew Israelites were also still there, and still insulting the students.

“You all are a bunch of Donald Trump incest babies,” Israel said to them, according to the video, before asking if there were any black students among them.

When a black Covington student came forward, Israel called him “Kanye West” and the n-word, the footage shows. He tells the teen his friends will one day harvest his organs, an apparent reference to the racially fraught movie “Get Out.”

At that point, the students began chanting, jumping and shouting. The songs culminated in one student stripping off his shirt and shouting as others cheered.

“The chants are commonly used at sporting events. They are all positive in nature,” Sandmann said. “We would not have done that without obtaining permission from the adults in charge of our group.”

Banyamyan said the Hebrew Israelites took the performance as a racist impersonation.

“They were mocking my ancestors in a chant, one of them was jumping up and down like a cave man,” he said. “Did I provoke that?”

'A mob mentality'
To Jessica Travis, a Florida attorney who was at the memorial with her mother, the students looked out of control.

“The kids really went into a mob mentality, honestly,” she said, adding that she didn’t see any chaperones trying to control the situation. She said she heard one student tell the Hebrew Israelites to “drink the Trump water.”

Jon Stegenga, a photojournalist who drove to Washington on Friday from South Carolina to cover the Indigenous Peoples March, recalled hearing students say “build the wall” and “Trump 2020.” He said it was about that time that Phillips intervened.

“He said, ‘I wish I could say something to these people, to the whole crowd,’ ” Stegenga said in an interview Sunday.

Another member of the Indigenous Peoples March suggested Phillips start singing, the photographer said. Phillips played a prayer song on a drum as he walked toward the students.

Some of the students began doing a “Tomahawk chop” and dancing, the video shows. Phillips said he found it offensive but kept walking and drumming.

Most of the students moved out of his way, the video shows. But Sandmann stayed still.

Asked why he felt the need to walk into the group of students, Phillips said he was trying to reach the top of the memorial, where friends were standing. But Phillips also said he saw more than a teenage boy in front of him. He saw a long history of white oppression of Native Americans.

“Why should I go around him?” he asked. “I’m just thinking of 500 years of genocide in this country, what your people have done. You don’t even see me as a human being.”

Stegenga described Phillips as emotional. “He was dealing with a lot of feelings, as he was being surrounded and not being shown respect,” the photographer said. “In Native American culture, respect of elders is everything. . . . It was a heartbroken feeling.”

[The Indians were right, the English were wrong: A tribe reclaims its past]

Phillips said he blamed both the students and the Hebrew Israelites for what happened.

“If it wasn’t for those Israelites being there in the first place, this wouldn’t have happened,” he said. “And if it wasn’t for the lack of responsibility from school chaperones, this wouldn’t have happened either.”

Sandmann said Phillips bore responsibility, too.

“He locked eyes with me and approached me, coming within inches of my face,” the statement said. “I did not speak to him. I did not make any hand gestures or other aggressive moves. To be honest, I was startled and confused as to why he had approached me. We had already been yelled at by another group of protesters . . . I was worried that a situation was getting out of control where adults were attempting to provoke teenagers.”

School officials and the Catholic Diocese of Covington released a joint statement Saturday condemning and apologizing for the students’ actions. “The matter is being investigated and we will take appropriate action, up to and including expulsion,” the statement said. In a column on the town website, Covington Mayor Joe Meyer declared that “The videos being shared across the nation do NOT represent the core beliefs and values of this City.”

The debate over what happened continued to play out on social media Monday, with one Twitter user posting video that showed Covington students jumping and yelling around Phillips as he played. Sandmann does not appear to be in the clip.

With his statement circulating, and more attention focused on the behavior of the Hebrew Israelites, some public reaction had already shifted. March for Life organizers, who on Saturday had called the teens’ behavior “reprehensible,” deleted that statement from their website Sunday evening and pledged to reserve judgment.

“It is clear from new footage and additional accounts that there is more to this story than the original video captured,” the group said in a new statement. “We will refrain from commenting further until the truth is understood.”

And Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) tweeted that “in the face of racist and homosexual slurs, the young boys refused to reciprocate or disrespect anyone.”

“In the context of everything that was going on (which the media hasn’t shown) the parents and mentors of these boys should be proud, not ashamed, of their kids’ behavior. It is my honor to represent them,” Massie’s tweet said.

In his statement, Sandmann said he had received “death threats via social media, as well as hateful insults. One person threatened to harm me at school, and one person claims to live in my neighborhood.” He said he was “mortified that so many people have come to believe something that did not happen — that students from my school were chanting or acting in a racist fashion toward African Americans or Native Americans.”

Travis, who was in town to attend the Women’s March before sightseeing, said the scene on Friday shocked her and her mother.

“It was really depressing,” she said, “to see we are even more divided than ever.”

Moriah Balingit, Michelle Boorstein, DeNeen L. Brown, Joe Heim and Julie Tate contributed to this report.

5 Reasons BuzzFeed’s Story Should Never Have Been Accepted by the Mainstream Media

Phelim McAleerTownhall 1-19-19

https://townhall.com/columnists/phelimmcaleer/2019/01/18/5-reasons-buzzfeeds-story-should-never-have-been-accepted-by-the-mainstream-media-n2539304?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=01/19/2019&bcid=9930c656b2212929c884960baf64bc5a&recip=26163198

MIL-ED Posting note: 

BuzzFeed was the original online publisher of the “Trump dossier” Here too, they very publicly claimed the authenticity of their sources 

It should be noted that an overwhelming portion of the mainstream media jumped on this story and then further extended its impact by speculating that this was a proven offense rising to the standard of impeachment... and then immediately jumping to “the very likely possibility of this “offense” as being the initiator of impeachment action against Donald Trump.

 Particular offenders include representative Adam Schiff, Sen. Dick Durbin, Representative Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Charles Schumer. Media culprits include the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NBC, PBS, AP.

 Clarifications from sources within Robert Mueller’s office are clear and direct that the BuzzFeed statements relating to any evidence and/or any witnesses are 100% fabrications.

.The Special Counsel’s office has issued a statement debunking the BuzzFeed “bombshell scoop” that President Trump directed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress.

The story was widely regurgitated by the mainstream media, with the smallest of caveats, and then they marched full on pointing out that suborning perjury is an impeachable offense. They were excited, gleeful almost but here are five reasons they should never have reported the story in the first place. They are five red flags about Jason Leopold, one of the journalists behind the story, that meant they should not run a story on the report without independent verification. These are Jason Leopold’s five red flags:

1. In 2006 Leopold ran a detailed story stating that Karl Rove had been informed he was about to be indicted for leaking the name of CIA agent Valarie Plame. The story stated very authoritatively that Rove himself had “told President Bush and Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten, as well as a few other high level administration officials,” that he was going to be charged. The indictment never happened. Just like the Trump story, Leopold said he had multiple sources for a story that turned out not to be true. 

2. Of course anyone can make a mistake and maybe Leopold was misled by his “multiple sources” but in another story it looks like Leopold was involved in fraud and forgery of documents bolstering a story. In a 2002 story for Salon about energy company Enron, Leopold quoted a damning email which the subject of the story denied ever writing. After much prevaricating, Leopold eventually produced a “faxed copy of the email” with no headers or other identifying details. He never produced an original. The story was eventually removed from Salon’s archive.

3. Sources he quotes say he never spoke to them. In the same story Leopold claims he was given information by a source but the source denied this. 

Leopold told Salon’s editors his phone bill would show the calls to the source. Again after much prevaricating, Leopold produced the phone bill and it showed just one call - less than a minute long and it occurred five days after he submitted the first draft of the story.

4. Leopold has plagiarized stories. Salon found he had lifted almost verbatim 480 words from a Financial Times story.

Leopold apparently submitted a forged document to cover his plagiarism. He told Salon that he had not plagiarized the FT story because the FT story was in fact based on a Dow Jones story that he had originally written. He sent them a copy of a story that he claimed the FT had ripped off. Salon and Dow Jones could find no record of Leopold’s alleged “original” story in the Dow Jones archive, however. 

5. Leopold can’t even be truthful when he tries to confess to not being truthful. In 2005 Leopold wrote a confessional memoir. He wrote about how he “engaged in lying, cheating and backstabbing…and was looking for a path to redemption.” However just days before the book's release, the publisher, Rowman & Littlefield, pulled it off the shelves after one of the sources quoted in the book claimed Leopold made up quotes. 

In truth the mainstream media should never have run the BuzzFeed story without verifying it themselves. It is just too serious a claim to report without proof that they themselves should have seen and checked. But they didn’t care. We hear a lot about how President Trump has apparently damaged institutions and democracy. The media claim he is “ethically challenged.” But perhaps the real story to emerge from this presidency is how the media is ethically challenged and have thrown all standards aside in their desire to bring the president down. 

TRUMP TEAM'S ACTIONS PANICS  CUBA's COMMUNIST THIEVES, THEIR  ACCESSORIES TO THEFT AND THEIR 

(UNREGISTERED) US AGENTS

Humberto Fontova  lTown Hall 1-19-19

https://townhall.com/columnists/humbertofontova/2019/01/19/trump-team-panics-communist-thieves-their-accessories-to-theft-and-their-unregistered-us-agents-n2539272?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=01/19/2019&bcid=9930c656b2212929c884960baf64bc5a&recip=26163198

Don’t get me wrong, amigos. The mainstream media does NOT label the recent bombshell declaration by Secretary of State Pompeo in the same manner as does this column. Instead we get stuff like this:

 “U.S. considering allowing lawsuits over Cuba-confiscated properties (Reuters) - The Trump administration is considering allowing a law that has been suspended since its creation in 1996 to go into effect, allowing U.S. citizens to sue foreign companies and individuals over property confiscated from them by the Cuban government…It has been waived by every president ever since, Democrats and Republicans alike, due to opposition from the international community…” 

Alas! To quote the Eagles: “There’s a new kid in town.” And as we’ve learned from his blunt statements to NATO to the UN, to the Paris Climate gang, to the NAFTA gang, to the parties “scandalized” by our new embassy in Jerusalem, etc. -- this new kid doesn’t stay up nights in a fetal position sniveling and whimpering about the delicate sensibilities of “the international community,” especially those “allies” who’ve been taking the American taxpayer to the cleaners for decades.  

Comprende, “international community?” Given the “new kid in town” you might start nervously “looking over your shoulder” (so to speak) when partnering with the mass-murdering and larcenous Castro regime while spitting on the rights (and even graves) of burglarized American citizens.

In brief: The buzzard-like European, Asian, Canadian, etc. companies who swooped into Cuba rubbing their hands and snickering to partner with the Castroite thieves to take over, operate and profit from property STOLEN at Soviet gunpoint from U.S. citizens (some who were tortured and murdered for resisting the blatant theft) may finally face some music at the hands of the theft victims.  

You see, amigos: You’d never guess this from the Cuba “reporting” by the Fake News Media but the reason for the Cuba embargo in the first place was Castro’s mass theft, at Soviet gunpoint, of almost 6,000 businesses in Cuba worth $9 billion (in current dollars) from U.S. citizens. A few American business owners who resisted were tortured and murdered.

The Inter-American Law Review classifies Castro’s mass burglary of U.S. property as “the largest uncompensated taking of American property by a foreign government in history.” Rubbing his hands and snickering in triumphant glee, Castro boasted at maximum volume to the entire world that he was freeing Cuba from “Yankee economic slavery!” (Che Guevara’s term, actually) and that “he would never repay a penny!” (this was the only promise Fidel Castro kept in his life!)

One of these American burglary victims was Howard Anderson, a successful businessman who owned a chain of service stations and a Jeep dealership (not a casino or brothel, which were relatively rare in pre-Castro Cuba, by the way.)  Mr Anderson was a happy family man with four children and president of the American Legion's Havana Chapter. He was beloved in the Cuban community. Howard Anderson embodied in his athletic 6' 2" frame everything the Castroites most hated and resented (and envied.) I’ll quote from Anderson v. Republic of Cuba, No. 01-28628 (Miami-Dade Circuit Court, April 13, 2003). 

“In one final session of torture, Castro’s agents drained Howard Anderson’s body of blood before sending him to his death at the firing squad.”

"Death to the American!" screamed Howard Anderson's communist “prosecutor” at his farce of a trial on April 17, 1961. "The prosecutor was a madman!" says a Swiss diplomat who witnessed the trial, "leaping on tables, shrieking, pointing, as Mr. Anderson simply glared back." 

Two days after his "trial," Howard Anderson refused a blindfold, to glare at his executioners. Medically he was probably in shock at the time from the blood-draining. "Fuego!"  The bullets shattered Howard Anderson's body at dawn on April 19, 1961. 

Regarding the embargo, the Associated Press goes on to quote a concerned “expert” regarding  “Trump weighs dramatic tightening of U.S. embargo on Cuba…"If they take this decision they will be moving from a policy of limiting U.S. engagement with Cuba to a policy of very actively trying to disrupt the Cuban economy," said Phil Peters, a longtime Cuba expert and consultant for U.S. businesses in Cuba.”

Note how in this column’s title I refer to the Castro regime’s “unregistered agents.”  Yet the AP referred to Phil Peters as a “longtime Cuba expert” and “consultant.” Pretty innocuous, no? So did I exaggerate or even lie?  

Well, allow me to spill some (thoroughly-documented from a court discovery document) beans on this “Cuba expert” so you can decide for yourselves: 

Canada’s Sherritt International ranks among the most notoriously buzzard-like of Castro’s partners in theft. The multi-billion mining company rubbed its hands and gleefully partnered with the Castro regime to occupy and run the stolen and formerly U.S.-owned Moa nickel plant, making them probably the world’s top trafficker in stolen U.S. property. Consequently their CEO was barred by U.S. law from entering our country. 

“Canada’s Sherritt Int. works quietly in Washington,” start’s the court discovery document from several years ago. “Recently it has given money to a former State Department employee, Phil Peters, to advance its interests. The money to Peters goes through contributions to the Lexington Institute, where Peters is (was) a vice president. Because the Lexington Institute is a 501(c) (3) not-for-profit, there is no public record of Sherritt’s funding. This has allowed Peters to advise and direct the (Congressional) Cuba Working Group (founded by Jeff Flake in 2002, members include Barbara Lee and Keith Ellison) in ways beneficial to Sherritt… 

In brief: one of the Castro regime’s top business partners—probably the world’s top trafficker in stolen U.S. property, a company whose CEO was barred by U.S. law from entering the U.S. -- was funneling under-the-table payments to a person who constantly lobbies for an end to the Cuba embargo in the Fake News Media and through his allies in Congress like former Sen. Jeff Flake, Barbara Lee and Keith Ellison. Yet the Fake News Media habitually bill him as an “impartial Cuba expert!” 

Recommended from Townhall

THE WASHINGTON POST USES ARENS OBITUARY TO BASH BIBI

 Sean Durns  algemeiner 1-17-19

https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/01/17/the-washington-post-uses-arens-obituary-to-bash-bibi/

Newspapers typically publish obituaries of famous figures in order to sum up their life’s work. The Washington Post, however, used an obituary to belittle Israel’s prime minister. In so doing, the newspaper not only discarded decorum and decency, but illustrated how deep its biases go.

Moshe Arens, a former Israeli politician, died at the age of 93 on January 7, 2019. By any measure, Arens was a legendary figure, serving three times as defense minister and once as foreign minister. He was, as The New York Times reported, an influential ambassador to the US who “proved adept at making Israel’s case in the United States and came to be valued by Reagan administration officials as an Israeli government insider.”

An aeronautical engineer turned statesman, Arens was “one of the longest-surviving members of Israel’s founding generation,” the paper said — even seeking the premiership.

As The Algemeiner noted, Arens “was current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s primary mentor in the 1980s,” and helped “pave the way for Netanyahu’s rise to political power.” The Washington Post, however, chose to phrase this part of Arens’ biography differently, writing: “Mr. Arens’s most enduring political legacy is probably his role in launching the career of Netanyahu, a charismatic furniture salesman — and family friend — whom Mr. Arens hired as his No. 2 after being appointed ambassador to the United States.”

Readers unfamiliar with Israeli history — which, if one is open to a charitable interpretation, might include Washington Post obituary writers as well — might think that Arens just plucked a furniture salesman out of the blue. The Post’s description, however, is both misleading and incomplete.

In fact, Netanyahu was a “32-year-old frustrated sales executive at an Israeli furniture company,” according to an Arens obituary penned by Bibi biographer (and frequent critic) Anshel Pfeffer. There is, of course, a significant difference between the jobs of a “salesman” and “executive” — not only in duties, but, if implicitly, in prestige as well.

Moreover, by the time that Netanyahu was chosen by Arens, Bibi was already a combat veteran of the elite IDF unit Sayeret Matkal, which is roughly analogous to the US Army’s Delta Force. Netanyahu was a decorated officer, having been shot in one operation. The future prime minister also possessed dual degrees from an elite school, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and had founded the Yonatan Netanyahu Anti-Terror Institute, named after his brother, a Sayeret Matkal officer who had been killed in an iconic hostage rescue mission in Uganda. That’s quite a resume — and one that the description of “furniture salesman” hardly hints at.

The Post’s gratuitous jab at Netanyahu was, of course, meant to demean the Israeli prime minister. At first glance, a single line in a larger article might not mean much. But the decision to belittle Bibi in another man’s obituary is quite revealing. It showcases how deeply ingrained The Washington Post’s anti-Netanyahu bias is. The paper simply can’t resist an opportunity to take a punch at him.

The obituary also illustrates another problem with the paper. As the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting (CAMERA) has documented, Washington Post reporting on the Israel-Islamist conflict has long been plagued by omissions of important details and context.

For example, the Post wrote that Arens appeared “frequently on news programs to argue on behalf of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in the summer of 1982.” The newspaper doesn’t tell readers why Israel initiated what the IDF called Operation Peace for Galilee. But The New York Times obituary of Arens does, noting, “in 1982 … Israel was drawing headlines and international criticism for invading Lebanon to flush out the Palestine Liberation Organization.” At the time, the PLO was a designated terrorist group responsible for murdering Israeli civilians, both on the Jewish state’s soil and elsewhere.

Similarly, the Post noted that Arens’ first posting as defense minister occurred when his predecessor, Ariel Sharon, was forced to resign “in the aftermath of the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Beirut.” Readers aren’t provided any more details. But once again, The New York Times does slightly better, pointing out that “Sharon, a decorated general … had been forced to resign after a tribunal found him indirectly but personally responsible for the massacre by Israeli-allied Lebanese Phalange militiamen at the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps near Beirut.”

William Shakespeare once wrote, “No legacy is so rich as honesty.” Yet in using a man’s obituary to besmirch the current Israeli prime minister, The Washington Post lifts the curtain and reveals its own ethics. When it comes time to evaluate the newspaper’s legacy, its biases should play a starring role.

Sean Durns is a Senior Research Analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.

The following videotape shows the young Bibi Netanyahu has formulated a consistent policy approach .   Benjamin Netanyahu Consistent Since 1978

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6&v=z8FTdnnn2V4

Nancy Pelosi Appoints Anti-Israel Radical Ilhan Omar to House Foreign Affairs Committee

PM 01/17/2019 | 

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/01/17/nancy-pelosi-appoints-anti-israel-radical-ilhan-omar-to-house-foreign-affairs-committee/

Link above for full report.

THE NEW, NEW ANTI-SEMITISM

Victor Davis Hanson  National Review January 15, 2019

 https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/new-anti-semitism-woke-progressives-old-stereotypes/

Old stereotypes resurface among today’s woke progressives.

The old anti-Semitism was mostly, but not exclusively, a tribal prejudice expressed in America up until the mid 20th century most intensely on the right. It manifested itself from the silk-stocking country club and corporation (“gentlemen’s agreement”) to the rawer regions of the Ku Klux Klan’s lunatic fringe.

While liberals from Joe Kennedy to Gore Vidal were often openly anti-Semitic, the core of traditional anti-Semitism, as William F. Buckley once worried, was more rightist. And such fumes still arise among the alt-right extremists.

Yet soon a new anti-Semitism became more insidious, given that it was a leftist phenomenon among those quick to cite oppression and discrimination elsewhere. Who then could police the bigotry of the self-described anti-bigotry police?

The new form of the old bias grew most rapidly on the 1960s campus and was fueled by a number of leftist catalysts. The novel romance of the Palestinians and corresponding demonization of Israel, especially after the 1967 Six-Day War, gradually allowed former Jew-hatred to be cloaked by new rabid and often unhinged opposition to Israel. In particular, these anti-Semites fixated on Israel’s misdemeanors and exaggerated them while excusing and downplaying the felonies of abhorrent and rogue nations.

Indeed, evidence of the new anti-Semitism was that the Left was neutral, and even favorable, to racist, authoritarian, deadly regimes of the then Third World while singling out democratic Israel for supposed humanitarian crimes. By the late 1970s, Israelis and often by extension Jews in general were demagogued by the Left as Western white oppressors. Israel’s supposed victims were romanticized abroad as exploited Middle Easterners. And by extension, Jews were similarly exploiting minorities at home.

NOW WATCH: 'Trump's Birth Control Effort Blocked'

Then arose a relatively new mainstream version of Holocaust denial that deprived Jews of any special claim to historic victim status. And it was a creed common among World War II revisionists and some American minorities who were resentful that the often more successful Jews might have experienced singularly unimaginable horror in the past. The new anti-Semitism that grew up in the 1960s was certainly in part legitimized by the rise of overt African-American bigotry against Jews (and coupled by a romantic affinity for Islam). It was further nursed on old stereotypes of cold and callous Jewish ghetto storeowners (e.g., “The Pawnbroker” character), and expressed boldly in the assumption that black Americans were exempt from charges of bias and hatred.

Anti-Semitic blacks assumed that they could not be credibly charged with bigotry and were therefore free to say what they pleased about Jews. Indeed, by the 1970s and 1980s, anti-Semitism had become the mother’s milk of a prominent post–Martin Luther King Jr. black-activist leadership, well beyond Malcolm X and the Black Panthers — even though Jews had been on the forefront of the civil-rights movements and had been recognized as such by an earlier generation of liberal black leaders.

Soon it became common for self-described black leaders to explain, to amplify, to contextualize, or to be unapologetic about their anti-Semitism, in both highbrow and lowbrow modes: James Baldwin (“Negroes are anti-Semitic because they’re anti-white”), Louis Farrakhan (“When they talk about Farrakhan, call me a hater, you know what they do, call me an anti-Semite. Stop it. I am anti-termite. The Jews don’t like Farrakhan, so they call me Hitler. Well, that’s a great name. Hitler was a very great man”), Jesse Jackson (“Hymietown”), Al Sharpton (“If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house”), and the Reverend Jeremiah Wright (“The Jews ain’t gonna let him [Obama] talk to me”).

Note that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton both ran as Democratic candidates for president. Sharpton officially visited the Obama White House more than 100 times, and Wright was the Obamas’ longtime personal pastor who officiated at the couple’s wedding and the baptism of their daughters and inspired the title of Obama’s second book.

In the past ten years, however, we have seen an emerging new, new anti-Semitism. It is likely to become far more pernicious than both the old-right and new-left versions, because it is not just an insidiously progressive phenomenon. It has also become deeply embedded in popular culture and is now rebranded with acceptable cool among America’s historically ignorant youth. In particular, the new, new bigotry is “intersectional.” It serves as a unifying progressive bond among “marginalized” groups such as young Middle Easterners, Muslims, feminists, blacks, woke celebrities and entertainers, socialists, the “undocumented,” and student activists. Abroad, the new, new bigotry is fueled by British Labourites and anti-Israel EU grandees.

Of course, the new, new anti-Semitism’s overt messages derive from both the old and the new. There is the same conspiratorial idea that the Jews covertly and underhandedly exert inordinate control over Americans (perhaps now as grasping sports-franchise owners or greedy hip-hop record executives). But the new, new anti-Semitism has added a number of subtler twists, namely that Jews are part of the old guard whose anachronistic standards of privilege block the emerging new constituency of woke Muslims, blacks, Latinos, and feminists.

Within the Democratic party, such animus is manifested by young woke politicians facing an old white hierarchy. Progressive activist Linda Sarsour oddly singled out for censure Senate majority leader Charles Schumer, saying, “I’m talking to Chuck Schumer. I’m tired of white men negotiating on the backs of people of color and communities like ours.”

In attacking Schumer, ostensibly a fellow progressive, Sarsour is claiming an intersectional bond forged in mutual victimization by whites — and thus older liberal Jews apparently either cannot conceive of such victimization or in fact are party to it. With a brief tweet, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez dismissed former Democratic senator Joe Lieberman’s worry over the current leftward drift of the new Democratic party. “New party, who dis?” she mocked, apparently suggesting that the 76-year-old former Democratic vice-presidential candidate was irrelevant to the point of nonexistence for the new progressive generation.

Likewise, the generic invective against Trump — perhaps the most pro-Israel and pro-Jewish president of the modern era — as an anti-Semite and racist provides additional cover. Hating the supposedly Jew-hating Trump implies that you are not a Jew-hater yourself.

Rap and hip-hop music now routinely incorporate anti-Semitic lyrics and themes of Jews as oppressors — note the lyrics of rappers such as Malice, Pusha T, The Clipse, Ghostface Killah, Gunplay, Ice Cube, Jay-Z, Mos Def, and Scarface. More recently, LeBron James, the Los Angeles Lakers basketball legend, tweeted out the anti-Semitic lyrics of rapper 21 Savage: “We been getting that Jewish money, everything is Kosher.” LeBron was puzzled about why anyone would take offense, much less question him, a deified figure. He has a point, given that singling out Jews as money-grubbers, cheats, and conspirators has become a sort of rap brand, integral to the notion of the rapper as Everyman’s pushback against the universal oppressor. The music executive and franchise owner is the new Pawnbroker, and his demonization is often cast as no big deal at best and at worst as a sort of legitimate cry of the heart from the oppressed.

Note that marquee black leaders — from Keith Ellison to Barack Obama to the grandees of the Congressional Black Caucus — have all had smiling photo-ops with the anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, a contemporary black version of Richard Spencer or the 1980s David Duke. Appearing with Farrakhan, however, never became toxic, even after he once publicly warned Jews, “And don’t you forget, when it’s God who puts you in the ovens, it’s forever!”

Temple professor, former CNN analyst, and self-described path-breaking intellectual Marc Lamont Hill recently parroted the Hamas slogan of “a free Palestine from the river to the sea” — boilerplate generally taken to mean that the goal is the destruction of the current nation of Israel. And here, too, it’s understandable that Hill was shocked at the ensuing outrage — talk of eliminating Israel is hardly controversial in hip left-wing culture.

The Democratic party’s fresh crop of representatives likewise reflects the new, new and mainlined biases, camouflaged in virulent anti-Israeli sentiment. Or, as Princeton scholar Robert George recently put it:

The Left calls the tune, and just as the Left settled in on abortion in the early 1970s and marriage redefinition in the ’90s, it has now settled in on opposition to Israel – not merely the policies of its government, but its very existence as a Jewish state and homeland of the Jewish people.

In that vein, Michigan’s new congresswoman, Rashida Tlaib, assumed she’d face little pushback from her party when she tweeted out the old slur that Jewish supporters of Israel have dual loyalties: Opponents of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions movement, which targets Israel, “forgot what country they represent,” she said. Ironically, Tlaib is not shy about her own spirited support of the Palestinians: She earlier had won some attention for an eliminationist map in her office that had the label “Palestine” pasted onto the Middle East, with an arrow pointing to Israel.

Similarly, Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) — like Tlaib, a new female Muslim representative in the House — used to be candid in her views of Israel as an “apartheid regime”: “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.” On matters of apartheid, one wonders whether Omar would prefer to be an Arab citizen inside “evil” Israel or an Israeli currently living in Saudi Arabia or Egypt.

Sarsour defended Omar with the usual anti-Israel talking points, in her now obsessive fashion. Predictably, her targets were old-style Jewish Democrats.  This criticism of Omar, Sarsour said, “is not only coming from the right-wing but [from] some folks who masquerade as progressives but always choose their allegiance to Israel over their commitment to democracy and free speech.” Again, note the anti-Semitic idea that support for the only functioning democracy in the Middle East is proof of lackluster support for democracy and free speech.

The unhinged Hank Johnson (D., Ga.) has derided Trump as a Hitler-like character, and Trump supporters as a doomed cadre of sick losers. He had once wondered whether too many U.S. Marines stationed on the shores of Guam might tip over the island and capsize it, so it was not too surprising when he also voiced the Farrakhan insect theme, this time in connection with apparently insidious Jewish destroyers of the West Bank: “There has been a steady [stream], almost like termites can get into a residence and eat before you know that you’ve been eaten up and you fall in on yourself.”

Out on the barricades, some Democrats, feminists, and Muslim activists, such as the co-founders of the “Women’s March,” Tamika Mallory and the now familiar Sarsour, have been staunch supporters of Louis Farrakhan (Mallory, for example, called him “the greatest of all time”). The New York Times recently ran a story of rivalries within the Women’s March, reporting that Mallory and Carmen Perez, a Latina activist, lectured another would-be co-leader, Vanessa Wruble, about her Jewish burdens. Wruble later noted: “What I remember — and what I was taken aback by — was the idea that Jews were specifically involved, and predominantly involved, in the slave trade, and that Jews make a lot of money off of black and brown bodies.”

Progressive icon Alice Walker was recently asked by the New York Times to cite her favorite bedtime reading. She enjoyed And the Truth Will Set You Free, by anti-Semite crackpot David Icke, she said, because the book was “brave enough to ask the questions others fear to ask” and was “a curious person’s dream come true.” One wonders which “questions” needed asking, and what exactly was Walker’s “dream” that had come “true.” When called out on Walker’s preference for Icke (who in the past has relied on the 19th-century Russian forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in part to construct an unhinged conspiracy about ruling “lizard people”), the Times demurred, with a shrug: It did not censor its respondents’ comments, it said, or editorialize about them.

These examples from contemporary popular culture, sports, politics, music, and progressive activism could be easily multiplied. The new, new anti-Semites do not see themselves as giving new life to an ancient pathological hatred; they’re only voicing claims of the victims themselves against their supposed oppressors. The new, new anti-Semites’ venom is contextualized as an “intersectional” defense from the hip, the young, and the woke against a Jewish component of privileged white establishmentarians — which explains why the bigoted are so surprised that anyone would be offended by their slurs.

In our illiterate and historically ignorant era, the new, new hip anti-Semitism becomes a more challenging menace than that posed by prior buffoons in bedsheets or the clownish demagogues of the 1980s such as the once-rotund Al Sharpton in sweatpants. And how weird that a growing trademark of the new path-breaking identity politics is the old stereotypical dislike of Jews and hatred of Israel.

Trump’s Mideast Strategy

Walter Russell Mead    Wall Street Journal Jan. 14, 2019 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-mideast-strategy-11547509876?mod=rss_opinion_main

Like Obama, he wants the U.S. to step back. Unlike Obama, he wants to contain Iran.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks in Doha, Qatar, Jan. 13.

As Secretary of State Mike Pompeo concludes his swing through the Middle East, the Trump administration’s regional strategy is coming into view. Like President Obama, President Trump wants to reduce American commitments while promoting stability. But their strategies differ. Mr. Obama thought the best hope for a reduced U.S. footprint was conciliating Iran. Mr. Trump, by contrast, seeks to build a coalition of U.S. regional allies—even if those allies fall well short of perfection—that can provide a stable security architecture and offset Iranian strength as the U.S. steps back.

In seeking a reduced Middle East presence and retreating from expansive human-rights goals, both Team Obama and Team Trump have reacted to significant changes in American politics. Public support for U.S. military action and democracy promotion in the Middle East has all but collapsed, for two reasons. First, decades of engagement in the region have brought neither stability nor democracy. Second, as America’s dependence on Middle East energy recedes, many voters see less reason to prioritize the region. Pundits can argue that these reactions are shortsighted, but politicians must take them into account.

The Trump administration hopes that with limited American support, Israel, Turkey and the Sunni Arab countries can together contain Iran. If so, Mr. Trump can claim credit for improved Israeli-Arab ties and a more stable region even as he cuts back on American troop and aid levels. This is a sounder strategy in the abstract than the Obama team’s gamble on Iranian restraint. U.S. relations with the Sunni Arab powers, Israel and Turkey are sometimes difficult, but a policy based on continued cooperation with them is more feasible than subordinating their interests to chase after an improved relationship with the deeply hostile regime in Tehran.

Yet the Trump plan also has significant drawbacks. The first is that, as the Hudson Institute’s Michael Doran points out, it unites the president’s domestic critics. Many of Mr. Trump’s staunchest critics in the conservative foreign-policy establishment continue to support the George W. Bush strategy of muscular engagement and democracy promotion. They are appalled by both Mr. Trump’s desire to retreat from the region and his willingness to work with autocrats like Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Team Obama, meanwhile, may be out of power but remains influential among opinion makers and pundits. And it knows a Saudi alliance is America’s only alternative to the Iran outreach of the Obama era. The Obama lobby has therefore joined the neoconservatives in the hopes of using public horror at the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, revulsion at the humanitarian cost of war in Yemen and unease about the deplorable state of human rights in Mr. Sisi’s Egypt to disrupt the Trump administration’s Middle East strategy.

A second difficulty with the Trump approach is that relying on such disparate U.S. allies as the Gulf sheikhdoms, Israel and Turkey forces Washington into the Middle East cat-herding business. Over the weekend, Mr. Pompeo found himself embroiled in the Saudi-Qatar rivalry. Meanwhile, national security adviser John Bolton was trying—and failing—to reassure the Kurds while calming the Turks over the conditions of U.S. troop withdrawal from Syria.

Getting Turkey and Israel to work together is also a hard sell; last month Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as an “anti-Semitic dictator” whose army “massacres women and children” in Kurdish villages. Fortunately for Mr. Trump, the Sunni Arab powers and the Israelis are working together more effectively than ever before because the threat from Iran is so great; unfortunately, the Saudis and Israelis hate and fear Mr. Erdogan almost as much as they do Tehran’s ayatollahs.

Even if Washington succeeds in controlling its herd of allies, it must still orchestrate an effective strategy for rolling back Iran’s influence. That is hard; in Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, Iranian influence is deeply entrenched. Without sustained American engagement, Mr. Trump’s hoped-for grand alliance will fall short.

Yet sustained American engagement is exactly what Mr. Trump hopes the grand alliance will help him avoid. Meanwhile, it is a safe bet that Russia, Iran and to some extent China will be looking for ways to make it as difficult as possible for Mr. Trump to achieve his objectives in the Middle East. At home, so will the neoconservatives and the Obama lobby.

Mr. Trump’s approach to the Middle East, for all its difficulties, may well be America’s least bad option. To pull it off, however, will require extraordinary diplomatic skill, self-control and not a little luck. As Mr. Pompeo harnesses his caravan of cats for their trek across the desert, he should brace for some interesting times.

Benjamin Netanyahu Consistent Since 1978

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6&v=z8FTdnnn2V4

The Strategy Washington Is Pursuing in the Middle East Is the Only Strategy Worth Pursuing  Michael Doran  Mosaic   1-7-19 https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/2019/01/the-strategy-washington-is-pursuing-in-the-middle-east-is-the-only-strategy-worth-pursuing/

America needs to back up its allies (Israel, Saudi Arabia, and potentially Turkey), and isolate its adversaries (Iran, Russia, China, Islamic State). Everything else is secondary.

President Trump’s surprise December 19 announcement of an immediate withdrawal of American forces from Syria hit some Israelis like a sucker punch. “With this withdrawal, the United States abandons Syria and leaves Israel alone,” said Yaakov Amidror, a former national-security adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. While conceding that “the effect of the U.S. decision is primarily psychological and diplomatic,” Amidror continued: “In those arenas, this is a very significant decision.” Subsequent reports to the effect that the drawdown of forces will be slower than originally announced and coordinated with America’s allies have softened the blow, but the shock still remains.

In retrospect, the announcement shouldn’t have come as a surprise. After all, Trump has never hidden his conviction that extended military operations in the Middle East are futile. He campaigned on the theme in 2016 and then returned to it last April. The United States, he declared then, had “spent $7 trillion in the Middle East in the last seven years. We get nothing out of it, nothing.” To this general observation, he added a specific promise: “We’ll be coming out of Syria . . . very soon. Let the other people take care of it now.”

In the intervening months, however, the president’s top advisers seemed to suggest that the withdrawal would never happen. “We’re not going to leave as long as Iranian troops are outside Iranian borders, and that includes Iranian proxies and militias,” said National Security Adviser John Bolton last September. Given Bolton’s proximity to the president, the promise sounded authoritative.

The shock in Israel, then, was understandable, and it quickly gave way to related fears. Trump’s Syria decision is clearly part of a larger effort that includes patching up American relations with Turkey, a goal that leaves Israelis decidedly cold. For over a decade, Jerusalem’s relations with Turkey have been abysmal, with no prospect of improvement on the horizon. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president, who aligns with the Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab world, would appear to have made hostility to Israel an enduring part of his political persona. To make matters worse, the American withdrawal will likely entail a downgrading of U.S. relations with the Syrian Kurdish forces that have aided the United States in the fight against Islamic State.

For reasons both romantic (Kurds as a stateless people struggling to establish a homeland) and strategic (Kurdish aspirations seen as blocking the regional ambitions of Ankara) Israel is sympathetic to Kurdish nationalism. Thus, shortly after Trump’s announcement, Netanyahu made a point of publicly labeling Erdogan as an “anti-Semitic dictator” who “has an obsession with Israel because he knows what a moral army is and what a real democracy is, in contrast with a military that massacres the Kurds.”

But the greatest source of Israel’s fears is not Turkey; that distinction is held by Iran. The American presence in Syria had formed the primary obstacle in the way of Iran’s completing a land bridge and an unbroken corridor of political influence from landlocked Tehran to Beirut on the Mediterranean shore. With only 2,000 soldiers, the United States was controlling, indirectly, about a third of the entire country, yet this small force was still large enough to overwhelm any potential combination of adversaries, as it proved last February when it annihilated some 200 Russian mercenaries in a matter of hours, with no losses on the American side.

No question, the American withdrawal will indeed create a vacuum in the region that Iran—and behind Iran, Russia—will inevitably seek to fill, thereby escalating clashes on the ground with Israel. Indeed, within days of Trump’s decision, Israel launched a premonitory airstrike deep into Syrian territory on Iranian targets, causing serious ripple effects in relations between Jerusalem and Moscow.

As Israel squares off against this Russian–Iranian axis, what kind of support will it receive from the White House? Not much, if American congressmen and senators, and major pundits in the media, know what they’re talking about. The prevailing view among them is not just that Israel feels sucker-punched; it is that Israel has indeed been sucker-punched.

The truth is less alarming, however.

I. Trump/Obama

No sooner had Trump announced the withdrawal than two interlocking themes immediately moved to the fore of the national discussion. The first stressed that Trump is a dangerously mercurial leader and utterly resistant to sound advice from wizened aides. The resignation of Secretary of Defense James Mattis, an event apparently sparked by the Syria decision, helped to bolster the idea that the Syria withdrawal was a decision worthy of King George III, “the mad king who lost America.”

The second theme focused on the difficulties the decision will impose on allies like Israel—difficulties said to be almost entirely of Trump’s making but to which he seems completely indifferent. Mattis’s letter of resignation helped feed this motif in pointing out that the defense secretary’s own “views on treating allies with respect” were at odds with the president’s.

In some circles, these motifs led immediately to invidious comparisons between Trump and Barack Obama. Yes, the argument went, Trump moved the embassy to Jerusalem; and yes, Nikki Haley, his first ambassador to the United Nations, was a vast improvement over her predecessor. But such gestures of support to Israel are symbolic only, and symbolism, however welcome, won’t keep the wolf from the door. When it comes to the hard security of Israel, the analysis continued, Trump is unreliable, far more so than his predecessor, who may have reached out in friendship to Iran, but did so in a systematic and fully thought-out fashion.

The Economist aptly summarized this prevailing view of the withdrawal decision in a few arresting lines. Trump’s decision-making, the magazine editorialized, reflected the defects of his instinct-driven character. In contrast to Obama, who had conducted his Middle East policy with sobriety and deliberateness, Trump had impulsively “lobbed missiles at Syria and menaced Iran.” But, the editors speculated, “as he swings between threatening to crush foes and getting out entirely, the latter instinct will dominate.” Therefore, when all is said and done, he “will mostly prove even more detached than Obama,” but in a way bound to provoke “unpredictability, ineffectiveness, and prolonged chaos.”

This leads us to an important substantive point that has been largely overlooked in the high dudgeon directed at the president’s modus operandi. The essential choice, the Economist would have us believe, is between the orderly, reasonable withdrawal from the Middle East offered by Barack Obama and the chaotic, blustery one currently being orchestrated by Trump. The end result, however, is the same: withdrawal from the Middle East and the end of American “hegemony” there.

Give the Economist its due. Trump’s Syria decision does place significant risks before America’s allies. The decision, furthermore, forces us to contemplate competing approaches to withdrawing the United States from the Middle East. To this we might add that choosing between them would be the most consequential decision that Americans would make regarding the Middle East in the coming decade. So the stakes could not be higher.

The Economist gets the big story about Syria completely wrong—as do most of the prestige media.

But the Economist also gets the big story completely wrong—as do most of the prestige media. The choice that actually faces us, the one muddled by all the handwringing over the president’s personal character and by the crocodile tears being shed, momentarily, for Israel, is of a different order entirely.

It is a choice between, on the one hand, a withdrawal of American power based on the conviction not just that the situation has become hopeless but that over the decades the U.S. choice of allies, including Israel, has made it worse—the Obama position—and, on the other hand, a withdrawal of direct American military engagement while ensuring that the United States will continue reliably to support those same historic allies and others drawn to its and their side, thereby enhancing the possibility of a stabilized Middle East in the next decade.

II. The Palin Doctrine

To dig out the truth about Trump’s Syria decision requires us to spool back five years and refresh our memories of what might be called “the Palin doctrine.” In a political speech in 2013, Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska and former Republican vice-presidential candidate, offered her own preferred solution to problems like the then-raging Syrian civil war: “let Allah sort it out.” This idea has exercised far greater influence on American policy than most observers have realized.

In 2013, Sarah Palin offered her own solution to problems like the then-raging Syrian civil war: “let Allah sort it out.” This idea has exercised far greater influence on American policy than most observers have realized.

Around the time that Palin announced her solution, Barack Obama began making his own case for non-intervention in the Syrian civil war. If Palin’s justification carried about it more than a whiff of anti-Muslim sentiment, Obama exuded empathy for the dying Syrians and agonized elaborately over the trade-offs he was nevertheless compelled to make between the need to honor our “highest ideals and sense of common humanity” and the need to “advance our security.” As president, Obama reminded us, he was “more mindful” than most people of “our limitations.” And so, though it pained him greatly, he, too, would favor leaving Syria’s fate to Providence.

Indeed, he’d already done so. Recall that in August 2012, Obama had drawn his famous “red line,” threatening severe retaliation if the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad were to use chemical weapons. A year later, following a particularly heinous chemical attack, the president came under political pressure to make good on his threat. But even as he readied a military response, he was working in secret to erase his red line. In this he was helped by, in effect, the Palin doctrine, now embodied in the persons of the Tea Party Republicans on Capitol Hill. Obama knew that, if these isolationist types were asked to authorize an attack on Syria, they would refuse. And so, making as if the Constitution gave him no choice but to seek congressional approval for a strike, and fully expecting to be turned down, he did ask them.

Ben Rhodes, Obama’s national security adviser for strategic communications, later revealed how Obama explained this move to his aides. “The thing is,” Rhodes quotes the president as saying, “if we lose this vote [in Congress], it will drive a stake through the heart of [interventionist] neoconservatism—everyone will see they have no votes.” Thus did Obama shrewdly turn Palin’s doctrine into something close to a bipartisan consensus.

Sure enough, in the 2016 elections, the two candidates on the left and the right who whipped up the most enthusiastic support were Donald Trump and the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. Both campaigned on a non-interventionist platform. Like Obama before him, Trump had concluded that his personal certainty about the futility of military deployments in the Middle East was backed by a powerful electoral imperative. Today, there is no reason to imagine that other major presidential candidates in 2020 will arrive at a different conclusion. Whether delivered in the abrasive style of Sarah Palin or the silky tones of Barack Obama, the Palin doctrine is now the baseline American position.

It is not, however, the baseline position of the pundit class.

III. A Coherent Vision

Two groups produce much of the most significant analysis about the Middle East in the American media: neoconservatives on the right, former Obama officials on the left. Both groups are hostile to Trump, convinced that he is a danger to the country and that his policies are woefully misguided. The second group is politically more influential than the first.

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The neoconservatives, rejecting the notion that non-interventionism is now an inescapable reality, continue to push muscular answers as if they enjoyed mainstream support. Here, for example, is the columnist Bret Stephens inveighing against the president in the New York Times: “He has done nothing to prevent Iran from continuing to arm Hizballah. He shows no regard for the Kurds. His fatuous response to Saudi Arabia’s murder of Jamal Khashoggi is that we’re getting a lot of money from the Saudis.”

The neoconservatives, rejecting the notion that non-interventionism is now inescapable, continue to push muscular answers as if they enjoyed mainstream support.

Unfortunately, these three short sentences, if translated into policy, would simultaneously put Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran into a straitjacket, nullifying the strategic fact that they are not at all the same—the first being a once and possibly future ally, the second a longstanding and current ally, and only the third an enemy. Whatever this amounts to, it is not foreign policy.

As for the second foreign-policy group, it functions both as a brain trust of the moderately progressive wing of the Democratic party and as a whisperer for the prestige liberal media. Its members, too, seek to tarnish Trump personally, but the alternative they favor for the Middle East is Obama’s policy of engaging America’s enemies, especially Iran. Thus, last spring, as Trump moved to withdraw from Obama’s nuclear deal, former Secretary of State John Kerry engaged in a flurry of diplomatic activity designed to thwart the president’s initiative—activity that, the Boston Globe stipulated in its report, was, to say the least, highly “unusual” for a private citizen.

Nor was Kerry operating alone. As the Globe noted, he is the point man of Diplomacy Works, an organization of former Obama officials aiming to influence public opinion through the media. The group produces a regular newsletter that, according to the Globe, it distributes to a network of “nearly 4,000 policy makers and foreign-policy experts,” and as of last year it claimed responsibility for “100 news articles, 34 television and radio hits, and 37 opinion pieces,” all touting the 2015 Iran deal “as a major factor for stability in the Middle East and for global nuclear non-proliferation.”

In two years’ time, Diplomacy Works and related groups hope, Trump will be voted out of office and a new president can return American foreign policy to the grooves that Obama defined. And so, when the Economist both likens and contrasts Trump’s approach to Obama’s, it is not simply making an academic comparison. To the degree that Obama-style courting of America’s enemies is the shadow foreign policy of “centrist” Democrats, the magazine is describing today’s electoral options—sophisticated and deeply considered versus frivolously whimsical and frighteningly dangerous—as it sees them.

It would no doubt be too much to expect a news outlet to undertake a study of the actual (as opposed to the alleged) logic of the current administration’s position and its goals, and how the Syria withdrawal serves them. And yet that decision is in fact part of a coherent vision, neither interventionist in the neoconservative sense nor isolationist in the Palin/Obama sense, of a new American order in the Middle East.

IV. Three Obstacles, Three Friends

The United States may lately have grown deeply skeptical of military action, but it retains a vital interest in building a stable order in the Middle East, if for no other reason than to keep the region’s worst pathologies at bay. In the Trump administration’s conception, three key obstacles stand in the way of an order amenable to American interests and to the interests of peace.

The first is what might be called jihadistans, zones of chaos defined by failed states like Syria and Yemen. Offering no easy or immediate path to a better future, the jihadistans are problems that must nevertheless be somehow managed. The second is the problem posed by Sunni terror groups like al-Qaeda and Islamic State, which take root and prosper in the jihadistans. The third is the rise of Iran, which, abetted by Russia, is training and equipping Shiite militias based on the Hizballah model; these it deploys to project its power into at least four different Arab countries: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen.

The administration seeks to contain both the Sunni terror groups and Iran simultaneously. If the deployment of American forces on the ground is the tool of last resort, and therefore to be avoided if at all possible, then the next best option—indeed, the only sensible option—is to work through allies.

When, however, one surveys America’s traditional friends in the Middle East, very few have the ability to project power beyond their borders. Only three truly stand out in that regard: Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. Notably, the Obama administration, in pursuing its Iran policy, fell out with all three.

Only three of America’s friends in the Middle East can project power. The Obama administration, in pursuing its Iran policy, fell out with all three.

In each case, Obama was careful to present the tensions with those allies that his policy had itself created as the result of conflicts over values—a construal that implicitly put his administration on the side of the angels. Saudi Arabia was a Wahhabi state with a democracy deficit. Turkey was led by Erdogan, an authoritarian who was turning a blind eye to al-Qaeda and Islamic State in Syria. Both countries were trying to drag the United States into a destructive Sunni-Shiite conflict—as if their policies derived from base sectarian motives rather than (as was the case) a shared fear of the Iranian–Russian alliance. Somehow, the White Houses’s vaunted commitment to humanitarian values never induced it to rethink its own shameless outreach to the regime in Tehran, more brutal and more sectarian than its Sunni rivals.

By contrast, from the moment Trump took office it was obvious that he planned to work with, and through, Israel and Saudi Arabia. His plans for Turkey have been less apparent, so let’s start there.

Rebuilding the American alliance with Ankara is a formidable task. The source of the difficulty resides primarily in the deal brokered by the Obama administration with the YPG, the Syrian Kurdish Forces that the United States turned into its primary partner in defeating IS.

Critics of Trump’s Syria withdrawal routinely make two points. First, the actual cost of maintaining the 2,000 Americans in Syria was negligible. Second, that being the case, the abandonment of the Kurds entailed by the withdrawal reveals the administration to be just another in the long line of American governments that could never be trusted to keep their word.

Both points ignore the simple fact that, by developing the relationship with the YPG in the first place, Obama had himself betrayed a treaty ally. And it was a costly betrayal. The YPG is the Syrian wing of the PKK, the Kurdish separatist organization in Turkey that any Turkish president, not just Erdogan, would regard as a mortal enemy. By mid-century, Kurds are estimated to make up over one-third of Turkey’s population. The Kurdish question therefore is the most significant in the country’s domestic politics and in its foreign policy. The issue is, in a word, existential for the Turkish Republic.

By aligning with the YPG, the United States drove Turkey into the arms of Russia, and sowed the seeds of a multiyear Kurdish–Turkish war. Out of a misguided commitment to these Kurdish “allies,” any American forces still in Syria would therefore be obligated to remain ensconced there for many years to come. Trump’s Syria withdrawal cut the Gordian knot that Obama’s ill-considered policy had created. Whether it can help lead to more positive outcomes between Washington and Ankara remains to be seen.

Next, Israel. Trump’s conception of the Middle East is hardly a dream world. To an ally like Israel, it presents, to put it mildly, very serious challenges—one of which stands out: if the Israelis have any hope of preventing Syria from becoming a permanent Iranian military base, they must act alone. Only independent military action can solve their problem. This is indeed a daunting prospect, especially when one considers that behind Iran stands Russia, making the risk of an Israeli–Russian war a very real possibility.

But it is a mistake to interpret Israel’s loneliness as a direct result of Trump’s withdrawal from Syria. The withdrawal focuses the mind on an unpleasant reality, one that the withdrawal did not create. After all, the 2,000 American troops had no legal mandate to engage Iranian troops unless directly threatened by them (as they were last February). Significant Democratic voices in Congress, joined by a few Republicans, were already loudly underscoring this point and demanding a timely withdrawal, a demand that grew even sharper teeth after November’s mid-term elections. Even if Trump had been personally more inclined to keep the troops in place, he likely would have come under pressure to pull them out, especially if Turkish operations against the Syrian Kurds put the Americans in harm’s way.

Israel’s fate is a lonely one, but Israel is very powerful militarily, possibly more powerful than at any time in its history, and it is not at all isolated. In the administration’s conception, the United States fervently desires to see Israel succeed in curtailing Iranian power. Trump and his foreign-policy advisers, led by Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, will likely be eager to provide Israel with any weapons and intelligence it may lack to do the job. They will also continue to coordinate closely with it politically, and ensure that the United States serves as a deterrent to Russian military action.

In their sudden solicitude for Israel, the administration’s critics, for their part, have drawn a false distinction between the “symbolic” steps that Trump has taken in favor of the Jewish state, like moving the embassy to Jerusalem, and the supposedly “real” support that the 2,000 troops were providing and that would now be lost. In international affairs, however, “symbolic” support with tangible diplomatic, political, and historical consequences, like moving the embassy, is real support—as few know better than Israel’s leaders.

As against the charge that Trump has left Israel in the lurch, Israel’s government remembers that the architect of the Iranian land bridge that now threatens war on Israel’s northern border was none other than Barack Obama. Nor have Netanyahu and his aides forgotten such key aspects of the Obama administration’s approach as, to list just the highlights: falsely accusing them of spying on America; leaking information about sensitive Israeli military operations in Syria; coaching the press on Israel’s cooperation with Azerbaijan against Iran, and how it was allegedly undermining American security; duplicitously concealing the Iran negotiations from them; tacitly condoning hostile action against Israel in the UN Security Council; ceaselessly hectoring them about Israel’s supposed recalcitrance in negotiations with the Palestinians; berating them in the media for insufficient concern regarding civilian deaths in Gaza; lecturing them endlessly on West Bank settlements; funneling financial assistance to their opponents during the Israeli election while calling Netanyahu himself “a chickenshit.”

About six months into the Trump presidency, I asked a senior Israeli official to describe the difference between working with the Trump and the Obama administrations. “The Obama administration treated us to a non-stop diet of hostility and contempt,” he answered. “With the Trump administration, we are experiencing chaotic friendship.” He paused to clarify: “chaotic friendship is better.”

Obama and the former officials in his “echo chamber” (to use Ben Rhodes’s impudent term for the network of politicians, pundits, reporters, and broadcasters who faithfully parroted his White House narrative of Obama’s Iran policy) have insinuated that their adversarial attitude toward Israel arose out of one of those tragic clashes of values so dear to the former president’s mentality. In this rendition, Obama cared deeply about democracy and human rights—meaning Palestinian rights—whereas the chauvinistic government of Benjamin Netanyahu did not. Granting that Obama did sincerely disagree with Netanyahu on the Palestinian issue, this claim was nevertheless a dodge. In plain fact, the attitude toward Israel was itself part and parcel of the Obama administration’s approach to regional order: the outreach to Iran required a downgrading of America’s traditional allies, among whom democratic Israel was clearly the most irksome.

Joseph Biden, the former vice-president, recently expressed the matter with admirable clarity. “Our biggest problem is our allies,” he said in an interview. While in office, Biden had made the same statement, but in the belief that he was speaking off-the-record. When the statement became public, the ensuing controversy forced him to retract and apologize. As we now see, it was no mere slip of the tongue but in fact his considered judgment.

 

V. The Saudi-Israeli Convergence

Finally, Saudi Arabia. Nowhere has the Biden mindset been more pervasive, or more pernicious, than in the prevailing attitude among liberals and Democrats (and some Republicans) toward Saudi Arabia, which, under Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, has committed the unpardonable sin of working closely with the Trump administration to dismantle the Iran deal and to reconstitute a coalition dedicated to containing Iran. The crown prince has been depicted as spoiled and reckless, and his erratic behavior, so the story goes, is a major threat to stability in the Middle East and a danger to the United States.

Before swallowing this tale whole, one would do well to ask a few pointed questions. In the Middle East, which state of consequence shares Israel’s interest in preventing Iran from developing a nuclear-weapons capability? Which state is similarly dedicated to curtailing Iranian power on the ground in Syria and Yemen? Which will help promote a strategic view of the Middle East that correctly sees the rise of Iran, and not the Palestinian question, as the key problem to be solved? Finally, which Arab leader has done the most to advance a general warming of relations with Israel and, incidentally, shares with Israel a deep distrust of the growing influence of Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the Arab world?

In brief, the convergence of interests between Israel and Mohammad bin Salman’s Saudi Arabia is both startling in its breadth and historically significant. It also comes at a fortuitous moment, when other regional allies of the United States can no longer take Washington’s support for granted. Indeed, the Saudi–Israeli convergence is, in part, a response to the fact that, on the international scene, America has gone wobbly.

The convergence of interests between Israel and Mohammad bin Salman’s Saudi Arabia is both startling in its breadth and historically significant.

Trump’s conception of regional order quite openly seeks to further the Saudi–Israeli convergence and to build upon it, in hopes of constructing an effective policy of containment even in an era of domestic wariness regarding military commitments abroad.

Of course, it is no secret that this initiative has been met recently by a ferocious countereffort to anathematize Mohammad bin Salman and throw ice water on any idea of America’s engaging Saudi Arabia altogether. The weapon was handed to the administration’s critics when Saudi assassins murdered the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2. Now the very same critics who claim vociferously that Trump’s Syria withdrawal has betrayed America’s allies, including Israel, are mounting a no-holds-barred attack on Israel’s tacit partner in confronting the Iranian threat and America’s own longest-term ally in the Arab world.

There can be no disputing that the murder of Khashoggi deserves a very sharp response from the United States. But influential voices are calling for much more, advocating what amounts to a restructuring of U.S.–Saudi relations and thereby of U.S. strategy altogether in the Middle East: withholding arms sales and defense cooperation, pressuring Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to make concessions to the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen, and even working to have Mohammad bin Salman removed from power. (In March 2015, it was he, then the kingdom’s defense minister, who presided over the Saudi-led intervention in neighboring Yemen after the Houthis, an Iranian proxy trained and equipped by Hizballah and Tehran, had occupied the capital Sanaa, seized the presidential palace, and placed the government of Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi under house arrest.)

Indeed, one of the greatest achievements of this campaign has been to convince people, even people with foreign-policy experience, that Khashoggi’s murder is more than just a point of bitter contention between Riyadh and Washington; it is a matter of the utmost strategic significance for America.

For some time now, Saudi Arabia has been in the crosshairs of the Democratic party’s progressive wing. In September 2017, for example, Senator Bernie Sanders expressed his hostility to the Saudis in the sharpest of terms. “Do I consider them an ally? I consider them to be an undemocratic country that has supported terrorism around the world,” he said. “No, they are not an ally of the United States.” The Khashoggi affair has now pulled more moderate elements of the party toward the Sanders position, not least because it offers a good line of attack against the president. “We have a president who is part of the cover-up as to what happened in that consulate or embassy when Mr. Khashoggi was murdered,” Hillary Clinton said recently. “And we have a president and those closest to him who have their own personal commercial interests.”

Nor have Republicans been paragons of strategic clarity. To take a single instance: instead of directing the resources of his office to the machinations of the primary enemies of the United States, the Tennessee senator Bob Corker, outgoing chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, busied himself with the weighty task of thwarting Trump over the Khashoggi murder. He hauled Gina Haspel, director of the CIA, to Capitol Hill to give a bipartisan group of like-minded senators a detailed intelligence briefing on the crown prince’s involvement in the affair. Corker, together with Senator Bob Menendez, also sent a letter to Trump demanding a formal determination as to whether bin Salman was personally responsible for the killing of Khashoggi. Under the terms of the Global Magnitsky Act, such a determination would automatically trigger sanctions against the de-facto ruler of Saudi Arabia.

Nicholas Burns, a Harvard professor and former senior official of the State Department, has been a key player in connecting the murder of the journalist with the global defense of democracy and freedom. “We’ve always believed we stand for these values . . . and for an honorable person like Khashoggi to be interrogated and murdered by a government that’s friendly to the U.S., we have an obligation to speak out and disavow and condemn it,” Burns said. “We have to uphold these values. If we don’t uphold them, who’s going to uphold them in the world?” Expanding the range of his vision, he pointed to the threat posed to America by the rise of Russia and China. “The democracies of the world need to check the actions of these authoritarian powers,” he intoned, “so [the Khashoggis murder] is a test for us.”

But what makes Khashoggi a test in the competition with authoritarian powers? Over the last three months, as the American media have been obsessed by the Khashoggi affair, stories have broken regarding, among other things, the forcible detention by China of one-million Uighurs and the kidnapping and forcible return to China of Meng Hongwei, the former president of Interpol. Both are far more consequential for American foreign policy than the Khashoggi affair, yet they have received a fraction of the attention.

The case of Meng is particularly noteworthy. In recent years, Beijing has kidnapped, forcibly repatriated, incarcerated, and tortured numerous Chinese nationals. Among the hundreds captured in this brazen worldwide operation, code-named Fox Hunt, are dozens of individuals from Canada and Australia; others have even been snatched from American soil. How many well-informed Americans can identify by name a single one of them, or even identify the American cities where they were taken? How many American pundits and politicians screaming to punish Mohammad bin Salman have made similarly urgent arguments about the need to punish Chinese leader Xi Jinping for his multiple affronts to American sovereignty?

Exaggerating the significance of Khashoggi’s murder sends a signal of American confusion to the world.

Exaggerating the significance of Khashoggi’s murder sends a signal of American confusion to the world. It suggests that the world’s only superpower has lost the meaningful capacity to differentiate one heinous misdeed by a close ally from continuous threats posed by its true enemies, not least in the Middle East itself. Every word expended on the Khashoggi affair has been a lost opportunity to discuss, for example, such simultaneous machinations as the plot by Iran to carry out an assassination in Denmark, the second such plot in Europe this year, or the discovery of tunnels being dug by Hizballah from Lebanon into Israel.

 

Over the last two months, the Khashoggi media campaign succeeded in generating in the Senate a “moral panic,” a widespread fear of a rising evil so great as to demand an unchallengeable need for action. The panic reached its apogee in the week before Christmas, when a bipartisan clutch of senators raced to advance legislation to combat the threat. The spirit of the Senate was well captured in the title of the resolution sponsored by the Republican senator Lindsey Graham—a title made absurdly long so as to cover every conceivable evil:

A resolution expressing the sense of the Senate that Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman bin Abd al-Aziz al-Saud of Saudi Arabia be held accountable for contributing to the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, preventing a resolution to the blockade of Qatar, the jailing and torture of dissidents and activists inside the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the use of force to intimidate rivals, and the abhorrent and unjustified murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Although Graham’s resolution covered all the bases, it has yet to go to a vote. But two similar resolutions did pass, both of them bipartisan and one of them, co-sponsored by Bernie Sanders and Senator Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah, invoking the War Powers Act. If the paltry, non-lethal support the U.S. is offering to the Saudi-led coalition actually constitutes war-fighting, then virtually every act of U.S. foreign policy would similarly fall under the purview of that act.

In Yemen, however, what will determine the course of events is indeed the iron logic of war. The Houthis are an Iranian proxy force. If they win, Iran will win. If they merely force a stalemate, Iran will retain a base on Saudi Arabia’s southern border from which rockets and missiles provided by Iran can target Riyadh. Precisely as it has done in Lebanon for Hizballah, and against Israel, Iran will have every incentive to increase the size and power of that arsenal.

No senatorial display of outrage can refute this logic. A policy of punishing Saudi Arabia will not improve “the humanitarian crisis in Yemen,” and it will not stop the fighting there. It will succeed only in handing Iran a victory and the U.S. a strategic defeat. By contrast, the only way to insure that we do end the killing, end the humanitarian crisis, and achieve our strategic goal of containing Iran is to work for a Saudi victory.

This is the stark logic of war. If the humanitarian cost of a Saudi victory is too high for our moral sensibilities to bear, then the only answer is for the U.S. to become more engaged, to help the Saudis with their strategy and their tactics, to bring the war to a quicker and more decisive outcome that will destroy the lives of fewer people. Those are the real options—moral and strategic. No one in the Senate is discussing them.

Call it the punitive agenda: one that will weaken the American position in the Middle East and expose Israel to further risks, as some Israelis themselves have made abundantly clear. “Don’t throw the prince out with the bathwater,” the Israeli ambassador Ron Dermer urged. It is wise counsel, unfortunately unheeded by American senators who, full of passionate intensity, have lent bipartisan legitimacy to a program designed to destroy any effective containment policy of the kind outlined above. No good can come from this, and it has the potential to do much harm.

VI. The Only Viable Strategy

The challenges of the Middle East are many and complex. Trump’s strategy of refraining from direct military engagement while assuring support to one’s allies, therefore, is by no means guaranteed to succeed. But in an era of deep skepticism about the deployment of American forces in general, it represents the only viable strategy if the twin goals of American policy are to contain the Sunni terror organizations and Iran simultaneously. The successful containment of Iran would, in turn, reduce the power of Russia, whose expanded influence in the region is largely dependent on Iranian-led ground forces.

In a January 2014 interview with David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, Barack Obama made clear that although the allies of the United States expected him to help them contain Iran militarily, he refused to play that role. Instead, he envisioned “a new geostrategic equilibrium” in which the United States would mediate between its traditional allies and Iran. From 2014 on, Obama sought to implement this conception, which his acolytes continue to tout.

Obama saw the Middle East as a roundtable, at which Iran and Russia would be prominently seated. The job of the United States, in this conception, was to advance proposals for stabilizing the region that would be acceptable to all of the “stakeholders” around the table. But this approach suffered from a debilitating fallacy or, rather, delusion: namely, that the true ambitions of Iran (and Russia) were purely defensive and, therefore, limited. Its advocates assumed that Tehran’s public rhetoric calling for the expulsion of American forces from the region and for the ultimate destruction of both Israel and the United States was just that: rhetoric. What Iran truly coveted, they believed, was legitimacy and security. It was looking for a deal. If the United States would only treat Tehran with respect, the Islamic Republic would become a reasonable partner for stabilizing the region.

During the Obama presidency, Iran pocketed every tangible concession from the United States while offering largely token concessions in return.

During the Obama presidency, Iran pocketed every tangible concession from the United States while offering largely token concessions in return. As Iran’s militias on the ground gobbled up territory, the regime grew more solvent, stronger militarily, and more confident of its ability to threaten American allies with impunity, as evidenced by, among other things, its ever more aggressive support for the Houthi rebellion in Yemen. As a result, the region grew more violent and more unpredictable, and America less reliable.

Iran today is more than happy to continue nurturing this delusion through limited diplomatic engagement, provided that America continues to turn a blind eye to its military advances on the ground while offering Tehran a short path, by means of the nuclear deal, to a completely unfettered nuclear program. Thus has Obama’s conception of regional order led not to the “equilibrium” that he imagined but to chaos and the pronounced weakening of the American security system.

In the Trump conception, by contrast, the Middle East is not a round table but a rectangular table. On one side are the United States and its traditional allies. On the other side are its adversaries: Russia and Iran, their proxies, and the Sunni terror groups. The job of the United States, in this conception, is to elevate the power of its friends over its adversaries while simultaneously mediating among the allies, who are a fractious bunch.

To repeat: the choice faced by Americans and their allies in the Middle East is plain. It is between seeking to co-opt Iran through American concessions and emoluments and, instead, seeking to contain it (and Russia) through American financial pressure and military and diplomatic pressure from allies. And that is really no choice at all, because abject failure is baked into the previous administration’s approach. The current approach is the only viable option that holds out any chance of success.

Last March, when the Senate first addressed the question of whether to punish the Saudis over Yemen, Lindsey Graham, who had not yet fallen victim to the moral panic, spoke judiciously. “The flaws of the Saudi government are real,” he said. “But my [Republican] friends on the other side . . . constantly put Saudi Arabia and Iran on the same footing. I think that is a very unwise analysis—to suggest that Saudi Arabia is just as bad as Iran is just missing the point big time.”

The “big-time” point is this: an ally is a state that supports the American security system. Two questions should thus decide whether America treats a state as a friend or as a foe. Will the state actively help to defend that system against those—Russia, China, and Iran—who seek to weaken or destroy it? If it won’t take action, will it at least deny its territory and resources to America’s enemies?

In the Middle East, if not in the world, these questions should take precedence. When an ally stumbles, we should help it to its feet. When our enemy stumbles, we should help keep it down and on the ground. Any consideration that subverts this elementary logic, no matter how “moral” it may appear on the surface, is fundamentally unsound. The choices in the Middle East are stark: either the United States will build a security system with its own military or with its allies’ militaries, or it won’t have one at all. In the absence of a viable security system, its moral influence in the world will decline significantly.

“Without bread,” the Jewish sages say, “there is no Torah.” In foreign policy we might similarly say, “Without basic security, there are no American values.” There are lessons in this for American politicians in both parties, for supporters of Israel, and for lovers and promoters of liberty around the world.

About the author

Michael Doran, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and the author of Ike’s Gamble: America’s Rise to Dominance in the Middle East (2016), is a former deputy assistant secretary of defense and a former senior director of the National Security Council. He tweets @doranimated.