THE NEXT LEBANON-ISRAEL WAR WILL BE UNLIKE ANY OTHER By Barbara Diamond, TOI JUNE 26, 2019

THE NEXT LEBANON-ISRAEL WAR WILL BE UNLIKE ANY OTHER

By Barbara Diamond, TOI  JUNE 26, 2019  

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-next-lebanon-israel-war-will-be-unlike-any-other/

Posting note:   this is similar to the tactical approach that has been recommended to cause the cessation of Islamic fired missiles and rockets from Gaza. It is posted for your information without comment

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When one attends the annual Shurat Ha Din conference on Law and War, it is a marathon of experts presenting their views on the International understanding of the protocols of fighting a war. It is an update on fighting international terrorist network funding. It is an opportunity to face uncomfortable truths and to digest sensitive new information which we had not heard before. One never knows what will stand out as life-changing information.

At the end of two days of seminars, military experts, politicians, international previous heads of State, technology experts and International leaders – new conclusions came upon me which I must now digest and share with you.

The first and most critical conclusion is quite simply that Israel will be at war with Lebanon in the not too distant future. It may be one year or two or three…but it is coming. It is really quite absurd as the Lebanese people have quite a good life and Israel makes no demands upon them and threatens them in no fashion. I am quite sure that the Lebanese people do not relish the idea of their homes being destroyed, family members dying and their way of life being decimated. But that is exactly what is waiting for them if there is no international attention, world-wide pressure and internal rebellion against Nazrallah’s leadership of Hezbollah.

The influence of Iran as the major player behind all that is evolving is beyond dispute. Whilst the world essentially is terrified of a nuclear capable Iran, they manage to avoid dealing with the reality that Iran is at the core of all of the previous and potential wars in the Middle East. When it was revealed that Lebanon has shored up its missiles to a whopping 140,000 units, it seemed an impossible number. Surely someone has made a mistake? Where did they come from? Who paid for them? Numbers are easy to dismiss … but facts are not.

The answers became clear over the past two days at the Shurat Ha Din conference. Iran has paid for it all and is using Hezbollah in Lebanon as its surrogate to “handle” the Israeli problem. The dots became connected when specialists on North Korea explained that country’s role in all that is developing. Whilst pretending to be interested in joining the “family of nations” North Korea is in fact not only selling Iran all the weapons It needs, but is setting up factories in Iran which are staffed with North Korean employees who make the weapons with the parts secretly shipped from North Korea on the open seas. According to the two experts, a ship from North Korea with contraband can change its flags and name on the outside up to twenty plus times in one journey in order to avoid international detection. That the dictator Kim Jae-ryong’s family is essentially evil and demagogic can be validated with the recent revelation that North Korean emissaries who were sent to meet with the U.S. negotiators returned to North Korea only to be assassinated for not bringing back the information the regime required as to what they considered the USA’s “true intentions.”

The world is facing a new group of evil players who are not dissimilar to Adolph Hitler, to whom Alan Dershowitz referred when discussing the need for nations to face evil before it has a chance to fully evolve. Dershowitz explained that had Churchill attacked Hitler in the early days, a possible 100,000 Germans might have been killed. By waiting until Europe had no option but to go to war, the result was a death toll of fifty million people. It does seem that no one is capable of learning from the lessons of history…regardless of their enormity.

Until Naftali Bennett explained that Israel’s army will never again go into Lebanon to dismantle a missile as he did when he was a specialist in the Army during the Lebanon war in which he served, it was unclear what he was about to reveal. He reports that Israel now knows that 30% to 40% of the homes in Lebanon are built with a missile room as part of the residence. That room has a ceiling which can be opened electronically so the missile can be shot from the residence. This explains how 140,000 missiles can be out of sight to overhead surveillance. Large homes are actually built around the larger missiles as they would be too large to bring into a previously built structure. Lebanon is gearing up for war. Hezbollah is in control of Lebanon now. The government of Israel knows it. Now we know it.

The creativeness of this approach is the Arab mentality at its most vile. Because they trust that Israel will not fire upon civilian targets and will follow the rules of international warfare, they presume that they will have the upper hand. They think Israel will be so torn at the thought of killing innocents, that they will not be able to defend themselves swiftly. Experts believe that Hezbollah will open the next war with 3,000 to 4,000 rockets per day aimed at Israel. Divide that into 140,000 and you can imagine the potential length of the war. That of course presumes that Israel will be caught unaware. It will not be.

Naftali Bennett unexpectedly became the most interesting speaker of the two days…because although he did not reveal the Israeli security cabinet’s plan for reprisal, he made it clear that the laws which exist for international warfare are outmoded… and hence invalid. Warfare will no longer be man to man combat on the ground. Technology has taken warfare into a terrifying place and the law is lagging behind so severely as to be irrelevant in future conflagrations.

By definition, if one allows one’s home to host a missile, then the members of the family in that home are no longer innocent collateral damage, but part of the military force intent on participating in an all-out war. That changes all prior assumptions. The very same Israeli army which up until now discussed every detail with lawyers without making a military move, would now need to have carte blanche to destroy every home, hospital, mosque and school in defense of our Nation state. The laws on the books do not begin to deal with the new realities of potential combat here in the middle east.

It is certainly not for me to say that Israel would use an atomic bomb on Lebanon, but there may be no alternative.

Alan Dershowitz spoke to the conference with stunning information which I myself had missed somewhere along the line. He reports that the Grand Mullah of Iran claims that once they reach nuclear capabilities, it will take only one bomb to kill three million Israelis. When they are reminded that Israel has nuclear capabilities which could kill 20 to 30 million of their people, they shrug their shoulders and say…”that is fine with us. We will lose people but the Muslim faith will survive. “ Little wonder the people of Iran are terrified of the Mullahs. Rightly so. If the Iranian population does not wake up soon and depose them by force, their own nation could be decimated in this web of evil intent.

Professor Dershowitz discussed at great length the need for pre-emptive action. He explained that in International law, when there is clear evidence that an enemy plans to destroy another nation, that other nation has the right of first attack. Will Israel wait for the first three or four thousand missiles to rain down on it before it reacts ?

Iran has created an opportunity for their own people to survive unscathed by encouraging Hezbollah to do its bidding.

The Israelis who are angry at their Prime Minister for not destroying Gaza as Hamas sends hundreds of rockets toward our Southern towns are not looking at the entire picture. What we have not been privy to is the severity of the situation in Lebanon. If Israel begins another war with Gaza, it would be the perfect time for Hezbollah to garner the will to begin their own attack. This is not a war which will be fought on the ground. Our soldiers will not be going into the houses to find the missiles… drones will locate them and homes and families will be decimated. Preserving peace is a delicate balance.

The message given loud and clear at the end of the conference by Nitsana Darshan-Leitner  founder and president of the organization thirteen years ago, is that it is our individual obligation to let the entire world know -now … that in the next Lebanon war, all civilians will be considered combatants and will not be spared. If we share the message with clarity, there is actually a possibility that the Lebanese people who do not have the missiles in their homes will force Hezbollah out of their lives so that they will survive.

For the first time ever, I am taking pause to consider whether the time is right for an “Unity” government in spite of all the dis-unity we have witnessed. With our enemies taking themselves to a new level, we need to be cohesive as a Nation prepared to support one another rather than waste our efforts with petty deprecation.

Thus far Israel has taken the moral high ground in every war effort. How long will it be before that is no longer a viable option?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born in the Washington DC area, Barbara has been a pro Israel activist for over four decades, having had a radio show in Jerusalem called “Barbara Diamond One on One” , doing in depth interviews which aired in Israel and in the UK. She participated in missions to the USSR to meet with Refuseniks, to Ethiopia with a medical team to help the Jewish villages and to China to open up relations prior to China recognizing the State of Israel, She has been pro-active lobbying congress and helping to start a Pro Israel PAC in Los Angeles. She stays involved through the Jerusalem Press Club attending up to the moment briefings which she would like to share with the readers. Ms. Diamond is the 2018 recipient of the “StandWithUs”-Israel leadership award.

‘THE EVIDENCE ROOM’: WHEN SKILLS ARE USED FOR EVIL BY JORDAN SCHACHTEL | JUN 26, 2019

‘THE EVIDENCE ROOM’: WHEN SKILLS ARE USED FOR EVIL 

 BY JORDAN SCHACHTEL | JUN 26, 2019 | COVER STORY Jewish Journal of Los Angeles

https://jewishjournal.com/cover_story/300669/the-evidence-room-when-skills-are-used-for-evil/

When we learn about the Holocaust, we often hear stories about the evils committed by individuals and groups belonging to institutions of what we perceive to be of the highest moral order.

Ancient Greek physician Hippocrates instructed physicians, “First, do no harm.” Millions of doctors around the world sworn to uphold its principles in the Hippocratic Oath carry that directive in their hearts. However, infamous Nazi physician Josef Mengele and his colleagues at Auschwitz did not follow these principles. Instead, they used their advanced medical skills to conduct horrific human experiments and maximize human pain through torture and murder.

Science has tremendous virtue. Individuals in the hard sciences have touched the lives of billions, helping the human race live more healthy, fruitful lives through scientific discoveries and advancement. But Nazi scientist and chemist by trade Bruno Tesch invented the gas Zyklon B, which originally was used as a pesticide, and weaponized it for the explicit purpose of exterminating human beings. Some 3 million victims of the Holocaust died from exposure to Zyklon B. The Nazis enlisted willing scientists and used their inquiring minds to find ways to supplement and advance genocide.

Architecture embodies the spirit of innovation and design. “Architecture is my delight, and putting up and pulling down, one of my favorite amusements,” Thomas Jefferson, who has been described as the “father of” American architecture, commented on his passion. Architects are both creative and extremely technical. Their problem-solving skills have been utilized to overcome incredible challenges. Architects, too, can use this skill set to commit unspeakable evil.

Nazi architects used their hybrid abilities of crafting innovative plans and ensuring technical perfection to assist in the Holocaust. Without the murderous innovations Nazi architects created and refined, the Nazis would never have been able to design and advance the world’s most ruthless killing machine, the concentration camp, and use it in an attempt to exterminate the Jewish race. The Holocaust took the lives of 6 million Jews. Without architects, that number undoubtedly would have been far fewer. The sad truth remains that at the time of Nazi rule, no group within German society was short of individuals more than willing to use their skill set to advance Nazi causes.

In 1993, Emory University professor Deborah Lipstadt wrote “Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.” The no-holds-barred exposé tackled what Lipstadt identified as the key motives behind Holocaust denial. She determined that the world’s high-profile Holocaust deniers largely are a mixture of anti-Semites and second-rate pseudo-historians. Three years later, infamous British Holocaust denier, racist and anti-Semite David Irving, whom Lipstadt named in the book as a Holocaust denier, sued Lipstadt and her publisher for libel, claiming the label was false and his reputation as a legitimate historian had suffered as a result.

In the English courts system, public figures such as Irving receive much more robust protection from open, public scrutiny than in the American system. On top of that, libel laws benefit the person bringing the case. In U.S. courts, the burden of proof lies with the plaintiff. But in the U.K., the burden of proof lies with the defendant.

One of Irving’s key contentions was that there were no mass-extermination gas chambers at Auschwitz — where more than 1 million Jews were killed — or any other death camps. He said it was a giant Jewish deception, adding there were “logistical and architectural impossibilities” for such a high casualty toll. Irving claimed the gas chambers were not killing machines, but merely used to spray for pesticides.

During the winter of 1945, as the Nazi war effort was crumbling, SS chief Heinrich Himmler ordered his troops to bomb the gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz. Before fully abandoning Auschwitz, the Nazis did their best to rapidly dismantle and destroy the evidence of their crimes against humanity. Holocaust deniers, ignoring thousands of witness testimonies about the horrific brutality at Auschwitz, often have pointed to the lack of clear physical structures at the concentration camp.

To succeed in defending Lipstadt from the lawsuit, her legal team had to provide definitive proof the Holocaust did happen. Luckily, the Nazis ultimately were unsuccessful in covering up their crimes. Throughout the years, independent investigators have pieced together blueprints, photographs and other pieces of evidence to back up witness testimonies about the Holocaust, leading to a definitive understanding of the largest genocide in human history.

The exhibits in “The Evidence Room,” currently on display at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., largely are based on architectural designs that were brought to light during that landmark 2000 case, Irving v. Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt. Historian Robert Jan van Pelt, who testified as an expert witness during the case, had in his possession a series of letters and blueprints that displayed the formation and continuing improvement of these architectural killing machines.

“The Evidence Room” installation originally was commissioned for the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2016. A team from the School of Architecture at the University of Waterloo in Canada designed and built the project. Van Pelt and a handful of professional architects led the team. 

“It is a profound experience for all of us,” van Pelt said in a statement upon its original commission, “and, in design terms, a radical, unprecedented investigation into the possibility to represent something unrepresentable: the architectural evidence of a factory of death.”

“The Evidence Room” features three architectural reconstructions of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

The Door

Nazi architects designed the entrance to the gas chamber with two goals: maximum “security” and maximum killing speed and efficiency. The door to the gas chambers simultaneously acted as an impenetrable jail cell and as a key component of a rapid extermination machine.

The gas-tight door was modified so it opened out, rather than in, so guards could more efficiently retrieve corpses. A latch further reinforced the door. The door had a peephole so guards could observe the swift deaths of everyone inside. The victims’ side of the door was fitted with a mesh wiring surrounding the peephole to prevent prisoners from attempting to break the glass.

The Wall Hatch and Ladder

This system was designed so guards could lob Zyklon B, the human-killing pesticide, into aboveground gas chambers. Nazi troops would climb a ladder and toss gas cannisters into an open hatch, leaving locked-in victims with nowhere to go. This type of killing machine could take out an estimated 1,000 innocent lives per day.

The Gas Column

Architects designed the floor-to-ceiling column to double the killing speed of the ladder system. The column system allowed Nazis to lower Zyklon B through an airtight hatch, then remove the gas cannisters in an expedited manner, freeing up the gas chambers for more rounds of extermination. Nazis used the gas column to kill as many as 2,000 people at once.

In addition to the three constructions, the white walls are lined with blueprints and letters of correspondence between Nazi architects.

I visited “The Evidence Room” on the day it opened. Why did a memorial to the Holocaust end up at the Hirshhorn and not, say, a Jewish museum or a Holocaust museum?

“‘The Evidence Room’ reaches even beyond those particular connections. Of course, it is a Holocaust memorial. But at the same time, it’s unlike any other Holocaust memorial,” Alan Ginsberg, executive director of The Evidence Room Foundation, told the Journal. Ginsberg’s foundation is responsible for owning, maintaining and exhibiting the artwork.

“In Washington, D.C., it’s at the National Museum of the Contemporary Arts of the United States. It’s architecture, it’s history, and it’s contemporary art,” he said. “That decision was deliberate. It was not an accident. It brings the exhibition to a much bigger, much different audience. It’s, of course, about the Holocaust, but it’s more than that. And the Hirshhorn is absolutely the perfect venue for this, for its debut in the United States.”

In an exhibition-accompanying book of the same name, contributor Anne Bordeleau, one of the four principles behind the project (and a registered architect), discusses the potential effect the all-white exhibition at the Hirshhorn museum will have on visitors.

“The room asks for a pause, questioning our relation to time and history,” Bordeleau wrote. “It offers a significant gap in time that for a split second might disrupt our obsession with the now and the future. It does not explain, nor elucidate. It merely poses a question that comes to its fullest answer when one effectively experiences the casts in their mute, fragile, ghostly, and yet indubitable presence.”

“The Evidence Room is a visual testament to the truth of the Holocaust,” reads a plaque at the entrance of the exhibition. “The Evidence Room serves as a space for contemplating and remembering the horrors of the past so that the testimony of Holocaust survivors will not die with them.”

Political pundits and university academics often claim we live in a “post-truth” world; that nothing can be entirely ruled out; that everything should be placed in a gray area. With that standard, Holocaust denial cannot be ruled out. With that standard, sitting members of Congress, without batting an eyelash, can forcefully declare there are concentration camps near the U.S. southern border akin to those Nazi Germany used to kill six million Jews.

“The Evidence Room” reminds us that objective realities remain part of this world. It also is a testament to how forensics and a worthy investigative effort can uncover undeniable truths. There are many gray areas in our society, and some issues rife for a worthy debate and discovery. But just as one cannot deny the laws of thermodynamics, the same truths apply to the realities of the Holocaust.

“It has much more universal context. There are some things that are simply irrefutable. We live in this world of postmodernism, subjectivism, relativism and, of course, there’s value in interpretation. But it can be taken to an irrational extreme,” Ginsberg said. “There’s a universal essence of this work of art. Some events absolutely happened. Some things are just objective truths. If you say this didn’t happen, that’s not your opinion. That’s just wrong.

“It’s very disorienting, this discourse that we have culturally today, to suggest that almost nothing is real, that everything is subjective,” he added. “I think it’s time to tilt the swing a little bit back, to temper this subjectivism with reality.”

“The Evidence Room” is on display through Sept. 8.

Jordan Schachtel is a national security analyst and investigative journalist. He is an advisory board member of the Gross Family Center for the Study of Anti-semitism and the Holocaust. He can be reached on Twitter @JordanSchachtel

TAKE THE PALESTINIANS’ ‘NO’ FOR AN ANSWER

Eugene Kontorovich  Wall Street Journal   6-23-19

https://www.wsj.com/articles/take-the-palestinians-no-for-an-answer-11561316980?mod=itp_wsj&mod=&mod=djemITP_h

They’ve rejected every peace initiative. Their no-show this week in Bahrain should be the last.

This week’s U.S.-led Peace to Prosperity conference in Bahrain on the Palestinian economy will likely be attended by seven Arab states—a clear rebuke to foreign-policy experts who said that recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and the Golan Heights as Israeli territory would alienate the Arab world. Sunni Arab states are lending legitimacy to the Trump administration’s plan, making it all the more notable that the Palestinian Authority itself refuses to participate.

The conference’s only agenda is improving the Palestinian economy. It isn’t tied to any diplomatic package, and the plan’s 40-page overview contains nothing at odds with the Palestinian’s purported diplomatic goals. Some aspects are even politically uncomfortable for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Given all that, the Palestinian Authority’s unwillingness to discuss economic opportunities for its own people, even with the Arab states, shows how far it is from discussing the concessions necessary for a diplomatic settlement. Instead it seeks to deepen Palestinian misfortune and use it as a cudgel against Israel in the theater of international opinion.

This isn’t the first time the Palestinians have said no. At a summit brokered by President Clinton in 2000, Israel offered them full statehood on territory that included roughly 92% of the West Bank and all of Gaza, along with a capital in Jerusalem. The Palestinian Authority rejected that offer, leading Israel to up it to 97% of the West Bank in 2001. Again, the answer was no. An even further-reaching offer in 2008 was rejected out of hand. And when President Obama pressured Israel into a 10-month settlement freeze in 2009 to renew negotiations, the Palestinians refused to come to the table.

After so many rejections, one might conclude that the Palestinian Authority’s leaders simply aren’t interested in peace. Had they accepted any of the peace offers, they would have immediately received the rarest of all geopolitical prizes: a new country, with full international recognition. To be sure, in each proposal they found something not quite to their liking. But the Palestinians are perhaps the only national independence movement in the modern era that has ever rejected a genuine offer of internationally recognized statehood, even if it falls short of all the territory the movement had sought.

The best example is Israel itself, which jumped at a 1947 United Nations proposal for a Jewish state, even though it was noncontiguous and excluded Jerusalem and much of its present territory. The Arab states rejected the proposal, which would have also created a parallel Arab country.

India and Pakistan didn’t reject independence because major territorial claims were left unaddressed. Ireland accepted independence without the island’s six northern counties. Morocco didn’t refuse statehood because Spain retained land on its northern coast.

While there have been hundreds of national independence movements in modern times, few are fortunate enough to receive an offer of fully recognized sovereign statehood. Including 1947, the Palestinians have received four. From Tibet to Kurdistan, such opportunities remain a dream.

Several lessons must be drawn from the Palestinians’ serial rejection of statehood—and this week, even of economic development. First, the status quo is not Israeli “rule” or “domination.” The Palestinians can comfortably turn down once-in-a-lifetime opportunities because almost all Palestinians already live under Palestinian government. Since the 1993 Oslo Accords, they’ve enjoyed many of statehood’s trappings, particularly in foreign relations. Israel undertakes regular antiterror operations, but that’s different from overall power. For instance, the U.S. doesn’t “rule” over Afghanistan.

Second, statehood and a resolution to the conflict is not what the Palestinians truly seek. This is what economists call a “revealed preference”: To know what consumers truly want, look at what they choose. The Palestinians have repeatedly chosen the status quo over sovereignty.

Finally, throw out the assumption that when Palestinians reject an offer, it stays on the table and accrues interest. If offers will only improve with time, the Palestinians have an incentive to keep saying no.

The Palestinian Authority cannot be forced to accept a peaceful settlement, and Israel doesn’t wish to return to its pre-Oslo control over the Palestinian population. But rejectionism, culminating this week in Bahrain, must have consequences.

For more than 50 years, the future of Jewish communities in the West Bank—and the nearly half a million Jews who now live there—has been held in limbo pending a diplomatic settlement. While the authority rejects improved hospitals, port arrangements and employment centers, many of the benefits for Palestinians could still be achieved by locating them in parts of the West Bank under Israeli jurisdiction. But to do that, the question mark over these places, which include all of the Jews living in the West Bank and a much smaller number of Palestinians, must be lifted. Washington should support Israeli initiatives to replace military rule with civil law in these areas, normalizing their status. The Palestinians’ no-show in Bahrain should end their ability to hold development and growth hostage.

Mr. Kontorovich is director of the Center for International Law in the Middle East and a law professor at George Mason University, and a scholar at the Kohelet Policy Forum.

HOW THE ISRAELI LEFT LOST IT by Edward Alexander Algemeiner 6-23-19

HOW THE ISRAELI LEFT LOST IT

by Edward Alexander   Algemeiner   6-23-19

https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/06/23/how-the-israeli-left-lost-it/?utm_content=blog1&utm_medium=daily_email&utm_campaign=email&utm_source=internal/

Review of The Crack-Up of the Israeli Left by Mordechai Nisan, Canada: Mantua Books.

“When It comes to defaming Jews, the Palestinians are pisherkes [pipsqueaks] next to Ha’aretz.” — Philip Roth, Operation Shylock

When the German Parliament, in spring of this year, declared, by a large majority, that the BDS movement is an antisemitic campaign in direct line of descent from the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses and products, the most fierce and intemperate attack on the Germans (for pointing out the obvious) came from prominent figures in Israeli journalism and academia. Ha’aretz, long ago labelled by Steve Plaut (Israel’s Jonathan Swift) “the Arab paper written in Hebrew,” led the charge against the German parliamentarians for coming to the support of their country. They were joined by more than 60 deep thinkers who argued, in an online petition, that the “amalgamation” of calls for boycotts with antisemitism “is wrong, unacceptable and a threat to Germany’s democratic foundation.”

While some of the signatories — who included well-known professors from universities in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, and Beersheba — may dislike BDS a bit, “we all reject the fallacious claim that the BDS movement as such is anti-Semitic [sic], and we defend every person and every organization’s right to support it.”

Related coverage

June 23, 2019 8:46 am

Israelis of this sort are the primary subject of Mordechai Nisan’s new book, The Crack-Up of the Israeli Left, although he also excoriates numerous “foreign Jewish Leftists” and their non-Jewish allies. He pays particular attention to the dogmatism and dictatorialness of the anti-Zionist leftists in academia, cousins of the Philistines whose despicable antics today roil the campuses of Yale and NYU and Oberlin and scores of other deeply troubled places.

The domination of Israeli campuses by leftist faculty is coextensive with the history of the Zionist enterprise. Nisan suggests, for example, that the Revisionist sympathies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s father Benzion Netanyahu probably explain why the foremost historian of medieval Spain spent his academic career in Ithaca, NY (Cornell) rather than Jerusalem (Hebrew University). A less well-known example might explain the strenuous though unsuccessful opposition, during Brandeis University’s early years, to granting tenure to Marie Syrkin, a major figure in the Zionist movement as well as a distinguished poet and essayist. Among her colleagues were the non-Zionist Irving Howe and the anti-Zionist Herbert Marcuse.

Nisan knows that intellectuals in countries other than Israel have often tended to adopt the motto “the other country, right or wrong.” But they do not generally arise within 50 years of a country’s founding, and in no case have they cultivated their “alienation” in a country whose “right to exist” is considered an acceptable subject of discussion among otherwise respectable people and nations. Midge Decter put the matter shrewdly in May 1996: “A country only half a century old is not supposed to have a full fledged accomplished literary intelligentsia. … This is an extravagance only an old and stable country should be allowed to indulge in.” On May Day, 1936 the Labor Zionist leader Berl Katznelson angrily asked, “Is there another people on earth whose sons are so emotionally and mentally twisted that they consider everything their nation does despicable and hateful, while every murder, rape and robbery committed by their enemies fills their hearts with admiration and awe?” Nisan locates this perversion on the Israeli Left, and especially its professoriat.

The heart sinks, the mind reels to learn that the odious doctrines of “diversity” and multiculturalism (a euphemism for cultural deprivation) have spread from American universities to Israel, where the institution whose very name means “out of many, one” pursues its opposite: race-thinking. Nisan cites a notorious recent example, much beloved of feminist Israel-haters: “One of the most weird and morally staggering innovations at the Hebrew University, was a student’s sociological research on Israeli soldiers who, despite the alleged wicked occupation of the territories, refrain from raping Palestinian women. The researcher concluded that Jewish soldiers were racist and exclusivist in refusing the opportunity to exploit Arab women as sex plunder.” To this does race-thinking come.

The Crack-Up is an openly partisan book. Nisan dons no masks, and immediately reveals his sympathies in the book’s dedication. “Dedicated to the memory of all the Israeli victims of savage Palestinian terrorism, who were callously betrayed by treasonous and defeatist policies, and to all the many hundreds of Israelis slaughtered and maimed with the launching of the delusional Oslo peace process in 1993.”

Nisan describes, plausibly yet perhaps imprudently, his “own unpleasant encounters with a few Hebrew University professors, who were my ostensible colleagues … and demonstrated adversarial demeanors.” A friend of mine who taught at Mount Scopus’ Truman Institute for Peace once told me he was “the only Jew there”; and he later fled to Oxford, that much older home of “lost causes, forsaken beliefs, impossible loyalties.”

Nisan lays primary blame for the oppositional attitude of Jewish intellectuals upon what the great novelist Aharon Appelfeld called “antisemitism directed at oneself.” But Nisan lists baser motives as well: “It is good business to be a leftist. You get funded from foreign antisemites, you get to travel around the world, speak on distinguished panels, enjoy extensive media coverage, and receive praise from a variety of prominent people and noteworthy organizations. Fame, though short-lived, is an attractive commodity, though tarnished by infamy forever.”

Edward Alexander is the author of numerous books, among them Irving Howe: Socialist, Critic, Jew and Jews Against Themselves.

Trump Dodged An Ambush By Avoiding War With Iran Kurt Schlichter Town Hall 6-23-19

Trump Dodged An Ambush By Avoiding War With Iran

Kurt Schlichter Town Hall 6-23-19

Posting note: We post this article because we find it very interesting. Postal does not mean  endorsement nor agreement. 

 Appending this note. does not imply disagreement.

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2019/06/24/trump-dodged-an-ambush-by-avoiding-war-with-iran---p--n2548787?utm_source=schlichterdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&bcid=9930c656b2212929c884960baf64bc5a&pid=b8b16dfe-99b6-4391-8b93-c70c673bf076

Assuming nothing happens between the time I write this and the time you read it, it appears that Donald Trump has refused to take the sucker’s bait and engage us in open war with Iran. And while I remain more hawkish than many of my fellow supporters of the Trump Revolt against the garbage liberal elite, it’s pretty clear that Trump was right. Some quality conservatives disagree with me in good faith, but whatever makes Fredocons like Bill Kristol upset is presumptively a good idea.

Let’s clarify some things. Iran is our enemy – the notion that we might wish to avoid being drawn into open conflict today does not mean these mullah bastards don’t deserve to be hanged from the very cranes they use to murder gays, women who refuse hijab oppression and people who like freedom. We have been at covert war with them for four decades, and they’ve murdered our people from Lebanon to Iraq and elsewhere. We are morally justified in wiping out Iran’s scummy leadership and using as much force as we choose to prevent their obtaining the bomb that Obama and his coterie of collaborators tried to hand it. Don’t confuse the fact that it is not to our advantage to openly attack Iran (or at least its rulers) right this minute with the mistaken idea that Iran is not our enemy. We have every moral right to inflict ruthless payback.

Let’s clarify another thing. Iran and our liberal elite both seemed eager for open war. Since when did either want what was best for Trump, which means what is best for America? Napoleon allegedly said, and I’m paraphrasing, “Don’t do what your enemy wants you to do.” Sun Tzu advised readers to irritate a temperamental enemy into mistakes. This is what they were doing. The Iranians hit those tankers, and their denials were baloney. The Iranians shot down our unmanned drone, and their claim it was in their territory was baloney too. Why would they do that? Drones and recon aircraft had flown that path for decades. Why now?

They wanted to be attacked. 

There’s no other reasonable explanation. And these attacks were the perfect provocation because they were not that provocative. No Americans were killed, and we know the Iranians have no qualms about murdering Americans – they were responsible for hundreds of American deaths in Iraq. An attack may have cost them a couple radar sites and missile batteries, but so what? With the sanctions strangling their economy, and the Persian people restless from four decades chafing under these fanatics’ rule, this would be a great way to unify the country against an outside attacker and seize the moral high ground while splitting the US off from its allies and undercutting Trump’s rule.

And our elite also wanted Trump to attack. Why?

Some are legit patriots who recognize Iran is a threat and want it erased – with them, this is a reasonable disagreement on strategy and tactics. Save your criticisms of Mike Pompeo and John Bolton for someone else – I’m glad they’re in place even if I may not agree with their strategic assessment of this situation. They are doing what they think is good for America, and we can work with that. 

But others are more cynical, and less patriotic. They recognize that another war – over a robot plane – would undercut Trump’s own legitimacy with his base, maybe fatally. Trump was hired in significant part because Normal Americans were sick and tired of having their kids sent off to fight wars that our garbage elite has no intention of winning – and we had no intention of winning one with Iran. That means invading and occupying – no dice. This would be more inconclusive Mideast skirmishing. The Democrats would have loudly and proudly opposed this new war and, if they had their way, it would have defined Trump’s presidency like Vietnam did LBJ’s, or Iraq did Bush 43’s.

“Hey, wait,” one might ask. “Weren’t we just talking about one airstrike and that’s it?” Well, the advocates in DC were, but Iran might have had other ideas. After all, the enemy gets a vote, and it could have voted to massacre Americans still in Iraq or elsewhere. Once you jump into war, you lose the ability to jump out when things get ugly.

Let’s talk conspiracy theories. Is it possible that the John Kerry/Ben Rhodes Iranophile faction, still stinging because Trump binned their disastrous Iran Deal and exercising their liberal free pass on the Logan Act, told the mullahs to provoke Trump with some non-fatal pokes in order to weaken him domestically and help restore the rule of people who always put American interests last? 

That is, Democrats. 

I don’t know, but can we really rule that out? We keep hearing from these people about how Trump is an existential threat to America, and if they really believe that, is it so nuts to think they might canoodle with Tehran to defeat him? If you had told me a few years ago the entire senior DoJ and FBI would conspire to pull off a soft coup to undo an election, I might have advised you to take a deep breath and chill. But then I watched it happen.

So, I don’t know if it this is what went down, but no one can say you’re insane for thinking it could. And that possibility had to enter into Trump’s calculations.  

Couldn’t you just feel the disappointment out there in the garbage mainstream media when Trump saw the ambush and decided, at the last minute, not to walk into the kill zone? They spent all day nailing together their cross and he decided to skip the crucifixion.

And what if the Iranians were ready and waiting for us and shot down a bunch of our planes? Can you imagine the hit Trump would have taken? Even if no one tipped them off that we were coming – it’s horrible to even write that, but can we be absolutely confident no one might think the sacrifice worthwhile if it dealt a defeat to The Donald? – there is nothing publicly disclosed about the plan Trump scrubbed that could not be guessed by a half-way competent major.

But leaving aside the politics, which adults understand you cannot do, was this a bad purely strategic decision?

At the Army War College, before it disgraced itself by cowering before SJWs and when we weren’t reading Clausewitz, we learned about the elements of national power: DIME – diplomatic, information, military and economic. There are lots of tools in the toolbox. The Iranians publicly shot down a US drone, which was a military action but was arguably more of an information (i.e., propaganda) operation. Why do we have to reply in kind? No practical military option exists to defeat the mullahs, since we’re not marching into Tehran unless Max Boot and Bill Kristol start getting their phone calls returned by the White House again. So, an attack would have been a one-time punch to show our resolve with no lasting effect on their strategic capabilities. In other words, an information operation, and not much of one since no one actually thinks Trump won’t unleash hell if the baddies do something really bad.

If you want to hurt the mullahs – and I do – you use the tools that they can’t match even as you mercilessly disembowel them. Diplomatic: Let’s help the Iranian resistance, as opposed to the Obama policy of propping up the Imam-ocracy. Let’s make them chase their own tail trying to snuff out internal opposition so they can’t cause mischief around the region and the globe.

Economic: Impose more sanctions. If the choice is doing biz with the US or Iran, Iran loses every single time. And we should leverage this crisis to our own advantage to help America prosper. The Far East (China, Japan and South Korea) gets most of its oil from the Persian Gulf. Hey, didn’t Trump just make the US a net exporter of petroleum products by undoing the Obama oil exploration self-castration rules? Asia can buy from us instead, or they can go defend their own sea lanes. Choose.

Good choice. Welcome to Texas.

We win, Iran loses. We prosper, Iran sinks into economic chaos, and eventually its people get sick of misery and those murderous Khomeinist creeps swing.

War is what the mullahs wanted because they know they can’t lose strategically in a military context – only Trump can. But they can only lose strategically to our diplomatic and economic power – if we choose to ruthlessly employ it.

Oh, the military option is still there. And the patience to await the right time to use it instead of reacting precipitously is a combat multiplier. We need to set the timetable, not our opponents. 

It’s clear that Iran and certain domestic political actors – the Democrats – share a common interest in seeing Trump defeated politically. Their interests were therefore aligned in favor of the strike Trump called off. Why again would we do what our opponents want?

The nice thing about Trump is that he has no intention of being played for a sap.

If Trump gets talked into yet another unnecessary war – the “unnecessary” qualifier is important because a justifiable war won’t hurt him – then it’s pretty clear he loses in 2020 and we would then start down the slope toward the nightmare I write about in my action-packed yet super-snarky novels about the United States’ split into red and blue countries, People's Republic, Indian Country and Wildfire. Not surprisingly, liberals and the sad Loser Boat crew from the failed Weekly Standard hailed my novels as “Appalling.” So, declare war on those goofs and check out my books.

FBI WON'T SAY WHETHER IT'S SEEN UN-REDACTED TECH DOCUMENTS TO DRAW CONCLUSIONS ON DNC HACK

FBI WON'T SAY WHETHER IT'S SEEN UN-REDACTED TECH DOCUMENTS TO DRAW CONCLUSIONS ON DNC HACK

Aaron Klein

The FBI would not provide a comment when asked whether it saw the un-redacted sections of three reports from the private firm CrowdStrike that served as a basis for the Obama-era intelligence agencies’ conclusion that Russian agents hacked the servers of the Democratic National Committee.

“The FBI does not have a comment to provide,” a spokesperson for the FBI Office of Public Affairs wrote in response to a Breitbart News email request on the matter.

Yesterday, this reporter documented that, according to a U.S. government filing, the Obama-era intelligence community relied on three redacted CrowdStrike reports marked as drafts to reach the Russia hack conclusion.

The U.S. government further admitted in the same lawsuit that it does not possess the un-redacted CrowdStrike reports about what allegedly happened to the DNC servers and that it relied upon DNC lawyers to generally characterize what was in the redacted sections.  The revelation prompted Breitbart News to request comment on whether the FBI ever saw the un-redacted sections of the reports at all.

The admissions about the CrowdStrike reports were contained in a U.S. government court response to a motion filed by attorneys for former Trump confidante Roger Stone, seeking to compel the government to release un-redacted CrowdStrike reports about the alleged hacks — reports the government says it doesn’t possess.

The DNC famously refused to allow the FBI to access its server to verify the allegation that Russia carried out a hack during the 2016 presidential campaign. Instead, the DNC reached an arrangement with the FBI in which a third party company, CrowdStrike, conducted forensics on the server and shared details with the FBI.

As Breitbart News previously documented, CrowdStrike was financed to the tune of $100 million via a funding drive by Google Capital.

Google Capital, which now goes by the name of CapitalG, is an arm of Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company. Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Alphabet, has been a staunch and active supporter of Hillary Clinton and is a longtime donor to the Democratic Party.

It was previously reported that Perkins Coie, the law firm that represented the DNC and Clinton’s campaign, helped draft CrowdStrike to aid with the DNC’s allegedly hacked server.

On behalf of the DNC and Clinton’s campaign, Perkins Coie also paid the controversial Fusion GPS firm to produce the infamous, largely-discredited anti-Trump dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele.

The January 6, 2017 U.S. Intelligence Community report alleging Russian interference in the presidential race says, “Russian intelligence gained access to Democratic National Committee (DNC) networks and maintained that access until at least June 2016.” The charge is not attributed, but no government agency ever assessed the DNC servers and instead the FBI relied on CrowdStrike.

Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller’s indictment of Stone specifically references CrowdStrike as providing the data on the Russian hack.

The indictment states:

By in or around May 2016, the Democratic National Committee (“DNC”) and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (“DCCC”) became aware that their computer systems had been compromised by unauthorized intrusions and hired a security company (“Company 1”) to identify the extent of the intrusions.

“Company 1” clearly refers to CrowdStrike.

The charge document continues:

On or about June 14, 2016, the DNC — through Company 1 — publicly announced that it had been hacked by Russian government actors.

From in or around July 2016 through in or around November 2016, an organization (“Organization 1”), which had previously posted documents stolen by others from U.S. persons, entities, and the U.S. government, released tens of thousands of documents stolen from the DNC and the personal email account of the chairman of the U.S. presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton (“Clinton Campaign”).

“Organization 1” refers to WikiLeaks.

The indictment led Stone’s lawyers to seek the un-redacted CrowdStrike reports.

In its response, the U.S. government for the first time details how it received three CrowdStrike reports labeled “draft” detailing the results of the firm’s investigations into the DNC servers.

“Although the reports produced to the defendant are marked ‘draft,’ counsel for the DNC and DCCC informed the government that they are the last version of the report produced,” says a footnote in the government filing.

Another footnote describes the extent of the redactions. One sixty-two page report contains redactions that appear on 12 pages. Another report is 54 pages, and has redactions on 10 pages. A third, 31-page report has five lines redacted in an executive summary section.

DNC lawyers voluntarily produced the redacted CrowdStrike reports for the FBI to assess, according to the lawsuit response.

The government relied on DNC attorneys to generally describe the themes of the redacted sections.

The document states:

At the time of the voluntary production, counsel for the DNC told the government that the redacted material concerned steps taken to remediate the attack and to harden the DNC and DCCC systems against future attack. According to counsel, no redacted information concerned the attribution of the attack to Russian actors.

The U.S. government response says it cannot provide Stone with the un-redacted CrowdStrike reports because “the government does not possess the material the defendant seeks; the material was provided to the government by counsel for the DNC with the remediation information redacted.”

In June 2016, The Washington Post reported on the Perkins Coie law firm’s involvement in bringing in CrowdStrike to investigate the DNC’s allegedly hacked server.

The Washington Post documented how Michael Sussmann, a partner with Perkins Coie who also represented the DNC, contacted CrowdStrike after the DNC suspected its server had been hacked. CrowdStrike then identified hacker groups allegedly tied to Russia.

The Post reported that Sussman called in Shawn Henry, president of CrowdStrike.

The Post reported:

DNC leaders were tipped to the hack in late April. Chief executive Amy Dacey got a call from her operations chief saying that their information technology team had noticed some unusual network activity. “It’s never a call any executive wants to get, but the IT team knew something was awry,” Dacey said. And they knew it was serious enough that they wanted experts to investigate.

That evening, she spoke with Michael Sussmann, a DNC lawyer who is a partner with Perkins Coie in Washington. Soon after, Sussmann, a former federal prosecutor who handled computer crime cases, called Henry, whom he has known for many years.

Within 24 hours, CrowdStrike had installed software on the DNC’s computers so that it could analyze data that could indicate who had gained access, when and how.

According to the Post, citing DNC officials, the “hackers” had “gained access to the entire database of opposition research on GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump.”

In testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee in January 2017, then-FBI Director James Comey confirmed that the FBI registered “multiple requests at different levels,” to review the DNC’s hacked servers. Ultimately, the DNC and FBI came to an agreement in which a “highly respected private company” — a reference to CrowdStrike — would carry out forensics on the servers and share any information that it discovered with the FBI, Comey testified.

A senior law enforcement official stressed the importance of the FBI gaining direct access to the servers, a request that was denied by the DNC.

“The FBI repeatedly stressed to DNC officials the necessity of obtaining direct access to servers and data, only to be rebuffed until well after the initial compromise had been mitigated,” the official was quoted by the news media as saying.

“This left the FBI no choice but to rely upon a third party for information. These actions caused significant delays and inhibited the FBI from addressing the intrusion earlier,” the official continued.

CrowdStrike is a California-based cybersecurity technology company co-founded by experts George Kurtz and Dmitri Alperovitch.

Alperovitch is a nonresident senior fellow of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council. The Council takes a hawkish approach toward Russia and has released numerous reports and briefs about Russian aggression.

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, whose agency released the intelligence assessment on Russian hacking, is on the Council’s international advisory board.

The Council is funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Inc., the U.S. State Department and NATO ACT.

Another Council funder is the Ploughshares Fund, which in turn has received financing from billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.

Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio.” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.

Joshua Klein contributed research to this article.

FBI was warned Manafort 'evidence' probably fake - 

Posting notice: John Solomon is a particularly thorough and accurate source. MIL-ED has not evaluated this article. However, it is likely that the allegation made are correct and that the FBI, particularly Andrew Wisemann was aware that many FBI  "  findings" which were used to obtain permission for surveillance and/or oth,er warrants were false at the time they were utilized as justification.

---

The Democratic-funded dossier of Russian propaganda that was largely debunked by the Mueller special counsel investigation apparently wasn’t the only bogus document fueling the “Russia collusion” allegations.

Another document, known as the “black cash ledger,” forced forced Paul Manafort to resign as Trump’s campaign chairman in the summer of 2016 and eventually face indictment.
But investigative journalist John Solomon has found through documents and more than a dozen interviews with knowledgeable sources that the FBI used the document to advance the case against Manafort even though it was repeatedly warned that it was not reliable and likely was a fake.

Solomon, writing for The Hill, noted that in search warrant affidavits, the FBI portrayed the ledger as one reason it resurrected a criminal case against Manafort that was dropped in 2014.

The ledger supposedly contained a list of off-the-book payments from Ukraine’s Party of Regions to Manafort.

Significantly, Mueller’s special counsel team and the FBI were given copies of a warning by Manafort’s Ukrainian business partner Konstantin Kilimnik that the document likely was bogus, according to three sources familiar with the documents.

Further, Ukraine’s top anticorruption prosecutor, Nazar Kholodnytsky, told Solomon he warned the State Department’s law enforcement liaison and multiple FBI agents in late summer 2016 that Ukrainian authorities who recovered the ledger believed it likely was a fraud.

“It was not to be considered a document of Manafort. It was not authenticated. And at that time it should not be used in any way to bring accusations against anybody,” Kholodnytsky said, recalling what he told FBI agents.

Kilimnik, a regular informer for the State Department, wrote in an email to a senior U.S. official in August 2016 that Manafort “could not have possibly taken large amounts of cash across three borders. It was always a different arrangement — payments were in wire transfers to his companies, which is not a violation.”

Solomon pointed out that according to the FBI operating manual, submitting knowingly false or suspect evidence in a federal court proceeding violates FBI rules and can be a crime under certain circumstances.

While the FBI and Mueller’s office did not cite the actual ledger, it cited media reports about it. And it turned out that the feds assisted on one of those stories as sources.
Agents mentioned the ledger in an affidavit supporting a July 2017 search warrant for Manafort’s house. And three months later, the FBI — seeking a search warrant for Manafort’s bank records — cited a specific article about the ledger as evidence Manafort was paid to perform U.S. lobbying work for the Ukrainians.

In the affidavit arguing probable cause to obtain the search warrant, an FBI agent cited an Associated Press article reporting Manafort’s company records showed it received at least two payments that corresponded to payments in the “black ledger.”

But Solomon reports the agent failed to disclose that both FBI officials and Justice Department prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, who later became Mueller’s deputy, met with the AP reporters one day before the story was published and assisted their reporting.
“So, essentially, the FBI cited a leak that the government had facilitated and then used it to support the black ledger evidence, even though it had been clearly warned about the document,” Solomon writes.

He further points out that the FBI was told the ledger claimed to show cash payments to Manafort. But agents had been told since 2014 that Manafort received money only by bank wires.

During the 2014 investigation, Manafort and his partner Richard Gates voluntarily identified for FBI agents tens of millions of dollars they received from Ukrainian and Russian sources and the shell companies and banks that wired the money. “Gates stated that the amounts they received would match the amounts they invoiced for services. Gates added they were always paid late, and in tranches,” FBI memos I obtained show.

Solomon observes that the best proof that the FBI knew the black ledger was a sham is that prosecutors never introduced it to jurors in Manafort’s trial.

Rep. Mark Meadows, a senior Republican on the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee, told Solomon Wednesday night he is asking the Justice Department inspector general to investigate the FBI and prosecutors’ handling of the Manafort warrants.

THE DEPARTMENT OF ANTI-ISRAEL STUDIES By Victor Rosenthal 6-20-19

THE DEPARTMENT OF ANTI-ISRAEL STUDIES

By Victor Rosenthal 6-20-19

http://abuyehuda.com/2019/06/the-department-of-anti-israel-studies/

I met Prof. Cary Nelson on Monday. Nelson, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Illinois, is former president of the American Association of University Professors, and the author of many books and articles on diverse subjects.

Nelson showed us his new book, Israel Denial: Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, & the Faculty Campaign Against the Jewish State. I only looked at it for a few minutes, but Elder of Ziyon has a complete review here. I want to write a little about the academic world that makes such a book necessary.

It’s an attempt to push back against the remarkably ubiquitous participation of Western humanities and social-sciences university faculty in the process of demonization of Israel. It’s axiomatic that today’s college students are tomorrow’s political and business leaders, and the fact that most Western universities are monolithic anti-Israel environments today is not encouraging for the future.

The most important part of the book is a detailed refutation of claims made by Judith Butler, Steven Salaita, Saree Makdisi, and Jasbir Puar, against Israel. With the exception of Salaita, whose work is so substandard and his public invective so vulgar that he has been unable to find and keep an academic position, they hold highly prestigious jobs and have no difficulty publishing whatever they write in the best venues. Butler and Puar, in fact, are professorial rock stars, with numerous awards and accolades to their credit.

Nelson, who is old enough to have grown up in an era in which standards of scholarship were adhered to – facts were checked before being cited, articles were carefully vetted before being published, candidates for academic positions were evaluated on scholarly rather than political criteria, and there was an implied commitment to seek objective truth – found himself shocked by the total collapse of academic standards in the humanities and social sciences. This was particularly evident in connection with the Israeli-Muslim conflict.*

Jasbir Puar, for example, has recently published a book called The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017), in which she accuses Israel of deliberately and sadistically starving, maiming, and stunting the Palestinian population in order to achieve its “biopolitical goal” of breaking the bodies and spirit of the Palestinians to end their “resistance.” One reviewer called the book a modern “blood libel,” similar to the medieval accusations that Jews murdered Christian children in order to use their blood to make matzot.

Puar gave a lecture at Vassar College in 2016 in which she claimed that Israel poisons Palestinians with lead, uranium and phosphorus, and that the IDF shoots Palestinians in order to harvest their organs – (something which, Nelson pointed out, is medically impossible). She threatened to sue anyone who released an audio recording of that speech.

Nelson explained that Puar’s factual assertions about stunting and starvation can be debunked quickly enough by a high school student armed only with access to Google. It’s possible to show that the nutrition of the Palestinian Arabs is among the best in the Arab world, and has greatly improved since 1967 (only to decrease somewhat in areas under Hamas control since 2007). Her claim that the IDF aims at the legs of rioters or terrorists is true – but only insofar as these are cases in which the alternative would be to shoot to kill. For most of her accusations, there is simply no evidence of any kind. Puar simply makes up the facts she needs, and then “explains” them with a vicious fantasy of Jews as Nazis.

Puar is published by the respected Duke University Press. Nelson wondered why their editors were unable to check any of her factual assertions. He wondered why her similarly defective papers passed the peer review required by scholarly journals, and why she has been granted honors, academic tenure, grants, fellowships, and other prestigious and remunerative perquisites despite her penchant for inventing facts and using them to support a superstructure of demonization of a nation and its people.

I do not wonder.

Some years ago, the late Barry Rubin told me about the collapse of any semblance of scholarly integrity in his field of Middle East Studies. He noted that when he was a student, he could expect his teachers, some of whom had political views diametrically opposed to his own, to evaluate his work on its merits. But then – due to endowments and donations from the Arab nations – the complexion of the departments changed, with candidates being selected primarily because of their political views. The brilliant Rubin, author of countless books and articles, had difficulty finding a university position.

This is now the case in many departments of humanities and social sciences, although not necessarily because of Arab money. It is particularly bad in departments of Women’s or Gender Studies (Jasbir Puar is a professor in such a department at Rutgers University), Ethnic Studies, and so on, but it is not limited to them. The explanation is threefold.

First, the postmodern understanding of the nature of reality that has become common outside of the hard sciences (where you might blow up the lab if you make up your own facts), allows the subordination of reality to narrative. Every identity group – especially oppressed minorities – sees the world differently, and no window on the world is more true than any other. One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, and one man’s truth is another’s lie. What is real is the narrative, and it is acceptable to create “facts” as long as they support it.

Second, the introduction of the (somewhat corrupted) concept of intersectionality, in which every member of an oppressed group must support the struggle of every other such group, seems to encourage every “victimized” person to speak out on behalf of other victims, regardless of their expertise. For example, Jasbir Puar, as a “queer” “woman of color,” apparently has the right to speak – even to write books – in support of the Palestinians, even if there is no reason to believe that she actually knows anything about them.

Third, and most important: while the postmodern destruction of the scholarly enterprise has affected other subjects of study, nothing else has been the focus of so much concentrated negative energy as the alleged ill-treatment of the Palestinians by Israel. No other stateless people has so many (or indeed, any) cheerleaders in Western academe as the Palestinian Arabs, and no state besides Israel – not even North Korea – has been so vilified by so many faculty members so much of the time. There is something very familiar about this. It’s always about the Jews, isn’t it?

For whatever reason, the viral memes of misoziony (extreme, irrational hatred of Israel, pronounced mis-OZ-yuh-nee) and bad old antisemitism have a solid foothold in Western universities, where ground zero is the identity studies departments.

Cary Nelson’s careful exposure of the lies upon which some of the more vicious attacks rest is a necessary corrective. But it’s only a starting point, and I’m not optimistic. One answer to Nelson’s question about why nobody at the Duke University Press fact-checked Jasbir Puar’s manuscript could be that where Israel and the Palestinians are concerned, the facts don’t matter. Why bother checking them when everyone knows that Israel is a sadistic oppressor of Palestinians, even if some of the details are wrong?

__________________________

* The usual expressions, “Arab-Israeli conflict” or “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” are too narrow and do not capture what I see as its true nature: the religion-based rejection of Jewish sovereignty anywhere in the Middle East by almost the entire Islamic world, including the Arabs but also the Islamist regimes in Turkey and Iran.

LARRY JOHNSON: EXPOSING THE FRAUDULENT DNC SUIT AGAINST TRUMP FOR RUSSIAN COLLUSION by Jim Hoft

LARRY JOHNSON: EXPOSING THE FRAUDULENT DNC SUIT AGAINST TRUMP FOR RUSSIAN COLLUSION

by Jim Hoft

The Democrats are in big trouble now that the plot to destroy Donald Trump’s Presidency is being uncovered. The facts that will be revealed in the coming months will fully expose the foundation of lies and show that the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community were weaponized against U.S. citizens who dared oppose Hillary Clinton.

As we look back at the suit the DNC filed against Trump and the Russians in April 2018 the so-called ‘facts’ asserted by the DNC in their complaint are not so clever lies.

Did they really believe that this concoction of crap would hold up in the face of a serious investigation?

Let’s look at the specifics (you can read the full complaint here).

Russian agents trespassed onto the DNC’s computer network in the United States, as well as other email accounts, collected trade secrets and other private data, and then transmitted the data to Defendant WikiLeaks, whose founder, Assange, shared the defendants’ common goal of damaging the Democratic party in advance of the election.

Now look at these facts. There was never any forensic evidence that Russia “hacked” the DNC. Oh yes, you have been fed the nonsense that the intelligence community “concluded” that is what happened. But we need only look at what CrowdStrike CEO Alperovitch and FBI Director have stated in public.

Alperovitch told Washington Post Reporter Ellen Nakashima on June 14, 2016 the following:

CrowdStrike is not sure how the hackers got in. The firm suspects they may have targeted DNC employees with “spearphishing” emails. These are communications that appear legitimate — often made to look like they came from a colleague or someone trusted — but that contain links or attachments that when clicked on deploy malicious software that enables a hacker to gain access to a computer. “But we don’t have hard evidence,” Alperovitch said.

A competent cyber security company only needed to examine the server logs and the logs of the computers attached to the server to obtain evidence showing how the penetration occurred. But CrowdStrike never figured that out and had no hard evidence.

How about the FBI? Surely they had “forensic” evidence. Nope! Jim Comey testified to the House Intelligence Committee in March 2017 and stated the following:

“we never got direct access to the machines themselves. The DNC in the spring of 2016 hired a firm that ultimately shared with us their forensics from their review of the system.”

Surely the NSA, who collects and stores all email communications from the United States to foreign countries had the proof. No again. Here is what both NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers and FBI Director Comey told Congressman Hurd of Texas:

HURD: Director Rogers, did the NSA ever get access to the DNC hardware?

ROGERS: The NSA didn’t ask for access. That’s not in our job…

HURD: Good copy. So director FBI notified the DNC early, before any information was put on Wikileaks and when — you have still been — never been given access to any of the technical or the physical machines that were — that were hacked by the Russians.

COMEY: That’s correct although we got the forensics from the pros that they hired which – again, best practice is always to get access to the machines themselves, but this – my folks tell me was an appropriate substitute.

But CrowdStrike’s Alperovitch went on the record almost one year earlier admitting, “we don’t have hard evidence.”

The U.S. Government also has not provided any evidence that the Russians transmitted DNC emails to Julian Assange at Wikileaks. But the NSA has provided evidence that a DNC employee, Seth Rich, was communicating with Assange. We know this thanks to a FOIA request by lawyer Ty Clevenger to the NSA filed in November 2017, who requested any information regarding Seth Rich and Julian Assange. The NSA informed Clevenger in a letter dated 4 October 2018 that:

Your request has been processed under the provisions of the FOIA. Fifteen documents (32 pages) responsive to your request have been reviewed by this Agency as required by the FOIA and have found to be currently and properly classified in accordance with Executive Order 13526. These documents meet the criteria for classification as set forth in Subparagraph © of Section 1.4 and remains classified TOP SECRET and SECRET.”

Former NSA Technical Director, William Binney commented on this revelation:

Ty Clevenger has FOIAed information from NSA asking for any data that involved both Seth Rich and also Julian Assange. And they responded by saying we’ve got 15 files, 32 pages, but they’re all classified in accordance with executive order 13526 covering classification, and therefore you can’t have them.

That says that NSA has records of communications between Seth Rich and Julian Assange. I mean, that’s the only business that NSA is in — copying communications between people and devices.

Someone in the U.S. Intelligence Community shared classified information with the DNC lawyers that foreign intelligence services were collecting on the Trump campaign in the summer of 2015. This fact is revealed in the DNC complaint:

Russia’s cyberattack on the DNC began only weeks after Trump announced his candidacy for President of the United States in June of 2015. And, within months, allied European intelligence services began reporting suspicious communications between Trump associates and Russian operatives to their U.S. counterparts.

The Guardian newspaper reported in April of 2017 that the British Government was the first to collect this information (see British spies were first to spot Trump team’s links with Russia):

Britain’s spy agencies played a crucial role in alerting their counterparts in Washington to contacts between members of Donald Trump’s campaign team and Russian intelligence operatives, the Guardian has been told. GCHQ first became aware in late 2015 of suspicious “interactions” between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents, a source close to UK intelligence said. This intelligence was passed to the US as part of a routine exchange of information, they added.

But this was false intelligence. The “communications” with Russia were manufactured by the British intelligence services and the CIA and the FBI. This is revealed inadvertently by the DNC complaint, which cites the Trump Moscow Tower Project as their “evidence” that Trump was colluding with the Russians:

In late 2015, while campaigning for President, Trump himself signed a letter of intent to develop and license his name to a new real estate development in Moscow-potentially fulfilling a decades-long dream. This project was to be financed through a Russian bank under sanction by the United States. The deal was brokered by Felix Sater, a Russian emigre, convicted felon, and longtime business partner of Trump. In explaining the deal to Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal attorney, Sater suggested that he would get Russian President Vladimir V. Putin (“Putin”) to support the project in an effort to boost Trump’s electoral hopes: “I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected I know how to play it and we will get this done. Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will.”

Felix Sater was not a Russian agent. He was an FBI informant and had been so since 1998. It is no coincidence that Sater was signed up as an informant by Andrew Weissman (see Felix Sater and the Steele Dossier). Sater was a plant inside the Trump organization and could only have been tasked by the FBI to propose the deal with Russia and to bait Trump with the prospect of meeting with Putin. Trump did not take the bait.

The effort to bait the Trump campaign was not confined to Felix Sater. The meeting at Trump Tower in New York City in June 2016 also was a failed set up:

On June 3, 2016, Russians connected to the Kremlin contacted Donald Trump, Jr. to offer damaging information about the Democratic presidential nominee as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Trump, Jr. did nothing to alert American law enforcement. Rather, he expressly embraced the illegal plan, responding: “I love it especially later in the summer.”

On June 9, 2016, Trump Jr., Manafort, and Kushner met with the Russians in Trump Tower. Days later, on June 15, 2016, GRU Operative #1 widely disseminated a trove of stolen documents to the public, claiming they were DNC material.

The Russians who met with Trump Jr. were working with Fusion GPS, a firm hired by Hillary Clinton’s law firm, Perkins Coie. Special Counsel Robert Mueller presented in his report a very disingenuous account of this meeting:

On June 9, 2016, senior representatives of the Trump Campaign met in Trump Tower with a Russian attorney expecting to receive derogatory information about Hillary Clinton from the Russian government. The meeting was proposed to Donald Trump Jr. in an email from Robert Goldstone, at the request of his then-client Emin Agalarov, the son of Russian real-estate developer Aras Agalarov. Goldstone relayed to Trump Jr. that the “Crown prosecutor of Russia … offered to provide the Trump Campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia” as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Trump Jr. immediately responded that “if it’s what you say I love it,” and arranged the meeting through a series of emails and telephone calls.

The meeting was with a Russian attorney, Natalia Veselnitskaya. Mueller’s report misrepresents who Veselnitskaya was really working for:

The Russian attorney who spoke at the meeting, Natalia Veselnitskaya, had previously worked for the Russian government and maintained a relationship with that government throughout this period oftime. She claimed that funds derived from illegal activities in Russia were provided to Hillary Clinton and other Democrats. Trump Jr. requested evidence to support those claims, but Veselnitskaya did not provide such information.

Mueller and his team failed to acknowledge that Veselnitskaya was working closely with the firm Hillary Clinton hired to produce the Steele Dossier. NBC News reported on Veselnitskaya:

The information that a Russian lawyer brought with her when she met Donald Trump Jr. in June 2016 stemmed from research conducted by Fusion GPS, the same firm that compiled the infamous Trump dossier, according to the lawyer and a source familiar with the matter.

In an interview with NBC News, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya says she first received the supposedly incriminating information she brought to Trump Tower — describing alleged tax evasion and donations to Democrats — from Glenn Simpson, the Fusion GPS owner, who had been hired to conduct research in a New York federal court case.

Glenn Simpson, the guy working for the Clinton campaign, supplied the supposedly derogatory information. Even a mediocre investigator would recognize the problem of the relationship between the lawyer claiming to have dirty, damning info on Hillary with the firm Hillary hired to dig up dirt on Donald Trump. This was another botched set up and the Trump folks did not take the bait.

If the Democrats had a brain in their political head, they would withdraw the suit and seek shelter. I do not think that is likely to happen.

One thing is certain–this malevolent charade will be fully exposed and it is likely to cause significant harm to the Democrats, the FBI and the CIA.