WHEN IT COMES TO ANTI-SEMITISM, 

FOR THE LEFT IT’S SUDDENLY ‘ALL LIVES MATTER’

 MICHA DANZIG   JEWISH JOURNAL OF LA  MAR 7, 2019

https://jewishjournal.com/culture/lifestyle/first_person/294917/when-it-comes-to-anti-semitism-for-the-left-its-suddenly-all-lives-matter/

When It Comes to Anti-Semitism, For the Left It’s Suddenly ‘All Lives Matter’

On June 23, 2015, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, spoke at a historic African American church in Missouri. She spoke to a great deal of applause when she spoke about religion, racism, and access to quality education. But three words got her in trouble: “All Lives Matter.”

Before using the phrase, Clinton was retelling an anecdote about the lessons she learned from her mother:

“I asked her, ‘What kept you going?’ Her answer was very simple. Kindness along the way from someone who believed she mattered. All lives matter.”

Even though Clinton’s campaign pointed out almost immediately thereafter that Ms. Clinton had previously said that “Black Lives Matter,” that did not prevent a torrent of criticism and complaints on social media from Clinton’s use of that phrase.

And the reality is that much of this criticism was well deserved. Well before June 2015, African American civil rights activists had explained why responding to African American concerns about police violence disproportionately directed at African Americans or the very real danger faced by young male African Americans for simply being perceived as suspicious by law enforcement with the phrase “All Lives Matter” is insulting.

They had explained that while it is certainly true that “all lives matter” saying that in this context – the context of the unique history of discrimination and bias faced by African Americans in the USA – serves to remove focus from the specific grievances of African Americans, as well of their lived concerns and community experiences. It also serves to gloss over the particular issues and concerns of African Americans and make them seem as if their concerns are faced equally by all people – when they plainly are not. As one African American on Twitter aptly wrote:

Yet now, many of those same people who aggressively responded to any person that dared utter or repeat the phrase “all lives matter” including when Hillary Clinton did so in her anecdote about her mother, are now in effect saying “all lives matter” when it comes to Jews and our very unique and lived experiences with anti-Semitism.

Over the past few months, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar has repeated one anti-Semitic slur after another. After lying during her campaign about her support for BDS, the boycott movement that seeks to only boycott and sanction one state on the whole planet, the Jewish one, Omar then came out in favor of BDS (all while she opposes sanctions on truly heinous regimes, like Maduro’s Venezuela).

Subsequently, Omar defended an earlier tweet of hers where she asserted: “Israel has hypnotized the world. May Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.” Only after numerous people, including Bari Weiss, in an excellent article in the NY Times, noted how the conspiratorial myth of the Jewish powers of hypnosis for use in sinister and duplicitous plots has been used for literally thousands of years to incite and justify the persecution and murder of Jews, did Omar begrudgingly apologize for this tweet.

Shortly thereafter, clearly not fazed by the controversy and likely emboldened by it, Omar tweeted that American politicians’ support for Israel is “all about the Benjamin’s.” When asked on Twitter by a writer for the quite left-leaning Jewish publication The Forward who she thought was paying American politicians to support Israel, Omar responded: “AIPAC!”

Setting aside: that the largest pro-Israel donor to political candidates last election cycle was the left leaning JstreetAC (which gave entirely to Democrats); that AIPAC literally ranked as the 147th highest-ranked entity in terms of lobbying spending in 2018; and that pro-Israel lobbying expenditures in total at $5,022,028 was behind entities like Toyota ($7,150,453), the Recording Industry Association of America ($5,642,155), the nefarious Association of International CPAs: ($5,200,000) as well as tens of millions of dollars behind entities like the US Chamber of Commerce ($94,800,000), the National Association of Realtors ($72,808,648), and pro-South Korea lobbying groups ($70,500,000) and pro-Japan lobbying groups ($51,400,000); the notion that American politicians support for Israel is “all about” (meaning solely because of) money implicitly spent by Jews, is not a “dog whistle” to an age-old antisemitic slur about Jews pulling the levers of power with their “Jewish money,” it is an outright scream.

It is an age-old slur against Jews; one that led to the antisemitic text written by the Czar of Russia’s secret police: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, purported to describe a secret conspiratorial Jewish plan to take over the world and achieve global domination, including by using nefarious and evil Jewish bankers to control politicians, world economies and ultimately destroy civilization. And like the screed or slur of Jews with hypnotic power, the slur of Jews and their money controlling politicians has often led to the persecution and murder of Jews and it is a slur that is often used by those murdering Jews today (be they Hamas terrorists or White Supremacists).

Within 18 days of her making her vile “all about the Benjamin’s” tweet, Omar said – at an event hosted in a restaurant owned by a man who once claimed that the U.S. is “getting its marching orders from Tel Aviv” (echoing David Duke, another antisemitic conspiracy theorist) – “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is okay for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”

After getting some (thankful) serious pushback from some of her congressional colleagues for invoking yet another anti-Semitic slur, Omar decided to double-down on her anti-Semitism, tweeting three days later: “I should not be expected to have allegiance/pledge support to a foreign country in order to serve my country in Congress or serve on committee.”

To be clear, nobody has asked Omar or anyone else in the U.S. Congress to “swear allegiance” to Israel or any other foreign country. Not for Japan, which the US supports in numerous ways, not Kuwait, when the US Congress backed sending hundreds of thousands of US troops to fight for Kuwait’s sovereignty; and not to Nigeria, Zambia, Uganda, Tanzania, and Kenya, which last year received a combined $3 billion in foreign aid from the U.S.

And Omar knows this. But just like her colleague, Rashida Tlaib, Omar can’t help but accuse Americans who support the only Jewish state of doing so for pernicious reasons; and of supporting policies or positions that favor Israel, not because for example: they genuinely believe it is the right thing to do, Israel is the sole democracy in a sea of brutal autocracies, Israel’s environmental and medical innovations and inventions literally save lives, or because America and the US are critical military allies, sharing intelligence, and important military innovations (like the Iron Dome).

Omar also doesn’t even give American Jews the benefit that is afforded to millions of other Americans, who are Nigerian, Kenyan, Italian, Polish, Irish, Japanese etc., the right to be Americans first and foremost, but to also want to see their ancestral homeland, particularly ones that are strong U.S. allies, do well too.

No. For Omar, people in Congress or in America who support Israel, are different than those who support Japan, Kenya, Ireland, etc. Their support for Israel is based on a nefarious “pledge of allegiance” to Israel, something that every American citizen is supposed to give only to the U.S. Well, there is a name for this anti-Semitic slur; and it is a pretty infamous one: the “dual loyalty” canard.

Like, the other two slurs invoked by Omar, this one also goes back millennia and has been used for centuries, including in the last one by both Hitler and Stalin, as a justification, for persecuting, rounding up, and murdering Jews. For more on the role that the mendacious and vile dual loyalty slur has played for literally thousands of years for Jews, as one of the most persecuted and oppressed groups in history, one should read Alex Zeldin’s excellent piece in the Forward on Omar’s all too familiar attack on Jewish “allegiances.”

Yet in the face of Omar repeatedly spewing anti-Semitic slur after anti-Semitic slur; Jew-hate inspiring canards, which have literally plagued and caused the persecution and frequently the mass murder of Jews (and ONLY Jews), what has been the reaction of much of the so-called progressive left?

All lives matter. Or worse.

Linda Sarsour’s response to a proposed resolution in Congress – that was to merely condemn the unique and pernicious hate which is anti-Semitism – started with a tirade against Nancy Pelosi as a supposed tool of the “white patriarchy” – which Sarsour plainly thinks includes Jews (though David Duke, who called Ilhan Omar the most important member of Congress, disagrees) and ended with a call for at most a generic resolution against all forms of bigotry (“You want a resolution? Condemn all forms of bigotry. All forms of bigotry are unacceptable. We won’t let them pin us up against each other. We stand with Representative Ilhan Omar.”)

Not to be outdone by Sarsour, the newly crowned queen of the “progressive left” and phone buddy with the king of the British political antisemites Jeremy Corbyn, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) jumped into the Twitter fray defending Omar too.

AOC tweeted: “One of the things that is hurtful about the extent to which reprimand is sought of Ilhan is that no one seeks this level of reprimand when members make statements about Latinx + other communities (during the shutdown, a GOP member yelled “Go back to Puerto Rico!” on the floor).” Notably, what AOC didn’t write was that this (silly) comment was in reference to certain House Democrats going on a boondoggle to Puerto Rico during the government shutdown, not race or ethnicity.

Knowing perhaps that this Puerto Rico comment was not going to cut it, AOC then tweeted: “But incidents like these do beg the question: where are the resolutions against homophobic statements? For anti-blackness? For xenophobia? For a member saying he’ll ‘send Obama home to Kenya?”

Plainly, for Linda Sarsour and AOC, a member of the most powerful legislature in history calling Jews disloyal Americans who require allegiance to a foreign power all while they spread around their “Jew money” to buy that allegiance for a country, which has conspiratorial Jew-power to hypnotize people to ignore their evil, at best warrants a resolution that condemns “all forms of bigotry.” Because “all lives matter.”

The sad thing is not that Sarsour or AOC made these morally obtuse “all lives matters” comments to defend Omar. That was expected. In the Bizzaro world of regressive identity politics, Omar as a Muslim immigrant woman from Africa simply outranks Jews. Just as Farrakhan must be defended by the likes of Sarsour and Tamika Mallory (and even called the G.OA.T. by Mallory) no matter how many utterly vile things he says about Jews, Omar too must be defended.

The sad thing, the truly awful pathetic thing, is how quickly other Democrats folded on even the idea of a specific resolution condemning antisemitism and also jumped to Omar’s defense.

Congressman James Clyburn, the Democratic Whip and a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, defended Omar by saying her experience was “more personal” than Jews whose parents survived the Holocaust. As an apparent defense of Omar’s repeated use of anti-Semitic slurs Clyburn suggested that Omar’s personal experience of having fled from war-torn Somalia as a child was more pertinent and relevant than the experiences of the descendants of Holocaust survivors. And that is relevant to her blatant anti-Semitism how?

Imagine, this scenario: a Holocaust survivor comes to America and is elected to Congress. Instead of learning from his horrible experiences, this particular survivor is a vile racist who repeatedly references many slurs that are uniquely hurtful and even dangerous for African-Americans. Would Congressman Clyburn give this Holocaust survivor a pass on his racist comments because his experience as a Holocaust survivor was “more personal” to him the experiences of the descendants of slaves in America?

But even worse than Congressman Clyburn’s obscene defense (which also ignores the dozens of Jews who have been murdered and violently attacked in anti-Semitic hate crimes just in the past year alone in both the USA and Europe), was the obsequious and disingenuous efforts of Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren who defended Omar by deflecting from Omar’s actual comments and repeated use of the most vile and base anti-Semitic slurs, by claiming that the people deeply offended and concerned about Omar’s conduct were trying to stifle debate about America’s foreign policy towards Israel. Elizabeth Warren even went further to claim that those hurt by Omar’s comments were “branding criticism of Israel as automatically anti-Semitic” which she added “has a chilling effect on our public discourse.”

“Criticism of Israel”? “Debate on foreign policy”? Really??? Is that what Omar was doing when she claimed Israel (home to 50% of the world’s Jews and the only Jewish state) has the power to “hypnotize the world” to ignore its “evil”? Was Omar criticizing Israeli policy when she claimed American politicians support for Israel is “all about the Benjamin’s” (Jewish money)? Was Omar encouraging a debate on foreign policy when she asserted to a cheering crowd, which was shouting out “all about the Benjamin’s,” when she claimed that Americans who support Israel have an allegiance to a foreign country?

Of course not. She was trafficking in the worst anti-Semitic slurs. She was using age-old anti-Semitic canards not to encourage debate, but to stifle it. To label all who oppose her views as “evil.” After all, if you believe Omar’s statements about Jews and others who support Israel are true, then what is there to debate? If support for Israel, an evil country with hypnotic powers, is only because of disloyal American Jews who bribe corrupt politicians to ignore Israel’s “evil,” then shouldn’t the debate be over?

Sens. Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren should all be ashamed of themselves. Unless their moral compasses are completely broken, they have to know that none of the slurs that people are objecting to by Omar had anything to do with legitimate criticism of Israel or debate on foreign policy. What they did, was cave-in to the worst elements in their party out of fear of losing their “progressive” base. They failed to stand up to the worst anti-Semitism voiced by a member of Congress in modern US history. They capitulated to the “all lives mattering” by AOC and Sarsour. They have taken the Democratic Party a giant step closer to becoming as infamously anti-Semitic as today’s Labour Party in England. What they have told us is that while “all lives matter,” Jewish lives matter less.

The ‘Times’ and Israel: A Review of 2018

The bottom line: Not good.

 Commentary magazine  FEB, 2019 BY GILEAD INI

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-times-and-israel-a-review-of-2018/

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On the first day of 2018, the publisher of the New York Times wrote a letter to his readers. Quoth A.G. Sulzberger: “The Times will hold itself to the highest standards of independence, rigor and fairness—because we believe trust is the most precious asset we have.” Fairness and accuracy would be paramount, he promised, “and in the inevitable moments we fall short, we will continue to own up to our mistakes, and we’ll strive to do better.”

The date of the letter suggests it would be only fair to look closely at the 12 months of journalism that followed and judge whether the Times delivered on Sulzberger’s promise of impartial, accurate reporting. That is what the media-monitoring organization CAMERA did when producing a timeline assessing a year’s worth of the newspaper’s coverage of the Arab–Israeli conflict. The timeline, alas, makes clear that the Times fell far short of those promised standards when it came to its coverage of Israel and its opponents.

Again and again, the newspaper distorted the news, downplayed inconvenient facts, and departed from journalistic norms. And while the chronological list of the newspaper’s stumbles is striking, a still more damning picture emerges when we sort those stumbles by common theme—a picture of a newspaper eager to tilt public opinion by glossing over news reflecting poorly on Palestinian actors while at the same time zooming in on perceived Israeli misdeeds. 

“More Than Just Victims”

At one point during her tenure as public editor of the New York Times from 2012 to 2015, Margaret Sullivan delivered a stunning message to her colleagues. In an otherwise gentle 2014 column about the paper’s coverage of the Arab–Israeli conflict, Sullivan called on Times reporters to remember that the Palestinians “are more than just victims.” Her colleagues, don’t forget, are professional journalists at the country’s most reputable newspaper. That the public editor felt the need to impart such a rudimentary lesson about the Palestinians, a multidimensional group that has experienced but also imposed plenty of suffering, raised questions then about how much Times journalists actually knew about the conflict, or about impartial journalism. 

In 2018, the newspaper demonstrated time and again that it was unwilling to offer frank coverage of news that highlighted the Palestinian role in exacerbating the conflict. In one emblematic example, Times journalist Nellie Bowles described the Palestinian Authority’s payments to families of imprisoned terrorists as a figment of the right-wing imagination. Facebook, she lamented, has been “flooded with far-right conspiracy programming like ‘Palestinians Pay $400 million Pensions for Terrorist Families.’” In fact, the Palestinian government had been perfectly open about its payments. The newspaper, at least in this case, made amends after CAMERA contacted editors. “That is not a conspiracy theory,” a correction noted.

On March 20, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas called David Friedman, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, the “son of a dog.” The New York Times ignored the story, leaving readers in the dark about a dramatic diplomatic incident. You might ask whether the newspaper would likewise look away if an Israeli prime minister denounced an American ambassador. The record gives a clear answer. A couple of years earlier, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu criticized a statement by then-ambassador Dan Shapiro as being “unacceptable and incorrect.” At the time, the Times shined the spotlight on Netanyahu’s incomparably milder statement, covering it in a news story and again in an editorial that slammed Netanyahu’s critique as “unusually personal and unfair.” Apparently “son of a dog” is neither of those.

This protective censorship of Abbas’s words is part of a pattern. After the Palestinian leader delivered an inflammatory address to the PLO Central Council in which he slandered his Jewish neighbors, recited conspiracy theories, and rewrote history, the American Jewish community was united in outrage. Adding his voice to the condemnation from the left and the right, Aaron David Miller, a longtime U.S. peace negotiator, called the performance an “unhinged speech” that “veered into rank anti-Semitism.” Shapiro, the former ambassador, dubbed elements of the lecture “outrageous,” “bizarre,” and “shameful,” and concluded that Abbas was “out of the peace talks game.” 

And the Times? A story on the speech by Jerusalem bureau chief David Halbfinger ignored nearly all of Abbas’s incendiary claims—that Israel traffics in drugs to debilitate Palestinian children, that European persecution of Jews wasn’t religious discrimination but instead a product of the Jews’ “social function,” and that Israel was the secret hand behind the expulsion of Jews from the Arab world, to name but a few examples. 

The paper’s omissions were dramatic, but not surprising. Just a month earlier, Abbas had delivered another speech citing specifically anti-Jewish passages from the Koran while telling his audience that “no one is better at falsifying history or religion” than those people. Again, the New York Times reported on the lecture. And again, its article, by Istanbul bureau chief Carlotta Gall, ignored Abbas’s casual anti-Semitism. 

Why? This same newspaper thought it was newsworthy, in 2018, that the Israeli prime minister’s wife had lost her temper nearly a decade earlier. Why doesn’t it feel the same about destructive hate speech, today, by the actual Palestinian leader? Refer to the nationalities in the previous two sentences. They explain why a leader’s outburst is ignored, but a spouse’s is covered; why bigotry is swept under the rug, but a tantrum is international news. 

Mahmoud Abbas was far from the only beneficiary last year of the newspaper’s selectively gentle touch. Consider this headline, published during the wave of Palestinian riots along the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel: “Battle Weary, Hamas Gives Peaceful Protests a Chance.” 

Hamas is the internationally designated terrorist organization that rules the Gaza Strip. Only a day before the Times headline described the group with language from John Lennon’s classic anti-war anthem, Israel had uncovered a Hamas attack tunnel leading from Gaza into Israel. A few days before that, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar declared to Palestinians gathered at the Israeli frontier, “We will take down the border, and we will tear out their hearts from their bodies”—a chilling and illuminating threat that Times reporters opted not to report. 

That tunnel and those words are not peaceful. Nor were the rocks, firebombs, and explosives hurled at Israeli targets during what another article by Halbfinger, the Jerusalem bureau chief, nonetheless insisted was Gaza’s “experiment with nonviolent protest.” 

The impulse to soft-sell border riots as supposedly peaceful protests was so strong that the newspaper chose to describe well-armed Palestinian combatants as “protesters.” After eight Hamas gunmen and three bomb-planting operatives were killed while attacking Israel, Times Cairo bureau chief Declan Walsh —and correspondents Iyad Abuheweila, Isabel Kershner, Megan Specia, Marlise Simons, and Alan Cowell —repeatedly included the attackers in a count of 60 purported protesters shot by the army. When editors were made aware that the casualties included at least 11 armed assailants, the paper’s standards editor Rogene Jacquette stood by their language. Why?

The Times left no stone-throwing unturned. Under a photo of Palestinian rioters, a caption insisted that “Palestinians threw stones in response to Israeli forces’ intervention during an anti-occupation rally near the Gaza Strip on Tuesday.” 

The caption, it turns out, was cribbed from a Turkish state-owned news agency. The so-called rally wasn’t about the occupation, but rather focused on tearing down Israel’s borders. And the stone-throwing was not a “response” to Israeli forces’ intervention. To the contrary, as a Palestinian reporter noted in a piece by Germany’s Deutsche Presse-Agentur: “The demonstrators threw stones and burned tires close to the fence of the border. Israeli soldiers responded with force when the protesters tried to cut the fence’s barbed wire.”

The Times even soft-pedaled rocket attacks. In an article about a barrage of rockets that prompted Israeli counterstrikes on Hamas infrastructure, Halbfinger insisted that “on both sides of the Gaza border, civilians caught up in the fighting said they felt terrorized by it.”

Civilians on both sides terrorized? Sure. But “caught up in the fighting”? That describes Gaza’s residents, not the Israeli civilians who were, in fact, the targets of Hamas’s rockets. 

Another story, about another eruption of cross-border fighting, likewise downplayed Hamas rockets by claiming without evidence they were “mostly calibrated to hit border areas rather than population centers.” That was a novel twist on Hamas’s inaccurate and indiscriminate munitions, which had indeed bombarded Jewish population centers during the exchange, and which would have hit more if not for Israel’s Iron Dome anti-rocket system. In the 1,000-plus-word piece, moreover, Isabel Kershner never bothered to inform readers that the Hamas rockets preceded and prompted the Israeli airstrikes. Why?

Is it for the same reason that the unprovoked stabbing of an Israeli embassy guard in Amman, which ended with the killing of the assailant, was later rewritten as a “confrontation involving an Israeli guard at Israel’s embassy compound in Amman, which left two Jordanians dead”? Must reporters be reminded that Jordanians, too, are more than just victims?

Remodeling Reputations

As the newspaper airbrushed stabbings, shootings, and rocket fire in 2018, it also provided makeovers for anti-Israel ideologies and denigrated Israel’s supporters. 

Those Gaza border riots, for example, were part of what Palestinians dubbed the “Great March of Return,” an open reference to the dream of eliminating Israel and its Jewish majority by overwhelming the country with millions of “returning” Palestinians. But in an article about the border tensions, Times reporters erased that goal entirely, with David Halbfinger and Iyad Abuheweila telling readers instead that “the demonstrations were part of a mass protest against Israel’s decade-long blockade of Gaza,” period. (The language was altered after CAMERA contacted Times editors.)

Anti-Israel BDS activists, too, are open about their ultimate purpose, but were likewise laundered by Times journalists. Omar Barghouti, a co-founder of the BDS movement, has written that his goal is to eliminate Israel and replace it with “a unitary state where, by definition, Jews will be a minority.” His movement concurs. But in the pages of the New York Times, the ugly eliminationism was transmuted into something softer and more likely to gain support from readers— Richard Pérez-Peña dubbed it a movement “to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel primarily in protest against its settlement and security practices in the West Bank.”

The BDS movement doesn’t hide its range of demands, which amount to a call for the end of the Jewish state. The Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations has noted that BDS seeks to destroy Israel. A left-wing Americans for Peace Now official has written that “BDS’s prime motivation, if their messaging is to be believed, is not to end the occupation at all; rather, it is to end Israel.” And even J Street, a group devoted almost entirely to criticism of Israel, has acknowledged that BDS “does not … recognize the right of the Jewish people to a state.” This isn’t about “settlements.” So why does the newspaper want its readers to think so?

In 2017, Barghouti himself wrote a letter to the Times taking issue with the language that suggested his group is narrowly opposed to the occupation. “The goal of the global Palestinian-led B.D.S. movement (boycott, divestment and sanctions) is not only to end the ‘occupation of the West Bank,’” he protested (emphasis in original). The goal, he and his movement BDS have long made clear, is the influx of millions of Palestinians into Israel, a demographic gerrymandering meant to eliminate the Jewish majority in Israel in favor of Palestinian rule. Barghouti wiped off the newspaper’s lipstick intended to conceal his goals and recast BDS as an anti-occupation movement. So why has the Times continually applied that lipstick?

This, too, is a pattern. A student named Lara Alqasem temporarily kept out of Israel due to her former position as leader of Students for Justice in Palestine—a pro-BDS campus group that crows about how Israel’s “days are numbered”—was said by Halbfinger to have been barred merely “over a stint as an advocate for Palestinian rights.” Eliminating Israel is not a “Palestinian right.” And to confuse SJP demands with rights is to participate in partisan advocacy. 

The newspaper didn’t only transform anti-Israel into pro-rights; it also insisted anti-Israel was, well, not anti-Israel. In a separate story about the SJP student, Times correspondent Isabel Kershner insisted that her “credentials as an anti-Israel activist are far from clear-cut”—as if leadership in a group that the Anti-Defamation League called “the primary organizer of anti-Israel events on U.S. college campuses,” and which “has consistently demonized Israel,” leaves room for ambiguity. 

While Israel’s harshest opponents were made unrecognizable by so many coats of gloss, the newspaper applied darker shades to moderate voices. White House correspondent Mark Landler, for example, described the American decision to recognize Israel’s capital as being popular among “a segment of hard-line pro-Israel American Jews.” 

In fact, as Voice of America correctly noted at the time, the decision was “welcomed by a majority of the top U.S. organizations representing American Jews.” Subsequent polling revealed that American Jews were evenly split between those supporting the administration’s Jerusalem moves and those opposing it. That’s not a “segment” of “hardliners.” 

That same tactic of marginalizing support for Israel can be seen, too, in the paper’s coverage of the United Nations Human Rights Council, a body whose anti-Israel bias has been, according to the Times, criticized by “conservatives.” 

“Conservatives have been complaining about the council since its inception in 2006,” Gardiner Harris told readers. To make the case, he cited criticism by George W. Bush, Benjamin Netanyahu, Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo, and Elliott Abrams. That’s all. The takeaway? You can criticize a hostile obsession with Israel. But if you do, dear Times reader, you might just be a conservative. 

This framing is a thick cloud of journalistic smoke that concealed nearly constant condemnation of the Human Rights Council from a broad cross section of observers. These include Obama administration ambassadors Susan Rice, Samantha Power, and Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe; Democratic senators Jeff Merkley and Bill Nelson; UN Secretaries General Ban Ki-moon and Kofi Annan; senior officials from Human Rights Watch; and even, back in 2006, the New York Times editorial board itself, which slammed the council’s “shameful pattern” of bias against Israel.

Does the Times really believe that half of American Jews are “hardliners”? Does it believe that the Obama administration and its own editorial board were stacked with “conservatives”? Or is it using such characterizations as a tool to steer readers toward its preferred positions? 

Consider the ugly characterizations the paper reached for to describe Kenneth Marcus’s advocacy against BDS and anti-Semitism. After Marcus was nominated for a position at the U.S. Department of Education, the newspaper’s Erica Green accused him of “choosing sides” against students of color because he opposed BDS and advocated for maligned Jewish students at the University of Wisconsin. 

A subsequent article by Green charged Marcus with “squelching anti-Israel speech” and called him a “longtime opponent of Palestinian rights causes” for the offense of supporting a definition of anti-Semitism consistent with the ones embraced by the Obama administration, the European Parliament, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, and mainstream Jewish organizations. 

So while the anti-Israel student was an “advocate” for Palestinian rights, the foe of anti-Semitism is an “opponent” of those rights. Why wasn’t she an opponent of Israeli rights? These are slippery standards. And they shift again when, in glaring contrast with all this certitude about what Palestinian rights are and aren’t, the newspaper suddenly opted for scare quotes when referring to “the Israeli ‘right’ to land” in its sovereign territory between the Green Line and the Mediterranean Sea. 

Let’s add to the mix the newspaper’s description of Peter Beinart, a columnist who devotes most of his energy to deriding the Jewish state, but whom the Times introduced as someone “known for his love of Israel.” This is far from the most egregious example of the newspaper’s editorializing, but it is still worth asking: Known to whom? To the same people who know Marcus as an opponent of rights but who can’t decide whether the leader of a virulently anti-Israel student group is anti-Israel? To those who are silent about Mahmoud Abbas’s anti-Jewish rhetoric but suddenly concerned about screams by Mrs. Netanyahu? To those who insist Palestinian gunmen are “protesters” and Palestinian rock-throwers are merely “responding” to Israel’s outrageous attempts to stop, well, Palestinian rock-throwing? To those who insist that American Jewish supporters of Israel are “hard-line,” critics of the Human Rights Council are “conservative,” and those who mention Palestinian payments to terrorists are “far-right” conspiracy theorists? 

These examples are but a sample of 2018’s distortions—but a large enough one to show an entrenched pattern of bias. 

That pattern, of course, isn’t unique to 2018. If we had created a timeline for 2017, it would include, for example, Rebecca Flint Marx’s description of Rasmea Odeh, the convicted murderer of two Jews, as merely a “controversial activist.” 

The Times has gotten off to a terrible start in 2019, too. After U.S. Representative Rashida Tlaib reacted to proposed anti-BDS legislation by charging members of Congress with loyalty to Israel and not the United States, she was widely slammed for endorsing the anti-Semitic dual-loyalty charge. 

“They forgot what country they represent,” Tlaib asserted on Twitter. “This is the U.S. where boycotting is a right & part of our historical fight for freedom & equality.” To which Senator Marco Rubio responded, “This ‘dual loyalty’ canard is a typical anti-Semitic line.”

Here, though, is how the exchange looked to New York Times readers:

Ms. Tlaib took a swing at anti-B.D.S. legislation this month, writing on Twitter that “this is the U.S. where boycotting is a right & part of our historical fight for freedom & equality.” Mr. Rubio fired back, “This ‘dual loyalty’ canard is a typical anti-Semitic line.”

Reporter Catie Edmondson effectively covered for Tlaib by concealing the most contentious part of her tweet, and she simultaneously made Rubio’s criticism of her dual-loyalty charge—and similar concerns raised by mainstream Jewish organizations—appear nonsensical. 

Editing errors happen, of course. But this was no mistake. Rogene Jacquette, the New York Times standards editor, explicitly stood by the paper’s characterization of the exchange. 

In ad campaigns, open letters, and codes of ethics, the newspaper asks us to trust its reporting. That requires us to first assess whether it deserves our trust—and here’s the gloomy assessment: The New York Times consistently flouts the rules of ethical journalism. And it does so as part of a campaign to protect anti-Israel activists and steer public opinion against the Jewish state.

North Korea: How the Discussion Was Changed

by Peter Huessy   March 6, 2019 

 https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13840/north-korea-discussion

With the meetings between US President Donald Trump and North Korea's Chairman Kim Jong-Un, the US administration is seeking to change the "accepted" narrative about the Korean peninsula and Western Pacific, just as it has with respect to the Middle East. 

The rationale for the summits between US President Donald Trump and North Korea's Chairman Kim Jong-Un may well be misunderstood by the critics of the American administration. By meeting with the North Korean leader, the administration is seeking to change the "accepted" narrative about the Korean peninsula and Western Pacific, just as it has with respect to the Middle East.

Whether the administration can be successful is an open question, but changes already secured in the Middle East give support to the administration's strategy and goals.

In the Middle East, for instance, the "Peace Process" tail has, for decades, wagged the Middle East dog -- with the Palestinian Authority (PA), previously the PLO, having near veto power over US policy in the region. So central was this to America's thinking that former US President William Jefferson Clinton said in 2010, if Israel simply provided the Palestinians with a state, most terrorism would go away -- as if the grievance of Muslim terrorists about not yet having a Palestinian state explains their wholesale murder of fellow Muslims, to say nothing of Christians, Israeli civilians and Americans, murdered in literally countless Islamic terror attacks .

President Trump has rejected this Middle East framework or narrative. He declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel, moved the US Embassy there, ordered the closure of the PLO office in Washington, quickly decimated ISIS, and cut significantly the funding for United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA).

This UN agency, founded shortly after World War II, has still some 75 years later not settled "Palestinian refugees." Now decades later, the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of these refugees, as well as Arabs drawn from throughout the Middle East, are kept in slums and barrios from which a ready pool of terrorists can be drawn.

President Trump then also put together an informal alliance of Gulf states, particularly the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, to be joined by Israel and the United States, to challenge Iran, which, as the world's worst state sponsor of terrorism, was finally the primary focus of United States concern.

The administration withdrew from the Iran "nuclear deal" (JCPOA); Iran was not living up to its obligations under the agreement, anyway. Contrary to promises of changed Iranian behavior, Iran, since the 2015 JCPOA, has aggressively increased its funding for terror, including to Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, increased its funding and arms shipments to the Islamic jihadis in Yemen, and has accelerated its ballistic missile programs while making significant strides in nuclear weapons technology capability, as just recently outlined in a February 25 report by the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS).

The administration has similarly sought to change foreign policy conventional wisdom about the nuclear threat from North Korea. To do this, the administration first had to cement the US relationship with its ally, the Republic of (South) Korea, and underscore (not hide) the central role of China in the ongoing hostile policy of North Korea in the region.

Second, President Trump had to assert that the US was in the business of deterring North Korea, not the other way around. Trump's comment about having a really big "nuclear button" was not just macho bragging, but a statement of fact: no longer would the US tolerate North Korean attacks near or on the US, Japan or South Korea -- whether bombings, cross-border commando raids, sinking Navy vessels, shelling villages or grabbing American ships. such as the USS Pueblo.

The Trump administration was sending a very strong message that the US would no longer be silent in the face of North Korean threats to turn Seoul or Los Angeles into a sea of fire. As former CIA Director Mike Morell told Gatestone at the 2018 Reagan Defense Forum, since the end of the Korean War in 1953, the US, had not once used military action in response to a North Korean attack on the US, its interests or allies, so how could that behavior by the US be characterized by North Korea as a "hostile policy"?

Third, the administration needed to seek an immediate end to North Korea's practice of testing ballistic missiles over South Korea and Japan, as well as testing nuclear weapons, and threatening Hawaii, Guam or the US mainland with "merciless" strikes.

Fourth, the US secured the deployment in South Korea of a THAAD missile defense battery while also increasing by $60 million annually South Korea's support for American troops. The administration now can point to the additional South Korean support when going to the American people and asking, for its own military forces, greater defense spending, which over the past two years has been significant. That quid pro quo underscores the commitment the administration has made to the US-South Korean alliance.

Fifth, having cemented the US-South Korean alliance, a message was sent to North Korea that nothing is going to undermine that relationship and American soldiers are going to remain on the peninsula, contrary to the recurring demands of North Korea and China that all US troops leave.

Sixth, the administration has suggested an alternative economic vision for North Korea, which, situated between three economic powerhouses -- China, South Korea and Japan -- could become (certainly in relative terms) economically far better off than it is today. Critics may be right that such a deal is not possible. It may be that the North Korean leadership wants only to survive, keep its nuclear weapons, and work to secure sufficient funds to take care of its ruling elite -- and wait for the day that US forces leave the peninsula.

The security implications of a permanently nuclear-armed North Korea, however, are sufficiently serious to support the administration's initiative to denuclearize the peninsula. In January 2019, the special US envoy of the United States to North Korea, Stephen Biegun, announced in a speech at Stanford University that the North Korea had indeed pledged to give a full inventory of its nuclear enrichment facilities at the upcoming summit. Apparently, North Korea changed its mind.

Indeed, why would North Korea bargain away its nuclear weapons capability if they believe that precisely that capability is what guarantees the survival of its regime? It only makes sense for North Korea to give up its nuclear capability if they are, in fact, not to protect the North's sovereignty or guarantee its survival, but for some other purpose. What if instead, for example, North Korea regarded its nuclear program as the very leverage necessary to bargain concessions from the US and South Korea? What if the goal were to secure an extremely important concession -- the removal of US military forces from the Korean peninsula, a goal long-sought, put on the table before North Korea even acquired nuclear weapons?

So far, however, with the exception of a "halt" in military exercises, the Trump administration has correctly resisted making any such "concessions." This self-restraint comes despite concessions demanded regularly by angry North Korean officials at meetings with American officials, especially apparently at the most recent meeting with the United States Secretary of State.

As China expert Michael Pillsbury explains, the Chinese and North Koreans are flummoxed by President Trump. These two nations had regularly expected minor and reversible "concessions" by the North would be reciprocated by the US and allies with massive food and energy assistance, as well as sanctions relief, as has occurred in the past.

Now, it is true that for all the past efforts going back to the Agreed Framework of 1994 between the US and North Korea, the North has previously rejected a trade of ongoing sanctions relief and economic assistance in return for "giving up" its nuclear capability.

At the recent summit in Hanoi, however, that changed. North Korea, for the first time, did explicitly agree to dismantle its nuclear enrichment facility at Yongbyon, but in return for all sanctions that are "harmful" to the people of North Korea (mainly those imposed by the United Nations) being eliminated. This has been described as a "small deal" proposal, but nonetheless it was an actual trade heretofore never put on the table.

What the North seems not to have counted on was the US countering with a requirement that ALL North Korean nuclear facilities and weapons be dismantled -- "a very big deal" -- implying the American intelligence community knows that the North has considerably more nuclear facilities than those put on the table at Hanoi.

Why is that significant? If the question is trading an end to sanctions for denuclearization, then the definition of what exactly constitutes the North Korean nuclear capability is what is up for discussion, not that the nuclear weapons must be retained by the North to secure its survival.

It should now be clear to North Korea (and China) that the US troops in South Korea and Japan, and the US military presence in the Western Pacific, are not on the table for discussion.

The Trump administration took office after eight years of "strategic patience," which led only to more North Korean missiles, nuclear bombs and weapons shipments to terror states. The proponents of these policies -- having failed miserably -- now lecture the Trump administration about what America's North Korean policy should be. They seem, however, unwilling to see that the very nature of the discussion has now been changed -- to a necessary focus on North Korea's nuclear capability and not on the US military presence or ostensible US "hostile policy" in the region.

Dr. Peter Huessy is President of GeoStrategic Analysis, a defense consulting firm he founded in 1981, as well as Director of Strategic Deterrent Studies at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. He was also for 20 years, the senior defense consultant at the National Defense University Foundation.

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THINGS WE KNOW THAT AREN'T SO

Clifford D. May    ISRAEL HAYOM      3-7-19

http://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/things-we-know-that-arent-so/

It's been observed – and variously attributed to Mark Twain, Will Rogers and Ronald Reagan, among others – that what gets us into trouble is not what we don't know but what we know that isn't so.

For example, we know that modernity, like gravity, exerts a pull that nations and their rulers, sooner or later, find irresistible. As then-U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said to Russian President Vladimir Putin after the latter invaded Ukraine five years ago: "You just don't in the 21st century behave in 19th-century fashion." Putin's nonverbal reply: And why not?

Also widely believed: that the arc of history bends toward justice – or at least in some meaningful direction. Such historical determinism is supported by no evidence whatsoever as far as I'm aware.

A related article of faith is that nations evolve, eventually becoming liberal democracies. It's true that Germany and Japan transformed after World War II. But that was the result of unequivocal defeat and prolonged American occupation. Meanwhile, as suggested above, post-Soviet Russia remains decidedly illiberal and undemocratic. As for nations that used to be either Soviet constituent republics or Soviet vassal states, the jury is still out.

Conventional wisdom has long held that when people become wealthier, when they gain economic power, they demand political power to go with it. And they get it because those in charge conclude that governing through consent is preferable to ruling through fear. China, simultaneously becoming richer and more authoritarian, debunks that theory.

We think we know that democratic habits, once acquired, are not easily broken. In Turkey, however, people have been casting ballots for generations. Turkey now has a veritable president for life, one who fancies himself less a politician in the Western sense than a sultan in the Ottoman sense.

Americans and Europeans, on both the Left and the Right, are inclined to believe in homo economicus, a fictional creature who rationally prioritizes the optimization of economic benefits. Even when our adversaries and enemies make clear that what motivates them is ideology and/or theology, we tell ourselves they don't really mean it.

This delusion was among the reasons U.S. President Barack Obama gave Tehran's theocrats billions of dollars and offered to integrate them into the global financial and trading system. Significant economic improvements for ordinary Iranians could have been the result. The ruling clerics, in exchange, were asked only to end their nuclear weapons program and become reasonably law-abiding global citizens.

Instead, of course, they spent the bulk of the cash on ballistic missiles, terrorism, Shia militias in Syria and Iraq, and Houthi rebels in Yemen. Ruhollah Khomeini, the first supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, famously said: "This revolution was not about the price of watermelons." His successors – already fabulously wealthy themselves – were not about to prioritize affluence for their fellow countrymen over jihad against their enemies.

U.S. President Donald Trump took a similar approach toward North Korea, offering to make the hermit kingdom as crazy, rich Asian as Singapore.  It is now apparent that the price he put on that, "final fully verified denuclearization," is more than Kim Jung Un is willing to pay. The dynastic dictator also lives a life of extraordinary luxury and cares not a whit whether his subjects eat bulgogi or tree bark.

We know little about the Palestinian-Israeli peace plan being developed for Trump by Jared Kushner, his adviser and son-in-law, and Jason Greenblatt, his special representative for international negotiations. But I'm willing to give odds that it will hold out the promise of dramatically improved living standards for average Palestinians, as well as statehood, in exchange for a serious commitment to peaceful coexistence with the Jewish state.

I'll give even better odds that Palestinian leaders won't be tempted by such a tradeoff. Those who use a secular vocabulary, e.g., Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, will declare that the rights of his people are not for sale. Those who use a theological vocabulary, e.g., Hamas military leader Yahya Sinwar, will forthrightly proclaim their religious duty to recover all the lands that Allah has endowed to the Muslims. (Because that contradicts things most journalists know that aren't so, most will avoid reporting it.)

Perhaps you're thinking: But surely there is universal understanding of the value of negotiations and why peace through compromise is preferable to a prolonged conflict that ends with one side victorious and one side defeated. Perhaps you recall what Kerry also said: "This does not have to be a zero-sum game."

If so, you think you know what diversity means, but you don't. Diversity implies more than a smorgasbord of cuisines, clothing and music. It implies widely differing perspectives on what's important in this world and, for some people, the next world as well.

George Orwell, reviewing "Mein Kampf" in 1940, observed that Hitler "has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life." He "knows that human beings don't only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently want struggle and self-sacrifice."

If that's true of the followers of extremist ideologies, how much more must it apply to would-be conquerors and rulers?

The comforting notion that skilled diplomats bearing gifts and not baring their teeth can seduce and reform those who threaten us may be the most important thing we know that simply isn't so.

Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a columnist for The ‎Washington Times.‎

Strong horses and strong Jews

by Victor Rosenthal

When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse. – Osama bin Laden

All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it’s impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer. – Niccolò Machiavelli

It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that anti-Jewish expression of all kinds – ordinary Jew-hatred, antisemitic violence, and anti-Zionism – throughout the world are at their highest levels since the end of the Second World War.

Theodor Herzl and others thought that the normalization of the Jewish people – the change from “rootless cosmopolitans” living in other peoples’ homelands to a settled people in its own land – would bring about an end to the phenomenon of Jew-hatred.

It did not. People didn’t hate Jews any less, and the Jewish state simply provided another focus for hatred and another target for violent antisemitism.

It was also thought that if the traumatic events of the Holocaust and their historical roots in Jew-hatred were known throughout the world, there would be a wave of moral revulsion that would put an end to antisemitism. In simple terms, 1) Jew-hatred leads to mass murder, 2) mass murder is bad, 3) therefore, Jew-hatred is bad. So Holocaust museums were built, educational programs mandated, films made, and so forth.

This may have had some temporary effect, at least on overt expressions of Jew-hatred, which became socially unacceptable for a time. But it did not change hearts, and now, some years later, even the effect on overt expressions of hatred has dissipated.

For those who like to put the entire blame for the Holocaust on Hitler, the Nazis, or even Germany, I note that many British officials acted – before, during, and after the war – as though they would rather see Jews dead than in Palestine. Similar observations apply to the actions of US President Roosevelt, who had to be dragged kicking and screaming to do the minimum possible on behalf of Hitler’s victims. I don’t know or care what was in the hearts of these people, but they were aware of the Holocaust and their actions were deliberate.

Jew-hatred, both the individual kind and the kind that expresses itself as hatred of the Jewish state, is dangerous to the continued survival of the Jewish people. Indeed, many of its practitioners are acting consciously with the destruction of our people as a goal. They know what they are doing and are effectively using modern technology and psychological techniques to attack us.

As Jews, we have two general options: we can acquiesce to the disappearance of the Jews as a distinct people through a combination of violent oppression and suicidal assimilation, or we can try to preserve it.

I take it as a given that the Jewish people should survive as a people, and I place my obligation to the Jewish people ahead of my obligation to humankind in general, just as I prioritize my family over the other inhabitants of my neighborhood. These are moral axioms, first premises; if you don’t agree with me, I have no further arguments to convince you of them (and probably you should stop reading).

I wish to present a general framework for the preservation of the Jewish people. I am not proposing specific tactics, or even overall strategies – just some general principles, inspired by the writings of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Kenneth Levin, Niccolò Machiavelli, and others: I call it the Strong Jew Doctrine. I introduced the concept here, and it has application both in the schoolyards and college campuses of the West, and on the battlefields of the Middle East.

It’s based on the idea that honor, respect, and deterrence are critical for survival, and these properties – which actually inhere in those that meet and confront us, friends and enemies – depend on our use of power or our hesitance to do so.

The Jewish people have both gained and lost from their diaspora experience; but during centuries as a powerless minority, it developed an inferiority complex which interferes with its use of power, now that we have it. Over the years, Jews became accustomed to trying to buy safety with money, negotiating from a position of weakness, depending on the protection of others, and developing the capability to suffer. These strategies sometimes succeed in saving our skins and sometimes not, but they worked againstobtaining the respect of others, especially our enemies. They reinforced the antisemitic conception of the Jew as weak, sneaky, and contemptible – and as someone it is permissible to attack.

We don’t have to use those methods anymore. Today we are a people with an economically and militarily powerful homeland.

When challenged, whether by a neighborhood antisemite, the UN, or Hezbollah, a Jew or a Jewish state should respond in a way that takes into account not only meeting the particular challenge, but also maximizing the respect and deterrence that accrues as a result of our actions (our enemies, in particular, should experience fear and be deterred from future attacks). In this way, we not only hurt our enemies, but become the “strong horse.” The objective should be to obtain respect, not pity.

Sometimes what we must do to maximize respect is not consistent with European understandings of humanistic morality or international law. These are hard decisions, and there is no definitive general answer. Is it more important to avoid being accused of war crimes – which will happen regardless of what we do – or to reduce the risks faced by our ground troops in urban combat? This very question regularly comes up when the IDF is forced to enter Gaza or Arab towns in Judea/Samaria, and the army bends over backwards in the humanitarian direction. We would reduce the number of violent confrontations and our own casualties if we acted more aggressively when they did occur.

Here are some principles that either derive from or are consistent with the Strong Jew Doctrine, along with some examples of their application in personal and geopolitical situations:

Self-reliance is better than dependence. Accepting American military aid may seem to be advantageous for Israel, but we can do without it, it makes us dependent on an unreliable partner, and has numerous other deleterious effects.

It’s good to have passive defenses against aggression, but only an active response can provide a non-temporary solution. You can prevent a bully from hitting you by keeping your guard up, but you can only make him stop by hitting him back. Iron dome can protect a city, but it doesn’t motivate the enemy to stop firing rockets (indeed, it encourages him to fire more rockets in an attempt to overwhelm the system).

Never pay tribute or ransom. Some Israeli “security” officials argue that improving the humanitarian situation in Gaza or helping the PA meet payrolls helps prevent conflicts. Wrong: paying our enemies or introducing aid of any kind frees up funds for military purposes and sends a message of weakness. They are enemies.

Take revenge when appropriate. We live in the Middle East. Allowing members of other tribes to kill our people and to receive relatively mild penalties send the message that killing us is permissible. Allowing the PA to pay terrorists in our prisons encourages terrorism.

Restraint is not an indicator of strength. It is often the opposite. Letting Hamas burn southern Israel sends the message that we are too weak to stop them.

Use collective punishments when appropriate. Polls consistently show that the majority of residents of Gaza and the PA support violence against Israel. Many towns in the PA are dominated by clans associated with Fatah or Hamas. They provide direct support for terrorists. Why shouldn’t they pay a price?

Reprisals should always be disproportionate. When a bully hits you, hit him back harder. As Machiavelli recommended, when you have to hurt someone, hurt him so badly that he will not be able to get revenge.

Messaging should emphasize our strength, not our victimhood. Reports of terror attacks should stress that all the terrorists were eliminated on the spot (and they should be!), not how painful the attack was for us.

Never make threats that we are not prepared to carry out.It may seem paradoxical, but the more aggressive we are, the less Jew-hatred there will be. People and nations give lip service to meekness, but honor comes from boldness and exercise of power.

At the end of the day, it’s the strong horse that gets respect.

 PENETRATIONS OF US INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES BY HOSTILE SPY SERVICES DURING  JOHN BRENNAN’S CIA DIRECTORSHIP CRIPPLE US OPERATIONS WITHIN CHINA, IRAN , RUSSIA LEBANON

During John Brennan's directorship of the CIA, many brave foreign nationals who risk their lives inside extremely brutal regimes to provide the United States with essential information have been detected, imprisoned,  tortured and executed. Public examples:

1.     The loss of all recruited agents in China  [Between 20 and 30 of  the US   recruited agents in China were killed or imprisoned.] Media sources blamed the loss on a former CIA officer, Jerry Chung Shin Lee, who was arrested in January 2018 and is suspected of passing along their names to China

2.     In  May 2011 , according to Iranian state media,  30 people were arrested as CIA spies and 42 others were suspected of involvement with U.S. intelligence. Insiders attribute this failure to information that  was  provided to Iran by Monica Witt, a former Air Force counterintelligence officer (and later an intelligence contractor) who  defected to Iran 1n 2013 [where she is immune from any US criminal prosecution.]

Ms. Witt worked at the Air Force Office of Special Investigations from 2003-08 and then as a contractor, running an ultra secret Special Access Program, or SAP, until August 2010. The program gave her access to details about counterintelligence operations, true names of recruited agents, and identities of U.S. intelligence operatives in charge of recruiting foreign agents.Ms. Witt left the contractor in August 2010 for unspecified reasons.

 Witt  provided Iran  with the details of a secret communications system American handlers use to talk to their recruited agents.Other texts reveal she “told all” to an Iranian ambassador in Central Asia. As she boarded the plane, she texted her handler: “I’m signing off and heading out! Coming home.” The FBI’s assistant director for national security, stated that Witt became an “ideological” defector after converting to Islam. Her actions, he added, inflicted “serious damage to national security.”

The FBI fumbled the case in 2012 by warning Ms. Witt she might be targeted for recruitment by Iranian intelligence. A trained counterspy, she knew that the tip-off meant she was under investigation and surveillance. It likely set in motion her flight to Iran a year later.