WHY THOSE CLAIMING TO KNOW EVERYTHING ABOUT IRAN HAVE A SHAKIER UNDERSTANDING OF THE SUBJECT THAN DONALD TRUMP OR JOHN BOLTON.

Jonathan S. Tobin(March 27, 2018 / JNS)

https://www.jns.org/opinion/we-shouldnt-believe-all-the-experts/

We shouldn’t believe all the ‘experts’

President Donald Trump’s critics often take him to task for his ignorance of policy and his unwillingness to listen to experts. The first is an unavoidable consequence of his lack of experience; the latter seems like a fatal combination of hubris and contempt for knowledge.

On some issues, Trump’s animus for experts might be a mistake. Yet for all of his manifold faults as a leader and his egregious personal shortcomings, Trump’s instinctual distrust of the foreign-policy establishment and his determination to ignore their advice is more than justified.

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One example was Trump’s determination to flout conventional wisdom and recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. But there is no issue on which expertise has been more discredited by the so-called experts than Iran. With the appointment of John Bolton as the new National Security Advisor, the conflict between Trump and the experts has taken on a heightened importance. For the first time since taking office, Trump has a conservative foreign-policy team that is prepared to speak with one voice on Iran. Whereas Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and National Security Advisor Gen. H. R. McMaster were determined to preserve the Iran deal rather than to push hard to improve or scrap it, the trio of Pompeo, Bolton and Haley all grasp its essential shortcomings.

That is why we’re hearing so much this week from the Iran “experts” including 100 former diplomats and military personnel who are speaking out against Trump’s desire to alter the Iran deal. The misnamed group calls itself the National Coalition to Prevent an Iranian Nuclear Weapon. That is a case of false labeling since their purpose is to keep in place an agreement that will guarantee Iran will get a nuclear weapon.

Some of the signatories to its proclamation, such as Gary Sick, who promulgated the hoax about Ronald Reagan plotting with the Iranians prior to his election as president, are entirely discredited. Others, like former U.S. Ambassador Thomas Pickering, are shameless profiteers since he is a lobbyist for Boeing, which, like many European firms, is making billions doing business with Iran.

Still other members of the group are sincere, even if, like Wendy Sherman, who was a principle figure in the Clinton administration’s appeasement of North Korea and then President Obama’s top negotiator with Iran, it would be more useful if they spent their time explaining their catastrophic mistakes rather than taking potshots at Trump.

As with most purveyors of the foreign-policy establishment’s conventional wisdom, the group can count on flattering media coverage, including a fawning news article about its efforts in The New York Times. If that wasn’t enough, the Times also published an op-ed by Sherman further explaining their position against Trump and Bolton’s stance on Iran.

Yet the closer you look at what Sherman and her colleagues are saying, the more it appears that expertise isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. They not only take the Iranian regime at its word when it promises that it won’t build a nuclear weapon, they also don’t seem to understand the agreement.

While some defenders of the pact simply say it was the best deal the West could get and that the alternative is to allow Iran to race to making a bomb, Sherman and friends actually claim the deal is sufficient to keep the Iranians from going nuclear even after its terms expire. They take issue with Trump’s efforts to get the Europeans to back an effort to renegotiate the deal or add on to it with new measures that will eliminate the sunset clauses, which end the restrictions on Iranian nuclear activity after a decade. They think that the West will have time to react if Iran moves to build a weapon after the deal is concluded in the not-so-distant future.

This shaky premise is hard to take seriously since it is based on the notion that Western intelligence knows everything going on in Iran. But since the minimal inspections required by the deal place Iranian military installations off-limits to inspectors, that simply is not a credible position.

The Iranians know that European and U.S. foreign-policy establishments already lack the guts or the interest to foreclose the possibility of a bomb after 10 years. Why should they or anyone else believe that the Europeans and anyone else profiting from the end of sanctions would support their eventual re-imposition? Who can trust—absent pressure from someone like Trump—that the West would act even if worst came to worst?

The deal does nothing to stop Iran from building missiles that could carry nukes. It has also resulted in a situation where an enriched and empowered Iran is expanding its support to terror groups and engaging in adventurism in Syria that risks war with a Jewish state it wishes to eliminate. The fact that it will allow Iran to eventually get a bomb should have been a deal-breaker. Those seeking to preserve it are, for all of their lip service to the perils of proliferation, essentially guaranteeing that Iran will get a weapon.

The notion that the United States is powerless to reverse this situation is rooted in weakness and the spirit of appeasement. That’s why Trump and Bolton are right to push for new negotiations. They will also be right to exert as much pressure as needed to force the Europeans to go along with more sanctions, so as to regain the leverage that Obama threw away in 2013 when he made it clear that he would pay any price for a deal. Doing so is not without risks, but the alternative is to simply sit back and wait for the worst to happen.

If the so-called “experts” don’t realize this, then their expertise is of no value. You don’t have to be a fan of Trump to see why he is correct in ignoring their advice and instead, willing to listen to Pompeo, Bolton and Haley as America finally resolves to undo the damage that Obama and his minions have done.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS — the Jewish News Syndicate. Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.

 Obama’s Facebook Data Harvesting

 A former top Obama staffer recently revealed  that the Obama campaign “harvested” Facebook’s data on the friend networks of every American user. Obama’s  campaign used this technology to gain access to data on the “entire social graph” of Facebook — the friends of every American user. According to Carol Davidsen, a former Obama staffer who oversaw the former president’s data operations during the 2012 elections, Facebook was alarmed by the amount of data they had access to, but made a special exception for the Obama campaign because they were “on their side.”

Carol Davidsen@cld276 Replying to @cld276

Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.

Carol Davidsen@cld276

They came to office in the days following election recruiting &  were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.

8:02 PM - Mar 18, 2018

A New York Times piece following the 2012 election also reports that Obama’s data-gathering app “triggered internal safeguards” at the company, designed to detect suspicious activity.

Cambridge Analytica says that

         . they used no Facebook data during the 2016 election.

         . Aleksandr Kogan obtained the data via legitimate means.

         . they complied with Facebook’s request to delete the data.

         .they have agreed to allow the social media giant to conduct an independent audit to verify their claims. 

          . they would also “work with regulators as they investigate what happened.”

Update — A Facebook spokesperson provided this comment  – both the Obama and Romney campaigns had access to the same tools, and no campaign received any special treatment from Facebook.”

 Mark Zuckerberg’s statement to address users’ concerns about third-party access to data

There was no mention of Obama's utilization of face book data in Zuckerberg’s statement, which instead focused on Cambridge Analytica, the data analytics firm accused of failing to delete user data that had been passed to them by an academic, Aleksandr Kogan, who obtained the data via legitimate means.

In his statement, Zuckerberg claimed that Facebook had “learned from The Guardian, The New York Times and Channel 4 that Cambridge Analytica may not have deleted the data as they had certified.” HOWEVER, HE ALSO CONCEDED THAT CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA DENIES THE MEDIA’S ALLEGATIONS, AND THAT FACEBOOK HAS YET TO INDEPENDENTLY VERIFY THEM.

Zuckerberg announced three next steps for Facebook to address user concerns about data:

1. Facebook will investigate all apps that had access to “large amounts of information” prior to the rule change in 2014.
2. Facebook will conduct a “thorough audit” of “any app with suspicious activity,” and ban developers who do not agree to an audit.
3. Facebook will ban any developer who misused “personally identifiable information” (names, addresses, birthdays, etc.)
4. Facebook will introduce a range of new restrictions on third-party apps.
5. Facebook will make it easier for users to revoke third-party apps’ data

 According to Davidsen, Obama’s app falls into all three categories AND  IS STILL IN CIRCULATION. 

Will Facebook audit them and/or ask them to delete the data ?

Can the Iran Deal Be Fixed?

And should it be?

Omri Ceren   COMMENTARY MAGAZINE Mar. 15, 2018

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/can-iran-deal-fixed/

President Trump and his administration are approaching a make-or-break May deadline for deciding whether to stay in the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Lawmakers, analysts, and journalists have been struggling to reestablish something approaching a healthy debate in the aftermath of the factitious salesmanship of the Obama “echo chamber.” That was the mutually reinforcing and mutually credentialing network of ideologues, wannabe wonks, and callow journalists run by Obama’s deputy national-security adviser Ben Rhodes, who infamously bragged about how he had created it to drown out veteran journalists and experts.

If the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, is a coherent cluster of policies in the service of a modest arms-control strategy, there might be a basis for building on it as policy. But if it is a mess of contradictions that can’t be integrated into any coherent policy advancing American interests, then there are a dozen different scenarios in which the deal’s collapse becomes inevitable long before it begins sunsetting in the mid-2020s, and Donald Trump should just withdraw from the deal and shake everyone out of their slumbers.

After a six-month comprehensive review process that concluded in October 2017, Trump declared that the JCPOA had been giving Iran too much in exchange for too little. Iran had been granted legalized nuclear and ballistic-missile programs, hundreds of billions of dollars, and the diplomatic and military space to expand across the Middle East right up to Israel and Saudi Arabia’s borders. For its part, Tehran gave up certain nuclear work for about a decade and agreed to let the UN’s nuclear watchdog monitor most of what remained.

The president was required by a 2015 law to assess whether ongoing relief from sanctions was “appropriate and proportionate” to Iranian behavior. Trump assessed that the answer was no. Even so, the deal was left in place. But the administration made clear that it considered the JCPOA fatally flawed for at least three reasons: a weak inspections regime in which the UN’s nuclear watchdog can’t access Iranian military facilities, an unacceptable arrangement where the U.S. had to give up its most powerful sanctions against ballistic missiles even as Iran was allowed to develop ballistic missiles, and the fact that the deal’s eventual expiration dates mean Iran will legally be allowed to get within a hair’s breadth of a nuclear weapon.

So, for the U.S. to stay in the deal, Trump said, Congress and the U.S.’s E3 allies—Britain, France, and Germany—would have to repair each of these flaws. On ballistic missiles, for example, the U.S. and the E3 would have to announce that as far as they’re concerned, Iran’s testing a prohibited ballistic missile would be the same as Iran’s testing a prohibited centrifuge, and sanctions would be reimposed. In January 2018, the president put an exclamation mark on the policy, announcing that he was starting a 120-day clock for the E3 to agree to the fixes. Without them, Trump said, he will have the U.S. exit the deal no later than the middle of May, when a technical sanctions deadline comes up.

The demand for coherence and clarity stands in stark contrast to the way Obama and his team handled the JCPOA after its announcement. After the deal was implemented in January 2016, the Iranians quickly started grousing that the U.S. wasn’t doing enough to restore their economy, and there were strong suggestions that State Department officials had promised them active help. What followed were months of interagency turf and policy battles between the Departments of State and Treasury. Secretary of State John Kerry would make up something about the need to invest in Iran or how financial crime risks had been mitigated, but Treasury officials would angrily pull U.S. policy back. In one episode in November, Kerry defined down a technical requirement related to investment risk, and State had to publicly reverse his position after an interagency bloodbath that went public.

This process often deepened the ambiguities and contradictions of the deal, many times in the context of Iranian demands for more sanctions relief. It preserved the deal in the short term, but it led to an untenable combination in which the Obamans secretly promised further sanctions relief while they promised American politicians and activists that they would push back against Iran.

Under the Trump administration, top White House and Treasury Department officials have been dispatched to Europe to emphasize to U.S. partners that, one way or another, inside the deal or outside, America will increase its pressure on Iran in response to the Iranians’ continuing their ballistic-missile development, regional expansionism, human-rights atrocities, terror sponsorship, cyberattacks, and other malign behaviors. National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster warned at the 2018 Munich conference that “when you’re investing in Iran, you’re investing in” Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), an entity that controls huge swaths of Iran’s economy and that was designated as a terrorist group by the Trump administration last year. Top Iranian officials, including the country’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, described the efforts to chill investment in Iran for any reason as a violation of the nuclear deal.

It does appear that the Iranians genuinely believe they were implicitly (or maybe even explicitly) promised a hands-off approach—that the deal essentially prohibits the U.S. from using sanctions to keep Iran on the ropes in response to bad behavior. The terms of the JCPOA would suggest that this interpretation has merit, in the sense that the U.S. gave up its best nonmilitary leverage. In the banking sector, American diplomats agreed to lift sanctions on 23 out of 24 Iranian banks, including on the government-owned Central Bank of Iran, which bankrolls the IRGC. They also lifted sanctions on the full list of companies controlled by Iran’s supreme leader that had been designated in 2013.

The sanctions regime had been a patchwork of overlapping statutes, executive orders, and regulations aimed at countering the full breadth of Iran’s nuclear activities, global terrorism, ballistic-missile development, human-rights abuses, money laundering, military adventurism, and so on. In 2010, Congress passed the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act to target not just nuclear activity but also terrorism, ballistic-missile development, and non-nuclear weapons of mass destruction. In 2011, the Treasury Department designated all of Iran as a jurisdiction of primary money-laundering concern, which is an illicit-finance issue. For 2012, that finding was cited at the top of a sanctions amendment to the defense-authorization bill about terrorism, proliferation, and sanctions evasion. The Central Bank of Iran was blacklisted for money laundering because the Iranians were using it to move funds for terrorism and ballistic-missile research, and to bolster the Assad regime.

Why the U.S. chose to shred the sanctions regime is a matter of ongoing debate. A straightforward explanation is that the Iranians would not accept anything less, and then President Obama ordered his negotiators to make the appropriate concessions. Another theory suggests that the Obama administration was trying to show goodwill, because staffers believed that past U.S. actions were the source of current friction with Tehran. Or did the Obamans view sanctions relief as part of a broader policy of tilting toward Iran, empowering it as a stabilizing regional hegemon and putting it beyond the reach of future U.S. pressure? There were enough differing views among the foreign-policy players in the Obama White House and State Department to sustain any of those theories. Many officials didn’t have any particular affection for the Iranians but accepted that giving Tehran what it asked for was necessary to secure the nuclear deal that the president badly wanted. Others had been known to suggest that Iranian hostility was an understandable reaction to past U.S. policies. Perhaps if Iran could be made to feel more confident about its geopolitical position, it would become less aggressive. Others speculated that Iranian political dynamics made regime moderation a plausible scenario.

The Iranians wouldn’t accept a deal in which only nuclear sanctions were lifted, because so many other sanctions would remain in place. So the Obama administration redefined non-nuclear sanctions as “nuclear” sanctions, just so it could lift them. The Associated Press archly reported that the administration said that almost anything counted as a nuclear sanction: “They say measures designed to stop Iran from acquiring ballistic missiles are nuclear-related because they were imposed to push Iran into the negotiations.… They say sanctions that may appear non-nuclear are often undergirded by previous actions conceived as efforts to stop Iran’s nuclear program.”

It’s impossible to overstate the consequences of this disingenuous wordplay. The JCPOA prevents the U.S. from using its most powerful sanctions against Iran without checking Iran’s ability to engage in activities that pose severe risks to the security of the U.S. and our allies. It’s a structural instability at the center of the agreement.

That instability is not just limited to sanctions. The Obama administration subordinated its entire Iran policy—and much beyond it—to securing the Iran deal. In late 2009, Tehran sent to Washington a list of Iranian operatives whom the regime wanted released from American custody and another list of anti-Iranian opposition groups it wanted the U.S. to blacklist—demands the Obama administration met in part. The administration dismantled anti-proliferation and anti-drug-trafficking efforts that were tripping up the Iranians and their proxies. It publicly attacked and secretly leaked against the U.S.’s traditional Middle East allies who feared the deal would unleash Iran. The president personally spoke about acknowledging Iranian “equities” in Syria and declined to enforce the “red line” he had drawn on Syria’s use of chemical weapons because it would have prevented the deal.

The way the Obama administration obfuscated its concessions on ballistic missiles and inspections—two of the flaws Trump is now demanding get fixed or else—also suggest just how far it had to go to secure Iran’s participation in the deal. The Obama administration insulated those concessions with deliberate Humpty Dumpty ambiguity, and Trump’s insistence on clarification may finally topple the deal.

In a July 2015 Senate hearing, Kerry sparred with Senator Bob Menendez over how the related UN Security Council resolution supporting the deal gutted what had previously been an absolute ban against Iran’s developing ballistic missiles. The resolution took previous UN language—“Iran shall not undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear weapons”—and weakened it in a number of ways, then said that even those weakened restrictions would expire after eight years. Menendez pushed Kerry on the change, to which Kerry responded that the new language was in fact “the exact same language.” Menendez was amazed and couldn’t do much more than point out that he was actually reading aloud the old and new language from a page. Kerry wouldn’t budge. Of course, the new language did gut the ballistic missile restriction.

The surreal quality of that exchange was soon supplanted by vulgar thuggishness on the part of the Obamans. A month after the announcement of the JCPOA, the Associated Press reported that rather than have the IAEA inspect Iran’s military base at Parchin, where the Iranians were broadly suspected of having conducted work relevant to nuclear warhead detonation, the deal would allow Iran to inspect itself. Experts expressed concerns about the establishment of a Parchin Precedent in which Iran would be allowed to keep its military facilities closed to inspectors.

The Obamans responded with an all-out press assault. They attacked the AP’s reporters by name, blasted them during briefings, ran to friendly reporters to help in the attacks, and whipped up online reaction. They even conscripted Democratic lawmakers. Senator Chris Murphy declared from the Senate floor, “There is not a single senator who could say the AP story was correct,” and Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz said that she knew the story was false because she had been brought down to the White House Situation Room and shown proof, which she naturally couldn’t discuss. The AP scoop was subsequently confirmed. The Iranians were allowed to self-inspect.

It had always been a core demand of the international community that Iran needed to come clean on its past nuclear work, both to avoid kneecapping the IAEA—which had been in a protracted battle with the Iranians for years over Iranian opacity—and as a policy matter, because verifying any nuclear deal required determining what Iran’s past activities had actually been. Iran refused, and American diplomats collapsed on the issue. Kerry brushed off a reporter’s question by saying that the U.S. and its partners had “absolute knowledge” of Iran’s program anyway. Not “adequate knowledge,” which wouldn’t have been true either, but absolute knowledge! Shortcomings in intelligence about Iran’s past activities were confirmed by IAEA chief Yukiya Amano, former deputy national-security adviser James Jeffrey, and former CIA director Michael Hayden.

Two years after the nuclear deal was implemented, Iran’s military facilities have yet to be visited by the IAEA, according to all public accounts. IAEA officials suggested to Reuters that they are not going to make any requests that would give Trump an “excuse” to blow up the deal. For their part, the Iranians say their military sites are off-limits and were not included in the deal. Trump will have reason to be skeptical that any arrangement with the Europeans could ever get the IAEA to push the Iranians.

It’s not clear whether the president will tear up the deal. A team of American negotiators has been working on getting the E3 to agree to a range of fixes, and is testing whether there’s overlap between the maximum that the Europeans can give and the minimum that Trump will accept. The Europeans in turn are testing the Iranians to gauge their reactions and will likely not accept any fixes that would cause Iran to bolt.

The negotiations are problematic. The New York Times reported that, as far as the Europeans are concerned, the exercise requires convincing Trump they’ve “changed the deal without actually changing it.” Public reports about the inspection fix suggest that the Europeans are loath to go beyond urging the IAEA to request inspections, which the agency may be too intimidated to do. The ballistic-missile fix is shaping up to be a political disaster, with the Europeans refusing to incorporate anything but long-range missiles into the deal. That would leave us with inadequate tools to counter Iran’s development of ballistic missiles that could be used to wipe Israel, the Saudis, and our regional bases off the map.

The U.S. negotiating team is cognizant of all this, and the Europeans have gotten significant pushback. U.S. diplomats turned the president’s January demands into a checklist and made it clear to the Europeans that they’ll have to check every box. The Europeans for their part have been aggressively leaking and maneuvering—though that may be having the opposite effect of the one intended. Just before a March meeting between the U.S. and the E3 in Berlin on this topic, the State Department started quietly signaling that it would lay down the law on ballistic missiles, and the administration announced that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will be replaced by current CIA Director Mike Pompeo. Tillerson was one of the main forces in the administration for preserving the deal. Pompeo has been one of the main advocates for dismantling it.

There is always reason to worry, however. The problem is structural. If the Obama administration was being deliberately ambiguous because it couldn’t publicly justify concessions that the Iranians absolutely demanded, then the Europeans will have discovered as much when checking in with Tehran in the aftermath of Trump’s demands. There is a risk the Trump administration may be pushed to accept the hollow fixes acceptable to the Europeans.

Fixing the deal in this way would be the worst of all worlds. It would functionally enshrine the deal under a Republican administration. Iran would be open for business, and this time there would be certainty that a future president will not act to reverse the inevitable gold rush. Just as no deal would have been better than a bad deal, so no fix would be better than a bad fix.

Vladimir Loves Hillary The truth behind the media myth.

Daniel Greenfield   3-13-18

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/269557/vladimir-loves-hillary-daniel-greenfield

Vladimir Putin’s hatred for Hillary Clinton is one of the foundational myths of the election rigging conspiracy theory. Why else would the Russians risk a war to rig an election?

The origin story of the myth has appeared in a thousand media narratives. It was born in a media echo chamber in late July 2016 from overlapping stories in Politico, NBC News and Time Magazine. The stories all claimed that the Russian leader hated Hillary Clinton because she questioned his election results.

"When mass protests against Russian President Vladimir Putin erupted in Moscow in December 2011, Putin made clear who he thought was really behind them: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. With the protesters accusing Putin of having rigged recent elections, the Russian leader pointed an angry finger at Clinton, who had issued a statement sharply critical of the voting results,” Politico informed readers.

It all fits very nearly.

Hillary Clinton criticized the Russian election. Vladimir Putin accused her of interfering with the election and so he decided to pay her back.

Except that Moscow makes these accusations all the time. It accused the United States of trying to tamper with its election last week. And two months ago.

And these accusations are aimed at the administration that the media claims colluded with Russia.

If Putin rigged the election against Hillary because he blamed her for interfering in his election, shouldn’t he now rig the next election against Trump over this latest accusation? If Putin is consistent, then Trump’s next Dem opponent, whoever he or she might be, will be nothing more than a Russian puppet.

The media mythmakers want us to believe that Hillary Clinton’s criticism was an extraordinary event. By voicing these criticisms, she supposedly incurred Putin’s wrath which went on burning all these years.

In a meeting with donors, Hillary claimed that Putin rigged the election because “he has a personal beef against me”. Donors were supposed to believe that Russia had spent years and millions, risking a war, because of this “personal beef”. That’s enough beef for an international chain of restaurants.

But former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had called that same Russian election, a “mockery of the electoral process”. That’s far stronger language than anything that Hillary Clinton had used.

Some claim that Putin hated Hillary especially because a woman had dared to criticize him. Rice is not only a woman, but a black woman. If Putin is a sexist, isn’t he also probably a racist?

Criticism of Russia’s elections in the Putin era has been fairly routine. Hillary Clinton wasn’t breaking new ground with her tepid remarks. State Department human rights reports have been unflattering under any and every administration. Despite the media’s myths, nothing new happened in 2011.

But if Putin had really wanted to send a message in 2011 by retaliating against an American election, there was one next year. That would have sent a very direct and timely message. Instead he waited five years to unleash his brilliant plan to buy ads on Facebook and push fake Black Lives Matter groups.

Because the Ford Foundation can only divide Americans so much without a little help from Moscow.

If Putin hated Hillary, he could have gone after her in 2008 when she joked that he didn’t have a soul. But that didn’t stop her from brandishing a Reset Button or aiding Russia’s uranium acquisition anyway.

Putin did try to blame Secretary of State Clinton for the election protests. But that had more to do with delegitimizing the protesters by accusing them of treason. (The Dem conspiracy crowd has borrowed Putin’s tactic and accuses everyone who questions its conspiracy theory of being a Russian traitor.)

There’s no reason to think that the ’11 exchange was anything more than cynical politics. Hillary didn’t care about Russian election results. Putin knew that the protesters risking their lives were doing it before Hillary had said anything. And he knew that the Clintons were always open for business.

A year before Hillary’s election criticism, she had signed off on the Uranium One deal and the Clinton Foundation went on soliciting cash from Putin’s pals along with every other foreign power broker.

Much of the election conspiracy revolves around claims that Putin had suborned Trump. But why would he have needed to pour time and energy into developing a suborned presidential candidate when he already had a corrupt tool who would do anything for money including give away America’s uranium?

Could Putin really ask for anything better than the return of an administration that had sold pardons to foreign criminals for money and which already had its own slush fund that he could donate to?

And if Moscow was out to stop a hostile candidate, there were far more urgent threats and insulting candidates to target during the two previous presidential elections.

Mitt Romney had called Russia as a major threat in language far stronger than anything Hillary Clinton had used in 2011. That would have been a good time to put Putin’s thumb on the scale. Instead the Russians didn’t bother bringing down Mitt because like absolutely no one, they were waiting for Hillary.

And if the Russians were going to interfere in any election, it would have been in 2008. That’s when Senator McCain, a Russia hawk, was up against Barack Obama, a lefty who promised a Russia reset. McCain’s win would have been a serious threat to Russia. President McCain would have pushed back against Russia in Georgia. He would have fought to dramatically expand NATO. There hadn’t been an American election with so much at stake for Russia since Carter battled Reagan. And nothing.

Not unless the conspiracy crowd is suggesting that Russia helped Obama win.

McCain had warned that there would be a "dramatically different relationship" with Russia. And Putin had accused the United States of creating a “crisis in Georgia” to help McCain win. Unlike Hillary, McCain genuinely hated Putin. And there’s every reason to believe that Moscow was none too fond of him.

But we’re supposed to believe that the Kremlin was more threatened by Secretary Reset Button.  

Even if the Russians weren’t ready to interfere in ’08, McCain had two Senate races since then. He won his last race in ’16 by less than 350,000 votes. The Russians could have added him to their election interference hit list. If Moscow can rig a presidential election, the Arizona senate race should have been easy. And Putin would have eliminated a major critic whose advocacy continues to pose a threat.

But McCain is still in office while Hillary complains that she only lost because of sexist Russian bots.

The idea that Hillary Clinton posed a unique threat to Putin has no historical evidence behind it. Every losing presidential candidate since Kerry posed more of a threat to Vladimir Putin than her. Either the Russians took down McCain and Romney. Or the Hillary-Putin narrative is another conspiracy theory.

Since this “rigged election”, Ukraine will receive the actual weapons which Obama refused to sell them. Russian START treaty violations are being exposed and Patriot missiles are heading to Poland. While Obama allowed Russia’s Iranian allies to take American sailors hostage in the Persian Gulf, under Trump, our forces fought back against a Russian attack on an American base in Syria with maximum force.

Would Hillary Clinton have done any of those things or would she have pushed another reset button?

Vladimir Putin doesn’t hate Hillary. He finds her very useful. If she had won, Moscow would have gotten exactly what it wanted. After her defeat, Hillary has become Russia’s best troll, dividing the country and casting doubt on our political system while making opposition to Russia into a partisan issue.

The media myth that Putin hates Hillary just makes her a more effective agent of Russian influence.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.

Forget Russia, what about Qatar?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/269537/forget-russia-what-about-qatar-daniel-greenfield

Daniel Greenfield, FPM

There hasn’t been a sudden explosion of paranoia and fear about Russia like this since Sputnik.

In the ‘12 election debates, Obama had breezily dismissed Romney’s suggestion that Russia was the leading geopolitical threat. “You said Russia. Not al Qaeda. You said Russia,” he sneered. “And the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back, because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”

Obama was nearly right.

Russia is a serious geopolitical threat, but despite Putin’s imperial ambitions and the malicious actions of a regime run by former KGB operatives, it falls far behind the threat posed by the People’s Republic of China. The Cold War is over and Russia lost. That may be of small comfort to Ukraine or Georgia, and the other former subject nations of the Soviet Union that it threatens, but it’s no real threat to us.

China isn’t our leading geopolitical foe either.

Obama mentioned Al Qaeda in his attack on Romney. The Islamic terrorist group was already largely irrelevant. But the terror kingdom behind it is more dangerously relevant than ever.

According to the intelligence community, Abdullah bin Khalid al-Thani, a member of the Qatari royal family, its former interior minister and minister of Islamic affairs, was an Al Qaeda sympathizer who had harbored Khalid Sheikh Muhammad. When the FBI arrived in Qatar to arrest him, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks was transported away on a special Qatari government jet with blacked out windows.

And there have been suspicions over the years that Qataris played a larger role in 9/11.

But Qatar these days is far more of a threat than it was on 9/11. Its close ties to terror have made it a pariah nation in the region even as its support for Islamic theocracy crosses all factional lines.

It’s the main patron of the Muslim Brotherhood, an international Jihadist network, and has close ties to Iran. It spreads terrorist propaganda through Al Jazeera while subverting friendly governments. It seeks to influence American policy through think tanks like Brookings while spying on Americans.

Russia’s backing for the Shiite axis in Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen has been destabilizing, but not nearly as destabilizing as Qatar’s backing for the Islamist militias that wrecked Syria, Yemen, Libya, Egypt and much of the region. Qatar’s Iranian allies may be the final winners of the Arab Spring’s humanitarian catastrophe, but it was Qatari propaganda and weapons that kickstarted the region’s unholy wars.

While Qatar’s Al Jazeera terror network undermined governments, the terror kingdom shipped massive amounts of weapons to its Islamic terrorist allies. The Obama administration colluded with Qatar’s arms shipments to terrorists by instructing NATO forces not to interdict these shipments which later ended up in the hands of Jihadists in Libya and Mali. Qatar bought weapons from the genocidal Muslim Brotherhood regime in Sudan, whose leader is wanted by the ICC for crimes against humanity, and shipped them to Jihadists in Syria through the terror state of Turkey.

Secretary of State John Kerry even winked at Qatar’s funding of Hamas, another genocidal Muslim Brotherhood regime. This is the sort of serious collusion that we should be discussing.

But while Qatar funds terrorists, its massive propaganda operation also attempts to influence Americans. The terror kingdom acquired Current TV from Al Gore for $500 million. But the terror network failed to attract viewers. Al Jazeera America was sued for fraud by Gore, and its female and Jewish employees began coming forward with accusations of sexism and anti-Semitism.

But while Al Jazeera America failed, Al Jazeera remains the world’s most influential hostile state propaganda service, far more so than Russia’s RT. And it hasn’t given up on influencing Americans.

Al Jazeera recently boasted of having sent in an operative to secretly record pro-Israel activists. The terror network dispatched letters to pro-Israel groups and it’s believed by some that their existence is being used to pressure figures in the Jewish community into playing along with Qatar’s public relations effort. If Russia were similarly spying on and blackmailing Americans, there would be outrage.

Unfortunately, Qatar has burrowed deeply into the media and the political infrastructure of the left.

Al Jazeera is not the only vector for Qatari propaganda. The Brookings Institution, one of the most influential think tanks in the country, is subservient to Qatar. “[T]there was a no-go zone when it came to criticizing the Qatari government,” a Brookings Doha Center fellow revealed.

And then there’s The Intercept. The pro-terror site funded by a Persian billionaire has become notorious for its distribution of Qatari propaganda. The site, whose leading figure is Hamas apologist Glenn Greenwald, is a perfect forum for publishing smears, innuendo and even hacked documents. The Intercept frequently features attacks on the UAE, a Qatari rival, and Americans friendly to it, such as Jared Kushner, so that its contents appears to curiously echo those of Qatar’s PR and Al Jazeera.

Qatar’s influence operations took an ominous turn when Elliott Broidy, a top Trump donor, had his emails hacked by individuals he alleges were Qatari agents. The leaked emails play into Qatar’s conflict with the UAE. The emails have predictably popped up on Al Jazeera and Broidy had previously been targeted by The Intercept for a panel at which Steve Bannon had criticized Qatar.

“We have reason to believe this hack was sponsored and carried out by registered and unregistered agents of Qatar seeking to punish Mr Broidy for his strong opposition to state-sponsored terrorism,” Broidy’s spokesman said.

These two incidents of alleged Qatari espionage against Americans in order to influence our foreign policy raise serious questions. Yet the same media that obsessively searches for Russian bots on Reddit and Facebook seems entirely disinterested in discussing the subject. Skeptics of Russian influence have been told to put country ahead of party, but when will the left finally put country ahead of Qatar?

Perversely, instead of investigating the role of Qatar in influencing American elections, Mueller is reportedly taking the Qatari propaganda at face value and directing his investigation accordingly.

President Trump has been critical of Qatar. If Mueller uses Qatari opposition research to undermine a sitting president on behalf of a terror state, he will actually doing what Trump has been accused of.

Mueller had been accused of covering for the Muslim Brotherhood’s activities in America before. But now he risks being guilty of colluding with the Brotherhood’s Qatari backers to bring down an anti-Qatari president for the terror state that shielded the mastermind of the September 11 attacks.

There could be no greater act of treason than that.

Qatar’s domestic influence operation is far deeper and more dangerous than anything waged by Russia. Al Jazeera is infinitely more sophisticated than RT. The influence enjoyed by Qatar through Brookings has no Russian parallel. Its narrative on Yemen, Libya, Gaza, Burma and Egypt is the only story you will see in the media. The media in the United States hardly ever runs stories critical of Qatar anymore.

But if the latest allegations are true, Qatar’s terror backing and fake news operations have been supplemented by a domestic spying and blackmail operation against Americans.

And that cannot be tolerated.

Qatar is tiny compared to Russia. It’s a slave state of 200,000 masters and large numbers of foreign workers, many of them worked to death and treated little better than slaves. But yet it’s enormously wealthy and beneath its façade of moderation, it seeks to export Islamic supremacism around the world.

When we talk about Al Qaeda or Hamas, when you hear about the Arab Spring or the civil war in Yemen, when mention is made of the illegal invasion of Libya, the fighting in Syria, the real topic is Qatar.

Americans who collude with Russia should be held accountable. So should those who collude with Qatar.

And often they are one and the same.

Qatar, like Russia, is an ally of Iran. Like Russia, it arms and trains Islamic terror groups, seeks to undermine America, Israel and the West, and represents a major geopolitical threat.

Islamic terrorism is our leading geopolitical enemy. Its distribution and diversity makes it more difficult to pin down than the linkage between Communism and the Soviet Union. But the closest thing to the USSR of Islamic terror today is Qatar. When Democrats demand to know what Republicans are ready to do about Russia, Republicans should ask them what they are willing to do about Qatar?

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.

How Obama Caused the 2014 Gaza War

By Ira Strauss, NATIONAL REVIEW August 25, 2014 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2014/08/how-obama-caused-gaza-war-ira-straus/

By promoting democracy blindly, and with a bias for the Muslim Brotherhood, he empowered Hamas.It was the election and brief rule of the Muslim Brotherhood (under Mohamed Morsi) in Egypt that was the proximate cause of the Gaza war. It was the earlier election of the Muslim Brotherhood (in its Hamas incarnation) in Gaza that was the underlying cause. And it was unwise U.S. demands on Egypt and Palestine — demands that they hold elections and let Muslim religious parties run in them — that led to these twin evils.

Additional tunnels between Gaza and Egypt were constructed during Morsi’s year in power (June 2012 to July 2013). The materials for the tunnels at the other end of Gaza — the ones into Israel — were smuggled in from Egypt that same year. So were the new sophisticated weapons Hamas has been using. Now Israel is cleaning up the mess.

Morsi was not just a president, he was the leader of a movement-regime. The movement was the same Muslim Brotherhood of which Hamas is a branch and al-Qaeda is an offshoot.

The Obama administration had encouraged Egyptians to vote Morsi into office; this made the difference in his thin margin of victory. The administration bears causal responsibility for the present conflict, alongside the Brotherhood itself. The administration promoted uncritically what it called “democracy” in Egypt. At every point along the line it biased its democracy-promotion in ways that served the Brotherhood’s rise to power. This is obvious to Egyptians; they talk bitterly about how America foisted the Brotherhood on them. It is only Americans who have not heard about it.

Is it unfair for Egyptians to blame all of America for things the administration did, especially since the administration in fact did these things in the name of distancing itself from what it and its supportive media called the “Islamophobia” of “America”? Maybe it is not as unfair as it seems; after all, the Obama administration did not do this all by itself. It built on the mistakes the Bush administration had made. President Bush had demanded that the Palestinians and Egyptians scrap the rules of secular democracy and let the Muslim Brotherhood run in their elections. But then, the Bush administration, too, was hell-bent after 9/11 on distancing itself from the “Islamophobia” and “prejudices” of “America.” It was blaming everything wrong in the Mideast on America’s supposedly having “propped up” the more moderate and benign dictatorships of the region, by which it meant the fact of having sometimes dealt with them normally and not gone all out to topple them. One could, then, exempt “America” from the blame, theoretically, by saying that U.S. policy throughout this period has been influenced less by America per se than by an elite milieu in Washington, and in the media and academia, that is making policies for the sake of distancing itself from America. That proposition has a painful grain of truth, but it is a difficult truth for foreign countries to grasp. They have to deal with the America they are given.

Fortunately, Bush, while lacking the strength to stay free of foolish influences intellectually, had the decency to stop short on his democracy-promotion policy when he saw where it was leading. But by then it had already brought Hamas to power in Gaza; it was too late to save the window of opportunity for making peace between the Palestinians and Israel that had been opened when ahmoud Abbas was chosen to head the Palestinian National Authority in 2005.

The unchallenged bipartisan ideology in Washington, at least since 1991, has been that democracies never fight one another. It was deduced that Arab democracy was the road to peace with Israel; therefore if the Palestinians held legislative elections open to all major forces — even a terrorist religious party such as Hamas — they would become ready to make peace. The reality was the other way around: It was peace with Israel that would have been the road to enabling democracy to become a benign factor among Palestinians and others in the Arab world, instead of remaining a vehicle of anti-Western passions and totalitarian religious movements. The chance to make peace was sacrificed to the democracy-promotion ideology.

Obama in turn undid Bush’s self-correction. His theorists held that Bush’s real mistake was not his demanding that religious parties be allowed to participate in elections, but merely his failing to support Hamas after it won the Gaza elections in 2006. They added that he shouldn’t have backed off from further pressures on Hosni Mubarak when the Brotherhood won nearly every seat it had been allowed to contest in the 2005 elections in Egypt.

Obama “corrected” those “mistakes.” He gave his Cairo speech and invited leaders of the Brotherhood to sit in the front row. He enthused over the Arab Spring and at times, like a true revolutionary organizer, proclaimed the necessary next demands upon the old regime and the next strategic moves for the Revolution. He publicly demanded that Egypt legalize the Brotherhood as a political party — which meant scrapping Egypt’s secular rules in this matter. (And this in turn compelled the more extreme Salafists, who would have preferred to remain apolitical, to organize as a party, so that the Brotherhood would not get all the religious votes.) At the same time, the Western mass media, whose line was the same as Obama’s, supported and indeed demanded the outlawing of Mubarak’s party, an anti-democratic act of revolutionary vengeance that served to disorganize the moderate center of Egypt. Legalize the Brotherhood as a party; outlaw the “corrupt” centrists as a party: This was the actual substance of Obama’s version of the “democracy” policy. It made the Brotherhood by far the largest coherent political force in Egypt.

The media and the Obama administration initially justified this by saying there was no chance the Brotherhood could win an election, and they engaged in name-calling — “ignorant,” “Islamophobic,” “simplistic Americans” — at those who saw things more accurately. When the Brotherhood won the parliamentary elections handily, neither the media nor the administration had the decency to admit to being wrong, and wrong with deadly consequences; they turned on a dime and said the Brotherhood’s victory was a good thing. And they continued excluding from the discussion those who had been right, calling them the same dirty names as before. In the final round of the presidential elections, the administration positively encouraged Egyptians to vote for the Brotherhood’s candidate, Morsi, letting it be known that it was planning to send aid to Egypt if he won, and to impose financial penalties if he lost.

Once Morsi did win, by a bare 51 percent to 48 percent, Obama pressured the Egyptian army to submit. Meanwhile, the Brotherhood’s newfound power gave Hamas unprecedented strategic depth to its rear, inspiring it to start a war with Israel in 2012; Obama turned to Morsi to mediate an end to the war, letting Hamas came out ahead, and he praised Morsi’s statesmanship for it. Morsi and the Brotherhood shifted the balance of power in the Sinai peninsula toward extremists, releasing terrorists from prison; Obama turned to Morsi to rein them in. It was a pattern of the administration’s in effect arranging to be taken hostage, actively making itself dependent on a hostile movement, and then rewarding that movement. Morsi seized on both occasions of administration dependence on him, using them to purge the army and security services of non-Brotherhood leaders. Obama gulped and rationalized this as a step forward on the road to civilian control and democracy.

Morsi kept consolidating Brotherhood power, but the popular mood turned against his misrule. Literally millions of Egyptians came out into the streets demanding his ouster — many times more than had ever come out for the “Arab Spring,” which the media had misleadingly characterized as “the people.” The army’s spirit recovered, and it toppled Morsi — over Obama’s objections. Egyptians saw this as a last chance for the country to shake loose of the tightening vise of Brotherhood rule.

The army has proceeded to try to restore normal life in Egypt. This has been much more painful than it would have been to continue normal life had Morsi never been in power, or — to be frank — had Mubarak remained. The army has faced a low-intensity war with terrorists in the Sinai. It has slowed the flows of matériel to Gaza, but faced political limitations on what it could do there. The rest has been left to Israel. That is where we are now.

The period of Brotherhood rise and rule was a terrible period in Egyptian history — and in U.S. foreign policy. The world will be paying the price for it for years to come; the Gaza war is only the beginning of the ripple effects.

We need to learn the full lessons from this. We need to understand what we did wrong — not just my brief outline of it above — and why our thinking was so far off base. What was it in the words that are honored among us — democracy, revolution, nonviolence, change — that led us to be patsies for revolutions against benign, friendly governments such as Mubarak’s in Egypt and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s in Tunisia? Or to promote religious parties and totalitarian movement-democracies, and a shift in the balance of power to Islamists and terrorists? Or to promote democracy as an immediate goal everywhere, without checking whether the local political culture was compatible with it, or even checking first whether the popular majority in the country in question was not too hostile to the West and its interests? Was it that neither Bush nor Obama nor the rest of our elites had any other idea or organizing principle except democracy-promotion (the only difference being that Bush was publicly attacked for his mistakes by all the media, and, thanks to this partisan hatred of him, he was able to stop himself in mid-disaster)? Was it is an elite phobia about the supposedly “Islamophobic American people,” and an elite focus on dissociating itself from this Other America? Was there a fear of being called hypocrites if we promoted democracy when it made sense, and not when it didn’t make sense, i.e., when it hurt ourselves and the world? Did we forget that prudence has to be used when applying rules, and multiple concerns have to be balanced when making policies; and that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds?

We need to find the holes in our thinking and fill them in. Otherwise we will continue making the same basic mistakes over and over again. The consequences could grow considerably worse than they already are.

— Ira Straus is executive director of Democracy International and U.S. coordinator of the Committee on Eastern Europe and Russia in NATO. He has also been a Fulbright professor of political science and international relations. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2014/08/how-obama-caused-gaza-war-ira-straus/