The Deep State's Vendetta Against General Flynn Led to the Russia Collusion Hoax Lawrence Sellin WESTERN JOURNAL October 29, 2019

The Deep State's Vendetta Against General Flynn Led to the Russia Collusion Hoax

Lawrence Sellin  WESTERN JOURNAL  October 29, 2019  

https://www.westernjournal.com/deep-states-vendetta-general-flynn-led-russia-collusion-hoax/?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=conservative-brief-WJ&utm_campaign=dailypm&utm_content=western-journal

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Long before he met Donald Trump in August 2015, Lieutenant General Michael Flynn was a man marked by the Obama administration.

To them, he was a dangerous ticking bomb because of his deep intelligence knowledge and his outspoken opposition to President Obama’s cavalier attitude toward the resurgent threat of terrorism as represented by the rise of the Islamic State.

Already under the watchful eyes of U.S. and British intelligence for his contacts with Russians, Flynn’s initial meeting with Trump triggered a cascade of events that would eventually lead to Flynn’s coerced guilty plea for lying to the FBI and the entire Trump-Russia collusion hoax investigation.

In August 2012, during Flynn’s tenure as director, the Defense Intelligence Agency released an internal, classified report predicting the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Just three months before the 2012 election, candidate Obama did not want to hear that the war in Iraq was about to reignite thanks to his troop withdrawal and that al-Qaida in Iraq (now ISIS) was on the rise after declaring at the Democratic National Convention that he had “end[ed] the war in Iraq” and put “al-Qaida … on the path to defeat.”m the military on Aug. 7, 2014, ironically the day Obama announced that U.S. warplanes had begun bombing Islamic State targets, and U.S. troops would soon be dispatched back to Iraq.

Flynn, however, remained on the Obama administration’s radar screen, his past and occurring interactions with Russians being carefully logged by U.S. and British intelligence.

That surveillance would later provide “evidence” of Russian collusion including Flynn’s attendance at a December 2015 dinner in Moscow to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Kremlin-linked English-language news service RT, where he was seated next to Vladimir Putin.

The key and earliest known connection to the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, however, occurred in February 2014, six months before Obama fired him as DIA Director.

Flynn had traveled to England to speak at the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar. It was at that event that individuals, who eventually became key figures in the Russia hoax, appeared, such as Stefan Halper and Sir Richard Dearlove.

According to Chuck Ross of The Daily Caller:

“Dearlove, who served as chief of MI6 from 1999 to 2004, had contact during the 2016 [U.S. Presidential] campaign with dossier author Christopher Steele. He is also a close colleague of Stefan Halper, the alleged FBI and CIA informant who established contact with several Trump campaign advisers. Dearlove and Halper attended a Cambridge political event in July 2016 where Halper had his first contact with Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.“

The actual inflection point came in early 2016 when the Obama administration’s vendetta against Flynn and his alleged Russian sympathies evolved into the Trump-Russia collusion hoax after Trump piled up primary victories.

It was long before George Papadopolous arrived on the scene, the individual often cited by the Deep State as the trigger for the Russia collusion investigation, in particular his meeting with Australian diplomat Alexander Downer in May 2016 in which “damaging material” about Hillary Clinton held by the Russians was allegedly discussed.

The formation of CIA Director John Brennan’s inter-agency Trump task force, which was immediately leaked to the BBC, much to Brennan’s consternation, coincided with Flynn becoming a foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign as described by a Reuters article on Feb. 27, 2016, titled “Trump being advised by ex-U.S. Lieutenant General who favors closer Russia ties.”

That Brennan-led task force included not only U.S. intelligence agencies, but likely also foreign services such as Britain’s CIA, MI6, and its National Security Agency equivalent GCHQ, which had access to NSA’s database of recorded telephone conversations and emails.

No doubt, Brennan’s task force employed the services of a network of intelligence freelancers located in Europe, some of whom seem to have had connections with the British secretive strategic intelligence and advisory firm, Hakluyt, founded by former MI6 members and retaining close ties to British Intelligence services.

Those allegedly connected to Hakluyt are Stefan Halper, Sir Richard Dearlove, Alexander Downer and John Brennan, who was photographed meeting with Hakluyt personal in 2018.

Hakluyt’s top executives come from MI6 and it has retired GCHQ officials as board members. Perhaps coincidentally, listed on the board of Hakluyt’s parent company, Holdingham, is Louis Susman, formerly Obama’s ambassador to Great Britain, a major fundraiser for Democratic presidential candidates and reportedly a close friend of Hillary Clinton.

The scheme appears to have involved foreign sources in an artificial feedback loop, gathering unsubstantiated information to support the Russian collusion hoax or feeding back planted CIA information that could then be “legitimately” passed on to the FBI to generate a counterintelligence investigation, where Trump personnel or Trump himself could be interrogated.

Parallel coordination with sympathetic media outlets was an obvious additional option. It is not unlike a disreputable journalist providing disinformation to another journalist, then using that story as verification of his preconceived notions.

Another peculiarity of the Flynn saga occurred during the first meeting between then-President Obama and President-elect Donald Trump held within 48 hours after the 2016 election. Among all the critical national security issues that could have been discussed, Obama offered two pieces of advice, one regarding North Korea and the other an oddly out-of-place personnel employment recommendation — don’t hire Michael Flynn.

The rest is history.

Seeing the indictment of Flynn, Trump’s national security advisor, as the first step towards impeachment, the Deep State applied unscrupulous, if not illegal, tactics to coerce a guilty plea.

In December 2017, Flynn did plead guilty to charges that he lied to the FBI about his contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in what many regard as an “ambush” interview conducted by Peter Strzok, who was later fired from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigative team.

 Now it appears that the FBI may have tampered with the notes from his 2017 interview, during which they claim Flynn lied.

The time is long past that the case against Lieutenant General Michael Flynn be dismissed and the real Deep State perpetrators of entrapment and criminal conspiracy be investigated.

The views expressed in this opinion article are those of their author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by Western Journal. MIL- ED   believes that Lawrence Sellin's  viewpoint  deserves  careful   and widespread consideration…. and when coupled with other definitive information certainly calls into question the actions of several government agencies and individuals relating to the  massive legal assault on Gen. Flynn.

JEWS WILL NOT ABANDON THE DEMOCRATS, EVEN AS THE DEMOCRATS ABANDON THEM By Abraham H. Miller American Thinker 10-27-19

JEWS WILL NOT ABANDON THE DEMOCRATS, 

EVEN AS THE DEMOCRATS ABANDON THEM

By Abraham H. Miller   American Thinker   10-27-19

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/10/jews_will_not_abandon_the_democrats_even_as_the_democrats_abandon_them.html

The quip among Jewish Republicans about President Obama’s trafficking with anti-Semites was that he was so popular with American Jews that had he nuked Tel Aviv, he would have lost no more than 30% of the Jewish vote.

The affinity for American Jews for the Democrat Party has long been a political curiosity. The distinguished essayist Milton Himmelfarb observed that in America, Jews had attained the socioeconomic status of Episcopalians, but for some reason they continued to vote like Puerto Ricans.

Nothing seems to dissolve the sinew that ties Jews to the Democrats. President Obama’s association with the anti-Semitic Rev. Jeremiah Wright brought a collective yawn. Photos of Barrack Obama embracing the Rev. Louis Farrakhan, who compared Jews to termites, did not concern them. 

The anti-Semitic diatribes of the so-called “Squad” have been dismissed as a minority voice among the Democrats that would be easily controlled by Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The House resolution condemning boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israel was showcased for having been passed, while ignoring that of the 17 votes against it, 16 came from Democrats.

The positions on Israel of Democratic presidential hopefuls Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders should send chills up the spine of the Jewish community, but they do not. Warren and Sanders would cut off aid to Israel and unless Israel returns to what Abba Eban appropriately called the Auschwitz Borders.

On college campuses, Jews are forbidden access to the marketplace of ideas unless they parrot leftist newspeak. The Arab/Israeli conflict is described in mythical terms of colonialism, ignoring that the Arabs ethnically cleansed Jews from Jerusalem and the territories, and by the end of the 19^th century, Jerusalem was a Jewish, not a Muslim city.

The faux colonial model is the product of leftist intellectuals, an oxymoron because scholarship and ideology are inherent contradictions. It is leftists that perpetuate the banality of the activist scholar so eagerly embraced in what once passed for higher education.

Much of the Jewish community either buys into this or ignores it. Given a choice between preserving their Jewish identity or embracing the ideology of the left, many Jews would prefer to be Democrats than Jews.

President Franklin Roosevelt’s abandonment of Europe’s Jews is rationalized as a three-term, popular president’s inability to control his own Department of State. Roosevelt was a racist and an anti-Semite. He incarcerated loyal Japanese who subsequently proved their patriotism and courage on Europe’s battlefields. His incarceration order was a function of his own phobia of Asians and was protested even by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Roosevelt abandoned the Jews for similar reasons.

Jews have bought into the Democrats’ obsession with President Donald Trump as a racist and anti-Semite. Trump, whose daughter is an observant Jew and who has Jewish grandchildren, is labeled an anti-Semite. In contrast, hatemonger Al Sharptonis honored in a New York synagogue during the recent high holidays, and Congressman Hank Johnson’s allusion to Jews as termites, invoking a medieval and Nazi stigma resurrected by the Rev. Louis Farrakhan, barely causes concern.

The future of Jews in the Democratic party is already written in the workings of the British Labour Party, which is infused with a virulent anti-Semitism enhanced by its leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Dame Louise Ellman, who has been a vocal critic of Corbyn’s venomous anti-Semitism, faced an ouster vote, which the local party members scheduled for Yom Kippur eve, the holiest night of the Jewish calendar. The timing was hardly coincidental. Ellman eventually quit.

It is facile to dismiss the current anti-Semitism within the Democrat Party as the rantings of a few peripheral members. The Democrat Party is moving left. It is increasingly oriented toward making decisions based on the ideology of intersectionality, meaning that professed victims of the white patriarchal oppressor must share a common political outlook.

Ironically, within this ideology, Jews, historically the most oppressed people enduring the world’s oldest hatred, are part of the privileged classes, and Muslims, no matter how many countries they control or how they oppress women and their own people, are victims.

It will not end well for the Jews. The British Labour Party is transmitting that message. Will Jews recognize their political self-interest before it is too late? Those of us who think that if Barack Obama had nuked Tel Aviv, he would have lost far less than 30% of the Jewish vote, think otherwise.

Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science, University of Cincinnati, and a distinguished fellow with the Hyam Salomon Center.

Ukraine: The Democrats' Russia. 2hr 3min

Ukraine: The Democrats' Russia. 2hr 3min

The facts that the media refuse to share 

 The entire Ukraine timeline on the chalkboard.

  Glenn Beck 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuvfYE7ZdL0

THE OTHER SIDE OF TRUMP's WITHDRAWAL FROM SYRIA

THE OTHER SIDE OF TRUMP's WITHDRAWAL FROM SYRIA

1.  Trump Outsmarts Putin With Syria Retreat  Zev Chafets Bloomberg.com      October 25, 2019 

2.  Dem analysts support US withdrawal from Syria[ Prepared for the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations By the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs]

1. Trump Outsmarts Putin With Syria Retreat

Zev Chafets Bloomberg.com      October 25, 2019

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-25/trump-outsmarts-putin-with-syria-retreat

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After U.S. President Donald Trump announced a withdrawal from Syria, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a resolution denouncing it as “a benefit to adversaries of the United States government, including Syria, Iran and Russia.'

Six days later, Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader of the Senate, introduced a similar resolution. “If not arrested,” he said, “withdrawing from Syria will invite more of the chaos that breeds terrorism and create a vacuum our adversaries will certainly fill.”

Such bipartisan agreement is rare in Washington these days. But it underestimates the wisdom of Trump’s decision, the benefits for U.S. interests in the Middle East and the nasty trick he has played on Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Trump calls Syria a “bloody sandbox.” He’s right about that. It is also a briar patch of warring tribes and sects, inexplicable ancient animosities and irreconcilable differences.

The president is not prepared to take responsibility for this complicated place, or to get caught up in it. If leaving creates an opportunity for Russia to fill the vacuum, as American lawmakers believe, then it is one Trump is happy to cede. The Russian leader struts on the world stage, but he has not exactly won a victory.

Sooner or later, al-Qaeda, Islamic State or the next iteration of jihad will break loose in Syria. When that happens, the Russians will be the new Satan on the block. Their diplomats in Damascus will come under attack, as will Russian troops. More troops will be sent to defend them. Putin’s much-prized Mediterranean naval installations will require reinforcement. And so on. Soon enough, jihad will inflame Russia’s large Muslim population. Moscow itself will become a terrorist target.

The “safety zone” that Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have recently carved from northern Syria will collapse. Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad rightly considers it a violation of his country’s sovereignty, and if he can persuade his Russian patrons to shut down the zone, Erdogan will threaten another invasion. If Putin then sides with Turkey, Assad will take matters into his own hands. His army may not be fit for fighting armed opponents, but the Kurds are and can act as Assad’s proxies.

If and when such a border fight develops, Putin will find himself between Assad and Erdogan. Whatever he does, he will wind up in that most vulnerable of Middle Eastern positions, the friend of somebody’s enemy.

As the big power in charge, Russia also will be expected to help its Syrian client rebuild the damage from the civil war. Physical reconstruction alone is expected to cost $400-500 billion. This is a bill Trump had no intention of paying — and one more reason he was glad to hand northern Syria to Putin.

Russia cannot afford a project of this magnitude. It’s possible that Putin expects EU countries to foot the bill — motivated either by humanitarian impulses or by the desire to forestall another wave of destitute immigrants. But this is wishful thinking. Faced with a potential influx of Syrian refugees, Europe is more likely to raise barriers on its southern and eastern borders than to invest in affordable housing in the ruins of Aleppo and Homs.

What’s more, Syria needs more than new housing. It needs an entire economy. Tourism, once a major industry, has vanished. The country’s relatively insignificant oilfields are inoperable or in the hands of the tiny contingent of U.S. troops that’s left to guard them. And the country’s biggest export product is spice seeds.

Another headache for Putin is the ongoing Israel-Iran war, which is being fought largely in Syrian territory. So far, Russia has been studiously neutral. The powerful Israel Defense Forces are engaged against what their leaders regard as a strategic threat. And, unlike the Kurds, Israel is not a disposable American ally. Putin knows this and will not risk a military confrontation no matter how many Syrian-based Iranian munitions warehouses Israel destroys or how hard Assad pushes him to retaliate.

Critics who see the U.S. withdrawal as an act of weakness that will hurt American prestige and influence in the Middle East are wrong. The Arab world understands realpolitik and will read Trump’s indifference to the fate of Syria as the self-serving behavior of the strong horse.

For that is what the U.S. is. It has far more naval power, air dominance, strategic weaponry and intelligence assets than any other country in the region, including Russia. And its allies are the richest, best situated and most militarily potent countries in the Middle East. Not one of them will trade its relationship with Washington for an alliance with Moscow, and Trump knows this. As far as he’s concerned, Putin is welcome to the sandbox and the briar patch.

Zev Chafets is a journalist and author of 14 books. He was a senior aide to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and the founding managing editor of the Jerusalem Report Magazine.

© Copyright 2019 Bloomberg News. All rights reserved.

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2.    Dem analysts support US withdrawal from Syria

Prepared for the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations

By the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs

• For nearly a decade, U.S. policy in Syria has been a never-ending mission impossible without realistic goals or the means to achieve them. The decision to abandon the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a mainly Kurdish-led militia, of which at least 40% are Syrian Arabs and other minorities, was predictable. It should have been clear that after the physical dismantling of the ISIS Caliphate, the U.S. relationship with the SDF would become increasingly fraught.
• The SDF did not sacrifice its fighters out of love for America; rather, it hoped to harness U.S. power to help protect Kurdish territory and guarantee autonomy in a future Syria. Washington and the Kurds formed a marriage of convenience to defeat ISIS, but over the longer term there would have been a reckoning over divergent goals. It is an open question whether the next administration, Congress and the American public would be prepared to foot the bill of getting drawn into what would have been a nation-building exercise.
• Putin did what the Obama and Trump administrations would not - intervene in the Syrian civil war. Putin won the Syrian civil war, and he deserves its spoils. And what spoils they are - a war-torn society, a ruined economy, bombed-out cities, and millions of refugees. If Putin wants to take on the burden of rebuilding Syria, fixing what his air force destroyed, and brokering peace among Syria's many factions, then we should let him.
• But the idea that Putin's Syria gambit will allow him to take over the Middle East is just silly. Few, if any, core U.S. interests - halting nuclear proliferation, preserving Israel's security, preventing terrorist attacks against the homeland, and maintaining the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf - are likely to suffer.
• Rather than chase unrealistic ambitions, the U.S. should remain focused on what its core interest in Syria has been since 2011: countering the threat from ISIS. The conditions that created ISIS are not going to go away. But Washington should assume that at some point Assad and his allies will act in their own self-interest - and they all want to prevent a resurgence of ISIS.
• More importantly, attacks by ISIS, while horrific for the people of Syria, should not be conflated with a heightened threat to the American homeland. It has been 18 years since the U.S. suffered a terrorist attack that was planned and executed by foreign jihadists. Attacks on the U.S. homeland may well continue to be committed by radicalized U.S. citizens, but that problem won't be solved by maintaining American troops in Syria.
  
    [ Points taken from Some Uncomfortable Truths about U.S. Policy in Syria - Aaron David Miller, Eugene Rumer and Richard Sokolsky (Politico)
  https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/10/18/trump-syria-turkey-kurds-news-analysis-229858  Aaron David Miller served as a State Department Middle East negotiator in Republican and Democratic administrations.Eugene Rumer is director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Russia and Eurasia Program. Richard Sokolsky was a member of the Secretary of State's Policy Planning Office in 2005-2015.]

Keeping Our Honor in the Middle East - Victor Rosenthal October 24, 2019

Keeping Our Honor in the Middle East -

 Victor Rosenthal   October 24, 2019

http://abuyehuda.com/author/abu-yehuda/ 

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What I’m about to write will probably be off-putting, even offensive to some Western readers. But it’s a subject that is extremely relevant to life in much of the rest of the world, especially in the Middle East. Everyone knows that tribal identity plays an important role here, more so than in the West. And there is a related idea that is no less important.

I’m talking about honor, and what I believe to be the moral imperative to maintain one’s honor and the honor of one’s tribe or nation.

Right now, the Tikkunists of liberal Judaism (and liberal Christianity as well) are running for the exits. According to the philosophy espoused by liberal, humanistic Westerners, the only moral considerations are those that relate to not hurting others and being fair to all. Indeed, many believe that tribalism and nationalism are actually immoral, because they imply treating outsiders and insiders differently.

But in other cultures, there are other principles that are important, in many cases important enough to die – or kill – for. One of them is honor, which refers to the public reputation of a person or tribe for the willingness to do whatever is necessary to defend its property and interests. In the Middle East, a person (or nation) that will not fight to protect their property deserves to lose it.

This is at variance with Western usage of the word. In the West, honor is an objective characteristic of an individual. In the Middle East, it refers to the subjective beliefs of others about an individual, a family, a tribe, or a nation. In the West, honesty is the most important component of honor. In the Middle East, toughness and the willingness to do what you must to protect yourself or your group are what determine the degree of honor you possess.

When you lose honor, which you do by not defending yourself when someone takes something of yours or hurts you in some other way, you put the world at large on notice that it is permissible to hurt you. The consequences of losing your honor include losing your property or your life.

In some Arab societies the concept has expanded to a pathological degree. Insofar as women are considered property, even a hint that the “ownership” of a woman by her own or her husband’s family is compromised is enough to damage the honor of her family. Such cases often have tragic endings, when the woman is murdered by close family members in order to restore the family’s honor. This happens even among well-off, educated Arab citizens of Israel.

I do not suggest that we adopt the hateful pathologies of Arab societies. But many Israelis, particularly the Ashkenazi elite that comprise our decision-making classes, are too quick to trade honor for peace and quiet. Our enemies value honor more than we do. There are countless examples of damaging compromises: we don’t punish terrorists in a manner commensurate with their crimes (i.e., we don’t kill them, and sometimes we even punish our own soldiers for killing them). We don’t retaliate for arson balloons, or sometimes even for rocket attacks.

We allow Arab members of the Knesset to literally call for the destruction of the state, despite a law that says that anyone who does that may not sit in the Knesset (we disqualify right-wing Jewish candidates for less). We selectively enforce laws, tax regulations, etc., in favor of Arab citizens to avoid trouble. We allow our enemies to hold our citizens, dead and alive, captive. And, disgracefully, we have allowed the piecemeal takeover of the Temple Mount and most of the Old City of Jerusalem by the Palestinian Arabs, after the high price in blood that we paid to take them back in 1967.

I could go on and on, but it is always the same: it would be hard, expensive, dangerous, or – very important – make us look bad in the eyes of the West, if we were to protect our honor; and since honor is only subjective, why bother?

But honor is not “only subjective.” In the Middle East, deterrence is not determined only by the size of your army and whether you have nuclear weapons (not that these aren’t important); honor is a big part of it. Why is it possible for Hamas to keep throwing thousands of terrorists at our border fence every Friday, and to burn our fields and forests with impunity? Could it be that the repetition of rocket attacks is due to our policy of attacking empty buildings? When we don’t kill those who are trying to kill us, the message is sent that they should keep trying.

While Israel has great military power at hand, it keeps squandering its honor. When Hillel said, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” he was saying that it is morally required to act in one’s own interest, no less so than it is morally wrong to be “for myself alone.” One of the characteristics of moral situations is that moral principles sometimes conflict, and that makes it hard to take decisions in particular cases. In Israel, it often happens that our Western moral sensibility conflicts with Middle Eastern imperatives. Unfortunately, the Western sensibility usually pushes the Middle Eastern one aside. We need to learn to balance these principles before our honor deficit becomes so great that we completely lose the ability to defend ourselves.

We can start by removing those members of the Knesset who despise and incite against the Jewish state, by ensuring that terrorists do not survive to enjoy the benefits paid to them by the Palestinian Authority, by taking back sovereignty over the Temple Mount and the Old City, by making Hamas pay in blood for burning our fields, and so on.

Some will say that this is unjust or illiberal, and perhaps by Western standards – standards growing out of Hellenistic and Christian traditions, which do not factor in honor – they may be correct. But we live in the Middle East, not Seattle or Berkeley, and in this neighborhood you can’t ignore tribe, nationality, or religion – and above all, honor.

An Open Letter to Google's Sergey Brin

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 An Open Letter to Google's Sergey Brin

Dennis Prager

Dear Mr. Brin: Fifty years ago this week, when I was a 21-year-old college senior, I was in the Soviet Union, sent by the government of Israel to smuggle in Jewish religious items and smuggle out names of Jews who wanted to escape the Soviet Union and could then be issued a formal invitation to Israel.

I was chosen because I was a committed Jew and because I knew Hebrew and Russian. I was no hero, but the trip did entail risk. The Soviets did not appreciate people smuggling out names of Soviet citizens who sought to emigrate, information the Israeli government and activist groups in America used to advocate on their behalf.

My four weeks in the USSR were, of course, life-changing. This young American, lucky beyond belief to have spent his entire life in the freest country in the world, experienced what it was like to live in a totalitarian police state. People feared merely being seen speaking with a Westerner, lest the KGB arrest and interrogate them. People arranged to meet me at a certain tree in a certain park and only spoke to me while walking to avoid eavesdroppers. I met with Jewish engineers, doctors and professors who could find no work because they were known to the government to be "otkazniki," or "refuseniks" — Jews who had applied for exit visas to leave the Soviet Union and been refused permission. I'm sure you know of them from your parents.

I left the Soviet Union angry and grateful — angry there are people who have the audacity to tell other people what they could and could not say, and grateful beyond measure to have been born in America, where no one could tell anyone what they could say. From that day to this, I have never taken freedom, especially freedom of speech, for granted.

Why I am writing to you about this?

Because, beyond my wildest dreams, two things are happening in America.

One is that for the first time in America's history, free speech is seriously threatened.

In 1977, when Nazis sought to march in Skokie, Illinois — those terrible human beings chose Skokie because it was home to many Jewish Holocaust survivors — virtually every liberal and conservative organization, including Jewish organizations, defended the Nazis' right to march. Because in America — and only in America — it was understood that even if the most loathsome speech was not protected, all speech was at risk.

That has changed.

Today, decent people — people who abhor Nazism and every other form of evil, left or right; people like Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro and Ayaan Hirsi Ali — are shouted down, threatened, disinvited or never invited to speak at America's universities.

The other thing that is happening is even more frightening. The company that you co-founded, Google, the greatest conduit of speech in world history, is also suppressing speech. I have asked myself over and over: How could the company founded by a man whose parents fled the Soviet Union do this?

It so boggles the mind that I have to hope you are simply not fully aware of what your company is doing.

So, in a nutshell, let me tell you what Google has done to one organization, Prager University (better known as PragerU). Every week, PragerU releases a five-minute video on virtually every subject outside of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math). Some of the finest minds in the world have presented these videos — including professors from Harvard, Stanford and MIT; four Pulitzer Prize winners; three former prime ministers; liberals; conservatives; Democrats; Republicans (including never-Trumpers); gays; and, of course, many women and members of ethnic and racial minorities.

Yet YouTube, which Google owns, has placed hundreds of our videos on its restricted list. In addition to the inherent smear of being labeled "inappropriate for children," this means no family that filters out pornography and graphic violence, no school and no library can see those videos. Among those restricted videos is one during former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper defends Israel. Had someone told me 50 years ago that a company led by the son of Soviet Jewish refuseniks would suppress a video by a world leader defending the Jewish state, I would have told them they were out of their mind. That's one reason I can only assume, or at least hope, that you are not fully aware of what your company is doing.

Or how about a video series I present on the Ten Commandments? YouTube is suppressing a number of those, too. When Sen. Ted Cruz asked a Google official why Google restricted one of my videos on the Ten Commandments, the official responded (it's on YouTube) that it was because the video "contains references to murder."

In fact, PragerU has repeatedly asked Google over the past several years why any of our videos are on the restricted list, and we have received either a runaround or silence. We have never received a substantive explanation. We have no desire to see government intervene in private business to protect free speech. But your company has availed itself of protections under law that shield it from liability for defamation, copyright infringement, etc. Your company's arrogance is such that a vast number of Americans — liberals as well as conservatives — are worried that the major conduit of speech in the Free World doesn't care about free speech.

Mr. Brin, along with millions of other Americans, I fought to bring your parents from a land with no freedom to the Land of the Free. None of us has ever asked for anything in return. It was our honor to work for liberty in general and for Soviet Jewry specifically.

What Americans most want from immigrants is that they help keep America free. I never had any doubt that those leaving the Soviet Union would fulfill that mission.

Until now.

Freedom of speech is the most fundamental of all freedoms. It's what your parents yearned for and bequeathed to you. Please don't help take it away from those who made it possible — the people of America.

Sincerely yours,

Dennis Prager

Members of Previous Generations Now Seem Like Giants Victor Davis Hanson

Members of Previous Generations Now Seem Like Giants

 

Victor Davis Hanson

 

Many of the stories about the gods and heroes of Greek mythology were compiled during Greek Dark Ages. Impoverished tribes passed down oral traditions that originated after the fall of the lost palatial civilizations of the Mycenaean Greeks. 

 

Dark Age Greeks tried to make sense of the massive ruins of their forgotten forbearers' monumental palaces that were still standing around. As illiterates, they were curious about occasional clay tablets they plowed up in their fields with incomprehensible ancient Linear B inscriptions.

 

We of the 21st century are beginning to look back at our own lost epic times and wonder about these now-nameless giants who left behind monuments that we cannot replicate, but instead merely use or even mock. Does anyone believe that contemporary Americans could build another transcontinental railroad in six years?

 

Californians tried to build a high-speed rail line. But after more than a decade of government incompetence, lawsuits, cost overruns and constant bureaucratic squabbling, they have all but given up. The result is a half-built overpass over the skyline of Fresno -- and not yet a foot of track laid.

 

Who were those giants of the 1960s responsible for building our interstate highway system? California's roads now are mostly the same as we inherited them, although the state population has tripled. We have added little to our freeway network, either because we forgot how to build good roads or would prefer to spend the money on redistributive entitlements.

 

When California had to replace a quarter section of the earthquake-damaged San Francisco Bay Bridge, it turned into a near-disaster, with 11 years of acrimony, fighting, cost overruns -- and a commentary on our decline into Dark Ages primitivism. Yet 82 years ago, our ancestors built four times the length of our singe replacement span in less than four years. It took them just two years to design the entire Bay Bridge and award the contracts. Our generation required five years just to plan to replace a single section. In inflation-adjusted dollars, we spent six times the money on one quarter of the length of the bridge and required 13 agencies to grant approval. In 1936, just one agency oversaw the entire bridge project. 

 

California has not built a major dam in 40 years. Instead, officials squabble over the water stored and distributed by our ancestors, who designed the California State Water Project and Central Valley Project. Contemporary Californians would have little food or water without these massive transfers, and yet they often ignore or damn the generation that built the very system that saves us.

 

America went to the moon in 1969 with supposedly primitive computers and backward engineering. Does anyone believe we could launch a similar moonshot today? No American has set foot on the moon in the last 47 years, and it may not happen in the next 50 years.

 

Hollywood once gave us blockbuster epics, brilliant Westerns, great film noirs, and classic comedies. Now it endlessly turns out comic-book superhero films or pathetic remakes of prior classics. Our writers, directors and actors have lost the skills of their ancestors. But they are also cowardly, and in regimented fashion they simply parrot boring race, class and gender bromides that are neither interesting nor funny. Does anyone believe that the Oscar ceremonies are more engaging and dignified than in the past?

 

We have been fighting in Afghanistan without result for 18 years. Our forefathers helped to win World War II and defeat the Axis Powers in four years. In terms of learning, does anyone believe that a college graduate in 2020 will know half the information of a 1950 graduate? In the 1940s, young people read William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pearl Buck and John Steinbeck. Are our current novelists turning out anything comparable? Could today's high-school graduate even finish "The Good Earth" or "The Grapes of Wrath"?

 

True, social media is impressive. The internet gives us instant access to global knowledge. We are a more tolerant society, at least in theory. But Facebook is not the Hoover Dam, and Twitter is not the Panama Canal. Our ancestors were builders and pioneers and mostly fearless. We are regulators, auditors, bureaucrats, adjudicators, censors, critics, plaintiffs, defendants, social media junkies and thin-skinned scolds.

 

A distant generation created; we mostly delay, idle and gripe. As we walk amid the refuse, needles and excrement of the sidewalks of our fetid cities; as we sit motionless on our jammed ancient freeways; and as we pout on Twitter and electronically whine in the porticos of our Ivy League campuses, will we ask: "Who were these people who left these strange monuments that we use but can neither emulate nor understand?” In comparison to us, they now seem like gods.

CAUSES OF CONFLICT: The conflict is NOT over territorial claims. The reason for the conflict was, and remains, the fact that a Free Jewish State sits on territory at all.

 CAUSES OF CONFLICT:

The conflict is NOT  over territorial claims. The reason  for the conflict was, and remains, the fact that a Free Jewish State sits on territory at all.

---

By Martin Sherman  10-10-19

“Until 1967, Israel did not hold an inch of the Sinai Peninsula, West Bank, Gaza Strip or Golan Heights…Year after year Israel called for …peace. The answer was a blank refusal and more war”-Yitzhak Rabin, 1976

The most righteous of men cannot live in peace if his evil neighbor will not let him be– from Wilhelm Tell Act IV, scene III, by Friedrich von Schiller, 1804.

It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism, while the wolf remains of a different opinion. – R. Inge, Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, 1915.

He who comes to kill you, rise up early and kill him first – The Talmud

The Oslo process that resulted in the signature of the “Declaration of Principles” on the White House Lawns on September 13, 1993, was in many ways a point of singularity in the history of Zionism, after which everything was qualitatively different from that which it was before. It was a point of inflection in the time-line of the evolution of Jewish political independence, at which what were once vaunted values became vilified vices.

Metamorphosis: From deterrence to appeasement?

Thus, almost at a stroke, Jewish settlement and attachment to land, once the essence of the Zionist ethos, were branded as the epitome of egregious extremism. Jewish military might, once exalted as a symbol of national resurgence and self-reliance, was excoriated as the instrument of repression and subjugation.

This metamorphosis is decidedly perplexing. After all, even by the early1990s, Zionism had proved to be one of the most successful—arguably, the most successful—movement of national liberation that arose from the dissolution of the great Empires—providing political independence, economic prosperity and personal liberties to a degree unrivaled by other such movements.

Moreover, despite the manifest justice on which it was founded, Zionism was always territorial and only prevailed, progressed and prospered because it was reinforced by force of arms. Without either of these two components—the land and the sword—it would be no more than an historical footnote today.

The staggering metamorphosis that took place in the Israeli leadership’s approach was aptly described by Daniel Pipes, who—almost two decades ago—wrote:

“the policy of deterrence dominated Israeli thinking during the country’s first 45 years, 1948-93, and it worked well…. Eventually, Israelis became impatient for a quicker and more active approach…That impatience brought on the Oslo accords in 1993, in which Israelis initiated more creative and active steps to end the conflict. So totally did deterrence disappear from the Israeli vocabulary, it is today not even considered when policy options are discussed.”

“…Historians will be baffled…”

Presciently, he summed up the consequences of this ill-advised change:

“In retrospect, the 1990s will be seen as Israel’s lost decade, the time when the fruits of earlier years were squandered, when the country’s security regressed. The history books will portray Israel at this time, like Britain and France in the 1930s, as a place under the sway of illusion, where dreams of avoiding war in fact sowed the seeds of the next conflict.”

His dour prediction was starkly borne out.

Indeed, since then Israel has been compelled to wage four major military campaigns to quell Palestinian-Arab carnage against its citizens and its cities—one in Judea-Samaria, Operation Defensive Shield (2002); Operations Cast Lead (2008-9), Pillar of Defense (2012) and Protective Edge (2014) in Gaza—with a fourth round of fighting in Gaza widely considered only a matter of time.

Pipes’s caveat is eerily reminiscent of Winston Churchill’s stern address  to the House of Commons barely a year before the outbreak of World War II:

“…historians a thousand years hence will still be baffled by the mystery of our affairs. They will never understand how it was that a victorious nation, with everything in hand, suffered themselves to be brought low, and to cast away all that they had gained by measureless sacrifice and absolute victory….”

It is difficult not to see much of the same pattern reflected in Israel’s behavior after its sweeping victory in the 1967 Six Day War. For it has frittered away nearly all the fruits of that great triumph.

How terrorist nuisances evolved into strategic threats

It relinquished the vast expanses of the Sinai Peninsula for a grudging peace agreement with Egypt—which resembles an uneasy state of non-belligerence far more than harmonious set of relationships between the two signatories. The one major achievement of the agreement—the demilitarization of Sinai—is being eroded away, even without Israeli consent, as Cairo bolsters its military presence on the peninsula in a (less than successful) effort to deal with sustained and stubborn Jihadi insurgency. Concern over this is two-fold. Firstly, this could permanently undermine the demilitarization of the Sinai—especially if a more inimical regime than the present Sisi one is (re)installed in Cairo. Secondly, it is an open question whether the Egyptian military will have the resolve and the resources in the long run to impose law and order in Sinai, and much of its weaponry will fall into the hands of the Jihadi militants it is meant to subdue—as has happened in the past on a thankfully small scale.

In Gaza, the dovish doctrine of political appeasement and territorial withdrawal lead to the razing of Jewish communities, the uninterment of Jewish graves and the desecration and destruction of Jewish places of worship. With the IDF gone, the extremist Hamas ejected the somewhat less extreme Fatah and exploited the freedom of action the evacuation provided it to transform itself from being a terrorist nuisance into a quasi-strategic threat.

On Israel’s northern front, territorial retreat (or rather flight) from South Lebanon and the dishonorable desertion of local allies there, abandoned the area to the Islamist Hezbollah, who amassed a formidable arsenal, bristling with rockets and missiles, trained on Israel’s population centers and strategic installations. Here again, the concept of concessions allowed—indeed, induced—a terrorist nuisance to evolve into a genuine strategic threat.

“Destroying peace; promoting violence…”

On Israel’s eastern flank, Oslowian concessions allowed armed militia to deploy within mortar range of the nation’s parliament, the Prime Minister’s office and the Supreme Court; and gave the Palestinian-Arab terror groups free access to military grade explosives and automatic weapons that brought tragedy and trauma to Israel’s streets, sidewalks and shopping malls. In trying to coax the Palestinian-Arabs into an agreed resolution of conflict, Israel made perilous, gut-wrenching concessions and in return, received not only waves of gory terror, but a flood of Judeophobic indoctrination and Judeocidal incitement from the official Palestinian Authority (PA) media and education system.

Indeed, recently, the PA changed the content of schoolbooks used from “first grade through[out] high school”, in which virtually any reference to peace, the peace process and any agreement concluded with Israel has been erased. Likewise, removed from the new curriculum was any information, previously taught to Palestinian pupils, relating to ancient Jewish history in “Palestine” and the Jewish presence and connection to Jerusalem. Indeed, according to Marcus Sheff, CEO of IMPACT-se (the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education) that conducted the study of the new Palestinian school books: “The new curriculum destroys any possibility for peace with Israel, enhances and promotes violence and hatred more than ever.”

“I trust Obama to get a good deal.”

Further afield, the application of concession rather than coercion continued to bear bitter fruits for Israel. Instead of being brought to its knees by the Obama administration in 2015, the tyrannical theocracy in Tehran was given much needed relief that allowed it to continue its mischief far and wide, sowing murder and mayhem across the Middle East.

By the terms of the scandalous JCPOA signed between Iran and the P5+1 nations, the “Islamic Republic” was given free rein to promote terror and enhance its military power (especially its missile capabilities) with relative impunity and considerably more cash.

True, the decision regarding the Iranian deal was not an Israeli one, but domestic rivals of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu strongly criticized his rigorous opposition to the Obama approach to Iran and its nuclear ambitions, and chastised him for publicly clashing with the US president—this despite the fact “…that Netanyahu [had] tried to impact the president’s stance in years of one-on-one conversations and in the endless top-level contacts between his officials and the Obama administration…indicated that private argument and entreaty…failed.”

Indeed, during the high profile 2015 Saban Forum, just months before the conclusion of the Iran nuclear accord, then-head of the opposition, the dovish Isaac Herzog, declared: “I trust the Obama administration to get a good deal.” Just how unfounded that trust proved to be is now a matter of historical record.

There, of course, can be little doubt that domestic division in Israel on the Iranian issue, or at least on the approach to it, helped accentuate the bipartisan rift in the US and facilitated the Democratic majority that approved the deal.

Today, almost five years and billions of dollars later, Iran’s recent attack on Saudi oil installations has demonstrated how it has upgraded its prowess, leaving Israel to confront a new and deadly menace, within the appalling parameters of the JCPOA!

Imagine the dread

But not only have continued concessions, withdrawal and retreat precipitated continued conflict and violence, but the converse seems true as well.

Indeed, one can only shudder with dread at the thought of the perilous predicament the country would be facing, had it heeded the call from the allegedly “enlightened and progressive” voices, who – right up until the gory events of the Syrian civil war that erupted in 2011—hailed the British trained doctor, Bashar al-Assad, as a moderate reformer, with whom a durable peace deal could be cut – if only an intransigent Israel would yield the Golan to his regime.

For, as ominous as the current Iranian military deployment in Syria is, it might well have been far more menacing. After all, the fact that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard is not perched on the Golan Heights, overlooking the Sea of Galilee, is solely because Israel did not fall prey to the seductive temptation of the land-for-peace formula, as urged by many, in both the international community and in its own security establishment—and did not cede the strategic plateau that commands the approaches to the entire north of the country.

The lessons of what transpired when Israel made concessions and when it did not, when it favored diplomacy and when it relied on deterrence, are lessons Israel can ill afford to ignore.

Real reasons & recalcitrant realities

Yet despite decades of proven failure, Israel’s doves still cling doggedly to their fatally flawed dogma, insisting if only Israel would make additional concessions, a new epoch of Judeo-Arab peace and prosperity would dawn.

Thus, impervious to reality and oblivious to reason, they refuse to acknowledge error, no matter how blatant. Undeterred by catastrophe, unmoved by disaster, they persist in urging Israel toward ever greater perils.

Just how different things once were, before the doves began to dominate the discourse, is starkly underscored by an address by Yitzhak Rabin before a joint session of the US Congress (28 January 1976).

In it, he pointed out that, “Until 1967, Israel did not hold an inch of the Sinai Peninsula and the West Bank, the Gaza Strip or the Golan Heights. Israel held not an acre of what is now considered disputed territory. And yet we enjoyed no peace. Year after year Israel called for – pleaded for – a negotiated peace with the Arab governments. Their answer was a blank refusal and more war.”

He then went on to identify the causes of conflict: “The reason was not a conflict over territorial claims. The reason was, and remains, the fact that a Free Jewish State sits on territory at all.”

Although Rabin later diverged from his diagnosis, the subsequent chain of death and destruction proved its validity. The real reason for the conflict is “the fact that a Free Jewish State sits on [any] territory at all!

The unpalatable, but unavoidable, conclusion, for doves and hawks alike, that arises from this is that:

The maximum Israel can hope for is to be grudging accepted. The minimum it must strive for is to greatly be feared. Its very survival depends on it.

Martin Sherman is the founder & executive director of the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies

AUDIO, EMAIL EVIDENCE SHOWS DNC COLLUDED WITH UKRAINE TO TAKE DOWN TRUMP IN 2016

 AUDIO, EMAIL EVIDENCE SHOWS DNC COLLUDED WITH UKRAINE TO TAKE DOWN TRUMP IN 2016

1.   2 hour full chalkboard presentation on Ukraine [Glenn Beck presents publicly available documentation … Convincing, non-dogmatic] 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuvfY...

2. All the Evidence for Ukraine: The Scandal Explained 10-4-19

https://www.glennbeck.com/glenn-beck/all-the-evidence-for-ukraine-the-scandal-explained

3. Documents, video, and audio  hard evidence that will help explain this unbelievable  DNC collusion  with Ukraine to take down Trump in 2016

• Letter from Senator Chuck Grassley to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

• All of the documents collected by John Solomon.

• National Anti-corruption Bureau of Ukraine — signed Memorandum of Understanding.

• FEC 2016 Expenditure connected to Ali Chalupa.

• Statement of Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko to The Hill.

 Democrats have been trying for years now to find evidence that President Donald Trump colluded with Russia to sway the 2016 election. As it turns out, the DNC was doing the exact same thing in Ukraine. See the documents, finances, hacked emails, and audio recordings that show the Ukraine scandal goes far beyond Joe and Hunter Biden, and their involvement with Ukraine oil company Burisma. It goes much, MUCH further than that. 

 Leaked email from Alex Chalupa  [a lawyer hired by Democrats to "investigate" then-candidate Trump in Ukraine, addressed to Louise Miranda at the DNC].

CHALUPA:  Hey, a lot coming down the pipe. I spoke to a delegation of 68 investigative journalists from Ukraine last night at the Library of Congress, the Open World Society forum. They put me on the program to speak specifically about Paul Manafort. I invited Michael Isikoff, who I've been working with for the past few weeks, and connected him to the Ukrainians. More offline tomorrow, since there was a big Trump component you and Lauren need to be aware of that will hit in the next few weeks. Something I'm working on that you should be aware of.

 BECK:  ”What was crazy, was the Isikoff article that came out was stuff from the dossier from Fusion GPS.  This is why Tony Podesta shut down the Podesta Group, like on the day that Paul Manafort was arrested. Okay? As soon as they arrested him, the biggest lobbying firm, the Clinton lobbying firm, millions of dollars, [Podesta] walks into the office in one day, and says, 'close the doors.' Not like, 'Hey, at the end of the week, or at the end of the month, we're going to wrap things up,' [he said ] 'Close the doors.' And he shut his firm down. Well, why? Because he's working with the same group of people, that Manafort [was.]"

"So, you're expecting me to believe that Manafort got money under the table, but the Podesta Group didn't?" Beck asked. "No way. No way."

"They [the Podesta Group] only existed from 1988 to 2017. It's just a coincidence they happened to stop the thing right there," Stu joked. "It was a fly-by-night operation, one of the biggest lobbying firms in Washington for 30 years."

Beck  went on to play an audio recording of Artem Sytnyk, Director of the National Anti-corruption Bureau of Ukraine who was tried and convicted in Ukraine for interfering in the U.S. presidential election in 2016, speaking with friends, "Kolya" and "Ivan."

Beck shared a translation of the Ukrainian tape:

Kolya: Did they, those Russians, help Trump? Your people?

Sytnyk: I think they did. Yeah. I helped him, too. Not him, but Hillary. I helped her.

Kolya: Yeah. Right. Then her position tottered, right?

Sytnyk: Well, this is how they write about it, right.

Ivan: Hillary's humanitarian aid ... [indiscernible.]

Kolya: Well, I'm about ... the commentaries. At the time, we were not [indiscernible.]

Sytnyk: Trump ... his purely inner problem ... issue ... they dominate over the external matters. While Hillary, she is -- how shall I put it? She belongs to the cohort of politicians who comprise the hegemony in the US. Both in the US and the entire world, right? For us, it's ... sort of ... better. For Americans ... what Trump is doing is better for them.

Kolya: Well, we have lots of those American experts here now ... [indiscernible.]

Sytnyk: Well, there, you see why Hillary lost the elections? I was in charge of the investigation of their "black accounting" records. We made the Manafort's data available to general public.

Kolya: So what?

Sytnyk: He was imprisoned. Manafort then was the head of the Supreme Headquarter of Trump, right? Then he was dismissed, too, including due to the "black accounting." After that, he was sentenced to 80 years of imprisonment term. How about Trump? Did he not give a s***. They have their system working there and it works smoothly.

Kolya: Everybody worked smoothly there.

Sytnyk: And when they carried out the elections, a week before the elections, the FBI reopened the investigation in respect of Hillary. So her rating dropped for 7 percent and that's why Trump managed to win the elections at a pinch.
I'm still unable to understand why he's fighting with the FBI. They try to catch him on the hand. If it were not the FBI, he would not have won the elections. They torpedoed Hillary's ratings for 7 percent.

"So here he is. He is admitting to tampering with our elections. Admitted working with the Hillary Clinton campaign," Glenn said. "He is actually convicted in the highest court in the land in Ukraine. This is all front page news, in Ukraine, while we are saying, 'Was there anyone tampering with the election?'"