Trump Admin Calls Out Pro-Islam Bias, Corruption in Middle East Studies Programs -

Trump Admin Calls Out Pro-Islam Bias, Corruption in Middle East Studies Programs -


Where analysts and “experts” are created.

This article was first published by Gatestone Institute. Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

The Trump administration recently called out and threatened to cut federal funding for the Consortium for Middle East Studies (CMES), a program run by Duke University and the University of North Carolina (pictured above). It was accused by the U.S. Education Department of misusing a federal grant to advance “ideological priorities” and unfairly promote “the positive aspects of Islam,” particularly in comparison to Judaism and Christianity.

The Education Department summarized its position in an August 29 letter that opens with a reminder: institutions of higher education may receive federal funding via Title VI of the Higher Education Act of 1965—though “only for the purposes of establishing, strengthening, and operating comprehensive foreign language and area or international studies centers and programs.”  The logic is simple: “cultural studies providing historical information about customs and practices in the Middle East and assisting students to understand and navigate the culture of another country, in concert with rigorous foreign language training, could help develop a pool of experts needed to protect U.S. national security and economic stability.”

After reviewing the Consortium for Middle East Studies’ curricula, the Department letter warned that it had “little or no relevance” to federal funding:

For example, although Iranian art and film may be of subjects of deep intellectual interest … the sheer volume of such offerings highlights a fundamental misalignment between your choices and Title VI’s mandates. Although a conference focused on “Love and Desire in Modem [sic] Iran” and one focused on Middle East film criticism may be relevant in academia, we do not see how these activities support the development of foreign language and international expertise for the benefit of U.S. national security and economic stability. Similarly, the link between the statutory goals and the academic papers referenced in your grant proposal, Amihri Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending and Subversion in the Early Modern Ottoman Intellectual History, or Radical Love: Teachings from Islamic Mystical Tradition, is patently unclear.

The Department letter further accused the program of projecting and “advance[ing] narrow, particularized views of American social issues” onto the Middle East.  It cites a CMES teacher training seminar that described itself as focusing on “issues of multicultural education and equity to build a culture and climate of respect,” and “serving LGBTIQ youth in schools, culture and the media, diverse books for the classroom and more.”

Just as the CMES proliferates in topics popular on U.S. campuses—but that have no bearing on the realities of the Middle East—so too is there “a startling lack of focus on geography, geopolitical issues, history, and language of the area, as Congress required in Title VI,” the Department letter continues.  As for those two fields that the grant was primarily designed for, “foreign language instruction and area studies advancing the security and economic stability of the United States have taken ‘a back seat’ to other priorities at the Duke-UNC CMES.”

In short, “the Duke-UNC CMES offers very little serious instruction preparing individuals to understand the geopolitical challenges to U.S. national security and economic needs but quite a considerable emphasis on advancing ideological priorities.”

Significantly but not surprising, the letter further accused CMES of “lack[ing] balance as it offers very few, if any, programs focused on the historic discrimination faced by, and current circumstances of, religious minorities in the Middle East, including Christians, Jews, Baha’is, Yadizis, Kurds, Druze, and others.”  Instead,

there is a considerable emphasis placed on understanding the positive aspects of Islam, while there is an absolute absence of any similar focus on the positive aspects of Christianity, Judaism, or any other religion or belief system in the Middle East. This lack of balance of perspectives is troubling and strongly suggests that Duke-UNC CMES is not meeting legal requirement that National Resource Centers “provide a full understanding of the areas, regions, or countries’ in which the modern foreign language taught is commonly used.”

The letter concluded by warning CMES to respond by September 22 or risk losing funding.  CMES did; it send a 16-page letter of explanation, adding that it “will re-examine its procedures to ensure that its Title VI-funded activities continue to match the purposes and requirements of the Title VI program,” and was granted another year of funding.

Whatever lasting impact the Education Department letter has on CMES, it is a welcome development for several reasons.  First, it suggests that the government is paying attention.  This is important considering that over a dozen other Middle East Studies departments—including at Columbia, Georgetown, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale universities—are also Title VI recipients.  Moreover, all of them can be accused of most if not all of the failures cited in the Education Department letter to Duke and North Carolina (perhaps suggesting that the latter two, in the guise of CMES, were meant to be an example and warning to the rest).

Another benefit of the Department letter is that, although it only concerns Title VI recipients, it made national headlines—it made waves—that may lead to more questions and/or create more public awareness on the greater issue: that most Middle East Studies departments on campuses across America can to varying degrees be accused of focusing on irrelevant topics, sidelining language skills, whitewashing Islam—in short, indoctrinating students in the Left’s views.

As the letter is about funding, it may also prompt questions about its flipside—foreign funding.  For example, a 2018 report found that “elite U.S. universities took more than half a billion dollars” from  Saudi Arabia in gifts and donations “between 2011 and 2017”; as far back as 2005, Georgetown and Harvard each received $20 million “to support Islamic studies on their respective campuses.”

Why would a nation that treats women like chattel, teaches Muslims to hate all non-Muslims, arrests and tortures Christians “plotting to celebrate Christmas”—a nation that has crack units dedicated to apprehending witches and warlocks—become a leading financial supporter of America’s liberal arts?  The answer would seem to be obvious: so that recipients can show their gratitude by indoctrinating students in a fictitious Middle East and Islam—both of which are supposed victims of America.

In all spheres of life, education is intimately connected with success—as its opposite, ignorance, is connected with failure.  The reason U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East has tended towards disaster is because policymakers depend on advisors and analysts who are products of the aforementioned Middle East and Islamic studies programs.  Until such time that Middle East Studies teach their topics with objectivity, balance, and above all, honestly—all criteria indispensable to success—failure will continue to dominate American policy.

Truth-Telling to Advance Peace ... applying the demonizing epithet “illegal” creates a destructive narrative that makes a peace deal less likely

by David M. Weinberg / JNS.org

https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/11/29/truth-telling-to-advance-peace/?utm_content=opinion1&utm_medium=daily_email&utm_campaign=email&utm_source=internal/

JNS.org – Critics of the Trump administration’s determination that settlements “are not per se illegal” assert that it is detrimental to the possibility of peace. Like President Donald Trump’s move of the US embassy to Jerusalem, they say, it is motivated only by crass political considerations.

These critics are wildly off base.What they don’t understand is that the Trump administration’s moves have been designed to reset the Mideast diplomatic stage in a way that will advance a realistic peace process, one based on historical truths, concrete realities, pragmatic solutions, and responsible behavior.

First and foremost this means dialing down unreasonable Palestinian expectations and rolling back Palestinian maximalism. The Palestinian leadership must be disabused of the notion that it can coerce Israel into rapid, wide-ranging, and risky withdrawals by appealing to international courts and tribunals. The canard that settlements are illegal, or a war crime, has been a key part of this insufferable Palestinian offensive.

As US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo wisely said last week, “Calling settlements illegal hasn’t advanced peace.” Just the opposite. As long as the world deems Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria to be illegal and considers the territories stolen property, the Palestinians have no reason to negotiate with Israel.

Even if you think that Israeli settlements should be rolled back in the context of a sensible peace arrangement, applying the demonizing epithet “illegal” creates a destructive narrative that makes a peace deal less likely. It is deleterious discourse.

What Washington has done — last week and in its recent decisions on Jerusalem, UNRWA, aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA), the Golan Heights, and more — is put the Palestinians on notice that the United States will not deliver Israeli concessions on a silver platter, and that the longer the Palestinians adhere to an obstructionist policy, the less statehood they will get.

Washington is also asserting that real peacemaking begins with truth-telling. As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “Jews are not foreign colonialists in Judea and Samaria.” Or as Blue and White Party co-founder and former Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon said, “One cannot be an ‘occupant’ in his own land.” Now, let the negotiations begin from here.

Implicit in the Trump administration’s refreshingly realistic approach is the understanding that Israeli-Palestinian negotiations should not take as their starting point a 70-year-old armistice line forced upon Israel by Arab aggression; “from the point that talks last left off” 11 years ago under a previous, defeatist Israeli government; from the defensive “security fence” forced upon Israel by Palestinian terrorism; or from any borders high-handedly dictated in advance by jaundiced foreign countries or politicized international legal tribunals.

Similarly, Israel’s baseline position at the outset of any future talks should be that 100 percent of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) belongs to Israel by historical right, and that this right is richly buttressed by political experience, legitimate settlement, and security needs. Only then can Israel hope to obtain a sensible compromise.

Keep in mind that there is a broad consensus in Israel on security and settlement matters — accentuated by Blue and White Party leaders’ positive response to the US announcement on settlement legality and to previous US declarations regarding Jerusalem and the Golan. Even if the Palestinians one day choose to settle with Israel, Israel will insist on maintaining control of the Jordan Valley and most highland settlement zones, not to mention a very broad Jerusalem envelope.

And thus, kudos are due to the Trump administration for essentially rejecting obsolete paradigms and hackneyed diplomatic assertions such as “everybody knows what the contours of a Mideast peace settlement look like and they run along the pre-1967 lines,” or, “Israel must allow a full-fledged Palestinian state on contiguous territory in full control of all its borders.”

Today, these are no more than ruinous, synthetic gospels.

The reason for this is that the Clinton-Obama parameters for an Israeli-Palestinian deal were never wise or fair to Israel. They didn’t sufficiently take into account Israel’s historic and national rights in Judea and Samaria. They certainly didn’t consider, and today cannot adequately accommodate, the dramatically-changed security environment in the Mideast since the Arab upheavals began and Iran began its march to Israel’s borders.

Worst of all, those parameters insufficiently considered the irredentist nature of the Palestinian national movement. We now know, alas, that the PA isn’t anywhere near becoming the stable, moderate, democratic State of Palestine that was promised to Palestinians and Israelis alike.

Instead, one part of the Palestinian-claimed area is run by an exceedingly corrupt secular dictatorship that “pays for slay” (it funds terrorism against Israel) and seeks the criminalization of Israel in every international forum, and which would fall to Hamas without Israel’s military presence, while the other part is already ruled by Hamas, a radical Islamist dictatorship armed to the teeth by Iran, that has fought three wars against Israel over the past 10 years and is openly committed to Israel’s destruction.

Remember this, too: The only Palestinian government(s) in Judea, Samaria and Gaza that Israelis can live with over the long term must agree to a permanent end to the conflict and all claims on Israel — meaning no “right” of return, the inculcation of peace (and not genocidal antisemitism) in schools and media, and reconciliation with Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

But almost all Palestinians reject these contours, which they view as a “sovereign cage.” They do not crave a “statelet” (even on the 1967 lines) and apparently feel no urgency about achieving it.

As the prominent Palestinian adviser professor Ahmad Khalidi has admitted: “The concept of Palestinian statehood is nothing but a punitive construct devised by our worst enemies — the U.S. and Israel — to constrain Palestinian aspirations and territorial ambitions.”

Or as PA leader Mahmoud Abbas has repeatedly made clear, the Palestinian liberation movement will never recognize Israel as a Jewish state or agree to forgo the so-called “right” of refugee return. In short, he wants his state, but without an end to the conflict. He wants a state in order to continue the conflict against the “illegal Jewish settler” presence in all “Palestine.”

Stripping Abbas of any legitimacy for such warlike discourse about Israeli “illegality” is a key goal, and hopefully will be a solid outcome, of the Trump administration’s announcement last week.

One Trump administration critic, Senator Mark Warner (D-VA, charged that Pompeo’s announcement about settlements “serves no strategic purpose.” Warner is wrong: In the long-term perspective, the determination that settlements are not illegal is strategically smart, tactically valuable, historically purposeful and potentially promising of peace.

David M. Weinberg is vice president of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategic Studies, jiss.org.il. His personal website is: davidmweinberg.com. A version of this article first appeared in Israel Hayom.

“Better to believe the threats of our enemies than the promises of our friends.”

“Better to believe the threats of our enemies than the promises of our friends.”

Iran’s military leaders often threaten to annihilate Israel or at least destroy Tel Aviv. In view of the growing probability of a direct military confrontation between the two states, Israelis would do well to remember Elie Wiesel’s words: “Better to believe the threats of our enemies than the promises of our friends.”

Professor Eytan Gilboa is director of the Center for International Communication and a senior research associate at the BESA Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University. Currently, he is Israel Institute Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

I Am the Anonymous Whistleblower By Dov Fischer 11-9-19

I Am the Anonymous Whistleblower

By Dov Fischer  11-9-19

spectator.org/i-am-the-anonymous-whistleblower 

There is plenty of corruption in American politics to blow whistles at. 

 

The Jewish holidays season recently has ended. It begins with Rosh Hashanah, which Jewish tradition sets as the New Year of all humanity ... runs through the Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, the anniversary of G-d forgiving the sin of the Golden Calf after Moses alighted Mount Sinai the second time and prayed 40 days for forgiveness (Sh’mot/Exodus 34) ... continues into the week-long celebration of the Sukkot festival (Vayikra/Leviticus 23: 33-43) ... and culminates with the holidays of Sh’mini Atzeret and Simchat Torah when Jews celebrate the spiritual joy of having publicly read and studied the Pentateuch, the Five Books of Moses, during the prior 12 months — and then begin the annual cycle anew with Breishit/Genesis 1 by publicly reading the Torah all over again, starting with “In the Beginning, G-d created the heavens and the earth.”

Because I am a congregational rabbi, I mostly have to go “off the grid” on most other matters every year during a two-month period that begins from two or three weeks before Rosh Hashanah (preparing sermons, coordinating membership drives, overseeing our shul’s High Holidays hotel program, brushing up on blowing the shofar) and that continues two weeks or so after Simchat Torah, as I promptly must catch up frantically on six weeks of backlogged secular matters that necessarily have taken a back seat all that time. 

So, with apologies, this article is longer because there is much to say after a month “off the grid.”

We are encircled by hypocrisy and mendacity. The despicable deceit, the false posturing,
the public lying for personal gain. Is Nancy Pelosi really motivated by a desire to protect our nation — or by a never-satiated need for holding on to personal power at whatever cost may be imposed on all of us? Is Congress’s primary role really to conduct non-stop all- consuming investigations of our duly elected government leaders, paralyzing their agencies and executive operations while abandoning all legislative responsibilities to the Obama Judges who predominate in the states of the Ninth Circuit? 

Can there be a more despicable two-faced liar than Adam Schiff — whether in publicly reciting a transcript that he falsifies or even in his cynical exploitation of his Congressional District’s large population of 70,000 Armenian-American voters whom he manipulates by making one annual visit to Glendale every April 24? They complain that he ignores his District all year and spends all his time like some Stalinist KGB prosecutor, conducting secret star-chamber proceedings to destroy people’s lives — and then manipulatively mollifies them by suddenly getting a resolution passed that condemns the Armenian Genocide as he shifts into impeachment high gear. He has been in Congress for twenty years, and suddenly the Democrats only now pass a resolution acknowledging one of the worst inhumanities ever perpetrated — Turkey’s Medz Yeghern, the unspeakably horrific Turkish Holocaust of some 1.5 million Armenians between 1915-1923. Then, having cynically given his constituents their resolution, he goes back to conducting his show trial.

Yes, the Swamp’s Great Evil provides so much material for an Orthodox Rabbi’s sermons — but I prefer to keep my synagogue messages focused on spiritual, Torah-based themes, trying my hardest to avoid commenting from my shul pulpit on the secular garbage outside. 

Yet we Orthodox Jews, the fastest growing community of Jews in America, are deeply conservative. Pro-life. We oppose assisted suicide. We are people of deep faith. We live by the principle of personal responsibility. We recognize only two genders. We despise Communism and the socialist Left. We love President Trump. In the Democrat-predominant New York Tri-State area, more than 90 percent of Orthodox Jews are happy with Trump. Even in radical left Los Angeles — Home of the Homeless, Turf of the Typhus — more than 70 percent of Orthodox Jews vote Trump. We despise what the Democrats have done, particularly these past three decades, to destroy the social unity and moral fiber of our country. More than a year before the Trump Administration recently issued an order to protect the religious freedoms of adoption and foster-care agencies, over one thousand Orthodox rabbisurged such action. We Orthodox Jews hate that we are denied coverage in the media, with our views blacked out by a Corrupt Journalist Corps who have a different agenda to promote. If NBC can cover up for human garbage like Harvey Weinstein, and if ABC can cover up for human garbage like Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Clinton, with CBS accommodating the “competition” by firing an employee as a courtesy to ABC, then we Orthodox Jews do not have much chance having our voices resonate.

Though media keep us hidden and anonymous, we have had plenty to say about corruption.

If Adam Schiff conducts secret star-chamber proceedings with falsified transcript readings of a President’s phone call and with leaked out-of-context quotes to select Corrupt Journalists, do not be surprised that you have not heard my testimony released. 

But I have had plenty to testify about corruption. And when I say that “I” have been the anonymous whistleblower, I know how many tens of millions of additional Americans of all religions, faiths, ethnicities, races, and backgrounds likewise have been blowing the whistle along with me for years in deafening decibels that the Corrupt Journalist Corps will not broadcast.

I am the anonymous whistleblower who blew the whistle on the Bill Clinton corruption. How, long before #MeToo, Bill Clinton was raping Juanita Broaddrick, sexually abusing by exposing himself to Paula Jones, sexually abusing by grabbing at Kathleen Willey, sexually abusing by leveraging his status over Monica Lewinsky. Not to mention Clinton’s endless journeys on the Epstein airplane, the “Lolita Express.” Not to mention the corruption of the Clinton Foundation’s many scandals.

I am the anonymous whistleblower who blew the whistle on the Hillary Clinton corruption. Travelgate. Cattle futures. Whitewater, and the missing records of the Rose Law Firm. The Uranium One transfer of American uranium to Russian interests while Bill scandalously was getting paid huge speaking fees. How she joked and giggled about successfully defending a monster who had raped a child. How she sent the deceitful Susan Rice on four television talk shows in one day to lie to the American people about the real cause of the Benghazi massacre that saw our ambassador murdered, with Rice attributing the catastrophe to a stupid and unwatchable short YouTube video that almost no one ever viewed, even as Hillary secretly was emailing her daughter about the real and true cause of the disaster: an Arab Islamist jihad attack timed to coincide with September 11. How Hillary was using her email account illegally, endangering the foreign policy of the United States by emailing confidential and highly classified documents in channels that exposed them to being hacked and intercepted by our enemies, even as she maintained a private server in her home bathroom. How, when she was called upon to produce those emails, she destroyed 33,000 of them — an outright spoliation felony that would have landed any other American in prison long-term. How she lied to us, as though we all are idiots, telling us that those spoliated emails dealt with things like her yoga classes and buying Chelsea a wedding dress — 33,000 emails for yoga and a dress. We know she cannot contort herself into a lotus position — and we did not let her contort herself into the POTUS position. How she lied when she claimed to have braved bullets in Bosnia in 1996, when she in fact landed in a safe area where   gathered with flowers. How she even lied about being named for someone who in fact was not famously known yet at the time of her birth. And of course how she maneuvered campaign money through a Seattle law firm to subvert Trump with lies — as her campaign paid $5.6 million to Perkins Coie, and Perkins Coie retained Fusion GPS, which then hired Christopher Steele to compile the infamous fake dossier. And how, despite herself trying in every way to ingratiate herself with the Russians, she shamelessly declares one after another opponent — ranging across the spectrum from Donald Trump to Tulsi Gabbard to Jill Stein — as “Russian assets.”

I am the anonymous whistleblower who blew the whistle on Joe Biden and his decades upon decades of public lying and corruption. How he made a passionate speech about his own life story — when it was not his story but plagiarized from British politician Neil Kinnock. How he falsified accounts of traveling into dangerous regions of Afghanistan and risking his life to praise a real war hero, when it all was a big lie. How his son, a bum who had been kicked out of the Navy Reserves for cocaine use, got paid $50,000 a month for sitting on a corrupt Ukrainian energy company’s board, leveraging our votes — though never cast for him — to become rich beyond our wildest dreams. How Joe Biden corruptly leveraged his position as Vice President here in America, unilaterally threatening to withhold a billion dollars that Ukraine needed and was slated to receive, to force Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was investigating the corrupt company, Burisma, that was paying Hunter Biden $600,000 a year for sitting on his rump. (Interesting, by the way, that the lead candidate of the anti-NRA Democrats, the party that wants to take away guns, named his kid “Hunter.”) How Joe Biden was a leading advocate of racial segregation when that position was popular among his constituents. How he told Iowa voters in 2007 in one of his earlier failed Presidential campaigns that they and their kids are smarter because they are white:

“There’s less than one percent of the population of Iowa that is African American. There is probably less than four of five percent that are minorities. What is in Washington? So look, it goes back to what you start off with, what you’re dealing with. When you have children coming from dysfunctional homes, when you have children coming from homes where there’s no books, where the mother from the time they’re born doesn’t talk to them — as opposed to the mother in Iowa who’s sitting out there and talks to them, the kid starts out with a 300-word larger vocabulary at age three. Half this education gap exists before the kid steps foot in the classroom.”

I am the anonymous whistleblower who blew the whistle on all of Elizabeth Warren’s lies and corruption. How she claimed to be an American Indian to advance her career every step of the way. A Sioux, gezuntheit. How she took the place of a true, honest minority member whose identity we never will know, by lying her way into an Affirmative Action slot by claiming to be a Cherokee Squaw. How she lied by publishing supposed family American Indian food recipes that appear to have been copied from the New York Times. How she lied when she claimed she was fired from a teaching job because she was pregnant. How she

lied by defaming her mother’s memory to score points, apocryphally telling of her mother smacking her in the face. Indeed, the false face of this forked-tongued public liar was never more obvious than when she had herself video’d as being “cool,” just pulling out a beer: “Hold on a sec. I’m gonna get me, um, a beer.” And her husband just so happened to be hanging around at the moment: “Hey ... ya wanna beer?” He: “No, I’ll pass on the beer for now.” How she made hundreds of thousands of dollars by representing big corporations against consumers, victims of asbestos, and even victims of breast-implant failures.

I am the anonymous whistleblower who blew the whistle on the corruption of the Obamas. How Barack obtained a beautiful big house for himself on a nice piece of land through his corrupt relationship with convicted felon Tony Rezko. How Michelle Obama suddenly got a job as Vice President of Community Relations at the University of Chicago Hospital, at a $121,910 salary, after Barack was elected an Illinois state legislator ... then got a salary hike to $$316,962 for the same job after Barack was elected to the U.S. Senate ... and how one of Senator Obama’s first acts in office was to advance an earmark of more than one million dollars to that hospital ... and how that job quietly was eliminated as the Obamas then moved on. How Barack secretly sent 400 million dollars in cash by plane to Iran. How Obama lied that his Obamacare would not force anyone to lose their doctors or health plans. How Obama lied on Fast and Furious ... and on Lois Lerner weaponizing the IRS to persecute political opponents ... and on his role in trying to subvert the Trump Presidency ... and on his “stimulus” going to “shovel-ready jobs” ... and half a billion wasted on Solyndra ... and on the permanent limits of a “new normal” in the economy that never could boom again without a magic wand.

I am the anonymous whistleblower who blew the whistle on the false narrative of Robert O’Rourke, a Scottish-Irish descendant of White Privilege falsely portraying himself as “Beto,” supposedly a Hispanic neo-Zorro to gullible voters in El Paso. How “Beto” actually descends from huge amounts of money and “White privilege.” How this “Kennedyesque” Democrat hit-and-run, fleeing from the scene of a car accident he caused. How he associated with a gang of computer hackers. While others drooled over his selfie-obsessed video-streaming of getting his teeth flossed, his ear hairs trimmed, or his being a very big boy who does not cry when he gets an immunization injection, I blew the whistle on his fake narrative. And now the skateboarder whom Vanity Fair put on its front cover with his prophecy “Man, I’m just born to be in it” — is totally out of it, man. Dude!

I am the anonymous whistleblower who blew the whistle on Kirsten Gillibrand, a phony who got elected to a House seat held by Republicans when news mysteriously leaked only days before the election that the GOP incumbent beat up his wife. How Gillibrand turned 180 degrees overnight from the conservative “blue dog” Democrat façade she used to get elected to that House seat and transmogrified into advocating an extreme-leftist agenda when she was named to the Clinton Senate seat. How she next turned 180 degrees from being a Bill Clinton sycophant and bottom feeder to lead the chorus that Clinton should have resigned. How she took a lead role in the #MeToo movement while knowingly tolerating sexual harassment and abuse of women staffers in her own office by her valued male chauffeur. How she endorsed Jew-haters like Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour while reaching out to Jewish donors and voters in New York. How she made a national fool of herself at a gay bar, trying to seem cool and yelling out “Gay Rights!”

I am the anonymous whistleblower who blew the whistle on Kamala Harris and how she slept her way into public life. How she consorted publicly, openly, and shamelessly with the married Willie Brown, rising up the California Democrat ladder to reach statewide office on his back ... and on hers. How she prosecuted and imprisoned others for marijuana possession while smoking weed herself. How she told an interviewer that she smoked marijuana in college while listening to Snoop Dogg and Tupac — how cool! — when in fact they had not yet emerged in those years.

I am the anonymous whistleblower who blew the whistle on the Communist Bernie Sanders, the apostate who laid the foundation in America to legitimize Jew-hatred from the likes of Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, who have brought Hitler Nazi tropes to Washington, D.C., questioning Jewish loyalties, saying that Jewish money controls politicians (“It’s about the Benjamins, baby), asserting that Israelis hypnotize the world, and describing the “calming feeling” of contemplating Arab Islamic roles during the Nazi Holocaust. How he made it legitimate to suggest diverting American aid away from Israel and towards the terrorist Iran-supplied Hamas government of Gaza. How he endorsed the Soviet Union, honeymooned there, praised Communist bread lines as “a good thing,” endorsed communist governments from Cuba to the Sandinistas. How he aligns with Jew haters, endorses and defends them and notably is endorsed by them, setting himself essentially as the very definition of an apostate.

I am the anonymous whistleblower who blew the whistle on the corruption in the Comey FBI. The lies to Congress. How Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were in the conspiracy to subvert the Trump presidency from within the FBI and to prevent him from achieving his agenda if he ever got elected, along with a coterie of sleazes from Comey to McCabe, with cheering on the sidelines from the likes of a John Brennan, whom Obama named to head the CIA even though the man had been an avowed Communist who voted for Gus Hall. And then, in the style of a classic Communist-style “false flag” operation that seeks to achieve a propaganda purpose by diverting attention from a real traitor by pointing an accusation to an innocent patriot, Brennan accused the patriot Donald Trump of “treason” — thus taking the public’s eyes off the real traitors in the room.

There is so much corruption in our politics. So much more and worse than candidate Donald Trump ever imagined when he campaigned on a promise to “drain the swamp.” The corruption is so pervasive and runs so deep that perhaps it cannot be drained. Today’s Democrats fight with whatever they have at their disposal; they cheat, lie, leverage their Corrupt Journalist Corps to advance their propaganda. They hold closed-door hearings and

then selectively leak out of context. They have no fear of being exposed because the Corrupt Journalist Corps are in on the fix. The only exposure that ever comes at all is when they all run against each other for a Presidential nomination, so of necessity attack and expose each other publicly. By contrast, the vast majority of Republicans do not know how to fight. They are limp-wristed wimps, Girlie Men, best epitomized by a Mitt Romney who agrees to allow a CNN Democrat Leftist to conduct a crucial Presidential debate unilaterally, then gets himself interrupted by her repeatedly in the middle of that debate when she joins his opponent, Obama, in a lie ... and then stands like a deer in headlights incapable of or unwilling to defend himself like a man and fight back because “that is not nice.”

I am not the only one. There are many tens of millions of us anonymous whistleblowers. We have been blowing the whistle unnamed for years. The Corrupt Journalist Corps silence our voices, hide our names. Our testimony is suppressed. But we voted in November 2016 for President Trump. And we will reelect him in 2020. They will hear the decibels then.

Al-Baghdadi and Trump’s Syrian chess board Caroline B. Glick Israel Hayom 11-2-19

To: LTGJC    From: Operations Office   Date: November 1, 2019 

Subject: Trump’s Syrian chess board 

MIL-ED has posted  "Al-Baghdadi and Trump’s Syrian chess board”by Caroline Glick . Again, she gets correct what most of the US MSM  have missed.

Al-Baghdadi and Trump’s Syrian chess board

Caroline B. Glick  Israel Hayom 11-2-19

https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/al-baghdadi-and-trumps-syrian-chess-board/

Trump is not flying blind in Syria. He is implementing a multifaceted set of policies that are based on the strengths, weaknesses and priorities of the various actors.

US President Donald Trump’s many critics insist he has no idea what he is doing in Syria. The assassination of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi over the weekend by US special forces showed this criticism is misplaced. Trump has a very good idea of what he is doing in Syria, not only regarding ISIS, but regarding the diverse competing actors on the ground.

Regarding ISIS, the obvious lesson of the al-Baghdadi raid is that Trump’s critics’ claim that his withdrawal of US forces from Syria’s border with Turkey meant that he was going to allow ISIS to regenerate was utterly baseless.

The raid did more than that. Al-Baghdadi’s assassination, and Trump’s discussion of the mass murderer’s death, showed that Trump has not merely maintained faith with the fight against ISIS and its allied jihadist groups. He has fundamentally changed the US’s counterterror fighting doctrine, particularly as it relates to psychological warfare against jihadists.

Following the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration initiated a public diplomacy campaign in the Arab-Islamic world. Rather than attack and undermine the jihadist doctrine that insists that it is the religious duty of Muslims to fight with the aim of conquering the non-Muslim world and to establish a global Islamic empire or caliphate, the Bush strategy was to ignore the jihad in the hopes of appeasing its adherents. The basic line of the Bush administration’s public diplomacy campaign was to embrace the mantra that Islam is peace, and assert that the US loves Islam because the US seeks peace.

Along these lines, in 2005, then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice prohibited the State Department, FBI and US intelligence agencies from using “controversial” terms like “radical Islam,” and “jihad” in official documents.

The Obama administration took the Bush administration’s obsequious approach to strategic communications several steps further. President Barack Obama and his advisers went out of their way to express sympathy for the “Islamic world.”

The Obama administration supported the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood against Egypt’s long-serving president and US ally Hosni Mubarak and backed Mubarak’s overthrow with the full knowledge that the only force powerful enough to replace him was the Muslim Brotherhood.

As for the Shiite jihadists, Obama’s refusal to support the pro-democracy protesters in Iran’s attempted Green Revolution in 2009 placed the US firmly on the side of the jihadist, imperialist regime of the ayatollahs and against the Iranian people.

In short, Obama took Bush’s rhetoric of appeasement and turned it into America’s actual policy.

The Bush-Obama sycophancy won the US no goodwill. Al Qaida, which led the insurgency against US forces in Iraq with Iranian and Syrian support was not moved to diminish its aggression and hatred of the US due to the administration’s efforts.

It was during the Obama years that ISIS built its caliphate on a third of the Iraqi-Syrian landmass, opened slave markets and launched a mass campaign of filmed beheadings in the name of Islam.

In his announcement of al-Baghdadi’s death on Sunday, Trump unceremoniously abandoned his predecessors’ strategy of sucking up to jihadists. Unlike Obama, who went to great lengths to talk about the respect US forces who killed Osama bin Laden accorded the terrorist mass-murderer’s body, “in accordance with Islamic practice,” Trump mocked al-Baghdadi, the murdering, raping, slaving “caliph.”

Al-Baghdadi, Trump said, died “like a dog, like a coward.”

Al-Baghdadi died, Trump said, “whimpering and crying.”

Trump posted a picture on his Twitter page of the Delta Force combat dog who brought about al-Baghdadi’s death by chasing him into a tunnel under his compound and provoking him to set off the explosive belt he was wearing, and kill himself and the two children who were with him.

Trump later described the animal who killed Allah’s self-appointed representative on earth as “our ‘K-9,’ as they call it. I call it a dog. A beautiful dog – a talented dog.”

Obama administration officials angrily condemned Trump’s remarks. For instance, former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell said he was “bothered” by Trump’s “locker room talk,” which he said, “inspire[s] other people” to conduct revenge attacks.

His colleague, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff retired Admiral James Winnefeld said that Trump’s “piling on” describing al-Baghdadi as a “dog” sent a signal to his followers “that could cause them to lash out possibly more harshly in the wake.”

These criticisms are ridiculous. ISIS terrorists have richly proven they require no provocation to commit mass murder. They only need the opportunity.

Moreover, Trump’s constant use of the term “dog” and employment of canine imagery is highly significant. Dogs are considered “unclean” in Islam. In Islamic societies, “dog” is the worst name you can call a person.

It is hard to imagine that al-Baghdadi’s death at the paws of a dog is likely to rally many Muslims to his side. To the contrary, it is likely instead to demoralize his followers. What’s the point of joining a group of losers who believe in a fake prophet who died like a coward while chased by “a beautiful dog – a talented dog?”

Then there is Russia.

Trump’s critics insist that his decision to abandon the US position along the Syrian border with Turkey effectively surrendered total control over Syria to Russia. But that is far from the case. The American presence along the border didn’t harm Russia. It helped Russia. It freed Russian President Vladimir Putin from having to deal with Turkey. Now that the Americans have left the border zone, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is Putin’s problem.

And he is not the main problem that Trump has made for Putin in Syria.

Putin’s biggest problem in Syria is financial. The Russian economy is sunk in a deep recession due to the drop in global oil prices. Putin had planned to finance his Syrian operation with Syrian oil revenues. To this end, in January 2018, he signed an agreement with Syrian President Bashar Assad that effectively transferred the rights to the Syrian oil to Russia.

But Putin hadn’t taken Trump into consideration.

US forces did not withdraw from all of their positions in Syria last month. They maintained their control over al-Tanf airbase which controls the Syrian border with Jordan and Iraq.

More importantly, from Russia’s perspective, the US has not relinquished its military presence adjacent to Syria’s oil facilities in the Deir ez-Zor province on the eastern side of the Euphrates River. Indeed, according to media reports, the US is reinforcing its troop strength in Deir ez-Zor to ensure continued US-Kurdish control over Syria’s oil fields.

To understand how high a priority control over Syria’s oil installations is for Putin, it is worth recalling what happened in February 2018.

On February 7, 2018, a month after Putin and Assad signed their oil agreement, a massive joint force comprising Russian mercenaries, Syrian commandos and Iranian Revolutionary Guards forces crossed the Euphrates River with the aim of seizing the town of Khusham adjacent to the Conoco oil fields. Facing them were forty US Special Forces deployed with Kurdish and Arab SDF forces. The US forces directed a massive air assault against the attacking forces which killed some 500 soldiers and ended the assault. Accounts regarding the number of Russian mercenaries killed start at 80 and rise to several hundred.

The American counterattack caused grievous harm to the Russian force in Syria. Putin has kept the number of Russian military forces in Syria low by outsourcing much of the fighting to Russian military contractors. The aim of the failed operation was to enable those mercenary forces to seize the means to finance their own operations, and get them off the Kremlin payroll.

Since then, Putin has tried to dislodge the US forces from Khusham at least one more time, only to be met with a massive demonstration of force.

The continued US-Kurdish control over Syria’s oil fields and installations requires Putin to continue directly funding his war in Syria. So long as this remains the case, given Russia’s financial constraints, Putin is likely to go to great lengths to restrain his Iranian, Syrian and Hezbollah partners and their aggressive designs against Israel in order to prevent a costly war.

In other words, by preventing Russia from seizing Syria’s oil fields, Trump is forcing Russia to behave in a manner that protects American interests in Syria.

The focus of most of the criticism against Trump’s Syria policies has been his alleged abandonment of the Syrian Kurds to the mercies of their Turkish enemies. But over the past week we learned that this is not the case. As Trump explained, continued US-Kurdish control over Syria’s oil fields provides the Kurdish-controlled SDF with the financial and military wherewithal to support and defend its people and their operations.

Moreover, details of al-Baghdadi’s assassination point to continued close cooperation between US and Kurdish forces. According to accounts of the raid, the Kurds provided the Americans with key intelligence that enabled US forces to pinpoint al-Baghdadi’s location.

As to Turkey, both al-Baghdadi and ISIS spokesman Abu Hassan al-Mujahir, who was killed by US forces on Tuesday, were located in areas of eastern Syria controlled by Turkey. The Americans didn’t try to hide this fact.

The Turkish operation in eastern Syria is reportedly raising Erdogan’s popularity at home. But it far from clear that the benefit he receives from his actions will be long-lasting. Turkey’s Syrian operation is exposing the NATO member’s close ties to ISIS and its allied terror groups. This exposure in and of itself is making the case for downgrading US strategic ties with its erstwhile ally.

Even worse for Turkey, due to Trump’s public embrace of Erdogan, the Democrats are targeting the Turkish autocrat as Enemy Number 1. On Tuesday, with the support of Republican lawmakers who have long recognized Erdogan’s animosity to US interests and allies, the Democratic-led House overwhelmingly passed a comprehensive sanctions resolution against Turkey.

The al-Baghdadi assassination and related events demonstrate that Trump is not flying blind in Syria. He is implementing a multifaceted set of policies that are based on the strengths, weaknesses and priorities of the various actors on the ground in ways that advance US interests at the expense of its foes and to the benefit of its allies.

J STREET NOTES …MIL-ED DELIBERATIONS AND CONCLUSIONS ON THE 2019 J STREET CONFERENCE

A. Basic Propositions Undelying MIL-ED   discussion/analysis

*  Support for Israel should be a bipartisan issue.

* If Support for Israel  becomes a partisan issue, it  will create enormous enmity for the State of Israel [within at least 50 percent of the population, which would ultimately give succor and support to Israel’s enemies]. And it certainly does not help the Jewish state survive if an incoming American president regards Israel as “the other party’s issue.”

*That is why  it should be alarming to every American  Jew that mainstream leaders of the Democratic Party, such as Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and almost all of the major contenders within the Democratic Party have attended the J Street Conference.

B. Even more  alarming is that many of the speakers in this week’s  J St conference  made outrageously naive and even hostile statements about the State of Israel—demonstrating no empathy for what the Jewish state must contend with—to rapturous applause. These are links to JNS Daily Syndicate <editor@jns.org> 

1. Sanders says aid to Israel should go ‘right now’ to Gaza instead, calls Netanyahu a 'racist' Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) also said the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been “racist.”BY JACKSON RICHMAN

https://www.jns.org/sanders-its-a-fact-not-anti-semitic-to-say-netanyahu-government-has-been-racist/

2. Castro seeks to re-enter 2015 Iran nuclear deal, may place conditions on aid to Israel BY JACKSON RICHMAN

He stressed the essentiality of the two-state solution and  vehemently criticize Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 

https://www.jns.org/castro-to-re-enter-the-2015-iran-nuclear-deal-may-place-conditions-on-aid-to-israel/

3. Klobuchar: ‘I disagreed’ with Trump’s Golan recognition“Let me be very clear in how strongly I believe that that promise that the prime minister made during his political campaign was wrong,” said U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) at the annual J Street Conference.BY JACKSON RICHMANhttps://www.jns.org/klobuchar-i-disagreed-with-trumps-golan-recognition/

4. Buttigieg reiterates linking US assistance to Israel on not annexing West Bank  BY JACKSON RICHMAN

“We need to have the visibility to know whether U.S. funds are being used in a way that’s actually not compatible with U.S. policy, and U.S. policy should not be promoting this kind of settlement construction,” said Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Ind.

https://www.jns.org/buttigieg-reiterates-linking-us-assistance-to-israel-on-not-annexing-west-bank/ 

 C. J Street  Mission Claims/ Backers

 J Street’s mission claims: “J Street organizes and mobilizes pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans who want Israel to be secure, democratic and the national home of the Jewish people. Working in American politics and the Jewish community, we advocate policies that advance shared U.S. and Israeli interests, as well as Jewish and democratic values, leading to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

However,  J Streets actual  actions on Capitol Hill show that there is little or no daylight between the positions taken by J Street and those of Israel’s avowed enemies, including  NIAC, the National Iranian American Council, which advocates for policies sympathetic to the Iranian regime; CAIR, the Council of American Islamic Relations, which was an unindicted co-conspirator of the Holy Land Foundation Trial; and ISNA, the Islamic Society of North America, which was established in July of 1981 by American members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Research into J Street’s backers indicates a Washington cadre of paid Saudi agents, sycophants and factotums. Included are Nancy Dutton, widow of Fred Dutton, the longtime Saudi foreign agent. (As recently as August 2008, news reports identified her as the Saudi’s lawyer); Judith Barnett, (who has been registered with the Justice Department for being a foreign agent of Saudi Arabia); and RAY CLOSE, WHO HAS BEEN A CIA STATION CHIEF IN SAUDI ARABIA, AND  "ON THE DAY HE RETIRED FROM THE CIA, RAY CLOSE WALKED ACROSS THE STREET AND JOINED KAMAL ADHAM  (THE HEAD OF SAUDI’S INTELLIGENCE SERVICE), IN A BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP.”[ Lenny Ben David,  chapter in , Saudi Arabia and the Global Terrorist Network].

What’s even more disturbing than who backs them is what they have supported. Just a few highlights: J Street was one of the most vocal supporters, together with NIAC for the Iranian nuclear deal, which has by now proven to have enriched, empowered and emboldened the Islamic regime and its terror proxies, such as Hamas and Hezbollah. It currently opposes any sanctions on Iran.

They claim not to support BDS, yet they support “targeted BDS” (the labeling of any product that has been manufactured over the “Green Line”). This has proven to be disastrous for the Palestinians, whom they claim to care so much for, as in the case of when SodaStream was forced to uproot itself from the territories and left so many previously employed Palestinians without a job.

J Street lobbied vociferously against the Taylor Force Act, which withheld the amount American funding to the Palestinian Authority which they had been giving to their “martyr’s fund” or “prisoner’s pension fund,” money that incentivized terror to murder innocent civilians. It has supported the Goldstein Report that condemned the defensive action Israel was forced to take against Hamas missile attacks in “Operation Cast Lead” and fully supported the U.N. Resolution condemning Israel in 2016 for its occupation of the dispute territories, which the Obama administration shamefully refused to veto.

And therein lies the heart of the problem. Like many Jewish organizations, J Street is seduced by lofty slogans like “pro-Israel/pro-peace.” These words are intended to give the impression that all that Israel has to do is immediately withdraw from the territories, and then peace would ultimately break out.

This ignores the empirical evidence of what happened after the withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May of 2000, giving Hezbollah and their 150,000 missiles easy striking distance to Israel.

It also ignores the internally gut-wrenching Gaza withdrawal of 2005, where the land has been used to launch thousands of rockets and incendiary devices launched from kites and balloons, making life for those on Gaza’s neighboring communities a living hell and destroying thousands of acres of Israel’s agricultural land.

D.  Personal Observations ( submitted by  by ad hoc review committee chaired by John Train):

*It the height of arrogance for  Americans (Jewish and non-Jewish) sitting  within the safety of the United States —to tell the Israelis what to do. They are the ones who ultimately will have to live with the consequences of any withdrawals.

*  Nearly everyone recognizes that Israel lives in a very rough area in the Middle East. And if there is one thing that recent events in Syria have  reinforced for all of us  is that  Israel is fighting for very survival in an  exceptionally tough neighborhood. [And as former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said, “We have nowhere else to go.”]

 MIL-ED  thanks Sarah N. Stern ( founder and president of the Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET), a pro-Israel and pro-American think tank and policy institute in Washington, D.C.) for sharing  her thoughts and observations with us which served as  important component of the  deliberations which resulted in the article, above.