Forget Russia, what about Qatar?

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

Daniel Greenfield, FPM

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

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

Obama was nearly right.

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

China isn’t our leading geopolitical foe either.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There could be no greater act of treason than that.

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

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

And that cannot be tolerated.

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

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

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

And often they are one and the same.

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

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

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

How Obama Caused the 2014 Gaza War

By Ira Strauss, NATIONAL REVIEW August 25, 2014 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To NBC the murder of Jewish schoolchildren is "an act of resistance” and the rebuilding of a bathroom in a home  that had been lived in by Jews for hundreds of years is a "war crime".

In 1948 Jordan's Arab Legion conquered the Old City of Jerusalem and took control of territory on the western side of the Jordan River, including the cities of Jericho, Bethlehem, Hebron and Nablus.^[3] At the end of hostilities, Jordan was in complete control of the West Bank.

The Jewish inhabitants who had lived there for hundreds of years were expelled and  their property was seized. Arabs from other areas were brought in to occupy the homes confiscated from the Jews. All vestige of previous Jewish occupation was assiduously destroyed.

Since then much of the media [such as NBC, article below] has described the addition of a bathroom on a house reconstituted on the land previously held by Jews as “a war crime” and the murder of Jewish children in their classrooms as an “ action of resistance to occupation."

NBC: Slap heard ‘round the world: Ahed Tamimi becomes symbol of Palestinian resistance

Posted: Mar 10, 2018 11:05 AM PST

<em class="wnDate">Saturday, March 10, 2018 2:05 PM EST</em>

Updated: Mar 10, 2018 11:05 AM PST

<em class="wnDate">Saturday, March 10, 2018 2:05 PM EST</em>

Written By NBC News

http://www.kvoa.com/story/37694604/slap-heard-round-the-world-ahed-tamimi-becomes-symbol-of-palestinian-resistance

NABI SALEH, West Bank — The online footage of a 16-year-old Palestinian girl, Ahed Tamimi, slapping and punching armed Israeli soldiers towering over her reverberated around the world.

After being arrested with her mother, Nariman, days after the Dec. 15 incident, the teen with long blond curly hair swiftly became a global symbol of resistance to Israeli occupation.

Tamimi, now 17, did that by simply bucking a longstanding stereotype of Palestinian activists — hoary old warriors and rock-throwing young men — and in the process electrifying a Palestinian population disheartened by years of settlement-building on land envisioned as a future state. She also prompted renewed international attention on Israel's occupation of the West Bank, and on the Palestinian cause in general.

The teen's fate now lies in the hands of an Israeli military judge who is weighing charges of incitement and assault. She has been imprisoned since her arrest, and her trial resumes Sunday behind closed doors.

Sineen Amereh, 16, a Palestinian resident of Arab-majority east Jerusalem, has no doubt about Tamimi’s importance to her people's struggle against the occupation, as well as to the role of girls in that resistance.

“She’s a perfect idol for all girls her age — nobody before has done something like that,” said Amereh, an 11th grader. “If we weren’t brave, then the Israeli soldiers would think we’re weak, think we will just give up.”

Amereh says she and others are scared of soldiers like the ones Tamimi faced, but her fellow teen's actions have given her confidence to stand up to injustice.

“Everyone is afraid, but we will keep fighting because it is not easy to give up on your land, on your home,” said Amereh.

It is commonly felt by Arabs in east Jerusalem and the West Bank — which Israel has occupied since the 1967 war with Syria, Jordan and Egypt — that Israel is deliberately driving Palestinians from their homes. From 1967 to 2016, some 200 Jewish settlements housing around 600,000 people were built on occupied land, according to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem. There are some 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank.

Israeli checkpoints limit the movement of Palestinians, and many cannot get to land that they say is legally theirs but lies near Jewish communities. Meanwhile, a process to create an independent Palestinian state as part of a “two-state solution” has foundered.

While Ahed Tamimi has excited many Palestinians hoping to end decades of statelessness, she and her family have been denounced in Israel for being, at best, terrorist-sympathizers who train children to deliberately provoke soldiers on film to discredit the country and its army.

“It’s an extended family that committed terror attacks, and she’s part of this theater,” said Anat Berko, a member of Israel's Parliament and an expert on female and child Palestinian suicide bombers.

“You’re speaking about a society that used and abused those children," Berko said of the Palestinians, adding that filmed episodes involving Tamimi and her family were classic “Pallywood” — an attempt to manipulate the media to score public relations points against Israel.

Berko praised the Israeli military — “the best soldiers on earth” — who have been criticized for heavy-handedness in this and other cases.

“She slapped a soldier and he didn’t do anything,” Berko said. “An American soldier or a British soldier — do you think he would let her push him in such a way?”

Berko does not question the Tamimis' authenticity, but others have.

Israeli Deputy Minister Michael Oren sparked outrage in January after admitting that the Tamimis had been the subject of a classified investigation into whether they actually "light-skinned" actors and not a real family.

‘Entrance For Israeli Citizens Is Forbidden’

Ahed Tamimi has long been filmed and photographed protesting and confronting soldiers in Nabi Saleh, a cluster of buildings on a couple of hillocks in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

An Israeli watchtower sits in a gray-walled base on the road into town. Next to it a sign warns in white lettering against red: “The Entrance For Israeli Citizens Is Forbidden, Dangerous To Your Lives And Against The Israeli Law.”

Rows of neat red-roofed houses sit within sight of the village. This is Halamish, a Jewish settlement deemed illegal by international law.

In 2009, led by Ahed Tamimi’s father, Bassem Tamimi, villagers and rights groups started holding weekly Friday protests against what they saw as the settlement’s expropriation of land and appropriation of the village’s water source — a spring.

In a recent act of violence in Halamish, a Palestinian man broke into a home in July and fatally stabbed three member of one family

Nabi Saleh has an estimated population of around 600, almost all of whom are Tamimis, a clan famous for its decades-long resistance to Israeli occupation. Hundreds of villagers have been detained, wounded or killed protesting.

In 2011, Mustafa Tamimi died after a tear-gas canister hit him in the face at close range as he threw rocks at soldiers. In 2012, Rushdi Tamimi was shot dead by Israeli soldier while he was throwing stones. Tamimi’s cousin Ahlam Tamimi was imprisoned for her involvement in a 2001 suicide bombing of a Jerusalem pizza restaurant that killed 15 and wounded more than 120.

A handful of Israeli soldiers stand smoking on the side of the main road into Nabi Saleh one day last week. Three skinny young men hover around 100 yards away. A couple of hours later, a series of booms echo up the hill, sending a herd of goats scurrying to the edge of a field. White clouds of tear gas drift over the rocky ground before dispersing.

A few children wander the town’s streets, chatting and joking with journalists. One is Mohammed Tamimi, 15, a gangly boy who looks like part of his skull has been sliced off at an angle.

According to the family, Mohammed's injury provoked Ahed’s outburst in December. Family, rights activists and journalists who have seen medical documents say he was shot in the head by an Israeli soldier minutes before the confrontation in the front yard of Ahed’s house.

At least one Israeli military official contests that account, and says Mohammed admitted during interrogation that he was injured falling off a bicycle. Later, Mohammed said he had been under duress during the detention — part of regular sweeps of Nabi Saleh’s young people — and was afraid he wouldn't be let go if he told the truth.

Israel has been criticized for its arrests of boys and more recently girls — a trend Ahed has been part of.

In 2015, one out of every 250 inmates in Israeli prisons was a girl, according to Ayed Abu Eqtaish of the Defense for Children International Palestine, which advocates for the rights of minors in Israeli detention. After October 2015, that ratio rose to around 10 girls out of every 300 inmates.

Amnesty International has also criticised Ahed's detention, saying in a statement that “footage of this incident shows that she posed no actual threat and that her punishment is blatantly disproportionate.”

She's also garnered the support of a series of public figures in the U.S., including the N.F.L.'s Michael Bennett, the academic Cornel West, and the actors Danny Glover and Rosario Dawson, who signed a petition calling for her release.

The comedian Sarah Silverman provoked praise as well as outrage when she said on Twitter that Jewish people had “to stand up EVEN when — ESPECIALLY when — the wrongdoing is BY Jews/the Israeli government.”

When asked to comment on this story, an Israeli military spokesperson said in a statement that “unfortunately, in recent years, many minors, sometimes very young, have been involved in violent incidents including acts of terror, and other offenses.”

“When the law is enforced against minors, it is done taking their age into account,” it added.

‘A dancer’

Privately some Palestinians are asking whether they should allow their sons and daughters to get caught up in protests at all. While there has been no public discussion on the issue, Nabi Saleh’s children haven’t held a protest in weeks.

One Palestinian who asked not to be named because he didn't want to put his children in the public eye said that while he admires Ahed as a fighter for Palestinian rights, he would not wish for his own daughter to do the same.

“She should go to school and be at home,” he said.

Ahed’s younger cousin Janna, 11, does not stay at home. She calls herself the world’s youngest journalist and has some 275,000 followers on Facebook, where she goes by the name Janna Jihad. She's been active since the age of 6 or 7.

Janna speaks English with an American accent, and finishes many of her statements with, “So yeah.”

“I wanted to be the voice of the Palestinian children and send their message to all the world," Janna said. "Let this world know about our suffering our feelings, our parents getting killed, our sisters and brothers getting injured and arrested."

Janna then climbed a tree next door to pick green almonds for her family and guests, before kicking a soccer ball up the road outside Ahed's home.

Bassem Tamimi, Ahed's father, is exhausted by the constant media requests, as well as from looking after three children without his wife — who remains in jail too — while also working at the Interior Ministry of the Palestinian National Authority.

An experienced activist, he has been detained many times by Israeli authorities, and convicted of “sending people to throw stones, and holding a march without permit.”

Amnesty International has called Bassem Tamimi a prisoner of conscience, while the European Union has labeled him a human rights defender.

A tour of Ahed's bedroom reveals orange walls out of the 1970s, dirty clothes spilling out of a hamper and posters of Ahed on one of two single beds covered in rumpled purple sheets.

While Tamimi says he’s slept in his daughter's bed a few times since she went to jail, he is unsentimental about raising his children to fight the Israeli occupation. For one thing, he said, it is impossible to keep them out of trouble, what with regular military raids and the presence of soldiers.

“In India they give a small amount of poison to every child born to protect him and defend him from the snakes,” he said. “And we must train ourselves from the snakes in our life, the occupation.”

His children have no choice but to live under occupation where “there was no safe place,” he said.

But, he adds, “if you give me a promise from your country, and European countries ... if we have a promise that the occupation will leave our life [in] 10 years, I will send [Ahed] to be a dancer.”

Gov. Bevin responds to question concerning his stance on school violence

http://www.kentuckynewera.com/multimedia/video/news/youtube_c2674705-960f-52ed-b8d8-9d2c34d514e4.html

Here is Robert Mueller’s Hit List and What He’s Asking For

by Cristina Laila

 Publication note. Cristina Laila’s Article contains  useful information. The source from which we re- produced it appended an editorial judgment hostile to Robert Mueller and his staff. 

 We have reproduced Laila’s  entire article for your information, [black] and  the appended

 Editorial comments , by a different author [blue ].

Axios reviewed a Grand Jury subpoena that Mueller’s team sent a witness recently; it revealed the special counsel’s hit list and what the team of liberal hack lawyers is asking for.

Here is what Mueller is asking for according to a report by Jonathan Swan of Axios:

• Mueller is subpoenaing all communications — meaning emails, texts, handwritten notes, etc. — that this witness sent and received regarding the following people:

1. Carter Page
2. Corey Lewandowski
3. Donald J. Trump
4. Hope Hicks
5. Keith Schiller
6. Michael Cohen
7. Paul Manafort
8. Rick Gates
9. Roger Stone
10. Steve Bannon

The subpoena asks for all communications from November 1, 2015, to the present. Notably, Trump announced his campaign for president five months earlier — on June 16, 2015.

Bottom line: In December, the president's lawyer Ty Cobb told me the White House would be free of the Mueller investigation "shortly after the first of the year absent some unforeseen delay." We know very little about what's keeping the investigators so busy, but the breadth of this subpoena means Mueller's team could easily stumble into goodies about Trump's inner circle given so many people are coughing up material. (Cobb didn't respond to a request for comment.)

Not only is Mueller’s witch hunt a way to delegitimize President Trump and a way to recommend impeachment charges, it’s also one big oppo research campaign.

Mueller and his team of Obama/Hillary donors are able to peek into the underbelly of how Trump won the 2016 election by reviewing all of their communications.

Americans are watching in horror as an innocent president and his family are put through hell for the ‘crime’ of winning the election.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton actually committed multiple crimes during the election including using a fraudulent dossier to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on her political opponent.

Why aren’t investigators issuing subpoenas to Hillary Clinton and her cronies for their emails, texts and handwritten notes?

Mueller is out of control and must be shut down. After Mueller’s witch hunt is shut down, he should be investigated by a special counsel.

State Department Backs Lebanese Land Grab against Israel

EVELYN GORDON COMMENTARY MAR. 2, 2018

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/foreign-policy/middle-east/state-department-backs-lebanon-land-grab-israel/

State Department officials have spent a lot of time in Lebanon recently. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson visited the country two weeks ago, and Acting Assistant Secretary of State David Satterfield made an appearance last week. Among other issues, they are trying to mediate two Lebanese-Israeli disputes. The problem is that only one of these is a quasi-legitimate conflict; the other is a patently illegitimate Lebanese land grab. By treating that claim as legitimate, the State Department is not only encouraging aggression but proving, once again, that international guarantees to Israel are worthless.

The quasi-legitimate dispute relates to where the maritime border between Israel and Lebanon runs. As I noted back in 2011, Beirut is currently claiming maritime territory that it didn’t consider Lebanese as recently as 2007, when it signed (but ultimately didn’t ratify) a deal demarcating its maritime border with Cyprus. That makes the State Department’s proposal to award Lebanon 75 percent of this territory outrageous. Nevertheless, the fact remains that Israel and Lebanon have no agreed maritime border, and international law doesn’t provide an unequivocal answer as to where it should run. So State’s mediation is justifiable, even if its proposal isn’t.

The second dispute, however, is over Lebanon’s claim that Israel’s planned new border wall encroaches on Lebanese territory in 13 places. And on this, there should be no question whatsoever, because a recognized international border, known as the Blue Line, already exists and the UN has twice affirmed that Israel isn’t violating it.

The first time the UN affirmed realities on the ground was after Israel unilaterally withdrew from Lebanon in 2000. Then, the UN Security Council unanimously confirmed that all the areas Beirut now claims were, in fact, on Israel’s side of the border. The second was earlier this month when the UN Interim Force in Lebanon reaffirmed that all the new construction is on Israel’s side of the border.

The latter, incidentally, is particularly noteworthy because UNIFIL usually sides with Beirut in any Lebanese-Israeli dispute, for the simple reason that its peacekeepers are located on Lebanese soil and therefore vulnerable to reprisals if it ruffles Lebanese feathers. Indeed, as reported by the Jerusalem Post just last week, members of UNIFIL’s French contingent recently told a French paper that they routinely refrain from doing the job they’re officially there to do—ensuring that Hezbollah conducts no military activity in southern Lebanon, as mandated by Security Council Resolution 1701 of 2006—for fear of clashes with the Lebanese Army.

Given the existence of both a recognized international border and unequivocal UN confirmation that Israel hasn’t violated it, the only proper response to Beirut’s protest over a new fence would be to politely tell it that it has no case whatsoever. The territory in question is unarguably Israel’s, and Israel is free to build whatever it pleases there. Instead, the State Department has treated Lebanon’s claim as legitimate. Tillerson demanded that Israel halt construction until it reaches an agreement with Lebanon on the border, while Satterfield proposed land swaps to satisfy Lebanon’s claims. In other words, State is asking Israel to cede land which the Security Council unanimously recognized as sovereign Israeli territory just because a thuggish neighbor covets it and has threatened war if its demands aren’t satisfied.

Needless to say, this is an excellent way to encourage aggression. If Lebanon can get Washington to pressure Israel to cede internationally recognized Israeli territory merely by claiming land to which it lacks any vestige of right and then threatening war if its demands aren’t met, why wouldn’t Lebanon—or any other country interested in grabbing Israeli land—keep repeating this tactic?

But it also makes a mockery of the international guarantee contained in that Security Council resolution from 2000. After all, it’s hard to imagine a stronger guarantee of the validity of Israel’s northern border than a unanimous Security Council resolution affirming it. Yet ever since that resolution was passed, Lebanon has made repeated demands for territory on the Israeli side of the border. Every single time, the State Department and the rest of the international community has treated Beirut’s demands as valid and pressed Israel to offer concessions to assuage them.

This began almost immediately when Lebanon laid claim to the Shaba Farms region in the early 2000s. The Blue Line border actually assigns Shaba to Syria, meaning it isn’t Lebanon’s to claim; any dispute over it would have to be resolved between Israel and Syria. But instead of telling Beirut to get lost, the Security Council asserted, in that same Resolution 1701 of 2006, that parts of the Lebanese border it unanimously affirmed just six years earlier were now “disputed or uncertain” and thus required a new UN demarcation. The Bush Administration subsequently pressured Israel (unsuccessfully) to turn Shaba over to Lebanon.

Today’s State Department has gone even further. Instead of demanding that Israel give Lebanon territory which the UN previously deemed Syrian, it’s now demanding that Israel give Lebanon territory which the UN previously affirmed as Israel’s own. In other words, it’s telling Israel that international affirmation of its borders is no protection against future demands by other countries for chunks of its territory; the U.S. government—and also, naturally, the rest of the international community—will support any claim whatsoever against Israel, even if it lacks any shred of validity.

Admittedly, it’s not news that international guarantees are useless; Israel has learned this lesson many times before. But you still have to wonder what State Department officials are thinking. After all, they’ve been trying for years to mediate peace deals between Israel and its neighbors, and all their proposals are based on Israel ceding strategically important land in exchange for international recognition of its borders and guarantees of their validity. Yet at the same time, they’ve been doing their utmost to prove that international recognition and guarantees are worthless. And then they wonder why Israelis don’t think the international guarantees they’re being offered are a good substitute for the defensible borders they would lose.