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June 2016

Hillary’s Service as Secretary of State: A Failure of Leadership (and a National Security Disaster) By Kenneth Eliasberg

In evaluating Hillary Clinton’s competence, a good place to start is to take a close look at her tour of duty as Secretary of State. Is the U.S. safer and/or held in higher regard around the world as a result of her efforts?

Perhaps it might be worthwhile to note why she got that appointment: Not because of either her acumen or experience. Rather it was Barack Obama extending the olive branch in order to bring a fractured Democratic Party together — fractured because of a very heated and divisive Democrat primary.

That said, even a cursory examination of her service in this position yields up a resoundingly negative answer to that question. As has already been frequently noted, her tour began with her screwing up the Russian reset button, and it ended with her Benghazi dereliction, leading to the death of 4 Americans. What happened in between these bookends, and what are the consequences of those happenings?

Let’s start with the Middle East, that boiling cauldron of infidel hatred. Syria, where, you may recall, President Obama drew a red line (apparently in invisible ink) should Assad use chemical weapons against the insurrectionists, is in chaos — after Syria did use chemical weapons and Obama failed to act on his red line. And now, long after Obama declared the importance of taking down the Assad government, Russia is in the country, providing support for Assad remaining in power (and thereby providing the Russians with a Mediterranean access).

Fake-Passports Gangs Arrested in Europe Migration crisis has led to a growing market in forged documents, says Europol chief By Valentina Pop

Nineteen people involved in the production and shipping of thousands of fake European Union passports and other documents were arrested in Greece and the Czech Republic in the past few weeks, the bloc’s law-enforcement agency, Europol, said Tuesday.

Sixteen people suspected of document forgery “on a large scale” and the smuggling of migrants were arrested in Greece last week, and three other suspects were taken into custody in the Czech Republic on May 10, Europol said.

The arrests come as migrants who arrived in the EU last year seek to legalize their stay, while others who are still outside the bloc have fewer options to enter after the route via Turkey, Greece and the Balkan countries was cut off.

The forged documents—passports from EU countries, identity cards, driving licenses, asylum-seeker registration cards, residence permits and visas to the border-free Schengen area—were shipped through courier companies to other EU countries as well as to countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, Europol said. They cost between €100 ($111) and €3,000, depending on the quality, type and country of issue.

In Athens, the suspected criminal network was composed of two groups—one comprising mainly Bangladeshi nationals, the other mainly Sudanese nationals. The Bangladeshi group sent at least 126 parcels containing travel documents via courier last year, while the Sudanese group sent 431 parcels over the same period, Europol said.

Macra: The Quiet Health-Care Takeover A 962-page rule puts the federal government between doctors and patients. By James C. Capretta and Lanhee J. Chen

The American people have become familiar with ObamaCare’s failings: higher premiums, fewer choices and a more powerful federal health bureaucracy. Yet another important piece of health-care legislation, signed into law last year, has gone almost unnoticed.

The Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act, known simply as Macra, was enacted to replace the outdated and dysfunctional system for paying doctors under Medicare. The old system, based on the universally despised sustainable-growth rate formula, perennially threatened to impose unsustainable cuts in physicians’ fees. Macra passed Congress with bipartisan support and President Obama quickly signed it. Unfortunately, the law empowers the federal bureaucracy at the expense of the doctor-patient relationship, putting the quality of American health care at risk.

In an effort to secure broad support, Congress wrote into the law general guidance but left important details of implementation to the executive branch. What happened next was predictable: In April the administration presented a 962-page regulatory behemoth. This new set of rules uses the power of Medicare to put the federal government in charge of almost every aspect of physician care in the U.S.

Macra adopts the same theory of cost control embedded in ObamaCare. It assumes that the federal government has the knowledge and wherewithal to engineer better health care through “delivery system reforms,” forgetting the utter failure of the bureaucracy’s previous effort. ObamaCare and now Macra use Medicare’s payment regulations to force hospitals and physicians to change how they care for their patients. The administration’s regulations will force doctors to comply with scores of new reporting requirements and intrusions into their practices. Physicians who refuse to bend will see their Medicare fees cut.

Macra and the new regulations force physicians to pick between a “merit-based incentive payment system” or an “alternative-payment model.” Doctors who choose the former will get paid fee-for-service, but they will receive meager annual increases of only 0.25% starting in 2019. Some doctors could earn “bonus payments” but only if the federal bureaucracy approves of their performance. CONTINUE AT SITE

Palestinians: Sex in Gaza City by Khaled Abu Toameh

A 27-year-old female journalist recounted that a Palestinian official working for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza invited her for a job interview. The official “tried to approach and touch her, but she walked away and left the office… The following day… he offered her the job in return for having sexual intercourse with him.”

The victim noted that under Palestinian law, UNRWA officials enjoy immunity from being prosecuted.

Palestinian journalist Amjad Yaghi found that the Palestinian Basic Law does not tackle the issue of sexual harassment in Palestinian society. Meanwhile, the Hamas connections of these criminals will keep them out of jail and in positions of power.

Where are the women’s rights organizations now? Where are the European and American overseers of the international human rights organizations in the Gaza Strip? Do they only awaken from their slumber when they smell fresh Israeli meat? How many women will be sexually assaulted while these watchdogs sleep?

Sex is a taboo topic in the conservative Palestinian society. So it came as a nasty surprise to many when the rampant sexual harassment in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip was recently brought to public attention.

A damning report, entitled “Gaza: Sexual Harassment and Bribery Chase Job-Seekers,” was published in the Beirut-based, Hezbollah-affiliated newspaper Al-Akhbar. Amjad Yaghi, the young Palestinian journalist who wrote the exposé, showed extraordinary courage in doing so.

Hamas, needless to say, was not amused.

Bangladesh: All about Israel-Hating by Sebastian Bustle

Everyone shook hands and greeted each other courteously, but Aslam Chowdhury came under fire in Bangladesh after the photographs of the two men together were published on Safadi’s Facebook page, and then picked up by Bangladeshi media. On May 15, police detectives arrested Chowdhury for alleged “involvement in a plot to oust the Bangladesh government with the support of Israeli intelligence Mossad.”

Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, a Bangladeshi journalist, was sentenced in 2014 to seven years in prison, allegedly for trying to travel to Israel, to speak on the rise of Islamic militancy in his country, and how madrassahs (Islamic religious schools) are being used to spawn militants.

Bangladesh has no diplomatic relations with Israel. It is a country where Jews and Israeli people are being cursed in every Friday sermon, from more than 250,000 mosques.

Israel, the Mossad and Jews, seen as one, are now a political issue in Bangladesh politics. Accusations and denials about “Israel and Mossad connections” are going on among the rival political parties and leaders. Both the government and largest opposition party, Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), have been trying to cash in on the existing antagonistic sentiment against Israel among the country’s 90%-Muslim population.

Bangladesh has no diplomatic relations with Israel. It is a country where Jews and Israeli people are being cursed in every Friday sermon, from more than 250,000 mosques. Imams across the country shout before the Friday prayer’s sermon audience that Jewish people are infidels.

The latest dirty game of Israel-hating began in early May. A Bangladeshi politician, Aslam Chowdhury, who is a Joint General Secretary of the BNP, visited the Indian capital of Delhi and the historic city of Agra, where he met Mendi N. Safadi, reportedly a member of Israel’s Likud party.[1] Everyone shook hands and greeted each other courteously, but Aslam Chowdhury came under fire in Bangladesh after the photographs of the two men together were published on Safadi’s Facebook page, and then picked up by Bangladeshi media.

JED BABBIN: THE AMERICAN NAVY AS FARCE

Rep. Randy Forbes speaks out on the Farsi Island incident and other threats to our diminishing seapower.

On January 12 two U.S. Navy riverine boats were sailing south through the Persian Gulf to Bahrain near Iran’s Farsi Island. One of the boats had broken down and the other stayed with it. Six Iranian boats surrounded them and demanded their surrender at gunpoint. The Americans did. They were forced to their knees and taken into captivity on the island.

It’s not clear how the Iranians treated the U.S. sailors, but we know a few key facts. The Iranians seized Navy computers aboard the boats and copied their contents. The sailors were interrogated individually — constantly — and paraded before Iranian television crews. In footage broadcast internationally, they were apparently compelled to admit that they were in the wrong for entering Iranian waters — though the evidence showed they had not — and to apologize for doing so.

But every American soldier, sailor, airman and Marine is trained to refuse to aid the enemy in that manner. It’s a violation of their duty to do so. So were they abused? Tortured? Threatened with immediate execution? We don’t know because the Obama administration has classified everything about how the sailors were treated.

They were released after about sixteen hours. The only reaction from President Obama was a statement by Secretary of State John Kerry thanking the Iranians for their cooperation and patting himself on the back for effective diplomacy. There was never even a word condemning the Iranians for violating international law by seizing the American boats in international waters.

Two weeks ago Rep. Randy Forbes (R-VA) got our attention when he said that the classified information about the incident, if made public, would shock the American people. He said that we would be shocked by not only how Iran treated our sailors but also how the Obama administration responded. As Forbes pointed out, Obama did nothing at all to help the sailors while they were in captivity.

Blaming the victim, part II Why do Americans have to struggle to understand Palestinian violence?Dr. Alex Grobman

Americans have difficulty in grasping the random nature of the stabbings, stoning and car-ramming attacks against Israelis. This is, in large part, is due to a basic assumption that everyone aspires to the same goals of a productive life and a positive future for their family and children asserts Elan Journo, a fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute and its Director of Policy Research. The inability of Americans to accept that a majority of Palestinian Arabs do not share this vision undermines our ability to understand the underlying causes of the conflict. [19]

American leaders foster this common misconception. “Throughout the Middle East, there is a great yearning for the quiet miracle of a normal life,” declared President Bill Clinton during his remarks at the Signing Ceremony for the Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principle on the South Lawn at the White House on September 13, 1993. [20]

Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright quoted Clinton’s erroneous assessment of the desire for “the quiet miracle of a normal life” at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on January 8, 1997. [21] After visiting a school in Ramallah, Albright thought “The young Palestinians aren’t responsible for the unfair hand history has dealt them; they’ll never achieve what is fully fair in their eyes, but the peace process is the best path to the best deal they can get.” [22]

“Throughout the Middle East, there is a great yearning for the quiet miracle of a normal life,” declared President Bill Clinton.
At Camp David in 2000, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Yasir Arafat 94 percent of Judea and Samaria; ten years later, Ehud Olmert offered Abbas 93.6 percent with a one-to-one land swap. In other words, expansion has not significantly reduced the land available for establishing a Palestinian Arab state. [23] Abrams said that there “has been no deliberate policy or government push to expand settlements; on the contrary, there have been official constraints. The government has officially approved only 9,197 residential construction permits in the entirety of Judea and Samaria (i.e., the entire West Bank including the major blocs, excluding Jerusalem) in the six years since Netanyahu took office in 2009. Approximately two-thirds of those units approved were built inside the major blocs. That means only 500 or so units were approved each year for construction outside the settlement blocs.” [24]

At the Annapolis Conference, held on November 27, 2007 at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, President George W. Bush insisted that “The Palestinian people are blessed with many gifts and talents. They want the opportunity to use those gifts to better their own lives and build a future for their children. They want the dignity that comes with sovereignty and independence. They want justice and equality under the rule of law. They want freedom from violence and fear. [25]

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice revealed her own confusion about the conflict during what she thought was an off the record meeting of leading international leaders, including former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. Rice indicated she had no intention of drawing historical parallels or being too introspective, but as a young girl she grew up in Birmingham, Alabama “at a time of separation and tension.”

Ignoring Iran’s Abuse By Lawrence J. Haas

“I can assure you,” Wendy Sherman, President Barack Obama’s lead negotiator on the Iran nuclear deal, said the other day, “that if Iran takes truly horrific terrorist action, or truly horrific human rights action, that people will respond.” Uh huh.

Sherman’s comments, which she made during a May 25 event at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, came a day after Stephen Mull, Obama’s lead coordinator on implementing the deal, acknowledged at a congressional hearing that Washington hasn’t leveled any sanctions on Iran over its human rights violations since inking the deal last summer – even as Tehran cracks down harder on its own people.

Apparently, Iran’s decision to hang 13 prisoners on a single day in May, including one in the city square of Mashhad in the presence of children, doesn’t constitute “truly horrific human rights action.” Nor, apparently, does the 10-year sentence that Iran imposed a few days later on a human rights activist, about which the Office of the United Nations Commissioner for Human rights said it was “appalled.”

Nor, apparently, does the barbaric punishment that more than 30 students near Qazvin, northwest of Tehran, received recently after throwing a graduation party where boys and girls danced and girls removed their headscarves: 99 lashes each, which the authorities reportedly imposed less than a day later.

The administration’s refusal to sanction Iran over human rights has ignited bipartisan anger on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers reminded top Obama officials that they backed the nuclear deal based on administration assurances that it would impose sanctions over human rights and other issues as circumstances warranted. The clash over sanctions, which erupted at the House Committee on Foreign Affairs last week, comes amid growing congressional interest in imposing new sanctions on Iran to replace those that will expire later this year, and administration concerns over such efforts.

Nearly a year after U.S.-led global negotiators finalized their nuclear deal with Iran, two realities have grown clearer: that hopes the pact would moderate Tehran’s hard-line regime remain a pipe dream, and that the administration will do nothing to anger Tehran and raise the chances that it will disavow the deal.

Turkey’s Demographic Winter and Erdogan’s Duplicity BY David P. Goldman

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan demanded that Turkish women abandon contraception in a televised address May 30, Reuters reported. “We will multiply our descendants. They talk about population planning, birth control. No Muslim family can have such an approach,” Erdogan said. The Turkish leader has denounced Turkish women for refusing to have more babies on many earlier occasions.

Erdogan has played every side of every issue, alternately courting and rejecting the European Union, claiming the United States as an ally against ISIS while aiding the terrorist army on the sly, succoring Hamas while proposing to rebuild relations with Israel, helping Iran run sanctions while claiming the Gulf States as Sunni allies. Christina Lin catalogued his double-dealings in a May 31 news analysis for this publication.

When he talks about Turkey’s failing demographics, though, Erdogan is speaking from the heart. Turkey’s Kurdish citizens continue to have three or four children while ethnic Turks have fewer than two. By the early 2040s, most of Turkey’s young people will come from Kurdish-speaking homes. The Kurdish-majority Southeast inevitably will break away. Erdogan’s hapless battle against the inevitable motivates the sometimes bewildering twists and turns of Turkish policy.

The Glazov Gang Raymond Ibrahim Moment: The Pope Who Gained the World, But Lost His Own Soul

This special edition of The Glazov Gang presents The Raymond Ibrahim Moment with Raymond Ibrahim, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

He discussed The Pope Who Gained the World, But Lost His Own Soul, unveiling Pope Francis’ Jihad on Christianity.

Don’t miss it!http://jamieglazov.com/2016/05/31/raymond-ibrahim-moment-the-pope-who-gained-the-world-but-lost-his-own-soul-2/