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December 2016

Lies and Hypocrisy Over Aleppo Where are the tears for Aleppo’s Christians and Jews? Daniel Greenfield

250,000 Christians lived in Aleppo before the Sunni-Shiite Islamic civil war began. Today their numbers have fallen to 40,000.

There were no worldwide protests over this ethnic cleansing of Christians from Aleppo as there are over the fall of the Sunni Islamic state whose Jihadis are euphemistically described as rebels. There were no photos of crying Christian children blanketing every media outlet. But today you can hardly open a newspaper without seeing a teary Sunni Muslim kid allegedly being evacuated from Aleppo.

Given a chance, the weeping Sunni Muslims did to their Christian neighbors in Aleppo what they had done to them back during the Aleppo Massacre a hundred years ago when they were upset that the decline of Islamic Sharia power led to Christians gaining some civil rights. The Jewish population of Aleppo, which had once made up 5% of the city, had already been wiped out in the 1947 Muslim riots.

The last Jewish family was evacuated from Aleppo to escape the Sunni Jihadis two years ago.

The destruction of the Jewish and Christian communities of Aleppo happened without a fraction of the hysterical tumult over the defeat of the Sunni Jihadis and their fellow Muslim religious dependents.

“Aleppo will join the ranks of those events in world history that define modern evil, that stain our conscience decades later,” Samantha Power declared at the United Nations.

Why doesn’t the ethnic cleansing of 210,000 Christians stain Power’s conscience? Or the church bombings by Islamists in Egypt, the stabbings of Jewish women in Israel and the Boko Haram genocide of Christians in Nigeria? True modern evil is the righteous conviction of liberals that only Muslim lives matter and that their Christian, Jewish and other non-Muslim victims somehow have it coming.

The fall of the Sunni theocracy is denounced as an outrage that will stain the conscience of the world. Journalists have taken a break from their ski vacations to lecture us on how we should have done something. That “something” being the thing they didn’t want us to do in Iraq, where Saddam Hussein had butchered hundreds of thousands, but that is somehow now a moral imperative in Syria.

Why do the Sunni Muslims of Aleppo matter while the ethnically cleansed Christians of Aleppo don’t? And why was removing Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, a crime that liberals still howl about while removing Assad, an Alawite Shiite, is a moral imperative? Because the “righteousness” axis of our foreign policy is controlled by the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, the Sunni Saudis and the rest of their Sunni Gulfie ilk.

The Muslim Brotherhood set our agenda for the Arab Spring. It’s why our government and our human rights organization backed the popular overthrow of Mubarak, but fought the popular overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Morsi. Kenneth Roth, the head of Human Rights Watch, an organization which despite its name has solicited money from the Saudis, the sugar daddies of the Sunni Jihad, sneers at Copts for supporting the “persecution” of the Muslim Brotherhood. That’s not just Orwellian. It’s evil.

Rep. Brian Mast (R-Florida District 18) on His Recovery From Battle and Journey To Congress Distinguished veteran and newly-elected Representative shares his inspiring story at Restoration Weekend.

Brian Mast – U.S. House, Florida, District 18 from DHFC on Vimeo.

Introduction Speaker: What a wonderful event? There’s just such a victorious spirit here. When you look at the huge gains that we made not only in the Presidential, but in the House and in the Senate, I do not believe that any of those three would’ve been possible or even close to possible without everyone in this room, so thank you very much. Tonight I have the wonderful opportunity to introduce to you a true American hero. Brian Mast fresh off his fantastic victory for U.S. House in District 18. Brian served our country for 12 years as a bomb disposal expert for the elite Joint Special Forces Operation Command saving countless lives at great personal cost to himself, but not only did he serve our great country, he then went on after that to serve alongside the Israeli Defense Forces. Let me give you one of the best men I know. He’s going to tear up D.C. Proud to call you a friend.

Brian Mast: Thank you. I’m honored to have the opportunity to address you. I actually had prepared remarks that I was going to give, but some of the remarks that were already given inspired me to tell another story, and it’s one of the most important stories that I have inside of me. I always think it’s important to tell this when I get the opportunity. I think it’s even more so important to tell this now that I’m going to have the opportunity to go to Washington, D.C. and serve as a Representative alongside some absolutely great men and women, Representative Gohmert, Representative Desantos. I’m honored to be joining the ranks of you all, but this story actually occurred while I was in Washington, D.C. It wasn’t too long ago. It was shortly after the new year, and as was mentioned I was a bomb technician. I did it in our highest level of special operations. I loved it.

The nature of the work that we did was very similar to the Bin Laden raid. We would only go out under the cover of darkness, as well as after very specific targets that we would’ve been following for days or weeks or months, and it was our job at that point to either kill or capture the individuals that we were out there going after. And so I go up to Washington, D.C., and I’m asked to address a few members of Congress and staffers, some White House staffers, and I’m asked to tell them a little bit about the story about the night that I was injured, and not to speak to them politically, but more so to give them a motivational speech, and so I did my best to do that.

I told these Representatives and their staffers about the night that I was injured, as I’ll tell you a little bit about right now. It was a very normal night for the assault force that I was a part of. It was September 19, 2010. It was working out of Kandahar, Afghanistan. The target that we were after was in the south of Kandahar, and as we went after this target we were out on two Chinook helicopters, and they dropped us off in a very tall marijuana field. There are a lot of marijuana fields there. There are a lot of opium fields in Afghanistan. They dropped us off in a pot field, and as they dropped us off there, it was actually on the wrong side of a river. We had to get onto the other side of this river, and as the lone bomb technician, it was essentially my job to lead and clear the way for our assault force to where we had to go to, and so as I was leading and clearing the way, I told my guys at one point we had to get across this river. There was only one place that we could get across it. If I could figure out there was only one place to get across that river, certainly any enemy that was in that area could figure out there was only one place we could get across it. I was almost certain that there were bombs buried in the ground there somewhere, so they needed to let me check things out.

Long Arm of Israel Reaches Hamas Terrorist Mohammad Zawari, father of Hamas’ UAV program, meets justice. Ari Lieberman

Aside from a bullet, it’s difficult to know what went through Mohammad Zawari’s mind when Israeli agents finally caught up with him. Perhaps he was astonished by the fact that Mossad agents were able to track and pinpoint his location within the relative safe confines of Tunisia. Or perhaps he felt regret for having rubbed the Israelis the wrong way. Either way, justice finally caught up with the man who was attempting to enhance Hamas’ Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) program and had also performed “work” for the Iranian proxy terror group, Hezbollah.

Zawari, who had been nicknamed the “engineer,” had been a prominent member of the Tunisian Muslim Brotherhood. His prominence caught the unwanted attention of Tunisian authorities prompting his flight to Syria in 1991. He returned to Tunisia following the overthrow of former Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 2011.

Zawari was deeply involved in Hamas’ UAV program and was responsible for many technical innovations in drone technology, bolstering the group’s offensive capabilities. He reportedly entered Gaza on numerous occasions through a network of tunnels crisscrossing the Gaza-Sinai border. Hamas confirmed that Zawari was a member of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades and described him as a commander “who supervised our UAV program.”

As is common practice, Israel did not acknowledge responsibility for the terrorist’s liquidation but given Zawari’s nefarious activities, it certainly had good reason to target him. Hamas has increasingly been using kites with GoPros and low tech UAVs to surveil Israel’s border communities. Israel believes that in the next war with Hamas, the terror group will attempt to infiltrate Israeli border communities through tunnels in an attempt to execute a mega attack aimed at killing or capturing as many Israelis as possible. The drones, which gather intelligence on border communities, are integral to Hamas’ diabolical plans.

Israel’s vaunted intelligence services have, over the years, done a remarkable job keeping Israel’s citizens safe from those who have dedicated their lives to killing Jews.

In 2008, Imad Mughniyah, Hezbollah’s chief military operations officer and the brainchild of its “special operations,” was liquidated in a joint Mossad/CIA operation. Mughniyah had made a career out of killing innocent civilians. After evading several assassination attempts, justice caught up with him in Damascus when explosives in the headrest of his SUV separated his head from his body.

In 2008, General Muhammad Suleiman, Bashar Assad’s chief weapons procurement adviser was liquidated at his plush seaside villa in Tartus. Suleiman was also responsible for Syria’s militarized nuclear program (Syria’s nuclear facility had been destroyed by the Israeli Air Force in 2007) and the transfer of sophisticated weaponry to Hezbollah. He was killed by Israeli snipers belonging to the Shayetet-13 unit, the Israeli equivalent to the U.S. Navy SEALS.

Flashback: Bill Clinton Gave China Missile Technology Democrats intermittently talk tough about our enemies — but only after aiding and comforting them. Matthew Vadum

With all this talk of Russians allegedly interfering in U.S. elections, it is worth recalling that it wasn’t too long ago that the previous Democrat in the White House betrayed America by working hand in hand with our Communist enemies in mainland China.

As president, Bill Clinton essentially wiped out any strategic advantage the U.S. had by selling advanced U.S. missile technology to our enemy, the People’s Republic of China.

That “administration’s voluntary release of all the secrets of America’s nuclear tests, combined with the systematic theft of the secrets that were left as a result of its lax security controls, effectively wiped out America’s technological edge,” David Horowitz writes in the recently published, The Black Book of the American Left Volume 7: The Left in Power: Clinton to Obama.

Unlike the administrations that preceded it, the Clinton administration accepted millions of dollars from the military and intelligence services of at least one hostile foreign power. All of this was done in exchange for illegal campaign contributions from a massive totalitarian country determined to eclipse the U.S. as a world superpower.

President Clinton also lifted security controls, allowing thieves to access other vital military technologies, while disarming his own side and opposing needed defenses.

“One of the key technological breaks China received, without having to spy to get it, was the deliverance of supercomputers once banned from export for security reasons,” writes Horowitz.

“Supercomputers underpin the technology of nuclear and missile warfare, and not only for firing and controlling the missiles. A supercomputer can simulate a nuclear test and is thus crucial to the development of nuclear warheads. But, according to a Washington Post editorial: ‘In the first three quarters of 1998 nine times as many [supercomputers] were exported [to China] as during the previous seven years.’”

“This transfer,” he writes, “was authorized three years after the spy thefts were detected. What rationale—besides stupidity, greed, or some other equally indefensible motive—could justify this? What responsible president or administration official, at any relevant level in any government, would allow the massive transfer of national-security assets like these to a dictatorship they knew had stolen their country’s most highly guarded military secrets?”

Back in the 1990s, as longtime Clinton bagman Terry McAuliffe, now governor of Virginia, set records raising money for the Clintons. In that era congressional investigators unearthed an elaborate Communist Chinese money-laundering scheme.

China’s Anschluss in the South China Sea Beijing is seizing all the territory it can — while it can. By Arthur Herman

China’s seizure of an American underwater drone in international waters in the South China Sea has grabbed the headlines — for good reason. It’s not often that China commits an aggressive, provocative act like this, in full view of the U.S. naval vessel that launched the drone (although China has seized U.S military gear before, as in 2001 when a Navy surveillance aircraft was forced down on Hainan Island after it collided with a chicken-playing Chinese warplane).

But China’s thievery, and our humiliation in doing nothing about it except uttering feeble protests and politely waiting for them to return the drone, is only part of a much larger strategy China has been unveiling over the past seven years. In effect, China is annexing the entire South China Sea and eliminating any claim by other countries — including the United States to navigate its waters or fly through its airspace without China’s permission. It’s essentially an Anschluss of the South China Sea, analogous to Hitler’s takeover of Austria in 1938.

The centerpiece of this effort was also revealed last week, even though it was overshadowed by the drone story. Satellite pictures show that China has built a series of air strips and hardened structures for military aircraft on three islands in the contested Spratly Islands where just three years ago there were no islands at all: Fiery Cross Reef, Mischief Reef, and Subi Reef. China’s on-going dredging operations to build its Great Wall of Sand on those sites have now created enough space for full military installations. Also, on four other nearby artificial island, China is putting antiaircraft batteries and close-in-weapons systems that can target and shoot down cruise missiles.

Those weapons can serve as the future centerpiece of a Chinese network of mobile surface-to-air missile systems installed in the Spratlys. In sum, China will probably be able to keep anyone China doesn’t like — particularly the United States — out of South China Sea airspace.

None of this comes as a surprise to those of us who have been sounding the alarm bells about China’s increasingly aggressive moves in the South China Sea. Nor is the Obama administration’s feeble and completely inadequate response to these moves a surprise. It’s an administration whose specialty has been letting the United States be humiliated, whether it’s by Iran, in the Hormuz Straits, where it grabbed our sailors and made a display of their surrender; or by Russia, in Crimea and Syria; or by China, in the South China Sea. After eight years, the whole world knows that Obama lacks the will to halt those powers that are bent on twisting the rules of the global order to their advantage.

In September, I warned that as Obama’s time in office winds down, Russia, China, and Iran will look for opportunities to seize what they can get before a new president takes office on January 20 — one who will take a very different approach to being bullied and humiliated.

The Jihad Online A case of pointless litigation By Kevin D. Williamson

Omar Mateen murdered 49 people in an Orlando nightclub, and Mark Zuckerberg did not.

But Omar Mateen was an Islamic jihadist who now is as dead as fried chicken, while Mark Zuckerberg is a Silicon Valley billionaire who is very much alive.

Hence, the lawsuit.

The families of Tevin Crosby, Javier Jorge-Reyes, and Juan Ramon Guerrero, three men killed at the Pulse gay club by Mateen in the purported service of Allah, are suing Twitter (market capitalization $12.5 billion), Facebook (market cap $341 billion), and Alphabet (that’s Google and YouTube to you, market cap $557 billion) on the theory that these technology companies did not do enough to keep the Islamic State and sundry Muslim radicals from using their platforms to recruit and inspire such acts of savagery as that in Orlando.

This is partly, perhaps mainly, a case of defendant-shopping: The families in question might plausibly have sued everybody from the Islamic State to the government of Iran to the FBI in this case, but good luck collecting on a judgment against any of them. The nerds who run Facebook and Google have billions of dollars at their disposal, no sovereign immunity, and no proclivity for cutting the heads off of those who oppose them.

Suing Mark Zuckerberg because the wack-a-doodle school of Islam uses social media is a little like suing Johannes Gutenberg for all the evil that has been done by readers of Mein Kampf, The Communist Manifesto, or The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But at the same time, Zuckerberg et al. are inviting such litigation.

The question here involves the interaction between distinct but overlapping activities: creating new kinds of communication technology; creating commercial spaces in which that technology is deployed to create a platform; producing content on those platforms, or exercising editorial control over content on those platforms.

A few examples might be illuminating. As I pointed out at the time, my hometown newspaper, the Lubbock Avalanche Journal, committed a gross and obvious libel against Rick Perry when he was the governor of Texas, (the libelous column is still on the newspaper’s website), falsely claiming, among other things, that he is a felon. When challenged on this by me and by others, the newspaper’s editors (who really ought to know better or see if their insurance plan covers self-respect implants) protested that they assumed no editorial responsibility for material published on their website, which is, as a matter of law, absurd. This is not something like, say, Daily Kos, where basically anybody can write “diaries” or the like, or the intellectual sewers that we call “comments sections.” The only reason that Rick Perry hasn’t sued the pants off of the editors and publisher of the Avalanche Journal is that doing so apparently isn’t worth his time.

Twitter, Google, and, to a much greater extent, Facebook do exercise some editorial control over their services, usually incompetently. But what they exercise is mainly either negative control (banning certain individuals, groups, or points of view, or removing material) and curatorial control. Conservatives complain, rightly, that they do this in a way that reflects their biases, which are those of corporate Democrats of the Clintonian variety. But being biased is neither a crime nor a tort, in spite of the dearest wishes of the president-elect.

Facebook and YouTube will remove certain kinds of material, either on their own volition or in response to complaints. (For YouTube, this is at least as often in response to copyright complaints as to anything else.) One line of thinking might lead us to believe that in exercising this editorial control they assume general editorial responsibilities, i.e., that by deleting material or suppressing jihadist propaganda they acquire a legal liability if they fail to do so, or fail to do so extensively and quickly enough. Under this model, these companies are more like a newspaper and less like the companies that build the newspaper’s presses or manage its fiber-optic networks.

The downside of that model of liability is obvious: If exercising some editorial discretion creates a broad and general liability for content on the site, then Facebook and Twitter have a very strong motive to exercise no responsibility at all, and to treat NAMBLA, the Islamic State, and the National Model Railroad Association as though there were no difference between any of them. Failing that, there is a motive to swing too far in the other direction, to engage in heavy-handed editorial exclusion of controversial and radical points of view, to overreact to strong language and powerful images, and to draw the boundaries of social-media discourse in the narrowest commercially viable fashion. That would not be a good outcome, either.

As imperfect, biased, and editorially incompetent as Facebook and Twitter’s ad hoc approaches are, there is not any obviously preferable alternative to them, and certainly not one that respects our free-speech traditions and the fact that these very public forums are, after all, the private property of the firms that create and operate them.

American Legislator Predicts Rosy Israeli Future During Trump Era The ardently pro-Israel Rep. Clemmons described a positive future for Israel during the Trump administration. By: Lori Lowenthal Marcus

Ardently pro-Israel American politician Alan D. Clemmons, Republican Representative in the South Carolina House of Representatives, was in Israel last week. He was there with a number of Texas state legislators whom he is helping draft and work on passing anti-BDS legislation, just as he did in South Carolina.http://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking-news/american-legislator-predicts-rosy-israeli-future-during-trump-era/2016/12/20/

Clemmons took time out of his trip to meet in Gush Etzion with American and Israeli leaders to discuss work he and others are currently doing to support the state of Israel and to find areas of future collaborations.

Clemmons was brought to Gush Etzion by the Yes! Israel Project for an event at the home of Project leader Ruth Jaffe Lieberman.

In addition to his recent work promoting anti-BDS legislation in state legislatures throughout the United States, the South Carolina legislator was instrumental in crafting the intensely pro-Israel plank for the Republican party’s platform last summer. Clemmons had tried to get similar language included in the 2012 platform but had not been successful.

The language of the plank which Clemmons helped to craft compares Israel’s vision to that of America’s, rejects dictating terms of any peace agreement by those not living in the region and calls for the termination of funding for any entity which attempts to do so. Clemmons introduced the language and shepherded it through the subcommittee and then the full committee. When the language was formally approved, the members present rose to give it a standing ovation.

Clemmons also introduced legislation into the South Carolina legislature to allow its states drivers to purchase special license plates emblazoned with the message: “South Carolina Stands With Israel,” and which contains entwined flags of South Carolina and Israel. That legislation was enacted in 2011.

Although not a member of President-Elect Trump’s transition team, Clemmons is well-connected and spoke plainly to those present about the rosy future he sees for Israel during the Trump administration.

The last many years of living under the thumb of the State Department mentality which treated peaceful Israelis and recalcitrant Arabs as equally culpable was over. During the Trump administration, Israel’s view about itself and its own sovereignty will be what sets the agenda.

2016: A Turning Point for Europe? Western nations may have finally had enough of the slaughter. Bruce Bawer

For Western Europe, 2016 began with an apocalyptic frenzy, a nightmarish vision of its possible future – namely, an avalanche of brutal sexual assaults, over a thousand of them, committed on New Year’s Eve by savage Muslim gangs in the streets and squares of Cologne and several other major German cities.

The horrific events of New Year’s Eve didn’t happen out of the blue, of course. For over a generation, thanks to irresponsible immigration policies that had never been submitted for approval to any electorate, as well as to straightforward demographic realities, Western Europe had been steadily Islamized. At first in a few large cities and eventually even in small, remote towns, the presence of Islam became more and more visible. Over time, government officials who had made these developments possible, and who had cut back their own citizens’ welfare-state entitlements in order to feed, clothe, and house newly arrived Muslims, were rewarded not with the gratitude and assimilation they had expected but with the exact opposite. Steadily, Muslim communities developed into crime-ridden, sharia-governed enclaves, increasingly explicit in their hostility to infidels, increasingly aggressive in their rejection of the values of their host cultures, and increasingly insistent on their legal independence from secular authorities. Forced marriage, female genital mutilation, and honor killing became European problems. Hijab proliferated, then (in some places at least) niqab. And authorities reacted to all of it with a feckless passivity.

Along with the quotidian reality of stealth jihad came jihad of the more headline-grabbing sort: terrorism. Only months after 9/11, the Netherlands experienced the coldblooded murder of politician Pim Fortuyn, a vocal critic of Muslim immigration and leading prime ministerial candidate; in 2004, journalist Theo van Gogh, who had just released a documentary about Islam’s treatment of women, was butchered in broad daylight on an Amsterdam street. In 2006, Muslims around the world rioted, committed major acts of vandalism, and massacred dozens in response to a Danish newspaper’s publication of cartoons of their prophet. Bombs took 191 lives in and around Madrid’s Atocha railway station in 2004 and 52 lives in London in 2005; last year saw the assassination of 12 people at the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Each time, mainstream media and public officials made haste to insist that the atrocities had nothing to do with Islam, to reaffirm their dedication to the policies that made this bloodshed possible, and to shower Europe’s Muslims with inane, unmerited praise. Europeans didn’t have to be familiar with Islamic theology to understand that, like it or not, they were at war. And they didn’t need to know the term dhimmi to recognize that their elites were kowtowing to would-be conquerors.

These elites inhabited a bubble of privilege, protected from the consequences of their own policies. Most Western Europeans did not. In the space of a few years, they’d seen their neighborhoods dramatically transformed. Their once-safe streets were dangerous. Their children were harassed at school. Jews, especially, were terrorized. There was no sign of a reversal in this rapid process of civilizational decline and destruction. And if they tried to discuss the issue honestly, they risked being labeled bigots, losing their jobs, and even being put on trial. Here and there, voters found, and supported, politicians who articulated their concerns. But the political establishment erected cordons sanitaires around them, denying them power and, when possible, dragging them, too, into court. Instead of heeding the voice of the people, officials doubled down.

Greece and Iran: The Dark Side of the Relationship by Maria Polizoidou

The Iranian government, with these two cases (Kabis and Noor 1), seems to hold in its hands a bomb that can blow up the Greek economic and political system. If Greek authorities seriously investigate these cases, they will trigger a domino-effect of disclosures that could well destabilize Greece’s government.

Iran can blackmail and manipulate its political influence inside Greece, or Iran can use its ability to destabilize a member of NATO and Eurozone, Greece, to strengthen its international position.

As Sunnis and Shiites are fighting for regional hegemony in the Middle East — Syria, Yemen — Greece, as geographical gate for Europe and the Balkans, is a trophy country for the Iranian regime. In recent years, the Iranians have been exploiting the corrupt establishment’s thirst for money. Through drug dealing and oil smuggling, Iran seems to be trying to buy political influence and access to the Greek media. Well-informed diplomatic sources say that the Iranian Embassy in Athens is extremely active in Greece’s political and economic life behind the scenes.

Until now, the Greek political and economic regime, after the junta in 1974, had always been extremely friendly to Sunni political Islam. During the Iran-Iraq war, the Greek regime sided with Iraq. Andreas Papandreou, former Prime Minister of Greece, was a close friend and supporter of the PLO and its chairman, Yasser Arafat. Greek businessmen and media owners always had close economic relationships with the Gulf States’ petrodollar business, and lobbying by Greek ship-owners, who carry Arab oil to international markets, always favored Sunni Arabs.

The influence of Sunni Islam in Greece is also large in the political and economic systems — many times stronger than in other countries of the European Union, with the Greek media always on the side of the Palestinians, Hezbollah and in recent years, many did not hide their sympathy for Hamas.

Dimitris Kabis, a professor at the University of Piraeus and recently a ship-owner — as president of Empire Shipping Limited — seems to be the protagonist in a network of oil-smuggling, arms-dealing and lobbying in Greece for the Iranian regime.

In March 2013, the US froze Kabis’s accounts, after accusing him of violating the US and EU sanctions on Iran, by bringing oil from Iran to China.

Dimitris Kabis was accused by the US that, with $500 million from Iran, he bought eight tankers for the National Iranian Tanker Company (NITC). Each of the eight tankers carried oil worth $200 million — per shipment — to China, in violation of the sanctions imposed on Tehran. In 2014, the NITC reportedly returned five of the eight tankers, but he illegally sold the remaining three in India and Bangladesh and received $100 million, which he apparently embezzled from the Iranian government.

Kabis, with the Iranian funds and a network of 20 Greek businessmen, for years supplied Iran with pharmaceuticals, weapons, high-technology products, money-laundering services and everything else Tehran needed. Among the Greek businessmen, at least one was confirmed as a TV station owner who has close relationships with Kabis.

Kabis seems to have violated an agreement signed by him and the NITC, and in July was arrested in Tehran and sent to prison. Although Tehran’s “special” court acquitted him, the Iranian seized took his passport. Kabis now resides in the Greek Embassy in Tehran, but does not have the necessary documents to return to Greece. That is why he sent a letter to the Greek Minister of Foreign Affairs to help him come back.

My ADL Problem What exactly is the famed organization fighting, and whom is it fighting for? By Jonathan Bronitsky

I’m conservative by most measures, and I’ve long known that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is markedly progressive on most policy issues. But I wasn’t looking for a brawl. I was simply searching for friendship. Relatively new to the Detroit metropolitan area, I was hoping to become more involved in the Jewish community and perhaps as well to partake in interesting discussions about domestic and international topics. That’s why I accepted an invitation from the Glass Leadership Institute, the ADL’s 10-month, nationwide program “designed for a select group of young professionals as an up-close and personal opportunity to expand their knowledge about the nation’s premier human relations organization.”

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/191920/my-adl-problem

The thought of publishing something about the ADL didn’t cross my mind until I attended the ADL’s National Leadership Summit in May, about seven months after beginning the program. And even once the thought had crossed my mind, I hesitated in putting pen to paper. I wanted to give the ADL the benefit of the doubt. Maybe I had been too critical—or just too thin-skinned. I decided, however, that I needed to share.

First, I hope this essay persuades the ADL, which is heavily invested in antibullying (e.g., “No Place For Hate” campaign), to consider that it itself has become a bully to conservatives who remain in its ranks. Shutting out right-leaning individuals through crowd intimidation and derision weakens coalitions, which are vital in advocacy work. This behavior also diminishes the organization’s values, which will turn stale and trite when left unchallenged.

Secondly, I want the ADL to revisit and clarify its mission. “The nation’s premier civil rights/human relations agency,” asserts that it “fights anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry”; not just “all forms of bigotry,” but “anti-Semitism” and then “all forms of bigotry.” Yet as murderous anti-Semitism around the globe has surged in recent years, the ADL has dedicated itself more and more to matters of social justice in America (e.g., immigration, women’s reproductive health, economic “privilege”) that are already being pursued by a plethora of lobbying outlets and activist foundations. This wouldn’t be problematic—or rather, duplicitous—per se. But the ADL loudly and incessantly bemoans the fact that Jews are living in an increasingly dangerous world. “Thirty or forty years ago,” I heard over and over again at the National Leadership Summit, “I couldn’t have imagined that Jews would be getting shot dead in the streets of Europe.”

Well, resources are limited. Is combatting anti-Semitism a “priority” for the ADL? If so, then the organization should put its money where its mouth is. Alas, this outcome seems ever more unlikely as it seeks to enforce group conformity and advance political agendas that have nothing to do with defending the Jewish people.

***

Unlike the ADL leadership, or those members of the leadership with whom I’ve had contact, I genuinely believe in diversity of opinion and its ability to generate and nurture progress. Having spent a chunk of the past decade in the Ivory Tower, I have witnessed the stultifying effects of ideological uniformity upon scholarship and society. The most rewarding conversations I had during that period were with individuals on the Far Left. (For instance, I learned a lot about the strengths and weakness of philosophies on both ends of the political spectrum from the Cambridge Marxist Discussion Group.) They forced me to revisit and, occasionally, refine some of my principal notions. As a result, not infrequently, my rivals and I discovered common ground.

Part of my frustration with the ADL stems from its blatant intellectual dishonesty, which may arise from the organization’s fundraising ambitions. It’s difficult to convey just how intellectually insulting, how patronizing it was to be repetitively told by winking staff members that their organization is “nonpartisan.” If the ADL, which possesses 501(c)(3) designation, touts a legislative agenda that mirrors that of the Obama Administration, then what organization is partisan? True, the ADL does not participate in Democratic political campaigns and, therefore, keeps its tax-exempt status. But is it really in the spirit of the law/IRS code for the ADL to laud liberalism and disparage conservatism? And how does this conduct aid Jews in Europe and elsewhere who are literally under fire?