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April 2017

Hungary Threatens to Close University Funded by George Soros by Kieran Corcoran

The government of Hungary is planning to pass new laws that would shut down a major university founded and funded by liberal billionaire George Soros.

Conservative leaders in the country want to implement extra regulation that would make it impossible for Soros’s Central European University (CEU) in Budapest to keep operating.

According to POLITICO, legislation proposed in the Hungarian parliament would revoke the institution’s ability to award degrees.

The move is part of a wider crackdown on the influence of foreign money in Hungarian politics.

Soros was born in Hungary, and spends significant sums on non-profits in the country, but is a naturalized US citizen.

CEU is technically an American institution, and is accredited to award degrees by the state of New York, despite having no physical presence there.

The proposed laws would ban institutions based outside the EU from issuing degrees unless they have a campus in their home territory as well.

A Hungarian government statement said: “Several institutions are acting unlawfully when they issue foreign university degrees here in Hungary while not conducting teaching in their country of origin, as prescribed by Hungarian regulations…

“The government will be making the Hungarian regulations stricter to include the fact that universities from outside the EU can only hold courses and issue degrees in Hungary on the basis of an international treaty.”

CEU officials claim the law has been written specifically to target them.

There is no love lost between Soros and Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party, who come from opposite ends of the political spectrum.

The new proposals have been condemned by Soros’s Open Society Network, university officials and the local US Embassy.

Telegraphic reminders of reality by Ruthie Blum

Upon her return from a class trip to Poland, taken as part of her Israeli high school education, my ‎daughter recounted with passion the experience of seeing the Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau — now a museum of atrocities — in person. ‎

I asked her how she felt about the letter I and the other parents had been instructed to write in secret, which the teacher was to ‎distribute three days after the 11th graders arrived in Poland. In my letter, I tried to provide ‎comfort for the emotional distress I assumed she would feel seeing the fingernail marks on the walls of the gas chambers ‎and the rooms full of Jewish hair, eyeglasses and shoes. But I also wanted to say something ‎uplifting about the history and future of our people, without prompting a cynical roll of her eyes.‎

I did this by expressing how proud I was to be the mother of native Israeli children, born and raised in ‎the Jewish state established just a few years after Adolf Hitler’s defeat and unsuccessful attempt at ‎executing the Final Solution. This, I told her, was one answer to her and her brothers’ occasional questions about why I left the land of Toys ‘R’ Us and Macy’s for Jerusalem, of all places.‎

‎”You’re not going to believe this coincidence,” my daughter said. “A girl in my class whose mother is ‎American wrote almost the same thing as you did. But her conclusion was that this was why we ‎needed a Palestinian state.”‎

This story came to mind with the release Thursday of a German-language telegram sent by Third Reich ‎SS commander Heinrich Himmler to Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini. The document, ‎dated around Nov. 2, 1943, was uncovered in the archives of Israel’s National Library. ‎

‎”From the outset, the National Socialist [Nazi] movement of Greater Germany has been a standard ‎bearer in the battle against world Jewry,” Himmler wrote to al-Husseini. “For this reason, it is closely ‎following the battle of freedom-seeking Arabs, particularly in Palestine, against the Jewish invaders. ‎The shared recognition of the enemy and the joint fight against it are creating the strong base [uniting] ‎Germany and freedom-seeking Arabs around the world. In this spirit, I am pleased to wish you, on the ‎‎[26th] anniversary of the wretched Balfour Declaration, warm wishes on your continued fight until the ‎great victory.”‎

What is striking about this telegram is not its contents — which simply constitute yet further evidence ‎of the warm relations between the Nazis and the mufti — but rather how similar its sentiments are to ‎those regularly voiced today. Not in Germany, where one could face charges for such anti-‎Semitic rhetoric, but in the Arab world and Palestinian Authority. ‎

In other words, my daughter did not have to travel to Europe for a tour of Hitler’s gas chambers to be ‎exposed to a purposeful and concerted effort to wipe her and her classmates off the face of the ‎earth.‎

The Continuing Syrian Crisis and America’s Conundrums by Andrew Harrod

A Hudson Institute panel examines the difficult choices facing the United States in Mesopotamia.

“It is a vexed question, the end state,” stated Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Michael Doran concerning conflict-wracked Iraq and Syria during a March 10 Hudson Institute presentation in Washington, DC. His assessment would strike many as a dramatic understatement concerning the difficult challenges facing American policy in a murderously sectarian region discussed by him and his fellow panelists.

Providence Managing Editor Marc LiVecche criticized international inaction by the United States and other countries during the Syrian civil war between the Bashar al-Assad dictatorship and rebels since 2011. “The longer you continue avoiding, or not making intentionally, the right decisions then the negative consequences continue to barrel along through history, multiplying like bunnies.” The resulting quagmire is “making any right thing incredibly difficult, first to identify, and second to do.”

Yet Doran’s analysis indicated that appeals for action are easier said than done, particularly concerning safe zone proposals for Mesopotamian populations seeking shelter from the region’s maelstrom. “If you want to have control over it, you are talking about a significant application of direct American force and Americans, or working through proxies that have their own agenda that we may or may not agree with it.” He wondered about possible American responses if Assad’s Iranian and Russian allies “start pushing refugees into the safe zone” through this coalition’s favored tactic of ethnic cleansing. Alternatively, “what if Al Qaeda, ISIS [Islamic State in Iraq and Syria], and the Iranians and the Russians start creating sleeping cells in the safe zones?”

“In order to police the actual safe zone, you have to be ready to impose costs on the Iranians and Russians if they take any step that threatens your policy,” Doran stated. Thus “you are immediately in a competition with the Iranians and the Russians and you have to be willing to win the competition ladder. That requires a very significant American force package in the region.” “If our action in Syria is seen as a threat to the Iranian position, and it will be, the Iranians could act anywhere—it is one strategic theater” in the Middle East; “they could flood the Green Zone in Baghdad with Iraqi Shiite militiamen and so on.”

Doran noted that establishing safe zones “is not a solution, it has to be part of something larger” and that in fighting ISIS, “we need to be aware of the larger strategic context while we are taking care of this urgent problem.” He thus concluded:

Let’s drop the notion that defeating ISIS is our grand strategic goal in the region. Our grand strategic goal in the region is to build a new order in the region. To build a new order in the region we need partners. To get the partners we have to show that we are willing to compete with the Iranians and the Russians and that means we are also hostile to the Assad regime. It doesn’t mean we have to say regime change in Syria tomorrow, it doesn’t mean we have to drive the Russians all the way out of the region.

“We want to create an order that is favorable or at least acceptable to our major partners in the region,” Doran stated, but currently “what everybody sees is that the United States is ushering in an Iranian-Russian order.” This strategic situation helped explain why over 60 nations in an anti-ISIS coalition had not defeated ISIS’ “30,000 nasty guys in pickup trucks for over a year” as these nations “don’t really want to do the job.” America is the “only power on earth that thinks the destruction of ISIS is the number one priority in the Middle East. Everybody else is asking themselves what new order is going to replace the ISIS order, is it going to work to my advantage or not.”

Candidate Clinton and the Foundation April 23, 2015

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s determination to reconnect with voters in localized, informative settings is commendable, but is in danger of being overshadowed by questions about the interplay of politics and wealthy foreign donors who support the Clinton Foundation.

Nothing illegal has been alleged about the foundation, the global philanthropic initiative founded by former President Bill Clinton. But no one knows better than Mrs. Clinton that this is the tooth-and-claw political season where accusations are going to fly for the next 19 months. And no one should know better than the former senator and first lady that they will fester if straightforward answers are not offered to the public.

The increasing scrutiny of the foundation has raised several points that need to be addressed by Mrs. Clinton and the former president. These relate most importantly to the flow of multimillions in donations from foreigners and others to the foundation, how Mrs. Clinton dealt with potential conflicts as secretary of state and how she intends to guard against such conflicts should she win the White House.

The only plausible answer is full and complete disclosure of all sources of money going to the foundation. And the foundation needs to reinstate the ban on donations from foreign governments for the rest of her campaign — the same prohibition that was in place when she was in the Obama administration.

The messiness of her connection with the foundation has been shown in a report by The Times on a complex business deal involving Canadian mining entrepreneurs who made donations to the foundation and were at the time selling their uranium company to the Russian state-owned nuclear energy company. That deal, which included uranium mining stakes in the United States, required approval by the federal government, including the State Department.

Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal April 23, 2015

The headline on the website Pravda trumpeted President Vladimir V. Putin’s latest coup, its nationalistic fervor recalling an era when its precursor served as the official mouthpiece of the Kremlin: “Russian Nuclear Energy Conquers the World.”

The article, in January 2013, detailed how the Russian atomic energy agency, Rosatom, had taken over a Canadian company with uranium-mining stakes stretching from Central Asia to the American West. The deal made Rosatom one of the world’s largest uranium producers and brought Mr. Putin closer to his goal of controlling much of the global uranium supply chain.

But the untold story behind that story is one that involves not just the Russian president, but also a former American president and a woman who would like to be the next one.

At the heart of the tale are several men, leaders of the Canadian mining industry, who have been major donors to the charitable endeavors of former President Bill Clinton and his family. Members of that group built, financed and eventually sold off to the Russians a company that would become known as Uranium One.

Beyond mines in Kazakhstan that are among the most lucrative in the world, the sale gave the Russians control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States. Since uranium is considered a strategic asset, with implications for national security, the deal had to be approved by a committee composed of representatives from a number of United States government agencies. Among the agencies that eventually signed off was the State Department, then headed by Mr. Clinton’s wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

As the Russians gradually assumed control of Uranium One in three separate transactions from 2009 to 2013, Canadian records show, a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton Foundation. Uranium One’s chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling $2.35 million. Those contributions were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons, despite an agreement Mrs. Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors. Other people with ties to the company made donations as well.

And shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One, Mr. Clinton received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock.

The Myth of Jewish Theft of Arab Land Alex Grobman, PhD

One of the most persistent canards Arabs have exploited against Israel is that she stole Palestinian Arab land, which explains why this dispute remains intractable. This fabrication has led the media to label Israel as occupiers of Palestinian Arab lands. An examination of what the Jews found as they returned to their ancestral homeland, the enormous obstacles they encountered and how they overcame them should debunk this lie. 1

Those Jews who settled in the Yishuv, the Jewish community in the land of Israel before the establishment of the Israeli state, came to a land that was sparsely populated and economically underdeveloped, with sizeable regions of desert, semiarid wilderness and swamps. Before the British arrived in Palestine at the end of World War I, the Ottoman government had practically no involvement in regulating land use, health and sanitary conditions or controls on the construction of private and public buildings. Except for a few roads and a rail line that projected imperial power, there were few public works projects. Resident Arabs, traditional in outlook, had no interest in new plans for their communities. For Herzl and other European Zionists, Turkish Palestine, was inviting because of its lack of government accountability, absence of local Arab initiative, and the “empty landscape.” 2

Condition of the Land

The task facing the early Jewish pioneers in purchasing land and resurrecting neglected desert regions, malarial valleys, swamps, hills and sand seemed almost insurmountable.3 Walter Clay Lowdermilk, a soil conservationist who reclaimed lands throughout the world, found Palestine “a

land impoverished by erosion and neglect.” The “soils were eroded off the uplands to bedrock over fully one-half the hills; streams across the coastal plains were chocked with erosional debris from the hills to form pestilential marshes infested with dreaded malaria; the fair cities and elaborate works of ancient times were left in doleful ruins.” 4

Henry Baker Tristram, an English clergyman and biblical scholar, describes the situation in the mid-19th century: “A few years ago, the whole Ghor [the Jordan Valley] was in the hands of the fellahin, and much of it cultivated for corn. Now the whole of it is in the hands of the Bedouin, who eschew all agriculture, except in a few spots cultivated here and there by their slaves; and with the Bedouin come lawlessness and the uprooting of all Turkish authority. No government is now acknowledged on the east side; and unless the Porte acts with greater firmness and caution than is his wont, it will lose the last vestige of authority on the right bank also, and a wide strip of the most fertile land in all Palestine will be desolated and given up to the Nomads.

The same thing is now going on over the plain of Sharon, where, both in the north and south, land is going out of cultivation, and whole villages rapidly disappearing from the face of the earth. Since the year 1838, no less than 20 villages have been thus erased from the map and the stationary population extirpated. Very rapidly the Bedouin are encroaching wherever horse can be ridden; and the Government is utterly powerless to resist them or to defend its subjects.”5

Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Dean of Westminster Abbey, added what he saw in Palestine in 1853: “In Judea it is hardly an exaggeration to say that whilst for miles and miles there is no appearance of present life or habitation, except the occasional goat herd on the hill side, or gathering of women at the wells, there is hardly a hill-top of the many within sight which is not covered by the vestiges of some fortress city of former ages. Sometimes they are fragments of ancient walls, sometimes mere foundations and piles of stone, but always enough to indicate signs of human habitation and civilisation…. But the general fact of the ruins of Palestine, whether erect or fallen, remains common to the whole country; deepens and confirm, if it does not create, the impression of age and decay, which belongs to almost every view of Palestine, and invests it with an appearance which can be called by no other name than venerable.” 6

In 1894, Scottish theologian George Adam Smith published his comprehensive investigative report on the Holy Land in which he said: “Judah has lost his eyes, and his raiment is in rags.”7