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June 2017

A Tweet Is Just a Tweet: It Tells Us Nothing about Whether Trump Is Under Investigation By Andrew C. McCarthy

Can we all stipulate that no one ever wants to be the subject of an investigation? If you are innocent of wrongdoing, the fact that there is no meritorious criminal case is often beside the point.

There is a stigma attached to being an investigative subject. Many people who do not appreciate how politicized the legal system has become will conclude that if you are under investigation, you must have done something wrong. Some other people who know precisely how politicized the legal system has become, and like it that way, will exploit the fact that you are under investigation to stigmatize you. Public perception aside, being the subject of an investigation is also debilitating because of the time it takes to defend oneself, the financial burden of retaining lawyers (and, for a public official, retaining press agents who can deal with the media frenzy), and the anxiety that makes it difficult to focus on one’s job and other responsibilities.

President Trump is now in the grip of this situation. This weekend, it produced some of the more excruciating news coverage in recent memory as one of his lawyers, Jay Sekulow, was tendentiously grilled on the question of whether the president has conceded that he is under investigation.

Like many Trump problems, this one was caused by a Trump tweet. Foolishly allowing himself to be baited by a Washington Post report that special counsel Robert Mueller is now weighing whether the president committed an obstruction crime, Trump tweeted: “I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt[.]”

Clearly, Trump is exasperated over what he sees as much ado about nothing. Constitutionally, the president does not need a reason to fire the FBI director, who — like every unelected subordinate official in the executive branch — serves at the president’s pleasure. Before Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, Rod Rosenstein, the Trump-appointed deputy attorney general, wrote a memorandum recommending that Comey be dismissed. In the subsequent furor over Comey’s dismissal — largely stoked by Trump’s conflicting reasons for firing the director, which first adopted but then parted company with Rosenstein’s memo — Rosenstein appointed Mueller as special counsel. In that role, Mueller is not independent — he answers to Rosenstein (because Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, is recused). So technically, Trump is correct: The man who wrote the memo endorsing Comey’s removal has authorized an investigation that is reportedly probing whether that removal somehow constituted a felony.

Straight talk and Palestinian ‘intent’ By Shoshana Bryen

President Donald Trump’s straight talk about veneration of violence in Palestinian society has had important consequences. It was the catalyst for Norway and Denmark to disassociate from the Palestinian Authority (P.A.) habit of naming public spaces for terrorists. UNRWA, the Red Crescent (UAE), and the U.N. secretary general have all denounced various terrorist behaviors of both Hamas and the P.A. Whether they did it from conviction or are just moving in the direction they believe the president of the United States wants them to go is almost irrelevant – they’re going there.

However, when it comes to what the P.A. itself says, caution and a heaping tablespoon of salt are required. The P.A. fears that a key source of foreign aid – the U.S. government – is finally fed up with Palestinian behavior, both incitement and payments, and may pull the plug. The House and Senate are considering the Taylor Force Act – which would require certification that the P.A.:

Is taking steps to end acts of violence against U.S. and Israeli citizens perpetrated by individuals under its jurisdictional control, such as the March 2016 attack that killed former Army officer Taylor Force;
Is publicly condemning such acts of violence and is investigating, or cooperating in investigations of, such acts; and
Has terminated payments for acts of terrorism against U.S. and Israeli citizens to any individual who has been convicted and imprisoned for such acts, to any individual who died committing such acts, and to family members of such an individual.

That’s good reason for them to worry, but the salt of skepticism was missing when U.S. secretary of state Rex Tillerson announced in a Senate hearing, “They [the P.A.] have changed that policy and their intent is to cease the payments to the families of those who have committed murder or violence against others. We have been very clear with them that this is simply not acceptable to us.”

He may have been clear, but Palestinian “intent” is a twisty, bendy thing, especially since the P.A. claimed that it had already stopped paying in 2014. If it stopped then, why does it have to “intend” to stop now?

Two months ago, I wrote for The Gatestone Institute:

Largely through the work of Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), the question of payments to terrorists and their families has come to the fore. Worried about foreign aid payments from the U.S. and the EU, in 2014 the Palestinian Authority claimed it stopped paying salaries and that future money would come from a new PLO Commission of Prisoner Affairs. However, PMW reported from Palestinian sources:

“The PLO Commission was new only in name. The PLO body would have the ‎same responsibilities and pay the exact same amounts of salaries to prisoners; the former P.A. Minister of Prisoners’ Affairs, Issa Karake, became the Director of the new ‎PLO Commission and P.A. Chairman Mahmoud Abbas retained overall supervision of ‎the PLO Commission.”

Otto Warmbier, American student who was detained by North Korea, has died

June 19 (Reuters) – U.S. student Otto Warmbier, who was imprisoned in North Korea for 17 months before being returned home in a coma less than a week ago, has died in a Cincinnati hospital, his family said in a statement on Monday.

“Unfortunately, the awful torturous mistreatment our son received at the hands of the North Koreans ensured that no other outcome was possible beyond the sad one we experienced today,” the family said in a statement following Warmbier’s death at 2:20 p.m. EDT (1820 GMT) at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center.

The 2016 Election and the Demise of Journalistic Standards Michael Goodwin *****

“Which brings me to the third necessary ingredient in determining where we go from here. It’s you. I urge you to support the media you like. As the great writer and thinker Midge Decter once put it, “You have to join the side you’re on.” It’s no secret that newspapers and magazines are losing readers and money and shedding staff. Some of them are good newspapers. Some of them are good magazines. There are also many wonderful, thoughtful, small publications and websites that exist on a shoestring. Don’t let them die. Subscribe or contribute to those you enjoy. Give subscriptions to friends. Put your money where your heart and mind are. An expanded media landscape that better reflects the diversity of public preferences would, in time, help create a more level political and cultural arena. That would be a great thing. So again I urge you: join the side you’re on.”

…..Ronald Reagan’s optimism is often expressed in a story that is surely apocryphal, but irresistible. He is said to have come across a barn full of horse manure and remarked cheerfully that there must be a pony in it somewhere. I suggest we look at the media landscape in a similar fashion. The mismatch between the mainstream media and the public’s sensibilities means there is a vast untapped market for news and views that are not now represented. To realize that potential, we only need three ingredients, and we already have them: first, free speech; second, capitalism and free markets; and the third ingredient is you, the consumers of news.

Free speech is under assault, most obviously on many college campuses, but also in the news media, which presents a conformist view to its audience and gets a politically segregated audience in return. Look at the letters section in The New York Times—virtually every reader who writes in agrees with the opinions of the paper. This isn’t a miracle; it’s a bubble. Liberals used to love to say, “I don’t agree with your opinion, but I would fight to the death for your right to express it.” You don’t hear that anymore from the Left. Now they want to shut you up if you don’t agree. And they are having some success.

But there is a countervailing force. Look at what happened this winter when the Left organized boycotts of department stores that carried Ivanka Trump’s clothing and jewelry. Nordstrom folded like a cheap suit, but Trump’s supporters rallied on social media and Ivanka’s company had its best month ever. This is the model I have in mind for the media. It is similar to how FOX News got started. Rupert Murdoch thought there was an untapped market for a more fair and balanced news channel, and he recruited Roger Ailes to start it more than 20 years ago. Ailes found a niche market alright—half the country!

Incredible advances in technology are also on the side of free speech. The explosion of choices makes it almost impossible to silence all dissent and gain a monopoly, though certainly Facebook and Google are trying.

As for the necessity of preserving capitalism, look around the world. Nations without economic liberty usually have little or no dissent. That’s not a coincidence. In this, I’m reminded of an enduring image from the Occupy Wall Street movement. That movement was a pestilence, egged on by President Obama and others who view other people’s wealth as a crime against the common good. This attitude was on vivid display as the protesters held up their iPhones to demand the end of capitalism. As I wrote at the time, did they believe Steve Jobs made each and every Apple product one at a time in his garage? Did they not have a clue about how capital markets make life better for more people than any other system known to man? They had no clue. And neither do many government officials, who think they can kill the golden goose and still get golden eggs.

Which brings me to the third necessary ingredient in determining where we go from here. It’s you. I urge you to support the media you like. As the great writer and thinker Midge Decter once put it, “You have to join the side you’re on.” It’s no secret that newspapers and magazines are losing readers and money and shedding staff. Some of them are good newspapers. Some of them are good magazines. There are also many wonderful, thoughtful, small publications and websites that exist on a shoestring. Don’t let them die. Subscribe or contribute to those you enjoy. Give subscriptions to friends. Put your money where your heart and mind are. An expanded media landscape that better reflects the diversity of public preferences would, in time, help create a more level political and cultural arena. That would be a great thing. So again I urge you: join the side you’re on.

As his rallies grew, the coverage grew, which made for an odd dynamic. The candidate nobody in the media took seriously was attracting the most people to his events and getting the most news coverage. Newspapers got in on the game too. Trump, unlike most of his opponents, was always available to the press, and could be counted on to say something outrageous or controversial that made a headline. He made news by being a spectacle.

Despite the mockery of journalists and late-night comics, something extraordinary was happening. Trump was dominating a campaign none of the smart money thought he could win. And then, suddenly, he was winning. Only when the crowded Republican field began to thin and Trump kept racking up primary and caucus victories did the media’s tone grow more serious.

One study estimated that Trump had received so much free airtime that if he had had to buy it, the price would have been $2 billion. The realization that they had helped Trump’s rise seemed to make many executives, producers, and journalists furious. By the time he secured the nomination and the general election rolled around, they were gunning for him. Only two people now had a chance to be president, and the overwhelming media consensus was that it could not be Donald Trump. They would make sure of that. The coverage of him grew so vicious and one-sided that last August I wrote a column on the unprecedented bias. Under the headline “American Journalism Is Collapsing Before Our Eyes,” I wrote that the so-called cream of the media crop was “engaged in a naked display of partisanship” designed to bury Trump and elect Hillary Clinton.

The evidence was on the front page, the back page, the culture pages, even the sports pages. It was at the top of the broadcast and at the bottom of the broadcast. Day in, day out, in every media market in America, Trump was savaged like no other candidate in memory. We were watching the total collapse of standards, with fairness and balance tossed overboard. Every story was an opinion masquerading as news, and every opinion ran in the same direction—toward Clinton and away from Trump.

For the most part, I blame The New York Times and The Washington Post for causing this breakdown. The two leading liberal newspapers were trying to top each other in their demonization of Trump and his supporters. They set the tone, and most of the rest of the media followed like lemmings.

On one level, tougher scrutiny of Trump was clearly defensible. He had a controversial career and lifestyle, and he was seeking the presidency as his first job in government. He also provided lots of fuel with some of his outrageous words and deeds during the campaign. But from the beginning there was also a second element to the lopsided coverage. The New York Times has not endorsed a Republican for president since Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, meaning it would back a dead raccoon if it had a “D” after its name. Think of it—George McGovern over Richard Nixon? Jimmy Carter over Ronald Reagan? Walter Mondale over Reagan? Any Democrat would do. And The Washington Post, which only started making editorial endorsements in the 1970s, has never once endorsed a Republican for president.

But again, I want to emphasize that 2016 had those predictable elements plus a whole new dimension. This time, the papers dropped the pretense of fairness and jumped headlong into the tank for one candidate over the other. The Times media reporter began a story this way:

If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalist tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?

I read that paragraph and I thought to myself, well, that’s actually an easy question. If you feel that way about Trump, normal journalistic ethics would dictate that you shouldn’t cover him. You cannot be fair. And you shouldn’t be covering Hillary Clinton either, because you’ve already decided who should be president. Go cover sports or entertainment. Yet the Times media reporter rationalized the obvious bias he had just acknowledged, citing the view that Clinton was “normal” and Trump was not.

I found the whole concept appalling. What happened to fairness? What happened to standards? I’ll tell you what happened to them. The Times top editor, Dean Baquet, eliminated them. In an interview last October with the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, Baquet admitted that the piece by his media reporter had nailed his own thinking. Trump “challenged our language,” he said, and Trump “will have changed journalism.” Of the daily struggle for fairness, Baquet had this to say: “I think that Trump has ended that struggle. . . . We now say stuff. We fact check him. We write it more powerfully that [what he says is] false.”

Baquet was being too modest. Trump was challenging, sure, but it was Baquet who changed journalism. He’s the one who decided that the standards of fairness and nonpartisanship could be abandoned without consequence.

Listen to Eastern Europe EU bureaucrats should hear the message loud and clear: Muslim migration waves are a pressing problem, and the public is fed up. By Michael Brendan Dougherty

The European Union announced this week that it would begin proceedings to punish Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic for their refusal to accept refugees and migrants under a 2015 scheme the E.U. commission created. The mission’s aim was to relieve Greece and Italy of the burden from migrant waves arriving from the Middle East and Africa, largely facilitated by European rescues of migrants in the Mediterranean.

The conflict between the EU and these three nations of the Visegrád Group is not just about the authority the EU can arrogate to itself when facing an emergency (one largely of its own making), but about the character of European government and society in the future. It is hard not to conclude that the dissenting countries are correct to dissent. Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia had voted against the 2015 agreement. Poland’s government had supported it then, but a subsequent election saw a new party come into power that rejected the scheme.

There is no doubt that Italy and Greece are under strain. This week the mayor of Rome, Virginia Raggi, pleaded with the Italian government to stop the inflow of people to her city. Raggi is a member of the Five Star Movement a Euroskeptic and anti-mass-migration association. Her election was a distress signal in itself, sent by the electorate. And Raggi has sent another such signal to Italy’s government, saying that it is “impossible, as well as risky to think up further accommodation structures.”

But the EU’s plan to impose sanctions on Eastern Europe has been met by unusually frank talk from dissenters there. Mariusz Błaszczak, the interior minister of Poland, said in an interview that taking in migrants would be worse than facing EU sanctions. “The security of Poland and the Poles is at risk” by taking in migrants, he said, “We mustn’t forget the terror attacks that have taken place in Western Europe, and how — in the bigger EU countries — these are unfortunately now a fact of life.”

The Polish government certainly has the wind of democratic support at its back. The truth is that the majority in nearly every European country says that migration from Muslim countries into Europe should be slowed down or stopped entirely. In Poland, less than 10 percent of respondents disagree with the statement that “all immigration from majority Muslim nations should be stopped.”

When public sentiment runs so strongly this way, and the sentiment of the political class runs the other way, coercive measures such as sanctions become inevitable. But that coercion may be dangerous to the continuation of the European project.

This week, former Czech Republic president Vaclav Klaus issued a fiery denunciation of the EU’s scheme: “We are protesting the attempt to punish us and force us into obedience.” He said that his nation should prepare itself to exit the European Union altogether. But he also took all the subtext hiding behind refugee politics and made it explicit. “We refuse to permit the transformation of our country into a multicultural society . . . as we currently see in France and in Great Britain.”

In the past year, Western European politicians often scolded Eastern European governments for retreating from European values, “the open society,” and democracy. And Eastern Europeans on social media just as often threw that rhetoric back in their face. Which looked more like an open democratic society, Paris with its landmarks patrolled by the military — or Krawkow, with its Christmas market unspoiled by the need for automatic weapons?

Team Trump Cannot Fear the I-Word The president didn’t do anything impeachable, but his aides need to say so. By Andrew C. McCarthy

Impeachment.

See, it’s not that hard. All together now: Impeachment . . . impeachment . . . impeachment.

Don’t be fraidy-scared. It’s okay to say the “I-word.” Really.

Apparently, Team Trump doesn’t think so.

It was painful to watch Trump apologists fan out in the media to defend the president over the weekend. They have a persuasive argument to make against the obstruction probe reportedly being pursued by special counsel Robert Mueller. But it cannot be made without discussing impeachment.

It seems Team Trump has calculated that the word “impeachment” must be resisted — that utterances of it would cross a psychological barrier, normalize public consideration of it, begin to create the political conditions in which it could actually happen.

It is a bad strategic call. It is like telling your advocates: “Go explain two-plus-two. But whatever you do, don’t mention the word ‘four.’”

Here is how this works.

There is no legal obstruction case against President Trump. As we have repeatedly explained, obstruction requires prosecutors to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a public official acted corruptly in endeavoring to influence or interfere with an investigation. To establish the corrupt mental state, prosecutors must prove that the official knew what he was doing was against the law.

The president’s actions here, no matter how much one might judge them ham-handed or inappropriate, were not against the law. A president has prosecutorial discretion: He may lawfully shut down an investigation, to say nothing of merely influencing it. And the intelligence services exist to serve the president: He may lawfully terminate any intelligence-collection effort he chooses to.

In point of fact, Trump did not shut down the investigation of Michael Flynn or the counterintelligence probe of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election. Since he had the authority to bring these investigations to a screeching halt, he cannot have acted corruptly by taking lesser lawful action. Period.

The claim that Trump may be guilty of a prosecutable obstruction crime is premised on a legal error – namely, that the FBI and the Justice Department are a separate branch of government, independent of the executive. In fact, they are subordinate to the president. The power they exercise, as inferior officers, is the president’s power. It does not matter whether an FBI director finds it troubling that a president makes suggestions to him about how a case should be handled. The president gets to do that. If the FBI director finds that intolerable, he can resign. The director’s comfort level is constitutionally irrelevant.

Prosecutorial discretion is part of a continuum of executive police powers that includes the ultimate interference in law-enforcement: the pardon power. No matter how offended we are when a president pardons (or commutes the sentences of) serious criminals, the matter is unreviewable by the courts. The president may not be prosecuted for obstruction of justice over it, even though it seems like a profound obstruction of justice, because the president has the indisputable authority to take the action.

Palestinians Praise Terror Attack by Bassam Tawil

President Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority (PA), which is funded by Americans and Europeans, has once again chosen to maintain silence following a terror attack perpetrated by Palestinians. This silence of Abbas and his PA leadership, specifically their refusal to condemn the terror attack, can only be interpreted as an endorsement of the killing of Jews.

This is the twisted logic of Abbas and his people: How dare Israeli police officers shoot terrorists armed with knives and a submachine gun and prevent them from killing more Jews?

One wonders: how does this public endorsement of the Jerusalem terror attack and the terrorists stand up to Abbas’s promise to President Trump to stop anti-Israel incitement and “promote a culture of peace” among Palestinians?

For many Palestinians, the stabbing murder of a 23-year-old Israeli Border Police officer in Jerusalem on June 16 is an act of “heroism” that proves that the “revolution against the Zionist entity will continue until the liberation of Palestine, from the (Mediterranean) sea to the (Jordan) river.”

For many Palestinians, the three terrorists who murdered the young woman, Hadas Malka, are “heroes” and “martyrs” who will be rewarded by Allah in Paradise.

President Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority (PA), which is funded by Americans and Europeans, has once again chosen to maintain silence following a terror attack perpetrated by Palestinians. This silence of Abbas and his PA leadership, specifically their refusal to condemn the terror attack, can only be interpreted as an endorsement of the killing of Jews.

The silence of Mahmoud Abbas following the Jerusalem terror attack, specifically his refusal to condemn the attack, can only be interpreted as an endorsement of the killing of Jews. (Photo by Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images)

Moreover, in a move reminiscent of a demented Alice in Wonderland, Abbas’s ruling Fatah faction, which is often described by Westerners as “moderate” and “pragmatic,” publicly blasted Israel for killing the three terrorists who murdered the policewoman and wounded several others.

In a statement published in Ramallah shortly after the terror attack, Fatah “condemned the Israeli occupation forces for killing three young Palestinian men in East Jerusalem.” It said that the killing of the three terrorists “proves that the Israeli government is pursuing its policy of escalation.” Fatah called on the international community to “seriously look into providing protection for the defenseless Palestinian people.”

The Fatah statement failed to mention that the three Palestinian “young men” were armed with knives and a homemade submachine gun. Nor did Fatah mention a word about the Border Police officer who was stabbed to death in the terror attack.

Such a statement could never have been published without the approval of Abbas and his top cronies in Ramallah. They even seem to have endorsed the Fatah communiqué by publishing it on the website of the PA’s official news agency, Wafa. This agency is managed and funded by the PA, which also appoints the editors and journalists working there.

This is the twisted logic of Abbas and his people: How dare Israeli police officers shoot terrorists armed with knives and a machinegun and prevent them from killing more Jews?

Fatah spokesperson Osama Qawassmeh went as far as accusing Israel of committing a “war crime” by killing the terrorists and thwarting a bigger attack. He called on the international community to condemn Israel for the “cold-blooded” killing of the three terrorists in Jerusalem, dubbing it a “cruel crime.” Qawassmeh, who is considered a trusted advisor and confidant of Abbas, seized the opportunity to heap praise on the terrorists, describing them as “martyrs.” Palestinians, he added, should remain faithful to the “blood of the martyrs” by “holding on to their lands and holy sites and defending them.”

One wonders: how does this public endorsement of the Jerusalem terror attack and the terrorists stand up to Abbas’s promise to US President Donald Trump to stop anti-Israel incitement and “promote a culture of peace” among Palestinians?

This is but further proof in an endless string of damning evidence concerning the ‘peace lies’ spouted by Abbas and his PA. The PA president is always among the first to denounce terror attacks around the world, including Britain, France and Germany. Yet when Palestinians murder Israelis, they suddenly become “heroes” and “martyrs.”

How would the British government and public have reacted had someone condemned the British police for killing the three terrorists who carried out the recent London Bridge attack?

How would the British government and public have reacted had the international media run headlines such as, “British policemen kill three Muslim men in London attack?” This is precisely how Abbas’s media outlets — and the BBC — reported on the Jerusalem terror attack: “Israeli policemen shoot dead three Palestinians in Jerusalem” and “Three Palestinian youth martyred at the hands of Israeli occupation policemen.”

It is no wonder, then, that many Palestinians have been celebrating the terror attack in Jerusalem. If these are the messages Abbas and his PA and Fatah cronies are sending to their people, why should it come as a surprise that many Palestinians have been glorifying the terrorists and calling for more attacks against Jews?

Hamas, notably, was the first party to applaud the Jerusalem terror attack, saying it proves that the Palestinian intifada was continuing and would escalate.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Marxist Palestinian terror group, also joined the chorus of those heaping praise on the terrorists for murdering the Israeli policewoman. Hamas and the PFLP have claimed responsibility for the “heroic operation” and dismissed as “false” a statement by ISIS taking credit for the attack.

To be clear: the two terror groups are furious with ISIS for attempting to rob them of the “honor” of murdering a young policewoman on the streets of Jerusalem. This is the surreal reality in the Middle East today.

Not to be left behind in the promotion of Jew-killing, Palestinians across the political spectrum took to social media to applaud the latest terror attack and express their jubilation over the murder of the policewoman.

In innumerable postings on Facebook and Twitter, dozens, if not hundreds, of Palestinians praised the terrorists, describing them as “heroes” and “martyrs.” They particularly expressed excitement over the use of a homemade submachine gun (often referred to as a “Carl Gustav”). This type of weapon is often produced in workshops in various parts of the PA-controlled territories in the West Bank.

Washington Ignores Saudi “Involvement in Supporting Terrorism and Terrorist Groups” by A. Z. Mohamed

Saudi Arabia is the second largest source of ISIS fighters from Muslim-majority countries, with an estimated 2,500, according to a working paper produced by the National Bureau of Economic Research. According to a report by the Institute for Gulf Affairs, a whopping 16% of these fighters were in the U.S. when they joined ISIS.

An equally disturbing finding of the report is that the Saudi government, which has been monitoring its nationals in the U.S., is fully aware of the fact that many of them are joining ISIS and not only has done little to stop it, but has kept information about it from American authorities.

A new investigative report reveals that hundreds of Saudi and Kuwaiti nationals residing in the United States — many of them students with dual citizenship and receiving government scholarships — have joined ISIS and other terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq during the past three years.

Titled “From American Campuses to ISIS Camps: How Hundreds of Saudis Joined ISIS in the U.S.,” the report — released June 1 by the Washington-D.C.-based think tank the Institute for Gulf Affairs (IGA) — provides details of the flow of students leaving American institutions of higher learning to fight in the Middle East.

According to a 2016 working paper produced by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Saudi Arabia is the second largest source of ISIS fighters from Muslim-majority countries, with an estimated 2,500. If the IGA report is accurate, a whopping 16% of these fighters were in the U.S. when they joined ISIS.

An equally disturbing finding of the report is that the Saudi government, which has been monitoring its nationals in the U.S., is fully aware of the fact that many of them are joining ISIS and not only has done little to stop it, but has kept information about it from American authorities.

This completely contradicts the 2014 State Department assertion that “Saudi Arabia has continued to cooperate with the United States to prevent acts of terrorism … through information exchange agreements with the United States.”

Meanwhile, according to the report’s authors — IGA director Ali al-Ahmed, a Saudi Shiite expatriate critical of the Sunni regime in Riyadh, and researcher Mohamed Dhamen — the FBI failed to notice the steady stream of would-be jihadis exiting the U.S. and heading for Iraq and Syria in the three years since then. This failure should not come as a surprise, given that one of the FBI’s own employees — Daniela Greene, a translator with top security clearance — absconded to Syria in June 2014 and married an ISIS recruiter she had been assigned to investigate. The rogue agent lied to the FBI about where she was going, alerted the terrorist that he was the subject of an FBI probe and shared classified information with him.

In a May 10 letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley requested additional information on how Greene, who eventually turned herself in and reached a lenient plea deal, was able to slip through the system undetected. Two days later, Grassley released a statement about it:

“I’m troubled that a relationship between an FBI employee and a prominent ISIS recruiter went unnoticed, and more troubled that there wasn’t a safeguard to successfully catch this incident… It’s important for the public to understand how this happened and how similar problems will be prevented in the future. We also need to know how prosecutors settled on the charges in this case. A sentence of two years seems unusually light for such a potential threat to national security.”

New Zealand festival removes ‘Israel’ from Joseph musical Wellington city council apologizes after Tim Rice asks for explanation of lyric change, saying ‘permission not given’ By David Sedley

A New Zealand production of “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” sponsored by a local council has been forced to issue an apology to famed lyricist Tim Rice after removing “Israel” from the lyrics to one of the songs.

Festival organizers said they were doing so to keep things simple for students who would be performing, but did not explain why they found the word Israel in the play problematic.

The substitution was discovered by Twitter user, Kate Dowling, who noted on Friday that in the song “Close Every Door,” the line “Children of Israel” had been replaced with “Children of kindness.”

She wrote to the Wellington city council and to Rice, one half of the famed musical writing team, together with Andrew Lloyd Webber, to ask for clarification.

The changed lyrics were the work of the New Zealand capital’s Artsplash festival, in which 10,000 elementary school pupils take part. They distributed song sheets to those who were taking part with the changed lyrics to one of the best known songs.

The musical, written by Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, tells the biblical story of Joseph and the Israelites leaving Canaan and going to Egypt.

In both the biblical story and the musical, the word “Israel” does not refer to the country, but to Jacob, who was given a second name, and “children of Israel” means Joseph and his brothers.

Rice was unhappy at the “unauthorized” change, tweeting, “This is a totally unauthorised change of lyric by @WgtnCC. Plus it’s a terribly drippy and meaningless alteration.”

He tweeted to the Wellington City Council asking them to explain.

“Please explain Joseph lyric change: ‘children of Israel’ to ‘children of kindness’. Permission not given. Tim Rice.”

Hamas and ISIS Argue Over Credit for Stabbing Israeli Policewoman June 18, 2017 Daniel Greenfield

In the sinkhole of moral depravity inhabited by Islamic terrorists, pedophiles and serial killers (but I repeat myself) there are vital issues at stake. Such as which “lion of the caliphate” stabbed a 23-year-old Israeli policewoman to death.

Hadas Malka, a 23-year-old Border Police officer, was murdered in a combined shooting and stabbing attack in Jerusalem’s Old City on Friday evening.

Four other people were wounded, among them two moderately and one lightly.

The attack took place around 7:30 p.m. on Friday evening, when two terrorists armed with knives and rifles attacked people at Zedekiah’s Cave. They were shot dead by security forces.

A third terrorist stabbed Malka, who was stationed at the Damascus Gate. He, too, was eliminated by security forces.

Malka, who suffered critical injuries, was evacuated to the Hadassah Mount Scopus Hospital, where she later succumbed to her wounds.

Then the rush was on to take credit for murdering a 23-year-old Jewish woman. First ISIS claimed credit…

The Islamic State (ISIS) on Friday night claimed responsibility for the stabbing and shooting attack in the Old City of Jerusalem, in which 23-year-old Border Police officer Hadas Malka was murdered.

According to the SITE Intelligence Group, ISIS identified the attackers and referred to them as “lions of the Caliphate”.

It takes real “lions” to stab an Israeli woman.

Initially Hamas played it cool.

In a statement, Hamas said that “the attack in Jerusalem is renewed proof of the continued revolution of the people against the occupier, and that the intifada continues until full freedom is attained.”

Freedom being the genocide of non-Muslims and tyranny for Muslims.

But once ISIS took credit, Hamas demanded credit.

Hamas on Saturday rejected the Islamic State (ISIS) group’s claim of Friday’s terrorist attack in Jerusalem, in which 23-year-old Border Police officer Hadas Malka was murdered.

Sami Abu Zuhri, a spokesman for Hamas, told the Palestinian Arab news agency Safa that the perpetrators of the “operation” were two “fighters” from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and that the third terrorist was a member of Hamas.

Unless he was a member of ISIS.

And thus we have the Gazan Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic State arguing which of them should get credit for stabbing a 23-year-old Jewish woman.