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October 2017

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The New Terrorist-Industrial Complex By E. Jeffrey Ludwig

By on October 26th, 2017

The administration of Pres. Donald Trump is considering whether to disallow the sale of Boeing passenger planes to Iran. This hideous addendum to the horrendous P5+1 deal with Iran, where the U.S. was the most important signatory, was another one of Pres. Barack Obama’s expressions of “goodwill” to the murderous, anti-American regime of crackpot ayatollahs. Jonathan S. Tobin, writing at the time of the transaction with Boeing, tells us, “Not only has Boeing gotten into bed with terrorists, the same can be said of those who are counting on all the new business ties changing the nature of a terrorist regime.”

Presumably, having a big business deal with a terrorist nation (Iran is still on the U.S. State Department list of state sponsors of terrorism) does not, per the American left, make us complicit with terrorism; rather, it is a way of ameliorating “tensions” and “strains.” Nonetheless, the American left is still fond of quoting Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address caution that the U.S. constitutional republic faces threats from the “military-industrial complex.” In light of this precedent, perhaps we may consider the “Boeing exception” as ushering in a new age: that of the terrorist-industrial complex.

This shift, whereby global business interests, the government of the United States, and our P+5 partners all collude with the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, is ominous for Europe and the U.S., as well as for the stability of the Middle East. And the implications extend even farther than that. This deal portends a great shift in the moral-ethical climate of the entire planet. The entire power elite of the world is hereby going beyond mere greedy excess or dealing first and foremost in terms of expediency.

The deal with Boeing is the essence of the yetzer hara (bad tendency of mind or spirit) that Solomon Schechter wrote about in a couple of wonderful books. The deal and its “exceptions” reek of the moral poison that comes from violating the Commandments “Thou shall not bear false witness” and “Thou shall not covet.” It also reflects a failure to follow a New Testament teaching wholly consistent with the Hebrew Scriptures: “You cannot love both God and mammon.” Please be forewarned: God will not be mocked.

Who says humans are basically good? It is a fiction. Were we good, there would be no need for the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament). There would be no need for a Christ. The prophets and the forefathers would have no relevance. There would be no need for prayer, study, tzedakah (charity), mitzvoth (good deeds), blessings. There would be no need for repentance (tshuva). There would be no need for grace and mercy. There would be no need for atonement, for the Cross. Anything honorable and worthy is honorable and worthy only in contrast with what is not honorable and worthy. If expedience were the standard, then there would be no room for the moral, honorable, or worthy.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

When Scandals Collide By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on October 26th, 2017

As Rich noted last night, we have learned finally, courtesy of the Washington Post, that Fusion GPS, the research firm that produced the notorious “Trump Dossier,” was funded by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Of course, the Clinton campaign and the DNC always want layers of deniability and obfuscation – and let’s note that it has served them well – so they hire lawyers to do the icky stuff rather than doing it directly. Then, when the you-know-what hits the fan, outfits like Fusion GPS try to claim that they can’t share critical information with investigators because of (among other things) attorney-client confidentiality concerns.

Here, the Clinton campaign and the DNC retained the law firm of Perkins Coie; in turn, one of its partners, Marc E. Elias, retained Fusion GPS. We don’t know how much Fusion GPS was paid, but the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid $9.1 million to Perkins Coie during the 2016 campaign (i.e., between mid-2015 and late 2016).

A friend draws my attention to an intriguing coincidence.

In its capacity as attorney for the DNC, Perkins Coie – through another of its partners, Michael Sussman – is also the law firm that retained CrowdStrike, the cyber security outfit, upon learning in April 2016 that the DNC’s servers had been hacked.

Interesting: Despite the patent importance of the physical server system to the FBI and Intelligence-Community investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, the Bureau never examined the DNC servers. Evidently, the DNC declined to cooperate to that degree, and the Obama Justice Department decided not to issue a subpoena to demand that the servers be turned over (just like the Obama Justice Department decided not to issue subpoenas to demand the surrender of critical physical evidence in the Clinton e-mails investigation).

Instead, the conclusion that Russia is responsible for the invasion of the DNC servers rests on the forensic analysis conducted by CrowdStrike. Rather than do its own investigation, the FBI relied on a contractor retained by the DNC’s lawyers.

The most significant pressing question about the so-called Trump Dossier is whether it was used by the FBI and the Obama Justice Department to get a warrant from the FISA court to conduct national-security surveillance on people connected to the Trump campaign. As I have previously pointed out, this would not be as scandalous as it sounds if (a) the Justice Department had a good faith basis to believe the people the Bureau wanted to surveil were acting as agents of Russia, and (b) the FBI first corroborated whatever information it took from the dossier before presenting it to the FISA court.

But it certainly is interesting that we are once again, in a case involving alleged Russian espionage, reviewing a situation in which the FBI relied on a contractor retained by the DNC’s and the Clinton campaign’s lawyers at Perkins Coie.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Facebook, Social Media, Aiding Jihad; Censoring Those Who Counter Jihad by Benjamin Weingarten

By on October 26th, 2017

That major technology companies are openly stifling the free speech of people trying to counter jihad is bad enough; what is beyond unconscionable is that they simultaneously enable Islamic supremacists to spread the very content that the counter-jihadists have been exposing.

According to the legal complaint, the names and symbols of Palestinian Arab terrorist groups and individuals were known to authorities, and “Facebook has the data and capability to cease providing services to [such] terrorists, but… has chosen not to do so.”

A separate lawsuit claims that Twitter not only benefits indirectly by seeing its user base swell through the increase of ISIS-linked accounts, but directly profits by placing targeted advertisements on them.

When jihadist content is permitted to spread unchecked across the globe via cyberspace, it is a matter of national and international security. Tragically for Western civilization, its tech and media icons have been colluding — even if unwittingly — with those working actively to destroy it.

For the past few years, large social media and other online companies have been seeking to restrict or even criminalize content that could be construed as critical of Islam or Muslims, including when the material simply exposes the words and actions of radical Islamists.

The recent attempt by the digital payment platform, PayPal, to forbid two conservative organizations — Jihad Watch and the American Freedom Defense Initiative — from continuing to use the service to receive donations, is a perfect case in point. Although PayPal reversed the ban, its initial move was part of an ongoing war against the free speech of counter-jihadists — those working to expose the ideology, goals, tactics and strategies of Islamic supremacists, and who are trying to defeat or at least to deter the Islamic supremacist global agenda.

Examples of this kind of censorship abound. In October 2016, for instance, conservative radio host and author Dennis Prager’s “PragerU” — which produces five-minute clips presented by leading experts in the fields of economics, politics, national security and culture — announced that more than a dozen of its videos were facing restricted access on YouTube, a subsidiary of Google. In theory, this meant that users who employed the filter for sexually explicit or violent content would be blocked from it.

Among these restricted videos however, were six relating to Islam: “What ISIS Wants,” presented by Tom Joscelyn, Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; “Why Don’t Feminists Fight for Muslim Women?” presented by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institute and Harvard’s Belfer Center; “Islamic Terror: What Muslim Americans Can Do,” presented by Khurram Dara, a Muslim American activist, author and attorney; “Pakistan: Can Sharia and Freedom Coexist?” and “Why Do People Become Islamic Extremists?” presented by Haroon Ullah, a foreign policy professor at Georgetown University; and “Radical Islam: The Most Dangerous Ideology,” presented by Raymond Ibrahim, author of The Al Qaeda Reader.

PragerU is not alone in having its content — presented by reputable thinkers — treated by social media companies as comparable to pornography, or similarly inappropriate or offensive material. For instance:

In January 2015, a mere two weeks after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg penned a #JeSuisCharlie statement in defense of free speech — in the wake of the Islamist terrorist attack on the Paris-based satirical journal Charlie Hebdo — Facebook censored images of the prophet Muhammad in Turkey.
In January 2016, the Facebook page “Justin Trudeau Not,” which contained content critical of the Canadian prime minister’s views on Islamic supremacism, was deleted by Facebook as a “violation of community standards.” The offense? The page’s authors “contrasted Trudeau’s immediate condemnation of a pepper spray attack against Muslims in Vancouver with his complete refusal to address a firearm attack by Muslims in Calgary.”
In May 2016, the administrator of a pro-Trump Facebook group was banned from Facebook for posting: “Donald Trump is not anti-Muslim. He is anti ISIS. What Trump is trying to say is that Homeland Security cannot differentiate which Muslim is [a] radical wanting to cause harm and which is a harmless refugee. Who is willing to sacrifice their family’s safety for the sake of political correctness? Are you?”
In June 2016, YouTube removed a video — “Killing for a Cause: Sharia Law & Civilization Jihad” — elucidating the aim of Islamic supremacists to subvert the West from within.
Also in June 2016, Facebook suspended the account of Swedish writer Ingrid Carlqvist for posting a video, produced by Gatestone Institute, on “Sweden’s Migrant Rape Epidemic.” After Gatestone readers responded critically to the censorship, the Swedish media started reporting on the case, and Facebook reinstated the video, without any explanation or apology.
In May 2017, Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of Britain First, a party “committed to the maintenance of British national sovereignty, independence and freedom,” was banned from Facebook for 30 days for “repeatedly posting things that aren’t allowed on Facebook.” The post that reportedly triggered t

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Climate Alarmists Use the Acid-Rain Playbook The parallels between the two environmental frenzies are many, but the stakes are much higher now.By Rupert Darwall

By on October 26th, 2017

Mr. Darwall is author of “Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex” (Encounter, 2017).
A majority of scientists might say a scientific theory is true, but that doesn’t mean the consensus is reliable. The science underpinning environmental claims can be fundamentally wrong—as it was in one of the biggest environmental scares in recent decades.

The acid-rain alarm of the 1970s and ’80s was a dry run for the current panic about climate change. Both began in Sweden as part of a war on coal meant to bolster support for nuclear power. In 1971 meteorologist Bert Bolin wrote the Swedish government’s report on acid rain to the United Nations. Seventeen years later he became the first chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

There are many parallels between acid rain and global warming. Each phenomenon produced a U.N. convention—the 1979 Geneva Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution in the case of acid rain, and the 1988 Framework Convention on Climate Change. And each convention led to a new protocol—the 1985 Helsinki Protocol and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Public alarm surrounding acid rain was far more intense, especially in Germany, where popular reaction to media stories about acid rain reached a pitch of hysteria not yet seen with global warming. A 1981 Der Speigel cover story featured an image of smokestacks looming over a copse of trees with the title “The Forest Is Dying.”

The most striking parallels are the role of scientific consensus in underpinning environmental alarm and the way science is used to justify cuts in emissions. The emission of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere “has proved to be a major environmental problem,” Bolin wrote in his 1971 report. National scientific academies across North America and Europe were in complete agreement. “We have a much more complete knowledge of the causes and consequences of acid deposition than we have for other pollutants,” a report by the National Academy of Sciences’ National Research Council said in 1981. According to the NRC, the circumstantial evidence was “overwhelming.” Many thousands of lakes had been affected, rivers were losing salmon, fisheries in the Adirondacks were in a bad way, red spruce were dying, and production from Canadian sugar maple trees had been affected. Acid rain was a scientific slam dunk.

Politicians duly parroted what the scientists told them. “Acid rain has caused serious environmental damage in many parts of the world,” President Jimmy Carter wrote in his 1979 environmental message to Congress. He signed an agreement with Canada to establish five acid-rain working groups, and Congress set up a 10-year National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program, which went by the catchy acronym Napap.

To Canadian anger, President Ronald Reagan was more skeptical than his predecessor. The head of Canada’s Federal Assessment and Review Office accused Mr. Reagan of “blatant efforts to manipulate” the science being done by the working groups. A formal note of protest from Ottawa pointed to the more than 3,000 scientific studies on acid rain yielding “sufficient scientific evidence” for policies to cut emissions.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Democrats, Russians and the FBI Did the bureau use disinformation to trigger its Trump probe?

By on October 26th, 2017

It turns out that Russia has sown distrust in the U.S. political system—aided and abetted by the Democratic Party, and perhaps the FBI. This is an about-face from the dominant media narrative of the last year, and it requires a full investigation.

The Washington Post revealed Tuesday that the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee jointly paid for that infamous “dossier” full of Russian disinformation against Donald Trump. They filtered the payments through a U.S. law firm (Perkins Coie), which hired the opposition-research hit men at Fusion GPS. Fusion in turn tapped a former British spook, Christopher Steele, to compile the allegations, which are based largely on anonymous, Kremlin-connected sources.

Strip out the middlemen, and it appears that Democrats paid for Russians to compile wild allegations about a U.S. presidential candidate. Did someone say “collusion”?

This news is all the more explosive because the DNC and Clinton campaign hid their role, even amid the media furor after BuzzFeed published the Steele dossier in January. Reporters are now saying that Clinton campaign officials lied to them about their role in the dossier. Current DNC Chair Tom Perez and former Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz deny knowing about the dossier arrangement, but someone must have known.

Perhaps this explains why Congressional Democrats have been keen to protect Fusion from answering dossier questions—disrupting hearings, protesting subpoenas and deriding Republican investigators. Two of Fusion’s cofounders invoked their Fifth Amendment rights last week rather than answer House Intelligence Committee questions, and Fusion filed a federal lawsuit on Friday to block committee subpoenas of its bank records.

The more troubling question is whether the FBI played a role, even if inadvertently, in assisting a Russian disinformation campaign. We know the agency possessed the dossier in 2016, and according to media reports it debated paying Mr. Steele to continue his work in the runup to the election. This occurred while former FBI Director James Comey was ramping up his probe into supposed ties between the Trump campaign and Russians.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Byron York: After Trump dossier revelation, FBI is next by Byron York

By on October 26th, 2017

Investigators looking into the so-called “Trump dossier” were not surprised when news broke Tuesday night that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC, working through the Democrats’ law firm, Perkins Coie, financed the “salacious and unverified” compilation of allegations of Trump collusion with Russia in the 2016 presidential campaign. (The “salacious and unverified” description comes from former FBI Director James Comey.)

There had been plenty of talk about the Democrats and Perkins Coie, so much that investigators almost assumed that was the case. But it wasn’t until the Washington Post broke the story that it was confirmed.

“I’m shocked,” one lawmaker joked Tuesday night. “Who could have ever guessed?”

And why did the story break when it did? Credit the much-maligned Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. The California Republican has been pursuing the dossier more aggressively than anyone else, and it was his Oct. 4 subpoena for the bank records of Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that handled the dossier, that finally shook loose the information.

But knowing that the Clinton campaign, the DNC, and Perkins Coie supported the dossier is not the end of the story. The most important next step is the FBI.

Sometime in October 2016 — that is, at the height of the presidential campaign — Christopher Steele, the foreign agent hired by Fusion GPS to compile the Trump dossier, approached the FBI with information he had gleaned during the project. According to a February report in the Washington Post, Steele “reached an agreement with the FBI a few weeks before the election for the bureau to pay him to continue his work.”

It was an astonishing turn: the nation’s top federal law enforcement agency agreeing to fund an ongoing opposition research project being conducted by one of the candidates in the midst of a presidential election. “The idea that the FBI and associates of the Clinton campaign would pay Mr. Steele to investigate the Republican nominee for president in the run-up to the election raises further questions about the FBI’s independence from politics, as well as the Obama administration’s use of law enforcement and intelligence agencies for political ends,” wrote Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.

In the end, according to reports, the FBI did not pay Steele. But the dossier did not go away. Indeed, in January 2017, Comey briefed President-elect Trump (and President Obama) on the dossier’s contents.

In recent months, Nunes has been trying to force the FBI to reveal just what it did in the dossier matter. The intel chairman issued a subpoena to the FBI on Aug. 24, and in the time since, not a single document has been produced to the committee. The FBI and the Justice Department have spent most of that time talking about possibly complying with this or that part of the subpoena. But so far — nothing.

The same is true of Grassley’s inquiries.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Trump dossier was Clinton’s dirtiest Political Trick: Michael Goodwin

By on October 26th, 2017

And so the worm turns. Make that worms.http://nypost.com/2017/10/24/the-trump-dossier-was-clintons-dirtiest-political-trick/

Just as key congressional panels open new probes into the still-smoking debris of last year’s election, the revelation that Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid as much as $9 million for the discredited Russian dossier on Donald Trump flips the collusion script on its head.

Now it’s Democrats’ turn in the barrel.

The explosive report in the Washington Post goes a long way to explaining how the dossier was so widely spread among political reporters during the election. The Clinton camp must have passed it out like Halloween candy to its media handmaidens.

News organizations tried for months to confirm the salacious details, but couldn’t. The document became public when BuzzFeed, a loud Clinton booster, published it 10 days before the inauguration, while acknowledging it couldn’t verify the contents.

The Post report provides possible answers to other questions, too. Because Clinton’s team paid for the dossier, it’s likely that she gave it to the FBI, where James Comey planned to hire the former British agent who had compiled it to keep digging dirt on Trump.

The finding also raises the possibility that the dossier is what led the Obama White House to snoop on members of Trump’s team, and leak the “unmasked” names to the anti-Trump media in a bid to help Clinton.

In short, we now have compelling evidence that the dossier was the largest and dirtiest dirty trick of the 2016 campaign. And Clinton, who has played the victim card ever since her loss, was behind it the whole time.

Anybody surprised? Me neither.

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