Displaying posts published in

January 2018

The Clamor over the Nunes ‘FISA Abuse’ Memo Let’s see what he’s got. By Andrew C. McCarthy

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/455757/printThere is a great deal of commentary, some of it hysterical, about a short memo authored by Republican staffers on the House Intelligence Committee under the direction of Chairman Devin Nunes (R., Calif.). The memo is said to be about Obama-era abuses of the executive branch’s surveillance authorities under federal law — specifically, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The contents of the memo are not yet known to the public, so the commentary is the familiar game of shaping reaction to it.

The Republican script is that this was “Watergate on steroids.” The Democratic counter is that the memo is a one-sided partisan summary that takes investigative actions out of context in order to make mountains out of molehills. Unless and until we can read the document, we cannot make a judgment about which of these assessments is true, or at least closer to the truth. We can, however, make some observations about the controversy.

The Claim That the Memo Is One-Sided
The most common complaint is that the memo represents the Republican slant on a dispute that should be above politics. (Yeah, yeah, I know . . . but stop snickering.) Now, maybe the memo will read like sheer propaganda, but this seems highly doubtful. There are extremely good reasons for Nunes and his staff to create a summary, and very easy ways for Democrats to remedy anything that is arguably misleading, so the “one-sidedness” objection appears overblown.

First, the main questions that we need answered are:

Were associates of President Trump, members of his campaign, or even Trump himself, subjected to foreign-intelligence surveillance (i.e., do the FISA applications name them as either targets or persons whose communications and activities would likely be monitored)?

Was information from the Steele dossier used in FISA applications?

If Steele-dossier information was so used, was it so central that FISA warrants would not have been granted without it?

If Steele-dossier information was so used, was it corroborated by independent FBI investigation?

If the dossier’s information was so used, was the source accurately conveyed to the court so that credibility and potential bias could be weighed (i.e., was the court told that the information came from an opposition-research project sponsored by the Clinton presidential campaign)?

The FBI has said that significant efforts were made to corroborate Steele’s sensational claims, yet former director James Comey has acknowledged (in June 2017 Senate testimony) that the dossier was “unverified.” If the dossier was used in FISA applications in 2016, has the Justice Department — consistent with its continuing duty of candor in dealings with the tribunal — alerted the court that it did not succeed in verifying Steele’s hearsay reporting based on anonymous sources?

These are not questions that call for nuanced explanation. These things either happened or didn’t. To provide simple answers to these straightforward questions would not be a one-sided partisan exercise, even if the person providing the answers happened to be a partisan.

FISA proceedings are classified, and applications for surveillance warrants from the FISA court typically include information from classified sources — informants who spy at great risk to themselves, intelligence techniques (e.g., covert surveillance), etc. Disclosing such applications and/or the underlying intelligence reporting on which they are based could thus jeopardize lives, national security, and other important American interests.

Thus, the problem: How do we convey important information without imperiling the sources and methods through which it was obtained?

Fortunately, this is far from a unique problem: It comes up all the time in court cases that involve intelligence matters, and Congress has prescribed a process for dealing with it in the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA). There are various remedies: Sometimes the classified information can be declassified and disclosed without causing danger; sometimes the classified information can be redacted without either jeopardizing sources or compromising our ability to grasp the significance of what is disclosed. When neither of those solutions is practical, the preferred disclosure method is to prepare a declassified summary that answers the relevant questions without risking exposure of critical intelligence secrets and sources. (See CIPA section 4 — Title 18, U.S. Code, Appendix.)

So, far from being unconventional, the preparation of a summary is a routine and sensible way of handling the complicated tension between the need for information and accountability, on the one hand, and the imperative of protecting intelligence, on the other.

As with any summary, there is always a danger of its being misleading. This, too, is a recurring problem in judicial proceedings, where the need to boil voluminous information down to its essence is obvious. The problem is solved by the so-called rule of completeness: If a party contends that his adversary is taking information out of context or otherwise omitting essential details necessary to an accurate understanding of a document, the party may propose that the necessary context or details be included. An example: Smith tells the police, “I was in the bank but I didn’t rob it.” At the trial, the prosecutor disingenuously suggests to the jury that Smith was implicitly admitting guilt when he told the police “I was in the bank” the day it was robbed. Smith would then be entitled to introduce his complete statement — the “but I didn’t rob it” portion is necessary to the jury’s understanding that, far from implicitly admitting guilt, Smith explicitly denied guilt.

Conforming to House rules, Chairman Nunes has taken pains to make his memo available to all members of Congress before proceeding with the steps necessary to seek its disclosure. Thus, lawmakers have an opportunity to propose the inclusion of details that may be necessary to correct any misimpressions; or Democrats could prepare their own summary in an effort to demonstrate Nunes’s partisan spin. Congressman Nunes is a smart guy, and he clearly knows he will look very foolish if he plays fast and loose with the facts. It is in his interest not to do that, and the careful way he has gone about complying with the rules — rather than leaking classified information, as Trump’s opponents have been wont to do — suggests that his memo will prove to be a fair representation of the underlying information.

On that last point, it would be hard to imagine a more one-sided partisan screed than the Steele dossier. Democrats seem to have had no hesitation about using it as a summary of purported Trump collusion with Russia.

The Failure to Share the Memo with the FBI
The Justice Department and the FBI are reportedly angry that, after they complied with the Intelligence Committee’s demand that they make classified and investigative materials available for inspection, Nunes will not permit the FBI to inspect his memo summarizing that information before moving to disclose it. The irony here is rich.

These executive-branch agencies did not cooperatively comply with congressional investigators; they stonewalled for five months. To this day they are stonewalling: Just this weekend, they belatedly fessed up that the FBI had failed to preserve five months’ worth of text messages — something they had to have known for months. An American who impeded a federal investigation the way federal investigators are impeding congressional investigations would swiftly find himself in legal jeopardy.

Moreover, it is not like the Justice Department and FBI did Nunes a favor and are thus in a position to impose conditions; Congress is entitled to the information it has sought in its oversight capacity. There is no Justice Department or FBI in the Constitution; while these agencies are part of the executive branch, they are creatures of statute. Congress created them, they are dependent on Congress for funding, and Congress has a constitutional obligation to perform oversight to ensure that the mission they are carrying out — with taxpayer support and under statutory restrictions — is being carried out appropriately.

Republicans tend to be favorably disposed toward law enforcement’s preferences. They would surely have preferred to have non-confrontational interactions with vital executive agencies led by Republican appointees of a Republican president. Indeed, most Republicans are puzzled by the lack of cooperation — by the failure of the White House to direct the president’s subordinates to comply with congressional requests for information about potential abuses of power carried out under the prior, Democratic administration.

This is a reciprocal business. If the Justice Department and FBI want accommodations, they have to exhibit cooperation — do the little things, like maybe remember that congressional subpoenas are lawful demands, not suggestions or pleas. On the record thus far, the committee has every reason to believe that submitting the Nunes memo for review by the Justice Department and FBI will result in more delay and foot-dragging. Clearly, there is a strategy to slow-walk compliance in hopes that events — such as, say, a midterm-election victory that returns the House to Democratic control — will abort congressional investigations of the investigators.

Nunes is wise not to play into that strategy. As he knows, if the House ultimately moves to declassify and publicize information, the chamber’s rules require giving the president five days’ notice. (See Congressional Research Service, “The Protection of Classified Information: The Legal Framework” page 3 and note 23.) Thus, the Justice Department and FBI will have an opportunity to both review the memo and try to persuade the president to oppose disclosure. There’s no reason to hold up the works at this point.

The Claim That the Memo Discredits or Distracts from the Mueller Investigation
Finally, committee Democrats and other critics contend that Chairman Nunes is engaged in a stunt designed to discredit Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, or at least distract attention from its subject matter — Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. These transparently political claims are ill-conceived.

The memo reportedly addresses an issue that is at least as significant as election meddling by Russia and suspected but unproven Trump-campaign collusion in it, namely: election meddling by the intelligence and law-enforcement arms of government and Clinton-campaign collusion in it. The latter issue involves conduct that predates Mueller’s investigation by more than two years — Hillary Clinton’s criminal conduct having been exposed in March 2015.

Let’s assume for a moment, and for argument’s sake, that there were irregularities in the Obama-era investigation of Trump associates (perhaps including Trump himself). This would discredit Mueller’s investigation only to the extent it is established that the premise of that investigation is traceable to those irregularities. For example, if the principal basis for the allegation that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia were shown to be the shoddy, unverified Steele dossier, this allegation would be discredited — and deservedly so. To the contrary, if it turns out that there are other legitimate grounds for suspecting Trump-campaign collusion in Russian activity that violated American law, those would plainly merit investigation — although we ought to be told what they are.

Moreover, it would remain perfectly legitimate to investigate Russia’s interference in the 2016 election — the counterintelligence purpose that the Justice Department told us was the principal reason for appointing a special counsel. Of course, as we’ve covered many times (see, e.g., here), there are independent reasons for discrediting Mueller’s appointment on this score: (a) The appointment was unnecessary because counterintelligence investigations are not prosecutor work and ordinarily do not have a prosecutor assigned because the aim is not to develop a criminal prosecution; and (b) the appointment was improper because the Justice Department is supposed to specify a crime that has triggered the need for a special counsel, and that was never done here.

Still, my objections on these grounds notwithstanding, the stubborn facts remain that Mueller has been appointed and Russian interference in our election is a worthy subject for investigation.

To the extent Democrats and their media friends caterwaul that the Nunes memo “distracts” from concerns about Russia, this brings us to a longstanding complaint among national-security-minded conservatives: We were warning about Russian perfidy long before the Democrats jumped aboard that bandwagon for patently political reasons. It has always been partisan hackery to mark acceptance of the “Trump collusion” narrative as the price of admission for taking threats posed by Russia seriously.

The moment that the “collusion with Russia” narrative is no longer politically viable (and we may be nearing that point if the Steele dossier is its foundation), Democrats will return to their default appeasement mode and goofy “Reset” buttons. But in the meantime, investigating Russia’s provocations will still be a worthy exercise. And even if there was no need to appoint a special counsel to lead such an investigation, Mueller has been working the issue and his conclusions should prove valuable. They will not rise or fall on the question of whether Obama-era executive agencies abused their powers.

Conclusion
There is no problem a priori with the fact that Nunes’s memo is a summary prepared by Republican members of the Intelligence Committee’s professional staff. There is no need to delay its release by permitting the FBI and Justice Department to vet it; they will have that opportunity in any event when the president is given five days to weigh in on whether the memo should be disclosed. And complaints that the memo is a distraction intended to discredit Mueller’s investigation are meritless political talking points.

Democrats contend that Chairman Nunes is engaged in a partisan stunt. The allegation that the Obama administration put the law-enforcement and intelligence arms of the federal government in the service of the Clinton campaign to undermine the Trump campaign is, they maintain, an overwrought conspiracy theory. If that is true, then Democrats — who have had the opportunity to review the memo — should be clamoring for it to be disclosed, not fighting its release. After all, Republicans have made extravagant corruption claims in recent days; if the memo does not bear them out, many a face will be covered in egg.

No one is more aware of this than Congressman Nunes. He is pressing ahead nonetheless. So . . . let’s see what he’s got.

READ MORE:

UConn Offers Counseling for Students Upset at ‘Even the Thought of’ a Ben Shapiro Speech This time, it was the school spearheading the snowflakery. By Katherine Timpf —

Upon learning that conservative speaker Ben Shapiro had been invited to campus, the University of Connecticut immediately offered its student body counseling services.

“We understand that even the thought of an individual coming to campus with the views that Mr. Shapiro expresses can be concerning and even hurtful and that’s why we wanted to make you aware as soon as we were informed,” stated a campus-wide email from associate vice president and chief diversity officer Joelle Murchison, according to an article in Shapiro’s Daily Wire.

According to the email, there hasn’t even been a “date, location or time” confirmed for the speech — but apparently the school still believed that it was necessary to start offering time for counseling now.

I like to think of myself as a sensitive person, but this is something that I simply cannot wrap my head around. There are a ton of people I can’t stand who are out there giving speeches every single day, and yet “the thought” of that has had absolutely zero impact on my mental health. It’s not “hurtful.” It doesn’t affect me. I have a life. I think it’s fine.

What’s interesting to me about this particular story is that it wasn’t even a group of students who ran to ring that “triggered” bell. (Although I’m sure that would have happened eventually.) This time, it was the school sending out a preemptive email, basically telling students that they should be upset. Talk of oversensitivity on college campuses is so often centered on the students-are-snowflakes narrative that people don’t realize how often it’s the school itself that’s prompting these sorts of things.

Germany: Return of the Stasi Police State? by Judith Bergman

Germany’s new law requires social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, to censor their users on behalf of the government. Social media companies are obliged to delete or block any online “criminal offenses” within 24 hours of receipt of a user complaint — regardless of whether the content is accurate or not.

Social media platforms now have the power to shape the form of current political and cultural discourse by deciding who will speak and what they will say.

Notice the ease with which the police chief mentioned that he had filed charges to silence a leading political opponent of the government. That is what authorities do in police states: Through censorship and criminal charges, they silence outspoken critics and political opponents of government policies, such as Beatrix von Storch, who has sharply criticized Chancellor Angela Merkel’s migration policies.

While such policies would doubtless have earned the German authorities many points with the old Stasi regime of East Germany, they more than likely contravene the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) to which Germany is a party, as well as the case law of the European Court of Human Rights.

Germany’s new censorship law, which has introduced state censorship on social media platforms, came into effect on October 1, 2017. The new law requires social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, to censor their users on behalf of the German state. Social media companies are obliged to delete or block any online “criminal offenses” such as libel, slander, defamation or incitement, within 24 hours of receipt of a user complaint — regardless of whether the content is accurate or not. Social media companies are permitted seven days for more complicated cases. If they fail to do so, the German government can fine them up to 50 million euros for failing to comply with the law.

The new censorship law, however, was not fully enforced until January 1, 2018, in order to give the social media platforms time to prepare for their new role as the privatized thought police of the German state. Social media platforms now have the power to shape the form of current political and cultural discourse by deciding who will speak and what they will say.

Time for Jordan’s King Abdullah to Stop Tolerating Genocide from Temple Mount by Dexter Van Zile

Not only is rhetoric like this from Jordan-approved Imams a clear-cut violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (which makes incitement to genocide a crime), Jordan’s tolerance for anti-Jewish and anti-Western rhetoric at the site is a violation of the treaty signed between Israel and Jordan in 1994.

“Allah called them ‘infidels’ so why should I be ashamed to call them that?… There is only one kind of punishment for those people: to stop them, to wreak vengeance upon them, and to teach them a lesson. This is not achieved through tolerance, negotiations, or kindness.” — Palestinian Imam Issam Amira, using the Al Aqsa Mosque, June 18, 2016.

In the United States, landlords who allow their tenants to use a property for criminal enterprises, such as the sale or manufacture of drugs are liable to having their property seized in a process called “asset forfeiture.” Maybe a similar process needs to be applied to Jordan’s custodianship of the Temple Mount, for clearly, the Hashemite Kingdom is not serious about preventing the site from being used for criminal incitement against Jews and Westerners.

When ISIS put a Jordanian Air Force pilot into a cage, poured gasoline on him, set him on fire and broadcast a video of the gruesome murder on the internet in February 2015, the Jordanian government responded decisively. It hanged two jihadists affiliated with Al Qaeda and broadcast images of Jordan’s monarch, King Abdullah II, wearing military fatigues to highlight Jordan’s participation in an American-led coalition that engaged in bombing raids against the terror organization. The Jordanian press office also publicized the king’s promise to exact revenge on ISIS for the murder of the pilot, Mouath al-Kasaesbeh, via a statement that was quoted in countless outlets.

Turkey: Targeting Kurds In Syria Making Turkey Feel Imperial Again by Burak Bekdil

“Operation Olive Branch,” the ironic code name the Turkish military has chosen for its incursion into northern Syria, has catered well to the Turkish psyche that craves shows of force of every possible flavor.

In practice, ironically, NATO member Turkey’s Operation Olive Branch targets the main ground force allies of its NATO ally, the U.S.

The area Erdogan targets is effectively home to most of Syria’s two million or so Kurds, who seek an autonomous entity that Turkey fears may further provoke separatist Kurdish sentiments among Turkey’s 10 million to 15 million Kurds.

In Turkey these days, there is every sign of collective hysteria in a once glorious nation that fell from grace, then longed for power and grandeur for nearly a century. Turks are dizzy with joy over their army’s incursion into Afrin, a Kurdish enclave in neighboring Syria.

It is almost a sin not to join the celebrations: “We are witnessing the lynching of anyone who dares to speak against it. Opposing the operation has become a death wish,” Nevsin Mengu, a prominent Turkish journalist, wrote in Sigma Turkey, an independent news outlet.

Paul Monk One Book Too Many

Admiration for Princeton professor Glen Warren Bowersock’s distinguished career and great learning inspired a reverent anticipation as I took up his latest book, ‘The Crucible of Islam’, which professes to examine the origins of that creed. Alas, that reverence was grossly misplaced.

The Crucible of Islam
by Glen Warren Bowersock
Harvard, 2017, 220 pages, US$25
_______________________

Glen Warren Bowersock, now eighty-one years of age, is by any measure one of the West’s most distinguished scholars of classical civilisation. His chosen field, from the start, was the history of the ancient Mediterranean world: Greece, Rome and the Near East. He is a prize-winning graduate of Harvard (1957) and Oxford (1959, as a Rhodes Scholar). His doctorate, at Oxford (1962) was on Augustus and the Greek world. He has served as lecturer in Ancient History at Balliol, Magdalen and New colleges, Oxford (1960–62), Professor of Classics and History at Harvard (1962–80) and was Professor of Ancient History at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University from 1980 until his retirement in 2006. He is the author of over a dozen books and has published over 400 articles on Greek, Roman and Near Eastern history and culture as well as the classical tradition.

The list of his honours is long and impressive and the titles of his books and the number of his scholarly articles are alike the stuff of open-mouthed awe on the part of any aspiring student of classical civilisation. They include a book based on his doctoral dissertation, Augustus and the Greek World (1965), Greek Sophists in the Roman Empire (1969), Julian the Apostate (1978), Roman Arabia (1983), Gibbon’s Historical Imagination (1988), Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World (1999), Interpreting Late Antiquity (2001), Mosaics as History: The Near East from Late Antiquity to Islam (2006), Lorenzo Valla: On the Donation of Constantine (edition and translation, 2007), From Gibbon to Auden: Essays on the Classical Tradition (2009) and The Throne of Adulis: Red Sea Wars on the Eve of Islam (2013).

This is a wonderful body of work and an indication of what our best universities in the West have been able to produce, even if all too many of our students in the twenty-first century read very little of it. Having read several of Professor Bowersock’s earlier works, not least his recent and fascinating study of pre-Islamic Arabia and Christian Ethiopia, The Throne of Adulis, I was prompted to buy and read at once his latest offering, The Crucible of Islam. I was dismayed, therefore, to discover that something strange has happened to the great scholar, leading to some startling, basic errors of history and an approach to his subject that would have astonished Edward Gibbon, whose “historical imagination” had exercised Bowersock in his prime. I had expected mature insights and fresh perspectives from this book, concise though it is, at only 220 pages. Instead, I found myself astonished by its errors and omissions and recoiling from its deference to Islam.

We might anchor a reflection on Bowersock’s writing about the origins of Islam in the famous remarks by Gibbon himself, in the fiftieth and fifty-first chapters of his celebrated history of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He makes the sardonic remark that:

The birth of Mohammed was fortunately placed in the most degenerate and disorderly period of the Persians, the Romans and the barbarians of Europe: the empires of Trajan, or even of Constantine or Charlemagne, would have repelled the assault of the naked Saracens, and the torrent of fanaticism might have been obscurely lost in the sands of Arabia.

John O’Sullivan Mugabe and After

Leader and chief beneficiary of Harare’s “velvet coup” Emmerson Mnangagwa has made the right noises, wooing investors with budgetary reforms and promising democratic elections. As the path he must follow is both winding and treacherous, optimism must necessarily be guarded.

By the standards of modern Africa, indeed of the modern world, the Zimbabwean Army coup that overthrew Robert Mugabe in mid-November was unusual. For a start it was bloodless: the Army moved into the capital, Harare, disarmed Mugabe loyalists in the security forces, confined the President and his wife to a luxurious house arrest, and urged him to step down. It was also organised efficiently and discreetly, up to a point anyway: only the coup plotters seem to have known about it in Zimbabwe, but the Chinese government was informed in advance by the man who emerged soon afterwards as the new president. Apparently Beijing raised no serious objection. Above all, however, almost everyone involved in these revolutionary events, except perhaps Mugabe and his wife, “Gucci Grace”, was anxious that they should be scrupulously conducted in line with proper constitutional forms.

Mugabe’s eventual resignation—after a brief hitch in which he failed to deliver the key sentence in a televised speech—was purchased with guarantees that he would be allowed to remain living comfortably and un-prosecuted in one of his well-appointed residences. Mugabe’s former deputy, Emmerson Mnangagwa, back from a brief visit to Beijing, was duly sworn in as the new Zimbabwean president by a Supreme Court justice in red robes, and promptly began his acceptance speech by declaring proudly that Mugabe was and would always remain his leader and mentor. That greatly comforted the leaders of surrounding countries in the African Union who, being leaders, are highly disapproving of unconstitutional challenges such as tanks on their lawns.

So it was all very Westminster, right down to suave hypocrisy. Constitutionally it invited comparisons with Britain’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 in which the successful plotters had to turn two blind eyes to allow the King, James II, to “escape”, after which they were able to declare the throne vacant. And when Tory purists objected that the throne should be occupied not jointly by the revolutionary royals, the Dutchman William of Orange and his ex-Catholic Stuart wife Mary, but by James’s rightful heir, the lawyer-like reply was “a living man can have no heir”. Owing in part to such subtleties, 1688 gave Britain three hundred years of stable government and growing world power. We cannot quite expect Zimbabwe’s velvet coup to make the country an empire on which the sun never sets but it has a decent chance of fostering political stability and economic recovery that in turn may help restore democracy there.

WE MUST END THIS APPEASEMENT AND BAN HEZBOLLAH : COL. RICHARD KEMP

Hezbollah is the most powerful terrorist organisation in the world. Yet Britain has proscribed only part of it: its military wing. This Thursday the MP Joan Ryan will lead a parliamentary debate aimed at designating the whole organisation, as the US, Canada and the Netherlands already do. Her chances are slim. The film Darkest Hour has reminded us of British ministers’ penchant for appeasement and, like Churchill, that is what she’s up against.

Hezbollah, the creation of Iran, emerged onto the world stage in Beirut in 1983, killing 241 US Marines and 58 French paratroopers in the most devastating terrorist attack before 9/11. Since then it has attacked in Latin America, Europe and the Middle East and planned strikes from Cyprus to Singapore. Last summer US authorities charged two Hezbollah terrorists with planning attacks in New York and Panama. Hezbollah is fighting to keep Assad in power in Syria and maintains an arsenal of 100,000 rockets in Lebanon, pointed at Israel.

During the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, Hezbollah was involved in Iranian-directed bombings that killed well over 1,000 British and US servicemen. Despite this, in Britain and elsewhere in Europe Hezbollah can freely raise funds for terrorism. Its supporters flaunt their assault rifle-emblazoned flags on our streets. They maintain sleeper cells in this country: planning, preparing and lying in wait for orders to attack.

When I worked for the Joint Intelligence Committee I monitored Hezbollah’s activities. I knew there was no division into peaceful and warlike elements. The regional states don’t buy it either; the Arab League designates the entire organisation. Even Hezbollah’s leaders don’t make any such pretence. In 2009 its deputy secretary-general confirmed that it was one unified organisation.

Trump in the Middle East: Note Who Curses America, and Who Blesses It The administration’s foreign policy is a welcome break from the preexisting Washington consensus. By Yoram Hazony

President Donald Trump has promised that in the Middle East under his presidency, “there are many things that can happen now that would never have happened before.” Two speeches of the last ten days offer dramatic confirmation of the emerging reconfiguration of America’s relationship with Israel and the Middle East under his leadership.

In a two-hour speech before the Council of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) last week, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, denounced the British, Dutch, French, and Americans for having conspired, ever since the 1650s, to create a Jewish colonial outpost that would “erase the Palestinians from Palestine.” As Abbas tells it, all this reached a climax on the eve of World War I, when the West realized that it was on the verge of collapse and that the Islamic world was “poised to inherit European civilization.” To put an end to this threat, the Western nations went about carving up the Muslim world so that it would be forever “divided, backward, and engulfed in infighting.” As for the United States, it has been “playing games” of this sort ever since then, importing, for example, the disastrous Arab Spring into Middle East.

Abbas summed up by demanding an apology and reparations from Britain for the Balfour Declaration and denying that the United States can serve as a mediator in the Mideast. Finally, he went to the trouble of cursing both President Trump and the U.S. Congress: Yehrab beitak (“May your house be razed”), he said.

I have been following the speeches of the PLO and its supporters in the Arab world for 30 years. Nothing here is new. These are the same things that Yasser Arafat, Abbas, and the mainline PLO leadership have always believed. It is a worldview that reflects an abiding hatred for the West, blaming Christians and Jews not only for the founding of Israel but for every calamity that has befallen the Muslim and Arab world for centuries.

What should be one’s policy toward an organization committed to such an ideology? One option is to sympathize with the shame and outrage to which the PLO gives voice, and to try to mitigate it with grants of territory, authority, prestige, and large-scale ongoing funding. American administrations have pursued this option, seeking to make a peace partner out of the PLO, since President Ronald Reagan announced a dialogue with it in December 1988. Israel, too, has pursued this option, since 1993.

Uganda President Praises Trump’s Straight “Hole” Daniel Greenfield

Nothing we’re saying is news to anyone who comes from these places.

People in Haiti are not under the impression that they’re living in a place that’s better than America. Or that its problems are purely coincidental. It’s only American lefties who get all worked up over it. The President of Uganda certainly isn’t in denial.

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni on Tuesday hailed Donald Trump for speaking “frankly” to Africans, after the US president unleashed a storm by reportedly describing African nations as “sh*thole countries.”

“I love Trump because he speaks to Africans frankly. I don’t know if he was misquoted or whatever. He talks about Africans’ weaknesses frankly,” Museveni said in the capital Kampala to members of the East African Legislative Assembly (EALA).

No stranger to controversy, on Monday he described Uganda as a “pre-industrial society” and said he regretted removing the death sentence, saying the move had been “a recipe for chaos”.

This isn’t an endorsement of Museveni, but frankly some frank talk is long overdue. Diplomacy is overall a good thing. And that comes with discretion. But at some point, enough is really enough.