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May 2018

Mahmoud Abbas’ exit from the Palestinian Authority is long overdue By Lawrence J. Haas

What’s more pathetic: Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ latest blast of ugly anti-Semitism, or the hopes that the global community has long invested in him as a true Israeli partner for peace?

If, as Albert Einstein reportedly said, insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” than U.S. and Western investments in Abbas over the years seem to fit the bill.

When, however, even the New York Times editorial board – which almost never misses an opportunity to blame the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on Israel – writes that Abbas’ vile words showed that it’s “time for him to leave office,” then perhaps Western elites are beginning to see the light.

“The Jews who moved to Eastern and Western Europe had been subjected to a massacre by one country or another every 10 to 15 years, since the 11th century and until the Holocaust in Germany,” the 82-year-old Abbas declared in an April 30 address.

“They say it was happening because they are Jews,” Abbas said. But, he explained, “the anti-Jewish [sentiment] was not because of their religion, but because of their function in society, which had to do with usury, banks, and so on.”

F.D.R. ON THE OTHER HAND WAS A PROTO-MONSTER

NEW DOCUMENTS REVEAL FDR’S EUGENIC PROJECT TO ‘RESETTLE’ JEWS DURING WORLD WAR II By Steve Usdin
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/260862/m-project-franklin-delano-roosevelt-jews
As the Holocaust raged, the American president secretly asked his government to study the possible resettlement of remaining European refugees in Africa and South America. His goal: for Jews to be ‘spread thin all over the world.’

A new exhibition at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Americans and the Holocaust, explores Americans’ knowledge of and responses to Nazism, war, and genocide. An unstated question runs through the photographs, films, and artifacts: What explains FDR’s apparent indifference to the plight of the Jews? If he’d had complete freedom to act without concern for the political consequences, what would he have done? Visitors leave the museum without answers.

Roosevelt didn’t address these issues publicly, but confidential files kept in his personal safe in the White House and released to the public decades after his death, as well as correspondence in his personal files, provide valuable clues. They make it clear that the question of where to settle the Jews had been on FDR’s mind for years. While he was uncertain about whether they would be better off on the slopes of the Andes or the savannahs of central Africa, there was one place he knew he didn’t want them: the United States of America.

Among the files in Roosevelt’s safe were documents about the origins and goals of the “M Project,” a secret study he commissioned of options for post-war migration (hence “M”) of the millions of Europeans, especially Jews, expected to be displaced by the war. The President first discussed the project in the summer of 1942 with John Franklin Carter, a journalist, novelist, and former diplomat who ran an informal secret intelligence service for Roosevelt. Carter’s No. 2 was an anthropologist named Henry Field.

Truman May Have Been the Proto-Trump By Victor Davis Hanson

When President Harry S. Truman left office in January 1953, most Americans were glad to see him go. Since the introduction of presidential approval ratings, Truman’s 32 percent rating was the lowest for any departing president except for that of Richard Nixon, who 21 years later resigned amid the Watergate scandal.

Americans were tired of five consecutive Democratic presidential terms. The Depression and World War II were both over, and people wanted a different sort of leadership that could jump-start the economy.

The outsider Truman had been an accidental president to begin with. When an ailing President Franklin D. Roosevelt ran for an unprecedented fourth term in 1944, worried Democrat insiders panicked. They feared that far-left-wing Vice President Henry Wallace might end up president if Roosevelt died in office.

Party pros replaced Wallace with the obscure Truman, a Missouri senator. They assumed that if worse came to worse, the non-entity Truman would be a token caretaker president.

Earlier, Truman had been immersed in scandal, owing to his ties to corrupt Kansas City political boss Tom Pendergast.

When Truman took office after Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, he knew relatively nothing about the grand strategy of World War II. No one had told him anything about the ongoing atomic bomb project.

But for the next seven-plus years, Truman shocked the country.

Over the objections of many in his Cabinet, he ordered the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan.

Kansas City Antifa Group Promises to ‘Fight Harder’ After Agitators Arrested in Clash with ‘the Pigs’ By Debra Heine

Five antifa radicals were arrested in Kansas City on May Day after they clashed with police in an incident the entire local media except for one blogger seems to have missed. The Red Guards Kansas City wrote about their May Day activities in posts on their blog and Facebook page.
Red Guards Kansas City
on Monday

“This day also further proved the cowardice and desperation of the pigs, who are increasingly frustrated and aggressive in the face of a rising power from the people. The dogs of the state will grow more violent and less bound by rules as our resistance to them strengthens, but these are the dying gasps of a system that is losing its grip and that knows it will soon be cast into the abyss. And so, though we know the danger to us will likely grow, we are not afraid of what is to come. For us and for all working people, what is coming is victory and power that will be worth our sacrifices and temporary suffering. The pain and humiliation of our comrades beaten and imprisoned only strengthens their resolve and fuels their rage.”

The Red Guards is a Maoist group that has chapters throughout the United States, including Los Angeles, where members on May Day burned an effigy of President Trump and called for “revolutionary violence” against “the capitalist state.” The group identifies as “antifascist” and aims to duplicate in the United States the anarchy and terror Chairman Mao’s Red Guards inflicted on China during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.

Donning masks, the Red Guards of Kansas City marched in the middle of the street without a permit, burned an American flag, waved communist flags, and carried a large banner honoring five murderous 20th-century communists. CONTINUE AT SITE

Your Taxpayer Dollars at the U.N. The case of the Bitkovs gets more outrageous

A United Nations prosecutor partly funded by the U.S. was supposed to be a cure for corruption in Guatemala. But the U.N. International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala—or CICIG by its Spanish initials—has had almost no oversight since it was established in 2006. Now it too is accused of corruption and politicizing the judiciary.

There’s nothing strange about absolute power run amuck. But it is weird that an army from the State Department, nonprofits and some business groups are resisting sunlight for a U.N. body that answers to no one.

The good news is that Republican Sens. Roger Wicker (Miss.), Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Mike Lee (Utah) and Rep. Chris Smith (R., N.J.) are more insistent. On Monday they sent a letter to the Chairman of the House subcommittee on state and foreign operations, Rep. Hal Rogers (R., Ky.), requesting a hold on a $6 million disbursement for CICIG until “Congress has conducted appropriate oversight.”

Israel Strikes Iranian Targets in Syria as Regional Tensions Mount Move is retaliation for Golan Heights rocket fire; escalating clashes come as Trump tries to get allies to join the U.S. in confronting Iran across the region By Dov Lieber and Dion Nissenbaum

Israel’s military carried out strikes against Iranian targets in Syria after it said Iranian forces based there fired rockets at its soldiers in the Golan Heights, raising the risk of a wider regional war just a day after President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the international nuclear deal with Tehran.

Iran’s attack in the Golan appears to be the first time Iran has opened fire from Syria on Israeli targets. The Israeli military said dozens of Iranian military sites across southern and central Syria were struck. The Israeli military called the strikes—which focused on sites related to logistics, intelligence and ammunition storage—its largest-ever operation against Iranian positions in Syria.

“It will take substantial time for the Iranians to replenish these systems,” said Jonathan Conricus, an Israeli military spokesman.

In a separate incident, Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen fired a barrage of missiles into Saudi Arabia on Wednesday. The pair of attacks were an early indication that Iran and its allies are flexing their muscles in the Middle East after Washington’s move.

The strikes heightened tensions in a region already on edge and underlined the risk of direct confrontation between Iran and Israel following the U.S. exit from the nuclear agreement. Iran, until now, had held back from any retaliatory response to recent Israeli strikes on its assets in Syria.

#NoMoreApologies by Steve Lipman

Does anyone say “department store” anymore? If you’re a Millennial or maybe even a tad older, you may not even be aware of what a department store is. If you’re thinking, Walmart or Target, or even Kohl’s, think again.

Until the 1970s or so, department stores were grand affairs; multi-story edifices, arranged in “departments,” and organized by floor. You needed to take an elevator, usually operated by a real person, to get to the floor that stocked whatever you were looking for. And as the elevator approached a floor, the operator would shout out the stops like a train conductor: “Fourth floor, kitchen appliances! Fifth floor, ladies lingerie!”

These days, you won’t find too many department store elevator operators, but even if you could, Richard Ned Lebow, a professor of political theory at King’s College London, recently showed that it’s no job for an amateur. A lot can go wrong just calling out the floors.

While attending an academic convention, Ledbow was riding in a hotel elevator―not in a department store elevator―with other passengers, including a number of women. Instead of saying the number of the floor he wanted to another passenger to press, Lebow quipped “Ladies Lingerie” as his floor choice.

Anyone who’d ever taken an old-fashioned department store elevator ride would have gotten the joke, and probably chuckled. Anyone not schooled in department store lore but possessed of good manners and an unexcitable mind probably would have ignored the comment, or thought this guy wandered into the wrong building. And that would be the end of it.

But that was just the beginning of it for Simona Sharoni, a professor of women’s and gender studies at Merrimack College. Sharoni was also on that elevator, and Lebow’s seems to have crack ruined her whole day.

Sharoni didn’t think Lebow was only joking. She couldn’t imagine anyone having the temerity to “make a reference to men shopping for lingerie while attending an academic conference.”

Right. Who does that? But still . . . what’s the problem?

Michael Kile: Kelp, Flannery’s Latest Brainwave

Apparently, if humanity would only listen, the planet could be saved from the ravages of global warming if we were to cultivate seaweed and then consign it to the ocean depths. It’s the latest grand scheme from the man who promoted ‘hot rocks’ salvation.

Two indefatigable disciples of Jeremiah for the price of a few cheers is a bargain in any language, but especially when the dialect of choice is climate babble. So it was at the earthy 2018 WOMADelaide’s carbon-neutral Planet Talks, where one of those warmist specimens, a resurgent Tim Flannery, revealed his latest eco-bright idea: salvation by seaweed.

Climate babble, n., 1. Silly or sincere speech about the climate and its effects, esp. the use of words or phrases designed to alarm, give an impression of authenticity, knowledge, precision, etc., such as: becoming obvious, not inconsistent with, in all likelihood, almost inevitable, not a moment to lose, carbon-negative technology, gut feeling, robust, runaway, tipping point, etc. 2. Climate-babbler: a person skilled in the art of climate babble. Syn., driveller, haruspex, snake oil salesperson. E.g.: “A decade ago climate experts were deeply worried; now they are terrified, tearful, traumatised and shaking in their sneakers.”

ABC Science Show’s legendary presenter, self-described “Methuselah” Robyn Williams was the other carbonphobic, teamed up for a fascinating “live” conversation with 60-year-old Flannery; mammalogist, palaeontologist, activist, explorer, discoverer of the greater monkey-faced bat, Pteralopex flanneryi, and author. His latest tome is Sunlight and Seaweed and it was assiduously promoted in their chat, all 51 minutes of which can be heard here.

Williams and Flannery go back a long way. The latter was a director of the South Australian Museum for seven years, from 1999. Williams, now a bequest ambassador for the Australian Museum Trust, was its president for eight years from 1986 and retains the title President Emeritus. It must be very nice to have friends with a taxpayer-funded national broadcaster at their disposal when you are trying to flog a book that presents seaweed as the salvation of mankind.

Augusto Zimmermann Adolf Hitler’s Debt to Karl Marx

This week, when people who should know better were marking the birth of modern Communism’s founder, his socialist heirs were flinging the standard slur that conservatives are ‘Nazis’. To find the Austrian Corporal’s real legatees they should look much closer to home.

May 5 was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx, author of Das Kapital and the spiritual leader of Communism, a totalitarian ideology that killed more than 100 million people in the 20th century alone. We should expect the European Union oligarchs to show a bit more respect for the innocent victims of Communism. And yet, Jean-Claude Juncker, the head of the European Commission attended the celebration marking the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth in Trier and openly declared that he was ‘celebrating the father of Communism’. The media also reports that the EU President defended Marx by arguing that he is not “responsible” for mistakes and atrocities committed in his name after his death. He delivered ‘an impassioned speech praising the legacy of the German philosopher’.[1]

The celebration of Marx by the European Commission President is particularly appalling for the European countries which suffered for decades under Communist dictatorships. And yet, Marx is not just the ‘father of Communism’. He is also the ‘mother’ of Nazi-Fascism, another ideology that claimed millions of lives in that continent. Indeed, all the intellectual frontrunners of Nazi-Fascism were radical Marxists at some stage of their lives. Like Marx, the early fascists condemned economic freedom and individual liberty. Above all, they agreed with Marx that capitalism should be eliminated because it supposedly favour only the ‘unproductive classes’ of industrialists at the expense of the working class.

Marxist Roots of Nazi Fascism

The Fascist movement was introduced in Italy after the World War I by Benito Mussolini. Raised by a Marxist mother, at the age of 29 Mussolini managed to become ‘one of the most effective and widely read socialist journalists in Europe’.[2] In 1912, he was elected the head of the Italian Socialist Party at the Congress of Reggio Emilia, opposing ‘bourgeois’ parliaments and proposing that Italy should be thoroughly Marxist. ‘Marx’, wrote Mussolini, ‘is the father and teacher … He is the magnificent philosopher of working-class violence’.[3] Of his own political aspiration, Mussolini remarked: ‘I wish to prepare my country and accustom it to war for the day of the greatest bloodbath of all, when the two basic hostile classes will clash in the supreme trial’.[4]

According to French historian François Furet, ‘Communism and Fascism grew up on the same soil, the soil of Italian socialism’. As Furet also explains, ‘Mussolini was a member of the revolutionary wing of the Socialist movement prior to supporting Italy’s entry into the Great War; then, immediately afterward, he found himself in violent conflict with the Bolshevik-leaning leaders of his former party’.[5] On the eve of that war, Mussolini predicted: ‘With the unleashing of a mighty clash of peoples, the bourgeoisie is playing its last card and calls forth on the world scene that which Karl Marx called the sixth great power: the socialist revolution’.[6]

However, the coming of that war coupled with his determination to bring Italy into it resulted in Mussolini losing his official position within the Italian Socialist Party.[7] As a result, on March 23, 1919, he was forced to create the Fascist Movement which promised, among other things, the partial seizure of all finance capital; the control over the national economy by corporative economic councils; the confiscation of church lands; and agrarian reform.[8] And yet, Lenin’s economic failures in the Soviet Union had turned Mussolini away from direct expropriation of industry. Still, Mussolini’s greatest aspiration was to establish a socialist utopia that should dictate how private business would be allowed to operate.[9] According to the British historian, Paul Johnson,

Mussolini now wanted to use and exploit capitalism rather than destroy it. But his was to be a radical revolution nonetheless, rooted in the pre-war ‘vanguard élite’ Marxism and syndicalism (workers’ rule) which was to remain to his death the most important single element in his politics.[10]

Outlook for Israeli Leader Brightens as Prospects for Iran Nuclear Deal Dim President Trump’s pullout from Iran accord has scrambled Israel’s politics and boosted Netanyahu’s fortunesBy Dov Lieber in Tel Aviv and Rory Jones in Dubai

President Donald Trump’s move to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal has dramatically brightened the political outlook for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose hold on office was at risk just weeks ago.

Mr. Netanyahu—who has long opposed the Iran deal—has faced spiraling police corruption probes that have entangled his wife and polarized Israelis.

But Israelis have rallied beyond Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing backers to support his policies on Iran, a shift that has scrambled the nation’s politics and boosted his fortunes.

Opposition politicians, who only weeks ago called for the Israeli leader’s resignation over alleged corruption, have lined up alongside Mr. Netanyahu. Yair Lapid of the Yesh Atid party and Avi Gabbay, head of the Labor Party, both welcomed Mr. Trump’s announcement, saying Israelis should display united support for renewed U.S. sanctions on Tehran.

Ze’ev Elkin, a member of Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party, said those who doubted the premier’s efforts to rescind the deal should now “eat their hats.” CONTINUE AT SITE