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January 2019

Israel’s secret weapons: optimism, patriotism and roots : Amb. (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

https://bit.ly/2R5TZVL

Israel is the 8th most powerful country in the world – as it was in 2017 – according to the 2018 Power Rankings, published by the US News & World Report in partnership with the world renowned Wharton School of Business (Pennsylvania University) and the global strategic consultancy Y&R’s BAV Group. Israel follows the USA, Russia, China, Germany, the United Kingdom, France and Japan, ahead of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, South Korea, Canada, Iran, Turkey, India, Australia, Switzerland, etc.. The ranking reflects the regional and global clout of national leadership and economic, political, diplomatic and military networking/alliances.

The NY-based Trading Economics – an online platform that provides economic data and forecasts and trading recommendations – highlights a surge of Israel’s Economic Optimism Index from a record low 21.70 in 1976 to all time high 131.40 index points in November 2018, ahead of South Korea’s 113.5, the European Union’s 109.60, the USA’s 104.80 and Japan’s 99.6.

Israel is ranked 8th in the November 2018 Global Consumer Confidence Index, conducted by the Paris-based global market research Ipsos, which operates in 88 countries, employing 16,530 persons. Israel follows China, USA, India, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Germany and Canada, ahead of Australia, Britain, Belgium, France, Italy, Japan, South Korea, etc..

The major engines, which have generated Israel’s demographic, economic, scientific, technological, agricultural, diplomatic and military growth – in addition to the engine of Israel’s brainpower, and the resulting innovative, cutting-edge commercial and defense industries – have been Israel’s relatively high level of optimism and patriotism/resilience, in the face of lethal challenges and threats menacing the Jewish State from its reestablishment in 1948.

Actually, 2018 Was a Pretty Good Year By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/2018-successful-year-for-american-economy/

Aside from the Washington hysterias, 2018 was a most successful year for Americans.

The year 2018 will be deplored by pundits as a bad year of more unpredictable Donald Trump, headlined by wild stock-market gyrations, the melodramas of the Robert Mueller investigation, and the musical-chair tenures of officials in the Trump administration.

A quarter of the government is still shut down. Talk of impeachment by the newly Democratic-controlled House of Representatives is in the air. Seemingly every day there are sensational breakthroughs, scandals, and bombshells that race through social media and the Internet — only to be forgotten by the next day.

In truth, aside from the Washington hysterias, 2018 was a most successful year for Americans.

In December, the United States reached a staggering level of oil production, pumping some 11.6 million barrels per day. For the first time since 1973, America is now the world’s largest oil producer

Since Trump took office, the U.S. has increased its oil production by nearly 3 million barrels per day, largely as the result of fewer regulations, more federal leasing, and the continuing brilliance of American frackers and horizontal drillers. It appears that there is still far more oil beneath U.S. soil than has ever been taken out. American production could even soar higher in the months ahead.

In addition, the United States remains the largest producer of natural gas and the second-greatest producer of coal. The scary old energy-related phraseology of the last half-century — “energy crisis,” “peak oil,” “oil embargo” — no longer exists.

Germany and the Migrants By Doug Petrikat

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/01/german_and_the_migrants.html

It has been over three years now since German Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the borders of Europe during the migrant crisis of 2015 and 2016, which allowed approximately 1.5 million to enter Germany alone. It would be difficult at this point to argue that this has been anything other than a blunder, and a major disaster for the people of Europe. While growing numbers of German citizens have been hoping that their government would come up with some realistic solution to the migrant issue, a leaked government report published in the Rheinische Post revealed instead that there are plans to accept millions more. And on December 10, 2018 Merkel appeared in Marrakesh, Morocco for the signing of the U.N. Migration Pact, which aims to facilitate the regular movement of people from the third world to developed countries.

Opening the borders of Europe was presented as a humanitarian effort to help refugees from the Syrian civil war. However, it is now known that 80% of those who arrived in Europe were not even from Syria. Once word got out that you could enter Europe without a passport, they arrived from other third-world countries such as Nigeria, Somalia, Morocco, Eritrea, Sudan, Iraq, and Bangladesh. These were mostly single males from 18 to 35, without skills and unemployable. Frans Timmermans, the pro-migration vice president of the European Commission, even admitted that the overwhelming majority of those who had entered Europe were not actually asylum seekers but economic migrants who had no more right to be in Europe than anyone else. Violent crime and terrorism have increased, and billions of Euros are spent every year to support the new residents. Some creative attempts have been made to deny the increase in violent crime and terrorism linked to mass migration, but the facts are beyond dispute.

During the peak of the migrant crisis it was claimed that the newcomers would become vibrant new additions to the German workforce who would compensate for Germany’s low birthrate. Merkel said the multitude of young men would help secure the welfare state and ensure that enough tax revenue is collected to support senior citizens on government pensions.

Europe’s New “Munich”: Iran by Giulio Meotti

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13380/europe-iran-appeasement

Iran’s terror campaign is not directed only at the West’s democratic ally in the Middle East, but also at Europe itself.

“The Iranian regime spends nearly a billion dollars a year just to support terrorism”. — Nathan A. Sales, US State Department Coordinator for Counterterrorism, November 13, 2018.

In 1938, the leaders of France and Britain signed the Munich Agreement with Hitler and Mussolini. British PM Neville Chamberlain hailed the agreement as bringing “peace for our time.” The weak and blind European governments trusted the Nazi leadership, who were already planning not only the invasion of their neighbors, but also the Holocaust. Today’s short-sighted effort by Europe to appease Tehran for profit is simply a replica of its 1938 surrender.

In the choice between greed and values, Europe is approaching an existential crossroads with Iran. Europe is both undermining its credibility and surrendering its principles.

For Western governments to defend the interests of businesses is normal. But to betray the Iranian people, who are repressed by their own regime; to undermine Israel’s concerns about Iran’s all too real threats of annihilation; to beg for an accord that fast-tracks Iran’s nuclear weapons capability, and to boycott efforts by the US administration to hold the Iranian regime accountable for its actions — these are not normal. They are lethal.

The Iranian leadership has long called for the destruction of Israel — the country, along with Saudi Arabia, most at risk from a nuclearized and aggressive Islamic Republic. In November, Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani, who has been hailed by the media as a “moderate”, called Israel a “cancerous tumor in the region.” A few months earlier, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, tweeted similar remarks:

“#Israel is a malignant cancerous tumor in the West Asian region that has to be removed and eradicated: it is possible and it will happen.”

Tightening Sharia Screws The clampdown on free speech intensifies. Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272399/tightening-sharia-screws-bruce-bawer

It started out with an isolated case here and there. In 2005, Oriana Fallaci was put on trial in Italy for her anti-Islam book The Force of Reason. In 2010 and again in 2011, politician Geert Wilders was tried in the Netherlands for publicly criticizing Islam. In 2011, the Danish Lars Hedegaard was found guilty by a Danish court of hate speech for having, in the privacy of his own home, made reference to the frequency of incest rape in Muslim communities. (The verdict was later reversed by the Danish Supreme Court.) Also in 2011, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff was tried and fined in Austria for having stated, truthfully, that the Prophet Muhammed was a pedophile. The verdict was upheld by two higher Austrian courts and, this year, by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

In the years since those notorious prosecutions were initiated, the net has spread ever wider, and such cases have become routine aspects of Western European life. In 2017 alone, about 77 people, most of them “middle aged and elderly ladies,” were convicted in Sweden of “inciting hate.” Also in 2017, two Norwegian parliamentarians, one of them belonging to the Conservative Party and the other to the Progress Party (which gained power by promising to fight such things) introduced a website at which citizens can, with a couple of keystrokes, report “hate speech” to the police. In Britain, too, members of the public are being urged to report “offensive or insulting comments” to the police, and increasing numbers of otherwise law-abiding British subjects are being imprisoned for, as Reason’s Brendan O’Neill put it, “making racist comments or just cracking tasteless jokes on Twitter.”

You might deduce from all this that Western European governments are already doing a bang-up job of suppressing freedom of speech. But the United Nations doesn’t seem to think so. At a December 6 meeting in Geneva of the UN’s Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, Keiko Ko, the committee’s Rapporteur for Norway, charged that the Norwegian government had not yet done enough to “prevent hate speech” directed at refugees and migrants, to ban so-called “racist organizations,” and to prosecute persons guilty of “racism, racial discrimination and xenophobia.” In response, a Norwegian official attending the meeting assured Ko of Norway’s determination to punish “hate speech” and to develop new ways for the police to “engage those spreading hatred.” Another Norwegian delegate affirmed that “[t]he prosecution of hate crimes, including hate utterances, was a priority in Norway.”

Romney’s Betrayal The new senator takes the low road. Matthew Vadum

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272440/romneys-betrayal-matthew-vadum

With a singularly impressive record of failure in public life under his belt, the always-predictable virtue-signaler Willard Mitt Romney has chosen to take the low road, beginning his freshman term in the United States Senate by stabbing President Trump and his fellow Republicans in the back.

Instead of, say, waiting a brief time to get settled into his new office as Utah senator, the former Massachusetts governor, who to this day refuses to apologize for his Bay State government healthcare program that inspired Obamacare, took to the pages of the Washington Post two days before his swearing-in to attack the “character” of someone who as president has been generous, forgiving, and supportive of him.

In his Jeff Bezos-approved column, Romney embraced the leftist critique of Trump, hurling every leftist smear he could think of and bashing the president for his mastery of social media, a field Romney barely grasps.

As senator, Romney vowed to “support policies that I believe are in the best interest of the country and my state, and oppose those that are not. I do not intend to comment on every tweet or fault. But I will speak out against significant statements or actions that are divisive, racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, dishonest or destructive to democratic institutions.”

Joel B. Pollak of Breitbart News provided a helpful timeline of the flip-flopping unsuccessful 2012 presidential candidate’s love-hate relationship with Trump in recent years on Twitter:

Syria and Our Foreign Policy Muddle Waiting for history to make our decisions is a dangerous strategy. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272357/syria-and-our-foreign-policy-muddle-bruce-thornton

Donald Trump’s decision to pull ground troops out of Syria, followed hard by Defense Secretary Mattis’ resignation effective January 1, has sparked the usual complaints about the unpredictable, shoot-from-the-hip president. And as usual, the most important issue underlying the debate over his decision is ignored––our failure to settle on a coherent, long-term foreign policy strategy.

Apart from the by now reflexive NeverTrump harrumphing, more sober commentators have made serious arguments both for staying and for leaving. The most compelling of the former are the risks of ceding more regional influence to Russia and Iran. Both of these rivals are solidifying their presence in the region, and neither is that serious about destroying ISIS, which still boasts thousands of jihadists intent on wreaking havoc on Western infidels. The terrorist gang Hezbollah, for forty years Iran’s creature, likewise will continue to control territory from which it threatens Israel with missiles supplied via the Iranian Quds Force personnel stationed in Syria. And our allies the Kurds, who have been stalwart warriors against ISIS, will be left hanging, vulnerable to the aggression of Islamist Turkey, which likewise does not consider ISIS a threat to eliminate.

The proponents of withdrawal also have arguments that must be taken seriously. Our strategic aims in Syria have been all over the place the past several years––supporting “moderate” rebels fighting to overthrow the Assad regime; enforcing with noisy, carefully calibrated cruise-missile strikes international sanctions against the use of chemical weapons; and ameliorating the growing “refugee” disaster spilling into Europe. Finishing off ISIS does not seem feasible with the current strategy and low level of troops. And our air power in the region, assuming it remains, along with ground forces in Iraq, can be quickly mobilized to answer any threat to our interests and security on the part of Russia or Iran.

Steven Karetzky Reveiws“100 Photographs: The most Influential Images of ALL Time.” A Time special edition, Dec., 2018

A Time special edition, Dec., 2018. It has been published in two other forms over the past few years, e.g., hardcover and has received rave reviews.

I reviewed this special issue of the magazine Time, published last month,as well as the book from two years ago with the same content.
This is the paperback edition of a volume issued two years ago, more than enough time for it to have had its numerous factual errors corrected. Unfortunately, Time has not done so. Perhaps it assumes this to be unnecessary since three-quarters of the Amazon reviews of that edition gave it five stars. Apparently, these reviewers, like those at Time, know nothing about the history of photography or the U.S.A. The main critique of the book on Amazon was that it contains too many depressing photos.

As stated on the cover, these photos have been extremely influential. The problem is that “The stories behind the pictures” noted on the cover are often erroneous and will merely augment the influence of the bogus photographs. I will deal with only a few of the most egregious of the work.

The famous “Migrant Mother” by the notorious Dorothea Lange, is a prime example. The viewer is supposed to pity the Depression era migrant worker who is meant to represent the dreadful sadness of all of them. Dorothea Lange had promised the woman when she took the photos of her that they would not be shown to anyone. She lied. Copies soon appeared in newspapers around the country, infuriating the “migrant mother.” In truth, she had been playing with her six children and had merely sat down for a moment to rest. As one of the New Deal’s left-wing photographers, Lange’s primary interest was to shake up the American public to gain more support for Depression era federal projects and to show what a horrible country the U.S. was. According to Frances Thompson and her children, she had a joyful family life and lived until the age of eighty.