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January 2019

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Ruthie Blum; The Anyone but Bibi Bluster

By on January 11th, 2019

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-anybody-but-bibi-camps-bluster/

When Tzipi Livni and her ilk try to promote the idea that Netanyahu is a greater danger to Israel than Islamist missiles and butcher knives covered in Jewish blood, most of us just sigh and yawn.

In a typical tirade against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin (“Bibi”) Netanyahu on Tuesday, Hatnua Party chair Tzipi Livni said, “No leader in Israel has the right to destroy everything we have built here for his own personal needs.”

Referring to Netanyahu’s televised address to the nation on Monday evening, Livni—still stinging from her sudden ouster by Labor Party leader Avi Gabbay as head of the Zionist Union opposition bloc—added, “That’s what he does on prime time.”

Livni was not alone in lambasting Netanyahu for causing the country to spend three hours speculating about the “dramatic announcement” he was going to deliver, and then treating viewers to a complaint that he is not being given a fair shake by the legal system.

It was a disappointing display. Rumors had been rampant of imminent war, the possible release of Israelis in Hamas captivity or potential U.S. recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. The letdown, then, was enormous.

More importantly, it provided “anybody but Bibi” politicians and members of the media with the perfect opportunity to accuse Netanyahu of hijacking the airways to make a case for his innocence in a number of corruption cases for which he is being investigated. Channel 10 went as far as to cut off the prime minister’s remarks in the middle and resume its regular news broadcast.

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IMMIGRATION, MEDIA Comments turned off

CNN’s Acosta Confirms Walled Part of the Border Is Crisis-Free

By on January 11th, 2019

https://freebeacon.com/uncategorized/cnns-acosta-confirms-walled-part-of-the-border-is-crisis-free/

CNN reporter Jim Acosta confirmed no crisis existed along a walled portion of the U.S.-Mexico border during a visit Thursday.

In a video shared to Twitter, Acosta pointed to “some of the steel slats that the president’s been talking about.” Walking along the border in McAllen, Texas, Acosta noted that the president has warned of a national emergency at the unwalled portion of the southern border. Acosta observed that this emergency did not exist along the portion of the border that had already been secured with steel slats.

“As we’re walking along here we’re not saying any kind of imminent danger,” he remarked, patting the border barrier with his hand as he filmed himself. “There are no migrants trying to rush towards this fence.”

President Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to “build the wall” and secure the border. Though the rate has decreased in recent years, hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals cross the southern border into the United States every year.

Democrats have refused to provide funding for the president’s border wall, though many have voted for it as part of larger immigration bills in the past. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) jokingly offered the president one dollar for the wall and called it immoral. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), have refused to accommodate Trump’s wish to build a border wall.

“He is not going to get the wall in any form,” Schumer said last month. Some Democrats, like Congressman Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.), have agreed that “enhanced fencing” would in fact help secure the border. The estimated cost is between $2-5.7 billion dollars.

In an address to the nation from the oval office Tuesday, Trump stopped short of declaring a federal emergency to secure unilateral authority to fund the wall. Now in its twentieth day, the government shutdown is approaching the longest of its kind in American history.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Trump?Edward Cranswick

By on January 11th, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/01-02/whos-afraid-of-the-big-bad-trump/

While some folks talk a big game about principles, what they really prefer is someone socking it to their enemies. Donald Trump won in 2016 because he could be relied on to punch every conceited political moraliser and mediocre pseudo-intellectual who attempted to stand in his way.

Fear: Trump in the White House
by Bob Woodward
Simon & Schuster, 2018, 448 pages, $45
______________________________

Bob Woodward’s account of the Trump White House, provocatively titled Fear, is not a very interesting book. For one thing, the title is grandiose, and is predicated on the fallacious assumption that the best way to understand Donald Trump is to take him at his word. The back of the dust-jacket provides the quotation from which the title is drawn, a remark Trump made (one of a whirlwind of contradictory and context-pandering remarks) during the 2016 campaign: “Real power is—I don’t even want to use the word—fear.”

Naturally, the book’s marketers were probably trying to play up the image of Trump the authoritarian strongman, possibly even a fascist, a recurrent fantasy that those with little political acumen relish in peddling. As others have pointed out, such tough-guy talk from Trump actually springs from an adolescent desire to play the tough guy (his favourite film is reputedly The Godfather), and so he places a premium on words like respect and fear and—my favourite of his rare terms of adulation—tough cookie.

This review appears in the current edition of Quadrant.
Click here to subscribe and avoid the paywall

Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury had the first-in-best-dressed quality of confirming our worst fears about Trump—his inherent ridiculousness, his abnormal inattentiveness, and his propensity to take as most valuable the advice he received most recently. So Woodward has nothing new to offer here.

Woodward’s prose is clear but leaden. He’s less a writer than a conduit for information (which isn’t the worst thing in the world: boring and clear writing is often necessary, but it hardly makes for engrossing reading).

Fundamentally, there’s nothing I read in Fear that I felt I didn’t already know—with the exception of the information regarding Trump’s inability to grasp the linkage between trade policy and foreign policy. The book opens with a terrifying account of Trump’s near foreign-policy debacle in demanding to withdraw from the KORUS free-trade agreement between the United States and South Korea. As is so often the case in foreign affairs, economic relationships are part of the quid pro quo that goes into securing a profitable strategic military position in a country. Abandon KORUS and you risk compromising a key strategic foothold in the Korean peninsula—a foothold essential to the United States’ early detection of nuclear operations by the North.

But even here, my assumption before and throughout the Trump presidency is that his worst behaviour will be circumscribed by the often eminently sensible team of advisers he has around him, chiefly Jim Mattis (thankfully, Trump is more than usually deferential when it comes to men in uniform) but many others, too.

Trump’s chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, is an amusing character in the book, stealing documents off Trump’s desk when he thought it better that The Donald didn’t see them, as in the KORUS case, where Trump had a draft letter on his desk signalling withdrawal from the agreement:

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Tlaib, the Democratic Party, and Jew-Hate The Democrats’ silence in the face of vile comments by one of their own. Ari Lieberman

By on January 11th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272496/tlaib-democratic-party-and-jew-hate-ari-lieberman

It’s fair to say that ex-congressman John Conyers (D, Mi.), who represented Michigan’s 13th district, was not a good guy. The octogenarian congressman willingly attended Farrakhan gatherings, signed on to anti-Israel legislation and was eventually forced to resign amid a string sexual harassment allegations. It’s also fair to say that his replacement, Rashida Tlaib, who identifies as “Palestinian,” is a walking train wreck by comparison.

In the hours following her inauguration, Tlaib demanded Trump’s impeachment, called him a “mother f*cker,” admitted that she used this language in front of her child, displayed a map in which the State of Israel was replaced with “Palestine,” insinuated that U.S. Jews maintain dual loyalties (this coming from a woman who draped herself in a “Palestinian” flag and garb during her inauguration) and implied that U.S. politicians are controlled by Israel.

This behavior is to be expected from someone like Tlaib, whose unhinged anti-Israel and anti-Semitic vitriol is well known. In fact, Tlaib is so anti-Israel that even the anti-Israel J Street withdrew support for her. What is surprising is the Democratic Party’s near-complete silence on the matter. The calumny of dual loyalty is nearly as old as antisemitism itself and is regurgitated with banal regularity by conspiracy theorists on the hard-right and left. Former KKK leader David Duke and Tlaib find common ground on this matter. Tlaib’s ally, the Farrakhan-supporting Linda Sarsour recently invoked the same anti-Semitic trope.

So why have Democrats remained silent? Why have they not issued a full-throated condemnation of Tlaib’s vile comments? There are three likely explanations, which are not mutually exclusive and often overlap.

First, many Democrats suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome, which prevents them from assessing serious matters, such as antisemitism, in rational terms. Tlaib is anti-Semitic to her core but because she is a Trump hater, she’s given a free pass. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) falls into this category. She showered Linda Sarsour with praise despite Sarsour’s odious past and ties to Farrakhan. Gillibrand’s hatred of Trump is so deep-seated that she will choose to pair up and find common cause with sordid characters who share her pedantic views on Trump.

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HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

A New National Security Strategy for America Immigration is America’s top national security threat. Daniel Greenfield

By on January 11th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272520/new-national-security-strategy-america-daniel-greenfield

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

After the Cold War, what is the biggest threat to America? The debate between Obama and Romney famously bogged down over the question of whether Russia was our biggest geopolitical foe. While Obama slammed Romney’s answer as a Cold War relic, after losing the next election, his party defines its foreign policy and domestic opposition around the fear that Russia is now more of a threat than ever.

Answers by other politicians have ranged from the structural, the national debt and internal divisions, to the inanimate and absurd; Bernie Sanders’ claim that global warming is our top national security threat. But assessments that name conditions rather than threat vectors are unhelpful because even when they are right, they tell us to address a weakness or failure, rather than meeting an external threat.

Being able to name and define external threats is vital for reaching informed national security decisions.

The debates over border security, Syria, Afghanistan, and Russian informational warfare have been taking place in a chaotic environment of rapid fire talking points backed by ideological agendas, but with no framework for understanding the larger threat environment and how to achieve national security.

Our national security framework dates back to the Cold War. The doctrines we employed during the Cold War quickly became dated even while the Soviet Union was around. They’re so old now that the vast majority of Americans weren’t even born when they were hatched. And yet in the generation since the Cold War ended, we haven’t found anything new to replace them with. And that is the problem.

The Clinton administration ignored national security and put the military at the disposal of the UN on exercises in nation building that helped revive Russia as a serious threat while ignoring the threat of Al Qaeda. The Bush administration rolled out nation building as a response to Islamic terrorism. This was a misguided approach that failed to understand the nature of the threat and how to address it.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

The New Palestinian ‘Catastrophe’: A Shopping Mall Hiring Palestinians by Bassam Tawil

By on January 11th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13531/palestinians-shopping-mall

“Rami Levy does not discriminate on the basis of ethnicity, gender, or religion when hiring and promoting employees. All employees, Palestinians and Israelis, are treated equally and receive equal benefits. Salaries are based solely on one’s position and performance. My goal for all Rami Levy employees is to have the same opportunity to succeed.” — Rami Levy, owner of Israel’s third-largest supermarket chain, half of whose 4,000 workers, he says, are Palestinians and Israeli Arabs.

Palestinian investors, according to Fatah official Hatem Abdel Qader Eid, could have prevented Rami Levy from building his new mall had they invested in the construction of a Palestinian shopping center. “It’s true that there are wealthy Palestinian businessmen…”

Now that the campaign has failed to prevent the opening of the mall, Fatah and its followers have turned to outright threats and violence. The threats are being directed toward Palestinian shoppers and Palestinian merchants who rented space in the new mall.

If a Palestinian who buys Israeli milk is a traitor in the eyes of Fatah, it is not difficult to imagine the fate of any Palestinian who would dare to discuss compromise with Israel. If he is lucky, he will have a close encounter with a firebomb. If he is not lucky, he will be hanged in a public square.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s ruling Fatah faction is angry. It seems a Jewish Israeli businessman has just built a shopping mall in east Jerusalem and most of its workers and customers are Arabs.

Fatah leaders have called for boycotting the mall.

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