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Ruth King

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Time To Reassess CrowdStrike’s Credibility Julie Kelly

By on October 8th, 2019

amgreatness.com/2019/10/07/time-to-reassess-crowdstrikes-credibility/

Trump foes dismiss any scrutiny of CrowdStrike as part of a “conspiracy theory.” But the tangled web between CrowdStrike, Democratic operatives, the Trump-hating media and the Obama Justice Department isn’t a theory, it is fact.

Days before the Senate voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh last year, a former FBI assistant director appeared on MSNBC to suggest the Supreme Court nominee had a major credibility problem. “This is not…an investigation about the sexual allegations, I think it really has moved toward credibility,” Shawn Henry, an NBC News analyst, told Nicolle Wallace on October 1, 2018. “At this point now, there are very clear allegations, and subsequent to the judge’s testimony, people have come out who appear to be credible who…appear to be contradicting his testimony sworn before the United States Senate.”

Henry, clearly reciting Democratic talking points to imply Kavanaugh perjured himself before the Senate Judiciary Committee during his September showdown with Christine Blasey Ford, also referred to Ford as a “victim” and claimed that the FBI’s investigation into Kavanaugh’s testimony had “fallen short.”

Henry was presented to viewers as the channel’s “national security analyst,” but there was one title the network overlooked: Shawn Henry is a top executive for CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm hired by the Democratic National Committee to investigate the infamous hack of its email system in early 2016. Perhaps not coincidentally, the firm determined that the Russians were behind the intrusion. CrowdStrike’s June 2016 assessment remains the sole source of evidence to supply the pretext of the government’s Russian election interference claim; later, it would help bolster the Trump-Russia collusion fable.

The president, according to a transcript released by the White House, mentioned CrowdStrike during a phone call with the new Ukranian president over the summer. Now, the California-based company is facing renewed scrutiny both about the handling of the DNC email hack and the firm’s political affiliations. Last month, in response to questions about the firm’s clear connections to Democrats, CrowdStrike rejected accusations of bias in an FAQ posted on its website:

“CrowdStrike is not affiliated with any political party. We are a public cybersecurity company, and are non-partisan. We have done cybersecurity work for, and currently protect, both Republican and Democratic political organizations at the state, local, and federal level.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Stalin Had Gulags, Turkey Has Courts by Burak Bekdil

By on October 8th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14914/stalin-gulags-turkey-courts

[Canan] Kaftancıoğlu [now under arrest for old tweets] came to prominence only after her critical role in defeating Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Istanbul’s municipal elections on March 31 and June 23, ending Islamist rule in Turkey’s biggest city after 25 years.

On September 20, a Turkish court held its first hearing of a case against two Bloomberg reporters accused of “trying to undermine Turkey’s economic stability.”…. “They’ve been indicted for accurately and objectively reporting on highly newsworthy events,” said Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait.

Thirty-six other defendants, including prominent economist Mustafa Sönmez and journalist Sedef Kabaş, are also on trial for their social media comments on Turkey’s economy and banks.

In May, Erdoğan said that Turkey was still committed to full membership in the European Union. He must have forgotten that, among hundreds of other hair-raising democratic deficits, he is the president of a country that has banned more than 245,000 websites and domains.

From 1936 to 1938, the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin brutally executed his “Great Purge,” a more innocent name for the wholesale liquidation of “enemies of the state.” The slaughter targeted, among others, Communist Party and government officials, journalists, academics, peasants, Jews, teachers, generals, members of the intelligentsia and many others. “Better that 10 innocent people suffer than one spy get away,” said Nikolai Yezhov, chief of the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs). “When you chop wood, chips fly.” In 1932, Stalin launched a war for the “Sovietization” of Russia. Seven decades later, Turkey’s Islamist strongman and president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, launched his war to “Islamize” Ataturk’s modern, secular Turkey.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A Tale of Two Coups by Andrew Ash

By on October 8th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14963/tale-of-two-coups

The good news is that it is wholly unlikely that either of the “two coups” will succeed. The increasingly transparent nature of the opposition’s underhanded tricks to reverse the outcome, will in fact, be their undoing.

The president was requesting that Zelensky cooperate with the US Attorney General in investigating possible crime and corruption from 2016. It is the president’s job as the Chief Executive to investigate such matters, as well as required by the Treaty with Ukraine on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters, signed September 30, 1999. No outcome was recommended.

There are also allegations that the entire attempted coup to unseat President Trump is actually an effort to head off an exposure of widespread criminality in the previous administration.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has reminded the House of Representatives that while the US Constitution does not explicitly require a vote by the entire House to launch an impeachment enquiry, neither does it support one “by a unilateral decree of the Speaker.” The Democrat-controlled House has so far tabled McCarthy’s resolution — twice. And in the traditionally “wrong” Congressional committee — Intelligence rather than Judiciary — to boot.

There are now apparently claims in the US by “multiple whistleblowers”… As [former prosecutor] Andrew McCarthy recently observed, however: “Remember your elementary math, though: Zero is still zero even when multiplied…..”

“Trump is the real whistleblower.” — Stephen Miller, White House senior policy adviser, Fox News Sunday, September 29, 2019.

The public sorely need their faith restored: that their rights as voters, along with fair play, will ultimately win out.

There appears to be a curious symmetry connecting both the blocking of Brexit, and the continued attempts to bring down a free and fair American election. The same or different types of “deep state” involved on either side of the Atlantic is debatable, but the repeated attempts at a coup d’état against both the American President and the British Prime Minister have a lot in common, not least the desire to thwart the openly expressed wishes of the US and British electorates.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump’s Jacksonian Syria Withdrawal He isn’t the first president to try to pull America back from the Middle East. By Walter Russell Mead

By on October 8th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-jacksonian-syria-withdrawal-11570487847

Under investigation for impeachment he may be, but President Trump can still shake the world with his tweets. Explaining his decision to pull U.S. troops away from the Turkish-Syrian border at the cost of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, and open the way for Turkish forces to create what Ankara calls a “safety zone,” President Trump tweeted early Monday that “it is time for us to get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars, many of them tribal, and bring our soldiers home.”

Hitting the caps-lock button, Mr. Trump went on to restate one of his bedrock beliefs, and a cornerstone of Jacksonian foreign-policy thinking: “WE WILL ONLY FIGHT WHERE IT IS TO OUR BENEFIT, AND ONLY FIGHT TO WIN.” As for concerns that a U.S. withdrawal would allow Islamic State to re-form, Mr. Trump was dismissive. “We are 7000 miles away and will crush ISIS again if they come anywhere near us!”

Criticism of Mr. Trump’s withdrawal decision has been intense, with prominent supporters like Sen. Lindsey Graham and former officials like Nikki Haley joining longtime opponents of the White House. Much of that criticism is justified, and the erratic nature of Trump-era policy making, as well as the often-unpredictable policy mix that results, are undercutting American prestige and influence in much of the world. But not all of the problems dogging the Trump administration Middle East policy are caused by Mr. Trump’s sometimes idiosyncratic views or policy-making style. As two other news stories from the Middle East last week make clear, the American position in the region is an odd mix of dominance and impotence that makes good policy making hard—and that makes the task of building domestic support for smart policy even harder.

The first development is a success story that underlines how dominant the U.S. has become: Fearing U.S. sanctions, China National Petroleum Corp. has abandoned plans for a multibillion-dollar investment in Iran’s South Pars gas field. This is part of a broader Chinese retreat from Iran in the face of American pressure; the Middle Kingdom isn’t yet ready to challenge the U.S. in the Middle East.

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HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Real-Life Immigrant ‘Joker’ Kills 4 in New York Bloody times in the social justice jungle. Daniel Greenfield

By on October 8th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/10/real-life-immigrant-joker-kills-4-new-york-daniel-greenfield/

While New Yorkers packed movie theaters to watch Joker, a homeless immigrant stalked the streets of the city bludgeoning four homeless men to death with a three-foot long metal pipe while they slept.

Rodriguez “Randy” Santos had come to the United States from the Dominican Republic four years ago.

In those four years, he racked up 14 arrests for everything from biting a man on the chest to groping a woman. He punched his mother and broke his grandfather’s nose. In just the last year he was arrested four times. And still the authorities remained comfortable with letting Santos walk the streets.

At least, until he was caught with a metal pipe covered in the blood and matted hair of four dead men.

And some marijuana.

This should have come as no surprise because he had busted back in May attacking a man with a metal weapon in his old homeless shelter. Instead of locking him up, he was given yet another chance.

And he took it.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Why the Syria Pullout Makes Sense America’s president stands firm for America’s national interest. Kenneth R. Timmerman

By on October 8th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/10/why-syria-pullout-makes-sense-kenneth-r-timmerman/

Washington is awash with dire predictions following President Trump’s “surprise” announcement late Sunday night to pull out the remaining 500 or so U.S. advisors currently in northern Syria.

But as the President tweeted on Monday morning, he was elected to end our “ridiculous endless wars,” which are costing us huge amounts in blood and treasure. Continued U.S. entanglement, according to Trump, can only make Russia and China happy.

So which is it: is the President endangering the United States and our allies by pulling out of Syria? Betraying our allies, the Kurds? Or is he defending America’s national interest?

I have spent a lot of time with the Kurds on the ground, especially in northern Iraq, along the Iranian border. I have also met with Kurdish peshmerga generals in Iraq, as well as the overall Iraqi commander, in charge of the fight against ISIS in Mosul.

That battle is over. And contrary to how MSNBC has been misquoting Sen. Lindsay Graham all day, the United States has indeed utterly defeated the ISIS caliphate.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Bombshell Admission: Clapper Says Obama Made Them Do It !!!!!

By on October 8th, 2019

https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2019/10/07/clapper-obama-made-us-do-it/

RUSH: Audio sound bite number 10, this morning on CNN Jim Sciutto is talking to James Clapper, who was as corrupt as Brennan, Obama’s Director of National Intelligence. And Jim Sciutto says, “Are you concerned that Barr or Durham’s investigation will find wrongdoing and seek to punish former intelligence officials like you?”

CLAPPER: The message I’m getting from all this is, apparently what we were supposed to have done was to ignore the Russian interference, ignore the Russian meddling and the threat that it poses to us, and oh, by the way, blown off what the then commander in chief, President Obama, told us to do, which was to assemble all the reporting that we could that we had available to us —

RUSH: Wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! Stop the digital. Did you hear what he just said? He just said (imitating Clapper), “And, by the way, should we have just blown off what Obama told us to do?” Does he know what he’s just done here? Clapper on CNN today said Obama made us do it. Here, finish the bite or play it from the top, whichever you have ready to go.

CLAPPER: — and put it in one report that the president could pass on to the Congress and to the next administration. And while we’re at it, declassify as much as we possibly could to make it public, and that’s what we did.

SCIUTTO: One issue I’m — (crosstalk)

CLAPPER: It’s kind of disconcerting now to be investigated for, you know having done our duty and done what we were told to do by the president.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

‘There Is No Climate Emergency’: Scientists Call for Reasoned Debate Richard Trzupek

By on October 8th, 2019

https://www.theepochtimes.com/there-is-no-climate-emergency-scientists-call-for-reasoned-debate-2_3100870.html

The message was clear: “There is no climate emergency.”

With those five simple words, a global network of scientistsand professionals attempted to inject reasonableness and decorum into what should be a robust discussion about a complex scientific and public policy issue, but has instead degenerated into an ever more intense mud-slinging contest over the years.

People on one side of the argument dismiss their opponents as wild-eyed socialists attempting to leverage public fear and ignorance to further their political agenda. On the opposite side, people dismiss those who disagree with their supposedly settled scientific conclusions as nothing more than knowing shills or ignorant dupes of evil energy interests.

In between those extremes that are so popular with armies of public relations professionals, who shape the messages of public interest groups and professional politicians to maximum effect, are a not-so-quiet silent majority of scientists and professionals who take a more measured, reasoned view of the science when considering the supposed climate emergency some say we’re facing.

A group of 500-some scientists and professionals signed on to the “European Climate Declaration” that was released last week. This simple, short, and understandable statement proposed how analysis of any public policy issue involving complex science should be approached from a reasoned, fact-based perspective.

Statements such as “97 percent of climatologists agree that anthropogenic climate change is occurring” isn’t a statement of fact, it’s an opinion twice removed. It’s an opinion that involves evaluation of the legitimacy of how the results of the poll in question were sorted to dismiss some answers and allow others, and it’s an opinion in terms of how representative the sample size is with respect to all climate professionals.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Ruth Wisse:What Saul Bellow Saw The Jewish writer who became America’s most decorated novelist spent his early years prodding the nation’s soul. Then, sensing danger to it, he took up the role of guardian.

By on October 7th, 2019

https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/arts-culture/2019/10/what-saul-bellow-saw/

In May 1949, a year after the establishment of the state of Israel, the American Jewish literary critic Leslie Fiedler published in Commentary an essay about the fundamental challenge facing American Jewish writers: that is, novelists, poets, and intellectuals like Fiedler himself.

Entitled “What Can We Do About Fagin?”—Fagin being the Jewish villain of Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist—the essay shows that the modern Jew who adopts English as his language is joining a culture riddled with negative stereotypes of . . . himself. These demonic images figure in some of the best works of some of the best writers, and form an indelible part of the English literary tradition—not just in the earlier form of Dickens’ Fagin, or still earlier of Shakespeare’s Shylock, but in, to mention only two famous modern poets, Ezra Pound’s wartime broadcasts inveighing against “Jew slime” or such memorable lines by T.S. Eliot as “The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot” and the same venerated poet’s 1933 admonition that, in any well-ordered society, “reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.”

How should Jewish writers proceed on this inhospitable ground?

There was a paradox in the timing of Fiedler’s essay, since this was actually the postwar moment when Jews were themselves beginning to move into the forefront of Anglo-American culture. The “New York Intellectuals”—the first European-style intelligentsia on American soil, clustered around several magazines and publishing houses—were beginning to gain prominence as writers, thinkers, critics, and professors. Fiedler was thus not a petitioner requesting permission to enter American letters but someone already in place and intending to stay. Indeed, by the end of his essay, after laying out the problem, he proposes an answer:

[We] can begin to build rival myths of our meaning for the Western world, other images of the Jew to dispossess the ancient images of terror. Several, of varying dignity and depth, are already in existence: the happy Hebrew peasant of the new Israel; the alienated Jew as artist (Kafka’s protagonist Josef K.) or dilettante (Proust’s Charles Swann) or citizen (Joyce’s Leopold Bloom); the sensitive young victim of the recent crop of American war novels; the ambiguous figure of Saul Bellow’s novel [The Victim], both victim and oppressor.

According to Fiedler, the response to existing negative stereotypes was to create autonomous new representations. For him, as for others at the time, the modern Jew could possibly even become a literary archetype: the new Everyman of a society in which many felt somewhat alienated, or marginal. In charting this proposed new path of Jewish fiction, Fiedler singles out such forerunners as Kafka and Proust and then, as a contemporary exemplar, Saul Bellow, whose second novel, The Victim, about a New York Jew who is being stalked by an anti-Semite, had been published two years earlier.

It was an auspicious choice of writer and book.

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ISRAEL, MEDIA Comments turned off

The Washington Post doesn’t let facts get in its way The Post gives inordinate space to the tiny fraction of Jews who are against the right of Jewish self-determination, consistently omits context, and casts Israeli concerns as overblown and the Arabs as victims.Sean Durns

By on October 7th, 2019

https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/the-washington-post-isnt-about-to-let-facts-get-in-its-way/

The overwhelming majority of American Jewry has a positive view of Israel. Yet, the overwhelming majority of opinion pieces and reporting from major US news outlets doesn’t reflect this reality. Instead, the media promotes a small and unrepresentative minority. The Washington Post offers a case in point.

Ninety-five percent of American Jews have a “strongly positive” view of Israel, according to an August 2019 Gallup poll. The pollster noted that this was “significantly more pro-Israel than the overall national averages of 71% favorable views of Israel and 21% favorable views of the Palestinian Authority.”

Similarly, a 2013 Pew survey observed: “76% of Jews (identified by religion) said they were at least somewhat emotionally attached to Israel. In addition, almost half said that caring about Israel is an essential part of being Jewish (with most of the rest saying it is important although not essential) and nearly half reported that they had personally traveled to Israel.”

In short: American Jewry is, except for a minuscule minority, pro-Israel. Yet, the American media often chooses to give a megaphone to Jews that actively oppose, or are hypercritical of, the Jewish state.

The Washington Post, for example, gives inordinate column space to the tiny fraction of Jews, American and otherwise, who are against the right of Jewish self-determination. In a Sept. 20, 2019 tweet, Mairav Zonszein of +972 magazine cheered that her publication was “all up in The Washington Post opinion pages today,” with two pieces from the same organization appearing on the same day. Zonszein proudly noted that editors of “mainstream outlets” were no longer editing out or tweaking her use of the term “apartheid.”

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