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Ruth King

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Russia, Trump & Flawed Intelligence Masha Gessen see note please

By on January 18th, 2017

This column by a Trump antagonist, published in the paper of dreckord is valuable in exposing the intel report on Russia’s interference in U.S. elections….rsk

After months of anticipation, speculation, and hand-wringing by politicians and journalists, American intelligence agencies have finally released a declassified version of a report on the part they believe Russia played in the US presidential election. On Friday, when the report appeared, the major newspapers came out with virtually identical headlines highlighting the agencies’ finding that Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered an “influence campaign” to help Donald Trump win the presidency—a finding the agencies say they hold “with high confidence.”

A close reading of the report shows that it barely supports such a conclusion. Indeed, it barely supports any conclusion. There is not much to read: the declassified version is twenty-five pages, of which two are blank, four are decorative, one contains an explanation of terms, one a table of contents, and seven are a previously published unclassified report by the CIA’s Open Source division. There is even less to process: the report adds hardly anything to what we already knew. The strongest allegations—including about the nature of the DNC hacking—had already been spelled out in much greater detail in earlier media reports.

But the real problems come with the findings themselves. The report leads with three “key judgments”:

“We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election”;
“Moscow’s influence campaign followed a Russian messaging strategy that blends covert intelligence operations—such as cyber activity—with overt efforts by Russian Government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users or ‘trolls’”;
“We assess Moscow will apply lessons learned from its Putin-ordered campaign aimed at the US presidential election to future influence efforts worldwide, including against US allies and their election processes.”

It is the first of these judgments that made headlines, so let us look at the evidence the document provides for this assertion. This evidence takes up just over a page and contains nine points. The first four make the argument that Putin wanted Hillary Clinton to lose. I will paraphrase for the sake of brevity and clarity:

Putin and the Russian government aimed to help Trump by making public statements discrediting Hillary Clinton;
the Kremlin’s goal is to undermine “the US-led liberal democratic order”;
Putin claimed that the Panama Papers leak and the Olympic doping scandal were “US-directed efforts to defame Russia,” and this suggests that he would use defamatory tactics against the United States;
Putin personally dislikes Hillary Clinton and blames her for inspiring popular unrest in Russia in 2011-2012.

None of this is new or particularly illuminating—at least for anyone who has been following Russian media in any language; some of it seems irrelevant. (Though the report notes that the NSA has only “moderate confidence” in point number one, unlike the CIA and FBI, which have “high confidence” in it.) The next set of points aim to buttress the assertion that Putin “developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump over Secretary Clinton.” The following is an exact quote:

Beginning in June, Putin’s public comments about the US presidential race avoided directly praising President-elect Trump, probably because Kremlin officials thought that any praise from Putin personally would backfire in the United States. Nonetheless, Putin publicly indicated a preference for President-elect Trump’s stated policy to work with Russia, and pro-Kremlin figures spoke highly about what they saw as his Russia-friendly positions on Syria and Ukraine.

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Leslie Stein The Unknown Enemy in Plain Sight

By on January 18th, 2017

The cognitive dissonance require to assert that poverty, not religious ardour, is the root of Islamist terror constitutes something far worse and more dangerous than a comforting delusion. It hobbles the West’s response before it can take effective shape.
Islamist apologists invariably postulate that Islamic terrorists are driven on account of being marginalized, discriminated and impoverished. US Secretary of State John Kerry, for example, would have us believe that poverty is one of the root cause of terrorism,[i] and that to counter terrorism we must ensure that there are “more economic opportunities for marginalized youth.”[ii] Kerry of course is no outlier, for among many others, he is in, on this issue, at one with the former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Archbishop of Canterbury, former US President Bill Clinton, Al Gore, the late Elie Wiesel and others.[iii] However their assertions lack empirical verification, for the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that terrorists do not commonly originate from within a country’s poorest social strata.

A survey conducted in fourteen Muslim states revealed the indigent were considerably less supportive of terrorism than those who were affluent.[iv] An MI5 report determined that at least 60% of terror suspects were highly educated and economically well off.[v] Much the same picture emerged from a study undertaken by France’s Center for Prevention Deradicalization and Individual Monitoring which concluded that two-thirds of those who had left France to fight for the Islamic State hailed from middle-class families.[vi] Having interviewed 250 surviving Palestinian suicide bombers, scholar Nasra Hassan noted that “none of them were uneducated, desperately poor, simple-minded, or depressed. Many were middle class and, unless they were fugitives, held paying jobs…two were sons of millionaires.”[vii] What did characterize each and every one of them was that they were “all deeply religious.”[viii] As Alan Kreuger of Princeton University and Jitka Maleckova of Charles University, Prague, determined, there is little direct connection between poverty and terror.[ix]

A casual glance at the portfolios of prominent Islamic terrorists reveals that many of them were anything but poor. Fifteen of the nineteen jihadists in the 9/11 attacks were of the middle class and their movement’s leader, Osama Bin Laden, was a son of a multi-billionaire. More recently, consier Omar Mateen, the mass murderer of the Orlando, who grew up in a family household that, although not rich, was by no means destitute. According to the Washington Post, Mateen’s “childhood in the coastal Florida town of Port St. Lucie was filled with ice cream from McDonald’s and trips to the mall.” [x] Nidal Hassan, the Islamist who killed 13 and injured 30 of his fellow US soldiers at Fort Hood, was not only an army major but also a psychiatrist. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber had been a student of the University of Massachusetts. Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh who masterminded the killing of the American journalist Daniel Pearl, graduated from the prestigious London School of Economics. Kafeel Ahmed who drove a car laden with explosives into the terminal at Glasgow airport was an engineer studying for a Ph.D. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines plane in flight, is the son of a wealthy Nigerian banker and business man. Azahari Husin, the brains and organizer behind the Bali bombing was a university lecturer and gifted mathematician.

The assertion that ‘terrorism is induced by poverty is so patently belied by both empirical and casual observations, we can only conclude that people like Kerry — educated and with reasonably high IQs, must be afflicted with an aptitude for cognitive dissonance. Otherwise, the only explanation is a stubborn idiocy in the face of so much empirical evidence.

Ruled out of consideration by those of Kerry’s mindset is that the particular belief system plays any part in motivating their actions. Were that not the case they would ask themselves why Jews, who have been infinitely more persecuted in Europe than Muslims, have never embraced Islamist-style massacres. Part of the problem is that the prevailing nostrums of multiculturalism posit all religions must command respect, a state of mind only tp be achieved by the absolute refusal to recognise that a theology — in this case Islam – is woven with tenets antithetical to Western values. This sometimes leads to ludicrous situations whereby, for example, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull first invited a prominent Iman to break halal bread with him at Kirribilli, then was obliged to denounce him after being informed of his guest’s urgings that homosexuals deserve death and how troublesome women nee to be hung by their breasts. Turnbull’s folly was to begin with the belief that people such as his problematic Iman are wayward clerics, rather than grasping that their views are shared by co-religionists — no doubt including other Muslims present.[xi]

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Israelis go ape for missing monkey : Ruthie Blum

By on January 18th, 2017

On Monday, every Israeli news outlet devoted space to the frantic search for Connor, a 17-year-old male capuchin monkey who escaped from the Zoological Center Tel Aviv-Ramat Gan, more commonly known as the “Safari,” and was later briefly spotted in busy Tel Aviv.

According to a spokeswoman who has known the “nice and friendly” simian since his birth, Connor fled to get away from Kimchi, a more dominant male. The two “roommates,” she said, never got along well, and in the last couple of years, the friction between them escalated, becoming too much for poor Connor to bear.

Connor’s first breakout occurred two days earlier, when he jumped the fence of his outdoor enclosure and wandered around the 250-acre site, managing to elude concerned zookeepers.

But with his escape to the big city a couple of days later, Connor’s caretakers were fearful for his safety amid the bustling, unfamiliar human and vehicular traffic. They asked the public to be on the lookout for him, and for anyone who encounters him not to panic him with sudden movements or loud noises.

This is not the first time a story about an animal on the loose in Israel has made the papers. The reason this one seems to resonate more than previous ones has to do with the length of time that the episode has gone on, and with the feelings of sympathy and amusement that small monkeys arouse in human beings.

What is most striking about the whole drama, however, is the context in which it unfolded.

On Sunday evening, the controversial Middle East “peace” summit held in Paris and attended by diplomats from more than 70 countries culminated in a declaration of support for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — a typical precursor to the demand that Israel withdraw to the 1949 armistice lines.

The following morning, while Connor was roaming the streets of Tel Aviv, new details were revealed about the investigation into Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over his possible deal with Arnon Mozes, the publisher of Yedioth Ahronoth.

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The Priority of the Government/Industry Cybersecurity Partnership :Chuck Brooks

By on January 18th, 2017

The change in the cyber risk environment coinciding with a heightened need for procurement of new technologies and services has created a new paradigm for a cybersecurity partnership between government and industry. The prioritization of that special partnership appears to be in the immediate plans for the new Trump Administration.
The appointment of former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani as a cybersecurity adviser signals the elevated importance of that intended government/industry partnership. One of his first tasks will be to assemble cybersecurity subject matter experts and leaders from industry to advise and spur innovation in and out of government. Mayor Giuliani has made it clear that the proposed group will work on cutting-edge cybersecurity solutions across industries such as the energy, financial, and transportation sectors.
Collaboration between government and industry stakeholders is a proven model that makes good sense. Together, government and the private sector can identify products and align flexible product paths, evaluate technology gaps, and help design scalable architectures that will lead to greater efficiency and fiscal accountability. Bridging R&D spending between the government and private sectors should also allow for a more directed and capable cybersecurity prototype pipeline to meet new technology requirements.
In addition to being collaborative, a working partnership of government and industry leaders should be focused and strategic in nature. To be effective the evolving cybersecurity partnership must also be 1) proactive and adaptive to change; 2) coordinated with The Department of Homeland Security (DHS); and 3) have a cyber risk management/consequence strategy.
Being Proactive and Adaptive to Change: There are many challenges of functioning in an exponentially changing digital world. This requires restructuring of priorities and missions for both government and industry. That is not an easy task and there is logic in joining forces.
As the capabilities and connectivity of cyber devices have grown, so have the cyber intrusions and threats from malware and hackers. The growing and sophisticated cyber threat actors include various criminal enterprises, loosely affiliated hackers, and adversarial nation states. A first mission for the new Administration’s cyber team will be to review recommendations prepared by cybersecurity experts from within and out of government and to assess gaps and vulnerabilities across the threat landscape.
In the past decade, the cybersecurity focus and activities by both government and industry have been predominantly reactive to whatever is the latest threat or breach. As a result, containing the threats was difficult because at the outset, defenders were always at least one step behind. That mindset has been changing due to a major series of intrusions and denial of service attacks (including OPM, Anthem, Yahoo, and many others) that exposed a flawed approach to defending data and operating with a passive preparedness.
Being proactive is not just procuring technologies and people it also means adopting a working industry and government framework that includes tactical measures, encryption, authentication, biometrics, analytics, and continuous diagnostics and mitigation, as applicable to specific circumstances.
The new advisory council led by Mayor Giuliani will become more proactive and adaptive in protecting assets and will also likely address policy and technology development implications around a whole host of other topics related to cyber threats. Some of these topics will include information sharing, securing the Internet of Things (IoT), protection of critical infrastructures, and expanding workforce training to mitigate the shortage of cybersecurity

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David Frankenhuis: Swedish Government Announces New Measures After Murder of 16 Year Old Boy

By on January 18th, 2017

Inhabitants of the Swedish city of Malmö are living in fear after a 16-year-old Iraqi boy was murdered last week. Ahmed Obaid had been gunned down by an unknown shooter in the Rosengard district on Thursday. The killing is part of a series of violent crimes that has plagued the city located in the south of the Scandinavian country for some time now. Obaid was shot near a bus stop. The teenager had never been involved in crime and was not known to police. His friends say he didn’t fight and had not previously been threatened, writes the dailyExpressen.

The perpetrators are still at large and their identities are still unknown. It does, however, seem yet another hallmark in the disintegration of the Swedish social fabric.

In response to the murder, demonstrators protested in front of city hall yesterday, writes the Swedish Local. Ahmed’s father Najm Obaid, who spoke at the gathering that was also attended by several politicians, said: “we won’t get Ahmed back, but I will be happy if this leads to the violence being stopped.”

Rim Jabboul, an 18-year-old schoolgirl who attended the protest, called the murder“devastating.” She said “it is a real shame that a 16-year-old should have to die like that. He had not lived his life yet. You have to look over your shoulder when you go out at night now. I don’t let my little brother go out at night any more. I hope that the politicians actually view this as a serious problem and start to solve this in Malmö.”

The organisers of the protest presented Justice and Migration Minister Morgan Johansson a set of measures he could implement in order to curb the violent crime wave.

“There’s nothing on it I don’t agree with,” Johansson commented on their proposals. “On the contrary,” he said. “In my opinion, there is no doubt what has to be done. We have to make sure that they can be prosecuted and that they can get long jail sentences.” The Minister furthermore stated that the Swedes “have to get rid of the weapons”, and he is also calling for“tighter punishment so that those who are held for serious gun crime can be arrested immediately and not just be released a few days later.” The government is already working on a draft that, amongst others, plans to quadruple the minimum sentence for the possession ofhand grenades. This type of weapon has recently been used in a Somali gang war that scourged the city of Gothenburg.

Stefan Löfven, Sweden’s Prime Minister, commented as well on the killing in Rosengard, a migrant-dominated precinct notorious for its virtual lawlessness. “On a personal level it’s a tragedy, of course,” he said when he was interviewed on the topic. “Then, on a societal level, it is completely unacceptable that we have this kind of environment where people take it upon themselves to murder.”

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Migrant Gangs Turn Swedish Shopping Mall Into No-Go Zone By Vincent van den Born

By on January 18th, 2017

Sweden’s most thriving shopping mall has been turned into a no-go zone. According toExpressen, one of Sweden’s two national evening papers, local police are intimidated, and have been forced to implement special measures against the increasingly threatening behaviour of the perpetrators.

According to the authorities, the rise in the number of cases like this correlates with the increasing arrival of undocumented migrants, with incidents involving ‘youths’ from Syria, Afghanistan and Morocco. This causes legal problems when bringing offenders to justice: many claim to be underage, which forces the police to hand them over to social services. “I’ve had people in front of me that look like they are 35, but who claim to be 15. I can’t prove they’re lying so we have to release them,” Rikard Sorensen, a police officer, says.

Expressen made a video report on the matter, in which, among others, the following narratives were told.

It’s 20:00 and the stores in Gothenburg’s Nordstan Mall are closing. As they close, a transformation takes place: the children of the streets awaken. Expressen’s journalists are following policemen on their patrol through the mall. The police go there to look for drugs and to show they too still exist. They are noticed. Large groups of men are present, going out of their way to confront the officers, grazing their uniforms as they pass, otherwise acting aggressively, making derisive sounds, all the while hiding their faces in ski masks.

On one particular Friday, September 2016, fifteen-year-old Jonas (fictitious name) and a friend meet a group of young people just outside of Nordstan. Lured by promises of cigarettes and a game of football, they follow the group back to an alley. Once there, out of sight, they are forced to the ground and robbed of everything. Mobile phones, credit card, cash and house keys. They’re not even allowed to keep their shoes and the shirt they’re wearing.

“One guy frisked me, then took a broken glass bottle to my throat, telling me to take off my sweater,” says Jonas. “It was scary, I’ve never experienced anything like it.” Jonas‘ friend was taken in a stranglehold, while both were also threatened with an iron bar. His mother recalls not even feeling safe at home: “We had to change the locks because they had my son’s name, credit card, the keys to the front door. It was horrible.“https://gatestone.eu/migrant-gangs-sweden/

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Trump’s China Problem View all posts from this blog By:Srdja Trifkovic

By on January 18th, 2017

In the course of this year President Donald Trump will improve America’s relations with Russia. He will also start purging the irredeemably politicized U.S. intelligence apparatus. The hysteria of recent weeks will be seen—a year from now—as a bizarre footnote to a failed presidency.

The “dossier” concocted by a British dirty tricks purveyor hired to smear Trump (the only provable instance of foreign meddling in the 2016 election), didn’t even pass the giggle test; the agencies’ joint statement on “Russian malicious cyber-activity” was equally pathetic. As an eloquent British old-leftist has noted, the lies about Russia have made the world’s most self-important journalists laughing stocks: “In the country with constitutionally the freest press in the world, free journalism now exists only in its honorable exceptions.”

John McCain and Lindsey Graham may go on with their dog and pony show, the MSM will go on producing fact-free reportage, but it will not matter. As his Monday interview with The Times of London indicates, Trump remains strongly committed to détente with Russia, and open to the “obsolete” North Atlantic Alliance’s long-overdue downgrading. Washington and Moscow will develop a new modus operandi, based on a realist strategic paradigm and transactional approach to deal-making. That will be a breath of fresh air, a plus-sum game for America, Russia, and the world. The prospect of uncontrollable escalations leading to mushroom clouds—so likely had Hillary Clinton been elected—has been averted. That is a meta-historical feat. Trump is no subtle intellectual, thank God, which enables him to grasp that Russia—Putin’s Russia, which has not been post-modernized to the liking of the bicoastal anti-America—is a natural ally of the church-going, pickup truck-driving, Bud-drinking flyover America.

Unlike his predecessor, Trump also understand that Islamic extremism is an existential threat to our civilization, and that immigration—especially Muslim immigration—must be controlled and radically reduced. Also on Monday, he told the Bild that Angela Merkel had made made a “catastrophic mistake” by taking in hundreds of thousands of migrants. His immigration realism drives Western self-haters insane, but he will not open America’s floodgates to the swarms of unvettable Middle Eastern “refugees.” He knows that there are already more than enough Somalis in the Twin Cities, Iraqis in Dearborn, and Pakistanis everywhere. The author of The Art of the Deal is also (somewhat surprisingly) an instinctive defender of the Western civilization.

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Congressman Jerry Nadler (NY : District) Trump Was ‘Legally Elected’ In An Illegitimate Election By Jen Chung

By on January 17th, 2017

Rep. Jerry Nadler took to CNN to explain why he will not be attending President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration this Friday. The Manhattan Democrat, whose spokesman confirmed to us on Saturday that he was skipping the event, said, “I cannot go because of the President-elect’s inflammatory comments racist campaign, his conflict of interests, refusal to disclose his taxes, and the last straw was his personal ad hominem attacks on an icon of civil rights movement, someone who suffered beatings and almost gave his life for this country, John Lewis.”

Nadler also agreed with Lewis’s belief that Trump isn’t a “legitimate” leader. “He was legally elected, but the Russian weighing in the election, the Russian attempt to hack the election — and frankly, the FBI’s weighing in on the election — I think makes his election illegitimate. It puts an asterisk next to his name,” Nadler explained.

Nadler did say that he and other Democrats will “work with him when we agree with him, we’ll oppose him when we don’t agree with him.”

Here’s Nadler’s formal statement about refusing to participate in the inauguration:

“The rhetoric and actions of Donald Trump have been so far beyond the pale – so disturbing and disheartening – and his continued failure to address his conflicts of interest, to adequately divest or even to fully disclose his financial dealings, or to sufficiently separate himself from the ethical misconduct that legal experts on both side of the aisle have identified have been so offensive I cannot in good conscience participate in this honored and revered democratic tradition of the peaceful transfer of power.

“We cannot normalize Donald Trump, and we certainly cannot turn our heads and ignore such a threat to the institutions and values of our democracy. His refusal to adequately address his business conflicts of interest, to show remorse for the inflammatory rhetoric in which he engaged during his campaign, his attempts to intimidate the press, and his continuing failure to demonstrate any interest in uniting Americans reveal a deep disrespect for the office of President.

“I refuse to sit idly by as he flaunts his illicit behavior without regard for the American people’s interest. I refuse to abide any effort to undermine a free and independent press, which serves a pivotal role in any democratic system and whose rights are guaranteed by our Constitution. I refuse to applaud for a man with a history of offensive and abusive behavior to women and minorities. I refuse to treat January 20, 2017, as business as usual.

“For these reasons, I have no interest in participating in the inauguration ceremony of Donald J. Trump.”

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Jew-Hatred Dressed up As ‘Justice’ A look at the hate group Students for Justice in Palestine. John Perazzo

By on January 17th, 2017

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/265477/jew-hatred-dressed-justice-john-perazzoEditor’s note: The following is the first in a series of articles highlighting the network of major hate groups in America that are supported and funded by the Left. For more information on Students for Justice in Palestine, visit the organization’s profile at DiscoverTheNetworks.org.

Founded at UC Berkeley in October of 2000, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is a highly influential campus organization with chapters based at approximately 200 American colleges and universities, where it organizes and sponsors anti-Israel events and campaigns more actively than any other student group in the nation. SJP’s declared mission is to “promote the cause of justice,” “speak out against oppression,” and “educate members of our community specifically about the plight of the Palestinian people” at the hands of alleged Israeli abuses. The benign tenor of this mission statement stands in stark contrast, however, to the countless reams of SJP propaganda that echo much of what is said by the Hamas terrorists who seek to permanently end Israel’s existence as a sovereign Jewish state. The reason for this is simple: SJP was in essence formed to help spread anti-Semitism through the halls of American academia; to wage a campus war against Israel by providing rhetorical support for the Jew-hatred undergirding the Second Palestinian Intifada which Hamas and allied terrorists had recently launched in late September 2000.

SJP’s principal founder, Hatem Bazian, has quoted approvingly from a famous Islamic hadith which calls for the violent slaughter of Jews and which appears in Hamas’s founding charter. He once spoke at a fundraising dinner for a Hamas front group that the U.S. government later shut down due to the organization’s ties to Islamic terrorism. On another occasion, Bazian portrayed Hamas as “a classical anti-colonial nationalist and religious guerrilla movement.” And he described Hamas’s victory in the 2006 Gaza elections as “a monumental event.”

Notwithstanding Hamas’s calls for the mass murder and genocide of Jews, the website of SJP’s UC Berkeley chapter describes Hamas not as a terrorist group but rather as “a vast social organization” that “provides schools, medical care, and day care for a number of Palestinians who otherwise live difficult lives”; a group with a “clean record as far as domestic corruption in governance [is] concerned”; and an entity whose “officials have often stated that they are ready for a long-term truce with Israel during which time final status negotiations can occur.”

It is commonplace for SJP’s rank-and-file members to support, or to at least decline to condemn, Islamic terrorism. As a Columbia University SJP member said in 2002: “We support the right of Palestinians to resist occupation and do not dictate the methods of that struggle. There’s a difference between violence of the oppressed and violence of the oppressors.”

That same year, SJP’s national convention was sponsored by the Islamic Association for Palestine, a now-defunct, Illinois-based front group for Hamas. The conference featured keynote speaker Sami Al-Arian, a former University of South Florida professor who served as the North American leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a terrorist organization whose objectives include the destruction of Israel, the elimination of all Western influences in the Middle East by means of armed warfare, and the convergence of all Muslim countries into a single Islamic caliphate.

Routinely denouncing Israeli self-defense measures as assaults on the civil and human rights of Palestinians, SJP generally neglects to judge those measures in the context of Palestinian terror attacks. For example, in a September 2014 “vigil” at Binghamton University in honor of Palestinians who had been killed in Operation Protective Edge—Israel’s then-recent military incursion into Gaza—SJP member Victoria Brown told the campus newspaper that her group’s goal was to “commemorate” and “humanize” the Palestinian “children, women and innocent civilians who were massacred” by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Yet she made no mention of the fact that the IDF’s actions were in response to a massive barrage of deadly rockets that Hamas terrorists had been firing indiscriminately into southern Israel.

On another occasion, New York City’s SJP created posters lauding the Palestinian terrorist Leila Khaled—who in September 1970 had participated in the multiple hijacking of five jetliners—for “committing her life to be a freedom fighter in the struggle for Palestinian liberation.”

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John Kerry’s Return to Vietnam He ends his political career as he began it: wrong about everything. J Matthew Vadum

By on January 17th, 2017

With mere days remaining in office, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry returned to Southeast Asia to reminisce with his Communist friends and ideological soulmates in Vietnam.

He was welcomed with open arms in Vietnam, still a Communist dictatorship after all these decades. And why shouldn’t he be? He’s one of the reasons the United States lost the war there.

Kerry’s vicious lies about the behavior of the U.S. military during the Vietnam War launched a thousand draft-card burning ceremonies.

It’s a wonder he wasn’t awarded the Vietnamese equivalent of America’s Presidential Medal of Freedom for his service to Vietnamese Communism.

Throughout his adult life, Kerry has instinctively sided with America’s enemies. After serving in the Vietnam War, Kerry made a long, profitable career out of bashing America, insulting and belittling U.S. troops – even going as far as promoting false stories about them committing war atrocities, and aiding hostile foreign powers.

In 2005, Kerry falsely accused U.S. forces of “terrorizing” the Iraqi people. He Bob Schieffer on “Face the Nation”: “And there is no reason, Bob, that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women…”

A liar and a useful idiot whose Botox obsession has turned his face into a Halloween mask, Kerry is the man who sent American singer James Taylor to France to sing soothing songs to the French people after brutal Muslim terrorist attacks while refusing to acknowledge the attackers were Muslim.

In addition to being a booster of Vietnam and the now-defunct Soviet Union, Kerry has long been an enemy of Israel and a friend of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its nuclear weapons development program, as well as a friend of Communist dictatorships in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Grenada.

So a final, nostalgic trip down the Ho Chi Minh Trail at U.S. taxpayer expense only seems appropriate.

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