FOREIGN POLICY, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Pompeo brings down the House The U.S. Secretary of State turns the tables on the false correlation between the existence of settlements and the lack of peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Ruthie Blum

Posted By on December 18th, 2019

https://www.jns.org/opinion/pompeo-brings-down-the-house/

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo returned fire on Monday to a large group of House Democrats who lambasted him last month for declaring that Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) are not illegal.

In a letter to Michigan Rep. Andy Levin, who led 106 of his colleagues to sign a joint complaint against what they called the “State Department’s unilateral reversal on the status of settlements, without any clear legal justification,” Pompeo picked apart each false claim lobbed by the likes of “Squad” members Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) with the force of an ax and the slice of a razor blade.

Kudos to him for putting them in their place, particularly when their objections are as far-fetched as their objectives.

Take their ridiculous assertion, for instance, that the announcement about the legitimacy of Israeli settlements “has discredited the United States as an honest broker between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, severely damaged prospects for peace and endangered the security of America, Israel and the Palestinian people. … [It also has] offered a tacit endorsement of settlements, their expansion and associated demolitions of Palestinian homes … ”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Blues at St. James Comey’s Infirmary Charles Lipson

Posted By on December 18th, 2019

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/12/17/the_blues_at_st_james_comey

When your best explanation for humiliating failures is that you were incompetent, not criminal, you are in trouble. When your defense is that underlings are to blame, you can expect them to bite back. That’s the situation facing James Comey, former FBI director. His current story matches Richard Nixon’s lame admission: “mistakes were made.”

Not that Comey made those mistakes himself, mind you. Mere sloppiness by others, he says. That’s his new story. His old one was that the FBI did everything by the book and that his critics were dishonest partisan hacks. His self-righteous stance went down the garbage disposal last week when Inspector General Michael Horowitz issued his devastating report and then told a Senate committee that Comey was wrong when he said the report vindicated him and the bureau.

Comey is still drifting down that river in Egypt, denying he failed in his basic duties. Yet he signed surveillance warrants as “truthful and verified” when he knew (or should have known) they were neither. He and senior officials at the Department of Justice used the same misinformation four times to spy on Carter Page, claiming, without evidence, that Page might be a Russian agent.

Caught in these lies, Comey is reluctantly admitting that he relied on the FBI’s standard procedures for gaining warrants and that underlings may have been careless. They may well have been, but so was Comey. Moreover, it was the director himself who gutted the safeguards designed to prevent overzealous agents from deceiving the court.

BOOKS, ISRAEL Comments turned off

What Everyone Needs to Know About the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict A shocking new book delivers explosive revelations. Brian Grodman

Posted By on December 17th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/what-everyone-needs-know-about-israelipalestinian-frontpage-editors/

A shocking new book reveals facts that every American – and every citizen of the free world – should know, but few do. In The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process, historian and Islam expert Robert Spencer shows how from the instant it came into being, and even before that, the State of Israel, far from being the aggressive violator of human rights of UN myth, has been the target of gratuitous and unprovoked violence by Arab Muslims – the “Palestinians,” who, as Spencer demonstrates in this book, have no actual existence as a people with a distinct ethnicity, language or culture.

These and other facts Spencer marshals in The Palestinian Delusion will surprise many, especially the young Americans who are involved in the BDS movement, in the mistaken belief that it is a justified and righteous response to Israeli wrongdoing. Spencer explains that the “Palestinians” were invented in the 1960s to distract from the fact that the Jewish State was a tiny sliver of land surrounded by huge and hostile Arab states. Before that, it was the name of a region, not of a people, like Staten Island or Compton. The name “Palestine” is ancient, but had never been attached to anything but a region: it was given to the land of Judea (i.e., land of the Jews) by the Romans in 134 AD, when they expelled the Jews from their ancient homeland. To rub salt in the wound, they renamed the land after the Jews’ Biblical enemies, the Philistines.

Spencer points out that just one hundred years ago, “the word ‘Palestinians’ was more often applied to Jews than to Muslim Arabs.” Not only that, but “some Arabs rejected the term, explaining: ‘We are not Palestinians, we are Arabs. The Palestinians are the Jews.’” The Palestinian Delusion shows that the claim – also false – that Jews stole Palestinian land actually predates the creation of the Palestinian people itself. The Arab Higher Committee called for the Arab Muslims of Palestine to leave the area in 1948, so that the Arab states could crush the Jewish state without hurting Arab civilians. The plan was that they would be able to return home in a matter of weeks. Instead, the Arab states lost the war, and began claiming that Israel existed on stolen land

It wasn’t until a couple of decades later that the Arab Muslims of the region began to refer to themselves as the Palestinian people. As Spencer demonstrates, even some of their central figures – Yasser Arafat, Edward Said – were really from somewhere else. In 1977, a leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) actually admitted it: “The Palestinian people does not exist.” The creation of the Palestinian people is one of the biggest propaganda victories in history, as their existence is now taken for granted.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Pompeo slams Democrats’ ‘foolish’ fixation on Israeli settlements Ariel Kahana

Posted By on December 17th, 2019

https://www.israelhayom.com/2019/12/17/pompeo-slams-democrats-foolish-fixation-on-israeli-settlements/

“While you are free to fixate on settlements as a barrier to peace, you are simply wrong in referring to that view as being subject to bipartisan agreement,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo writes in a strong rebuttal to 106 Democrats who had urged him to reverse his declaration on the legality of Israeli settlements.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo sent a firm letter of rebuttal on Monday to Democratic members of Congress, blasting as “foolish” their criticism of his declaration regarding the legality of Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria.

Pompeo was responding to Rep. Andy Levin (D-Mich.), who was behind a letter sent to the secretary of state last month, in which 106 representatives denounced the Trump administration for softening its position on the legality of the settlements. In the November letter, House Democrats said the move made peace between Israel and the Palestinians more difficult to achieve and urged Pompeo to “immediately” reverse his decision.

Pompeo took aim at Levin’s arguments that the administration’s announcement contradicts decades of bipartisan US policy and “blatantly disregards Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.”

“While I appreciate your interest in this important issue, I couldn’t disagree more with those two foolish positions,” Pompeo wrote in his answer to Levin.

“The State Department’s determination did not reverse any policy with regard to Israeli settlements,” he added. “Rather, the State Department reversed a legal determination by [former US Secretary of State John] Kerry made during the waning days of the Obama administration, that the establishment of settlements was categorically inconsistent with international law.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Big Hole in the China Trade Agreement by Gordon G. Chang

Posted By on December 17th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15305/china-trade-agreement-hole

Moreover, China’s officials, once they have encryption keys and access to the China network of a foreign firm, will be in a good position to penetrate the networks of that firm outside China. Therefore, Beijing will soon steal data stored on foreign networks and put companies, like Nortel Networks, out of business or ruin them to the point where Chinese entities can buy them up at reduced prices. Do we really want the Fortune 500 to be owned by China?

There is, of course, no point in including in the trade deal forced taking and intellectual property protections if they do not cover the cybersecurity rules.

Washington will have to do something fast to protect American businesses in China — and the American economy — because the Phase One deal is clearly inadequate. There is, after all, a big hole in the center of it.

There’s something missing from the “Phase One” trade agreement with China, announced Friday. And it’s something critically important. Yet, Larry Kudlow, President Trump’s director of the National Economic Council, appeared not to know about it afterwards.

“We will see,” said Kudlow in response to Maria Bartiromo on “Sunday Morning Futures,” her Fox News Channel show, as she asked him about Beijing’s new “cybersecurity” rules. “There’s a large IP chapter in this deal and there’s also a large forced technology transfer chapter in this deal. I don’t think we know enough about these new Chinese rules and we’ll have to look at that and by the way if they do violate them of course we will take action.”

Bartiromo was referring to two sets of Chinese rules. On December 1, Beijing implemented the Multi-Level Protection Scheme 2.0, issued pursuant to the 2016 Cybersecurity Law. On January 1, China’s Cryptography Law becomes effective.

These measures prohibit foreign companies from encrypting data so that it cannot be read by the Chinese central government and the Communist Party of China. Businesses will be required to turn over encryption keys. Companies will not be able to employ virtual private networks to keep data secret, and some believe they will no longer be allowed to use private servers.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

National Security Threat? Should the US Be Doing Business with China at All? by Benjamin Weingarten

Posted By on December 17th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15304/china-business-security-threat

“What I really want to know about is the intellectual property [IP] part of this…. isn’t it true that they’ve [China] just instituted their own new cyber security rules that are in place that say that no foreign company may encrypt data so it can’t be read by the Chinese central government and the communist party of China? In other words, businesses are required to turn over the encryption keys. Are these new rules that China just put in place basically negating any opportunity for the U.S. to protect its IP?” — Maria Bartiromo, Sunday Morning Futures, Fox News Channel, Real Clear Politics, December 15, 2019.

China’s 2015 National Security Law… says that all citizens, firms and organizations have “the responsibility and obligation to maintain state security.” Its 2017 National Intelligence Law obligates such individuals and entities to “support, provide assistance, and cooperate in national intelligence work…” It is not hard to see how China could apply rules even beyond the Encryption Law to justify violations of a deal with the U.S. under the guise of “national security concerns,” and the “rule of law.”

“[T]heir own track record, as well as the practices of the Chinese government, demonstrate that Huawei and ZTE cannot be trusted.” — US Attorney General William Barr; letter to the Federal Communications Commission, November 13, 2019.

How can the U.S. transact with China in any strategically significant area given the communist regime’s aims, and its power over every Chinese entity? Is the US ultimately trading away its freedom?

As the world awaits the details of the Trump Administration’s reported “phase one” trade deal with China — U.S. officials expect it to be executed in January 2020 — a more fundamental question arises: Should America be doing business with China in strategically significant areas, or even beyond?

In a December 15th interview with Director of the United States National Economic Council, Larry Kudlow, Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo indirectly touched on this question. Bartiromo asked Kudlow if the proposed deal accounted for new Chinese regulations that would seemingly threaten the intellectual property (IP) of American firms transacting with Chinese ones. She was likely alluding to China’s new Encryption Law, set to take effect on January 1, 2020. Some have suggested that the law would enable the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to collect all information that traffics on Chinese networks. To the extent the trade deal does not account for this law, the implication is that its provisions relating to IP protections could be rendered moot. Here is the relevant portion of the exchange:

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

MY SAY: A LATKE FESTIVAL IN BROOKLYN

Posted By on December 17th, 2019

Last night five of us- son and daughter in law and my two youngest granddaughters trekked out to Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn to the stately and elegant Brooklyn Museum for a latke (potato fritters- a Jewish culinary tradition) festival.

We were first greeted by a huge illuminated sign that simply said “OY”…the traditional complaint of my brethren. Inside there were hundreds upon hundreds of people milling about and tasting about twenty varieties of latkes- curried, chilied, fruited, traditional, Mexican, Moroccan, Russian, Thai, and laced with a variety of international flavors and spices. It was a joyous and diverse event with very friendly people of differing race, religion,  age, nationality, ethnicity, and religion.

To say I had a wonderful time is an understatement.  rsk

P.S. I make competition ready Latkes! rsk

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump hits new approval rating high amid impeachment Voters more positive about economy than any time in 18 years

Posted By on December 17th, 2019

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/dec/16/trump-hits-new-approval-rating-high-amid-impeachme/

By Stephen Dinan – The Washington Times – Monday, December 16, 2019

President Trump hit a record-high approval rating in one of the country’s most influential polls Monday, as Democrats lost support for impeachment over the past six weeks of hearings.

Impeachment has cost Democrats their first House seat as well. Rep. Jefferson Van Drew of New Jersey, an outspoken critic of the process, fled the Democratic Party to join the Republicans.

Democratic leaders aren’t changing course, though.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

NeverTrump Conservatives Started the Smear Campaign on Carter Page Julie Kelly

Posted By on December 17th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/16/nevertrump-conservatives-started-the-smear-campaign-on-carter-page/

If editors and journalists are truly serious about wanting redemption for the former Trump campaign advisor, they should first hold their own accountable.

In August 2015, Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson sent an email that would launch the biggest political scandal in American history.

According to his new book, Simpson started fishing for haters of Donald Trump who might be interested in funding his budding opposition research project on the Manhattan mogul. Simpson admits that he didn’t know a lot about Trump at that point but suspected the Republican presidential candidate would provide a deep trove of dirt for political operatives to mine.

Simpson, however, did not reach out to Democrats or the Hillary Clinton campaign or the Bernie Sanders team. Instead, he contacted a “longtime Republican politico” to see if he might be interested in backing Fusion’s work. They spoke by phone later that same day.

“Simpson told the Republican operative that there were plenty of preliminary indications that Trump would be a fertile subject for investigation, and that some of the lines of inquiry would probably resonate with the media or primary voters,” Simpson wrote. (The book is oddly written in third-person.)

“The operative said he was interested but needed to secure funding for Fusion’s fee, about $50,000 for the first month.”

BOOKS, HISTORY Comments turned off

The Totalitarian Legacy of the Bolshevik Revolution The contributors to a new book resist “the great forgetting.” Mark Tapson

Posted By on December 17th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/totalitarian-legacy-bolshevik-revolution-mark-tapson/

Two years ago, on the centennial anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia that ushered in a century of mass murder and misery, the Trump administration declared a National Day for the Victims of Communism. The New York Times, meanwhile, predictably celebrated the blood-soaked milestone with a series of opinion pieces touting the many upsides of Communism, such as better orgasms for women. The series was titled, with stunning tone-deafness, “Red Century.”

Also on that anniversary in 2017, Bucknell University, a private liberal arts college in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, held a symposium titled “Legacies of the October Revolution,” organized by Bucknell professor of sociology Alexander Riley and associate professor of English Alfred Kentigern Siewers. That symposium spawned an important new book titled The Totalitarian Legacy of the Bolshevik Revolution, edited by Riley and Siewers and featuring essays from three participating scholars. Contrary to the New York Times’ whitewashing, the book’s evaluation of the October Revolution is unequivocally damning.

“Now, a century later, the historical evidence on the nature and legacy of the Bolsheviks and the regime they established is indisputable,” writes editor Riley in the foreword, “Challenging Bolshevik Myth and the Poetry of Totalitarianism”: