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Israel Exposes Iran’s Nuclear Lies Huge intelligence find proves Trump’s suspicions correct. Joseph Klein

Posted By on May 1st, 2018

Israel now has proof of what many suspected all along about the disastrous nuclear deal that former President Barack Obama reached with the Iranian regime. “Iran did not come clean on its nuclear program,” Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu charged, claiming that more than 100,000 Iranian documents Israel’s intelligence agents obtained from a secret “atomic archive” in Tehran prove the nuclear deal is “based on lies.” This latest development should make President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the nuclear deal a no-brainer.

Prime Minister Netanyahu announced in a press conference that the trove of secret nuclear weapons files came from a hidden Iranian site where they were moved in 2017. He said the files contain materials, which Israel has shared with the United States, that include “incriminating documents, incriminating charts, incriminating presentations, incriminating blueprints, incriminating photos, incriminating videos and more.” The prime minister added that the United States has confirmed its authenticity, a claim supported by Trump administration officials who have reviewed the secret documents.

“Prime Minister Netanyahu gave a powerful presentation today of compelling new evidence documenting Iran’s determined pursuit of a nuclear weapon,” a senior Trump administration official said, as quoted by the Free Beacon. “It certainly would have been helpful to have this information when the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] was negotiated but the Iranians decided to lock it away in a secret vault for future reference. Only the regime knows what else they’re hiding, but the revelations today don’t give us much confidence in their protestations that they have never had interest in militarizing their nuclear program.”

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Caravan arrives, Honduran flags flying, middle fingers flashing By Monica Showalter

Posted By on May 1st, 2018

After a big buildup, the migrant caravan full of Central America’s finest has finally arrived, and as screengrabs from local television broadcasts show, they gave America the bird.

Seriously. Buried in a News 8 broadcast from San Diego was footage of illegal migrants and their supporters on the U.S. side breaching the U.S. fence on the border, waving a big Honduran flag, victory-style, and whipping out a big middle finger at America.

In times past, arriving immigrants used to kiss the earth. Today, they wave the middle finger at us. Look at these photos, both from News 8 and the CBS national report, rough and blurry, admittedly, showing just what that caravan was about in all its anti-American tenor, which frankly, should have been the lede to the story:

For a publicity stunt as staged as the migrant caravan from Central America, one that one might have expected to have been carefully choreographed to advance their narrative of needy people with sob stories needing asylum, what does it say that all we see are military-aged young men, some with tattoos, illegally entering the U.S. under the Honduran banner and angrily flashing the middle finger in what might be their first moments in America?

Here are more photos showing that this crowd (and its cheering section on the other side) is anything but the women and children in peril being promoted by the group’s organizers. Actually, it’s almost all single military-aged young men in small groups, who seem to be angry at our country and us for not letting them in on demand.

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Of Refugees, Borders, and Invaders By Sarah Hoyt

Posted By on May 1st, 2018

Apparently the “caravan” of Central and Middle [oops! — Ed.] Americans that was headed towards our Southern border, still is headed towards our Southern border.

Sure, Mexico has stopped openly lending support, and the lawyers accompanying the merry band have stopped telling them it’s a shoe in, but they’re still coming.

The truth of the matter is that Mexico might not be lending open support to this attempt to test US borders, but they are in fact lending it their support, by not arresting these illegal aliens on their soil (Mexico has much tougher immigration laws than ours) and not offering them asylum there. Instead, they let what must be a significant and large multitude continue towards the US border.

Why are they doing it? The answer is fairly obvious. From the linked article:

The Central Americans, many traveling as families, on Sunday will test the Trump administration’s tough rhetoric criticizing the caravan when the migrants begin seeking asylum by turning themselves into border inspectors at San Diego’s San Ysidro border crossing, the nation’s busiest.

They’re coming to test the “Trump administration’s tough rhetoric”. In effect, they’re coming to test our borders and our decision to uphold their integrity.

It shouldn’t need to be said, but I’ll say it: I am not against immigration. It would be stupid and weird for me to be against immigration, given that I’m an immigrant myself.

I am not, however, a believer in open borders. The whole open borders project is a weird project of intellectual elites who view themselves as the aristocrats of the world and all cultures similarly blighted and in need of their input. It was never realistic, and it is less realistic than ever for the US.

The US, while a nation, possessed of territory, like all nations, is something quite new in the history of the world, as our founding principles are a radical departure from past countries and an effort to create a citizenship of belief.

Because I am quite devoted to our founding principles and the liberty which they secure us, I don’t believe in immigration simply for economic necessity or to escape this or that. While those are valid motives to immigrate anywhere – including here – you should come here with the intention of becoming an American, or as my friend, Dave Freer, himself an immigrant to Australia, puts it, FIFO: Fit in or F**k off.

This “caravan” coming to “test” our borders is the very antithesis of FIFO, and in fact, if we do not find a way to turn it away, and ship these people back where they came from, we might as well consider our borders non-existent. And you know what you call a country with non-existent borders? Not a country. To study the fate of such a land, read up on the tragedy of the commons.

If we are open land whom anyone may come and settle in, first we need to stop the welfare system because pioneers by definition don’t get welfare. And second, we can kiss our culture and our founding principles goodbye, because, in the face of a massive invasion by another culture, there is no way to make anyone acculturate (a painful process at best) or fit in.

I know that many people on the left and right will emphasize the plight of the people in this caravan as “refugees” and bring up both the long tradition of Americans taking refuges from anywhere, when they were in peril of their lives, and the breach of such a policy, such as the turning away of boats full of European Jews fleeing the holocaust. They’ll say that the turning away of these “refugees” is an act of malice and racism.

In fact, it is neither. There might be many reasons to take in refugees, but one of them is not to accept a caravan composed in other countries and passing through many countries on the way here.

Take one of the members of the caravan: Nefi Hernandez, who planned to seek asylum with his wife and infant daughter [who] was born on the journey through Mexico, worried he could be kept in custody away from his daughter. But his spirits lifted when he learned he might be released with an ankle bracelet.

Hernandez, 24, said a gang in his hometown of San Pedro Sula, Honduras, threatened to kill him and his family if he did not sell drugs.

First of all, I beg leave to not believe his dire peril, or at least that the story is somewhat shaded. Sure. Maybe he sold drugs for this gang, then did something they didn’t like and got in trouble, but I don’t believe drug gangs are in the habit of threatening someone to make them join the trade. There is something that doesn’t hang together there.

But in addition to that, a drug gang, no matter how lawless the country, is not a government. Even if they wanted you to sell drugs in this particular village, in this particular province, they’d be unlikely to follow you to the next province or the next village, let alone the next country. Hernandez comes from Honduras. That means to get to Mexico he had to cross another country, probably Guatemala. And to get to the US he had to cross another country, Mexico.

CONTINUE AT SITE

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Iran lied (still does), people died, Obama hides By Ethel C. Fenig

Posted By on May 1st, 2018

Speaking in English to reach the widest international audience possible, Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu presented Iran’s own documents, videos, blueprints, and files, proving what opponents of the Iran agreement stated three years ago: Iran lied about its nuclear weapons development. Iran is developing nuclear weapons. Iran continues to lie.

You may well know that Iran’s leaders repeatedly deny ever pursuing nuclear weapons. You can listen to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei: “I stress that the Islamic Republic has never been after nuclear weapons.” … Well, tonight, I’m here to tell you one thing: Iran lied. Big time.

After signing the nuclear deal in 2015, Iran intensified its efforts to hide its secret nuclear files. In 2017, Iran moved its nuclear weapons files to a highly secret location in Tehran. …

So this atomic archive clearly shows that Iran planned, at the highest levels, to continue work related to nuclear weapons under different guises and using the same personnel. …

Iran was required by the nuclear deal to come clean to the International Atomic Energy Agency about its nuclear program. This was an explicit condition for implementing the nuclear deal. Iran has to come clean. So in December 2015, the IAEA published its final assessment of what it called the military aspects of Iran’s nuclear program. This is the report. …

Here’s what Iran actually told the IAEA. It said, Iran denied the existence of a coordinated program aimed at the development of a nuclear explosive device, and specifically denied – get this – specifically denied the existence of the Amad plan. The material proves otherwise, that Iran authorized, initiated, and funded Project Amad, a coordinated program aimed at the development of a nuclear explosive device. …

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

‘Americans and the Holocaust’ Review: What We Could Have Done A nuanced look at America’s efforts to stop the Holocaust—or lack thereof—shows why little about this subject is simple. By Edward Rothstein

Posted By on May 1st, 2018

Americans and the Holocaust

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Through 2021

What did we know and when did we know it? And what could have been done?

These are the questions posed by a new long-term exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Americans and the Holocaust.” And behind them is a long-simmering indictment. The accusations: that there was a continuous refusal before World War II to accept larger numbers of Jewish refugees; that there was a seeming refusal during the war to accept the scale of the murders; and that there was an outright refusal late in the war to expend any military effort in disrupting the Nazi killing machine.

We see the newsmagazines of the 1930s that reacted to Hitler’s rise; newsreels giving voice to native-grown American fascist wannabes; polls that revealed a resistance to getting involved in the growing conflicts; and excerpts of movies like “Casablanca” and “The Great Dictator” that began to confront the storm. The narrative carries considerable weight, partly because of the effort expended in understanding American action and inaction. It would have carried still more had other impulses not interfered.In treating the history chronologically the exhibition draws our attention to the sentiments of the period. There is, for example, the strong pull of isolationism in the 1930s (a force that President Franklin D. Roosevelt felt compelled to placate) as well as fear of economic collapse and wariness of foreign refugees. These attitudes, we also see, were not the result of ignorance. A crowdsourced sampling of American regional newspapers from the 1930s is offered on a touch-screen map, showing that Nazi mistreatment of Jews was widely reported. Touch-screen access to later reporting gives cogent evidence of how much was known about Nazi atrocities.

The refugee issue gets particular attention in a gallery dominated by graphics that suggest an ever increasing need was met by ever increasing resistance. The Immigration Act of 1924 permitted a maximum of 25,957 visas from Germany annually. But in 1933, only 1,241 were issued and there was a three-year waiting list. In 1939, when Nazi territories included Austria (with a 27,370 quota) and others (2,874), the limits were met but left a 11-year waiting list. In 1939, bills that proposed admitting 20,000 German refugee children never made it through Congress. After late 1941, there was no escape: Germany banned Jewish emigration from its territories.More affecting still are stories accessed through a touch-screen table. In 1939, Flora Hochsinger, living in Nazi-occupied Vienna, wrote to a woman referred to her: Harriet Postman in Waltham, Mass. Hochsinger said she had a Ph.D., worked for 32 years as a mathematics teacher, studied psychology with Alfred Adler, ran a children’s home in Vienna, knew needle-work and belt-making, and sought work. Ms. Postman contacted the White House, the State Department, celebrities, the agency B’nai B’rith and friends, but never found a sponsor. Hochsinger was deported from Vienna in 1942 and executed by a Nazi killing squad.To where do these accounts lead? In the final galleries, we see the duplicity of at least one official at the State Department— Breckinridge Long —intent on keeping out Jewish refugees. We learn about the too-little-known War Refugee Board established by Roosevelt early in 1944 to help address a problem belatedly acknowledged; among its modest achievements was a camp of 982 refugees from 18 countries established in Oswego, N.Y. And why wasn’t say, Auschwitz bombed? An animated map shows the slow Allied progress compared with the killing centers’ speedy work: By D-Day more than 5 million Jews had already been murdered. But even in late 1944, something might have still been done. Two letters in the exhibition capture the vexed nature of the issue: Dohn Pehle, director of the war Refugee Board, urges that bombing take place; Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy responds that the priority must be “the earliest possible victory over Germany.” CONTINUE AT SITE

IMMIGRATION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Gone With the Windrush in Britain The Brits rebel against the results of their immigration policies.

Posted By on May 1st, 2018

Amber Rudd lost her job as U.K. Home Secretary this weekend amid a widening immigration scandal. Yet there’s every chance Britain’s political class—and voters—will let this crisis go to waste.

Ms. Rudd’s resignation is the latest fallout from the Windrush scandal. For two decades starting in the late 1940s, the U.K. accepted migrants from across the Empire (later, the Commonwealth) to rebuild after World War II. Known as the “Windrush generation” because one of the first ships to bring them was the HMT Empire Windrush, hundreds of thousands and their children worked hard, paid taxes, and assimilated into U.K. society.

A 1971 law granted these migrants permanent U.K. residence and a path to citizenship. But an unknown number either never obtained formal proof of their immigration status because they didn’t realize they needed it, or have lost the relevant paperwork. Now they’re running afoul of a 2012 law that requires employers, landlords and even hospitals to verify the immigration status of prospective tenants, employees or patients. Some face deportation.

That law was a product of Prime Minister Theresa May’s promise, when she was Home Secretary, to create a “hostile environment” for illegal immigrants. David Cameron had pledged in 2010 to reduce annual net migration to below 100,000. Since Britain couldn’t limit arrivals from EU countries, Prime Minister Cameron and Mrs. May had to limit other skilled immigrants. They also concluded that ramping up deportations might help meet their targets.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Iran-Israel Shadow War The 2015 nuclear deal has financed Iran’s Syria military buildup

Posted By on May 1st, 2018

The shadow war between Israel and Iran in Syria is heating up, and on Monday Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu raised the stakes by revealing that Tehran is secretly maintaining its nuclear-weapons program.

In a presentation on national TV, Mr. Netanyahu revealed the country’s spooks had obtained “half a ton” of documents and CDs from a secret facility in the Shorabad District in southern Tehran. The Israeli leader claims the files “conclusively prove” that Iran lied about its nuclear-weapons program before signing Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear pact, and that it has since worked to preserve its nuclear-weapons related capabilities.

Mr. Netanyahu offered photographs, videos, charts and blueprints from the intelligence haul relating to Tehran’s Project Amad, which the Israeli leader called “a comprehensive program to design, build and test nuclear weapons.” The Iranians have always denied the existence of such a program, and the United Nations downplayed Tehran’s nuclear ambitions in 2015.

It’s no coincidence that Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif mentioned that 2015 U.N. assessment in a tweet Monday as evidence that Tehran should be trusted. Perhaps the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors would like to revisit those findings in light of this new evidence?

Mr. Netanyahu also claimed that the underground Fordow uranium enrichment facility was designed “from the get-go for nuclear weapons as part of Project Amad,” and misled the U.N. about its activities. The Iranians preserved Project Amad’s documentation and have kept its research team, headed by Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, largely in place in a new organization housed within the Defense Ministry.

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Here’s a Collection of Ben Rhodes’ Tweets That Got Everything Wrong on Iran By David Steinberg

Posted By on May 1st, 2018

The Obama administration and the media outlets which disseminated Ben Rhodes’ (admitted) propaganda on the Iran nuclear deal were wrong about everything.

The Republicans, President Donald Trump, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were right.

Here’s a collection of Ben Rhodes on Twitter — now as a likely member of the alliance pushing the comical narrative of a 2018 “#BlueWave” — getting everything wrong on Iran right up until the past few weeks:
Ben Rhodes
✔ @brhodes
It would not be “so easy” since there is a far-reaching inspections and verification regime to ensure that Iran is abiding by its commitments (which it is). Will Trump achieve a similar regime in North Korea? Does he even know how these agreements work?
Ben Rhodes
✔ @brhodes

The Iran Deal imposes strict, verified limitations on Iran’s centrifuges and stockpile to prevent them from obtaining a nuclear weapon. What Trump has talked about on NK – a vague, unverified commitment to denuclearization – is nowhere near as restrictive as the Iran Deal.

MEDIA Comments turned off

The New York Times’ Hatchet Job On Devin Nunes Is Riddled With Errors The New York Times article is riddled with errors that multiple sources publicly deny. It fails to include information easily found in the public record. By Mollie Hemingway

Posted By on May 1st, 2018

Jason Zengerle publicly announced his profile of Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., in today’s New York Times Sunday Magazine with the snarky tweet, “My latest for the @NYTmag on Devin Nunes, who’s been propagating, not to mention falling for, conspiracy theories since before the Deep State was even in a gleam in Donald Trump’s eye.”

It’s an accurate summation of the hit he attempted to place on Nunes, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI). The only problem is the case he attempts to make is riddled with errors and full of embarrassing and deliberate material omissions.

For example, Zengerle writes that a “suspicious” Nunes was wrong to believe that “Obama administration officials were ignoring evidence in a cache of documents collected from Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, showing that Al Qaeda was much stronger than the administration publicly contended.” Zengerle says Nunes’ predecessor as chairman of the intel committee, Rep. Mike Rogers, agreed with Obama officials’ assessment and told Nunes the documents Defense Intelligence Agency officials were analyzing at Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., showed nothing significant on that score.

“But Nunes wasn’t convinced. On a Saturday in May 2013, he flew from Washington to Tampa and paid a visit to Centcom headquarters himself, where he demanded to meet with the analysts reviewing the documents, in the hope of uncovering evidence of Al Qaeda’s strength—and an Obama administration cover-up,” Zengerle writes. “But after a meeting with the Army major general who headed Centcom’s intelligence wing, Nunes came back to Washington empty-handed.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Kim Makes Stunning Nuclear Concessions to ‘Crazy Guy’ Trump: Gordon Chang

Posted By on May 1st, 2018

In the last two weeks, stunning developments, one right after another, have suggested the possibility that the Korean War armistice will be turned into a peace treaty, North Korea will surrender its most destructive weapons, and the two Koreas will merge into one state.

How did peace break out in perhaps the world’s most troubled region? You can thank, in large measure, President Donald Trump. That does not mean, however, that he will be able to turn the promising situation he created into an enduring peace. In short, Trump the disrupter must become Trump the disciplined leader.

Last Saturday, Kim Jong Un, seemingly unprompted, promised to suspend “mid-range and intercontinental ballistic rocket tests” and to close his “nuclear test site in northern area,” a reference to the Punggye-ri facility. Hours ago, the office of South Korean President Moon Jae-in announced that Kim will allow foreign observers to witness the closure of the site next month.

Friday, Kim and Moon, at their historic summit, signed the Panmunjom Declaration for Peace, Prosperity, and Unification of the Korean Peninsula. The declaration, among other things, signals the intention of the two Koreas to formally end the Korean War by signing a peace treaty, expresses the desire for reuniting the two Korean states, and commits both leaders to rid their peninsula of nuclear weapons.