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Notable & Quotable: A Lesson of the 1967 War ‘The revisionists have much of the story right but they miss a crucial factor.’

Posted By on June 21st, 2017

https://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-a-lesson-of-the-1967-war-1497998869

The Hudson Institute’s Michael Doran, testifying before the U.N. Security Council about the 50th anniversary of the Six Day War, June 20:

May I again remind you of the example of [Egypt’s] Gamal Abdel Nasser ? A revisionist school of historiography claims that he never wanted war in 1967. His best military units were bogged down in Yemen, his economy was a shambles, and his relations with Jordan and Syria, his putative allies, were abysmal. Why would a leader in such a precarious position behave so recklessly?

The revisionists have much of the story right but they miss a crucial factor. Nasser was applying lessons that he learned a decade earlier, during the Suez Crisis. Then, as in 1967, he had precipitated a war that he could not possibly win militarily, but which he believed he could win politically, because, he gambled, the superpowers and the United Nations would intercede on his behalf. In 1956, that proved a very smart bet. In 1967, however, it utterly failed—with disastrous consequences for Egypt—to say nothing of the Palestinians. How much better would it have been for all parties if, back in 1956, the United Nations had insisted that, in return for an Israeli withdrawal from Egyptian territory, Nasser must grant Israel meaningful security guarantees?

The key lesson of 1967 war is that peace is best achieved not by United Nations intercession but by facilitating direct negotiations between the parties.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Congress and Obama Depleted the Military The Trump budget would increase spending only 3%. With today’s threats, that’s not nearly enough. By Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney

Posted By on June 21st, 2017

North Korea is making alarming progress in its ballistic-missile and nuclear-weapons programs. Russia and China are developing and fielding advanced weapons against which the U.S. may not be able to defend. Al Qaeda operates in more countries than ever. Islamic State is targeting the West and launching attacks throughout Europe and the Middle East. Iran is supporting terrorist organizations across the globe, modernizing its ballistic-missile and other capabilities and likely continuing to pursue nuclear weapons.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told the House Armed Services Committee last week that the U.S. is losing the military edge on which our security has long relied: “Today, every operating domain—including outer space, air, sea, undersea, land and cyberspace—is contested.”

Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, seconded that worry in written testimony for the same hearing: “Without sustained, sufficient and predictable funding,” he wrote, “I assess that within five years we will lose our ability to project power; the basis of how we defend the homeland, advance U.S. interests, and meet our alliance commitments.”

In short, the situation President Trump inherited is dire. America today faces an array of threats more serious and complex than at any time in the past 75 years.

President Obama and his policies are largely to blame. The 2011 Budget Control Act, which mandated across-the-board cuts, known as sequestration, at a time when threats were growing, has also done serious damage. “No enemy in the field,” Mr. Mattis told lawmakers, “has done more to harm the combat readiness of our military than sequestration.”

What have eight years of Mr. Obama’s policies, and six years of the Budget Control Act, wrought? The military superiority America relied on after the end of the Cold War has been seriously eroded, our capabilities diminished. In the past three months alone, military leaders have testified that:

• The Army is “outranged, outgunned, outdated,” with only three of 58 brigade combat teams ready to “fight tonight.”

• The Navy is the smallest and least ready it has been in modern times. Fewer than half the Navy’s aircraft can fly because so many are grounded for maintenance or because they lack spare parts.

• The Air Force is the oldest and smallest it has ever been, and less than half of its combat forces are sufficiently ready to fight tonight.

• The Marine Corps is insufficiently manned, trained and equipped across the depth of the force.

Rebuilding America’s defenses will require a massive, concerted and long-term effort that must begin today. Mr. Trump rightly promised to do this during last year’s presidential election. Unfortunately, the White House budget submitted to Congress earlier this month fails to provide the necessary resources.

The White House has requested only 3% more funding for defense than Mr. Obama’s proposed 2018 budget, meaning the Pentagon would essentially tread water for at least a year—time the U.S. cannot spare in this threat environment. Instead of leading the effort to repeal the Budget Control Act, the White House budget envisions extending it by six years, to 2027. The president’s budget also cuts funding in absolutely essential areas, including $300 million from missile defense and $1 billion from Navy shipbuilding. In sum, the 2018 White House defense budget differs little from what Mr. Obama would have requested were he still president. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Fighting Poverty Isn’t Brain Surgery, but Ben Carson Can Do Both ‘I don’t get upset when people say horrible things,’ the HUD secretary says. ‘People don’t like change.’By Jason L. Riley

Posted By on June 21st, 2017

At the end of our interview last week, I asked Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson for an example of the outside-the-box thinking that served him so well in his prior career as a pioneering neurosurgeon.

“Sure. I started advocating cervicomedullary decompression for achondroplasia,” said Dr. Carson, before shooting me a sly grin and switching to English. Achondroplasia, he explained, is the most common form of dwarfism, and 40 years ago about 7% of people born with the condition died in infancy. “It’s because they had tight, abnormal bone formation at the base of their skull, and that was squeezing the brain stem. And they would just stop breathing. Surgeons would try to go in sometimes and fix it, but it was so tight that they frequently made it worse or killed the patient.”

When he first talked about using a different surgical procedure on children with achondroplasia, at a medical conference in Rome in the mid-1980s, many objected: “The geneticists said, ‘You surgeons. If you would just leave these people alone, only 7% of them would die. But you guys think you can do anything.’ ”

Back home at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, colleagues complained to the hospital president that “Carson’s a wild man. You’ve got to stop him.” But Dr. Carson didn’t stop. “Finally, I had done enough cases where I was able to reveal the data. None of [the patients] had died, and they were doing well. And even though I’d gotten all that pushback, now it’s a standard procedure.”

“I don’t get upset when people say horrible things,” the secretary told me. “I understand human nature. People don’t like change.” A disposition that serves him well these days, when taking cheap shots at Ben Carson is something of a sport among reporters and cable-news sages. Never mind that he grew up poor in inner-city Detroit, raised by a single mother with mental-health problems who worked as a housekeeper. Or that he blasted through racial barriers in his medical career. Or that he has used his fame and fortune to expand the educational opportunities of low-income minorities. After all, what could a person from that background possibly know about helping people in difficult circumstances?

In the press, however, the secretary is most often portrayed as a doctrinaire conservative who is out of his depth running an agency tasked with assisting the poor. After he told a town-hall audience in May that poverty is “in part a mindset” and “to a large extent also a state of mind,” commentators couldn’t stop snickering. But Mr. Carson stands by his words. “I don’t say that without evidence. I think of my own life. I think of the way I used to think when I was at the bottom of my class and going nowhere fast,” he told me. “A lot of it is . . . being told the system is against you or that you’re a victim.” Some individuals and organizations “want to convince people that somebody else is in charge of them, and that’s why they get angry at people like me who say it’s partly the way you think.”

Media portrayals notwithstanding, Secretary Carson told me he is not opposed to government assistance and safety nets. “We have an obligation to take care of people who can’t care for themselves—the elderly, the disabled, the mentally ill—and certainly at HUD we’re going to take care of those people.” A case in point, he added, is dealing more effectively with the homeless population. We’re doing a better job at sheltering them but not at diagnosing why they became homeless in the first place and then treating it. “If you don’t do two and three, then you’re wasting your time.”

MEDIA Comments turned off

Anchorman III What was on the teleprompter at CBS News?By James Freeman

Posted By on June 21st, 2017

There was a time, a time before cable news, when the network anchorman reigned supreme. Thank goodness those days are long gone, but like the dominant broadcasters of yore, Scott Pelley of CBS News has a voice that could make a wolverine purr. Still, it’s not clear that anyone could make sense of the words that Mr. Pelley was speaking on Thursday.

In a commentary for the “CBS Evening News,” Mr. Pelley began:

It’s time to ask whether the attack on the United States Congress Wednesday was foreseeable, predictable and, to some degree, self-inflicted.

Some of the gunshot wounds might have been self-inflicted? If CBS had discovered evidence that those attending the congressional baseball practice had actually been wounded by their own bullets, rather than shots fired by James Hodgkinson, this surely would have been the scoop of the year. But Mr. Pelley quickly made clear that he and his colleagues had no such evidence. Instead, he was suggesting that the victims of the attempted assassinations might bear some blame for motivating Hodgkinson to attack:

Too many leaders, and political commentators, who set an example for us to follow have led us into an abyss of violent rhetoric which, it should be no surprise, has led to violence.

Blaming anyone other than the shooter for attempted assassination is generally a mistake. And the timing could hardly have been worse. Mr. Pelley was intoning his commentary on the same day that victim Rep. Steve Scalise (R., La.) was undergoing one of the series of surgeries he has required since the Wednesday attack. Last weekend his condition was upgraded to serious from critical. On Thursday, the day of the Pelley commentary, shooting victim Matt Mika was also in critical condition. Capitol Police Officer Crystal Griner was also still in the hospital on Thursday, according to CNN.

Given the timing and the circumstances that Mr. Pelley chose to make his case, one might have expected him to cite some truly damning rhetoric that had been uttered by the victims, if not direct evidence that they had incited Hodgkinson to carry out his bloody attack. One would have been wrong. The CBS voice offered not a shred of evidence that any of the shooting victims had done anything to create an “abyss of violent rhetoric,” or to inspire the actions of the man who tried to assassinate them. Instead, the anchorman mentioned a politician who was not targeted:

Bernie Sanders has called the president the “most dangerous in history.” And the shooter yesterday was a Sanders volunteer.

You might think that no sane person would act on political hate speech, and you’d be right. Trouble is, there are a lot of Americans who struggle with mental illness.

Mr. Pelley offered no evidence that Hodgkinson suffered from mental illness, nor did he explain how comments by Mr. Sanders could possibly raise the question of whether the victims’ wounds might be “self-inflicted.”

Believe it or not, the segment went downhill from there. The CBS newsman concluded by citing President Trump’s harsh rhetoric about his network and other media outlets, as if Mr. Pelley and his colleagues were the real victims of last week’s violence.

Coincidentally on Friday Mr. Pelley left the CBS nightly anchor chair to focus on his reports for the CBS program, “60 Minutes.” The move had been announced in May and in media terms, Mr Pelley remains kind of a big deal.

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Anatomy of a Witch Hunt The Trump-Russia scare comes from the same playbook as fake cancer scares. By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

Posted By on June 21st, 2017

Americans won’t be really good citizens until they read Timur Kuran and Cass Sunstein’s 1999 law review article about “availability cascades.”

Their launching point is the process by which we (i.e., human beings) decide to believe what others believe, and judge the truth of a proposition by how familiar it is. Such “availability cascades” drive government policy in good ways and bad, but usually bad. An example the authors analyze in detail is 1989’s fake “Alar” cancer scare that devastated U.S. apple growers.

Which brings us to today’s question: How did it become widely believed in the first half of 2017 that a U.S. president committed treason with Russia?

Consider what has passed for proof in the media. Tens of thousands of Americans have done business with Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union, not to mention before.

In 2009 President Obama made the first of his two trips to Russia with a gaggle of U.S. business leaders in tow.

Of these many thousands, four were associated with the Trump campaign, and now became evidence of Trump collusion with Russia.

Every president for 75 years has sought improved relations with Russia. That’s what those endless summits were about. Mr. Trump, in his typically bombastic way, also promoted improved relations with Russia. Now this was evidence of collusion.

Russian diplomats live in the U.S. and rub shoulders with countless Americans. Such shoulder-rubbing, if Trump associates were involved, now is proof of crime.

The Alar pesticide scare only took off when activists whom Messrs. Kuran and Sunstein label “availability entrepreneurs” peddled deceptive claims to a credulous “60 Minutes.” We would probably not be having this Russia discussion today if not for the so-called Trump dossier alleging improbable, lurid connections between Donald Trump and the Kremlin.

It had no provenance that anyone was bound to respect or rely upon. Its alleged author, a retired British agent named Christopher Steele, supposedly had Russian intelligence sources, but why would Russian intelligence blow the cover of their blackmail agent Mr. Trump whom they presumably so carefully and expensively cultivated? They wouldn’t.

Yet recall the litany of Rep. Adam Schiff, who declared in a House Intelligence Committee hearing: “Is it possible that all of these events and reports are completely unrelated and nothing more than an entirely unhappy coincidence?”

His litany actually consisted of innocuous, incidental and routine Trump associations interspersed with claims from the Trump dossier to make the innocuous, incidental and routine seem nefarious.

Maybe Mr. Schiff is a cynic, or maybe Harvard Law sent him back into the world with the same skull full of mush with which he arrived. But ever since, every faulty or incomplete recollection of a meeting with a Russian has been promoted in the media as proof of treason by Trump associates.

The president’s obvious irritation with being called a traitor is proof that he is a traitor.CONTINUE AT SITE

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Explosions at Brussels Central Station, Suspect with Explosive Belt ‘Neutralized’ By Patrick Poole

Posted By on June 21st, 2017

There are reports of two explosions at Brussels Central Station, where a man wearing what appeared to be an explosive belt has been “neutralized” in what Belgian authorities are calling a terror attack:

Local media reports indicate the suspect shouted “Allah akhbar” before being shot:

Belgian authorities won’t confirm if the suspect is dead or alive, but are saying there are no further injuries.

The Independent reports:

The main square and central station in Belgium’s capital Brussels have evacuated by place after reports of a blast.

Witnesses said La Grande Place was cleared in seconds, while others took pictures of a fire in the nearby Central Station.

Belgian media have reported a man wearing a explosive belt has been “neutralised” by police.

Local police tweeted about an “incident with an individual at Brussels Central station”.

It said: “The situation is under control but please follow the instructions [of police]”.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Report: As Many as 5.7 Million Non-Citizens Voted in 2008 Election By Rick Moran

Posted By on June 21st, 2017

A report from the conservative/libertarian think tank Just Facts shows that up to 5.7 million people who cast their ballots in the 2008 presidential election were non-citizens. The group used data from a Harvard study as well as US Census Bureau data to arrive at that conclusion.

Just Facts also estimated that up to 3.6 million non-citizens cast their vote in 2012.

Washington Times:

Just Facts’ conclusions confront both sides in the illegal voting debate: those who say it happens a lot and those who say the problem nonexistent.

In one camp, there are groundbreaking studies by professors at Old Dominion University in Virginia who attempted to compile scientifically derived illegal voting numbers using the Harvard data, called the Cooperative Congressional Election Study.

On the other side are the professors who conducted the study and contended that “zero” noncitizens of about 18 million adults in the U.S. voted. The liberal mainstream media adopted this position and proclaimed the Old Dominion work was “debunked.”

The ODU professors, who stand by their work in the face of attacks from the left, concluded that in 2008 as few as 38,000 and as many as 2.8 million noncitizens voted.

Mr. Agresti’s analysis of the same polling data settled on much higher numbers. He estimated that as many as 7.9 million noncitizens were illegally registered that year and 594,000 to 5.7 million voted.

With voter ID laws in so many states, how did the non-citizens get away with it?

“The details are technical, but the figure I calculated is based on a more conservative margin of sampling error and a methodology that I consider to be more accurate,” Mr. Agresti told The Washington Times.

He believes the Harvard/YouGov researchers based their “zero” claim on two flawed assumptions. First, they assumed that people who said they voted and identified a candidate did not vote unless their names showed up in a database.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Three Americans Still Held by North Korea By Bridget Johnson

Posted By on June 21st, 2017

Kenneth Bae was seized by North Korean officials in November 2012. Two years later, after suffering myriad health problems brought on by forced labor, Bae’s 15-year sentence was cut short and he headed home to Washington state.

The Christian missionary thought he could help suffering North Koreans in part by leading a tour company in the special economic zones that would help reveal the people’s plight. Pyongyang accused Bae of trying to topple the communist regime.

After the release and death of University of Virginia student Otto Warmbier, Bae said he was grieving with and praying for the young man’s family.

Bae called attention to the many people “living without freedom in the country of 24 million people – enduring horrible circumstances and forced labor – and we do not even know their names.”

“We plead with the U.S. government, the international community, and leadership in North Korea to value human lives. Every life is important — Otto’s life, lives of the American detainees, and the lives of each person in North Korea. I am a Christian, and part of what that means is to act justly and to have mercy on the innocent. Although we don’t know everything about life in North Korea, this much is sure: innocent people like Otto are suffering. I pray that these innocent people suffering in North Korea are not forgotten in this high-stakes game of weapons, sanctions, and international diplomacy,” Bae’s statement continued.

“Please join me in prayer and be a voice for the innocent. Please join me in praying for Otto’s family. This did not have to happen and should never happen again.”

Bae was released at the same time as Matthew Todd Miller, who had been arrested after entering North Korea in April 2014. In October 2014, Jeffrey Fowle, an Ohio tourist arrested after a Bible was discovered in his hotel room, was released — a month after being sentenced to six years of hard labor. The Pentagon sent an aircraft to pick up Fowle at North Korea’s request.

Ten Americans were detained and released by North Korea during the Obama administration, with Bae serving the longest period in captivity. Warmbier was seized in January 2016, and is believed to have suffered the brain damage that left him in an unresponsive state soon after being sentenced that March.

In June 2016, North Korea’s Korean Central News Agency blamed Bae’s

“babbling” about the regime for the prisoners’ plight, claiming Pyongyang would “not proceed with any compromise or negotiations with the United States on the subject of American criminals, and there will certainly not be any such thing as humanitarian action” as long as the former hostage spoke out about his experiences and advocated for those still suffering.

“As we grieve Otto’s passing, I also want people to know that other Americans remain detained in North Korea right now,” Bae added in his statement this week. “There are three Americans — Kim Dong Chul, Tony Kim, Kim Hak-Song — and the Canadian pastor Hyeon Soo Lim.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

A silent minority fights for its rights at San Francisco State U By Ethel C. Fenig

Posted By on June 21st, 2017

San Francisco State University leftists, who dominate that university, as per the left’s modus operandi, will allow only certain minorities it deems acceptable their “rights” while trampling on the rights of others – minorities, majorities, or just sincere non-identity-obsessed students. SFSU’s administration has, at most, passively accepted this state of affairs while often enabling the suppression of the rights of some in the face of violence by leftists.

And now, one minority group that has suffered in silence for years has said, “Enough! We have rights too and we’re demanding them!” No, not by counter-violence but by a lawsuit.

San Francisco State University Accused of Pervasive Anti-Semitism in Groundbreaking Federal Lawsuit Filed by Students and Members of the Jewish Community

A group of San Francisco State University students and members of the local Jewish community today filed a lawsuit alleging that SFSU has a long and extensive history of cultivating anti-Semitism and overt discrimination against Jewish students. According to the suit, “SFSU and its administrators have knowingly fostered this discrimination and hostile environment, which has been marked by violent threats to the safety of Jewish students on campus.” The plaintiffs are represented by a team of attorneys from The Lawfare Project and the global law firm Winston & Strawn LLP.

The lawsuit, which was filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California and also names as defendants, the Board of Trustees of the California State University System, SFSU President Leslie Wong and several other University officials and employees, alleges that “Jewish students at SFSU have been so intimidated and ostracized that they are afraid to wear Stars of David or yarmulkes on campus.”

The lawsuit was triggered following the alleged complicity of senior university administrators and police officers in the disruption of an April, 2016, speech by the Mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat. At that event organized by SF Hillel, Jewish students and audience members were subjected to genocidal and offensive chants and expletives by a raging mob that used bullhorns to intimidate and drown out the Mayor’s speech and physically threaten and intimidate members of the mostly-Jewish audience. At the same time, campus police – including the chief – stood by, on order from senior university administrators who instructed the police to “stand down” despite direct and implicit threats and violations of university codes governing campus conduct.

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ISIS Has New Plans of Attack Janet Levy

Posted By on June 21st, 2017

In an article entitled “Just Terrorist Tactics: Hostage Taking,” the recently released issue of ISIS’ online magazine, Rumiyah (Rome), features new techniques to terrorize non-Muslims.

Volume 9 of the terrorist group’s recruitment and propaganda tool introduces several new ideas of note for aspiring jihadists which involve 1) advertising for fake jobs, 2) falsely advertising property for rent and 3) participation in online sales sites such as Craigslist, Gumtree and eBay.

The advertising of a job at a local unemployment center is presented as a way to lure a particular type of target for “job interviews” (i.e. any male kafir). The “soldier of Allah” is informed that this should take place at various locations and times in order to eliminate the victims as they arrive by “attacking, subduing, binding and then slaughtering them.”

Falsely advertising a property for rent in the local classified section or with “For Rent” advertisement posters is suggested as another effective ploy. Perpetrators are instructed to describe the available property as a single room or studio so potential “tenants” will likely come alone to view the rental.

As the collection of goods is often conducted in person, the use of buy and sell websites is encouraged as well by the latest Rumiyah feature. The writer specifies that the viewing and collecting of the item in question should be arranged at a suitable location for carrying out a terrorist operation.

The recent Rumiyah article cautions Muslims to remind themselves that these actions constitute “worship” and that “Allah has obliged us to “kill the mushrikin*” wherever we find them and to “fight the disbelievers who are closest**” to us.” It stresses the importance of having a room specifically reserved for the disposal of bodies so that future victims are not alerted to any danger. The use of background noise to drown out sounds of a struggle is encouraged. It is suggested that in order to maximize the “terror in the hearts of the disbelievers***” and enhance the publicity value of the operation, some victims should be kept alive and used as hostages. The “ideal scenario” is depicted as the storming of the site by armed forces as the jihadist is killed as a shahid or martyr.

In issues of a prior ISIS publication, Dabiq, Muslims were urged to kill children and attack Christians.