Yes, Trump’s Going to Dump the Iran Deal by Fred Fleitz

In the days following Donald Trump’s victory, a variety of experts – mostly Trump critics – pronounced that, despite Trump’s frequent statements during the presidential campaign that the July 2015 nuclear deal with Iran is one of “the worst deals ever made by any country in history,” he has no choice but to stick with the agreement after he assumes office.

Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif was one of the first to insist as much, claiming a Trump administration cannot back out of the nuclear deal because it is not a bilateral agreement between the United States and Iran but “an international understanding annexed to a Security Council resolution.”

Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council (which The Weekly Standard’s Lee Smith once described as “the tip of the spear of the Iran lobby” in the United States) echoed Zarif’s statement. In a November 11 Foreign Policy article, he argued Trump can undermine the Iran deal but cannot directly dismantle it because the JCPOA is a multilateral agreement “codified by the UN Security Council.” Any attempt by a Trump administration to renegotiate the deal would violate international law and isolate the United States, Parsi said.

Even some conservative experts have suggested Trump probably won’t try to significantly modify or discard the nuclear agreement, but will instead try to goad Iran into withdrawing by strictly enforcing the deal.

But Trump senior national-security adviser Walid Phares poured cold water on speculation that Trump plans to walk back his statements about the Iran deal, when he commented on Facebook over the weekend that the “Iran Deal will be dismantled.”

This firm statement by Phares confirmed previous statements he and Mr. Trump have made that the deal is a dangerous agreement that needs to be either significantly renegotiated or abandoned. As an expert who has followed the Iran nuclear program for many years inside and outside of government, I would like to expand on their statements by offering three key points about the nature of the deal and ten guidelines for renegotiating it.

Big Wind Blown Away in Vermont Big Wind had a rough Election Day in the Green Mountain State. By Robert Bryce

Big Wind lost big last Tuesday.

While it’s not clear what Donald Trump’s election means for federal energy policy, it’s abundantly obvious that the wind-energy sector’s agenda was crushed in Vermont. Indeed, thanks to the resounding — and somewhat improbable — election of a new Republican governor, Phil Scott, it is possible that Vermont could ban construction of new wind projects. And in the towns of Grafton and Windham, voters rejected the proposed Stiles Brook wind project by big margins.

Scott’s whopping nine-point victory over Democratic nominee Sue Minter is all the more impressive considering that Vermont voted overwhelmingly for Democrats at the federal and state levels. Hillary Clinton beat Trump in the Green Mountain State by 29 points, and Democrats won huge majorities of the popular vote in every other state and federal race. Minter was apparently hoping to ride Clinton’s coattails.

Instead, she lost to Scott, despite being backed by a pro-wind-energy PAC called Wind Works Vermont and by one of America’s most prominent environmentalists, Bill McKibben. McKibben is a resident of Vermont (he teaches at Middlebury College) and the founder of 350.org, a group which aims to “stop all new fossil fuel projects.” A few months ago, McKibben published a cover story in the New Republic in which he declared that the American economy should be running solely on wind and solar energy. He has frequently declared the need to “do the math,” but he didn’t bother to note that if such an all-renewable scheme were pursued, it would require a 20-fold increase in Vermont’s wind-energy capacity.

Although it cannot be stated definitively that wind energy was the deciding factor in Scott’s win over Minter, it is abundantly obvious that wind has been one of the most divisive issues in the state. During the Democratic primary for governor, two of the three candidates, Matt Dunne and Peter Galbraith, opposed wind-energy development. In fact, Galbraith made opposition to wind energy the primary focus of his campaign. In the August primary, Galbraith came in third, with about 6,500 votes. Shortly after the primary, he told me that wind-energy development “was the issue [in the Democratic primary] and I think in the general election it will be an issue as well.” It appears that nearly all of Galbraith’s supporters went on to vote for Scott, who ended up beating Minter by more than 27,000 votes.

Jewish Leftists Choose Hamas Over Trump Teaming up with the financiers of the murder of Jews to fight Trump. Daniel Greenfield

The Islamic Society of North America was named by the Justice Department as an unindicted co-conspirator in funding Hamas. It was linked to two Hamas funding fronts, the Holy Land Foundation and KindHearts. ISNA’s checks were made payable to the “Palestinian Mujahadeen” or “Holy Warriors” which was a name used by Hamas.

ISNA’s co-founder Sami Al-Arian was the local head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Mousa Abu Marzook, a top Hamas official listed by the Treasury Department as a Specially Designated Terrorist, received tens of thousands of dollars from ISNA.

This should have come as no surprise as both ISNA and Hamas are arms of the Muslim Brotherhood.

But the American Jewish Committee has decided to team up with the financiers of the murder of Jews to oppose Trump. The left wing Jewish group and an Islamist organization that wrote out checks to Islamic terrorists enabling them to kill Jews have formed the “Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council”.

Statements from both ISNA and the AJC made it clear that this was a reaction to Trump’s win.

“We are uniting to help the administration navigate in the proper constitutional manner, to uphold freedom of religion and constitutional rights for all American citizens,” Eftakhar Alam of ISNA said.

“It is a reaction to some of the bigotry and hate speech that came out of the campaign,” Robert Silverman, the AJC’s director of Muslim-Jewish relations said. “We’re concerned about the public discourse in the whole country. We’re also concerned about messages that originated within the two communities. The Trump phenomenon is only going to make it come together more quickly.”

Could A Radical Israel Basher Soon Head The Democratic Party? Boycott Israel movement ally Keith Ellison gets closer to leading the DNC. Joseph Klein

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) is the leading contender to head up the Democratic National Committee. In announcing his candidacy for the position, Ellison said, “When voters know what Democrats stand for, we can improve the lives of all Americans, no matter their race, religion, or sexual orientation.”

Ellison has the support of the progressive wing of the party, including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, as well as the so-called establishment types such as Senator Chuck Schumer.

What would a Democratic Party led by Rep. Ellison really look like? One need look no further than Rep. Ellison’s own statements, associations and actions. Under Ellison’s leadership, the Democratic Party will continue to evolve into a pro-Islamist party that helps advance the stealth jihad agenda, and a party that moves away from its traditional support of our closest ally in the Middle East, Israel.

Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, has a past history of working actively on behalf of the anti-Semitic firebrand Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. In 1995, writing as Keith X Ellison, he published a column for Insight News, which praised Farrakhan as “a role model for black youth” and denied that Farrakhan was an anti-Semite. In 1997, Ellison defended a statement by Joanne Jackson of the Minnesota Initiative Against Racism, who was reported to have said that “Jews are among the most racist white people I know.”

When Ellison first ran for Congress, Nihad Awad, executive director of the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), provided his support at a fund raiser in Minneapolis for Ellison. Ellison in turn has spoken at CAIR fundraising events. He also defended CAIR against credible charges that CAIR was trying to infiltrate staff offices tied to committees on the judiciary, homeland security and intelligence. At CAIR banquets in late 2008, Ellison urged CAIR supporters to seek jobs in the then incoming Obama administration.

Some of Ellison’s donors have “a history of Muslim Brotherhood connections,” according to Campus Watch. The Minneapolis branch of the Muslim Brotherhood affiliated Muslim American Society reportedly paid for Ellison’s pilgrimage to Mecca for the Hajj in 2008.

Save Egypt Before It’s Too Late Needed: a new, sane policy under Trump. P. David Hornik

Zvi Mazel, a former Israeli ambassador to Egypt, reports that Egypt is in trouble.

On the one hand, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is pursuing ambitious economic reforms. He’s doubled the size of the Suez Canal, bringing a major spike in revenue. He’s building a new capital south of Cairo, aimed at relieving congestion and pollution in Cairo and making it a commercial and tourist hub.

Sisi has also launched processes of building about two thousand miles of new highways, cleaning and rehabilitating wheat silos where wheat—the main Egyptian staple—rots because of negligence, and developing oil and natural gas resources.

That oil and gas development, Mazel notes, “could be greatly accelerated if the West decided at long last to help Egypt. It has not happened so far.”

Indeed it’s well known that since Sisi—then the defense minister—overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood regime of Mohamed Morsi in July 2013, the Obama administration and other Western governments have turned Egypt a cold shoulder.

They have done so even though that overthrow was backed by the most massive popular protests in history, with 14 million Egyptians taking to the streets.

They were protesting a regime that was radical, incompetent, and—in office for a year—already taking steps to abrogate Egypt’s constitution and strangle the country in sharia legislation.

Yet “Western countries led by US President Barack Obama,” Mazel notes,

still see in president Sisi a military dictator who grabbed power from a “democratically elected president.” They do not want to admit that Morsi was toppled by a popular uprising—admittedly with the help of the army—just in time to prevent him from creating an Islamic dictatorship.

Jilted by the West, Sisi has had to turn elsewhere. China is underwriting his building of a new capital. More problematically, Egypt has already signed major arms deals with Russia, and Russia has pledged $25 billion toward the building of a nuclear power plant in northern Egypt.

It might all be less troubling if Egypt were mainly suffering from economic problems.

But, in addition, it remains under assault by radical anti-Western terrorist forces.

“The Muslim Brotherhood,” Mazel reports, “is still carrying out low-grade warfare against local infrastructure in the country.” And a branch of Islamic State in the Sinai Peninsula has kept up a string of deadly attacks. The most devastating was its downing one year ago of a Russian plane, which, says Mazel, “has brought tourism to a near standstill.”

And as the economy keeps struggling and Sisi institutes reforms—some of them, like a VAT increase, widely resented—the potential for popular insurrection, driven by or at least exploited by the Islamist forces, remains.

Or as Mazel puts it, “It is now show time for [Sisi]. The next few months will be critical.”

Israel, for its part, is helping Egypt both in the security and economic spheres, but the assistance it can give is limited by ongoing popular hostility to Israel and Jews in Egypt.

Another development in the next few months, however, offers the best hope of keeping Sisi’s government on its moderate, constructive course and keeping the jihadists at bay.

An AP analysis notes that U.S. president-elect Donald Trump has already praised the “good chemistry” between him and Sisi when they met at the UN in September, suggesting a possibility of “closer ties after the chill between al-Sissi and Obama.”

Indeed Egypt’s media cheered Trump’s victory, reflecting widespread resentment at Obama’s support for the short-lived but hated Morsi regime.

It is not that Egypt is an exemplary country or a Western democracy. As mentioned, hatred in the Israeli and Jewish direction is still pervasive decades after the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty. Vigilante attacks on Christians continue. Sisi’s crackdown on Muslim Brotherhood and other radical forces hardly meets Western judicial standards.

But in the real world, the Sisi government—which wants to align with the West, is nonbelligerent toward Israel, and at least aspires to curb Islamic extremism—is vastly preferable to the alternatives.

Supporting Sisi would mean a shift to a sane policy.

This Is No Time to Go Wobbly, Donald Trump must continue to refuse to play the game. Bruce Thornton

Trump-haters of both parties are using the president elect’s conciliatory meeting with Obama to suggest he dial back on his campaign promises and govern like the typical politicians he ran against. The old mantras of “healing the divisions” and “bipartisanship” are being chanted once again, with the usual mythic anecdotes about Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill yukking it up over drinks. These are the same sirens whose seductive songs of comity and cooperation and coming together to “solve the country’s problems” have lured many a Republican onto the rocks of policy disasters like Comprehensive Immigration Reform and the confirmation of Obama minion Loretta Lynch as Attorney General.

There are already a few signs that Trump is being influenced by such chatter. He told the Wall Street Journal that he might keep Obamacare’s disastrous mandate that insurance companies insure those with preexisting conditions. On 60 Minutes he walked back his promise to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary’s pay-for-play foundation. This might just be conciliatory rhetoric designed to tamp down the anger of Democrats. Let’s hope that’s all it is, for such accommodation is seldom if ever reciprocated by Democrats.

On the contrary, Democrats have repeatedly proven that bipartisanship to them means that Republicans roll over for whatever Democrats want. If not, Republicans are tarred as obstructionists, racists, or whatever other epithet du jour. That’s because progressives are cultists hungry for more power so they can impose their ideological vision by any means necessary. Like Goldfinger, they don’t want Republicans to talk, they want them to die. Assured of their political righteousness, they have one standard for themselves, the elect, and another for their enemies, the damned. The two terms of Barack Obama are a textbook case of progressive campaign duplicity followed by a refusal to respect competing ideas and negotiate in good faith. Exhibit number one is Obamacare, passed without a single Republican vote, and rammed through Congress with legislative legerdemain and big barrels of pork.

Then there’s Obama’s bypassing of Congress all together once it was taken over by Republicans. He made it clear he felt no compunction about trashing the Constitution’s separation of powers and limited executive whose primary purpose is “to see that laws are faithfully executed.” Like progressive godfather Woodrow Wilson, he wanted the power to make “good” laws, not just to veto bad ones. “If Congress won’t act, I will” and “I have a pen and a phone,” he threatened. As for “healing divisions” and “bipartisanship,” he dismissed all that by saying, “Elections have consequences,” brushing aside bipartisanship with an arrogant “I won,” and advising his partisans to “punish our enemies.” His philosophy of governing has been the “Chicago way”: “If they bring a knife to a fight, we bring a gun.” Nor was he punished for behavior Republicans keep warning is political suicide. He beat light-red super-nice-guy Mitt Romney by five million votes.

The European assault on freedom of speech by Paul Coleman

Ahead of spiked’s conference in central London next Wednesday – ‘Enemies of the State: Religious Freedom and the New Repression’ – Paul Coleman asks if Britain outside of the EU will be any more respectful of freedom of thought and speech.

It has been argued that Brexit will make us freer. Not just in an economic or political sense, but also in terms of individual civil liberties. spiked’s Mick Hume wrote that ‘the referendum result is a triumph for free speech and a smack in the eye for the culture of You Can’t Say That’. And it is.

Post-Brexit Britain will no longer be bound by an EU Code of Conduct that seeks to police the online speech of over 500million citizens and ban ‘illegal online hate speech’. Or an EU law that encourages the criminalisation of ‘insult’. Or a proposed EU law that undermines fundamental freedoms by purging Europe of every last shred of supposed ‘discrimination’.

We can distinguish ourselves from our European neighbours that are intent on pursuing more and more censorship. Just over the summer it was reported that prosecutors in Spain initiated criminal proceedings against the Archbishop of Valencia for preaching a homily alleged to have been ‘sexist’ and ‘homophobic’. In the Netherlands, a man was sentenced to 30 days in prison for ‘intentionally insulting’ the king on Facebook. And in Germany a prosecution was launched against a comedian who made jokes against Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

These kinds of cases have become normal on the continent. So much so that they barely generate news. And they are often willingly cheered on by the EU and other European institutions. Britain can tread a different path.

There is just one, small problem: when it comes to censorship and the quashing of civil liberties, the UK doesn’t need any encouragement from the EU, or anybody else.

Take the issue of free speech. In Britain there are countless attacks on this fundamental freedom that have little or no connection to EU law. Evangelical street preachers are routinely arrested for public preaching; peaceful campaigners have been prosecuted for holding allegedly insulting signs; and the police have started labelling wolf-whistling a ‘hate crime’. None of this was EU-mandated. CONTINUE AT SITE

Bad Ideas make for Bad Politics: Douglas Murray

It is astonishing how little news Britain gets from the Continent. Lest this be thought to be a post-Brexit thing, it is worth noting that this has been the case for years. In a spirit of reconciliation, could all of us agree — leavers and remainers alike — that a positive result of Brexit would be an upsurge in serious media coverage from the Continent?

***During visits to Paris, Berlin and Stockholm in the last month the way in which our media has let us down has struck me more than ever. The British print and broadcast media are happy to lead on news about celebrities and even their relatives. But regular news even from a capital city such as Berlin is almost wholly absent. Consider a single day’s news while I was there.

On the front pages was news of the fire-bombing of a mosque in Dresden — a fairly common event, though no one was injured, and the building was not badly damaged. The inside pages included the sort of stories that now wash across every day in Germany though fail to make news elsewhere. A story of a violent clash in a small village between a gang of German bikers and a gang of refugees. And another story relaying events at an asylum centre the day before. A migrant phoned the police because he had seen a young girl being assaulted in a bush by another migrant. Three policemen arrived and caught a Pakistani man in his late twenties raping a six-year-old girl from Iraq. One of the policemen took the girl away while the other two handcuffed the Pakistani migrant.

As they were putting him into the back of the police car the father of the girl, who had obviously heard about what had happened to his daughter, came running out of the centre wielding a knife, clearly intent on attacking the perpetrator. At which point the two policemen shot him dead. Just one of a thousand stories every day in Merkel’s Germany.

The Dying Days Of Zuma’s South Africa R.W. Johnson

First, the liberal opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) last month won Johannesburg, Pretoria, Port Elizabeth and Cape Town in the local elections, a huge blow to the ruling African National Congress (ANC). Second, the country is waiting on tenterhooks for the credit rating agencies to re-rate the country’s creditworthiness in November: most fear relegation to junk status. Third, President Jacob Zuma, a crony capitalist par excellence, is trying to hand as many favours as possible to his allies, the Gupta family. This is being resisted by his finance minister, Pravin Gordhan, and a showdown between Zuma and Gordhan cannot be long averted. Finally, there is the question of the presidential succession, to be decided by an ANC conference in 2017. Rumours fly that Zuma has already accepted $200 million from Vladimir Putin to commission a string of Russian nuclear power stations; that fearing jail, he is planning to retire offshore; and that he will push his ex-wife, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, into the presidency to succeed him. And so on.

One could write: “Apart from that, normal politics goes on.” In one sense that is true — we have rioting students burning down university buildings, affirmative action causing a flight of white cricketers and rugby players — but mainly it’s not true simply because the ANC, which has ruled the country since 1994, is disassembling before one’s eyes. There is an almost complete absence of leadership. Zuma remains largely passive when in-country, and he’s often out. The police, doubtless on his instructions, endlessly harass and threaten the finance minister, Pravin Gordhan. Not only do individual cabinet ministers squabble in public and make unilateral decisions without any semblance of cabinet co-ordination but even subordinate state agencies sometimes make large policy announcements, apparently chancing their arm to see what they can get away with. Many of the ministers are clearly buffoons, while ANC deputy secretary-general Jessie Duarte has made announcements that suggest complete economic illiteracy. But then the president himself has said he doesn’t really believe in markets and relies on Marx’s labour theory of value, which even Marxist economists stopped using in the 1950s.

As the local elections approached, propaganda from the ANC and the South African Communist Party (the parties are allies and all but indistinguishable) became increasingly frenzied. Opinion polls showing the ANC behind were denounced as having “a regime change agenda” and the SACP demanded that their publication be stopped. There were furious demands to “defend the capital”, and posters went up widely enjoining us all to “defend the revolution”. Zuma, for his part, threatened his audiences that if the opposition won cities like Port Elizabeth “the ancestors will never forgive you”. This led to considerable doubts as to whether the ANC would actually accept an adverse result. In Port Elizabeth the (theoretically) Independent Electoral Commission displayed great reluctance to declare an opposition victory but in the end the verdict of the polls was respected.

However, this was quickly followed by the ANC threatening to make the cities they had lost “ungovernable” and by initial council meetings where the ANC caucus tried to prevent the new administration from being sworn in. In Pretoria this was followed by a series of ANC-led illegal land invasions in which squatters grabbed public land and put up shacks, forcing the municipality to evict them and thus incur the ignominy of being portrayed as apartheid lookalikes. But this is all part of the rather muscular style of South African politics. The really important thing is that the ANC seems habituated to the rules of electoral democracy and this gives one some — not complete, but some — confidence that it may one day accept the loss of national power in good part.

The second issue — the possible downrating of South Africa to junk bond status — is still moot though most market sentiment is that it will happen, causing a stockmarket and currency downgrade of some severity. The result will, of course, be higher interest rates on all forms of government debt, increasingly tight constraints on government spending and, ultimately, an increased possibility that the country will be forced towards an IMF bail-out. All this is some way off and the ANC still lives in a dreamworld where the Brics banks will lend them lots of money at no interest and without conditions. Reality is likely to be a lot less comfortable and the crunch will be felt first in South Africa’s host of loss-making state-owned industries. South African Airways, for example, is run by one of Zuma’s girlfriends, Dudu Myeni, who is therefore unsackable despite her complete lack of business or aviation experience and the huge losses SAA has incurred under her care. It is doubtful if any commercial airline would employ Ms Myeni even as a receptionist.

Obama takes one more overseas vacation on the taxpayers’ dime And spends it taking cheap shots at American voters.By J. Marsolo

Obama never misses a chance to disparage the United States while praising himself. Obama is visiting Greece, Italy, and Peru, for God knows what reason, except to take a last vacation on the taxpayers’ dime.

Yesterday in Greece he said the election is not a referendum on his tenure and criticized the election as having a “dark side” of populist movements.

The Washington Post reported on November 15, 2016:

Obama, who made it clear during the course of the hour-long news conference that he did not view the recent U.S. election results as a referendum on his own tenure or world vision, suggested that targeting specific racial, religious ethnic groups could backfire[.] … Obama … made it clear that he sees a dark side to the kind of populist movements Trump’s campaign embodied[.]

Obama said: “We are going to have to guard against a rise in a crude sort of nationalism, or ethnic identity or tribalism that is built around an us and a them[.]”

If this wasn’t bad enough, Obama said:

In the United States we know what happens when we start dividing ourselves along the lines of race or religion or ethnicity. It is dangerous. It is dangerous, not just for the minority groups that are subjected to that kind of discrimination, or in some cases in the past, violence, but because we then don’t realize our potential as a country when we are preventing blacks or Latinos or Asians or gays or women from fully participating in the project of building American life[.]