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What price NATO? If member states aren’t willing to spend on their own defense, why should we? By Jed Babbin

Posted By on April 6th, 2016

Donald Trump panicked the foreign policy establishment when he said NATO is obsolete and ill-suited to fight terrorism. By saying that, and adding, “We can’t afford to do this anymore,” Mr. Trump drew gleefully harsh responses from Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton.

Mr. Cruz said, “Donald Trump is wrong that American should retreat from Europe, retreat from NATO, hand Putin a major victory and while he’s at it, hand ISIS a major victory.”

Mrs. Clinton’s claim to the presidency rests on her experience as secretary of state. If you read her memoir, “Hard Choices,” you’ll inevitably conclude that although she went nearly everywhere and conferred with almost everyone in power, by her own recitation she never persuaded anyone to support any American position or undertaking. On the basis of that non-expertise, Mrs. Clinton said Mr. Trump’s position on NATO “would reverse decades of bipartisan American leadership and send a dangerous signal to friend and foe alike.” She would, of course, leave NATO undisturbed on its current course.

At the risk of injecting facts into politics, we need to understand what NATO has become and why, before we can try to fix it or consign it to the ash heap of history.

Mr. Trump’s assertion that NATO isn’t constituted properly to deal with terrorism is correct but irrelevant. NATO was designed in the 1940s to deal with the postwar threats of Soviet aggression, not with the then-unforeseen terrorist threat. We cannot forget that after Sept. 11, 2001, NATO — for the first time — invoked Article 5 of its charter, the collective defense provision that states an attack against one member is an attack against all. Many NATO members, including Poland, Britain and others, sent troops to Afghanistan and Iraq, joining our wars against terrorism.

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RUTHIE BLUM: PRIMARY DISTRACTIONS FROM IRAN

Posted By on April 6th, 2016

Ahead of Tuesday’s Wisconsin presidential primaries, U.S. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan was in Israel, the destination he chose for his first foreign trip since assuming his post at the end of October.

In meetings with Israeli leaders — and in an interview with Times of Israel editor David Horovitz — Ryan reaffirmed his commitment to the Jewish state and his opposition to the nuclear deal with Iran. He also stated, in no uncertain terms, that — contrary to increasing rumor and pressure — he is not going to end up becoming the Republican nominee at what threatens to be a contested GOP convention. Nobody really believes he means it, however, because he had been equally adamant about not wanting the position he is currently occupying.

But, while distraught Americans from both parties are obsessing over whether Donald Trump can win the nomination — and if he does, whether he can beat likely Democratic rival Hillary Clinton — the Obama administration is being given a free pass to get away with murder, figuratively. More literally, it is enjoying the benefit of the doubt caused by the distraction of the public away from the havoc the White House and State Department are continuing to wreak, which is enabling the actual death of a lot of people in the present, and a whole lot more in the future.

The terrorism of the Islamic State group is only a tiny part of this, though it seems to be the only jihadist organization that gets a rise out of Westerners, whom it makes no bones about targeting for mass murder. Indeed, as the suicide bombings in Brussels on March 22 indicated, Europeans and Americans only wake up when a lot of people with whom they can identify get slaughtered senselessly. That this kind of thing is going on routinely everywhere else in the world barely elicits a yawn.

But as evil as ISIS is, it is still small fry compared to the Islamic Republic of Iran, the world’s greatest state sponsor of terrorism, with tentacles reaching far and wide. And now, thanks to the Obama administration, it also has multibillions of dollars at its disposal with which to build its nuclear arsenal. Nor does it hide its ambitions to wipe Israel off the map and its loathing for America, the “great Satan.”

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These Five Are the Best We Can Do? Presidential politics are so degrading, thanks to the press and the Internet, that superior people stay out. By Joseph Epstein

Posted By on April 6th, 2016

Midway through historian G.P. Baker’s biography of the Roman general and master politician Sulla (139-78 B.C.), I came across the following two sentences: “There are some systems which naturally take control out of the hands of good men. There are even some which necessarily put it in the hands of bad ones.” Baker’s observation took my mind away from Rome and back, where it was not eager to go, to the current presidential campaign. How did it come about that we have five such unimpressive contenders for the presidency of the United States? Is there something in our system of electing candidates that makes inevitable the rise of the mediocre and even the exaltation of the vulgar?

Difficult to find anyone who talks about the presidential primaries with any enthusiasm. Even yellow-dog Democrats and academic feminists can’t get much worked up for Hillary Clinton. The young are apparently taken with the socialist fantast Bernie Sanders—but then, being young, they don’t realize he is nothing more than a digitally remastered 1930s replay.
On the Republican side, John Kasich talks endlessly about his own accomplishments—he balanced the national budget, he worked splendidly with those across the aisle when in Congress, in Ohio he has done everything but wipe out ISIS—in a manner that, though he seems unaware of it, is off-putting even to voters who want to like him. Ted Cruz is the very model of the contrast gainer: He looks good, that is, only in contrast to Donald Trump.

Mr. Trump’s vulgarity is nonpareil—and by his vulgarity I don’t mean his profanity merely, but the vulgar quality of his speech, his thought, his very sentiments. So low have things fallen owing to Donald Trump that lifelong Republicans have told me that, in a Trump-versus-Clinton election, they are likely to hold their nose and vote for Mrs. Clinton. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Lessons From the Ranch: Schooling a Teen in Hard Work Sen. Ben Sasse’s daughter got a month-long education in caring for cattle and driving a tractor. Kyle Paterson

Posted By on April 6th, 2016

For the past month, Ben Sasse, the junior U.S. senator from Nebraska, has been tweeting out his “lessons from the ranch”—or, rather, his daughter’s lessons. While her peers across the country might have spent much of the past few weeks lolling about their bedrooms, staring at smartphones instead of doing homework, 14-year-old Corrie Sasse was hours from home, laboring as a farmhand in exchange for room and board.

“We just believe in work,” Mr. Sasse tells me. “In our family we try to figure out ways that our kids can work.” The freedom to do so is one benefit of home schooling, since Mr. Sasse and his wife, Melissa, clearly consider working hard an education in itself.

Corrie seems to have taken the ranch assignment in stride, texting updates to her father, who then shared them on Twitter. Production agriculture, she learned, can be a dusty, dirty, smelly business, not least during calving season, when this particular ranch expects 300 new arrivals.

Text #FromTheRanch: “Today we checked to confirm some cows were pregnant—which Megan did by jamming her hand up their rectum. Eww.”

We should confirm, for the uninitiated, that the pregnancy-check generally involves a shoulder-length disposable glove . . . but still. Mr. Sasse says that surprise, more than anything, helped his daughter overcome the ick factor: “It was just all of a sudden, the moment they were at, and she was told to do it, and that was the work that needed to be done that day.” Corrie donned the long glove too.

Text #FromTheRanch: “Am not going to call now. I need to get some sleep before checking cows—and feed the fats—at midnight. . . By the way, Dad, the ‘fats’ are cows soon to be slaughtered.”CONTINUE AT SITE

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Wisconsin Trump Stop Badger State Republicans vote for Ted Cruz and make a contested convention more likely.

Posted By on April 6th, 2016

Donald Trump’s defeat in Wisconsin on Tuesday marks a major turn in the Republican race for President that now may not be settled until the July convention in Cleveland. With a chance to make his nomination all but inevitable, Mr. Trump was rejected by a majority of the Badger State’s engaged and well-informed GOP voters.

Ted Cruz won the state as the party’s establishment rallied behind him, including Governor Scott Walker and his political operation. Badger State talk-radio hosts also opposed Mr. Trump, in contrast to national radio talkers who are more populists than they are reform conservatives. The exit polls also showed that Wisconsin voters aren’t as angry as GOP voters elsewhere in the country, perhaps because they’ve seen what a united reform movement can accomplish in their state.

Mr. Trump also hurt himself with a string of mistakes and uninformed statements that have caused millions of GOP voters to have second thoughts. His standing among women in particular has fallen to lows unheard of for a potential major party nominee—upwards of 75% negative. This raises doubts about whether he has any chance even against a candidate as flawed as Hillary Clinton, and whether he might cost the GOP its Senate and House majorities.

Mr. Trump’s core support—a third to 40% of GOP voters—remains loyal, and he is still the front-runner. But Wisconsin shows that the same blunt, polarizing style that thrills his supporters alienates most Republicans. His campaign is now saying Mr. Trump will shift to giving more serious policy speeches to look more presidential, but the businessman has never shown he has the discipline to carry that out. Maybe this defeat will get his attention. CONTINUE AT SITE

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The Historic Betrayal of the Palestinians by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on April 5th, 2016

Why, throughout its history, have the Palestinians been the victims of so many irresponsible leaders who harm their own constituents?

Historically, the Palestinian “liberation organizations” have had no ideology or motivation beyond the destruction of the State of Israel. They are proxies of the countries funding them, instead of acting in the authentic national interests of the Palestinian people.

Instead of bringing jobs, water and better education — as they promise when they stand for election — some Arab Israeli legislators sell out their people for a few crumbs of headline attention. They parrot the Iranian line, with no regard for the needs of their voters. Iran just wants to get its foot in the door.

With the generous “help” of our Palestinian leaders — and especially with the “help” of the treacherous Europeans who keep on enabling them — any real help for the Palestinians, and the top of our mountain, look more distant than ever.

We Palestinians, as a new people on the stage of history, have not yet learned from the experience of those who preceded us. We always seem to be motivated by factors working against us, and let ourselves be manipulated by foreign countries who use us as proxies to further their own interests.

We are making mistakes again, one after another. We do damage to the Palestinian national interest and instead of propelling ourselves forward, we push ourselves back. We work against our own best interests by constantly lying. We all know, for instance, that there is no truth to the claim that Jesus was a Palestinian, or when we say that the Jews have no historic links to Jerusalem. We just make ourselves look ridiculous. Whoever makes such claims not only attacks Christianity but also represents the entire Palestinian narrative as a blatant lie.

The Palestinian leadership continues to destroy every chance the Palestinians might have of becoming a genuine, internationally recognized nation by insisting on demands they know the Israelis will never meet. These include the right of return for more than 11 million Palestinians to a country of eight million, and refusing to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. The Israelis correctly understand both demands not as a desire to have a Palestinian state, but as a desire to have Israel’s state. That impression can only be confirmed every time anyone looks at a map of Palestine: by pure coincidence, of course, it is identical to the map of Israel, only the names are different

In 1948, when we could easily have established a Palestinian state in the large territories offered by the UN, and instead joined with five Arab armies in an attempt to destroy Israel and erect Palestine in its place.

Between 1949 and 1967, we could have established a Palestinian state in the West Bank while it was still under Jordanian control, and in the Gaza Strip governed by Egypt.

During the 1970s, instead of thanking Jordan’s King Hussein for taking in Palestinian refugees, Yasser Arafat and the PLO tried to overthrow him. The result was a civil war and the expulsion of the Palestinian leadership from Jordan to Lebanon.

Once in Lebanon, we set about creating a terrorist state-within-a-state, bent on subverting Lebanese sovereignty and attacking Israel. The Israelis consequently entered south Lebanon, and with the support of the Shi’ites there, we were expelled once again, this time to Tunisia.

Under Palestinian influence, Tunisia then became a hotbed of crime and international conspiracies, again endangering our hosts.

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Comey, Clintons and Clemency The FBI director’s connections to Hillary. Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on April 5th, 2016

Hillary Clinton’s email problems, going back to her time as Secretary of State, have not drawn heavy coverage from the old-line establishment media. As the investigation nears its final stages, FBI director James Comey’s past dealings with the Clintons may prove of interest.

Detail on those dealings emerged in American Evita: Hillary Clinton’s Path to Power, a 2004 book by Christopher Andersen, a former contributing editor to Time magazine who has written for Life, the New York Times, and Vanity Fair. None could be described as conservative but Andersen is candid about Hillary’s political past.

Hillary’s friends Robert Treuhaft and wife Jessica Mitford were “avowed Stalinists” who opposed the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and remained committed to the Communist cause. American Evita charts Hillary’s admiration for Marxist theoretician Carl Oglesby and Rules for Radicals author Saul Alinsky, from whom Hillary learned that “the only way to make a real difference is to acquire power.”

After Bill Clinton left the White House, one staffer told Andersen, the entire focus was on “getting Hillary back in.” The road led through New York, where Hillary took aim at the Senate seat vacated by Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Hillary was not from New York and had never spent more than a few days there, so she needed creative ways to attract votes.

New Square, a Hasidic enclave 30 miles northwest of Manhattan, had voted as a bloc in previous elections and campaign workers urged Hillary urged to stop there. In New Square, four members of the Skver sect had been convicted in 1999 of bilking government aid programs for some $30 million. During her visit, Hillary denied that any pardon was discussed.

The day before the election, in a letter to New Square’s main synagogue, president Bill Clinton said he looked forward to visiting the village. As Andersen noted, New Square delivered Hillary’s biggest victory margin of any community in New York state, 1,359 votes to only 10 for her opponent Rick Lazio.

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The Religion of Colonialism Why you can’t “colonize” Palestine. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on April 5th, 2016

At Israeli Apartheid Week, campus haters claim to be fighting “colonialism” by fighting Jews. Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies, dedicated to a country that doesn’t exist and which has produced nothing worth studying except terrorism, features diatribes such as Abdul Rahim al-Shaikh’s Palestine Re-Covered: Reading a Settler Colonial Landscape”. This word salad is a toxic stew of historical revisionism being used to justify the Muslim settler colonization of the indigenous Jewish population.

Colonialism is CPS’ favorite word. When Israeli social workers remove abused children from Muslim homes, that’s colonialism. Israeli farms are a form of environmental “colonialism”. When non-profits aren’t representative enough, it’s the fault of the “Israeli settler-colonial regime.” If it rains on Thursday, it’s caused by “colonialism,” preferably of the “Israeli Zionist colonial settler regime” variety.

But you can’t colonize colonizers. The Muslim population in Israel is a foreign colonist population. The indigenous Jewish population can resettle its own country, but it can’t colonize it.

Not even if you accuse Jews of being a “super-double-secret settler colonial regime.”

Muslims invaded, conquered and settled Israel. They forced their language and laws on the population. That’s the definition of colonialism. You can’t colonize and then complain that you’re being colonized when the natives take back the power that you stole from them.

There are Muslims in Israel for the same reason that there are Muslims in India. They are the remnants of a Muslim colonial regime that displaced and oppressed the indigenous non-Muslim population.

There are no serious historical arguments to be made against any of this.

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U. Denver’s Nader Hashemi Shills for Muslim Brotherhood’s ‘Muslim Democracy’ Apologists for terrorist organizations take center stage. Andrew Harrod

Posted By on April 5th, 2016

“I can’t have a serious conversation with you about the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and violence because” this author’s question “is driven by a certain ideological agenda,” declared University of Denver Middle East studies professor Nader Hashemi. His dismissal typified the ideological blindness towards the MB of a March 17 presentation by the Islamist-aligned Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID) before about thirty-five at Washington, DC’s National Press Club.

Hashemi concurred with his fellow panelists that enactment of the recently introduced Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act will “pour oil on the raging fires that are consuming” the Middle East. Despite the act’s extensive catalogue of MB violent support for Islamic supremacy in numerous affiliates across the Middle East, he echoed the panel in rejecting an American terrorist designation for the MB’s founding Egyptian branch. He contrasted a supposedly moderate MB with extremist groups like the Islamic State in Iraq and (Greater) Syria (ISIS) and warned that when “moderate forms of political Islam are crushed and denied a public voice, radical Islam thrives.”

Citing Rachid Ghannouchi of Tunisia’s MB-affiliated, deceptively moderate-sounding Ennahda party, Hashemi stated that the “only way to defeat ISIS is to offer a better product to the millions of young people in the Muslim world . . . Muslim democracy.” He drew from the swift fall of Arab dictators in the “Arab Spring” the lesson that “dictatorial rule is fundamentally precarious” and suffers from an “absence of internal political legitimacy.” The “Arab Spring” validated for him President George W. Bush’s 2003 statement that “stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty,” notwithstanding his costly Iraqi regime change experiment in “Muslim democracy.”

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America Now Has an Official Language: Newspeak The Library of Congress falls victim to semantic tyranny. Michael Cutler

Posted By on April 5th, 2016

George Orwell’s political novel “1984” painted a disturbing but all too prophetic image of how a totalitarian government would come to rule its citizens with an iron fist. Language — that is to say, the deceptive use of language — was a critical element of the government and the dystopia it created that Orwell described.

In Orwell’s thriller, electronic surveillance conducted by the omnipresent “Big Brother” was a major factor, as was the development and implementation of a language, Newspeak, that was devised to control thought over time by eliminating words from the vernacular. When words were eliminated, thoughts and concepts those words represented would be eliminated.

Furthermore, terms to describe government agencies were often the opposite of what their respective missions were. The editing process of published material, especially by rewriting history books and employing propaganda, was the domain of the Ministry of Truth. The omnipresent Party understood that “who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

The contradictorily named, “Ministry of Love” tortured citizens to coerce their unflagging and uncompromising compliance with the dictates of the government.

The world in which the residents of 1984 resided was a world of deception and lies where “up” was “down” and “right” was “wrong.” In the words of the official slogan of the Ministry of Truth:

“War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.”

In 1984 the use of conflicting terms were designed to be disorienting and intimidating to better gain total control over the masses.

Let’s contrast the machinations of the government in 1984 with the precepts of the Founding Fathers of our nation.

The Founding Fathers understood that democracy could only exist when citizens were granted a series of freedoms — including the freedom to express their thoughts and concerns with virtual impunity and to meet with others to hold discussions about grievances about their government. Journalists and their mission to report on the facts was sacrosanct to the Founding Fathers. As evidenced by the fact that journalists are members of the only profession that is specifically protected by the U.S. Constitution, the Founding Fathers understood that the citizens of this nation must have unfettered access to the truth.

Consider the First Amendment of the Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Now let’s consider how far we have fallen in just a few short years.