Debts of the Ayatollah

Iran gets money that should be used to pay its terror victims.

The giveaways in President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal keep piling up. By handing $100 billion or more in frozen funds to Tehran, the deal would not only fill the coffers of Iranian terror proxies. It would also abandon American victims of terrorism waiting to collect tens of billions of dollars in compensation owed to them by Iran.

Over two decades U.S. federal courts have found the Iranian government liable for orchestrating or supporting the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers U.S. Air Force facility in Saudi Arabia, and multiple shootings and suicide bombings in Israel, among other attacks. Judges have awarded some $45 billion in damages to hundreds of plaintiffs such as Embassy bombing survivor Anne Dammarell and the widow and orphaned children of Hamas bombing victim Ira Weinstein.

Trump’s Defective Economics By Mary Anastasia O’Grady

The candidate is promoting currency devaluation—he should ask Argentina and Brazil how that worked out.
To hear Donald Trump tell it, China is run by a cabal of geniuses who outsmarted the U.S. last week by cutting the purchasing power of their fellow Chinese citizens with a devaluation of the yuan.

“They’re killing us. Now they’re going to take more jobs . . . I mean it’s ridiculous,” the presidential hopeful told Fox News the day after China let its currency slip a measly 2% against the dollar. The yuan subsequently lost another 1%.

Japan is also run by a band of Asian Einsteins, according to Mr. Trump. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe “is a great leader,” who is “cutting the hell out of their currency, cutting, cutting, cutting.” As a result, Mr. Trump explained, “they’re back. Japan is back.”

The fast-talking Wharton alumnus didn’t say what he would do as president when trading partners announce that their currencies are to be marked down in relation to the dollar. But he suggested that devaluation is making China and Japan wealthier and more competitive and the U.S. poorer. China does it, in his view, because “they have no fear of us.”

Number of Hillary Clinton’s emails flagged for classified data grows to 60 as review continues By John Solomon –

While media coverage has focused on a half-dozen of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s personal emails containing sensitive intelligence, the total number of her private emails identified by an ongoing State Department review as having contained classified data has ballooned to 60, officials told The Washington Times.

That figure is current through the end of July and is likely to grow as officials wade through a total of 30,000 work-related emails that passed through her personal email server, officials said. The process is expected to take months.

The 60 emails are among those that have been reviewed and cleared for release under the Freedom of Information Act as part of a open-records lawsuit. Some of the emails have multiple redactions for classified information.

Bernie Sanders urges in Iowa, New Hampshire as ‘fiery authenticity’ resonates By Ben Wolfgang –

To say Sen. Bernard Sanders has struck a chord with Democratic voters in Iowa and New Hampshire would be an understatement, and local party leaders in those key early primary states believe the Vermont senator and self-described socialist’s appeal is growing stronger each day.

Mr. Sanders, who is seeking the White House as a Democrat, has been drawing thousands to recent campaign rallies and has crafted a populist message that centers heavily on themes of income inequality and economic fairness. Political analysts say his pitch, strikingly similar to that of progressive hero Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, is exactly what the progressive wing of the Democratic Party wants to hear from a candidate.

How Obama gets it wrong No military option against Iran remains By Morton A. Klein and Daniel Mandel

Defending the Iran nuclear deal he negotiated in Vienna, Secretary of State John Kerry has repeatedly asserted something that has been much ignored in the discussion surrounding it — that all options which the United States possesses today to stop Iran going nuclear will be there for a future U.S. president in 10 years. Similarly, President Obama breezily assures us, “The same options that are available to me today will be available to any U.S. president in the future.”

Were it only true.

The major options available to the president in the face of an Iranian nuclear threat are covert (sabotage, cyberwarfare) and military (precision airstrikes with bunker-busting bombs). Mr. Obama has these at his disposal today. But his successor is unlikely to have them in 10 years.

DANIEL GREENFIELD: THE GHETTO JEWS AND ISRAEL

Zionism was never limited to physically living in Israel. Jews have always lived in Israel. Nor is it limited to Jewish self-government. The ghetto was also a form of Jewish self-government in which Jews oppressed other Jews in order to avoid upsetting the powers outside the ghetto.

An Israeli ghetto whose court Jew leaders are always pleading for mercy from the world while beating their own people to appease the masters outside the borders of the ghetto is worthless.It is worse than worthless. It is a perversion of what Israel was meant to be.

Zionism was the physical resettlement of the land and the spiritual transformation of the people. Neither is fully realizable without the other. A resettlement in which Jews retain the habits of their old condition only creates another ghetto and no meaningful internal transformation from dependence to independence is possible without a physical relocation to an independent nation.

But the Ghetto Jew has proven much more difficult to uproot from the psyche than all the stones and thorns of the land of Israel. The Ghetto Jew has been freed from the ghetto, but it still exists inside his head.

Annika Hernroth-Rothstein: All the President’s Lies

A few weeks ago, U.S. President Barack Obama went on The Daily Show to tell its viewers that “the people” supported the Iran nuclear deal and that one should not get silenced by “the money” and “the lobbyists” trying to convince them otherwise.

Despite these, and other strenuous efforts by the White House, thousands of people from across the political spectrum gathered in New York’s Times Square to protest the deal, calling upon Congress to undo the damage.

At this point, Obama sent Secretary of State John Kerry to make sure the message was received. Kerry went on CNN to say that if the deal was blocked by Congress, it would be because Congress had been influenced by the Israel lobby, alluding in not-so-subtle ways that anyone opposing a U.S.-Iran alliance was in the pocket of “Big Jew” and thereby corrupt and disloyal.

Sound familiar?

If it does, it is because this theme of dual loyalty has been around as long as Jews have existed. It has proven to be an effective method of intimidation, as it speaks to our history of living off the goodwill of our hosts throughout the Diaspora. Before the creation of the State of Israel, we relied on the kindness of strangers and neighbors for our safety and survival, always being just one recession or plague away from flight.

Richard Baehr: For Obama Winning is not Enough

The condemnations of U.S. President Barack Obama’s creepy, anti-Semitic characterizations of ‎opponents of the Iran nuclear deal have revealed that even supporters of the ‎president and the deal he is selling have been taken aback by the toxicity of the ‎president’s words and campaign. The president’s speech at American University, ‎where he delivered his latest defense of the Iran nuclear deal before departing for ‎another vacation, was artfully deconstructed by Dennis Prager. The president’s ‎arguments in this speech were wrong on almost every count. ‎

Despite the administration’s drumbeat, war is not the only option to the very poor ‎deal Secretary of State John Kerry brought home after conceding pretty much every major ‎negotiating point to his Iranian counterparts in order to give Obama ‎something to sign. In fact, with all the billions in funds to be released to Iran, war ‎initiated by Iran has become more likely as Iran steps up its support of terrorists ‎aiming at Israel and Sunni Arab nations, and others further afield. Certainly, a ‎military action by the United States against Iran has never been a real option in the ‎Obama years, whether before negotiations began, through the negotiation period, ‎and now after them, whether or not a deal had been concluded and whether or not ‎this deal is approved or rejected by Congress. Rejection of a deal by ‎Congress would in no way increase the likelihood that this president will be going ‎to war with Iran. That has been obvious all along to Iran, as they witnessed the ‎world’s most powerful nation, come to them begging like a hungry dog looking for ‎food, or at least approval. It was common sense for Iran to continually demand ‎more relief from sanctions, or inspections, knowing the American desperation for a ‎deal meant there was no stick to balance the carrot of concessions. We would ‎never walk away from the talks, and we would never hit their nuclear facilities.‎

Environmental Groups Provide Cover For EPA Incompetence That Caused Toxic Waste Spill: Michael Leahy

“Despite these long term environmental effects, the few environmental groups who are willing to even offer a comment on EPA’s involvement in this incident appear to be more interested in spinning the narrative to blame the mining companies, while largely absolving the true culprit in this incident—the EPA itself.”

The same environmental groups who called for severe penalties against companies and industry executives responsible for similar environmental catastrophes are singing a different tune now that the EPA has caused a toxic waste blowout into Colorado’s Animas River.

Breitbart asked three leading environmental groups – the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council [NRDC], and Earth Justice – to explain why they aren’t working to see EPA leaders punished in the same way they wanted private industry executives held responsible for similar spills.

Only the NRDC offered a response.

Earth Justice and several other environmental groups have made no public comment on the Animas River spill at all. In their public statements, neither the NRDC nor the Sierra Club pointed the finger at the EPA.

Turkey’s Multiple Wars by Burak Bekdil

At home, the AKP is fighting tens of millions of secular Turks, atheists, Kurds, Alevis, the PKK, the DHKP-C and the clandestine network of Gülenists. Not a small list.

In addition, Turkey does not have full ambassadorial-level diplomatic relations with Syria, Israel, Egypt, Libya and Yemen.

To avoid fighting multiple enemies at multiple fronts is an old military strategy. Particularly in the last five years, Turkey’s Islamist rulers have chosen to do the opposite.

First, they deliberately polarized the society along pious-secular Muslim lines in order to reinforce their conservative voter base. In 2013, they brutally suppressed millions of demonstrators who took to the streets to protest the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). They accused Israel and the West (including Western media, a German airline and even “intergalactic forces”) of masterminding the protests.