Daniel Greenfield, Author at Israel Rising

May 15, 2018

THOUSANDS OF GAZA HAMAS THUGS ATTACK ISRAEL FOR $100 A DAY

They attack for $100 a day. And Israeli soldiers fight them for $13 a day.

Hamas supporters in Gaza held the world’s first peaceful protest with hand grenades, pipe bombs, cleavers and guns. Ten explosive devices were peacefully detonated. There were outbursts of peaceful gunfire and over a dozen kites carrying firebombs were sent into Israel where they started 23 peaceful fires. And Israeli soldiers peacefully defended their country leaving multiple Hamas attackers at peace.

“We will tear down the border,” Hamas Prime Minister Yahya Sinwar had peacefully vowed. “And we will tear out their hearts from their bodies.”

But the only hearts his terror thugs tore out were already bleeding with sympathy for Islamic terrorists.

The Hamas mob chanted, “Allahu Akbar” and the genocidal racist threat of, “Khaybar Khaybar, ya yahud,” a reference to the primal Islamic massacre of the Jews. While IDF soldiers held back the invaders, the jets of the IAF targeted the snake’s head striking Hamas compounds and outposts. By 5.30 PM, the Hamas organizers changed course and began urging the thugs away from further fence attacks.

Hamas had offered $100 to every rioter. During previous violent assaults back in April, the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist group had been offering $200 to anyone shot by Israelis, $500 for severe injuries and $3,000 to the dead.

$100 a day may not seem like a lot, but the Israeli teen soldiers they’re trying to kill, earn $13 a day.

The Hamas supporting thugs are depicted as helpless, starving victims who can barely lift the firebombs they’re throwing at Israelis, but they make ten times as much as the Israeli soldiers they are there to kill.

Hamas can write all those checks to its aspiring killers because the cash is coming from Iran.

Last year, Senwar, whom Israel had released in exchange for captured Israeli hostage Gilad Shalit, had boasted that Iran was once again “the largest backer financially and militarily”.

That comes out to an estimated $100 million a year.

With as many as 50,000 Hamas supporters in Gaza participating in the day’s attacks at $100 a head, over 1,000 allegedly injured at least $200 each, and another 52 allegedly killed at $3,000 each (there is no reason to treat Hamas casualty figures coming out of Gaza as anything other than propaganda), the whole thing cost Hamas and Iran $5.3 million. The unmarked cargo plane filled with foreign currency that Obama dispatched to Iran carried $400 million. That was part of a known $1.7 billion cash payment.

But the total Obama terror payments to Tehran may go as high as $33.6 billion.

Despite media misreporting, the Hamas mass fence attacks began back on March 30 and even though their Great March of Return was supposed to end in mid-May, the show proved to be unexpectedly popular in Tehran, Brussels and Berkeley, and the attacks will continue through at least June.

Even a single one of Obama’s cash smuggling runs to Iran is enough to fund attacks just like these for two and a half months. And the $100,000 that an Iranian group offered to anyone who blows up the embassy? That illegal cash run can pay for bounties on every American diplomatic facility in the world.

Lefties bemoaning Israel’s moral authority can look up and follow the money trail from Iran’s IRGC (the terror mothership whom Obama resisted sanctioning), to the unmarked cargo planes from Obama, and to their own greasy little fingers that pushed the button or marked the ballot for him. The Israeli teens in IDF khaki with rules of engagement for using force longer than some graduate thesis papers are dealing with a problem from hell created by Democrat voters who wanted to feel inspired by Obama.

The cost of that inspiration today ran to dozens dead. If the Israeli teens shooting in self-defense lack moral authority, where is the moral authority of the Obama voters whose votes financed the attack?

Those Israeli teens in green earn $408 a month if they’re in a combat unit. Before a raise a few years ago, they weren’t even earning $300. Support units earn $327 and rear units $225. Not only is that far lower than the average civilian salary, but if often hardly covers living expenses. Dodging the draft isn’t hard these days. The average red-shirted hipster does it easily, putting in a few years at a fake startup before heading to Berlin to protest Zionism. And those who serve know if that they make a single mistake, if they shoot an attacker who turns out not to be armed, Israeli leftists will see them jailed.

Hamas supporters charge at them for $100 a day. And IDF soldiers hold the line for $400 a month.

So why for $400 a month, do Israeli soldiers face down mobs of tens of thousands of Hamas supporters baying for their blood? The average IDF soldier who reports for duty comes from one of the Judean communities (slurred as settlements) under attack by Hamas or from development towns in the north under attack by Hezbollah. He is often a religious settler who sees the hand of G-d in the high hills or a descendant of Mizrahi immigrants whose recent ancestors were oppressed under Muslim rule.

When your family lives under fire, holding the line on the Hamas mob isn’t an abstract idea of duty.

The Hamas invaders were there to kill Israelis. The Israeli soldiers were there to protect Israelis. The attackers were invading someone else’s land while the defenders were protecting their own country.

That’s why Hamas has to pay its rioting thugs ten times as much as Israeli soldiers earn to attack them.

While the $100 a day thugs threw rocks and firebombs, the professional terrorists hung back waiting for a breach in the fence. Some were caught planting bombs. And killed. They are among the 10 known Hamas terrorists killed in the Gaza fighting and bemoaned by the media as victims of a Jewish massacre.

The $400 a month Israeli teenager with a rifle is there as the front line in case the fence is breached. Hamas wants to take more hostages to free more terrorists. If it can’t do that, it will kill them. And if the attackers make it past the soldiers, they will hit Israeli towns and villages hoping to kill anyone they find.

While the fence holds up, the Hamas terrorists and their supporters sent flaming kites in the hopes of setting Israeli farms and fields on fire. One such attack had already destroyed 400 acres of wheat.

A sympathetic New York Times piece from last week described the “flaming-kite squadrons” prepping hundreds of fire kites, but unfortunately, “The wind was blowing the other way.”

“The wind is still against us,” Ismail al-Qrinawi whined. “We are waiting for it to pick up so we can fly tens of kites and burn their crops.” Instead, “the direction of the wind not only thwarted the kites, but also blew copious amounts of Israeli tear gas toward the protesters.”

Pharaoh and his legions had the same bad experience with the wind. G-d must be an Islamophobe.

Hamas organized the invasion. It urged its human shields to head to the fence telling them that the Israelis had run away. That was the same way Egypt’s Nasser had tricked Jordan’s King Hussein during the Six Day War. Instead of defeating the Israelis and salvaging Gaza, Nasser’s scheme led to the liberation of Jerusalem, along with Judea and Samaria by the indigenous Jewish people. And it also had disastrous consequences for this latest attempted invasion by Egyptian-Jordanian settlers into Israel.

While the Hamas supporters were destroying their own crossing point infrastructure, as they had previously trashed their own gas lines, the United States was inaugurating the opening of an embassy in Jerusalem. Despite media misinformation, the riots predated the embassy and will postdate it.

The media used contrasting photos of the embassy opening and the Pallywood fake photos of protesters crying for the cameras and pretending to limp on crutches to smear Israel and America. And as usual they missed the real story. While Israelis and Americans were building something, Muslim terrorists were destroying everything they could get their hands on. While Rabbis and Pastors blessed, Imams cursed.

Hamas Sheikh Iyad Abu Funun had sworn on the Koran that, “We will not leave a single Jew on our Islamic land.” It did not matter, “whether left-Wing, right-wing, secular, religious, or extremist.”

That is what this is about.

The dedication of the embassy is a leap of faith. Faith in building rather than destruction. Faith in life instead of death. Faith in the G-d who watches over Jerusalem, not the Allah for whom Gaza burns.

Originally Published in FrontPageMag.

April 24, 2018April 24, 2018

TRUMP’S ART OF THE DEAL IN NORTH KOREA, ISRAEL AND SYRIA

Understanding Trump’s America First foreign policy.

It’s really not that complicated.

But President Trump’s Syria strikes have reopened the debate over what defines his foreign policy. Is he an interventionist or an isolationist? Foreign policy experts claim that he’s making it up as he goes along.

But they’re not paying attention.

President Trump’s foreign policy has two consistent elements. From threatening Kim Jong-Un on Twitter to moving the embassy to Jerusalem to bombing Syria, he applies pressure and then he disengages.

Here’s how that works.

First, Trump pressures the most intransigent and hostile side in the conflict. Second, he divests the United States from the conflict leaving the relevant parties to find a way to work it out.

North Korea had spent decades using its nuclear program to bully its neighbors and the United States. Previous administrations had given the Communist dictatorship $1.3 billion in aid to keep it from developing its nuclear program. These bribes failed because they incentivized the nuclear program.

Nukes are the only thing keeping North Korea from being just another failed Communist dictatorship.

Instead, Trump called North Korea’s bluff. He ignored all the diplomatic advice and ridiculed its regime. He made it clear that the United States was not afraid of North Korean nukes. The experts shrieked. They warned that Kim Jong-Un wouldn’t take this Twitter abuse and we would be in for a nuclear war.

But the Norks folded.

The Communist regime held high level talks with the United States and South Korea. It’s reportedly planning to announce an official end to the war. That probably won’t amount to much in the long term, but it shifts more of the responsibility for the conflict away from the United States and to the Koreas.

Trump accomplished more with a few tweets than previous administrations had with billions of dollars.

An instinctive negotiator, Trump’s realpolitik genius lay not in ideology, but in grasping the core negotiating strategy of the enemy and then negating it by taking away its reason not to make a deal.

When Trump called North Korea’s bluff, its nuclear weapons program was transformed from an asset that it used to blackmail aid from its potential targets into a liability that could end with its destruction.

Trump did the same thing with Jerusalem.

The PLO had refused to make a deal with Israel because its constant refusals to negotiate allowed it to keep escalating its demands. The more it sabotaged negotiations, the better the offers became.

The PLO’s Palestinian Authority didn’t have nukes, but its weapon of choice was terrorism. And it had played the same game as North Korea for decades. It would begin negotiations, demand payoffs, then sabotage negotiations, threaten violence, and demand an even higher payoff for ending the violence.

The PLO/PA knew that it could get the best possible deal by not making a deal.

Just like North Korea, Trump cut the PLO down to size by negating its negotiating strategy. Instead of the deal getting better and better, Trump showed that it would get worse by taking Jerusalem off the table.

Previous administrations had rewarded the PLO/PA for its refusal to make a deal by sweetening the pot. Instead Trump threatened to take away Jerusalem, the biggest prize in the pot. And then he warned that the PLO would lose even more of its demands if the terrorist group continued to refuse to make a deal.

Unlike Clinton, Bush and Obama, Trump did not overcompensate for the US-Israel relationship by pressuring the Jewish State to make a deal with the PLO so as to seem like an “honest broker”. Instead he leveraged that relationship to move the United States away from the conflict.

Moving the embassy to Jerusalem sends the signal that the US-Israel relationship doesn’t depend on a deal with the PLO. That’s the opposite of the messages that Clinton, Bush and Obama had sent.

Their old failed diplomacy that made the US-Israel relationship dependent on a deal with the PLO had given the terrorists control over our foreign policy. The US and Israel were perversely forced into appeasing the terrorists of the PLO just to be able to maintain a relationship with each other.

Trump kicked the PLO out of the driver’s seat. And the terrorist group is becoming isolated.

Saudi Arabia and its allies are much more focused on Iran than the old proxy war against Israel. And, for the moment, that leaves the PLO with few allies. If it doesn’t make a deal, then the United States will rebuild its relationship with Israel around regional security issues. And the Saudis have signaled that they are willing to do the same thing. Then everyone else exits the conflict except Israel and the PLO.

Trump left it to the South Koreans to decide the conflict with North Korea. Ditto for Israel.

The United States will put forward proposals, but the long game is to get America out these conflicts. And Trump does that by turning the United States from an eager mediator to a bully with a big stick.

He made it clear to Kim Jong-Un that he would have a much easier time negotiating with South Korea than with America. And he’s made it equally clear to the PLO that it’s better off turning to Israel than to its allies in the State Department. The message is, “You don’t want to get the United States involved.”

Previous administrations believed that the United States had an integral role in resolving every conflict. President Trump’s America First policy seeks to limit our involvement in foreign conflicts without robbing us of our influence by making those interventions as decisive and abrasive as possible.

It breaks every rule of contemporary diplomacy. But it has plenty of historical precedents. And it works.

President Trump wants to get out of Syria. But he doesn’t want to hand Iran another win. And he doesn’t want to get the United States bogged down in another disastrous regional conflict.

So, just like in North Korea and Israel, he sent a decisive message of strength.

The strikes were a reminder that unlike his predecessor, he was not afraid of using force. But just as in North Korea and Israel, the show of strength was only a lever for disengaging from the conflict.

Instead, Trump wants to bring in an “Arab force” to stabilize parts of Syria. That would checkmate Iran, split Syria between the Shiites and Sunnis, and ‘Arabize’ the conflict while getting America out of it.

The threat of more strikes would give an Arab force credibility without an actual American commitment.

And the threat of a Sunni Arab force is meant to pressure Assad into making a deal that would limit Iran’s influence over Syria. If Assad wants to restore complete control over Syria, he’ll have to make a deal with the Sunnis inside or outside his country. And that will limit Iran’s influence and power in Syria.

The debates over chemical attacks were never the real issue. Keeping weapons like that out of the hands of terror-linked states like Syria is good policy. But there was a much bigger picture.

Iran took advantage of the Obama era to expand its power and influence. Trump wants to roll back Iranian expansionism while limiting American exposure to the conflict. Once again he’s using a show of strength to mobilize the local players into addressing the problem while keeping his future plans vague.

Assad’s biggest reason for refusing to make a deal was that Iran’s backing made his victory inevitable. Iran and Hezbollah had paid a high price for winning in Syria. But they were unquestionably winning. The only thing that could change that is direct American intervention. And Trump wants Assad to fear it.

Trump is offering Assad the rule of his country. But to get it, he has to dump his biggest partner.

When Trump came into office, the two bad options were arming the Sunni Jihadis or letting Iran’s Shiite Jihadis win. Instead Trump has come up with a third option. Either keep the war going or force a deal.

Either the conflict will drag on, but with minimal American involvement. Or Assad will sell out Iran.

None of these are ideal options. But there are no good options. Not in North Korea, Israel or Syria. The Norks and the PLO aren’t likely to reform. Syria, like Iraq, will stay divided between feuding Islamic sects. None of these problems will go away at the negotiating table. And Trump understands that.

Trump is too much of a dealmaker to believe in the unlimited promise of diplomatic agreements. He knows that it takes leverage not just to make a deal, but to keep it in place. And he doesn’t believe that the United States can make a deal work when a key player really doesn’t want the deal to happen.

Trump’s Art of the International Deal identifies the roadblocks to previous agreements, breaks them down, puts the local players in the driver’s seat and then makes fixing the problem into their problem.

Obama’s people dubbed his failed diplomacy, “Smart Power”. Call Trump’s diplomacy, “Deal Power.”

Originally Published in FrontPageMag.

April 10, 2018

THREE WAYS OBAMA CAUSED THE SYRIAN DISASTER

The Radical-in-Chief didn’t just support one monster. He backed two.

Obama owns the disaster in Syria in a way that no one else does. Three of his policies intersected to cause the bloodshed, devastation and horrors there.

The Iraq Withdrawal
The Arab Spring
The Iran Deal

Obama’s Iraq withdrawal turned the country over to Iran and ISIS. The tensions between the Shiite puppet regime in Baghdad (which Obama insisted on backing) and the Sunni population created a cycle of violence that reduced the country to a bloody civil war between Shiite militias and Al Qaeda in Iraq.

The collapse of the multicultural Iraqi army allowed Al Qaeda in Iraq to seize huge swathes of territory. And ISIS and Iran began carving up Iraq into their own ethnically cleansed dominions.

Then his Arab Spring empowered the Muslim Brotherhood’s Sunni forces to seize power in countries around the region. Unlike Egypt and Tunisia, whose governments fell under White House pressure, and Libya, which Obama bombed and invaded, the Iranians and Russians didn’t cut their Syrian allies loose.

Iraq’s civil war spread to Syria. Initially Obama backed the Sunni Brotherhood militias. These groups represented themselves as free, secular and democratic. They were actually nothing of the kind. But as Libya and Yemen turned into disasters, and the Syrian militias clamored for direct military intervention, Obama instead turned to Iran. The Sunni Islamists hadn’t worked out so he cut a deal with the Shiites.

Obama’s new deal with Iran was sealed with a fortune in illegal foreign currency shipments flown in on unmarked cargo planes, a virtual blank check for Iran’s nuclear program, the collapse of sanctions and the withdrawal of support for the Sunni militias in Syria. And that gave Iran a free hand in Syria.

If you want to understand why Syria is a disaster area, these are the three reasons.

Obama empowered ISIS and Iran next door to Syria. Then he empowered Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda militias in Syria. And then he finally empowered Iran, Assad and Russia in Syria.

If he had set out to cause as much death and devastation as possible in Syria, he couldn’t have done any more damage without dropping nuclear bombs or his campaign propaganda on its major cities.

Every major terror player in Syria was empowered by Obama’s terrible decisions.

ISIS and Iranian expansionism grew in the vacuum his policies had created. He backed the Brotherhood and Al Qaeda militias with training, political support and weapons shipments. And then he decided to create another vacuum that would allow Iran to overrun the region to do the work he didn’t want to do.

Syria is just the culmination of a series of bad decisions guided by a single disastrous philosophy.

Obama’s foreign policy was a leftist response to 9/11 and the Iraq War. Its central premise was that Islamic terrorism was our fault. Islamic terrorists had attacked us because of our support for the governments in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. This idea was implicitly expressed in his Iraq War speech.

“Let’s fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality, and mismanaging their economies so that their youth grow up without education, without prospects, without hope, the ready recruits of terrorist cells,” he had declared.

The solution was withdrawing from Iraq. And withdrawing political support from our allies.

The Islamic terrorists would run for office, win elections and then stop being terrorists. Or at least they would limit their terrorism to domestic and regional violence. There would be no more justification for our “imperialist” military interventions in the region. That was Obama’s “smart power” foreign policy.

Instead it all went badly wrong.

The alliance between the Muslim Brotherhood, Qatar and the Obama regime toppled friendly governments and replaced them with terror states across the Middle East. But popular uprisings against Islamist rule in Tunisia and Egypt forced out Obama allies: Mohammed Morsi and Rashid Ghannouchi. Obama’s illegal invasion of Libya led to everything from the return of slave markets to ISIS cities. Libya’s Brotherhood allied with Al Qaeda influenced terror militias leading to the Benghazi attack.

Obama’s other worst Arab Spring disasters happened in Syria and Yemen. Iran used the Brotherhood bids for power as an opening. The fighting between Shiite and Sunni Jihadists devastated both countries. Obama wanted the Muslim Brotherhood to win, but he didn’t want to keep invading countries to do it.

The Muslim Brotherhood couldn’t take power or hold on to it without military support. Hillary Clinton had talked Obama into invading Libya. But he didn’t want any more wars. Especially after Libya.

When some of his advisers urged him to intervene more strongly in Syria, he wavered.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner, who vacationed all over the world, couldn’t actually find anyone except the French to actually support action in Syria. And he was too used to leading from behind to take the lead. The red line had been broken. He slowly crawled all the way up to action. And then ran away while pathetically blaming the British for his own cowardice, double-dealing and broken promises.

The former UK PM would reportedly describe Obama as, one of the “most narcissistic, self-absorbed people”.

Obama avoided the war by humiliating his own Secretary of State and colluding with the Russians. He dodged having to deliver on his red line by agreeing to pretend that Syria had destroyed its WMDs.

Triumphant press releases and media accounts claimed that all the chemical weapons were gone.

This fake deal would serve as a precedent for another fake deal to stop Iran’s own WMD program. Both deals were equally worthless and were backed by the experts and reporters who are now demanding action all over again against the Syrian WMDs that, if you listened to them, weren’t supposed to exist.

“The credible threat of force brought about an opening for diplomacy, to come in, which then led to something that no one thought was possible,” Derek Chollet, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, said.

There was no credible threat of force. And there was a reason no one thought that it was possible.

It wasn’t.

The Russians and Iranians had played Obama. And they would go on playing him. But Obama wanted to be played. He wanted to save face by handing over his disaster to the Russians and Iran.

He wanted to implement regime change in the Middle East. But he didn’t want to get his hands dirty.

It all began with his backing for Sunni Islamist takeovers. Then he switched to backing Shiite Islamists.

As Hillary once said, “What difference does it make?” Except to the dying and the dead.

We support monsters.

That is the familiar leftist critique of American foreign policy during the Cold War. The same radicals who supported the racist Sandinistas, who chanted, “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win” at their anti-war rallies, and wore red Che t-shirts, claimed that we wrongly supported anti-Communist dictators.

But the left is always twice as guilty of its own accusations.

In Syria, Obama didn’t just support one monster. He backed two. The bloodshed in Syria is entirely a product of the decisions that he made. But he wasn’t satisfied with supporting just one bunch of genocidal Islamic fanatics in a holy war. In one of the most extraordinary crimes, he backed both.

And he closed his eyes and allowed a third, ISIS, to rise.

Obama wanted to overthrow the dictators who were our allies. And he turned to the Brotherhood to do the job. When the Brotherhood couldn’t stand up to Iran or ISIS, he turned to Iran. He violated the law numerous times, providing weapons to Sunni Jihadists and cash to Shiite Jihadists, launching one illegal war and threatening to launch another, and it all ended in a miserable disaster that he ran away from.

The blood of 500,000 people is on his hands.

Originally Published in FrontPageMag.

March 13, 2018

FORGET RUSSIA, WHAT ABOUT QATAR?

Is Mueller colluding with the Muslim Brotherhood’s 9/11 backers?

There hasn’t been a sudden explosion of paranoia and fear about Russia like this since Sputnik.

In the ‘12 election debates, Obama had breezily dismissed Romney’s suggestion that Russia was the leading geopolitical threat. “You said Russia. Not al Qaeda. You said Russia,” he sneered. “And the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back, because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”

Obama was nearly right.

Russia is a serious geopolitical threat, but despite Putin’s imperial ambitions and the malicious actions of a regime run by former KGB operatives, it falls far behind the threat posed by the People’s Republic of China. The Cold War is over and Russia lost. That may be of small comfort to Ukraine or Georgia, and the other former subject nations of the Soviet Union that it threatens, but it’s no real threat to us.

China isn’t our leading geopolitical foe either.

Obama mentioned Al Qaeda in his attack on Romney. The Islamic terrorist group was already largely irrelevant. But the terror kingdom behind it is more dangerously relevant than ever.

According to the intelligence community, Abdullah bin Khalid al-Thani, a member of the Qatari royal family, its former interior minister and minister of Islamic affairs, was an Al Qaeda sympathizer who had harbored Khalid Sheikh Muhammad. When the FBI arrived in Qatar to arrest him, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks was transported away on a special Qatari government jet with blacked out windows.

And there have been suspicions over the years that Qataris played a larger role in 9/11.

But Qatar these days is far more of a threat than it was on 9/11. Its close ties to terror have made it a pariah nation in the region even as its support for Islamic theocracy crosses all factional lines.

It’s the main patron of the Muslim Brotherhood, an international Jihadist network, and has close ties to Iran. It spreads terrorist propaganda through Al Jazeera while subverting friendly governments. It seeks to influence American policy through think tanks like Brookings while spying on Americans.

Russia’s backing for the Shiite axis in Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen has been destabilizing, but not nearly as destabilizing as Qatar’s backing for the Islamist militias that wrecked Syria, Yemen, Libya, Egypt and much of the region. Qatar’s Iranian allies may be the final winners of the Arab Spring’s humanitarian catastrophe, but it was Qatari propaganda and weapons that kickstarted the region’s unholy wars.

While Qatar’s Al Jazeera terror network undermined governments, the terror kingdom shipped massive amounts of weapons to its Islamic terrorist allies. The Obama administration colluded with Qatar’s arms shipments to terrorists by instructing NATO forces not to interdict these shipments which later ended up in the hands of Jihadists in Libya and Mali. Qatar bought weapons from the genocidal Muslim Brotherhood regime in Sudan, whose leader is wanted by the ICC for crimes against humanity, and shipped them to Jihadists in Syria through the terror state of Turkey.

Secretary of State John Kerry even winked at Qatar’s funding of Hamas, another genocidal Muslim Brotherhood regime. This is the sort of serious collusion that we should be discussing.

But while Qatar funds terrorists, its massive propaganda operation also attempts to influence Americans. The terror kingdom acquired Current TV from Al Gore for $500 million. But the terror network failed to attract viewers. Al Jazeera America was sued for fraud by Gore, and its female and Jewish employees began coming forward with accusations of sexism and anti-Semitism.

But while Al Jazeera America failed, Al Jazeera remains the world’s most influential hostile state propaganda service, far more so than Russia’s RT. And it hasn’t given up on influencing Americans.

Al Jazeera recently boasted of having sent in an operative to secretly record pro-Israel activists. The terror network dispatched letters to pro-Israel groups and it’s believed by some that their existence is being used to pressure figures in the Jewish community into playing along with Qatar’s public relations effort. If Russia were similarly spying on and blackmailing Americans, there would be outrage.

Unfortunately, Qatar has burrowed deeply into the media and the political infrastructure of the left.

Al Jazeera is not the only vector for Qatari propaganda. The Brookings Institution, one of the most influential think tanks in the country, is subservient to Qatar. “[T]there was a no-go zone when it came to criticizing the Qatari government,” a Brookings Doha Center fellow revealed.

And then there’s The Intercept. The pro-terror site funded by a Persian billionaire has become notorious for its distribution of Qatari propaganda. The site, whose leading figure is Hamas apologist Glenn Greenwald, is a perfect forum for publishing smears, innuendo and even hacked documents. The Intercept frequently features attacks on the UAE, a Qatari rival, and Americans friendly to it, such as Jared Kushner, so that its contents appears to curiously echo those of Qatar’s PR and Al Jazeera.

Qatar’s influence operations took an ominous turn when Elliott Broidy, a top Trump donor, had his emails hacked by individuals he alleges were Qatari agents. The leaked emails play into Qatar’s conflict with the UAE. The emails have predictably popped up on Al Jazeera and Broidy had previously been targeted by The Intercept for a panel at which Steve Bannon had criticized Qatar.

“We have reason to believe this hack was sponsored and carried out by registered and unregistered agents of Qatar seeking to punish Mr Broidy for his strong opposition to state-sponsored terrorism,” Broidy’s spokesman said.

These two incidents of alleged Qatari espionage against Americans in order to influence our foreign policy raise serious questions. Yet the same media that obsessively searches for Russian bots on Reddit and Facebook seems entirely disinterested in discussing the subject. Skeptics of Russian influence have been told to put country ahead of party, but when will the left finally put country ahead of Qatar?

Perversely, instead of investigating the role of Qatar in influencing American elections, Mueller is reportedly taking the Qatari propaganda at face value and directing his investigation accordingly.

President Trump has been critical of Qatar. If Mueller uses Qatari opposition research to undermine a sitting president on behalf of a terror state, he will actually doing what Trump has been accused of.

Mueller had been accused of covering for the Muslim Brotherhood’s activities in America before. But now he risks being guilty of colluding with the Brotherhood’s Qatari backers to bring down an anti-Qatari president for the terror state that shielded the mastermind of the September 11 attacks.

There could be no greater act of treason than that.

Qatar’s domestic influence operation is far deeper and more dangerous than anything waged by Russia. Al Jazeera is infinitely more sophisticated than RT. The influence enjoyed by Qatar through Brookings has no Russian parallel. Its narrative on Yemen, Libya, Gaza, Burma and Egypt is the only story you will see in the media. The media in the United States hardly ever runs stories critical of Qatar anymore.

But if the latest allegations are true, Qatar’s terror backing and fake news operations have been supplemented by a domestic spying and blackmail operation against Americans.

And that cannot be tolerated.

Qatar is tiny compared to Russia. It’s a slave state of 200,000 masters and large numbers of foreign workers, many of them worked to death and treated little better than slaves. But yet it’s enormously wealthy and beneath its façade of moderation, it seeks to export Islamic supremacism around the world.

When we talk about Al Qaeda or Hamas, when you hear about the Arab Spring or the civil war in Yemen, when mention is made of the illegal invasion of Libya, the fighting in Syria, the real topic is Qatar.

Americans who collude with Russia should be held accountable. So should those who collude with Qatar.

And often they are one and the same.

Qatar, like Russia, is an ally of Iran. Like Russia, it arms and trains Islamic terror groups, seeks to undermine America, Israel and the West, and represents a major geopolitical threat.

Islamic terrorism is our leading geopolitical enemy. Its distribution and diversity makes it more difficult to pin down than the linkage between Communism and the Soviet Union. But the closest thing to the USSR of Islamic terror today is Qatar. When Democrats demand to know what Republicans are ready to do about Russia, Republicans should ask them what they are willing to do about Qatar?

Originally published on FrontPageMag.

March 12, 2018

THE LEFT’S FAKE ANTI-SEMITISM AND ITS REAL ANTI-SEMITISM

Fake outrage and real crimes.

After weeks of outrage at the close ties between top Democrats and Louis Farrakhan, the leader of an anti-Semitic hate group, the media finally condemned anti-Semitism by a top political official.

President Trump and OMB Director Mick Mulvaney had referred to outgoing NEC Director Gary Cohn as a “globalist.” And “globalist,” according to Think Progress, the Huffington Post, Salon and Vox, is an “anti-Semitic slur.” Those are the same media outlets that had no problem using “globalist” as a slur when targeting Trump. HuffPo had published a piece tarring him as “Trump: The Globalist Plutocrat” and Vox had described Trump going to Davos, “the world’s biggest party for globalist elites.”

Both Trump and Mulvaney were praising Cohn and minimizing a globalist-nationalist split. That’s why President Trump said, “He may be a globalist, but I still like him. He’s seriously globalist, there’s no question, but you know what, in his own way he’s also a nationalist because he loves our country.”

And why Mulvaney wrote that, “I never expected that the coworker I would work closest, and best, with at the White House would be a “globalist.” Gary Cohn is one of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with. Having the chance to collaborate with him will remain one of the highlights of my career in public service.”

Can’t you just spot the “anti-Semitic dogwhistles”?

There are some in the alt-right who use “globalist” as an anti-Semitic slur, just as there were those on the left who used neo-conservative as an anti-Semitic slur. But that’s not what those terms mean.

When Stephen Miller, a Jewish Trump adviser, told CNN’s Jim Acosta, a Cuban-American, that he was suffering from a “cosmopolitan bias,” Politico accused Miller of using an “anti-Semitic dog whistle.” While “cosmopolitan” was an anti-Semitic euphemism in the USSR, Miller isn’t a Russian Communist, he’s a Jewish conservative.

But a congressional Democrat recently did use an anti-Semitic dogwhistle.

Rep. Danny Davis defended his ties to Farrakhan, the anti-Semitic leader of the Nation of Islam, by arguing, “The world is so much bigger than Farrakhan and the Jewish question and his position on that.”

About the only people who think there’s a “Jewish question” these days are anti-Semites. When Hitler and Marx weighed in on the Jewish question, it was to denounce the Jews. Unlike “globalist,” when the term is used by the alt-right today, (shortened to JQ), its meaning is unambiguously hostile.

But the national media chose to ignore Rep. Davis’ remarks. It embargoed the story, just as it embargoed the recent release of a photo of Obama and Farrakhan and the controversy over Women’s March leaders’ ties to Farrakhan. And Farrakhan, who once praised Hitler, has been venting a stream of anti-Semitic invective at the “Satanic” Jews because he knows that the national media won’t touch him.

The controversy over Obama, Davis, Keith Ellison, Linda Sarsour and Tamika Mallory has played out in the Jewish and conservative media. But no one in the mainstream media is willing to ask why Obama, the No. 2 man at the DNC, the Congressional Black Caucus and the next generation of intersectional feminist leaders are comfortable hanging out with a racist who suggested that Jews use pot to make black men gay. But the media will only discuss anti-Semitism is when it serves its political agenda.

ThinkProgress had the chutzpah to accuse President Trump of using an “anti-Semitic dogwhistle” when the lefty advocacy site had been forced to clean house over actual anti-Semitic dog whistles. The uproar over the use of “Israel firsters” by the site led its editor-in-chief to denounce the “terrible, anti-Semitic language”. But Salon, which also denounced Trump’s “globalist” remark, had published pieces defending TP’s anti-Semitic language while smearing the lefty group’s Jewish critics. Some of the same culprits are now targeting Bari Weiss at the New York Times for her willingness to call out anti-Semitism on the left.

But while its personnel were using anti-Semitic dog whistles, TP accused Sarah Palin of using an “anti-Semitic term” when she defended herself against false accusations of being responsible for the Arizona shooting by accusing the media of a “blood libel”. The accusation that Palin was being anti-Semitic made as much sense as Politico suggesting that Stephen Miller was using Soviet anti-Semitic slurs against CNN.

But the left is happy to invent fake anti-Semitism while refusing to address its own real anti-Semitism.

It will pretend that Mulvaney, Trump and Miller are using anti-Semitic language, but it won’t speak up when a member of the Congressional Black Caucus talks about a Hitler-lover and the “Jewish question”.

The left doesn’t just use anti-Semitism as a political weapon while refusing to renounce it. It will even deploy accusations of anti-Semitism as a political weapon in support of anti-Semites like George Soros.

The same media outlets that won’t talk about the genocidal threats by Iran’s regime and by its terror proxies in Gaza, have been accusing the critics of Soros, a billionaire lefty donor, of anti-Semitism. Soros, a former Nazi collaborator, had called his wartime activities “the most exciting time of my life.”

Soros described growing up in a “Jewish, anti-Semitic home” with a mother whom he called, a “typical Jewish anti-Semite” who hated his first wife because she was “too Jewish.”

After he compared Israeli Jews to Nazis at an event honoring a Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel had declared, “I heard what happened. If I’d been there—and you can quote me—I would have walked out.” That same year, Soros had blamed the Jewish State for a “resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe”.

And Soros’ J Street, an anti-Israel group, is still mulling whether to stop endorsing Rep. Danny Davis. That’s their version of the Jewish Question. How much anti-Semitism by a progressive ally is too much?

The left treats anti-Semitism as another identity politics counter to be tossed in whenever convenient. It wants to be racist while accusing Republicans of racism. It wants to assault women while accusing Republicans of sexism. And it wants to be anti-Semitic while accusing Republicans of anti-Semitism.

Even while it appropriates anti-Semitism, treating it like another microaggression, triggered by terms like “globalist”, “cosmopolitan” or “blood libel” that have some anti-Semitic associations, but not in the context where they are presently being used, the left ignores what anti-Semitism actually is.

Anti-Semitism is not just another of the many intersectional expressions of bigotry as the left sees it. That misguided view of anti-Semitism makes it too easy to dismiss it as part of a bundle of attitudes that progressives don’t share. Emphasizing “globalist” and “cosmopolitan” appropriates anti-Semitism and reduces it to the worldview of people who don’t think about the planet the way that progressives do.

But anti-Semitism is ubiquitous. It’s not just a general phenomenon, but a specific one. It can pop up in any political worldview. It’s a black hole that curves ideologies and religions around its event horizon.

Appropriating anti-Semitism as a partisan political weapon lends cover to internal anti-Semitism within a political movement by externalizing it. The media can spot anti-Semitism in a random Trump quip, but not in the affinity of a former president, the second-in-command at the DNC and numerous members of Congress for Louis Farrakhan, a racist who praised Hitler and accuses Jews of running the country.

When Islamic terrorists kill Jews, when campus BDS thugs intimidate Jewish students, when their own party pals around with an anti-Semitic racist, they’re nowhere to be found. The left traffics in classic anti-Semitic stereotypes, supports rabid bigots and aids anti-Semitic regimes, but the moment they hear a whistle from the other side of the fence, they come barking as loudly as they can.

It’s bad enough that the left aids anti-Semitism from Berkeley to Tehran. It’s even worse when it appropriates anti-Semitism as a political weapon even while it remains an anti-Semitic movement.

Originally published in FrontPageMag.