Author: Daniel Greenfield

Daniel Greenfield is a journalist and conservative blogger who is critical of Islam. He was born in Israel and today lives in New York City. Today he posts at his blog Sultan Knish, FrontPage Magazine, Israel National News and is a Shillman Journalist Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
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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.

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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. 

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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.

  1. The Iraq Withdrawal
  2. The Arab Spring
  3. 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.

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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.

 

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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.

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NETANYAHU VS. THE LEFT’S DEEP STATE

The deep state is waging war on Trump and Netanyahu.

In a year and a few months, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will have spent more time at the helm of the Israeli government than any other man. The other man is David Ben-Gurion, the Socialist leader who repressed Zionist nationalist movements in Israel by fiat, by law and, as in the Altalena, by murder.

That factoid may not matter much to most people, even most Israelis, but it matters a great deal to the remnants of Ben-Gurion’s regime, the leftists who don’t win elections, but do control the government. Until ’77, Israel’s Prime Ministers came from the Labor Party. The last Labor Prime Minister left office in 2001. It’s not just that Netanyahu is eclipsing Ben-Gurion, but that Labor has become irrelevant.

But of course the Labor Party isn’t irrelevant. Its candidates may be a joke. Its base of support consists of Tel Aviv hipsters who never actually leave their leftist bubble except to visit Paris, New York or Berlin. Their burning social issue is how much more Daddy has to pay to get them a place in their trendy neighborhood. Not even Obama’s best people could help them get much mileage out of that one.

After the ’15 election, Haaretz, the paper of record for the Israeli anti-Israel left, had wailed, “Leftist, secular Tel Aviv went to sleep last night cautiously optimistic only to wake up this morning in a state of utter and absolute devastation.” Leftist secular Tel Aviv has been devastated for nearly two decades.

But Labor’s deep state still runs much of Israel the way it did when Ben-Gurion was still alive. It doesn’t just have the media and academia, the non-profits and the elites, the way most national ‘lefts’ do. It also controls the old machinery of government that it spent generations running and robbing.

Ben-Gurion’s tenancy may be a factoid to most, but it’s a sore insult to Labor. And its deep state is working overtime to force Netanyahu out of office using fake scandals, fake news and fake police.

This isn’t a new obsession. If you think CNN’s Trumpmania is bad, the Israeli police and media have spent the better part of a decade trying to invent ridiculous Netanyahu scandals. How ridiculous?

Netanyahu’s wife was accused of stealing bottle deposits. “Attorney general mulls probe into Sara Netanyahu’s bottle deposits” isn’t a gag, it’s an actual headline. The catering budget at the prime minister’s residence has been under investigation for years. But there was no investigation when Shimon Peres, the last rotten remnant of the Ben-Gurion regime, threw a lavish birthday party that cost millions and included Bill Clinton, Robert De Niro and Barbara Streisand. Clinton’s fee of $500K was paid by the JNF, which instead of planting trees, was paying one dirty leftist to lionize another.

Israel’s lefty fake news outfits cheered Peres, but took issue with Netanyahu’s ice cream budget.

Another Netanyahu investigation involved the nursing care provided to his father-in-law before his death, because the Israeli left has no more concept of decency than it does of national security.

None of these scandals ever actually go away. Much like the left’s perjury traps and obstruction of justice campaigns against Trump, discredited scandals are rolled into accusations of a cover-up.

And when that doesn’t work, then there are accusations of a media cover-up.

One of the investigations for which Israel’s lefty deep state cops want to charge Netanyahu involves an accusation that he had traded favors for positive coverage from Yedioth Ahronoth. But, as Caroline Glick points out, it never actually happened. Another accusation claims that Netanyahu provided favors in exchange for positive coverage from the Walla! news site. Both accusations testify to the left’s obsession with sowing fear into any media outlet providing positive media coverage of Netanyahu.

Israel Hayom, a free paper that covered Netanyahu positively, was targeted with a law banning the distribution of successful free papers. This attack on a literal free press was known as, “Law for the Advancement and Protection of Written Journalism in Israel”. Lefty journalism has plenty of ‘protektsia’ in Israel. But who will protect Israelis from the ‘journalists’ and their political bosses?

And who will protect actual journalists who report unfavorable information about the left’s deep state?

The message is that any paper that reports the truth might be accused of conspiring with Prime Minister Netanyahu by the police leadership who have their own incestuous relationship with media outlets.

Israel has a first-world military and a third-world police. Israel’s military is competitive, professional and heroic. Its police force is Middle Eastern. At its best, it’s useless and at its worst, it’s deeply corrupt and abusive. The same holds true for the entire justice system which remains a fossilized remnant of its socialist past that deserves to be classed with those of Russia or Uzbekistan.

The Netanyahu era has seen some limited reforms of the judiciary, but the police haven’t changed.

In the United States, the inciting incident of the Flynn investigation appears to have been his advocacy on behalf of FBI Supervisory Special Agent Robyn Gritz who had accused former boss Andrew McCabe and others of sexual discrimination. Police Commissioner Roni Alsheich used the campaign against the Prime Minister to accuse a female police officer who had complained about sexual harassment by a superior back in ’11 of secretly doing Netanyahu’s bidding.

The commander whom she had accused of sexual harassment was in the unit investigating Netanyahu.

Alsheich also suggested that private detectives were investigating his investigators. Both are a convenient way of shifting the blame for his own people’s misconduct to Netanyahu. Covering up sexual harassment and opening up the prime minister’s chair for Labor kills two birds with one stone.

Prime Minister Netanyahu has spent a good deal of his life trying to clean up the corrupt system that Ben-Gurion and his dirty socialists inflicted on Israel. It’s a system where the law is nothing and personal connections are everything. At its worst, party membership was required for government jobs.  The machinery of government did the bidding of insiders and crushed the outsiders who got in their way.

Some things have changed.

Israel has a booming private sector. Its growing population of the descendants of Holocaust survivors, refugees from Muslim countries and the Soviet Union have little love for or allegiance to Labor. Its government bureaucracy is a widely loathed corrupt boil on an incredible nation. (As it always was.)

But Labor’s state within a state still wields a great deal of power. It is no coincidence that in recent years, it locked up a prime minister and president who originated from the conservative Likud while Labor’s corrupt politicians have gotten a pass. Isaac Herzog, Labor’s head of the opposition, served as the errand boy for international criminals like Marc Rich and Octav Botnar. But Arafat will rise from the grave to sign a peace deal before a Labor princeling sees the inside of a prison cell.

Money from the estate of Botnar, a Communist, was funneled through Herzog, his lawyer, to Labor for its anti-Netanyahu ads. Rich was a wanted fugitive who bought a pardon from Bill Clinton.

Herzog was Rich’s lawyer.

But the media would rather talk about Netanyahu’s ice cream budget, Sara Netanyahu’s bottle deposits and how much the electrician got paid. The left always accuses the right of its own sins and crimes.

Some may wonder how a country under threat of terrorism, invasion and nuclear annihilation is wasting time on this nonsense instead of dealing with the real threat. Easy. The leftist deep state isn’t interested in dealing with the real threat. It undermined Netanyahu’s efforts to take out Iran’s nuclear program.

Israel’s retired top security bosses routinely pal around with anti-Israel groups and spread anti-Israel propaganda. Ami Ayalon, Carmi Gillon and Yuval Diskin, the former bosses of Shabak, Israel’s version of the FBI, defended the anti-Israel activists of Breaking the Silence. Ayalon had also served Labor in the Knesset. Breaking the Silence has received money from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund which was among the most aggressive funders of the campaign for the Iran Deal to protect its nuclear terror program.

The deep state is rotten and disloyal. And it’s launching a coup to put its own Labor man in power.

It’s not just the Ben-Gurion date that symbolizes the transfer of power from the corrupt socialist state of Labor to a cleaner Israel that fulfills the aspirations of those who dreamed and fought to make it real.

President Trump’s victory offers Netanyahu the opportunity to redefine Israel’s relationship with the PLO that was imposed on it by the Clintons and their Labor allies. Instead of leftist apparatchiks like Dennis Ross and Aaron David Miller calling the shots, pro-Israel Trump associates like David Friedman and Jason Greenblatt are breaking with the old failed ideas and defining a new future for Israel.

That made it more urgent for Labor’s deep state to stop Netanyahu. That’s why the charges are in.

Labor failed to stop Netanyahu at the voting booth despite Obama’s experts working for them. And  Obama isn’t around to restrain Netanyahu. A deep state coup against democracy is its last option.

The doomsday option isn’t just about stopping Netanyahu, it’s about stopping Israel.

The people won in America and Israel. But that just means that the deep state in both countries is becoming more ruthless in its efforts to defeat the voices, hopes and dreams of Americans and Israelis.

Originally Published in FrontPageMag.

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HOW TRUMP CHANGED SAUDI ATTITUDES TO ISRAEL AND THE ISLAMO-FASCISTS

A new diplomacy is already changing the Middle East.

What a difference an administration makes.

Under Bush, Muslim World League secretary-general Abdullah Al-Turki described the Jews as “perfidious” and suggested that “it is the natural disposition of the Jews who inherited this deception from their forefathers.”

Under Obama, the Muslim World League Journal ran an article claiming that “Jews” and “Jewesses” run the media. It was one of many violently anti-Semitic pieces that had appeared in the publication.

Under Trump, the Muslim World League sent a letter to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum before the commemoration of International Holocaust Memorial Day expressing, “our great sympathy with the victims of the Holocaust”. It goes on to completely disavow any support for the Holocaust or its denial, “This human tragedy perpetrated by evil Nazism won’t be forgotten by history, or meet the approval of anyone, except criminal Nazis or their genre. True Islam is against these crimes. It classifies them in the highest degree of penal sanctions and among the worst human atrocities ever.”

The letter was signed by Dr. Mohammad Al Issa, the new Secretary General of the MWL who had replaced Al-Turki in the summer of ’16. The MWL is under Saudi control and Al Issa, who is loosely associated with the reformers, was appointed as major changes were sweeping the desert kingdom.

The MWL Holocaust letter never mentions the Jews by name. It was sent to the Holocaust Memorial Museum, a United States government institution, rather than a Jewish communal institution. The new alignment between the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia is based on a growing threat from Iran. The letter allows Saudi Arabia to distinguish itself from Iran’s anti-Semitic obsession with the Holocaust.

“One would ask, who in his right mind would accept, sympathize, or even diminish the extent of this brutal crime,” the Muslim World League letter asks. The answer is meant to be quite obvious.

Two years ago, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, commemorated International Holocaust Remembrance Day with a Holocaust denial video. Iran’s bizarre obsession with Holocaust denial, convening a conference and hosting Holocaust cartoon events, is extreme even by the standards of a region where Mein Kampf is a bestseller and it’s generally believed that Hitler didn’t go far enough.

After Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad left office, he claimed that his Holocaust denial “broke the spine of the Western capitalist regime.” His successor, Hassan Rouhani, tried to put on a moderate façade by being ambiguous about the subject. And that gives the Saudis an easy opening.

But it’s not just the Iranians.

Not all that long ago, the Muslim World League had hosted Muslim Brotherhood leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi at its First International Islamic Conference on Dialogue. Also present was William W. Baker, a Neo-Nazi, who found a second career appearing at Islamist events to bash Israel.

Qaradawi would later combine the typical Islamist toxic cocktail of Holocaust fantasies and denial by declaring that Allah had sent Hitler to punish the Jews.  “The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them – even though they exaggerated this issue – he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers.” The believers are Muslims. The Brotherhood’s icon was fantasizing about a Muslim holocaust of the Jews. It’s a theme to which Brotherhood clerics frequently return to.

The genocidal hadith once featured in the Hamas charter has recently been preached at mosques from California to New Jersey. “Judgment day will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews. The Muslims will kill the Jews, and the Jews will hide behind the stones and the trees will say: ‘Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.’”

In June of last year, the Muslim World League booted Qaradawi from the Islamic Fiqh Academy. The realignment was strategic. The Saudis, UAE and Egypt were fighting the Brotherhood and Qatar. The new regional battle lines put Iran, Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood on the same side.

The MWL letter is meant to remind us that the Saudis are different than Iran and the Brotherhood.




The Obama era had broken the old alliance between the Brotherhood and most of their Gulf allies by giving the Islamist group too much and too soon. With political backing from the Obama regime and financial support from Qatar, the Muslim Brotherhood had begun seizing entire countries. Qatar was too drunk on the power of being able to conquer countries with its checkbook to stop. Its former allies isolated it and the Sunni terror state in Doha formed an alliance with the Shiite terror state in Tehran.

The Saudis went looking for allies in strange places. One of those places was Israel. They adapted to a radical new environment with major changes at home and abroad. The MWL letter is a product of shifts in an organization associated with support for the ruthless export of Wahhabism. Those same shifts have opened some limited opportunities for women in Saudi Arabia as it questions Wahhabism.

It would be unwise to read too much into the new Saudi attitude. There have been clear political changes in response to military, social and economic threats. If those threats were to go away, if oil were once again a sure thing, if Iran were to fall apart, if the Islamists became more pliable, then reform would likely prove to be another mirage. Like Gorbachev’s Perestroika, the Saudi reforms are necessitated by circumstances rather than sincerity. They might become the real thing in time.

But it would be a mistake to confuse posturing with principle. Or to disregard its significance.

The repercussions of Osama bin Laden’s original campaign against the House of Saud have transformed the region and the world. 9/11, the Iraq War and the Arab Spring have changed everything. Iran has become a regional power. Islamist organizations have been able to seize entire countries. Energy independence for America and Europe is becoming a reality. Qatar controls the foreign media’s narrative of the region through Al Jazeera. And that narrative is very unfriendly to the Saudis.

The House of Saud responded by questioning whether its arrangement with the House of Wahhab, the two swords on the coat of arms of Saudi Arabia, temporal power and religious power, is still relevant. Its reforms negotiate a complex balancing act between modernizing its political system while still holding on to religious power. The Saudis need America more than ever even as we need them less than ever. Its show of social changes, like the abolition of slavery in response to pressure from JFK, are also a message.

Had Hillary won, the Saudis would have been left alone to mastermind a regional struggle from Yemen to Lebanon to Libya. The former Secretary of State had made it clear that she would double down on the Arab Spring. But instead Trump won. And that’s one of the reasons that the MWL letter exists.

The Trump administration is unlike any of its Republican predecessors. It mixes the type of traditional energy diplomats like Tillerson, whom the Saudis have always been very comfortable with, with non-traditional thinkers and a sprinkling of serious pro-Israel people. Unlike the Bush era neo-conservatives who believed in regional democracy, but who have been frozen out of the Trump administration, they have very little interest in the democracy folly that led to the Arab Spring. Instead they are realists who prioritize fighting terrorism and stabilizing the region by throwing out a lot of the discredited old ideas.

That’s why President Trump imposed a travel ban and recognized Jerusalem, among other moves.

The realists reflect Trump’s desire for results over the misguided fantasies that led to the Palestinian Authority and the Arab Spring. And after decades of negotiating ideological delusions from D.C., the Saudis have eagerly embraced that realism. Trump, the Saudis and the Israelis want to stop Iran, stop the destabilizing expansion of Islamist civil wars and restore a measure of stability to the region.

Trump and Netanyahu want stability because they don’t want the region’s problems to be their problems. Trump doesn’t want to have to deploy more soldiers in more wars. And Netanyahu doesn’t want to see more terrorists showing up on Israel’s borders. Neither man wants Iran to have nukes.

The Saudis want to reclaim their central role in the region. They’ve offered Trump a way out of more regional wars that will be unpopular at home and they’ve offered Netanyahu a “Palestine” solution that may appear more feasible than the PLO dead end represented by Abbas. Like the Trojan Horse, it’s best to be wary of such gifts. But for now they’ve cemented a secretive alliance in a complex conflict.

The Middle East is a region of shifting sands and illusory mirages. Like thirsty caravans crossing the bleak desert, even the experts often see what they want to see. But one thing is as clear as water in the oasis.

President Trump has redefined what we expect of the Saudis. We can’t know whether the ripples in the House of Saud extend below the surface, but we do know that America is a moral authority again.

Originally Published in FrontPageMag.

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THE BIG PALESTINIAN LIE

End the “Palestinian” occupation of Israel.

Palestinian boss Mahmoud Abbas recently declared that Israel is “a colonial enterprise that has nothing to do with Jewishness.” Moses, King David and thousands of years of Jewish history would disagree. Israel and the Jews are part of the story of human civilization. Over 50% of the human race has a holy book that tells of the Jewish journey to Israel. That includes Mohammed’s own copy of the Koran.

Israel isn’t a “colonial enterprise.” Palestine is.

Anyone who wants to find out where the name Israel comes from can open the Book of Genesis 32:29. The story even appears in Islamic hadiths. But where does “Palestine” really come from?

Palestine isn’t a Hebrew or Arabic word. The Greeks used it to describe the area. And when the Romans and their Arab mercenaries repressed the indigenous Jewish population, they renamed it all Palestine.

Palestine, after the Philistines: but why did the Greeks and Romans name the area after the Philistines?

The Philistines were one of the Greek origin sea peoples who had originally invaded and colonized the area. The Jewish resistance to Philistine colonialism is chronicled in the histories of Samson, King Saul and King David. It was natural for the Greek and Roman colonies that the Jews of the Second Temple era clashed with to use “Palestine”, the name associated with earlier colonies, to refer to their new colonies.

That latest phase of Greek colonialism led to an extended conflict between the Persian Empire and Greco-Roman civilization. The Romans made extended use of Arab mercenaries and rulers to secure their dominions. One such ruler was Herod, the son of an Idumean father and a Nabatean Arab mother, (according to the Greek historian Strabo they were both Arabic peoples), who repressed the Jews.

The eventual decline and fall of the Roman and Persian empires made way for the Islamic conquests of the region. But the Islamic bandit hordes had no original ideas. Their religion was a hodgepodge of Judaism, Christianity, assorted pagan beliefs and Mohammed’s violent fantasies. The rest of their culture they took wholesale from the Greeks. This game of historical Idiocracy ended with a collection of Arab colonists who call themselves “Palestinians” and claim to be descended from… somebody.

In Germany, Abbas declared that, “the nation of Palestine, throughout its long history, has been a beacon of generosity, and our people are an extension of the 3,500-year-old Canaanite civilization.” The Palestinian Authority that the unelected dictator runs was created in 1993. There was never any such independent country before that. And inquiring minds would love to know what an Islamic terrorist group and the Arab clans it oversees have in common with the Canaanite civilization. Fire, the wheel?

But then, Abbas also insisted that, “Mohammed the Prophet was a Palestinian”. According to Islamic tradition, Mohammed was an Adnanite Arab from Arabia. They claim descent from Ishmael and Abraham. That means they aren’t Canaanites. And a number of the Arab clans who make up the “Palestinians” do have their origins in Arabia. For a brief, shining moment, Abbas was telling the truth.

Previously, Abbas had also claimed that Jesus was a Palestinian. If you’re keeping track, that means the Palestinians are Canaanites, Arabs and Jews. That certainly covers a lot of historical bases.

But we’re just getting started.

“The Bible says, in these words, that the Palestinians existed before Abraham,” Abbas also insisted. The Bible doesn’t say anything in “these words”, but people took it to mean that he was claiming that the Palestinians were actually the Philistines. But then he took credit for the invention of the “Canaanite-Palestinian alphabet more than 6,000 years ago.”

There’s no such alphabet. The Palestinian Authority and Muslims in Israel use the Arabic alphabet which does have its extremely distant origins in the Phoenician Proto-Canaanite alphabet. But so does Greek, Latin and the letters you’re reading now. Like most of the “Palestinian” leader’s claims, it’s nonsense.

Within a few years, Abbas claimed that the “Palestinians” are descended from the Canaanites, the Philistines, the Jews and the Arabs. Only the last one is true. The “Palestinians” were part of a wave of Arab and Islamic invaders whose incursions continued well into the modern era.

There are some 10,000 “Afro-Palestinians” in Gaza. Some are African settlers who came in the 19th century. The anti-Israel left would have you believe that a Sudanese Muslim who settled in Israel in the late 19th century is an indigenous “Palestinian”, but a Jewish refugee from Egypt is a foreign “settler”.

The Arab Muslims who live in ’48 and ’67 Israel are made up of various clans from around the region.

Abbas has referred to Jordan and Palestine as “one people living in two states.” Hamas interior minister Fathi Hammad had once asserted, “Personally, half my family is Egyptian. We are all like that. More than 30 families in the Gaza Strip are called Al-Masri (Egyptian). Brothers, half of the Palestinians are Egyptians and the other half are Saudis.”

The most famous Al-Masri is a billionaire who lives in a West Bank reproduction of an Italian villa named “The House of Palestine”, and was recently detained by the Saudis. Munib Masri served as a Palestinian Authority minister, holds a legislative seat and accounts for a quarter of the “Palestinian” economy. The greenhouse in his villa was a gift from Napoleon III to his mistress.

Masri, whose family name originated in Egypt, and claims to be a Palestinian, is actually a Saudi citizen who lives in an imported Italian villa. He made his money supplying the US military during Desert Storm.

That’s what a “Palestinian” looks like.

The “Palestinians” are Egyptians, Saudis, Jordanians, Senegalese, Sudanese and a number of other Muslim invasive colonists. They are not Philistines, Canaanites or Jews.  They’re as indigenous as Al-Masri’s “House of Palestine” made out of imported Italian marble and filled with European art.

The “Palestinians” are what they always were: a foreign Islamic Arab colony inside Israel.

The Big Lie of Palestine is that the Islamic colonists are the indigenous population of Israel and that the Jews are colonizing Palestine. But an indigenous people can never colonize their own country.

“Palestine” is a twisted colonial fiction. The name reflects Greek colonization of the region. And its use by the modern Islamic colonists shows their lack of any actual historical connection to Israel.

After all the agonized wailing about the deeply meaningful “Palestinian” connection to “Palestine”, they still haven’t come up with their own name for the place. One that they can properly pronounce. (There’s no proper “P” in Arabic.) But Abbas keeps coming up with new lies about which ancient people the “Palestinians” are descended from this week.

I can’t wait until he claims to be Cherokee.

The claim of the “Palestinian” colonists to Israel is a lie of Islamic imperialism. The Muslim powers of the region have funded the racist attacks by the PLO, Hamas and other Islamic terrorist groups on Jews.

The “Palestinians” are not the victims of colonialism. They are its perpetrators.

The fighting between Israel and Islamic terrorists is a struggle between imperialism and colonialism. The imperialists are not the oppressed Jewish minority that has been forced out of nearly everywhere else in the region. It’s the Arab Islamic majority that represses minorities across the region.

“Palestine” is a pathetic attempt to launder one imperial identity with another followed by shameless efforts to appropriate the identities of nearly every ancient people in the region. Including the Jews.

The only way to end the conflict is to end the lies.

Originally Published in FrontPageMag.

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WHAT WE GET FOR THE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS WE GIVE TO TERRORISTS

Arts, appeasement and AIDS bombs.

“We pay the Palestinians HUNDRED OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS a year and get no appreciation or respect,” President Trump tweeted. “With the Palestinians no longer willing to talk peace, why should we make any of these massive future payments to them?”

The President of the United States has a very good point. But it’s not as if the Islamic terrorists in the West Bank and Gazan territories of Israel have ever been willing to do more than occasionally talk peace before getting bored and stomping away from the table. And then stabbing a few children to death.

The United States has paid the PLO’s Palestinian Authority billions to occasionally pretend to talk about peace. There isn’t a dollar amount high enough to get the terrorists to actually agree to peace.

We know two things about the terrorist leader who will succeed Arafat and Abbas. His name will start with an ‘A’ and like Arafat and Abbas, he’ll wait around for the perfect moment in a peace negotiation with a lefty president before, as Arafat did to Clinton and Abbas did to Obama, breaking it all up.

And that’s one of the priceless things that the fake terror statelet of the Palestinian Authority gives us for our hundreds of millions of dollars. Every decade its leader will lead on a lefty and then leave him at the altar. It may cost us another few billion, but somewhere around 2026, President Cory Booker will be certain that he’s finally solved the Palestinian problem only to sit there confused with egg on his face.

Is that worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year? Maybe not. But it’s also a good lesson to lefties that they don’t understand the Muslim world and that no matter how hard they try, they never will.

But that’s not all that we get for our money.

The peace process with the PLO was the original test case for the Arab Spring and the Iran Deal. All three were founded on the same stupid belief that if you give the terrorists almost everything they want, they won’t kill you. Every year that passes shows that no matter what you give them, the terrorists will kill you. Bribing killers doesn’t work. Meeting their demands is impossible because there are always more.

If we had paid more attention to Arafat’s lying smirk, maybe we wouldn’t have fallen for the Arab Spring or the Iran Deal. And that’s another thing that the terrorists give us in exchange for all our hundreds of millions of dollars a year. The Palestinian Authority is a living museum of terrorist treachery. Its peace negotiations are an ongoing demonstration of the folly of appeasing terrorists.

Most small children learn not to put their hands on a hot stove at a very young age. Unfortunately none of them become politicians. And so every time a new president starts thinking about appeasing Islamic terrorists by letting them take over Egypt or develop nuclear weapons, he can test his terrorist appeasement theories in the confines of the smaller sandbox of the West Bank and Gaza.

Decades of testing have thus far produced no peace and no smarter politicians. After a few hundred years of peace negotiations, there still won’t be any peace. But maybe there will be smarter politicians.

Of the two impossible things in this scenario, smarter politicians are more plausible than nicer terrorists.

If we can just keep the peace process going for another few centuries, maybe our distant descendants will finally figure out that appeasing terrorists really doesn’t work. Not even if you offer them parts of Jerusalem, freeze settlements and agree to build a giant statue of Mohammed’s flying demon horse.

But that’s not all that we get from the hundreds of millions of dollars that we lavish on terrorist welfare.

Consider the arts.

The PLO’s takeover of the territories in ’67 Israel unleashed an unprecedented burst of artistic creativity. There’s hardly a gray concrete wall anywhere in Ramallah that isn’t decorated with murals of a smiling Arafat beaming down on the wretched suckers he spent his life ripping off. And then there are the posters of the suicide bombers, the ritual burnings of American flags and the Jihadist poetry readings.

“Our blood is food for the revolution/Yasser Arafat, for you we shall die” and “Sons of Zion, most evil among creation/barbaric apes and wretched ‎pigs” are examples of the arts that we subsidize. And while those poems may sound pretty horrible, they’re still better than what we get for our money at the NEA.

And then there’s the pioneering technological research being carried out by top PLO scientists.

Before the Car Jihad could be efficiently deployed on the streets of New York, Nice, Barcelona and London, it was field tested by expert Palestinian researchers in Jerusalem. Suicide bombings, airline hijackings and many of the other tools of the modern Islamic terrorist were refined in the PLO lab.

The hundreds of millions of dollars we spend each year funding the PLO is an investment in new terror tools and techniques. The terrorists of tomorrow are counting on us to fund their research. And every dollar we give the Palestinian Authority is an investment in helping the terrorists kill us in new and interesting ways. The possibilities are as horrifying as they are endless.

Back in ’04, a member of the PLO’s Fatah faction tried to build an AIDS bomb.

Rami Abdullah, an engineering student, wanted to blow himself up while carrying blood from a donor infected with AIDS. “After a period, it will kill a lot of people,” he explained.

Abdullah has already promised that if he gets out, he’ll try to live the dream of building an AIDS bomb.

An AIDS bomb plot by Tanzim, the most violent terror arm of the Palestinian Authority, was planned over Passover back then. But the lab Jihadis never figured out how to make it work. One day though, if we keep funding them, they might figure it out. And then we too can enjoy AIDS bombs in our cities.

And isn’t that worth a mere few hundred million dollars a year?

We could stop funding terrorists. Also we could stop smoking, running full tilt into glass doors and finally pull off that New Year’s resolution to stop drinking antifreeze. Those would all be good ideas. And they would make us safer and happier. So you can expect Washington D.C. to reject them out of hand.

The experts are convinced that if we don’t fund the terrorists, they’ll behave even worse. So far we haven’t actually tested this theory. No one wants to find out what they can come up with that’s worse than an AIDS bomb.

But if anyone in Washington D.C. can stop doing that stupid thing all the experts insist we need to do, it’s President Trump. And so just maybe this can be the year we stop running into glass doors, drinking antifreeze and funding terrorists. We may lose out on some Arafat murals and AIDS bombs, but the Americans who are regularly killed every year by Palestinian Islamic terrorists will thank him for it.

And if not, we can always look forward to President Elizabeth Warren being humiliated by President Ahmed of the PLO as he walks away from the table despite being offered 99% of Israel and Netanyahu’s first-born son. And then unleashes toddler stone throwers and AIDS suicide bombers across Jerusalem.

Because that’s what we get for our hundreds of millions of dollars. That’s all we’ll ever get from the PLO.

Published in FrontPageMag.

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BERNIE SANDERS GETS ADVISER FROM ANTI-SEMITIC THINK TANK

Support for the terrorists and sanctions on Israel.

Matt Duss had once compared Israel’s blockade of Hamas to “segregation in the American South.”

After the murder of the Henkin family in front of their children, the stabbing of a two-year-old and his mother in Jerusalem, Duss wrote, “it shouldn’t shock anyone that Israel’s harsh occupation and abuse provokes Palestinians.” He blamed the “rising violence” on Israel and not the PLO terrorists.

“Israel does need to start facing some costs and consequences for an occupation,” Matt Duss had told Al Jazeera. “The BDS movement has helped to elevate a debate that was long overdue.”

Matt Duss had traveled to Gaza to meet with Hamas members. He then whitewashed the Islamic terror group as a moderate organization willing to accept a two-state solution and stop killing Jews.

When Hamas kidnapped and murdered three Jewish teens, one of them American, Duss whined that Israel had “turned a police matter into a war” and launched a “crackdown on Hamas infrastructure in the West Bank under the pretext of searching for the missing boys”.

He described the Hamas terrorists as “Palestinian activists” and claimed that despite the brutal murders, “Hamas had largely held to the terms of the cease-fire.”

“A better option for dealing with stone-throwing Palestinian protesters might be to stop stealing their land,” Duss had once tweeted.

“One can recognize that anti-Semitism is a particularly pernicious bigotry among bigotries, however, while still questioning whether holding such views makes any leader ‘irrational'”, Duss wrote when defending the Iran nuke sellout.

Now he’s formulating foreign policy for Senator Bernie Sanders.

Bernie Sanders had previously invited Duss to testify before the Democratic Platform Committee in a push for an anti-Israel platform. Duss had urged the Dems to call for an end to the Hamas blockade.

Before becoming a foreign policy advisor to Senator Sanders, Duss headed up the Foundation for Middle East Peace. Despite its misleading name, FMEP is a fixture of the anti-Israel lobby. It was founded by Merle Thorpe: Jr, a wealthy Washington D.C. lawyer who was the sugar daddy for anti-Israel causes.

The Foundation for Middle East Peace funds anti-Israel groups that directly or indirectly promote BDS.

Before that, Duss was at the center of a major anti-Semitic scandal when he headed up Middle East Progress for the Center for American Progress. CAP bloggers had escalated their attacks on the Jewish State by accusing Jews of “dual loyalty” and of being “Israel Firsters”.

Faiz Shakir, the editor-in-chief at ThinkProgress, had admitted that the hateful attacks by at least one CAP blogger used “terrible anti-Semitic language.”

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, the ADL and even the White House’s Jewish liaison, during the Obama era, all criticized the hatred at the Center for American Progress. The Wiesenthal Center had reportedly described CAP as “infected with Jew-hatred and discriminatory policy positions toward Israel.” And CAP tried to smear the Wiesenthal Center, an organization founded by a Nazi-hunter, as “the far-right Simon Wiesenthal Center.”

The White House’s liaison called the CAP situation “troubling” and emphasized that this attitude did not represent the administration.

But apparently it does represent a prospective Bernie Sanders administration. That’s not surprising.

Senator Bernie Sanders has used his ethnic origins to mask the ugly anti-Semitism of his political allies, including Keith Ellison, the former Nation of Islam member whose virulent bigotry was, according to the Minnesota Daily opinion editor, “a genuine threat to the long-term safety and well-being of the Jewish people.”

When a bigot demanded to know Bernie Sanders’s relationship with the “Jewish community” while claiming that the “Zionist Jews” were “running the Federal Reserve”, “running Wall Street” and “running everything”, the Senator from Vermont responded by disavowing and bashing Israel.

“I may be Jewish, but you’re not going to find any candidate running for president, for example, to talk about Zionism and the Middle East,” Bernie groveled.

Like Ellison, Jesse Jackson and the Sandinistas, whom Sanders had defended despite their ugly anti-Semitism, Duss benefits from the Bernie protection racket for bigots. If you work for a man whose parents were Jewish, then you can’t possibly be accused of anti-Semitism.

What sort of foreign policy could Matt Duss be drawing up for Bernie Sanders?

Two years ago, Duss had called for using “sticks” on Israel and compared Jewish families living in Jerusalem to Iran’s nuclear weapons program. He suggested that political pressure could prevent “Israeli voters” from voting in the pro-Israel and anti-terrorist candidates whom he disapproves of.

“Voters currently see no costs or consequences to the occupation,” Matt Duss had complained. “By beginning to make those costs clear, as floating the possibility of sanctions does, the EU could play an important role in sharpening the choice before Israeli voters.”

Duss suggested that pressuring “millions of voters” in Israel was “worth a try.”

And who better to roll out sanctions on Israel than President Bernie Sanders?

When Bernie brought on Cornel West and James Zogby to push for an anti-Israel platform, a message was sent. When you bring in a 9/11 Truther and BDS activist who calls Israel an “apartheid state” and describes efforts to fight Hamas as “Jewish racism”, that says it all.

So does bringing in Matt Duss to work on “foreign policy”.

Bernie’s foreign policy has been very consistent. He supported the anti-Semitic Sandinistas who ethnically cleansed Jews from Nicaragua. He honeymooned in the USSR which persecuted Jews.

“No guns for Israel,” Sanders declared before the Yom Kippur War, which nearly destroyed the Jewish State. In 1990, he said that he “would like to see the US put more pressure on Israel.”

When Bernie Sanders reached out for perspective on the Middle East during his campaign, he contacted James Zogby, who had defended Hamas and Hezbollah, and Lawrence Wilkerson, who had accused Jewish officials of dual loyalty and suggested that Israel was behind Assad’s chemical weapons attacks.

Matt Duss fits perfectly with the rest of the sad, twisted freaks in the anti-Israel lobby.

And he’s valuable because he’s smoother than lunatics like Cornel West, a 9/11 Truther, or Lawrence Wilkerson, who accused Israel of “false flag” WMD attacks in Syria.

Extremists always need someone like Matt Duss to make their ugly views seem palatable.

We already know what Bernie’s real foreign policy on Israel will be.

He wants to end military aid and divert money from Israel to Hamas. He’ll attempt to end the non-profit status of Jewish schools in areas claimed by Islamic terrorists. He’ll demand the ethnic cleansing of parts of Israel. And those demands will be backed by economic and political pressure.

That’s what Bernie wants. It’s what the radical extremists he panders to want him to do.

Duss is on board to make this ugliness presentable. And to help Bernie avoid tactical blunders like his lie that Israel had killed “10,000 innocent people” in Gaza.

When Bernie Sanders starts delivering his incoherent speeches attacking Israel, it will be based on the work of bigots and haters who have found a human shield with a Brooklyn accent for their agenda.

Originally Published in FrontPageMag.