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The Transcript We Really Want to See – Taki’s Magazine – Taki’s Magazine

Posted by M. C. on September 27, 2019

https://www.takimag.com/article/the-transcript-we-really-want-to-see/

by Ann Coulter

The transcript of President Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky is yet another illustration of the rule: Never ask a question you don’t know the answer to.

But on the basis of one drama queen’s overreaction to a rumor she’d heard about what was said on a phone call she didn’t hear (I’m assuming the whistleblower is Christine Blasey Ford), the Democrats have launched impeachment proceedings against the president.

I guess they figured it’s easier than flying to South Dakota with picks and chisels and carving Trump into Mount Rushmore. But it will have the same effect.

Now that the transcript has been released, it’s The New York Times that doesn’t want anyone to see it.

The transcript I’d like to see is the one of Nancy Pelosi reading the Trump transcript.

F@@@@@@CK! Whose f***ing idea was it to demand this goddamn transcript?

F@CK!
F@@CK!
F@@@CK!

The absolute worst version for Trump — i.e. the one being repeated non-stop on MSNBC — is that he did exactly what Obama and Biden were doing to Ukraine: intimidating an ally into giving us something in exchange for the foreign aid we were giving them.

Biden himself bragged about getting Ukraine’s prosecutor fired by threatening to withhold a big fat check from them.

The Democrats’ argument is: No, no, no! When WE were pressuring Ukraine, we were doing it for good! Don’t you understand? We’re good; they’re bad.

The other reason the media are going to have to bury this transcript is that Trump brought up a few items that the media have been hoping the public would never find out about.

Trump said: “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution, so if you can look into it … It sounds horrible to me.”

“The transcript I’d like to see is the one of Nancy Pelosi reading the Trump transcript.”

Well, that’s something the media haven’t mentioned before. Ninety-nine percent of Americans will be hearing about the funny business with Biden’s son, Hunter, for the first time with the release of this transcript.

Why did Vice President Biden order the Ukrainian president to fire the prosecutor investigating the Ukrainian company paying his son millions of dollars? Are Democrats claiming that this company was clean as a whistle and it was an absolute OUTRAGE that it was being investigated?

Ukraine was looking into the company that conveniently placed Hunter Biden on its board long before Trump came on the scene. Something must have made the Ukrainian prosecutor want to investigate Biden’s company — and it sure wasn’t to curry favor with the Obama/Biden administration.

The second issue the media does not want anyone to think about is CrowdStrike.

What is CrowdStrike, you ask? That is the cybersecurity firm that is the sole source of the claim that the Russians hacked the DNC’s emails — which launched the conspiracy theories that tied our country in knots for the past three years.

The Russian collusion story was originally hatched by Hillary Clinton in the summer of 2016 to cover up the utter corruption revealed by the dump of Democratic National Committee emails on Wikileaks. As was her practice whenever a scandal threatened to engulf her, Hillary rushed out and told the press to investigate something else.

And “the great story” about the DNC email hack wasn’t about a “vast right-wing conspiracy” — as she claimed when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. No, this time, it was a vast Russian conspiracy!

At the time, the entire media laughed at Hillary’s Russian conspiracy nonsense — The New York Times, New York Newsday, the Los Angeles Times and so on. But then Trump won the election, and suddenly the Russia conspiracy seemed totally believable. What else could explain how Americans could put this boob in the White House?

The subsequent three years of breathless Russia coverage was based entirely on the word of one cybersecurity firm, CrowdStrike, that the DNC’s emails had been hacked by Russia. Recall that the DNC wouldn’t allow the FBI or any other U.S. government official anywhere near its computers. That’s precisely why so many cybersecurity experts doubted that it was the Russians: The FBI was never allowed to perform its own investigation.

CrowdStrike was founded by Ukrainian Dmitri Alperovitch (now an American citizen apparently — because who isn’t?) and funded by the fanatically anti-Russian Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk Foundation.

Talk about interfering with our democracy! Alperovitch and Pinchuk sent one political party and nine-tenths of the American media off on a wild goose chase into Russian collusion that, after years of accusations, investigations and embarrassing conspiracy-mongering … turned up goose eggs.

The entire Russian insanity was launched by a couple of Ukrainians. I think a lot of us would like to get to the bottom of that.

This is why Trump said to President Zelensky: “I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike … I guess you have one of your wealthy people … The server, they say Ukraine has it.”

(How’d you like to be the Ukrainian translator for a Trump conversation?)

Trump has been justly criticized for hiring his daughter and son-in-law at the White House. But at least when he pressures a foreign leader for a favor, it’s to investigate corruption, not to get a prosecutor off his son’s back. Maybe Biden’s son was guilty, maybe he was innocent. But it is a fact that Joe Biden held up foreign aid to a desperately needy ally in exchange for their halting prosecution that implicated his son. It’s not Trump’s fault that Biden is now running for president.

I’ll give the Democrats this: They’ve gotten so good at trying to remove Trump from office that, instead of three years, their insane accusations blow up in their faces within a week.

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The Freedom Fighter's Journal: How You Know It’s All Over ...

 

 

 

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How Checkbook-Journalist William Bradford Huie Taught the FBI – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on September 27, 2019

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/09/phillip-f-nelson/how-checkbook-journalist-william-bradford-huie-taught-the-fbi-how-to-catch-murderers-pay-them-off-and-call-them-cis/

By

LBJ: Master of Deceit

In my book Who REALLY Killed Martin Luther King Jr.?, I detailed not only William Bradford Huie’s central role in framing James Earl Ray as MLK’s assassin but noted a number of earlier instances of his long-term association with J. Edgar Hoover, dating back to the 1940s. The story about Huie’s involvement with Hoover and the FBI in the aftermath of the murder of three young civil rights workers had not been addressed. To fill that void, this story adds substance and context to their association, which inexorably led to greater closeness between them, thus creating the kind of trust that would be required for his key covert mission — one of ensuring that Huie’s myth would immediately be inserted into the public consciousness.

On June 21, 1964 three civil rights workers were murdered near Philadelphia, MS. The FBI and two hundred Navy sailors searched for the bodies but failed to find them. According to Wikipedia, “The three men’s bodies were only discovered two months later thanks to a tip-off.” What Wikipedia left off of that description was that the “tip-off” was from one of the culprits, who they paid $30,000 ($244,000 today) for the information — a technique taught to them by the unscrupulous author William Bradford Huie. This was not the first, nor the last, time that the FBI would work closely with Huie in their long association. Four years later, the FBI gave Huie a new, highly secret covert mission to “frame” James Earl Ray for the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.

In late July, Huie contacted the FBI’s Special Agent in Charge (SAC) in Jackson, Mississippi where he fielded the idea of his possible intervention into the search, broaching the suggestion that he offer one of the suspects $25,000 for information regarding the location of the bodies. He explained that he had already been given a $5,000 advance for an article to be written for the Saturday Evening Post regarding the murders. [1]

Three months later, Huie reappeared in the Jackson FBI field office, having published his story in the Saturday Evening Post about the murders. He announced that he had been given a $40,000 advance for a book to be published by Christmas, first in newspaper serial form, then “a cheap paperback edition” followed by a hardback “to be published later by Doubleday.” Though it is stated very subtlety in the Jackson SAC’s report to FBI headquarters dated 10/20/64, it is clear that the FBI acknowledged to him (but not publicly) that they had paid one of the murderers for the information about the location of the bodies:

The comments of the Jackson Special Agent in Charge (SAC) reveal his own insights about the “fiction writer” Huie who liked, occasionally, to be factually correct, but preferred not to get too hung up on that because in books he could “take more license” than normal reporters and magazine writers. It appears that his purpose that day had more to do with gaining an acknowledgement that the idea he had planted three months previously had taken root and it had indeed been the device that produced the bodies; it was as if he needed the recognition and affirmation that resorting to his scurrilous methods was indeed worth the price.

Twelve days later, on Sunday, November 1st, he went to an interview on NBC’s “Monitor” television show. It wasn’t enough for him that he got the nod from the Jackson SAC that they had adopted his idea for the payoff; evidently, to feed his own hubris and nourish his inflated ego, he decided that he couldn’t hold the secret anymore and needed the entire nation’s praise for “solving” the case through the short-cut that he had championed, as he then deliberately leaked the FBI’s secret when he let it slip that he had a key role in solving the triple-murder case:

Huie noted the ironies that his methods created, as he explained his plan for paying the murderer another $10,000 (over $83,000 in today’s currency) despite the fact that the state had not filed charges against any of them at that point. He even noted the question of the “morality” of paying murderers for information, knowing that the local citizenry would close ranks around the accused men to ensure they would not be terribly inconvenienced:

…

Finally, we also know that Huie, the famed “checkbook journalist” who had ingratiated himself into a number of unsavory missions for his own financial and promotional benefit, was an unprincipled, unscrupulous and mendacious man willing to do anything for financial rewards and public accolades. He proved that four years after this event when he accepted a new mission from FBI HQ: The mission to frame James Earl Ray, as described at length in Who REALLY Killed Martin Luther King Jr.?

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The Brexit Battle Shows Democracy Is Only Allowed When the Regime Likes the Outcome | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on September 27, 2019

https://mises.org/wire/brexit-battle-shows-democracy-only-allowed-when-regime-likes-outcome

The United Kingdom’s Supreme Court ruled “illegal” a parliamentary tactic used by PM Boris Johnson to ensure Brexit would be carried out on October 31, more than six months after Brexit was supposed to take effect.

While the court wasn’t ruling on Brexit, per se, the context of the situation makes it clear the ruling is really just the latest move from the UK’s political class designed to postpone Brexit yet again.

Given the history of EU-related referenda in Europe, we can already guess how the situation will play out. British voters will either be asked to vote again on Brexit — so that this time, they can get it “right” — or the Brexit agreement will be constructed in such a way that Brexit will be a British exit in name only.

At the same time, bizarrely, Johnson’s moves in parliament have been credited as being “undemocratic” or even a “coup.” This charge comes even though Johnson had attempted to call an early election, but was denied.

In the meantime, any sort of democracy that might actually strengthen the pro-Brexit position will not be allowed, as noted by Raphael Vassallo:

To recap, then: Britain first turned to the electorate to decide on its future in the European Union by means of a nationwide referendum…and ignored the result. Then its Parliament made it technically impossible to actually deliver on that mandate, by reducing the present government to the status of a lame duck. And to cap it all, it has now even shut the door to an election: which is about the only thing left that can possibly resolve the entire Brexit impasse to begin with.

But at least, the Commons’ reluctance to hold an election can easily be explained in purely party-political terms. Clearly, the Remainers have understood that Boris Johnson would most likely enlarge his parliamentary majority in an election. … Britain’s Parliament seems hellbent on preventing the British people from even expressing their will at all.

By now, this is a tried and true tactic in European politics. Only votes that help the pro-EU position are allowed. Everything else is declared “undemocratic” or is simply ignored.

In 2001, Irish voters rejected the Nice Treaty in a referendum (or, to be more accurate, rejected proposed amendments to the Irish Constitution, that would have made ratification of the Nice Treaty possible).

Ireland’s political class quickly went to work declaring that the Irish voters had made a mistake and didn’t really understand the importance of ratifying the treaty. Vassallo notes

… the response was to doggedly “pursue” the same rejected reforms anyway, with even greater determination than before.

So much so, that just a year later, the Irish were presented with a second national referendum… to approve a second raft of changes to Ireland’s Constitution, so as to once again permit the ratification of pretty much the same old Nice Treaty they had earlier rejected.

The second time, the majority voted “correctly” and demands for additional referenda, of course, ended.

Another tactic was used on the continent when the French and the Dutch were allowed to vote on the ratification of a new EU constitution. The voters rejected it.

But it naturally didn’t end there. French and Dutch politicians simply ignored the results of the referenda and devised an alternative strategy. They slightly revised the text of the constitution, called it the “Lisbon Treaty” and then ratified that without asking the voters.

Brendan O’Neill summed it up in The Guardian:

When French and Dutch voters rejected the European constitution in 2005 (and according to Valery Giscard d’Estaing, the current Lisbon treaty is the “same as the constitution”), they were sneeringly insulted by their betters in Brussels. Neil Kinnock said it was a “triumph of ignorance”. Andrew Duff, Liberal Democrat MEP, labelled the “rejectionists” as an “odd bunch of racists, xenophobes, nationalists, communists, the disappointed centre left and the generally pissed off”. He asked whether it is wise to “submit the EU Constitution to a lottery of uncoordinated national plebiscites”.

But by 2008, the Irish still hadn’t learned their lesson, and the majority voted incorrectly in a 2008 referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

Sure enough, Irish politicians demanded a second vote, and the second time, the voters got it “right.”

But not before they were roundly denounced by their betters in Parliament and in Brussels who knew better. O’Neill writes:

As soon as the Irish people’s ballots were counted in June [2008], their rejection of Lisbon was treated as the “wrong” answer, as if they had been taking part in a multiple-choice maths exam and had failed to work out that 2+2=4. Now, they will be given a chance to sit the exam again, “until [they] come up with the right answer,” says George Galloway , attacking EU elitism. The notion that the Irish “got it wrong” exposes gobsmacking ignorance about democracy in the upper echelons of the EU. The very fact that a majority of Irish people said no to Lisbon made it the “right answer”, true and sovereign and final. “No” really does mean no.

Here, O’Neill gets it slightly wrong. The “upper echelons of the EU” know exactly how democracy works. It is only to be tolerated if it leads to the outcomes preferred by the ruling classes. If not, then something must be done to correct the situation.

Just keep voting until the voters do things properly.

One such case occurred in California in 1994, when nearly 60 percent of the voters approved a measure to deny government services to foreign nationals living illegally in the US. It didn’t call for any deportations, or for any prosecution of any residents.

The measure was passed with “yes” votes from of 56% of African Americans, 57% of Asians, and  a third of Hispanics. It won in every region of California except the Bay Area. In heavily Hispanic Los Angeles County, it passed by a 12-point margin.

After the votes were counted, the result was simply ignored and thrown out. All that was required was to have a federal judge declare the will of the democratic majority to be null and void…

Democracy-The god that failed. Be seeing you

Elton John: ‘I am a European – not a stupid, imperialist English idiot’

The singer says Brexit has made him ashamed to be British, while performing in Verona during his final world tour

No doubt that sounds good to a leaver.

 

 

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What “Climate Justice” Really Means | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on September 27, 2019

https://mises.org/wire/what-climate-justice-really-means

…To sum up quickly, a carbon tax will be introduced for gas, starting with €10 per ton of CO2 in 2021, but increasing to €35 in 2025. This is not necessarily high when one looks at the greater debate on how high a carbon tax could be, and yet, it will have an effect for car owners, who will have to pay 12 cents per liter more in the end, increasing gas prices that are already three to four times as high as in the US. In addition, the car tax will be increased for cars that pollute significantly and domestic flights — or as they are also called, “dumping flights” — will cost at least €30 more. The quasi-state-run train company, which is known for its notoriously bad service and delays and gets outcompeted even by private bus services at this point (not to mention private train companies in neighboring countries), will get some additional subsidies.

Of course, the German government did its best to make it seem as though this reform package would not just mean higher costs. Commuting allowances would be increasing starting at a commute of 21 kilometers (13 miles), meaning a tax break for those traveling a longer way to get to work (talking about setting wrong incentives “for the environment”). Almost 75 percent of Germans have a commute of less than 21km, though, meaning the tax break is only useful for a minority. At the same time, the electricity prices are supposed to be reduced by around €30 a year — but it is difficult to see this as anything other than a nice, small tweak on the abhorrently high electricity prices which came into being due to some other ill-conceived environmental activism by the government…

What the climate apostles of today want instead goes much farther. They want to attain climate justice, something which sounds similar to another famous weasel term, namely social justice, and in fact is even more similar than one thinks at first. As Robert Colvile, the Director of the British Centre for Policy Studies, showed, reaching this goal includes a complete abandonment of nuclear power and fossil fuels by 2030 — a rather costly endeavor to say the least. The climate goals also require the rejection of new technologies such as geoengineering and carbon capture and storage. “Justice” requires massive financial transfers from the industrialized to the developing world. “Justice” demands food sovereignty (“culturally appropriate food markets”), and “agro-ecology,” which means “an explicit focus on social and economic dimensions of food system” as well as “a strong focus on the rights of women, youth and indigenous peoples.”

[RELATED: “Fear Global Warming? Markets Offer Our Best Chance for Survival“]

Worst of all, “non-market approaches” are the only ones deemed worthy of being taken into consideration. Indeed, the market economy itself has to be abolished to stop global warming. As Colvile puts it, “the ideas behind the climate strike movement are fundamentally illiberal.”

Luckily, though, environmentalism doesn’t have to be socialist. Nothing is wrong with wanting to protect natural wonders and trying to alleviate climate processes that would destroy these wonders and the livelihood of millions, if not billions of people. It is understandable that Greta and others want to protect this world.

For this, however, they perhaps should consider the market economy, their own declared enemy, as the lifeboat of the world. It is not only that we can fight environmental degradation while we can keep our capitalist system alive (as far as it still exists). This capitalist system may actually be helpful in that very fight. And in contrast to government-mandated “climate justice,” innovation and technological progress thanks to entrepreneurs wouldn’t bring with it mass unemployment and major economic distress, but greater prosperity.

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Australia’s Most Unpopular Tax – The Carbon Tax | A Daily Thought

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It’s impossible to know everything. Here’s the smartest way to be ignorant | The Daily Bell

Posted by M. C. on September 26, 2019

https://www.thedailybell.com/all-articles/news-analysis/its-impossible-to-know-everything-heres-the-smartest-way-to-be-ignorant/

By Joe Jarvis

 

I spent 15 minutes reading tuna cans in the grocery store the other day. I could have spent hours if I decided to look up each type online.

Keeping the price in mind, I wanted a smaller variety of tuna to avoid high mercury content and something with few dangerous chemicals in the packaging.

Finally, I made a decent choice. A mid-price smaller variety of tuna.

I’m not really sure about the chemicals in the packaging… but one thing I read online suggests avoiding a can in favor of a plastic pouch.

Food is an information-overload minefield.

For years “experts” have gone back and forth about whether salt, eggs, and animal fats are good or bad for you. They’ve introduced sugar substitutes, only to later link them to cancer.

And the debate will forever rage between the vegan and paleo religious sects.

Trying to find the ultimate truth of the best diet will drive you mad.

People react differently to this confusion. You could:

  1. Abandon all attempts to eat healthily. Eat what tastes good, and resign yourself to being unhealthy or overweight.
  2. Choose a dietary dogma, stick to it with religious fervor, and evangelize to others about the one true dietary-deity.
  3. Do your due diligence to eat pretty healthy. Adapt the info to your own body and situation, and don’t stress since no one seems to know anyway.

I choose option 3 because missing from the others is individuality. Has anyone ever considered that perhaps there is no one diet that is perfect for everyone?

Some things that are obviously unhealthy–sugar and fast food. My body tells me to stop ingesting this stuff because I feel like crap.

But that doesn’t mean everyone reacts the same.

A friend of mine grew up on candy and fast food. He was the most athletic of my friends in high school. And he still looks pretty good approaching his 30s, despite a corporate job.

Maybe his body reacts better to that stuff. Or maybe he always does enough exercise so that it cancels out the damage. Or maybe his body is rotting from the inside out, and will only start showing the signs of years of abuse in another decade.

I don’t know. And despite what experts tell you, they don’t know either.

Certain tribes close to the Arctic circle lived on whale meat and blubber for half the year. And they were perfectly healthy.

But that doesn’t mean you or I could necessarily be perfectly healthy eating whale blubber for half the year.

There are too many external and internal factors at play: nutrient content, how it was grown, additives, processing, selective breeding, genetic modification, health conditions food interacts with, ancestral homeland, etc.

Some studies suggest most people are not wheat intolerant, but glyphosate (a dangerous herbicide) intolerant.

Asians are highly susceptible to lactose-intolerance. It makes much more sense for Asians to cut out dairy than it does for me to cut out dairy when my ancestors have been drinking milk and eating cheese for thousands, if not tens of thousands of years.

(I love cheese.)

But it isn’t just food that is so confusing and impossible to nail down.

Just like sugar, we can all agree that war is horrible.

But is war never necessary? Should we never defend ourselves against aggression? Should we never eat fruit, because of the sugar it contains?

Fruit is good for you! And standing up against aggressive violence is too.

We have the same choice of how to react to various “truths.”

  1. Reject all truth as unknowable. Resign yourself to being ignorant, and cynically mock others for attempting to understand anything, or holding any opinions whatsoever.
  2. Choose an ideology, adhere to it with religious zeal, spread the gospel, and attack non-believers.
  3. Do your due diligence to understand what’s relevant to you. But don’t stress since no one seems to know anyway.

People of all stripes present “facts.”

Can I, or even a team of 100, really confirm one of the hundreds of “facts” we read on the internet daily?

I can’t tell the difference between a Hollywood movie and clips from a real war.

So are we to be stuck in this perpetual state of uncertainty?

Perhaps at some level that is our fate. We cannot possibly learn the truth about all the things we are told. There is nothing wrong with being mainly interested in the truths most relevant to your own personal life.

So take a defensive approach:

  • What do the people telling me this want me to do with this information?
  • How do they want me to feel/ act?
    • Anger, sympathy, frustration, love, hopelessness, desire, fear?
    • Will that benefit them?
    • Will it lead to the desired result?

Take 9/11 for example.

Whether the official story is true or not, the government wants me to trust them to provide me security.

Without truly knowing what happened on 9/11, I can still ask myself, have I become safer as a result of post 9/11 “security”? Have the wars in the Middle East decreased terrorism?

In my assessment, the government’s actions afterward should not be trusted. I can arrive at that conclusion without knowing the truth about 9/11.

If 9/11 was an inside job, the U.S. government got everything they wanted, and all their “progress” should be rejected and reversed. If 9/11 was not an inside job, then the U.S. government has failed their expressed purpose, and all their “progress” should be rejected, and reversed.

We can arrive at the best course of action without knowing the ultimate truth.

A broad knowledge base still helps get as close as possible to the truth. Often you can triangulate which facts are true if you gather enough sources and data.

But there are infinite subjects to consider. It isn’t possible, or even worthwhile, to find the truth about most things you are presented with on a daily basis.

It is up to us to decide individually which subject matters are most deserving of our focus. And just like the best diet, it will be different for everyone.

And anyway, it’s probably more worthwhile studying which diet is best for you, versus studying if 9/11 was an inside job.

We can control our diets. We can’t control a rogue state.

 

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US Should Support Israeli Land Grabs Say AIPAC Think-Tankers – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on September 26, 2019

https://original.antiwar.com/smith-grant/2019/09/24/us-should-support-israeli-land-grabs-say-aipac-think-tankers/

by

It is always worthwhile to monitor – before it’s too late – policy recommendations emerging from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC ecosystem. Since 1984 that ecosystem includes AIPAC’s associated think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Two WINEP thought leaders are currently advancing a serious proposal for the US to help Israel avert the fate of becoming a “bi-national state.” It’s a two-step process. First the US would formally recognize Israeli sovereignty over large Israeli-annexed West Bank settlement blocs. Then the U.S. would use its powers of persuasion to win European, U.N. and Arab acceptance of the deal, all the while giving Israel billions more in foreign assistance.

All of these policy prescriptions appear in the new Dennis Ross/David Makovsky book, Be Strong and of Good Courage: How Israel’s Most Important Leaders Shaped its Destiny. Dennis Ross worked on the “peace process” within US government for decades. Though trying to maintain a pretense of impartiality, Israel partisans like Ross working within such teams always managed to make the US appear to operate as “Israel’s lawyer.” WINEP’s David Makovsky labored as a journalist and then executive editor of the Jerusalem Post reporting on the “peace process” before joining WINEP.

The rocket boosters for the new book’s delivery vehicles are lessons Makovsky and Ross reveal from decisions made by Israel’s “founding fathers.” According to the book, whenever Israel was at an existential inflection point, David Ben-Gurion, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin and Ariel Sharon made near-unilateral and controversial decisions necessary for Israel to prevail.

For example, just prior to Israel’s declaration of statehood in 1948, David Ben-Gurion had to overcome opposition from the venerable US Secretary of State George Marshall. Marshall famously argued for a US funded plan to rebuild post-WWII Europe. Less known is that Marshall wanted “Zionists to delay declaration of statehood” based on department views of how to best advance US policy toward the Soviet Union and Arab states.

In David Ben-Gurion’s estimation, according to the book, “a declaration of statehood, by contrast, would allow the Zionists to tap their greatest resource – supporters abroad – who could help smuggle weaponry into the nascent country…” Ben-Gurion convinced members of his cabinet, who preferred postponement and accepting a truce, that immediately declaring statehood was the proper strategy.

Key to Ben-Gurion’s success – according to the book – was cultivating “a mass US movement to pressure leaders in Washington…” Ben-Gurion believed that Western democracies would, whenever a crisis arose (whether precipitated by Israel or not) respond to well-organized public pressure campaigns. This is why Ben Gurion spent ten months in 1940-1941 “rallying American Jewish organizations, coaxing them toward realizing that Zionism did not threaten their identity as Americans.” The book omits the precise details – which are available thanks to the release of FBI investigation records and a handful of prosecutions – about precisely how the Jewish Agency American Section, which was under Ben-Gurion’s command, organized a massive illegal weapons procurement and smuggling network in the US. Ben-Gurion also reached out to churches and labor unions to build a broader lobby for Israel within the US. Although, again, the book does not mention known details about the public relations and lobbying campaigns of the Israel lobby’s umbrella group the American Zionist Council which became AIPAC, it acknowledges the key role of proto-Israeli leaders in their formation.

Today the US Israel lobby must help Israelis avoid the fate of becoming a binational state, where Palestinians have the right to vote and other accoutrements of citizenship, according to Makovsky and Ross. It’s only fair, since Israel has provided a rallying point for Jewish identity in the US, according to the pair.

“Jewish leaders, too, have a stake in Israel preserving its basic Zionist character; it is very much part of their ethos and belief system. In addition, they well know that Jewish identity in America has, at least in part, been influenced by the ability to identify with Israel. Should that become more difficult, it would certainly produce a critical loss of support for Israel in the Jewish community, especially among the younger Jewish demographic that embraces more progressive, liberal values.”

If the delivery vehicle of Be Strong and of Good Courage is a collection of enticing founding father bios, what is the payload? It appears in the final chapter. As to be expected, it is an appeal for additional withdrawals from the U.S. Treasury Department and already dangerously overdrawn bank account of US international standing.

The status quo drift toward a binational state is unsustainable and a “prescription for endless conflict.” The root cause of that problem, which the authors intensely fixate upon, is the high “Arab” birth rate in East Jerusalem, parts of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. Israel can’t hang onto or annex everything. So, decisions must now be made.

Israel’s occupations, human rights violations and blockades vex European leaders, generate controversy on American college campuses and are now even being exposed by some elite opinion makers. While, according to the book, these diplomatic costs of militarily occupying and subjugating Palestinians to dire human rights conditions remain “manageable,” maintaining the pretense that there is a viable “peace process” that will lead inevitably to the “two state solution” the authors claim to prefer – is no longer feasible. And the Israelis are utterly oblivious to the true “demographic trends.” The book also cites a litany of supposed evidence that Palestinians “never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity” to obtain a state of their own. This has long been an Israel lobby canard, first deployed by Abba Eban, and no doubt plays well to Ross and Makovsky supporters.

The book proposes that in exchange for ending settlement construction east of the separation wall Israel built, much of it on Palestinian land, and a halt in Jewish real estate acquisition within Arab neighborhoods in occupied East Jerusalem, Israeli settlers would move to locations within Israel or to lands that will soon become part of Israel. Israel will of course maintain the right to conduct military operations east of the wall, but would abide Palestinian development of Dead Sea tourism and mineral industries.

The book recommends that the US Israel lobby, which partly owes its existence, identity and power to Israel, do what it does best: extract what Israel needs from America to realize Israel’s national ambitions. The US should provide “cash” to relocate settlers to areas within the Green Line or to newly annexed West Bank settlement blocs. The US should then block any UN resolutions opposed to unilateral Israeli annexations, and “work with the Europeans and others to gain their public support for Israel’s unilateral moves to ensure separation.” The US should also fight the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and publicly criticize European and Arab leaders who fail to wholeheartedly approve. Of course, Israel’s annexations will create new security challenges, so the US should also promptly increase Israel’s “qualitative military edge.”…

You get the idea

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Why isn’t the media covering Turkish President Erdogan’s ties to ISIS

Posted by M. C. on September 26, 2019

https://nypost.com/2019/09/21/why-isnt-the-media-covering-turkish-president-erdogans-ties-to-isis/

 

…But what should disturb Americans most about Erdogan is not his efforts to influence Congress, his abysmal record as a jailer of journalists, his genocidal war against the Kurds, or even the $100 million mosque he has constructed in Lanham, Maryland.

It’s Erdogan’s commitment to global jihad, and specifically, to ISIS terrorists. Since 2012, the Turkish intelligence service, MIT, under Erdogan’s direction, has been providing resources and material assistance to ISIS, while Turkish Customs officials turned a blind eye to ISIS recruits flowing across Turkey’s borders into Syria and Iraq.

Scores of ISIS fighters captured by pro-U.S. Kurdish forces in northern Syria showed Turkish exit stamps on their passports, and otherwise boasted of the direct assistance they had received from Turkish authorities.

“Turkish intelligence knows everything,” one captured ISIS fighter told his Kurdish captors recently.

Many former ISIS fighters have now joined the Turkish-backed forces that have occupied the Syrian Kurdish city of Afrin, where they have engaged in ethnic cleansing.

Two Turkish intelligence officers, captured by Kurdish guerilla fighters in northern Iraq in 2017, provided insider accounts of Turkish government assistance to ISIS and other jihadi groups operating in Syria and Iraq.

Turkey’s assistance to ISIS starts right at the top. In 2016, Wikileaks published an archive of 58,000 emails documenting the involvement of Erdogan’s son-in-law, Berat Albayrak, in helping ISIS market oil stolen from Syria and Iraq.

Until the publication of the emails, Albayrak had denied any involvement in the illicit oil trade.

Sümeyye Erdogan, daughter of the Turkish president, reportedly set up an entire medical corps, including a hospital to treat wounded ISIS fighters in Sanlurfa, a city in Southeastern Turkey close to the Syrian border.

ISIS evacuated severely wounded fighters across the border into Sanliurfa in Turkish army trucks without undergoing Customs inspection.

The evidence of Erdogan’s direct, personal and institutional support for ISIS and related jihadi groups is so extensive, the wonder is why the American media is not paying more attention to it.

This week a new group, the Turkey-ISIS Research Project, is sponsoring bus-billboards to roam the Big Apple. The message is clear: “Erdogan, the Godfather of Jihadist Terrorists, is Not Welcome in the United States.”

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More U.S. Commandos Are Fighting Invisible Wars in the Middle East

Posted by M. C. on September 26, 2019

Too much smoke and mirrors…i.e.lies

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https://theintercept.com/2019/09/25/special-operations-command-military-middle-east/

The percentage of commandos deployed to the Middle East is on the rise, according to new statistics provided to The Intercept by U.S. Special Operations Command. On average, more than 4,000 Special Operations forces — Navy SEALs, Army Green Berets, and Marine Corps Raiders among them — are deployed to the region each week, more than anywhere else in the world.

The increase comes at a time when the United States is apparently planning a troop drawdown in Afghanistan, despite a peace agreement with the Taliban having fallen apart. It also coincides with President Donald Trump’s announcements that the Islamic State has been defeated and that the U.S. is “rapidly pulling out of Syria.” Gone are the military surges that brought tens of thousands of conventional U.S. forces to Iraq and Afghanistan. Gone, too, is the faddish fixation with counterinsurgency, rehabilitated from the Vietnam War dustbin (only to be deep-sixed again) and the military’s “government in a box” pipe dreams.

Today, American warfare is increasingly typified by a reliance on Special Operations Forces, private contractors, local proxies working with and for the military and CIA, and air power. These low-visibility forces make greater secrecy and less accountability more likely for U.S. military actions in the Middle East, said Daphne Eviatar, director of the Security with Human Rights program at Amnesty International USA, who views the growing reliance on commandos as both predictable and troubling.

“Already we’re not getting answers to basic questions, like who the U.S. has killed and why it hasn’t better protected civilians, and the more the U.S. role is turned over to Special Operations Forces, the CIA, or contractors, the less information the government is going to provide,” Eviatar told The Intercept. “One has to wonder if that isn’t the reason they’re apparently shifting these roles to secret agents whose actions and their consequences the government isn’t required to disclose.”

While more than 80 percent of America’s commandos deployed oversees were stationed in the greater Middle East — an area the military defines as stretching from Northeast Africa to Central and South Asia — at the beginning of the decade, the number fell to just over 50 percent in 2017. Since then, however, deployments to the region have been increasing.

This year, 62 percent of elite forces serving abroad have been involved in the multiple military efforts being carried out across the Central Command, or CENTCOM, area of operations, including Operation Inherent Resolve, which is aimed at defeating ISIS, also known as Daesh, in Iraq and Syria; Operation Freedom’s Sentinel, the U.S. effort in Afghanistan, which includes counterterrorism missions and support of allied Afghan forces; and Operation Yukon Journey, which supports Saudi Arabia and its partners in their fight against Yemen’s Houthi rebels.

“The forces that have the best capabilities and are trained and educated for these kinds of counterterrorism and irregular warfare activities, including training foreign countries’ forces, are U.S. Special Operations forces,” said Seth G. Jones, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and former senior adviser to U.S. Special Operations Command.

This special ops increase in the CENTCOM area of operations comes as senior White House advisers have reportedly proposed expanding the CIA’s presence in Afghanistan…

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Another Day, Another Scandal. What the ‘Trump-Ukraine Collusion’ Is Really About — Strategic Culture

Posted by M. C. on September 26, 2019

Still, profiting off a family connection in this manner is plainly corrupt, and Biden is obviously attempting to deflect attention from his own misdeeds by screaming about Trump. The upshot is yet another tedious pseudo-scandal in which Democrats will only succeed in embarrassing themselves.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/09/25/another-day-another-scandal-what-the-trump-ukraine-collusion-is-really-about/

Daniel Lazare

 

For nearly a week, Washington has been consumed by reports that Donald Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to dig up dirt on Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden.

The furor began on Wednesday, Sept. 18, when the Washington Post disclosed that Trump had said something to an unknown foreign leader that “was so alarming that a US intelligence official who had worked at the White House went to the inspector general of the intelligence community.” Two days later, the Wall Street Journal reported that the foreign leader was Zelensky and that Trump had asked him “about eight times” in the course of a single phone conversation to look into allegations that then-Vice President Biden had pushed for the removal of a public prosecutor investigating a Ukrainian company that employed his son, Hunter. A day after that, Biden complained that Trump was trying to “smear me,” while on Sunday, Adam Schiff, Democratic chairman of the House intelligence committee, declared that Trump might be guilty of “the most profound violation of the presidential oath of office … during just about any presidency.”

From initial report to America’s greatest scandal ever in just four days – surely this was some sort of Washington speed record. Since the moment Trump was elected, Democrats have been searching for “the Big One,” as New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd put it, the scandal “that’s going to finally bring Donald Trump down” – and now at last they found it.

Of course, Democrats said the same about Russiagate, the scandal that dominated headlines for two and a half years but fizzled when special prosecutor Robert Mueller said he was unable to come up with evidence “that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government.” But now that Trump stood accused of conspiring or coordinating with the Ukrainian government – or at least trying to – surely the Big One was finally at hand.

But it’s not. One reason is that there’s no sign of a quid pro quo. The Washington Post suggested in its initial report that the purpose of the July 25 phone call was to “manipulate the Ukrainian government into helping Trump’s reelection campaign.” The means, supposedly, was $250 million in military aid that he was threatening to withhold if the Ukraine failed to cooperate. But the Wall Street Journal’s source specifically denied that Trump had threatened a cut-off while the New York Times reported that a decision to end military aid – subsequently revoked – had actually occurred weeks earlier.

Another reason for skepticism is that charges of a smear job clearly misplaced. If anyone’s activities are suspicious, it’s Biden’s, and Trump can hardly be blamed for wanting to get to the bottom of them.

To briefly recap: in February 2014, a US-backed coup spearheaded by ultra-rightists sent Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych fleeing and installed billionaire Petro Poroshenko in his place. This was bad news for a wealthy Yanukovych supporter named Mykola Zlochevsky who was widely accused of corruption and was in danger of losing all or some of his holdings. In an attempt to smooth things over with the Americans, Zlochevsky appointed Hunter Biden to a lucrative post with Burisma Holdings, a natural-gas company he founded in 2002. Hunter had just been discharged from the US Navy after testing positive for cocaine. He had no experience in the natural-gas business and knew nothing about the Ukraine. But he got the job anyway along with a salary of $50,000 a month.

But when the Ukrainian prosecutor general launched an investigation into Burisma, the Obama administration demanded that Viktor Shokin, the man who took over the office a year later, be removed. Indeed, Biden bragged that he threatened to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees during a visit to Kiev if Poroshenko didn’t do as he was told.

“I said, ‘We’re leaving in six hours,’” he said last year. “If the prosecutor’s not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch, he got fired.”

If anyone’s guilty of a quid pro quo, it would seem to be Biden.

Questions remain. Washington says it wanted Shokin because he was impeding the Ukraine’s anti-corruption drive and that it pushed for someone more vigorous even though the results for Burisma might have been negative. But the New York Times says the company was pleased by Shokin’s dismissal, and that a year later it was able to reach an amicable settlement with his successor. Hunter Biden’s job was safe.

Still, profiting off a family connection in this manner is plainly corrupt, and Biden is obviously attempting to deflect attention from his own misdeeds by screaming about Trump. The upshot is yet another tedious pseudo-scandal in which Democrats will only succeed in embarrassing themselves.

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We Are Jeopardized by the Creation of False Realities – PaulCraigRoberts.org

Posted by M. C. on September 26, 2019

The New York Times’ executive editor, Dean Baquet, told the Times employees that the Times was shifting its focus from Russiagate to Trump-the-racist. Note why Baquet characterizes Trump as a racist. Trump is a racist because the US has immigration laws and it is the duty of the president to enforce the laws of the US.

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/09/24/we-are-jeopardized-by-the-creation-of-false-realities/

We Are Jeopardized by the Creation of False Realities

Paul Craig Roberts

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” —George Orwell

In America today it is difficult to tell the truth without being accused of a variety of sins and marginalized. When speaking truth is no longer effective, there is no purpose in speaking it. This is the reason truth-tellers are being marginalized.  It is a way of shutting down truth, which, of course, makes it easy for the ruling oligarchs to control explanations in order to achieve their agendas.

Identity Politics is hate-based. It is no different from Marxist class war. It would be naive to expect any different outcome than Lenin’s class war that exterminated many. The lesson of history is that whoever is demonized is dispossessed or killed. It is the human way. When hatred is unleashed, it runs its course.

Thinking about my recent columns about the prospect of white genocide, the hatred of white people that has shown its ugly head is actually volcanic. https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/09/24/multiculturalism-brings-us-the-knockout-game/  How else to explain the national eruption of hate speech by the media, websites, Democratic Party, and universities against President Trump and white people the minute the El Paso shooting was reported? There wasn’t any disagreement except Tucker Carlson, and he was sent on “vacation” for saying that white supremacy is a hoax.

White supremacy is a hoax.  Why was the hoax created if not to be used to demonize white people?  If people, including many whites,  were not believers in this hoax, how could Carranza, the Mexican-American who heads the New York City school system, use the public school system to conduct a campaign against “toxic white supremacy culture.” Here we have the use of public money to cleanse America of “white toxic culture.”  So how are whites supreme when “white values” are being cleansed out of the culture?

Why is the NY Times committing itself not to better news reporting after the Russiagate fiasco, but to “reframing” America as a racist country beginning in 1619? To intelligent people, this sounds silly.  But to the New York Times this is real. The executive editor of the NY Times sees it as the Times’ duty to demonize Americans of British and European descent and to misrepresent them as racists who built a country on slavery. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/new-goal-for-new-york-times-reframe-american-history-and-target-trump-too 

The New York Times’ executive editor, Dean Baquet, told the Times employees that the Times was shifting its focus from Russiagate to Trump-the-racist. Note why Baquet characterizes Trump as a racist. Trump is a racist because the US has immigration laws and it is the duty of the president to enforce the laws of the US. If Trump did not enforce the immigration laws, he would be failing to perform his duty. According to Baquet, Trump is a racist simply because he enforces the immigration laws of the United States.

If Baquet doesn’t like immigration laws, why doesn’t he use the NY Times to lead a campaign to repeal the immigration laws instead of leading a campaign to brand Trump and the American people racists? If the Democratic Party doesn’t like immigration laws, why don’t they introduce bills to repeal the laws instead of blocking the president from enforcing the laws?  If we don’t need borders, we don’t need a military.

What the NY Times should be writing about is the creation of hate in America and its own contribution to the creation of racial and gender hate that divides the American people. Why is the New York Times preaching hate? Why is the New York Times a propagandist for hate-preaching Identity Politics, the ideology of the Democratic Party and the liberal/progressive/left, when it is supposed to be a newspaper? Read the rest of this entry »

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