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Trump Trillion-Dollar-Plus Deficits are Putting America on a Path to Fiscal Ruin
S. Collender - USA Today
It became very clear this month that neither the Trump White House nor its allies on Capitol Hill want you to know that the federal budget is already in very bad shape … and getting worse. It happened when the Treasury, the official keeper of Washington’s financial results, issued its monthly statement for the first ten months of fiscal 2018 about federal revenue, spending and, therefore, the budget deficit. Treasury showed what no president ever wants to admit: The deficit is spiking. The federal government’s red ink this year is already 21 percent above what it was in 2017, and there are few prospects that the bottom line will improve anytime soon … The budget policymakers on Capitol Hill and in the Trump White House obviously aren’t focusing on much beyond 2018 and 2020.
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US National Debt Jumps $500 Billion in Less Than Six Months
P. Kasperowicz - Washington Examiner
The U.S. national debt has increased by more than half a trillion dollars in less than six months, amid predictions that the U.S. is on the verge of returning to another explosion in government borrowing. The debt rose to an all-time high of $21.4 trillion on Thursday, according to government data posted Friday. That’s more than $500 billion above the $20.88 trillion seen March 7, just a bit more than five months ago. While the debt continues to rise, the pace of growth has slowed for much of 2018. It only took about six months for the debt to jump from $20 trillion to $21 trillion, a mark it hit in mid-March. … Fiscal 2019 is expected to be worse: The Congressional Budget Office predicts a budget deficit of just under $1 trillion.
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The Crucifixion of Jeremy Corbyn
Philip Giraldi
… Prime Minister Theresa May is careful never to offend either Israel or the wealthy and powerful British Jewish community … There are two principal objectives to the “get Corbyn” campaign. The first is to remove him from the Labour Party leadership position, thereby ensuring that he will never be elected Prime Minister, while also eliminating from the party any and all members who are perceived as being “too critical” of Israel. In practice that has meant anyone who criticizes Israel at all. And second it is to establish as a legal principle that the “hate crime” offense of anti-Semitism specifically be defined to include criticism of Israel, thereby making it a criminal offense to write or speak about Israel’s racist behavior towards its Muslim and Christian minority while also making it impossible to freely discuss its war crimes.
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Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn has ‘’declared war on the Jews,’’ claimed the President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Marie van der Zyl. She made the remark in an interview with i24news. She also said that Corbyn’s “hatred of Israel and Zionism runs so deep he cannot separate that from antisemitism.” “A Corbyn-led government could represent a threat to world security,” van der Zyl warned. Her comments came after recent revelations about the Labour leader’s meetings with Palestinian terrorist chiefs and visits to the Middle East to meet with senior Hamas figures, while he was still a backbencher.
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Can the US Keep Lying About Israel’s Nukes?
Grant Smith - Antiwar. com
… In 2012 the Obama administration promulgated a gag order in the form of a secrecy classification guideline – WNP-136 — banning all federal agency employees and contractors from discussing, writing about, or releasing government information about Israel’s nuclear weapons program … Backers of the gag order hope to undermine informed public debate about nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, ongoing illicit transfers of know-how, material and technology from the US to Israel, to maintain a spotlight on Iran as the region’s nuclear proliferation threat, as well as quell debate about whether the US is truly a champion of nuclear non-proliferation … Congress, subject to the same Israel lobby pressures, has similarly ignored its own law when passing massive annual aid giveaways to Israel …
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Israel Might Have as Many as 300 Nuclear Weapons. And Some Are in the 'Ocean.' (Thanks to Germany)
Sebastien Roblin - The National Interest
Israel has never officially admitted to possessing nuclear weapons. Unofficially, Tel Aviv wants everyone to know it has them, and doesn’t hesitate to make thinly-veiled references to its willingness to use them if confronted by an existential threat. Estimates on the size of Tel Aviv’s nuclear stockpile range from 80 to 300 nuclear weapons … Israeli Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu then purchased three more German submarines … In 2012, Der Spiegel published an expose detailing how German engineers were well-aware of the Dolphin 2’s intended role as nuclear-weapon delivery system, arousing some controversy with the public, as Chancellor Merkel supposedly agreed to the sale in exchange for unrealized promises from Netanyahu to adopt a more conciliatory policy towards the Palestinians.
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President Kennedy, Israel and the Nuclear Proliferation Problem
A. Cohen and W. Burr - National Security Archive (Washington, DC)
President John F. Kennedy worried that Israel’s nuclear program was a potentially serious proliferation risk and insisted that Israel permit periodic inspections to mitigate the danger, according to declassified documents published today … Kennedy pressured the government of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to prevent a military nuclear program, particularly after stage-managed tours of the Dimona facility for U.S. government scientists in 1961 and 1962 raised suspicions within U.S. intelligence that Israel might be concealing its underlying nuclear aims. Kennedy’s long-run objective, documents show, was to broaden and institutionalize inspections of Dimona by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
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Israel's Nuclear Arsenal Vexed Nixon: Deceit and 'Pressure'
The New York Times
… “The Israelis, who are one of the few peoples whose survival is genuinely threatened, are probably more likely than almost any other country to actually use their nuclear weapons,” Henry A. Kissinger, the national security adviser, warned Mr. Nixon in a memorandum dated July 19, 1969 … “This is one program on which the Israelis have persistently deceived us,” Mr. Kissinger said, “and may even have stolen from us.” … “On the other hand, if we withhold the Phantoms and they make this fact public in the United States, enormous political pressure will be mounted on us,” Mr. Kissinger went on.
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Iran demanded Monday that the UN’s top court order the United States to suspend nuclear-linked sanctions against Tehran, but Washington vowed to “vigorously” fend off the legal challenge. The Islamic Republic launched a suit at the International Court of Justice over US President Donald Trump’s decision to reimpose sanctions that were lifted in a landmark 2015 accord. Trump says the sanctions are needed to ensure Iran never builds a nuclear bomb. But Iran’s representative Mohsen Mohebi branded them “naked economic aggression”. His team of lawyers told the court in The Hague that the measures were already devastating Iran’s economy and threatening the welfare of its citizens. “The United States is publicly propagating a policy intended to damage as severely as possible Iran’s economy and Iranian nationals and companies,” Mohebi said.
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Hajo Herrmann, Luftwaffe Hero and Postwar Freedom Fighter
Revisionists.com
Hajo Herrmann (1913-2010) was an outstanding German Luftwaffe pilot who also distinguished himself during the Second World War as a courageous air force commander and innovative air defense tactician. After the war he built a new career as an attorney, and became known for his role in civil rights cases, defending patriots and “Holocaust deniers” accused of violating German laws against free speech. Until his death at the age of 97, he remained steadfastly loyal to his people, his heritage, and the ideals of his youth.
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Afghanistan: The War That Shames America
Eric Margolis
After 17 bloody years, the longest war in US history continues without relent or purpose in Afghanistan. There, a valiant, fiercely-independent people, the Pashtun (Pathan) mountain tribes, have battled the full might of the US Empire to a stalemate that has so far cost American taxpayers $4 trillion, and 2,371 dead and 20,320 wounded soldiers. No one knows how many Afghans have died … Watching the world’s greatest power bomb and ravage little Afghanistan, a nation so poor that some of its people can’t afford sandals, is a huge dishonor for Americans … Nobody in Washington can enunciate a good reason for continuing the colonial war in Afghanistan. One hears talk of minerals, women’s rights and democracy as a pretext for keeping US forces in Afghanistan. All nonsense.
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Fifteen Years of Forever Wars
Chas Freeman
… In 2018, the Cost of War Project at Brown’s Watson Institute documents American involvement in some level of combat in 76 nations. For at least the past 15 years, we have been creating more terrorists than we kill … We cannot erase past errors. We can and should learn from them. Yet we do not seem to be doing so. Instead, we continue to repeat our blunders … Today our homeland is shabbier and we are less – not more – secure than we were before we began our rampage through the Muslim world … All our current wars are extra-constitutional … And, all these wars began as illegal invasions of foreign sovereignty and breaches of the peace under the UN Charter and international law.
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America the Unexceptional
William S. Smith - The American Conservative
… Hubristic nations that claim a unique place for themselves high atop the moral universe tend to be imperialistic … And prideful claims of moral purity are the inevitable predicate to imposing one’s will upon another. Once leaders assert that their national soul is of a special kind — indispensable and not subject to the same rules — the road to hell has been paved … That Washington has meddled in countless nations’ affairs from Iraq to Russia — and caused untold damage — is of no account to the establishment. Rules do not apply to democracy promoters. After the Iraq war, we should have reconsidered our hubristic American exceptionalism … Without the return of a certain humility, there will be more military adventures abroad and political strife at home.
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America’s Meddling Machine: The US Funded Group that Interferes in Elections Around the Globe
Max Blumenthal – Grayzone
… These organizations are doing precisely what Congress accuses Russia-funded media outlets and troll farms of doing in the United States. They interfere in other countries’ politics with foreign money. The only difference is they do it openly, and in the name of spreading freedom. Founded in 1983 by then president Ronald Reagan, the National Endowment for Democracy became an international vehicle for the neoconservative agenda … Over the years, the NED and its partner organizations have weaponized civil society and media against governments that stand in the way of right-wing, free market parties and corporate interests.
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Looking West From Red Square
Paul Starobin - City Journal
… Consult a Russian … and you’re apt to scrape against the hard rock of a patriot. This was the great mistake in the neoliberal belief in global capitalism as an elixir for peace between the nations — an underappreciation of the staying power of nationalism, a resonant force in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and now again in the first decades of the twenty-first … The true nature of Russian–American antagonism is as a clash of complexes — an “inferiority complex” on the part of Russians, and a “superiority complex” on the part of Americans, Egor Sartakov, a specialist in the works of Nikolai Gogol, told me at the Budapest.
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The Secret Betrayal
Charles Lutton – Institute for Historical Review
From 1943 until early 1947 Western countries, led by Britain and the United States, returned nearly two and a half million prisoners of war and refugees to the Soviet Union, regardless of their individual wishes … During the summer of 1944 the British began to ship thousands of Russians from POW and refugee camps to the USSR. When informed of their destination, many of the prisoners committed suicide. The Foreign Office did what it could to suppress news of the suicides … British officers who delivered prisoners to Soviet ports, such as Murmansk and Odessa, witnessed NKVD execution squads murder Russians as they left ship.
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Stalin's 'Kiev Butcher' Executed More Than 10,000 People in 18 Months During Soviet Purges
Daily Mail (Britain)
A vile Soviet state killer with the blood of more than 10,000 people on his hands has been unmasked by a Russian researcher. Trained locksmith Ivan Nagorny – known as the Kiev Butcher – personally shot or ordered the executions in an 18-month period during Stalin’s notorious purges. Among those he himself slaughtered in a single day were 37 professors and tutors from Ukrainian universities who were sentenced to death as ‘enemies of the people’ on September 22, 1936. The ‘trusted’ Stalinist executioner was honoured two months later for his industrial-scale mass killing with a Red Star order … The butcher stripped his helpless victims of political repression before they were shot – and told his team tasked with clearing up their corpses to dress in their clothes.
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The Recruitment Problem the Military Doesn’t Want to Talk About: A Dwindling Pool of Largely Obese, Uneducated Delinquents
M. Perry - The American Conservative
… The problem, it seems, isn’t that young people don’t want to join the Army — or any of the services — it’s that they can’t … One in three potential recruits are disqualified from service because they’re overweight, one in four cannot meet minimal educational standards (a high school diploma or GED equivalent), and one in ten have a criminal history. In plain terms, about 71 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds (the military’s target pool of potential recruits) are disqualified from the minute they enter a recruiting station: that’s 24 million out of 34 million Americans.
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Behind the Mania to Stop Jeremy Corbyn
Norman G. Finkelstein
… If it’s anti-Semitism to believe that “Jews think they are better than other people,” then most Jews would appear to be infected by this virus … The three richest Brits are Jewish. Jews comprise only .5 percent of the population but fully 20 percent of the 100 richest Brits. Relative both to the general population and to other ethno-religious groups, British Jews are in the aggregate disproportionately wealthy, educated, and professionally successful … If Corbyn’s traducers succeed, the glimmer of possibility he has held out will be snuffed out by a gang of moral blackmailers and extortionists. Is it anti-Semitism to believe that “Jews have too much power in Britain” — or is it just plain common sense?
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Now, This is Racism!
Gilad Atzmon
What do you call an exclusively Aryan club that welcomes support from ALL members of society but only allows Aryans in as members? Nazis I guess. … Would Jeremy Corbyn accept support from groups that name themselves ‘Aryan Voice for Labour’ or ‘Whites for Corbyn’? Would the Labour party allow any such groups in its proximity? I don’t think so; they would be booted out in seconds. The Labour leader would be very quick to disassociate himself from such racially exclusive bodies. But neither Labour nor Corbyn have ever contemplated denouncing the Jews only, racially exclusive enthusiasts at Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL).
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Anti-American sentiment has arisen in Turkey, with the Turkish president blaming Washington for the collapse of Turkey’s currency. On Istanbul’s main retail shopping street a man declares, “We will bring the Americans to their knees,” as he burns dollar bills in front of TV cameras. An outpouring of anti-American anger is being felt across the country … President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called for a boycott of iPhones along with other American technology as he whips up anti-U.S. sentiment in increasingly bellicose nationalist speeches … “The anti-Americanism in the last decade has hit a record high among all the social classes, and from all the political parties from left to right,” Selcen added. For decades, anti-Americanism has been rife in Turkish popular culture. Films and TV shows often show Americans conspiring against Turkey.
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China, seeking to skirt U.S. sanctions, will use oil tankers from Iran for its purchases of that country’s crude, throwing Tehran a lifeline while European companies such as France’s Total are walking away due to fear of reprisals from Washington. The United States is trying to halt Iranian oil exports in an effort to force Tehran to negotiate a new nuclear agreement and to curb its influence in the Middle East. China, which has cut imports of U.S. crude amid a trade war with Washington, has said it opposes unilateral sanctions, and defended its commercial ties with Iran … China, Iran’s biggest oil customer, wants to keep buying Iranian crude despite the sanctions, which were re-imposed after the United States withdrew in May from a 2015 agreement to halt Iran’s nuclear program.
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Five Reasons for the Global Pushback on New Iran Sanctions
Lawrence J. Korb - The National Interest
Not surprisingly the Trump administration’s precipitous withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — known as the Iran Nuclear Deal — has lead too significant pushback from the other five signatories to the deal, as well from several other nations which have benefitted from the agreement. This strong disagreement has also been amplified by President Trump’s decision to re-impose sanctions on Iran which the Obama administration had canceled as part of the JCPOA.
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Facebook, Twitter Shut Anti-Israel Campaigns Tied to Iran
Associated Press / The Times of Israel
Facebook has identified and banned more accounts engaged in misleading political behavior ahead of the US midterm elections in November, including accounts linked to Iran attempting to promote anti-Israel content. The social network said Tuesday that it had removed 652 pages, groups, and accounts linked to Russia and, unexpectedly, Iran, for “coordinated inauthentic behavior” that included the sharing of political material. Facebook has significantly stepped up policing of its platform since last year, when it acknowledged that Russian agents successfully ran political influence operations on its platform that were aimed at swaying the 2016 presidential election. Other social media networks have done likewise, and continue to turn up fresh evidence of political disinformation campaigns.
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The Lesson in the Ruins of Rome
Stephen Kinzer - Boston Globe
… Despite its vast wealth and even vaster territory — it dominated Europe and much of the Middle East and North Africa — it collapsed. Walking through the ruins of ancient Rome has often led travelers to wonder how that happened … The United States is the Rome of our age. Are we heading for the same end? … Having subdued such great territory, Roman leaders believed there was no limit to how far they could extend their power. In the end, though, they overestimated what their armies could achieve. Satraps rebelled, wars bled the treasury, and a population dulled by spectacle tolerated it all until the empire collapsed … To citizens of those doomed empires, collapse seemed unimaginable until the end — just as it does to us today … Today this same misjudgment, fatal to Rome, shapes America’s approach to the world.
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Why Did Christianity Prevail?
Tom Bissell - The New York Times
… So how did Christianity triumph? To put it plainly, Christianity was something new on this earth. It wasn’t closed to women. It was so concerned with questions of social welfare (healing the sick, caring for the poor) that it embedded them into its doctrines. And while there were plenty of henotheist pagans (that is, people who worshiped one god while not denying the validity of others), Christianity went far beyond henotheism’s hesitant claim upon ultimate truth. It was an exclusivist faith that foreclosed — was designed to foreclose — devotion to all other deities … Thus, Christian believers go from roughly 1,000 in A.D. 60, to 40,000 in A.D. 150, to 2.5 million in A.D. 300. Ehrman allows that these raw numbers may look “incredible. But in fact they are simply the result of an exponential curve.”
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Washington Has Lost Its Way
Philip Giraldi
… Israel benefits from a large, influential and wealthy community of diaspora Jews that is willing to do its bidding and which also possesses easy access to the media and to politicians, many of whom are more than willing to be corrupted by money. This has led to the creation of an “Israeli narrative,” most particularly in the United States, which glamorizes the state of Israel through the incessant reiteration of expressions like “the only democracy in the Middle East” and “America’s best friend and closest ally,” both of which assertions are completely false. It should surprise no one that the Trump administration is packed with Israel-firsters from top to bottom … Within the White House, there is virtually no pushback against Israeli pretensions even when American interests are being damaged.
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Did Sheldon Adelson Just Capture the GOP?
Eli Clifton - LobeLog
Billionaire Sheldon Adelson, President Donald Trump’s biggest donor, just secured his role as the GOP’s top 2018 funder with a $25 million contribution to Senate Republicans midterm election efforts. In all likelihood, he also bought himself a direct line to any Republican whose ear he wants to bend. Adelson is outspoken about his priorities — a hawkish U.S. policy towards Iran, and unwavering U.S. support for Israel’s right-wing Prime Minister … House and Senate Republicans, as well as the Trump White House, have largely delivered on Adelson’s foreign policy wish list. Adelson, alongside with his wife Miriam, already contributed $30 million to House Republican efforts to maintain a majority, bringing the casino magnate’s direct investment in the GOP’s 2018 House and Senate election efforts to over $55 million.
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Flinging Poo at a Jew
David Cole
… There’s a myth that Jews tell themselves, and I’d go so far as to say that it’s a myth of such monumental importance, it influences not just Jewish behavior, but world events. It’s the myth that Jews are part of the “disenfranchised.” On one side is the “white Christian power structure,” and on the other side, the “outsiders” (blacks, Latinos, Muslims, gays, lesbians, trannies…and Jews). This is the guiding myth that informs the actions of Jewish leftists … This Jewish delusion of being among the “99 percent” is what compels Jews in the West to promote suicidal policies … Here in the U.S., leftist Jews are working overtime to flood this country with brown folks who don’t care about us. People who see us as white, and who see the Holocaust as a white-on-white crime from a distant land.
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Controlled Opposition: Sophisticated Jewish Power
Gilad Atzmon
… Jewish power is actually far more sophisticated than simply a list of Jewish lobbies or individuals performing highly developed manipulative skills. Jewish power is the unique capacity to stop us from discussing or even contemplating Jewish power. It is the capacity to determine the boundaries of the political discourse and criticism in particular. Contrary to popular belief, it is not ‘right wing’ Zionists who facilitate Jewish power, It is actually the ‘good’, the ‘enlightened’ and the ‘progressive’ who make Jewish power the most effective and forceful power in the land.
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Jewish-Zionist Power in America
Mark Weber – Podcast
A factual, reasoned 16-minute talk on the immense power and influence of the “Jewish lobby” in the US, and its harmful role, especially in directing US Middle East policy. As long as this power remains entrenched, says Weber, there will be no end to the Jewish-Zionist domination of American political life and the mass media, Zionist oppression of Palestinians, the Israeli threat to peace, and the bloody conflict between Jews and non-Jews in the Middle East.
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Jewish Wealth by the Numbers
Steve Sailer - Taki's Magazine
… Forbes Israel, the Tel Aviv offshoot of the American business magazine, has a cover story on Jewish billionaires. The Israeli edition has made up a list, drawn from Forbes’s overall ranking of the world’s 1,426 billionaires, of the 165 richest Jews in the world. “Per capita, Jews are a little over 100 times more likely to become billionaires than the rest of the human race.” … Jews are usually said to comprise about 0.2% of the world’s population, so eleven percent of the world’s billionaires means they’re doing pretty well.
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A 'Regime' is a Government at Odds With the US Empire
G. Shupak - FAIR
… The word “regime” suggests a government that is unrepresentative, repressive, corrupt, aggressive … When, for the media, does a government become a “regime”? The answer, broadly speaking: A country’s political leaders are likely to be called a “regime” when they do not follow US dictates, and are less likely to be categorized as such if they cooperate with the empire. … The case of stalwart US ally Israel offers an illuminating counterpoint. Even though Israel violently rules over 2.5 Palestinians in the West Bank and keeps two million under siege in Gaza, and even though Palestinians living as citizens of Israel face institutional discrimination, the Israeli government is almost never described as a “regime” in a way that carries the negative connotations discussed above.
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In Rural America, Violent Crime Reaches Highest Level in a Decade
A. Greenblatt - Governing
… The violent crime rate in rural areas, meanwhile, has climbed above the national average for the first time in ten years. In Iowa, the overall violent crime rate rose by three percent between 2006 and 2016, but shot up by 50 percent in communities with fewer than 10,000 residents. Violent crime rates have doubled in rural counties in West Virginia over the past couple of decades, while tripling in New Hampshire … Not all rural areas are poor, but many have lost jobs as factories have closed and farming has become increasingly consolidated. Lack of employment has naturally led to increases in poverty, which is closely associated with crime. The opioid epidemic has hit rural America particularly hard, and methamphetamine remains a major problem in many small towns.
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Where Have All the US Teachers Gone?
VOA News
As American students head into a new school year, a shortage of teachers — which reached a ten-year low in 2016 — is a major problem for an increasing number of U.S. states. In some states, there is especially a great need for teachers of special education, science and math. In others, schools are not finding enough qualified language teachers. In general, the U.S. has seen increased demand for teachers in recent years. Student numbers have risen, even as many school systems sought to reduce overall number of students per teacher. Shortages have largely been blamed on low pay rates for U.S. teachers. The issue has caused some to leave for better paying professions, while fewer people are choosing to become teachers.
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Americans’ View of Netanyahu is Highly Partisan, New Poll Finds
The Times of Israel
Americans’ opinion of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is sharply divided along party lines, a Gallup poll showed Tuesday. The survey of attitudes towards various world leaders showed 64 percent of Republicans had a favorable view of the Israeli leader, while only 17 percent of Democrats felt the same. Among independents Netanyahu had a 30 percent approval rating. The Israeli premier had an overall approval rating of 37 percent, with 29 percent disapproving, 13 percent having no opinion one way or the other, and 22 percent saying they had not heard of Netanyahu at all.
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Drug Overdose Deaths Hit More Than 71,500 in 2017
The Epoch Times
Fueled by the opioid crisis — particularly the flood of powerful synthetic opioids such as fentanyl from China — drug overdose deaths increased by at least 6.6 percent in 2017, according to provisional data by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). More than 71,500 Americans died of a drug overdose, with at least 68 percent of those deaths attributed to opioids. Both numbers are increases over the 64,000 deaths in 2016, of which almost two-thirds were opioid-related. Nebraska, North Carolina, and New Jersey had the largest increases in overdose deaths, up by 33 percent, 22 percent, and 21 percent, respectively. The states with the most overdose deaths were Pennsylvania, Florida, and California, which suffered more than 5,000 deaths apiece.
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Can America Ever Come Together Again?
Patrick J. Buchanan
… Most media elites accept the historic indictment — that before the Progressives came, this country was mired in racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia, and that its history had been a long catalog of crimes against indigenous peoples, Africans brought here in bondage, Mexicans whose lands we stole, migrants, and women and gays who were denied equality. The people who cheer Trump believe the country they inherited from their fathers was a great, good and glorious country, and that the media who detest Trump also despise them. For such as these, Trump cannot scourge the media often enough.
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President Trump on Monday signed a military spending bill that gives Israel $5.5 billion over the next ten years. This is part of a larger package to give Israel a total of $38 billion over the next ten years. While Israeli media reported on the aid to Israel, no U.S. media reports on the military bill seem to have mentioned the allocation to Israel. For example, an in depth PBS examination of the bill mentions aid to Ukraine, which gets a fraction of the amount to Israel, but fails to mention the money to Israel … It appears that no national U.S. news media have reported on these bills, despite the fact that this is the largest such aid package in U.S. history.
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Israel Is Not a Liberal Democracy
Paul R. Pillar
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared a “defining moment in the annals of Zionism and the annals of the state of Israel” when the Knesset enacted earlier this month a basic law (having constitutional status in Israel) making the right of national self-determination “unique to the Jewish people” and not applicable to all citizens … There always has been an inherent and fundamental tension between the idea of Israel as a democracy and the concept of giving preferential treatment to a single religious or ethnic group over all others. Major proponents of the new law recognize this, and some of them have been disarmingly frank about it … It should be noted that Israel is hardly alone in its region when it comes to giving preferential treatment to members of one religion even when this means impairing the freedom and rights of others.
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Atrocities in the Promised Land: The 'Insane Brutality' of Israel
Kathleen Christison (Former CIA analyst)
Words fail; ordinary terms are inadequate to describe the horrors Israel daily perpetrates, and has perpetrated for years, against the Palestinians… But the horror generally falls on deaf ears in most of Israel, in the U.S. political arena, in the mainstream U.S. media. Those who are horrified — and there are many — cannot penetrate the shield of impassivity that protects the political and media elite in Israel, even more so in the U.S., and increasing… Critics of Israel note increasingly that Israel is self-destructing, nearing a catastrophe of its own making. Israeli journalist Gideon Levy talks of a society in “moral collapse.”
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Uri Avnery, a trailblazing Israeli journalist and peace activist and one of the first to openly advocate for a Palestinian state, has died. He was 94. Avnery passed away on Monday at a Tel Aviv hospital after suffering a stroke. For decades, he was a symbol of the Israeli peace camp, easily recognized by his thick white beard and white hair. A member of Israel’s founding generation, he fought in its war of independence before becoming a publisher, member of parliament, author and activist. In the 1982 Lebanon War, he famously sneaked into besieged Beirut to talk to Israel’s then-nemesis, PLO chairman Yasser Arafat. Avnery challenged successive Israeli governments in arguing that a Palestinian state was the only way to secure peace for a democratic Israel with a Jewish majority.
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The Judaization of Israel
Uri Avnery (Israel)
… The Founding father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, now officially designated here as “the Visionary of the State”, envisioned the total disappearance of the Diaspora … In his diaries, which are of high literary value, Herzl did not hide his contempt for the Diaspora Jews. Some passages are positively anti-Semitic … A bill now being debated [and since then approved] in the Knesset would overturn the present doctrine of Israel being a “Jewish and democratic state” and replace it with the doctrine that Israel is “the nation-state of the Jewish people.”
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Hundreds of Neo-Nazis March in Berlin
Associated Press
Hundreds of neo-Nazis waving flags with the colors of the German Reich are marching through central Berlin, protected from counter-protesters by police in riot gear. Berlin police spokesman Thilo Cablitz said officers had to physically remove some left-wing demonstrators who had staged sit-down protests along the route of Saturday’s march. He added that stones and bottles were thrown at some of the far-right protesters, but couldn’t immediately say how many people were injured. The far-right protesters wore white shirts to commemorate the 31st anniversary of the death of high-ranking Nazi official Rudolf Hess and carried banners with slogans such as “I regret nothing.”
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Will We Ever Know Why Nazi Leader Rudolf Hess Flew to Scotland in the Middle of World War II?
B. Handwerk - Smithsonian
… Hess’s appearance on Scottish soil, a self-described mission of peace just weeks before Hitler would launch his ill-fated invasion of the Soviet Union, was one of the war’s strangest incidents. The search for explanations began on the morning after and has roiled on now for 75 years, spawning theories both intriguing (World War II might have ended differently) and bizarre (the man wasn’t Hess at all but a body double.) The truth is likely as interesting as any of the fantasies — but it’s still not entirely certain what happened 75 years ago … Some of the intelligence files on the Hess affair are known to have been ‘weeded,’ or destroyed. Whatever information they held is lost — but other classified files remain and have yet to be released.
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Chicago’s Fiscal Storm
S. Malanga - City Journal
… Even as Chicago grapples with nightmarish violent crime, the city faces imposing fiscal challenges. The city, which says that it will collect about $8.5 billion in local revenues this year, is burdened by an astounding $28 billion in unfunded pension liabilities and another $9 billion or so in money that it owes to general-obligation bondholders, as well as billions more in other debts. Chicago’s bonds, graded as “junk” by analysts, are among the lowest-rated of any major municipality. That forces the city to stretch the limits of municipal finance … It’s becoming increasingly difficult to see how this ends well in the Windy City … Chicago’s pension costs have doubled in the last decade — from $416 million in 2008 to $1 billion last year — and that’s just 42 percent of what it should be paying to fund new retirement credits that workers are earning, and to wipe out its debt.
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The Campus Culture of Fear and Its Costs
F. Furedi - City Journal
… As far back as the early 1990s, advocates for the regulation of speech on campuses justified their position on the ground that undergraduates were exceptionally fragile individuals who needed to be protected from psychological harm … A climate of fear is inhospitable to the cultivation of academic relationships and the pursuit of intellectual inquiry. Take the growing stigma attached to the term “controversial speaker.” Once, controversy was seen as essential to the workings of an academic community; nowadays, many university administrators fear controversy to the point that they have designed policies to marginalize or ban provocative speakers altogether … Arguably, the most regrettable feature of the campus culture of fear is the toll that it takes on human relations. People censor themselves vigilantly.
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There has been some reporting in the United States mass media about the deteriorating relationship between Washington and Ankara and what it might mean. Such a falling out between NATO members has not been seen since France left the alliance in 1966, and observers note that the hostility emanating from both sides suggests that far worse is to come as neither party appears prepared to moderate its current position while diplomatic exchanges have been half-hearted and designed to lead nowhere .. The Turkish- American relationship is in trouble and increasingly a liability for both sides, yet another indication that the NATO alliance forged in 1949 against the Soviet Union is today largely irrelevant.
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… Cynics have sometimes noted that one ironic aspect of Hollywood fare both in television and film is the overwhelming anti-realism regularly displayed on topics carrying a strong ideological tinge. Action movies invariably show small females easily knocking around numerous large male antagonists with well-timed blows and kicks, while blacks are quite frequently portrayed as brilliant scientists and scholars but only very rarely as street criminals or hoodlums. So some three generations after V-E Day, perhaps the still continuing stream of World War II films portraying Germans in a particular light should be best understood in these terms.
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How German Women Suffered the Largest Mass Rape in History
Al Arabiya News Channel (Dubai, UAE)
Between the months of January and August of 1945, Germany saw the largest incident of mass rape known in history, where an estimated two million German women were raped by the Soviet Red Army soldiers, as written by Walter Zapotoczny Jr. in his book, ‘Beyond Duty: The Reason Some Soldiers Commit Atrocities’ … Natalya Gesse, who was a Soviet war correspondent at the time, said that the Soviets didn’t care about the ages of their victims. “The Russian soldiers were raping every German female from eight to eighty. It was an army of rapists,” she said. This caused the deaths of no less than 200,000 girls and women due to the spread of diseases, especially that many eyewitnesses recounted victims being raped as much as 70 times in that period.
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An American Historian Looks at 'Ethnic Cleansing' of Germans
Robert Clive – Institute for Historical Review
The grim fate of the 15 million German civilians who found themselves trapped in the path of the Red Army in the closing months of World War II, or on the wrong side of the re-drawn postwar borders, is not a topic that has tended to excite the interest of historians. And the general public, which is subjected to constant reminders about wartime Nazi brutality, is certainly not aware that at least two million Germans lost their lives in the course of flight and mass expulsion from their ancestral homes in Eastern Europe. Alfred de Zayas, a graduate of Harvard Law School who earned a doctorate in history at the University of Göttingen in Germany, has devoted much of his professional career to setting the record straight.
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Kaufman’s Genocidal Book 'Germany Must Perish!
Theodore Kaufman
In this 1941 book, a Jewish-American author calls for the genocidal elimination of the German people through a program of mass sterilization, and the territorial dismemberment of Germany. Complete text, with an introductory note by Mark Weber.
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'Bandits in Uniform': The Dark Side of GIs in Liberated France
M. von Rohr - Der Spiegel (Germany)
… By the late summer of 1944, large numbers of women in Normandy were complaining about rapes by US soldiers. Fear spread among the population … With the landing on Omaha Beach, “a veritable tsunami of male lust” washed over France, writes Mary Louise Roberts, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin, in her new book … In it, Roberts scrapes away at the idealized picture of war heroes … The citizens of Le Havre wrote letters of protest to their mayor, and not just regarding prostitution. We are “attacked, robbed, run over both on the street and in our houses,” wrote one citizen in October 1945. “This is a regime of terror, imposed by bandits in uniform.” There were similar accounts from all over the country, with police reports listing holdups, theft and rapes.
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Israeli School Pupils Caught Dancing Naked at 'Nazi' Camp Site
The Independent (Britain)
Two Israeli teenagers have reportedly been caught on video dancing naked at a former Nazi death camp during a school trip to Poland. Security cameras filmed the pupils stripping off at Majdanek, a concentration camp which now houses a museum and memorial to victims of the Holocaust. They were expelled from the trip and forced to fly home after security staff saw the footage and notified authorities, Haaretz reported. Israel’s Education Ministry said it “views with great severity any behaviour that could harm the status and values represented by the trips to Poland” … One of the students, who reportedly exposed his backside at Majdanek, was fined. The other teenager was given a warning. In March, a 19-year-old Israeli man was fined $1,500 after he was caught urinating on a memorial for victims at the Nazi death camp Auschwitz.
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Remember the IHR in Your Will
Institute for Historical Review
Please consider a bequest to the IHR in your will. Your thoughtfulness now will help to keep the Institute fighting for truth and freedom for years to come. Leaving money to the IHR in this way is not complicated. Over the years the IHR has benefited from numerous bequests by men and women who have remembered the Institute in their wills.
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Being 30 Then and Now
Stef W. Kight - Axios
In the mid-to-late-20th century, the American economy and culture were ripe for 30-year-old men, who — more than European and Japanese — typically landed well-paid careers, bought homes, and supported large families. But since then, getting ahead has become much harder … Today, 30-year-old millennials are more likely to be still living with their parents and, while earning about the same or less than boomers, are typically saddled with college debt … Millennials now comprise almost a quarter of the population, and are the largest generation participating in the workforce. But their median salaries are lower than the prior generation of 30-year-olds, and the financial burdens they carry are heavier, limiting how much their lifestyle can mirror that of their parents … In 1989, less than 20% of families had student debt, compared with 41% in 2013 …
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Anatomy of a Scandal: Israel Crucifies Corbyn
Michael Howard - American Herald Tribune
In a campaign that’s as banal as it is mendacious, the mass media are pulling out all the stops to denigrate UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and ensure the British public don’t commit the heinous mistake of voting him into power one day … The hatchet job against Corbyn — coordinated across the media spectrum and directly linked to a foreign government (can you guess which one?) — is classic diversion … As to “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis,” such comparisons — sans Israel — are made every day. Hitler has been reincarnated about thirty times since 1945. Putin is Hitler. Assad is Hitler. Khamenei is Hitler. Nasrallah is Hitler. Saddam was Hitler. Gaddafi was Hitler. Milosevich was Hitler. Everyone we don’t like: Hitler. Why should Netanyahu, of all people, be exempt from this characterization?
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America’s Strategy in Afghanistan is Not Working
Doug Bandow - The American Conservative
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Afghanistan earlier this week and declared that U.S. strategy there “is indeed working.” Alas, evidence of success in America’s longest war is difficult to find … Nearly 17 years, 2,400 military and 3,500 contractor deaths, and almost a trillion dollars later, U.S. forces remain on station in Central Asia. Indeed, Donald Trump has upped force levels, expanded CIA covert operations, and increased airstrikes. Overall, Washington is set to spend $45 billion in Afghanistan this year. Despite recurring claims of progress and promises of improvement, Kabul appears little closer to standing on its own. … The number of Taliban fighters is thought to have at least tripled since 2014 to 60,000, and insurgents are active across the country … How can we characterize the results of nearly 17 years of war as anything but failure?
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It Still Doesn’t Get Worse Than Afghanistan
Stephen M. Walt - Foreign Policy
… For my money (and yours), the single most indefensible and brain-dead aspect of U.S. foreign policy today remains the fruitless but never-ending effort to defeat the Taliban and achieve some sort of meaningful victory in Afghanistan … At last count, that war has cost the United States more than a trillion dollars, and it is still costing American taxpayers some $45 billion per year. More than 2,400 U.S. soldiers have been killed and thousands more wounded, along with hundreds of contractors and coalition partners, and thousands of Afghan civilians, soldiers, and police. What does the United States have to show for all these sacrifices? Today, the Taliban control more territory than at any time since they were ousted from power … Opium production is at an all-time high as well …
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Mark Weber joins host Tim Kelly to talk about myths of World War II, and why they are relevant today. In this hour-long June 2018 session of “Our Interesting Times,” they highlight falsehoods and distortions about the “Good War” that are endlessly propagated in motion pictures, in schools, and even by politicians. The relentless propagation of lies and myths about World War II make it much easier for politicians and the media to persuade the public to accept new lies to justify new overseas military interventions, with calamitously harmful consequences for Americans and the world.
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Is World War II Still ‘The Good War’?
Adam Kirsch - The New York Times
… Even as the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have made Americans less confident about the ways we use our military power, the struggle with the Axis remains the classic example of American might deployed for virtuous ends … Even today, World War II helps underwrite our claim to that moral difference … After all, the present is always lived in ambiguity. To those who fought World War II, it was plain enough that Allied bombs were killing huge numbers of German civilians, that Churchill was fighting to preserve imperialism as well as democracy, and that the bulk of the dying in Europe was being done by the Red Army at the service of Stalin.
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A 'Good War' It Wasn’t
James J. Martin - Institute for Historical Review
Of the approximately half-million titles issued by mainline American publishers in the 1980s, Wartime by Professor Paul Fussell is one of a small selection which a revisionist might profit from reading … It used to be a conviction generations ago that the only certainty upon the outbreak of war was that one side would not win. Modern wars are mainly lost by both sides, though it takes awhile for this to be realized … All times are disorderly. The notion that human affairs move in the direction of something called “normalcy” is a hallucination.
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The SPLC’s Terrible Year Just Got Worse
New York Post – Editorial Board
It’s been a rough year for the Southern Poverty Law Center — deservedly so. And it just got more difficult, thanks to Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The SPLC, formed in 1971 as an aggressive civil-rights nonprofit law firm, has become the left’s go-to arbiter of what constitutes a hate group. Its pronouncements are quoted without challenge by the news media, and it has an endowment of $300 million, enriched by major corporate donors. Yet its overly broad definition of “hate” often goes far beyond truly vile outfits to include people and groups that simply don’t toe a politically correct line … As Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who’s also been smeared by the SPLC as an “anti-Muslim extremist,” has noted, the group these days is invested more in “profiting off the anxieties and white guilt of Northern liberals” than in actually upholding civil rights.
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Five German Cities Among 30 Most Livable in the World, New Survey Finds
Deutsche Welle (Germany)
Vienna has been ranked as the most livable city in the world for the first time, according to the latest Economist Intelligence Unit global survey. Five German cities, including Frankfurt, have ranked in the top 30. The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) has ranked Frankfurt, Hamburg, Berlin, Munich and Düsseldorf in the top 30 of its latest ranking of global livability, which was released on Tuesday. Frankfurt ranked the highest in 12th, with the EIU, part of UK news magazine The Economist, giving it a livability score of 96.0 out of 100. No German city received a rating of lower than 93.0, which was the score Düsseldorf received, and all five were among the 15 best-ranked European cities.
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America the Insolvent
Chris Martenson - Peak Prosperity
… The trajectory our global society is on will not end well … Here’s just a small smattering of the threats we’ve created for ourselves: One. $247 trillion of global debt, growing exponentially’ Two. Massively underfunded pensions mathematically unable to meet their future obligations … Collectively these all point to a future of less. Perhaps even a future of nothing. Our only option for safely navigating towards a better future is to start dedicating a huge amount of focus, time, energy and resources to addressing these threats. But, unfortunately, that’s simply not happening right now … Interest payments are already 25 percent of tax receipts and are certain to climb as the US federal government tacks on another $13 to $17 trillion in additional debt over the next ten years … The current trajectory is entirely unsustainable.
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Think Confederate Monuments are Racist? Consider Pioneer Monuments.
Cynthia Prescott - The Conversation
… Many cities are removing or reinterpreting their Confederate monuments, with the understanding that they commemorate racism. But few Americans realize that pioneer monuments placed across the country are also racist. As my research and forthcoming book on pioneer monuments since the 1890s show, most early pioneer statues celebrated whites dominating American Indians … Those statues showed white men claiming land and building farms and cities in the West. They explicitly celebrated the dominant white view of the Wild West progressing from American Indian “savagery” to white “civilization.” … The recent debate about Confederate monuments has sparked some discussion of pioneer monuments in a few places.
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America’s Coming Political Realignment
Patrick McDermott
… The last time the United States was this profoundly divided by politics, geography, and the issue of race, there was secession. In 1861, the North stopped secession by force. If there should be similar division in the future, there may be no will to fight … Under such circumstances, peaceful dissolution — the model followed in Czechoslovakia and the former Soviet Union — would be far preferable to the violent partition that occurred in Yugoslavia, India-Pakistan, or the War Between the States. Partition would be an important lesson for the rest of the Western world, much of which is facing its own looming demographic crisis.
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Why Confronting Israel is Important
Philip Giraldi
… Israel – not Russia – is the one foreign country that can interfere with impunity with the political processes in the United States yet it is immune from criticism … Jewish power, both in terms of money and of access to people and mechanisms that really matter, is what allows Israel to act with impunity, making the United States both poorer and more insecure. A well-funded massive lobbying effort involving hundreds of groups and thousands of individuals in the U.S. has worked to the detriment of actual American interests, in part by creating a permanent annual gift of billions of dollars to Israel for no other reason but that it is Israel and can get anything it wants from a servile Congress and White House without any objection from a controlled media … Politicians are terrified of crossing the Jewish lobby by saying anything negative about Israel …
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Malaysian Prime Minister Says He Should be Allowed to Criticize Jews
The Times of Israel / AP and JTA
In an interview on Monday, Malaysia’s avowedly anti-Semitic prime minister Mahathir Mohamad said accusations that he was anti-Semitic were meant to silence his criticism of Jews “for doing wrong things.” … “We should be able to criticize everybody,” he said, and assailed laws against denying the scale of the Holocaust. “Anti-Semitic is a term that is invented to prevent people from criticizing the Jews for doing wrong things,” he said. … He is a larger-than-life figure in Malaysia, with his influence dominating the multiethnic country’s politics from the Cold War into a new millennium. His first turn as prime minister stretched for 22 years, coming to an end in 2003 … He wrote on his personal blog in 2012 that “Jews rule this world by proxy,” the Associated Press has reported.
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BBC Bows to Pressure From Israel and Changes Gaza Headline
Middle East Monitor
The BBC has once again come under sharp criticism over its coverage of violence perpetrated by Israel against the Palestinians. Critics called the BBC out over its bias after the broadcaster bowed to pressure from the Israeli Foreign Ministry and changed the headline of a news piece concerning Israeli air strikes on Gaza. The BBC headline read: “Israeli air strikes ‘kill woman and baby’” for a news piece related to the killing of three Palestinians including a pregnant mother and toddler in Gaza on Wednesday night. The headline attracted the attention of Israel’s Foreign Ministry and the Board of Deputies of British Jews, who is currently leading a bitter campaign against Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn over a definition of anti-Semitism that conflates criticism of Israel with racism against Jews.
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You can always count on the neocons in Congress to ignore reality, ignore evidence, and ignore common sense in their endless drive to get us involved in another war. Last week, for example, Senators John McCain (R-AZ), Lindsey Graham (R-NC), Bob Menendez (D-NJ), and others joined up to introduce what Senator Graham called “the sanctions bill from hell,” aimed at applying “crushing” sanctions on Russia … What has Russia done that warrants “kitchen sink” sanctions that will “crush” the country and possibly designate it as a sponsor of terrorism? Sen. Menendez tells us: “The Kremlin continues to attack our democracy, support a war criminal in Syria, and violate Ukraine’s sovereignty.” There is a big problem with these accusations on Russia: they’re based on outright lies and unproven accusations …
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… A new study found that half of Americans born in the 1980s are falling behind their parents economically. The study is a project of researchers at Stanford University, Harvard University, and the University of California, Berkeley. Their report is called “The Fading American Dream.” Together, these findings show that many younger adults are experiencing “downward mobility.” In other words, they are not doing as well, either socially or economically, as their parents were at the same age … Among members of this generation, only about 60 percent of their children earned more money than they did. And only 50 percent of children born in the following ten years were earning more than their parents at the same age … “Absolute mobility has fallen sharply” over the past 50 years.
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Trump’s Campaign Against Iran Hurts American Workers
Eric Margolis
President Trump keeps vowing to create more jobs in America. But his actions often speak differently. The most egregious example was Trump’s cancellation of the multi-national Iran nuclear treaty that had been welcomed by the world as a major step to Mideast denuclearization … Washington’s denial to Iran of Boeing Aircraft (and Airbus planes because they contain US-made parts), means the loss of tens of thousands of highly-paid jobs in the US and Europe. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, claims he talked Trump into canceling the Iran nuclear deal and the Boeing orders. It’s hard to validate Netanyahu’s claim but it is clear that America’s ever more powerful Israel lobby and its ally fundamentalist Christian Zionists played a key role in thwarting the Iran nuclear deal and sale of commercial aircraft.
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German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier has sharply criticised U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs and sanctions policies, saying such measures were destroying jobs and growth, and that Europe would not bow to U.S. pressure regarding Iran … Turning to the U.S. sanctions against Iran, the minister said Germany and its EU allies would continue to support companies doing business with Iran despite U.S. pressure. “We won’t let Washington dictate us with whom we can do business and we therefore stick to the Vienna Nuclear Agreement so that Iran cannot build atomic weapons,” Altmaier said. German companies should be allowed to continue to invest in Iran as much as they want, and the German government is looking for ways together with its European allies to ensure that financial transactions could still take place, he added.
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The Knife in Iran’s Back: Trump Opens Door to Chaos
Vijay Prashad - Asia Times
… China, Russia and Turkey have already indicated that they will not buckle under US pressure. “China’s lawful rights should be protected,” said the Chinese government. China has no incentive to follow the new US position. First, China imports about US$15 billion worth of oil from Iran each year, and expects to increase its purchases next year. State energy companies such as China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and Sinopec have invested billions of dollars in Iran … China is seized by the unfairness of the reinstatement of sanctions on Iran, not only for its own economic reasons but also because it sees this as a violation of international agreements and a threat to Iranian sovereignty – two principles that China takes very seriously.
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The `Desert Fox’: Hitler's Ultimate Weapon of War?
Daniel L. Davis - The National Interest
… The “Desert Fox” commanded the Afrika Korps against Allied troops, mainly the British. In May 1943 Germany’s troops were eventually defeated in North Africa by the combined weight of U.S. General George S. Patton and Commander of the British Expeditionary Forces, Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery. But his victories in late 1941 through the spring of 1942, stands as textbook examples of how decisive leadership at the point of attack, and the use of creative, unconventional tactics can defeat a larger force. As has been proven in battles as far back as ancient Greece and Sparta, leadership in combat is usually the decisive factor between victory and defeat. Rommel’s performance in North Africa bear this out … Rommel demonstrated how superior leadership can sometimes overcome even material disadvantage.
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… The world has a new most livable city. Vienna now tops the Economist Intelligence Unit’s annual ranking, which is based on 30 factors including access to health care, education, infrastructure, culture, the environment and political and social stability. This year, the Austrian capital, home to 1.76 million people, beat out Melbourne, which had held the top slot for the past seven years. Canadian, Australian and Japanese cities scored the other top spots, with Melbourne, Osaka, Calgary, Sydney, Vancouver, Toronto, Tokyo, Copenhagen and Adelaide rounding out the top ten. Many U.S. cities, in contrast, saw their rankings fall this year, including Atlanta and Chicago, thanks in part to security issues, according to the Economist. Located on the Danube river, Vienna boasts a rich artistic and architectural legacy.
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A viral campaign calling out the BBC for alleged media bias and a lack of impartiality whipped up a huge Twitterstorm as citizens recounted examples of the state broadcaster’s prejudice under the hashtag #BBCswitchoff. The campaign, organised to highlight the publicly funded broadcaster’s perceived bias against Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, began at 6pm to coincide with the TV station’s news program. Thousands joined in on the protest, catapulting #BBCswitchoff to the top trending hashtag across the UK Thursday [Aug. 9] evening. British citizens used the opportunity to voice their frustration with BBC editorial decisions, laying down accusations of bias against the broadcaster on a number of topics, including its coverage of Corbyn, the NHS, the Yemen civil war, and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.
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Attorney General Sessions Sharply Criticizes SPLC, Says Justice Department Will Not Partner With Groups That Defame
The Washington Times
Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Wednesday the Justice Department would not partner with groups that discriminate against or defame others, singling out the Southern Poverty Law Center for its “hate group” campaign. The attorney general, speaking at the Alliance Defending Freedom Summit on Religious Liberty, accused the SPLC of wielding the “hate” designation as a “weapon … against conservative organizations that refuse to accept their orthodoxy and choose instead to speak their conscience.” “I have ordered a review at the Department of Justice to make sure that we do not partner with any groups that discriminate,” Mr. Sessions said in his prepared remarks. “We will not partner with groups that unfairly defame Americans for standing up for the Constitution or their faith.”
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Twitter Suspends Ron Paul Institute Executive’s Account, One Day After Big Tech Blocks InfoWars
RT News
Several Libertarian figures, including the Ron Paul Institute director, have found their Twitter accounts suspended. It comes after tech giants went after right-wing journalist Alex Jones, banning his show from their platforms. Radio host and editorial director of antiwar.com Scott Horton, former State Department employee and author Peter Van Buren, and Dan McAdams, the executive director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, found their twitter accounts suspended on Monday, according to Antiwar.com. Horton has been disciplined for the use of improper language against journalist Jonathan M. Katz, he said in a brief statement. McAdams was suspended for retweeting him, he said.
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I Was Banned for Life From Twitter
Peter Van Buren - The American Conservative
… “Hate speech,” clearly not prohibited according to the Supreme Court, is an umbrella term used by censorship advocates to describe anything they don’t want others to be able to listen to or watch. It is very flexible and thus very dangerous … Twitter is perhaps the most infamous example of a platform censoring its content. The site bans advertising from Russian media outlets. It suspends those who promote (what it defines as) hatred and violence, “shadow bans” others to limit the size of their audience, and tweaks its trending topics to push certain political ideas and downplay others … Let me end on a personal note. I was this week permanently suspended from my Twitter account, @wemeantwell.
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It’s Time for Canada to Take the Next Step Against Saudi Arabia
Stephen Maher - Mcleans (Canada)
… The colossal volume of money involved helps explain why Western politicians and media organizations treat Saudi human rights violations differently from the nearly identical human rights violations committed by Iran, for example … The Saudi government has one of the worst human rights records in the world. It oppresses women and minorities and exports religious extremism. It has beheaded 600 people since 2014, including some who lost their heads for political crimes, non-violent drug offences and sorcery. We should never have started selling them armoured vehicles and should stop immediately.
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The Saudi-Canada Clash: A Values War
Patrick J. Buchanan
Is it any of Canada’s business whether Saudi women have the right to drive? Well, Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland just made it her business … Who determines what are “basic rights” or “universal values”? … When did it become America’s “traditional role” to defend women’s right to drive automobiles in every country, when women had no right to vote in America until after World War I? In the America of the 1950s, homosexuality and abortion were regarded as shameful offenses and serious crimes. Now abortion and homosexuality have been declared constitutional rights. Are they basic human rights? To whom?
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Iranians are Not Pining for American Intervention
Akhilesh Pillalamarri - The American Conservative
Defense hawks in Washington think the people of Iran are waiting with bated breath for the regime in Tehran to collapse, and wouldn’t mind a little American help along the way — whether through direct military intervention, or “naturally” as the result of grassroots protests, “with Washington backing,” of course. There is no greater fallacy. While the people of Iran are undoubtedly frustrated with their government, they are not on the cusp of changing it, as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo seems to believe. In fact, any attempt by outside actors to change the regime would cause the people of Iran to unify around the clerics … Iranians, like Americans, value liberty in the sense of national self- determination: they would rather be under-served by their own leaders than by well-meaning foreigners or those perceived to be puppets.
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People Getting Dumber? Human Intelligence Has Declined Since Victorian Era, Research Suggests
M. Cooper-White - Huffington Post
Our technology may be getting smarter, but a provocative new study suggests human intelligence is on the decline. In fact, it indicates that Westerners have lost 14 I.Q. points on average since the Victorian Era. What exactly explains this decline? Study co-author Dr. Jan te Nijenhuis, professor of work and organizational psychology at the University of Amsterdam, points to the fact that women of high intelligence tend to have fewer children than do women of lower intelligence. This negative association between I.Q. and fertility has been demonstrated time and again in research over the last century.
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Were the Victorians Cleverer Than Us? The Decline in General Intelligence
M. A. Woodley, J. te Nijenhuis, R. Murphy - Intelligence (Elsevier)
The Victorian era was marked by an explosion of innovation and genius, per capita rates of which appear to have declined subsequently. The presence of dysgenic fertility for IQ amongst Western nations, starting in the 19th century, suggests that these trends might be related to declining IQ. This is because high-IQ people are more productive and more creative. We tested the hypothesis that the Victorians were cleverer than modern populations, using high-quality instruments, namely measures of simple visual reaction time in a meta-analytic study. Simple reaction time measures correlate substantially with measures of general intelligence (g) and are considered elementary measures of cognition.
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Opioids Could Kill Nearly 500,000 Americans in the Next Decade
Max Blau - Stat (Boston)
Opioids could kill nearly half a million people across America over the next decade as the crisis of addiction and overdose accelerates. Deaths from opioids have been rising sharply for years, and drug overdoses already kill more Americans under age 50 than anything else. Stat asked leading public health experts at ten universities to forecast the arc of the epidemic over the next decade. The consensus: It will get worse before it gets better. There are now nearly 100 deaths a day from opioids, a swath of destruction that runs from tony New England suburbs to the farm country of California, from the beach towns of Florida to the Appalachian foothills.
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Nearly One-Third of Americans Think News Media Is the 'Enemy of the People,' New Poll Shows
Newsweek
Almost a third of Americans believe the news media is “the enemy of the American people,” according to a survey of over 1,000 people with various political affiliations. A poll by Ipsos, a survey-based research organization, asked 323 Democrats, 363 Republicans and 207 Independents over the age of 18 what they thought of news media. Twenty-nine percent of respondents said they agreed with President Donald Trump that media is the “enemy of the people,” while 13 percent of respondents said they strongly agreed that the president should have the authority to shut down news outlets engaged in “bad behavior.” Eighty-five percent of respondents, however, said they believed freedom of the press was “essential for American democracy.”
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An AfD local leader was lambasted on social media – and by his own party – after calling Claus von Stauffenberg, a man who lead a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler a “coward” and a “traitor.” … In modern Germany, many regard von Stauffenberg, one of the central figures of the German Resistance, as a hero. Yet Lars Steinke, the head of the youth wing of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Lower Saxony, countered that view in a blunt statement, saying for him the officer was “an enemy of the German nation” … Steinke suggested that von Stauffenberg’s actions actually represented “a shameful attempt of a coward” … “Stauffenberg was a traitor who was ready to sacrifice millions of lives without any notable benefit for the German nation.”
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Sky News Australia aired a widely criticized interview with Blair Cottrell, known anti-semitic and anti-Islamic activist. The Executive Council of Australian Jewry criticized Sky News Australia for giving a platform to a far-right racist who once advocated for the display of images of Hitler in schools. Blair Cottrell, the former leader of anti-immigration group United Patriots Front, was interviewed by a former chief minister of the Northern territory, Adam Giles. Cottrell was convicted last year of inciting contempt against Muslims after staging a mock beheading to protest the building of a mosque. The interview was widely criticized by the Australian media … In response, news director Greg Byrnes posted a tweet that said Cottrell’s appearance was “wrong.” He announced the interview was removed from repeat time slots and online platforms.
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Facebook has shut down InfoWars’ page saying the conservative news outlet used hate speech. An editor at the website says the social media giant failed to tell it what the offending posts were. InfoWars Editor-at-large Paul Joseph Watson said in a tweet that the account has been “permanently banned” for “unspecified” hate speech. Visitors to InfoWars page are now greeted with a message saying: “Sorry, this content isn’t available right now”. Describing the development as a “chilling precedent for free speech,” Watson said that Facebook did not tell the media organization what the offending posts were. “To all other conservative news outlets – you are next. The great censorship purge has truly begun,” he wrote.
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British Police Investigate Previously Convicted Alison Chabloz Over Fresh Holocaust Blog Posts
The Jewish Chronicle (Britain)
A Holocaust revisionist who narrowly avoided jail after publishing “grossly offensive” songs mocking Jews is being investigated by police again after she called Shoah [Holocaust] “a gargantuan accumulation of nonsense”. Alison Chabloz, of Charlesworth, near Glossop, Derbyshire, was given a two-year suspended prison sentence on June 14, after being convicted of charges relating to three songs she posted to social media sites. Chabloz, 54, performed her songs in YouTube videos, titled Nemo’s Antisemitic Universe, I Like It How It Is, performed at the right-wing London Forum in 2016, and a third, titled (((survivors))). In the latter, Chabloz mocked Jewish figures, including Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, as well as Anne and Otto Frank, to the tune of Hava Nagila.
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… While Iranian democracy has been openly mocked in the United States as a sham, the fact is that democratic processes have shaped the Islamic Republic of Iran since its founding … The Iranian people would support its government refusing to bend a knee in the face of American threats; they would not support a government that surrendered their hard-won gains on the nuclear front, which the Iranian people suffered greatly to achieve … The danger here is that Trump doesn’t realize he is playing a losing hand. His bluff will be called by Iran (indeed, based upon Rouhani’s words, it has been called), but Trump will continue to throw chips into the pot until compelled to either reverse course and rejoin the JCPOA (unlikely), or force the issue and watch the United States enter a war with Iran it will not lose — but cannot win.
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If the US was hoping renewed sanctions on Iran would cause immediate economic turmoil and mass anti-government protests, it may be disappointed, though real pain could still be on the horizon. US President Donald Trump described the embargoes that returned on Tuesday as “the most biting sanctions ever imposed.” That was already an exaggeration since they only reimposed measures that were in place before the 2015 nuclear deal which he abandoned in May … Analysts said the idea that economic pain could lead to a full-blown revolution was far-fetched … China alone accounted for 25.6 percent of Iran’s imports and 19.7 percent of its exports since March – more than all European countries combined. China, India and Turkey have already said that they will not significantly cut their oil purchases from Iran.
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In Chicago, 74 Shot, 12 Fatally, Over the Weekend
Chicago Tribune
At least 74 people were shot in one of the most violent weekends of the year in Chicago, spurred by a 7-hour period early Sunday morning when 41 people were shot. Between 3 p.m. Friday and 6 a.m. Monday morning, twelve people were killed and 62 were wounded, according to Tribune data. Their ages spanned from 11 to 62 years old, and most of those shot were attacked on the South and West sides … As of Friday, at least 1,700 people have been shot in the city this year, fewer than the last two years at this time when violence hit record levels in the city but well above other recent years. There have been at least 300 homicides, according to Tribune data. Six of the shootings this weekend injured four or more people in a single attack, racking up 31 victims early Sunday.
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President Donald Trump says he will fully enforce the sanctions being re-imposed on Iran as a result of the US withdrawal from a 2015 nuclear deal … The UK, France and Germany – which were also parties to the 2015 accord along with Russia and China – have expressed “deep regret” at the US move. They have pledged to abide by their commitments under the deal. Iran has said it will also do so if it continues to receive the economic benefits … The British, French and German foreign ministers issued a joint statement with the EU’s foreign policy chief saying the nuclear deal was working and was “crucial” for global security. They also unveiled a “blocking statute” that will seek to protect European firms doing business with Iran against the impact of US sanctions.
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The European Union vowed on Monday to counter US President Donald Trump’s renewal of sanctions on Iran, in a test of the EU’s ability to preserve a deal that saw Iran limit its nuclear ambitions in exchange for removing strict curbs on its economy. As Washington’s so-called “snapback” sanctions are reinstated on Tuesday, a new EU law to shield European companies will also take effect to try to mitigate what EU officials say is their “unlawful” reach beyond US borders. Despite protests from European allies, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Washington would fully enforce the sanctions … The EU and other parties to the 2015 deal, China and Russia, are working to maintain trade with Iran …
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The Ugly Destination of Trump’s Iran Policy
Paul R. Pillar - The National Interest
It is no surprise that Iranian leaders have no interest in responding to President Donald Trump’s offer to hold a meeting. What would there be to talk about, especially that there appears to be no normal working-level U.S.-Iranian diplomacy going on? Trump’s credibility with the Iranians is near zero after trashing the one significant international agreement that both countries had signed in recent years. The Iranian leaders have no reason to play to Trump’s theater in which he would portray a supplicant Iran as responding to his campaign of pressure … The best outcome — and it isn’t good at all — that one can hope for from the administration’s current course on Iran is endless tension, more antagonizing of Iranian citizens who see the United States as hostile to their own interests, and a constant risk of escalation to open warfare.
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Would War With Iran Doom Trump?
Patrick J. Buchanan
… We thus appear to be steering into a head-on collision … The correlation of political forces is heavily weighted in favor of driving Tehran to the wall. In the U.S., Iran has countless adversaries and almost no advocates. In the Middle East, Israelis, Saudis and the UAE would relish having us smash Iran … Any shooting war in the Persian Gulf could see insurance rates for tankers soar, a constriction of oil exports, and surging prices, plunging us into a worldwide recession for which one man would be held responsible: Donald Trump. How good would that be for the GOP or President Trump in 2020? … If we start a war with Iran, on top of the five in which we are engaged still, then the party that offers to extricate us will be listened to, as Trump was listened to, when he promised to extricate us from the forever wars of the Middle East.
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How Israeli Tech Firms Act as Global Agents of Repression
Richard Silverstein - The Nation
Israel is, in many ways, an anomaly among nations. While it considers itself a democracy, it is actually a national-security state. Its military-intelligence apparatus is ubiquitous in the everyday affairs of its citizens … In the past two decades or so, Israel has greatly expanded use of these technologies. Veterans of these spy shops have transferred their knowledge into the commercial sphere and marketed themselves as agents of repression for clients around the globe. This is a dark, dirty secret that lies behind the hype of the “start-up nation.” Two Israeli companies are at the forefront of this commercialization of dirty ops: NSO Group and Black Cube … Black Cube was the cyber-surveillance firm that Weinstein’s lawyer, David Boies, hired … It should be troubling to Americans that an Israeli dirty-ops firm may have been working to sabotage US foreign policy.
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Populist Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini made a veiled reference to the late fascist dictator Benito Mussolini on Sunday. Salvini tweeted “tanti nemici, tanto onore,” meaning “so many enemies, so much honor,” a variation on Mussolini’s famous “molti nemici, molto onore,” or “many enemies, much honor.” He tweeted the comments on the anniversary of Mussolini’s birth [July 29]. Salvini’s tweet came in response to a magazine article about Salvini’s critics, including the Catholic Church and leading left-wing intellectuals, and his coinciding rise in popularity. Separately, in an interview with the UK’s Sunday Times newspaper, Salvini, from the right-wing League party, said Italy’s low birth rate is being used as an excuse to “import immigrants.”
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Changing Views of Fascism
Mark Weber – Video
Fascism is one of the most often misused and widely misunderstood political terms. Publicists of both the left and right use the term “fascist” not to describe but to discredit and smear adversaries. “Fascism” is often inaccurately used as a synonym for tyranny, militarism, Nazism, racism, or capitalism. During the first 13 years of Fascist rule in Italy, the regime and its leader (“Duce”), Benito Mussolini, were widely admired in the US and other countries. Attitudes in the US changed after the Italian subjugation of Ethiopia in 1935-36, and as Mussolini aligned Italy ever more closely with Hitler’s Germany.
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Leaders of Lithuania’s Jewish community have asked authorities in Vilnius to remove a plaque honoring an anti-Soviet fighter whose granddaughter said killed Jews. The Lithuanian Jewish Community last week posted on its website a statement calling for the removal of the plaque for Jonas Noreika that is displayed prominently on a central wall of the library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences in central Vilnius … He has enjoyed a hero status in Lithuania, where a school has been named for him and where then-President Vytautas Landsbergis attended his funeral in 2000.
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Heather MacDonald’s New Book: The Diversity Delusion
Manhattan Institute for Policy Research
… A provocative account of the erosion of humanities and the rise of intolerance … America is in crisis, from the university to the workplace. Toxic ideas first spread by higher education have undermined humanistic values, fueled intolerance, and widened divisions in our larger culture … The Diversity Delusion argues that the root of this problem is the belief in America’s endemic racism and sexism, a belief that has engendered a metastasizing diversity bureaucracy in society and academia. Diversity commissars denounce meritocratic standards as discriminatory, enforce hiring quotas, and teach students and adults alike to think of themselves as perpetual victims … Heather Mac Donald argues that we are creating a nation of narrowed minds, primed for grievance, and that we are putting our competitive edge at risk.
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Hawaii’s Quest for a New Type of Independence
Stephen Kinzer – Boston Globe
… Hawaii is the only American state that was once a kingdom. The royal family was overthrown in 1893 with decisive help from President Benjamin Harrison and US Marines. Soon afterward a new president, Grover Cleveland, condemned the overthrow as “an act of war” and asked Congress to return the royal family to power. Congress refused. Instead, in 1898, it voted to annex Hawaii. In 1959 Hawaii was admitted to the Union as our 50th state … Visiting these islands makes clear that while Hawaii is in the United States, it is not of the United States … Hawaii’s unique history, including our evidently illegal annexation, qualifies it for some form of special status within the United States.
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Virginia’s Taxpayer-Funded Israel Lobby
Grant Smith – Antiwar.com
The Virginia-Israel Advisory Board VIAB has one key difference with scores of privately funded state chambers of commerce created to foster closer economic integration between the United States and Israel while supporting the Israeli government’s policy agenda. Originally created by an uncodified act in 2001, VIAB has been funded by Commonwealth of Virginia taxpayers. Its charter is to “advise the Governor on ways to improve economic and cultural links between the Commonwealth and the State of Israel, with a focus on the areas of commerce and trade, art and education, and general government.” VIAB is a pilot for how Israel can quietly obtain taxpayer funding and official status for networked entities that advance Israel from within key state governments.
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Britain’s Labour Party: Cruising Towards Split Over Israel-Palestine
George Galloway – RT News
Britain’s Labour Party prepares to split; the Israel-Palestine issue breaks up the party after 100 years — to the relief of Prime Minister Theresa May. At least that’s the proximate cause of the rapidly approaching schism in the opposition Labour Party. Attempts to effectively outlaw existential criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel have foundered on the rocks of the obduracy of the veteran Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn whose commitment to the Palestinian cause has been a leitmotif of his 40 years in left-wing politics. Support for the Palestinians and opposition to Israel has grown massively in recent decades in Britain and throughout the Western world … The full might of the Israel lobby has been mobilized to first stop Corbyn winning the leadership, to depose him once he had won it, and above all to stop him becoming prime minister.
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Hiroshima Marks 73rd Anniversary of US Atomic Bombing
Kyodo (Japan)
Hiroshima marked the 73rd anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing on Monday, with its mayor making a fresh call for a world without nuclear weapons through dialogue but stopping short of explicitly urging Japan to join a global nuclear weapons ban treaty. Despite some expectations of progress toward nuclear disarmament in recent years, Mayor Kazumi Matsui warned of the re-emergence of tensions over nuclear weapons seen during the Cold War and sought rational actions by global leaders … At the Peace Memorial Park, a moment of silence was observed at 8:15 a.m., when the “Little Boy” uranium-core atomic bomb dropped by a U.S. bomber exploded above Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. It killed an estimated 140,000 people by the end of that year.
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Hiroshima, Nagasaki and US Mythology
Ron Forthofer - Countercurrents
The U.S. public has been kept in the dark or misled about foreign policy for much of our history. For example, as we commemorate the 71st anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, let’s re-examine the myth of necessity of those barbaric acts. The myth that just won’t die and is believed by most Americans is that these bombings saved millions of lives and were necessary to end WWII in the Pacific. However, excellent work by Gar Alperovitz in his books and other writing, by Mark Weber in The Journal of Historical Review as well as by numerous other historians, strongly debunk this myth.
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The Bomb Didn’t Beat Japan ... Stalin Did
Ward Wilson - Foreign Policy
The U.S. use of nuclear weapons against Japan during World War II has long been a subject of emotional debate … The fact that Japan had 68 cities destroyed in the summer of 1945 poses a serious challenge for people who want to make the bombing of Hiroshima the cause of Japan’s surrender. The question is: If they surrendered because a city was destroyed, why didn’t they surrender when those other 66 cities were destroyed? … The Soviet invasion invalidated the military’s decisive battle strategy, just as it invalidated the diplomatic strategy. At a single stroke, all of Japan’s options evaporated. The Soviet invasion was strategically decisive – it foreclosed both of Japan’s options – while the bombing of Hiroshima (which foreclosed neither) was not.
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Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Ralph Raico
The most spectacular episode of Truman’s presidency will never be forgotten, but will be forever linked to his name: the atomic bombings of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and of Nagasaki three days later. Probably around two hundred thousand persons were killed in the attacks and through radiation poisoning; the vast majority were civilians … By early summer 1945, the Japanese fully realized that they were beaten. Why did they nonetheless fight on? As Anscombe wrote: “It was the insistence on unconditional surrender that was the root of all evil.” That mad formula was coined by Roosevelt at the Casablanca conference, and, with Churchill’s enthusiastic concurrence, it became the Allied shibboleth.
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National Debt is About to Roar Back to Life as a Pressing Issue
Maya MacGuineas - CNN
As a result of an unprecedented debt binge by Congress over the past year, the national debt is about to roar back to life as a pressing issue after years of hibernation … The recent GOP tax cuts and bipartisan spending increases together will add $2.3 trillion to the national debt in the next ten years … These sums accelerate a coming fiscal freefall and will push the nation over a psychological barrier as soon as next year: trillion-dollar annual deficits … In 2022, the Highway Trust Fund will run out of full funding. In 2026, the Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund follows. In 2032, the Social Security trust fund surpluses run dry, and all beneficiaries regardless of age or income level will face a 21 percent across-the-board benefit cut … By 2023, we’ll spend more on interest payments than Medicaid or defense.
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South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has said the ruling African National Congress must initiate a parliamentary process to enshrine in the constitution a proposed amendment, paving the way for land grabs without compensation. Ramaphosa, who vowed to return the lands owned by the white farmers since the 1600s to the country’s black population after he assumed office in February this year, said on Tuesday that the ANC would introduce a constitutional amendment in parliament … Many of the Boers, descendants of Dutch settlers in South Africa, do not take the government’s promises at face value, instead seeking asylum abroad from what they say is a surge in violence and government-fueled hostility against them … Boers have also appealed to Russia, seeking to resettle farmers who no longer feel at home in South Africa.
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The Boer War Remembered
Mark Weber
The Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902 was more than the first major military clash of the 20th century. Pitting as it did the might of the globe-girdling British Empire, backed by international finance, against a small pioneering nation of independent-minded farmers, ranchers and merchants in southern Africa who lived by the Bible and the rifle, its legacy continues to resonate today. The Boers’ recourse to irregular warfare, and Britain’s response in herding a hundred thousand women and children into concentration camps foreshadowed the horrors of guerilla warfare and mass detention of innocents that have become emblematic of the 20th century.
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How King George V Demanded Britain Enter the First World War
The Telegraph (Britain)
It is a letter that throws fresh light on one of the darkest periods in Britain’s history. A note which has remained in private hands for a century details a previously undocumented meeting between George V and his Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, on the eve of the First World War … In the newly-disclosed meeting, the King informed Sir Edward it was “absolutely essential” Britain go to war in order to prevent Germany from achieving “complete domination of this country”. When Sir Edward said the Cabinet had yet to find a justifiable reason to enter the conflict, the King replied: “You have got to find a reason, Grey.”
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Even Neocon Historians Should Be Accountable.
Paul Gottfried
My anthology Revisions and Dissents deal critically with Hoover Institute fellow and frequent contributor to the American Greatness website Victor Davis Hanson. A Fox-news superstar in addition to his other claims to fame, Hanson specializes in totally unexamined assertions about modern history that as a professor I would never have tolerated even in a college freshman. Hanson has done well expressing these half-truths and fictions because they obviously please his neoconservative benefactors who have raised him to media prominence … Hanson’s latest syndicated column illustrates perfectly his anti-German fixation. Thus he opines: “Germany started and lost two world wars …”
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What We Truly Learned From the `Great War’
John Chuckman
No matter what high-blown claims the politicians make each year on Remembrance Day, The Great War [World War One] was essentially a fight between two branches of a single royal family over the balance of power on the continent of Europe … It was also a war between the world’s greatest existing imperial power, Britain, and another state, Germany, which aspired to become a greater imperial power than it was … The First World War was not a war to end all wars, as a slogan of the time claimed. If anything, it was a precursor for a great many wars to follow, and, most importantly, it was a powerful and important cause of World War II. It also was not a war about democracy …
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Christopher Clark’s book on the outbreak of World War I, “The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914,” has been called a masterpiece” by “The New York Times” and become a best-seller in several European countries … “This is what’s so disturbing about 1914 for today [says Clark], that we are in a world which is very like the world of 1914, more and more so … I suppose one of the lessons of the book is that bad stuff can happen very fast and we need to be extremely vigilant and we need to focus not so much on recognizing that a war is coming in advance, but even before those signs appear, on building structures that can avoid naked, armed conflict.”
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Woodrow Wilson Pushed U.S. Into World War I -- and Communism, Fascism and Nazism Resulted
Doug Bandow - The Huffington Post
A century ago [April 1917] Congress declared war on Imperial Germany. It was a bizarre decision: the secure New World voluntarily joined the Old World slaughterhouse, consigning more than 117,000 Americans to death for no intelligible reason … The only sensible decision was for America to stay out. There was no conceivable threat to the U.S … There was perhaps no president more sanctimonious and certain of his own righteousness [than Woodrow Wilson] … Good intentions are never enough to justify government action, especially foreign policy. Woodrow Wilson’s nominal idealism proved to be deadly. Americans should ponder the lessons of his fateful course a century ago. It’s time for U.S. presidents to work hard for peace rather than take what has become the far easier path to war.
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Human Rights Group Says Employee Was Targeted With Israeli Spyware
Associated Press
An Amnesty International employee has been targeted with Israeli-made surveillance software, the human rights group said Wednesday, adding to a growing number of examples of Israeli technology being used to spy on human rights workers and opposition figures in the Middle East and beyond. In a 20-page report, Amnesty outlined how it believes a hacker tried to break into an unidentified staff member’s smartphone in early June by baiting the employee with a WhatsApp message about a protest in front of the Saudi Embassy in Washington. The London-based human rights organization said it traced the malicious link in the message to a network of sites tied to the NSO Group, an Israeli surveillance company implicated in a series of digital break-in attempts …
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US Senate Passes Huge Defense Bill Including $550 Million for Israel
AFP / The Times of Israel
The US Senate easily passed a $716.3 billion defense authorization bill Wednesday that includes funding for Israel to defend itself against Hezbollah and Hamas, as well as ramping up military spending and bolstering America’s posture against Russia while avoiding policy changes that would have antagonized US President Donald Trump. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) passed 87 to 10 in the Senate a week after clearing the House of Representatives, and now heads to the White House for Trump’s signature … American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) praised the bill … thanking the Senate for helping to “protect Israel against mounting security threats.”
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US Senate Committee Approves AIPAC Bill to Give Israel $38 Billion Over Ten Years, With Additional Perks
The Jerusalem Post (Israel)
A Senate panel approved a bill on Tuesday [July 11] endorsing a decade-long aid package to Israel brokered by the Obama administration. The US-Israel Security Assistance Authorization Act of 2018 authorizes a memorandum of understanding negotiated in 2016 between the two governments which will provide Israel with $38 billion in military aid between 2019 and 2028. A bipartisan majority of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee passed the legislation, allowing it to proceed to the full Senate floor … The American Israel Public Affairs Committee [AIPAC], which pioneered the legislation, applauded its progress in a statement.
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Trump is Israel’s 'Useful Idiot'
Philip Giraldi
The claim made by many neoconservatives that Israel and the United States are partners in the Middle East because their strategic interests are identical is belied by the fact that the Israelis are more than willing to ignore Washington when its suits them to do so. The claim of identical interests has always been false, promoted by the Zionist media and an intensively lobbied Congress to make the lopsided relationship with an essentially racist and apartheid regime more palatable to the American public … The Israelis have found the new administration in Washington to be what Lenin once described as a “useful idiot” …
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Jewish Power
Joseph Sobran
… In proportion to their numbers, Jews are the most successful and powerful group in the United States today. They have both raw power, political and economic, and enormous intellectual influence, shaping America’s self-understanding … The Jews don’t really “run” America; but they haunt it in a peculiar way that makes it seem as if they run it, and gives them a leverage out of all proportion to their numbers, and even to their raw power. They have a certain moral authority, which isn’t altogether specious, but is certainly lopsided, since they are exempted from the kind of public criticism they are free to dish out.
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An independently made video based on a talk by historian Mark Weber, “A Straight Look at the Jewish Lobby.” “As long as the ‘very powerful’ Jewish lobby remains entrenched, there will be no end to the systematic Jewish distortion of current affairs and history, the Jewish-Zionist domination of the U.S. political system, Zionist oppression of Palestinians, the bloody conflict between Jews and non-Jews in the Middle East, and the Israeli threat to peace.” Runtime: 17:28 mins.
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Reform Party Deputy Chairman and MEP Urmas Paet, and Jaak Madison, a member of the board of the Conservative People’s Party of Estonia (EKRE), have condemned a critical statement issued by the Russian Embassy in Tallinn on Monday regarding an event held in Northeastern Estonia last Saturday to commemorate the Battle of Tannenberg Line fought in World War II … A statement published by the Russian Embassy on Monday found that the commemoration of those who died in the Battle of Tannenberg Line in 1944 is the glorification of Waffen SS veterans. “We resent that the unfortunate custom of glorifying Waffen SS veterans continues in Estonia,” the embassy said …
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This 16-minutes video presentation, with English-language narration, reviews the “Battle of the Tannenberg Line” – a major World War II battle in Estonia for the strategically important Narva Isthmus. A pan-European Waffen SS force of 22,250 men, including Germans, Estonians, Danes, Norwegians, Dutch and Belgians (Flemish and Walloons), fought July 25 to August 10, 1944, against vastly larger Soviet forces. About half of the Waffen SS infantrymen were Estonians. Known in Estonia as the “Battle of the Blue Hills,” it is regarded as a tactical victory for the European forces. The greatly outnumbered and outgunned defenders suffered about 10,000 casualties, while Soviet losses were 170,000 dead, missing or wounded.
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Israeli Intervention in US Elections 'Vastly Overwhelms' Anything Russia Has Done, Says Noam Chomsky
The Independent (Britain)
Veteran activist Noam Chomsky has accused Israel of “brazenly” interfering in US electoral politics in a way that vastly outweighs any efforts that may have been carried out by Russia. In comments in which he accused much of the media of concentrating on stories he considered marginal, and ignoring issues such as the “existential threat” of climate change, the 89-year-old linguist said in much of the world, the US media’s focus with Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 was “a joke” … “Whatever the Russians may have done barely counts or weighs in the balance as compared with what another state does, openly, brazenly and with enormous support,” he said. Speaking to Democracy Now, Mr Chomsky added: “Israeli intervention in US elections vastly overwhelms anything the Russians may have done …”
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Illiberal “Christian democracy” will replace multiculturalism after the European Parliament vote in 2019, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has predicted, adding that the EU elite have failed the people and should step down … It’s time for the current Western leadership of the EU to go, as it has failed to protect the bloc from immigration, he said. “Their big goal is to transform Europe, to ship it into a post-Christian era and into an era when nations disappear …,” the PM said. The liberal values and multiculturalism promoted by Brussels will crumble in the face of what he called “Christian democracy.” According to Orban, “Christian democracy is not liberal … It is illiberal, if you like.” This ideology rejects not only immigration and multiculturalism, but Communist values as well, he explained.
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George Soros Bet Big on Liberal Democracy. Now He Fears He is Losing
Michael Steinberger - The New York Times Magazine
… In Paris, I had coffee with Alex Soros, who is 32 and the second-youngest of George’s five children … Alex told me that for many years, his father had not been eager to advertise his Judaism because “this was something he was almost killed for.” But he had always “identified firstly as a Jew,” and his philanthropy was ultimately an expression of his Jewish identity, in that he felt a solidarity with other minority groups and also because he recognized that a Jew could only truly be safe in a world in which all minorities were protected. Explaining his father’s motives, he said, “The reason you fight for an open society is because that’s the only society that you can live in, as a Jew — unless you become a nationalist and only fight for your own rights in your own state.”
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Will Tribalism Trump Democracy?
Will Tribalism Trump Democracy? Patrick J. Buchanan
… Here in America, we, too, appear to be in an endless quarrel about who we are. Is America a different kind of nation, a propositional nation, an ideological nation, defined by a common consent to the ideas and ideals of our iconic documents like the Declaration of Independence and Gettysburg Address? Or are we like other nations, a unique people with our own history, heroes, holidays, religion, language, literature, art, music, customs and culture, recognizable all over the world as “the Americans”? … Today, a large share of the American people loathe who we were from the time of the explorers and settlers, up until the end of segregation in the 1960s. They want to apologize for our past, rewrite our history, erase our memories and eradicate the monuments of those centuries.
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Common Culture Makes a Nation
Linh Dinh
… Those who have never been to the US, however, still harbor many fantasies about it, for American movies and music videos are hypnotically seductive. Even as it kills and commits suicide, the US tirelessly projects images of boundless wealth, virility and sexiness. Producing next to nothing, it sells dreams .. A people can endure any travails if they still have a common culture and history. With these snuffed out, there’s no nation left to save. Just ask yourself, Who have the means and desire to hollow out America? What are their final aims?
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Catholic Church in Jerusalem Slams Nation-State Law, Urges Christians to Protest
The Times of Israel
The Latin Patriarchate in Jerusalem on Monday issued a statement slamming the newly passed nation-state law, which it called discriminatory, and said it violated both Israeli and international law. The Patriarchate, which represents the Roman Catholic Church in the Holy Land, called on all Christians in Israel to protest the law that reserves the right to national-self determination exclusively for Israel’s Jewish citizens. “The law fails to provide any constitutional guarantees for the rights of the indigenous and other minorities living in the country,” a Patriarchate statement said. “Palestinian citizens of Israel, constituting 20 percent are flagrantly excluded from the law.”
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We Should Be Aware of Russia’s Perspective
Sen. Rand Paul – USA Today
Whether or not to expand NATO is a question that deserves debate. Would it help or hurt U.S. national security? Does adding countries such as Albania and Montenegro increase our security or ensnare us in possible regional disputes? Are we willing to risk war with Russia by including countries that already are mired in military conflict with Russia? … There was a time when many cautioned against reckless expansion. Perhaps the most famous diplomat of the last century, George Kennan, wrote that NATO expansion would be a “fateful error” that would “inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion” and “restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations.”
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George Kennan and the Twisted Course of US Foreign Policy
Mark Weber – Podcast
George F. Kennan, an outstanding twentieth-century American diplomat and scholar, played an important role in implementing and shaping US foreign policy, and earned well-deserved praise as a historian. He was a consistent advocate of a “realist” US foreign policy — laid down by Washington, Jefferson, and other founders — based on a prudent regard for US interests, and especially the long-term interests of the American people. In 1947-48, Kennan joined with State Department chief George C. Marshall and other high-ranking US officials in opposing US support for the Zionist takeover of Palestine.
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George Kennan and the Discovery of Realism
Lee Congdon - Taki's Magazine
The tradition of thought with which George Kennan (1904-2005) is most often identified is that of political realism. That tradition appears to most Americans to be rather foreign, incompatible with new world enlightenment and morality … A prudent foreign policy was one that accepted the realities of power and interest and strove to keep the inevitable conflicts between nations within tolerable limits. Such a policy could be successful only if it took as its guiding principle the national interest … Realism meant something else as well: a rejection of any idea of American “exceptionalism” or messianism, any claim that superior virtue placed upon Americans a redemptive burden on a global scale.
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The World Wants You to Think Like a Realist
Stephen M. Walt - Foreign Policy
… Instead of relying on realism, both Republicans and Democrats tend to view foreign policy through the lens of liberal idealism. Rather than see world politics as an arena where security is scarce and major powers are forced to contend whether they wish to or not, America’s foreign-policy mavens are quick to divide the world into virtuous allies (usually democracies) and evil adversaries (always some sort of dictatorship) and to assume that when things go badly, it is because a wicked foreign leader (Saddam Hussein, Ali Khamenei, Vladimir Putin, Muammar al-Qaddafi, etc.) is greedy, aggressive, or irrational. When friendly states object to something the (virtuous) United States is doing, U.S. leaders tend to assume that critics just don’t understand their noble aims or are jealous of America’s success.