Is Donald A Quack? Friedmann's Recap. Hamas Operative Captured and Provides Information!

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Trump is what Rand states.  He might say what is on his mind but he would prove a disaster as president.  He does not have the temperament,  has a very thin skin (we already have one currently in the Oval Office) and no one really knows how he would accomplish all his assertions and I doubt he does either..

I give Donald credit for stirring things up and adding a little life to the campaign, I like that he says what is on his mind I just do not care for what is on his mind. With Donald you have to duck too much because he is a quack. (See 1 below.)

Trump this: https://www.youtube.com/embed/UZq3iCn2y74?rel=0 
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Michael  Walters has written up our speaker's comments from yesterday's presentation. (See 2 below.)

Melanie Phillips and her logic. (See 2a below.)
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Captured Hamas operative a treasure trove of information. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)Trump on Rand Paul: 'Spoiled Brat Without Properly Functioning Brain'
By Greg Richter


Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump responded to his presidential rival, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, via Twitter on Monday after Paul wrote an op-ed and held a telephone press conference in which he accused Trump of being a "fake conservative" and a "bully."

Trump didn't address the issue of his own political philosophy, but did attack Paul's intelligence:

Paul in his press conference called Trump a "bully" who attacks people personally who criticize him.

"Unless someone points out that the emperor has no clothes, they'll continue to strut about and what we'll end up with is a reality TV star as the nominee if we're not careful," Paul said. People have gravitated toward Trump because they feel he is delivering "truth-telling," the Kentucky senator said. "But I think someone needs to point out that the truth-telling really is that the emperor has no clothes. The truth-telling is bluster, the truth-telling is non sequitur, self-aggrandizement."

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2) The Iran Nuclear Deal – August 11

Dr. Robert Friedmann was the speaker on this overall Middle East perspective with emphasis on the Obama
Administration’s attempt to create a legacy of newfound peace with Iran and deferring their emergence as a nuclear state.  He is Professor Emeritus of Criminal Justice at Georgia State University and Director of the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange.

Historical Perspective

He started with a review of what happened towards the end of the First World War, when Britain and France created counties that had never really existed before - namely Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan via the  Sykes-Picot Agreement. This region had throughout history (before the discovery of the New World) been strategically situated as a connected focal point near the developed continents of Asia, Africa and Europe. So it was geography and not just religion that created controversies there. Jerusalem being claimed as an important city for Jews, Christians and Muslims.

Also noted was that Iran and Turkey had always been powerful non-Arab countries and rivals in the region.

Iran was a sophisticated military power for centuries, so when it became a Shiite state after the fall of the Shah, things turned for the worse. Some blame was placed on President Carter who misread the dangerous nature of that new Islamist State (“Khomeini is a noble cleric”). 

Carter then refused to exert American power to free the 52 hostages taken from the American Embassy in 1979. It took less than a day in 1981 for the new President Ronald Reagan to get them released. The implication is that the Middle East mentality respects power and senses the original action void as weakness by the U.S. This is viewed as crucial to the current Obama Administration getting out-negotiated by Iran by a wide margin.

Not just Jimmy Carter, but many Westerners were fooled by the intensity of the fundamentalist Muslims in intending to recapture their Caliphates and even desiring to take over the whole world.

The Deal - Why It’s So Bad

The principal reason is the very fact that Iran agreed to it, as they never intended to give up on their original intent to become a nuclear power. Friedmann’s view is that Obama and Kerry were so intent on having a deal that they virtually conceded on every major point. There is a general view among those familiar with the participants close to this “Deal” is that the U.S. got virtually nothing.

Obama’s assertion that only one nation publically expressed opposition to the Deal, Israel, is very misleading as all of Iran’s foes in the region privately are aghast at it, but will not publicly say so.

One reason offered for the one-sidedness of this

Deal is that the U.S. tends to negotiate in good faith, respecting contracts, while the other side is totally duplicitous. “Taqirra” in Islam means you are encouraged to lie to non-believers to achieve ultimate Islamist goals.

Further proof that we got hoodwinked in the Deal was Secretary Kerry’s astonishing admission that he had not read the “secret” bilateral side deal arranged between Iran and the UN inspectors. Iran can now declare any site as military and thwart inspection completely. Before that the “agreement” that Iran had 24 days to cover up a site before inspectors could get in.

Did we learn anything when Bill Clinton’s team of negotiators botched the North Korean negotiations to prevent nuclear expansion, and now North Korea has the bomb?

Audience Queries

In the Q&A session, Friedmann first explained why the U.S. Jewish community has not supported the Israeli abhorrance to this treaty. They still have a remnant liberal view of American politics, stemming from thousands of years of fearing a persecuting establishment, so they are reluctant to criticize Democratic politicians. Perhaps NY Senator Chuck Schumer’s opposition to the deal will start to change that.

On whether Israel, as a formidable military power in the region, will allow an Iranian bomb to be developed, he warned against unilateral Israeli action as inadvisable, as many others have an equal stake in preventing a nuclear Iran. Surprising alliances are starting up among Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Emirates, aligned with Israel against this Iran power play.  

Will Iran be reluctant to bomb Israel for fear of retaliation?   Not likely as they have little regard for life in general. During the Iran-Iraq war, they marched 40,000 young Iranians through an Iraqi minefield to clear it for their own older soldiers to then march through. Also even if nuclear radiation prevents Iranian invasion subsequently for 50 years, they have a very long perspective to their ultimate desire to expand the Caliphate, willing to wait centuries if they are convinced of ultimate victory. Be wary America.

And how naive is the Obama/Kerry view that being friendly with Iran will serve to inspire them to join the community of modern nations that prefer peace rather than war?

There is also the Islamic State threat (Friedmann eschews the terms ISIS and ISIL) that may create unusual alliances in the Middle East. (As for precedence in flip-flopping alliances, he referred to the Soviet Union and Germany and the Allied Powers in WWII.)

A final observation was made by Friedmann that the U.S. congress opposition to the Deal was crucial even if it is overridden by an Obama Veto. It sets the dynamic for a new president’s actions in 2017, if the Republicans win.

And if the Deal rejection survives an Obama veto, that will be a major opportunity to renegotiate. It will likely get support from the U.S. allies that caved in the past negotiation (England and Germany). Russia and China may even come around a bit as the U.S. still has formidable pressure points around the globe on trade and financial sanctions.

2a) As I See It: The West’s deadly culture of unreason

The Western world is facing an unprecedented threat from a global

 eclipse of reason.

By Melanie Phillips

The Western world is facing an unprecedented threat from a global eclipse of reason.

Deranged falsehoods about Jews and Israel pour out of the Arab and Muslim world. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, asserts that the Jews are a “cancerous tumor.” Sunnis tell each other that the Jews are a global conspiracy of evil.

Jews recognize such murderous and paranoid lunacies from the ravings of last century’s Nazis and communists and, before them, Christians in thrall to medieval and apocalyptic conspiracy theories.

It would be natural to suppose that all those civilizational trauma have left the Western world sadder but wiser. Alas, that is not the case.

For all their horrors, fascism and communism were confined to particular regimes, in Nazi Germany and its fascist allies or the Soviet Union and its satellites.

For sure, the rest of the world remained for far too long in denial of these terrible realities. But Western society itself had not been co-opted into these psychopathic creeds.

Today, though, the terrifying reality is that, confronted by totalitarian forces of irrationality and malice toward the civilized world, the most powerful sectors of that very same civilized world have themselves been consumed to a greater or lesser degree by something horribly similar.

The implicit premise on which the US-led deal with Iran is based is that the only way to stop the Iranian regime from getting the bomb is to enable it to get the bomb.

Ludicrous? Of course. At every level, this deal is an utter farce. It is supposed to monitor Iran’s compliance through inspection and verification. Yet it has emerged that the IAEA has done side-deals with the regime which will even allow Iran to inspect and verify itself by collecting its own soil samples.

The deal will delay the Iranian bomb only for 10 years, and that’s if Iran doesn’t cheat – which it has reportedly already started to do. Congress has been given intelligence evidence that, having agreed to allow IAEA inspection of its suspected nuclear military site at Parchin, the regime has brought in the bulldozers to conceal the evidence.

A poll by Quinnipiac University has revealed that 58 percent of Americans believe this deal would make the world less safe. No surprise there; any rational person would surely view it as an outright capitulation to terror. Yet astoundingly, the Obama administration is blaming Israel for turning America against it.

Secretary of State John Kerry has threatened that if Congress blocks the deal, Israel will be to blame. He also claimed that while Tehran has “a fundamental ideological confrontation” with the Jewish state, it has not implemented “active steps” to “wipe it off the map.”

No active steps? For heaven’s sake, that’s one of the purposes of its nuclear program – which Kerry, to his eternal shame, is now helping turn into a radioactive step.

Let’s be charitable: Kerry is said to be spectacularly stupid. No such explanation, though, can sanitize Obama’s outright malice toward not only Israel but the Jewish people.

Railing against “well-financed” lobbyists and the “big check writers to political campaigns” for opposing the deal, Obama thus threw in the faces of American Jews both the charge of malign Jewish conspiracy and the canard of dual loyalty.

Only Israel, he claimed, was against the deal (thus ignoring the passionate opposition of Saudi Arabia and large swathes of the Arab world). The only people against it, he said, were warmongers. Thus Obama managed to turn Israel from being the designated target of genocide into the sole country which actively wanted war.

But Iran is targeting not just Israel but America itself. Obama actually denied this, claiming that Iran wasn’t going to aim its weapons at the United States.

What, then, does he think its intercontinental ballistic missiles are for? What part of Iran’s regular chant of “Death to America, death to Israel!” doesn’t he understand? In the US, the population overwhelmingly supports Israel and understands the threat from Iran.

But the president’s agenda of empowering the Arab and Muslim world translates into a vicious animus against the one country, Israel, that stands in his way.

Britain presents the mirror image, with Prime Minister David Cameron sounding increasingly supportive of Israel but where the intelligentsia is consumed by virulent and irrational hatred of the Jewish state.

In Britain, there has been a total absence of any discussion of the Iran deal. Instead, there has been scandalized coverage of the terrible events in Israel last week, the murderous firebombing of the Arab Dawabsha family and the Jewish terror attack on the Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade.

There has been no coverage whatever of the dozens of terrorist attacks on Israeli Jews which have been going on now for months. Instead there was a BBC TV Panorama show devoted to the Jerusalem Light Rail system.

This was an absolute travesty, composed of historical illiteracy, present-day distortions and wholly unrepresentative and selective interviewing. The light rail is a force for integration since it brings Israeli Arabs into central Jerusalem. Yet presenter Adam Wishart – himself a Jew – only looked in the opposite direction and portrayed it, entirely falsely, as a weapon of Israeli colonization of Arab land.

The BBC dismissed complaints about the show.

But it is no use whatsoever complaining to the BBC about its anti-Israel animus. The most frightening aspect of this anti-Israel ideology is the way it takes over the mind so that those in its grip are intrinsically unable to recognize their own irrationality.

Accordingly, the BBC really does think that its anti-Israel position and wider knee-jerk leftism represent the political center-ground. So those who actually occupy the center-ground and who uphold truth against lies are dismissed as extreme or “rightwing” – and so cannot ever have truth on their side.

Since this mind-bending left-wing prism is the default position amongst the intelligentsia in Britain and the Democratic Party in the US, Israel and its supporters are in the nightmarish situation of being the only people telling the truth about what is happening – and yet being disbelieved or smeared simply because it is they who are saying it.

In the US, Israel is engaged in a desperate struggle to alert American legislators to the awful truth that their president has empowered the world’s principal terror regime and is making a nuclear war much more likely.

In Britain, it finds itself up against a general culture of unreason. Much nevertheless can still be done if Israel develops a coherent strategy to combat this culture. But to do that, it has to be prepared to delegitimize the delegitimizers and hold their feet publicly to the fire – even when they are ostensible allies.

And that will take a shift of perception that Israel has not yet quite made.

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3)  Arrested Hamas operative reveals organization’s operations and capabilities, Iranian support

A Hamas militant arrested by the Shin Bet and Israeli police last month has revealed the terrorist organization’s capabilities and strategy, as well as Iranian support and training. Ibrahim Adel Shahadeh Shaer, a 21-year-old from Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, was arrested while trying to enter Israel through the Erez border crossing. Shaer detailed the precise locations of Hamas’ digging, as well as access points to Hamas tunnels. He explained that Hamas intended to use tunnels dug across the border to infiltrate Israel in a future conflict, and to use a road recently built near the Israeli border as a springboard for future surprise attacks. Shaer described Hamas’ elite units, its anti-tank and anti-aircraft capabilities, and said the organization is capable of observing three kilometers into Israel. Hamas, the militant explained, disperses its weapons in civilians’ homes to avoid one centralized location from being destroyed by an Israeli attack. The terrorist group is continuing to build tunnels with materials disguised as reconstruction supplies.

Shaer also underlined Iranian support for Hamas. Iran provides support in the form of cash, advanced weaponry, and electronic equipment used to interfere with the radio frequencies of Israeli drones. Furthermore, Iran has trained Hamas fighters to use hang-gliders to infiltrate Israeli airspace in a future war.

In the agreement reached between the P5+1 and Iran last month, Iran is set to receive hundreds of billions of dollars in sanctions relief in the coming months and years. Experts argue that Iran will use much of that money to finance terrorist organizations like Hamas as well as additional proxy groups. Jonathan Schanzer, the Vice President for Research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, has stated, “[The] Houthis, the Assad regime, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas. Every one of these groups stands to benefit. They’re all salivating right now at this idea of a cash infusion.” Matthew Levitt, a terror finance expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote in submitted testimony to the Senate Banking Committee that the money would “direct substantial funding to foreign adventures, proxies and allies in keeping with [Iran’s] longstanding track record.” President Obama conceded in a speech last week that the sanctions relief would be of benefit to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the terrorist organizations that it supports.