Netanyahu!
===
This from a dear friend and fellow memo reader explaining how much he learned from watching Democrats debate! (See 1 below.)
Now go out and vote for the person best suited for what was once a proud nation.
===
Israel is spending a quarter of a billion dollars to invent technology capable of destroying Hamas tunnels. Hamas is spending millions building more tunnels while their citizens live in bunkers destroyed as a result of wantonly sending rockets into Israel.
This is the Arab mentality and leadership Obama believes Israel must make concessions to so there will be peace in The Middle East. (See 2 below.)
This is the same Obama logic that drove him to make a deal with Iran which has done nothing but break every paragraph since it was signed. Hillary wants to continue in Obama's foot steps.
The collapse of Libya is instructive and perhaps indicative of her judgement along with the failed reset button idea with Russia which now occupies Syria and part of Ukraine. (See 2a below.)
and
Then, Caroline Glick. (See 2b below.)
===
The FBI could prove to be Hillarious' biggest speed bump but it might turn out she broke more laws using her political office to raise foundation money for her presidential campaign than she did in her various actions involving her server and classified documents. (See 3 and 3a below.)
There are a lot of unexplained circumstances surrounding the deaths of those who had dealings with the Clintons, so I would hate to be Pagliano - maybe his plea bargain should have included being placed in The Witness Protection Program.
===
I am not ritualistic and I too lived through the Holocaust. Krauthammer is right when he writes.
victimhood is not a foundation on which to build one's faith.
Bernie's identity with The Holocaust is real but it seems a shallow basis for identifying with a great religion and people. (See 4 below.)
===
Dick
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1)WHAT I HAVE LEARNED FROM WATCHING THE DEMOCRAT DEBATES
Black Lives Matter, All Lives Don't Matter.
College should be free and all student loans cancelled.
All medical treatment should be free.
To become an American citizen you just need to show up here.
The economy sucks and after 7 years in office, it's not Obama's fault
The Middle Class is shrinking rapidly and after 7 years in office, it's not Obama's fault.
Average family income is continuing to drop and after 7 years in office, it's not Obama's fault.
Black youths have over a 50% unemployment rate and after 7 years in office it's not Obama's fault.
Hispanic youth unemployment is over 35% and after 7 years in office, it's not Obama's fault.
50% of the population is paying 100% of all the taxes and they are still not paying their “fair
share.” The other 50% are not receiving nearly enough free stuff and deserve more.
share.” The other 50% are not receiving nearly enough free stuff and deserve more.
Everyone who votes Democrat will work less, make more money, get more time off, spend more
time with family, pay less taxes, and get more government subsidies.
time with family, pay less taxes, and get more government subsidies.
Government wants even more money to squander on old promises already broken.
Being a "Progressive" is less cringe-worthy than saying you're a Liberal.
When America grows up, we want to be Norway, Sweden or the Netherlands .
There's a quagmire in Iraq and Obama's complete retreat from there has nothing to do with the
situation.
situation.
Republicans want dirty air, oil spills, trash in the streets, polluted oceans, no medical treatment,
young people without any education being paid the lowest possible wages, starving children, were
responsible for Jim Crow Laws and don't believe in equal rights.
young people without any education being paid the lowest possible wages, starving children, were
responsible for Jim Crow Laws and don't believe in equal rights.
Snowden and General Petraeus broke laws for releasing and not securing secret documents but
Hillary Clinton shares no responsibility for doing WORSE.
If Hillary is elected, everything will be rainbows and Unicorns - just like with Obama.
Hillary Clinton does walk on water.
Cheaters do prosper.
People often cheer stupidity.
There is only one candidate given a voice in the Democrat Race.
Hillary and Bill Clinton were born poor Black Children.
All the qualifications needed to be President is to be a woman.
Evil looks like anything white, rich, successful and productive.
You will receive a participation trophy in life.
Agreements of any kind should be signed and committed to, even if the other agreeing party
doesn't live up to its obligations.
doesn't live up to its obligations.
Everyone else does it, so should we, regardless of any results in those other countries.
Everything gone wrong in the world is George Bush's fault
======================================
2)
2)
| Israel Is Building a Secret Tunnel-Destroying Weapon |
As Hamas expands its tunnel network in Gaza, Israel, and the United States are collaborating on a clandestine project to thwart the Islamist group’s subterranean advantage. By Yardena Schwartz Foreign Policy March 10, 2016 http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/03/10/israel-is-building-a-secret-tunnel-destroying-weapon-hamas-us-gaza/ KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza — Bassem al-Najar has been homeless since August 2014, when Israeli warplanes demolished his house during the 50-day conflict that killed more than 2,000 Gazans and 72 Israelis. Najar lost his brother in the war, and for the next four months, he lived in a U.N. school with his wife and four children, along with 80 other families. They moved into a prefabricated hut, resembling a tool shed, in December 2014, where they expected to live for just a few months until their home was rebuilt. Today, he is still one of an estimated 100,000 Gazans who remain homeless. Yet while much of Gaza still lies in ruins, what has taken less time to rebuild is Hamas’s subterranean tunnel network, the very thing Israel entered Gaza to destroy. During Operation Protective Edge, the name used by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for the 2014 war, the military uncovered and destroyed 32 cross-border tunnels that snaked for miles beneath Gaza and reached into Israeli territory. Many of them, according to the IDF, began inside homes and mosques in Gaza and ended inside or on the edge of Israeli border towns. Hamas has made no secret of its efforts to fortify its labyrinth of tunnels, which have emerged as the group’s most powerful weapon — far more effective than its rocket arsenal. In just a handful of tunnel attacks over the course of that summer, Palestinian militants managed to kill 11 Israeli soldiers and capture the bodies of several soldiers in the hope of arranging a future prisoner exchange, in which Israel would trade Palestinian prisoners for the return of soldiers’ bodies. During the 2014 war, Hamas fired more than 4,800 rockets and 1,700 mortars at Israel, according to Amnesty International. Thanks to the Iron Dome, a first-of-its-kind anti-rocket system developed by Israeli engineers with the help of nearly $1 billion from the U.S. government, many of them were shot out of the sky before they could reach civilian towns and cities. The Iron Dome explains the extremely low number of civilian deaths on the Israeli side. But there is no Iron Dome-type system that has proved as effective at thwarting Hamas’s tunnel network. Although they are still waiting for their homes to be rebuilt and are living with just a few hours of electricity a day and barely any potable tap water, Najar and other Palestinians are not angry with Hamas for rebuilding the tunnels, which could lead Israel to wage another war to destroy them. “What angers me is that the occupation is still imposing a siege on Gaza, which prevents the building process,” he says. In fact, since the cease-fire between Israel and the militant Islamist group Hamas, more than 3 million tons of construction material have entered Gaza through Israel’s Kerem Shalom border crossing, according to Israeli figures. The first major tunnel attack occurred near that same crossing in 2006, when 19-year-old Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was captured by Hamas militants. Hamas held Shalit in Gaza until 2011, when Israel exchanged him for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners. The prospect of capturing another Israeli soldier, and concluding another prisoner exchange, is one reason the tunnels are so valuable to Hamas. According to experts in Palestinian politics, there is actually a surplus of cement and other construction materials in Gaza, leading to a black market that has enabled Hamas to easily repair the tunnels that Israel destroyed in 2014 and build new ones. “It’s no secret that Hamas has its ways of getting these construction materials,” says Mkhaimar Abusada, a professor of political science at Al-Azhar University in Gaza. “There are some Palestinians who buy cement to rehabilitate their homes at the fixed price of 560 NIS (new Israeli shekels) per ton [roughly $143] but sell it on the black market for 800 NIS [roughly $205]. This is part of the problem. Some of the Palestinians aren’t using the cement to rebuild their homes.” While Israel struggles to prevent the construction material it is allowing into Gaza from ending up in Hamas tunnels, it is developing a secret military weapon designed to eradicate the problem. According to intelligence officials, Israeli engineers are working tirelessly to develop what’s being called the “Underground Iron Dome” — a system that could detect and destroy cross-border tunnels. According to a report on Israeli Channel 2, the Israeli government has spent more than $250 million since 2004 in its efforts to thwart tunnel construction under the Gaza border. The United States has already appropriated $40 million for the project in the 2016 financial year, in order “to establish anti-tunnel capabilities to detect, map, and neutralize underground tunnels that threaten the U.S. or Israel,” said U.S. Defense Department spokesman Christopher Sherwood. While the majority of the work in 2016 will be done in Israel, Sherwood added, “the U.S. will receive prototypes, access to test sites, and the rights to any intellectual property.” Contrary to reports quoting the Israeli Defense Ministry, which claimed that the United States had already earmarked $120 million for the project, Sherwood said that appropriations are done annually, thus there is no guarantee that an additional $40 million will be appropriated in 2017 and 2018. Among the Israeli companies working to develop the new anti-tunnel mechanism are Elbit Systems and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, the same company that developed the Iron Dome rocket defense system. Both companies declined to provide any details due to security reasons, as did the IDF and other Israeli officials, who fear that such information could play into Hamas’s hands. Yet according to intelligence sources who spoke with Foreign Policy on the condition of anonymity, the system involves seismic sensors that can monitor underground vibrations. IDF Chief of Staff Gen. Gadi Eizenkot hinted at these efforts in February. “We are doing a lot, but many of [the things we do] are hidden from the public,” he told a conference at Herzliya’s Interdisciplinary Center. “We have dozens, if not a hundred, engineering vehicles on the Gaza border.” Yaakov Amidror, a former national security advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former head of Israel’s National Security Council, told FP the confidential new system is not yet operational, but it is “in a testing mode.” Since the beginning of 2016, nearly a dozen Hamas tunnels have collapsed on the Palestinians who were building them, killing at least 10 of the group’s members. While winter rains have been blamed as the culprit, the wave of collapses has led many here to wonder if Israel’s new secret weapon is already at work. Asked by the Palestinian Maan News Agency in February whether or not Israel was behind recent tunnel collapses, the coordinator of government activities in the Palestinian territories, IDF Maj. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, responded, “God knows.” Hamas, too, is paying close attention to Israeli attempts to thwart its tunnel network. Haniyeh, the senior Hamas official, told Gazans at Friday prayers on Feb. 19 that the Islamist group had “discovered an underground vehicle on which were installed cameras and sensors to monitor tunnels and fighters.” Even if Haniyeh’s claim is true, Israel still appears unable to completely counter Hamas’s subterranean advantage. And if the development of the Underground Iron Dome is any indication, it could be several years before Israel is able to employ an effective anti-tunnel system. In the meantime, Israeli residents of Gaza border towns are growing frustrated with what they perceive as a government that lacks any vision beyond fighting a war with Hamas every two or three years. Israel has fought three wars with Hamas since it withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005 — 2008’s Operation Cast Lead, 2012’s Operation Pillar of Defense, and 2014’s Operation Protective Edge. While border residents wish the government and military would do more to protect them from Hamas’s tunnels, many of them also want the government to help the people of Gaza. “Gaza is a pot that’s about to boil over, and unless something changes there, nothing is going to change here,” says Adele Raemer, who lives a mile from the Gaza border in Nirim, an Israeli settlement. “People can’t live like that without exploding. They are going to go underground and build tunnels if that’s how they are going to make a living.” According to veteran Israeli journalist Avi Issacharoff, the former Arab affairs correspondent for Haaretz, digging tunnels is one of the best ways to make a living in Gaza. Tunnelers typically earn about $400 a month, says Issacharoff. It’s a decent salary by Gaza standards, where unemployment is among the world’s highest, at 38 percent, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. “It’s a two-pronged problem,” says Raemer, a New York native and mother of four. “On the one hand, we have to protect ourselves, but on the other hand, we have to make it livable on the other side. I believe the people in Gaza want the same things we want here: security, safety, the ability to put food on the table for our children. It’s just complicated when you have Hamas ruling there. They’ve held us and the people of Gaza hostage.” Raemer ends our conversation with a lament: “We’re worse off now than we were before Operation Protective Edge, because Gaza is getting worse. Operation Protective Edge was supposed to protect me.” It’s a feeling echoed by many Israelis living along the Gaza border, who would like to see a long-term solution to the problem that is Gaza, not just the symptom that is the tunnels. 2a)SAUDI JOURNALIST: IRAN – NOT ISRAEL – IS THE GULF STATES' NO. 1 ENEMY Governing your enemies is the price you pay to be free
i
 By Caroline B. GlickTwo weeks ago, Saudi Arabia listed Hezbollah as a terrorist organization and canceled its $3 billion aid package to the Lebanese military. The Gulf Cooperation Council followed suit. Rather than support the move by his sponsors and allies, Saad Hariri, the head of the anti-Hezbollah March 14 movement, flew to Syria to meet with Hezbollah leaders. Saudi Arabia’s decision to end its support for the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) doesn’t mean that Saudi Arabia is making peace with Hezbollah. It means that the Saudis are no longer willing to maintain the fiction that with enough support, the LAF will one day challenge Hezbollah’s effective control of Lebanon. Hezbollah and its bosses in Tehran don’t seem too upset about the Sunnis’ decision to acknowledge that Hezbollah is a terrorist group. And they are right not to care. In essence, the Saudi move is simply an admission that they have won. Lebanon is theirs. Hezbollah’s isn’t the dominant force in Lebanon because it has better weapons than the LAF. Unlike the LAF, Hezbollah has no air force. It has no armored divisions. Hezbollah is able to dominate Lebanon because unlike the LAF and the March 14 movement, Hezbollah is willing to destroy Lebanon if doing so advances its strategic goals. This has all been fairly clear for more than a decade. But it took the war in Syria to force the truth above the surface. And now that it is clear to everyone that Lebanon has ceased to exist and that the country we once knew is now an Iranian colony, the time has come for Israel to reckon with the lessons of its own misadventures in our neighbor to the north. Since the mid-1990s, Israel has implemented three strategies in Lebanon and in Syria. All of them originated on the Left. All of them failed. The first strategy was appeasement. From the mid-1990s until the Syrian war began five years ago, Israel’s strategic framework for understanding Syria was appeasement. Initially, the notion was that Syria was our enemy because we control the Golan Heights. If we surrendered the Golan to Syria, we would have peace in exchange. In the years leading up to the Syrian war, our leaders embraced the idea that Syria was the weakest link in the Iranian axis. If we gave the Golan Heights to Syria, they said, then the Assad regime would withdraw from the Iranian axis. As it turned out, these positions had no basis in reality. Appeasement failed. Then there was unconditional surrender – or disengagement. Then-prime minister Ehud Barak implemented this strategy when he removed IDF units from the security zone in south Lebanon in May 2000. From the mid-1990s on, Yossi Beilin was the chief advocate of unconditional surrender in Lebanon. The logic of surrender was similar to that of appeasement – of which he was also a principal architect and advocate. The surrender strategy in Lebanon was based on the idea that Hezbollah fought the IDF in south Lebanon because the IDF was in south Lebanon. If the IDF were to leave south Lebanon, Hezbollah was have no reason to fight us anymore. So if we were gone, Beilin argued, Hezbollah would stop fighting, ditch terrorism and Iran, and become a normal Lebanese political party. The war with Hezbollah in 2006 destroyed the credibility of the surrender strategy. But the Left didn’t despair. They simply replaced surrender with the strategy of internationalization. The internationalization strategy forms the basis of UN Security Council Resolution 1701 that set the cease-fire terms at the end of the war with Hezbollah. IDF soldiers, who left Lebanon without victory, were replaced by UN forces from UNIFIL. UNIFIL forces were supposed to block Hezbollah’s reassertion of control over south Lebanon by facilitating the LAF’s takeover of the border with Israel. While UNIFIL was protecting the LAF on the ground, the LAF itself would be empowered by a massive infusion of US and Saudi aid. Saudi Arabia’s belated recognition that Hezbollah dominates the LAF, and controls Lebanon, makes clear that like appeasement and disengagement, internationalization is an utter failure. To a certain degree, Israel’s serial strategic blundering did have one ameliorative effect. Through them, Hezbollah has become so powerful that it now poses a threat to the great powers. So Russia in Syria now needs to curb it. So, too, it is so powerful that Iran is loath to waste it on a war with Israel that it will lose when it is fighting to win the war in Syria. For now then, Hezbollah is not an immediate threat. This is the case despite Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah’s recent threat to bomb Haifa’s chemical depots and cause a fireball with the cataclysmic effect of a nuclear bomb. But that doesn’t mean that the lessons of our repeated strategic mistakes in Syria and Lebanon shouldn’t be applied today. They should be applied, but toward another, more immediate foe – the Palestinians, toward whom Israel has applied the same failed policies, one after another, with similarly destructive outcomes. After the first intifada ground to a halt in 1991, Israel adopted the Left’s first strategy. The so-called peace process with the PLO, which began in 1993, was an attempt to implement a strategy of appeasement. We would gradually give the PLO Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Jerusalem. In return, the PLO would stop supporting terrorism and live at peace with Israel. The failure of the appeasement strategy led to the second intifada. The second intifada caused Israel to adopt the Left’s second strategy – unconditional surrender. Israel’s 2005 disengagement from Gaza failed just as spectacularly as its 2000 disengagement from Lebanon. Not only did it lead to the Hamas takeover of Gaza in 2007. It led to the further radicalization of the PLO and Palestinian society as a whole. The latter became convinced that terrorism worked. The former became convinced that the only way to garner public support was by being just as anti-Israel as Hamas.
Today, the center-left parties – the Zionist Union and Yesh Atid – cling to the failed strategy of disengagement. The far Left,
together with the Arab political parties, have already moved on to the internationalization strategy. In the Palestinian context, the goal of the internationalization strategy is the collapse of Israeli sovereignty. This strategy was in evidence this week with Peace Now head Yariv Oppenheimer’s outrageous claim Wednesday that in killing the terrorists who were in the midst of murdering innocents in Petah Tikva and Tel Aviv, civilians and security forces carried out summary executions. Oppenheimer, whose group is funded by foreign governments, did not make the claim because he wished to build his support base at home. He demonized his fellow citizens to advance his paymasters’ goal of delegitimizing Israeli sovereignty by among other things, criminalizing Israel’s right to self-defense. The goal of this delegitimization campaign is to make it impossible for Israel to function as a coherent nation-state and for it instead to become a powerless ward of Europe and the US. In the face of both the rise in Palestinian terrorism and of efforts by Oppenheimer and his comrades to use Palestinian terrorism as a means to cause the collapse of Israeli sovereignty, the government is at a loss. Its paralysis doesn’t owe to a lack of will. Rather it is the consequence of the government’s difficulty in contending with the coalition of powerful domestic and foreign actors that together make it all but impossible for Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his ministers to abandon the Left’s failed strategies and embark on a new strategic course. Perhaps the most poignant and infuriating expression of the government’s distress is its constant demand that PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas condemn Palestinian terrorism. On seemingly a daily basis our leaders voice the demand that the man who heads a regime that indoctrinates its youth – including its young children – to murder Jews condemn his own actions. Beyond being irrational, the demand is both defeatist and self-defeating. By demanding action from Abbas, we legitimize him and empower him. But so long as Israel refuses to abandon the appeasement strategy, and continues to accept that there is a peace process that can be resuscitated, the government will be unable to stop treating Abbas as legitimate and moderate. So, too, so long as the Knesset fails to take serious, concerted action against the nonprofit groups funded by hostile foreign governments and foundations, the government will be unable to take effective action against the radical Left and its partners from the Joint (Arab) List that openly support both Palestinian terrorists and Hezbollah. Just as Oppenheimer’s remarks weren’t directed toward the domestic audience, but to his European sponsors, so the Arab Knesset members who this week announced their opposition to Saudi Arabia’s decision to label Hezbollah a terrorist group, were directing their remarks toward their supporters – and Hezbollah’s sponsors – in Qatar. While adopting in turn every failed strategy the Left could invent and recycle, for the past generation, Israel has avoided implementing the only strategy that has ever worked. That is the strategy of sovereignty – or, more broadly, of governing territories necessary for our defense. From 1982 through 2000, Israel restrained Hezbollah and prevented it from taking over Lebanon by maintaining security control over the security zone in Lebanon. For 28 years, Israel prevented the Palestinians from becoming a terrorist society dedicated to the destruction of the people of Israel, by exerting security and civil authority over Judea, Samaria and Gaza through its military government and its civil administration. And it worked. By fighting our enemies rather than empowering them, we weakened them. The image of the first intifada that convinced us to legitimize the PLO was the teenager with a slingshot. The image of the second intifada that convinced us to run away from Gaza was a bombed out bus. So far, the image of the third intifada is a girl wielding scissors attempting to stab Jews. And we still haven’t figured out our response to her, although the Left would like us to run away or collapse. It is time to let this image guide us though. The girl with the scissors is not empowered. She is both dangerous and pathetic. She is both an enemy and a victim. You cannot destroy her. You can only punish her and then raise her up. In other words, you need to govern her. Governing enemies is unpleasant. It brings no instant gratification. Instead it promises only thankless, Sisyphean efforts. In other words, governing your enemies is the price you pay to be free.
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3) Hillary’s Other Server ScandalThe focus is on state secrets in her email—but what personal favors lay within?
By
Bernie Sanders keeps refusing to hit Hillary Clinton over her email. Or so it seems. But maybe the Vermont senator’s relentless assault on Mrs. Clinton’s corporate ties is about her email after all. Maybe Mr. Sanders is betting that Hillary has a bigger problem than classified information.
The question hanging over the Clinton campaign is whether she will be indicted for mishandling state secrets. Under the heroic grilling of Jorge Ramos at the Univision Democratic debate Wednesday, Mrs. Clinton was again forced to roll out a trail of misdirection, to insist (with astonishing brazenness) that
an indictment is “not going to happen.”
Classified information matters, and Mrs. Clinton stands accused of sloppy handling. Yet the former secretary of state didn’t set up a home-brew server with the express purpose of exposing national
secrets—that was incidental. Mrs. Clinton went to elaborate lengths to build a secret, private system for some other reason. She says it was for “convenience.” Others speculate she did it out of the Clintons’ longtime paranoia over paper trails. Opinion Journal Video
Pollster Doug Schoen analyzes the limitations of the Democratic frontrunner’s campaign strategy. Photo credit: Getty Images.
Mr. Sanders is likely hitting closer to the truth.
Lost in the classified kerfuffle is the other, lately ignored but still potent, scandal: the Clinton Foundation, and the unethical mixing of Mrs. Clinton’s public work and her personal fundraising/speech-giving/favor-doing. The more evidence that comes out, the more it looks as if that server was set up to provide an off-the-grid means for those two worlds to interact.
Take Bryan Pagliano, now reported to have
received Justice Department immunity in return for talking about his email services rendered. Mr. Pagliano has long ties to the Clintons. He ran Mrs. Clinton’s IT shop during her 2008 presidential campaign and then worked for her political-action committee. He was important enough that she custom-built a job for him at the State Department. He arrived only a few months after her in 2009, and he left when she left.
Mr. Pagliano maintained Mrs. Clinton’s server in her New York home. The State Department paid him, but a Clinton official confirmed to the Washington Post that the Clintons paid him in addition. Mr. Pagliano did not report that outside money on disclosure forms—as he was required to do. And the
State Department claims to have been unaware that Mr. Pagliano was getting personally paid by the secretary of state.
So Mr. Pagliano gets added to the list of insiders who were compensated to work simultaneously for
the government and the Clintons. Huma Abedin at one point worked for the State Department, the Clinton Foundation, Mrs. Clinton and a private company tied to the Clintons—all at the same time. Cheryl Mills worked for Mrs. Clinton at State while also holding a position at the Clinton Foundation. Sidney Blumenthal secretly assisted Mrs. Clinton at State (unpaid), while on the foundation payroll.
While in government, Ms. Mills was paid by an outside entity to negotiate with a foreign country (the United Arab Emirates) that had donated to the Clinton Foundation. She was also among those who reviewed Bill Clinton’s speaking events.
Ms. Abedin held her own clintonemail.com account. We recently found out that the State Department’s inspector general issued a subpoena to the foundation last fall, demanding documents about projects it engaged in while Mrs. Clinton was the nation’s top diplomat. That subpoena specifically asked for
records related to Ms. Abedin.
Mrs. Clinton would have us believe that the 31,830 emails she deleted from her server pertained to
yoga and weddings. And yet look at what the press has gleaned even from the few emails and foundation details that were released.
Foundation cash after Russian mining approvals. More than a dozen speeches by Bill to corporations
and governments with business pending before Hillary’s State Department. Dozens more donations to the foundation from companies that were lobbying the State Department. Checks to the foundation from a Swiss bank after Secretary of State Clinton solved its IRS problem. An email to Ms. Abedin, while she was at State, asking for help winning a presidential appointment for a Clinton Foundation donor.
What else? Plenty, surely. The Clinton Foundation existed in recent years to serve as an unofficial PAC for Mrs. Clinton’s expected presidential run. And Mrs. Clinton’s job at State was designed to serve the same end. Of course the business of the two was intertwined. And here’s to betting the server was maintained to facilitate that intertwinement.
Mr. Sanders started ramping up his attacks on Mrs. Clinton for her ties to “billionaires” and “Wall
Street” in mid-January. That’s almost precisely the time that news organizations reported (without garnering much public attention) that the FBI had expanded its email probe to examine the “intersection” between Mrs. Clinton’s State Department and the foundation. What is Mr. Pagliano now telling as part of his immunity deal?
Mr. Sanders knows that his corporate-special-interest line already plays well with crowds; it reminds people of the stench of the Clintons’ ethics. But he may also be betting that the FBI finds more to peg
on Mrs. Clinton than simply classified emails. And he may be right. 3a) Published March 11, 2016
Catherine Herridge is an award-winning Chief Intelligence correspondent for FOX News Channel (FNC) based in Washington, D.C. She covers intelligence, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security. Herridge joined FNC in 1996 as a London-based correspondent.
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4)
The Holocaust and American Jews
By Charles Krauthammer
Bernie Sanders is the most successful Jewish candidate for the presidency ever. It’s a rare sign of the health of our republic that no one seems to much care or even notice. Least of all, Sanders himself. Which prompted Anderson Cooper in a recent Democratic debate to ask Sanders whether he was intentionally keeping his Judaism under wraps.
“No,” answered Sanders: “I am very proud to be Jewish.” He then explained that the Holocaust had wiped out his father’s family. And that he remembered as a child seeing neighbors with concentration camp numbers tattooed on their arms. Being Jewish, he declared, “is an essential part of who I am as a human being.”
A fascinating answer, irrelevant to presidential politics but quite revealing about the
state of Jewish identity in contemporary America.
Think about it. There are several alternate ways American Jews commonly explain the role Judaism plays in their lives.
(1) Practice: Judaism as embedded in their life through religious practice or the transmission of Jewish culture by way of teaching or scholarship. Think Joe
Lieberman or the neighborhood rabbi.
(2) Tikkun: Seeing Judaism as an expression of the prophetic ideal of social justice. Love thy neighbor, clothe the naked, walk with God, beat swords into plowshares. As ritual and practice have fallen away over the generations, this has become the core identity of liberal Judaism. Its central mission is nothing less than to repair the world (“Tikkun olam”).
Which, incidentally, is the answer to the perennial question, “Why is it that Jews vote overwhelmingly Democratic?” Because, for the majority of Jews, the social ideals of liberalism are the most tangible expressions of their prophetic Jewish faith.
When Sanders was asked about his Jewish identity, I was sure his answer would be some variation of Tikkun. On the stump, he plays the Old Testament prophet railing against the powerful and denouncing their treatment of the widow and the orphan.
Yet Sanders gave an entirely different answer.
(3) The Holocaust. What a strange reply — yet it doesn’t seem so to us because it
has become increasingly common for American Jews to locate their identity in the Holocaust.
For example, it’s become a growing emphasis in Jewish pedagogy from the Sunday schools to Holocaust studies programs in the various universities. Additionally,
Jewish organizations organize visits for young people to the concentration camps of Europe.
The memories created are indelible. And deeply valuable. Indeed, though my own
family was largely spared, the Holocaust forms an ineradicable element of my own Jewish consciousness. But I worry about the balance. As Jewish practice, learning
and knowledge diminish over time, my concern is that Holocaust memory is emerging as the dominant feature of Jewishness in America.
I worry that a people with a 3,000-year history of creative genius, enriched by intimate relations with every culture from Paris to Patagonia, should be placing such weight on martyrdom — and indeed, for this generation, martyrdom once removed.
I’m not criticizing Sanders. I credit him with sincerity and authenticity. But it is
precisely that sincerity and authenticity — and the implications for future generations — that so concern me. Sanders is 74, but I suspect a growing number of young Jews would give an answer similar to his.
We must of course remain dedicated to keeping alive the memory and the truth of the Holocaust, particularly when they are under assault from so many quarters. Which is why, though I initially opposed having a Holocaust museum as the sole representation of the Jewish experience in the center of Washington, I came to see the virtue of having so sacred yet vulnerable a legacy placed at the monumental core of — and thus entrusted to the protection of — the most tolerant and open nation on earth.
Nonetheless, there must be balance. It would be a tragedy for American Jews to make the Holocaust the principal legacy bequeathed to their children. After all, the Jewish people are living through a miraculous age: the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty, the
revival of Hebrew (a cultural resurrection unique in human history), the flowering of a new Hebraic culture radiating throughout the Jewish world.
Memory is sacred, but victimhood cannot be the foundation stone of Jewish identity. Traditional Judaism has 613 commandments. The philosopher Emil Fackenheim famously said that the 614th is to deny Hitler any posthumous victories. The reduction of Jewish identity to victimhood would be one such victory. It must not be permitted.
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