Tehran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, immediately denounced the move to put Iran in the dock, saying it isn’t how things are done at the United Nations. American officials, though, think it should: After all, they say, Iran’s got its hands in narco-trafficking, the global spread of corruption, and terrorism. So it only makes sense for the “world body” to give it the attention it deserves.
There’ll be other firsts in September, Mrs. Haley vowed: President Trump will chair an unprecedented council meeting on global corruption and another on the illicit narcotics trade.
On Wednesday, Mrs. Haley overcame objections from Russia, China and Bolivia and conducted another first: a meeting on deteriorating conditions in Nicaragua and its regional implications.
The focus on Iran will offer a perfect opportunity to excavate and make public some dangerous trends in Tehran’s global troublemaking.
According to a court filing, Ms. Kobeissi connected with Drug Enforcement Agency operatives who presented themselves as members of a Latin American drug cartel, offering to launder their profits and increase their global reach.
The DEA agents handed her money they said was earned from drug sales. She told them about her connections to shady groups in “Lebanon, Iran, France, Belgium, Bulgaria, Benin, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Nigeria, Cyprus and cities across the United States,” according to the indictment. She proposed schemes to use that network to launder profits and widen drug sales to faraway markets, which the cartels are yet to penetrate (a slice of the profits would go to Hezbollah, of course).
Ms. Kobeissi also told the agents she could traffic drugs to the United States through Puerto Rico. And she’d buy arms from the cartel for Hezbollah and Iran, in violation of United Nations sanctions.
Hezbollah and its Iranian patrons are in deep with Latin America’s drug syndicates, says Emanuele Ottolenghi, fresh from a visit to the Brazil-Argentina-Paraguay border area.
Iran and its proxy, Mr. Ottolenghi told reporters this week, are looking to increase their political influence in Latin America. They also use the region’s corruption-plagued countries and narco-traffickers to finance increasingly expensive military adventures in Syria, Yemen and beyond.
Muslim clerics sermonize against drug use, but Iran isn’t just about devotion to Shiite-revered icons. Its revolutionary ideology is “Imam Hussein meet Che Guevara,” Mr. Ottolenghi, of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the reporters gathered at the Manhattan home of Dani Dayan, Israel’s consul general in New York.
The drug cartels, for their part, latch on to Hezbollah’s worldwide network to increase their global reach, he added — making the partnership good for both sides and twice as bad for global safety. It’s a match made in hell.
The Kobeissi case, as the Eastern District acting attorney at the time, Kelly Currie said, was about a “vast money laundering, drug trafficking, and international arms trafficking network that spanned multiple continents and attempted to provide a pipeline of dangerous weapons to a designated terrorist organization.”
So yes, the Buenos Aires bombings in the early 1980s and the more recent plan to assassinate a Saudi ambassador at an upscale Washington restaurant exposed Iran’s terrorist intentions in the region. But involvement with Latin America’s drug cartels and increasing Iranian political influence in the hemisphere are just as menacing.
Mrs. Haley declined to answer a question about Iran’s Latin America infiltration this week. She, and President Trump, would do well to use their United Nations meetings to ring alarm bells about it.
One of the constant themes of the “Resistance” — most recently restated in the New York Times’ anonymous op-ed Wednesday — is that President Donald Trump is “amoral” because he is interested in cultivating good relations with dictators.
In the words of the anonymous op-ed author: “In public and in private, President Trump shows a preference for autocrats and dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and displays little genuine appreciation for the ties that bind us to allied, like-minded nations.”
Notably, this is the
same line used by the Israeli left and by Israel’s
many critics in the West against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s foreign policy.
There are two aspects of this criticism that are worth pointing out.
First, the criticisms are utterly hypocritical.
The same “Resistance” howling about Trump’s desire to forge a détente with Russia based on a shared interest in fighting Islamic terrorists and preventing Iran from becoming the nuclear hegemon of the Middle East once bent over backwards to empower Iran. They gave the ayatollahs a clear path to a nuclear weapon, as well as $150 billion to finance their wars in Syria and Yemen, and their global terror attacks.
The same Never Trump Republicans attacking Trump for his efforts to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula without war happily supported then-Secretary of State
Condoleezza Riceas she cut a deal that only empowered Pyonyang.
The Obama administration alumni who now insist that Putin is America’s number-one enemy did everything they could to appease him – in exchange for nothing — for years.
As for Israel, the Israeli Left, and its American and European supporters, they have been attacking Netanyahu relentlessly for fostering close ties with the leaders of Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Rwanda, Kenya, and the Philippines. At the same time, they insist that Israel must cough up its capital city and its heartland to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and its terrorist regime.
Just last week, a delegation of leftist lawmakers and political
activists made a pilgrimage to Ramallah, where they met with PLO chief and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas. They cooed and purred about his great visionary leadership, and insisted forcefully that Israel and the Trump administration must recognize his greatness.
This would be the same Abbas who spends hundreds of millions of donor-transferred dollars every year to
pay the salaries of terrorists. This is the same Abbas that continues to reject Israel’s right to exist, who wrote a
dissertation arguing that the Holocaust is a Zionist fabrication; who has spent the past fifty years waging a political war to delegitimize Israel’s very existence.
Beyond the rank hypocrisy of these critics and their criticism, their “morality” card ignores the key fact that Trump’s policies, like Netanyahu’s policies, are succeeding in making the U.S. and Israel stronger, and making the world safer. In contrast, the “moral” policies of their opponents made the world more threatening and dangerous to the U.S. and to Israel.
Consider the Philippines. For the past week or so, Netanyahu’s domestic opponents, and their ready echo chamber in the U.S. media, have
been attacking him for welcoming Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte to Israel. Duterte arrived in Israel – the first Philippine leader to ever do so – on Sunday and spent four days in the country.
To be sure, Duterte
has a record of unseemly statements about women and brutal actions in his war on drug dealers. He even
praised Hitler.
But at the same time, Duterte has an overriding, permanent shared interest with Israel and the U.S. This shared interest is what caused Duterte to travel 6,000 miles from home, with a huge delegation of military personnel and businessmen in tow, to sit down with Netanyahu this week.
Like Israel and the U.S., Philippines has a permanent interest in defeating global jihadists.
Despite the distance between the Philippines and the Middle East, the tentacles of global jihad have spread to the archipelago nation. First, beginning in the 1990s,
Al Qaeda trained Islamic terrorists from the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), based on the island of Mindanao in the southern Philippines, in its camps in Afghanistan. It funded their insurgency against the Filipino armed forces, (AFP).
Over the years, the leaders of the MILF took steps to cut their ties with Al Qaeda and other global jihadist groups, and instead
pushed for autonomy in Mindanao. The peace treaty between the government and the MILF was signed in 2014, and in late July, Duterte
signed a basic law, passed by the Philippines Congress, which granted autonomy to the area.
While the MILF seems willing to accept a compromise with the government,
many other Islamic terror groups in the Philippines are adamant in their goal of rejecting the legitimacy of a non-Islamic state. A number of these Islamic jihadists traveled to Syria and joined Islamic State in recent years. Together with local groups, returning Filipino ISIS terrorist have established an active presence in Mindanao since 2014.
In May 2017, they took over the
city of Marawi in Mindanao and declared a caliphate. It took the AFP until October 2017 to defeat ISIS and restore government control of the city. The
U.S. and Australia actively assisted in those efforts.
Despite its territorial defeat in Marawi, ISIS continues to pose the the Philippines’ most acute security threat. Last month, the group
carried out two attacks in the southern Philippines in which 12 people were killed and scores were wounded.
In his public remarks in Israel, Duterte
repeatedly thanked Israel for its assistance in fighting and defeating ISIS in Marawi. His remarks – like his visit – revealed an Israeli policy of which few were aware.
Netanyahu realized that just because Duterte is controversial does not mean that Israel should turn its back on the Philippines as its territory is taken by ISIS. As he does whenever such a shared interest in fighting Islamic jihadists becomes apparent in a foreign land, Netanyahu reached out to Duterte and offered Israel’s assistance.
Netanyahu’s foreign policy is based on the recognition that the strongest foundation of a cooperative alliance is not shared ideology but shared interests.
Duterte’s remarks in Israel demonstrated that Netanyahu was exactly right.
Speaking to the Filipino migrant community in Israel on Sunday evening, Duterte
revealed that Israel provided “most of the intelligence gadgets that we used to win the Marawi siege.”
Addressing Netanyahu in their meeting on Monday,
Duterte said, “Mr. Prime Minister, I can only thank you so much especially the critical help that you have extended my country in time when we needed it most.
“It was a help to preserve the Republic of the Philippines and I thank you for that.”
Duterte, whose visit to Israel was marked by the
signing of a host of agreements for governmental cooperation, as well as arms and oil exploration deals, made clear that Israel’s assistance to the Philippines was the basis for a new and strong alliance between the two countries far broader than one battle.
In
Duterte’s words: “We share the same passion for peace. We share the same passion for human beings but we also share the same passion of not allowing our country to be destroyed by those who have the corrupt ideology who [do] nothing but to kill and destroy. In this sense, Israel can expect any help that the Philippines can extend to your country.”
Duterte’s statement is many ways is a public expression of the sentiments now held far more broadly by dozens of nations – including the likes of Saudi Arabia – who depend on Israel for assistance in the fight against both Iran and Sunni jihadist groups like ISIS, Al Qaeda, and the Muslim Brotherhood.
Certainly, no one ever heard a similar sentiment spring from the mouth of Abbas or his predecessor Yasser Arafat, or even from Israel’s supposedly like-minded allies in the European Union, which
expands its political war against Israel seemingly on a daily basis while emptily professing friendship with the Jewish state.
Last week, Netanyahu
set out his basic understanding of international affairs in a speech at Israel’s Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center in Dimona. In it, he made clear that Israel’s national survival is entirely dependent on its power, its ability to accumulate power over time, and its ability to judiciously use its power.
Netanyahu said, “The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end, peace is made with the strong.”
The same cast of characters who condemned him for welcoming Duterte to Israel also attacked his speech. Jacob Siegel, for instance, writing in Tablet magazine,
derided the remark as un-Jewish, and referred to the speech as “Bibi’s Bismark speech.”
But as Duterte’s visit shows — and indeed, as Saudi Crowned Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s cooperative policies towards Israel also
show — Israel’s power is what attracts new allies. And through its intrinsic morality, Israel also encourages these nations to diminish their prejudice and hatred – because they think doing so will serve their own nations better.
Moreover, just as Israel helps others to fight common foes, it opposes governments that support those foes. So it was that on Wednesday, when Paraguay’s new government announced that it was revoking its recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and returning its embassy to Tel Aviv, Netanyahu’s
response was swift and brutal. He did not merely recall Israel’s ambassador to Paraguay for consultations. He announced that Israel would be closing it embassy in Asuncion. Certainly, Israel has no reason to allow Paraguay to open an embassy in Tel Aviv.
The same tactics – reaching out to other leaders on the basis of common interests, using common interests as the basis for relations, and striking out at those who harm his country – are the guiding principle of Trump’s “America First” policies.
Like Israel, the U.S. cannot help its allies if it doesn’t help itself. The U.S. cannot advance its interests if they are subjected to automatic vetoes by allies acting selfishly. It cannot advance its interests if it maintains faith with “moral” policies, like the Iran nuclear deal and similarly failed nuclear agreements with North Korea, at the expense of actual counter-proliferation strategies that may involve smiling and waving while standing next to Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin.
The hypocrisy and substantive failure of the “moral” policies of Trump’s and Netanyahu’s critics show that the assaults against these leaders are not about the proper ends of foreign policy, or even about morality.
They are a power play. And given the disastrous failures of the “Resistance’s” foreign policies, it is clear that the outcome of this power struggle is something to which no one can be indifferent.
2b) Leftist Censorship Thrives on University Campuses in America
Originally Published on Townhall.com
In America today, there is perhaps no better example of the all-out assault leftists have launched against freedom of speech than on college campuses.
Leftists have progressively taken over American universities and, just as quickly, systematically eroded freedom of speech and engagement for the students. Not only are voices that leftist faculty members disagree with prevented from speaking, but voices espousing violent, anti-Semitic and radical Islamic rhetoric are welcomed in open arms.
One of the most active Islamic organizations on college campuses is the MSA-Muslim Students Association. They have nearly 600 chapters on college campuses in the United States and Canada, making them the most visible and influential Islamic student organization in North America. The MSA is mentioned in the Muslim Brotherhood memorandum for North America as one their front organizations to destroy America from within.
In May 2010, Jewish author David Horowitz was taking questions from an audience at UC San Diego when a female MSA student stood up to confront Horowitz about his views. When Horowitz asked the young woman if she supported the terrorist organization Hamas, she replied: "If I say something I'm sure that I will be arrested. For reasons of Homeland Security."
In other words, of course she supported Hamas, but she didn't want to be arrested or investigated on terrorism charges if she essentially admitted that she was a terrorist. But Horowitz pressed further. "I'm a Jew. The head of Hezbollah has said that he hopes that we will gather in Israel so he doesn't have to hunt us down globally. For it or against it?"
After a pause, the Muslim student leaned into the microphone and with a cold, calculating voice stated, "For it."
If that doesn't send chills up your spine, nothing will. When a student can stand up and declare herself a supporter of Jewish genocide with absolutely no consequence and the terrorist-linked organization she's a part of can still function openly on campus, we're way past the tipping point.
Of course, adding to the absurdity of allowing terrorists and anti-Semites to openly flourish on campus, conservatives are shunned and accused of "hate speech." In response to a scheduled appearance by Milo Yiannopoulos at leftist haven UC Berkeley, Antifa and their leftist comrades started a violent riot, smashing store windows, causing over $100,000 in damage and injuring innocent civilians.
Black-masked leftists threw large rocks, commercial fireworks and Molotov cocktails at police, in response to Milo setting foot on campus to say things they didn't like. Over 1,500 angry leftists formed a mob and chanted, "No safe space for racists," and "This is war," but were strangely missing their pitchforks.
One innocent woman who is a Trump supporter was pepper-sprayed in the face while being interviewed on live television by an ABC affiliate. That's strange, I thought the Left was supposed to be fighting for the rights of women.
Embarrassed by the national disgrace, administrators at Berkeley tried to play defense, while at the same time letting the violent mob know they support them in spirit.
"We condemn in the strongest possible terms the violence and unlawful behavior that was on display and deeply regret that those tactics will now overshadow the efforts to engage in legitimate and lawful protest against the performer's presence and perspectives."
See, it was all peaceful until 1,500 trouble makers showed up. They continued:
"While Yiannopoulos' views, tactics and rhetoric are profoundly contrary to our own, we are bound by the Constitution, the law, our values and the campus's Principles of Community to enable free expression across the full spectrum of opinion and perspective."
There's the continued attack on Yiannopoulos, an openly gay man, whose biggest crime was that he attempted to speak at a public university. When it comes to free speech, the aggressors are almost exclusively on the Left.
Remember, at multiple rallies then-candidate Trump spoke at during his presidential and primary campaign, countless interruptions of crazed leftists arose, as they screamed mindless babble at the top of their lungs to try to silence him. They knew that if the American people heard his message about putting America first and speaking truthfully about the threats of open borders he would win. So they tried desperately to silence him. But their plans failed, and President Trump won handily over Hillary Clinton.
How many times were Hillary Clinton's speeches interrupted by conservatives during her campaign? Did she ever have Secret Service Agents rush the stage during one of her speeches after a crazed conservative tried to attack her, as a crazed leftist did President Trump?
No.
No.
Hillary didn't confront those issues for the same reason that an anti-Semitic terror sympathizer like Linda Sarsour can speak at CUNY, and a domestic terrorist like Kathy Boudin can teach a class at Columbia, because the Left has a monopoly on violent anti-free speech radicalism.
The reality is freedom of speech, the most fundamental pillar of our Constitution and Western civilization at large, is under attack by two relentless enemies: radical Islam and the radical Left. Both are working together to shut you up and prevent your children and grandchildren from exercising the same rights that every American since the nation's founding have had the privilege of doing.
Unless Americans take hold of this increasingly dangerous threat, our ability to fight back with truth could be gone forever. We must not take this most crucial freedom for granted, for if we do, it's only a matter of time before the enemy takes it away. We must make sure those who represent us in Washington understand that freedom of speech is an absolute right, and that we will not be silenced.
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