Telegraph Operator Or President? Will Reason, Need and Logic Ever Dictate Middle East Policy? California and New York - Heavies!

Fly United, Die United Unless You Are Kicked Off First.
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Trump continues, through his press secretary, to keep the press guessing because he refuses to tell them everything they want to know about his intentions. He is forcing them to be creative in order to get some idea as to his plans and, since most are not creative, this makes them very frustrated because they have nothing to report.  Trump is obligated to keep Congress informed and seek their permission at some point should he wish and/or feel compelled to carry through on his sworn commitment to defend our nation but that does not include telling the New York Times and the other anti-Trump dis-informers.

What the mass media should know by now is the well over 24 years of  "patience" towards N Korea is over.  Whether China will or can restrain them is another matter and I doubt even Trump is totally sure,  Peace through strength is something Obama did not understand or possibly believed. Liberals never do until it is too late. Trump does understand and is willing to give a show of strength a try.  He is being forced to do so because "Ole" Bill and all subsequent presidents looked the other way while N Korea continued their aggressive policy of arming themselves and breaking their word.

Trump appears not to be a telegraph worker but rather chooses to be a president who is comfortable projecting confusion/uncertainty to our adversaries as to his response intentions.  My message to the mass media - suck it up!
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Common sense and logic has never been a significant determining concept in the Middle East. Rather religious passion and prejudice have tended to drive decisions/thinking.  Will any of this change? (See 1 below.)
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Most sane people realize California is far left of the rest of the nation geographically, socially, politically and in most every other way. In fact, if it were further left it would not longer be physically connected to America.

Furthermore, Californians, it also can be said, are outside the mainstream of what most Americans are like. Californians have weather and nature conditions that contribute to their strange behaviour. Earthquakes rattle their very being, maybe even their brains.  Floods and mudslides despoil their homes, wreck their cars and cause unusual grief and disruptions in their every day life.  Fires rage down mountains burning their abodes to the ground, destroying all their possessions and often killing their precious pedigree animals.

If this is not psychologically disturbing enough add the invasions Californians have experienced from Asians and Mexicans and other assorted persons seeking a living picking produce, cutting the lawns and pruning the shrubbery of the elites etc.

California is also the ancestral home of Hollywood.  Hollywood is the trend setting mecca of our country and is where so many of our changing values and mores are born. Hollywood is home to thousands of entertainers who feel a special need to mock the rest of us, to lecture us on how we should act, tell us what we should think and whom we should elect. When we do not follow their ways they become angry and disruptive, often rioting.

Yes, Californians are a privileged lot and they also feel, because of it, they are entitled.  This causes them to also feel disconnected from the rest of us 'heathens' whose values and sense of being does not accord with their own. After all, what do Trump fans know?  How can we possibly understand the plight of the Californians and their special needs?  How can we compete with their superior ways, their creativity, their skills?

In fact, we cannot nor, frankly, do we actually care to embrace their perspectives and values. This rejection often leaves them confused, petulant and resentful.

Californians claim they care very much about the rights of others. However, when Pearl Harbour was bombed and FDR incarcerated American citizens who were of Japanese parentage the majority of Californians did not lift a finger or voice in opposition. Their fellow men and women were incarcerated in prison camps but not a peep.

Today things are different. Perhaps Californians have decided to make amends, to atone and now they both encourage and allow their college and university students to protest the freedoms of others who hold different views and now these same students do not even wish to display the American Flag.

Will their acts of anarchy spread?  Many citizens of California's twin sister state of New York are very much in accord and  display very similar patterns of thinking and behaviour but their climate is not as endearing. This makes them somewhat more abrasive.

This is why I refer to America as a bar bell nation.  California and New York are the end heavies attached to the bar that is mostly composed of the rest of us except for some murky land in a Capitol City named after our Founding Father and First President. (See 2 below.)
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The SS - Steyer and Soros. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)INTO THE FRAY: Middle East meltdown 
By Martin Sherman

With the Mid-East on the cusp of melt-down, imagine what Isaiah (5:20) would say of proponents of ‘regional integration’: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness…”

Worst Chemical Attack in Years; US blames Assad  – New York Times, April 4, 2017.

Death toll climbs in clashes at Palestinian camp in Lebanon – Reuters, April 9, 2017.

Deadly blasts hit Coptic churches in Tanta, Alexandria – Al Jazeera, April 10, 2017.

Five Sudanese soldiers killed in Yemen conflict – Reuters, April 12, 2017.

These four recent headlines, spanning barely a week, bear chilling testimony to the grim and grisly realities of the Arab world.

Barbaric business as usual   

After all, had the several score killed in the April 4th chemical attack in Northern Syria been beheaded, or lynched, or burnt alive or slaughtered by any one of the other gruesome methods by which hundreds of thousands of civilians have lost their lives in the Syrian Civil War over the last five years, it is more than likely that their deaths would have gone largely unnoticed and unreported. Indeed, it would have been nothing more than brutal, barbaric business as usual for the region.

Across virtually the entire Arab world , from the Atlantic Ocean in the West to the Persian Gulf in the East; from the Sahara desert in the South to the upper reaches  of the Euphrates in the North, naked violence engulfs entire countries – Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya.  Others – like Lebanon and Egypt—are perennially on the cusp of its eruption; and in others (like Bahrain and Saudi Arabia), it lurks, simmering just below the surface, constrained only by the iron grip of police-state tyranny.

With painfully few—and dubious—exceptions (such as Iraq, teetering on the brink of failed state status and Tunisia, once the poster-child of the “Arab Spring”, now   increasingly threatened by Jihadi Salafi insurgents—see here and here), the Arab regimes are a noxious brew of theocratic tyrannies, military dictatorships and/or nepotistic monarchies. The violent exchanges that rage throughout the region occur between a wide range of protagonists and across a myriad of schisms: Sunni vs Shia, radicals vs. monarchs, rebel insurgents vs incumbent rulers, Islamist extremists vs traditional regimes.

Death, depravity and despotism

It is against this doleful and daunting backdrop that the fatal follies of the past and of the emerging prescriptions for the future course of what has been perversely dubbed “the peace process”, must be assessed.

For as growing numbers of erstwhile advocates of the two-state paradigm are becoming increasingly skeptical—indeed, even despairing—of its viability within any foreseeable future, rather than admit the enormity of their error, they are now turning to a new false deity, no less preposterous  or perilous than the tarnished chimera of two-statism. 

This is the new cult of “regionalism”, which attempts to invert the twisted logic of two- statism—but leaves it just as twisted. 

At the core, regionalism is the idea that, rather than strive for an agreement with the Palestinians as a necessary precursor to its acceptance by the states of the region, Israel can, and should, establish a pan-regional alliance with allegedly “moderate” states, driven by a recognition of common threats (the menace of Jihadi cohorts and the specter of nuclear Iran)—thereby paving its way to a resolution of the Palestinian issue. 

Central to this new cult is the bizarre belief that Israel’s “integration” into region—which, as we have seen, is little more than a cesspool of death, depravity and despotism –is a goal both necessary and worthy—and one that the nation ought to strive to achieve. 

Risible regionalism

Significantly, there are several glaring logical inconsistencies, non sequiturs and factual inaccuracies that plague the regional-integration doctrine.

First of all, as commonly presented, it almost inevitably entails circular reasoning – i.e. Israel should pursue relations with the moderate Arab states as a means of arriving at a resolution of the Palestinian problem; but the only way to arrive at such relations with the Arab world is to reach an agreement with the Palestinians.  So, resolving the Palestinian issue becomes both the objective of the regional-integration and the means to achieve it!

Thus, for instance in an article, Regional integration only way for Israel to achieve security, Atlantic Council senior fellow H.A. Hellyer writes: “…the only realistic way for Israelis to thrive in the long term is for them to be integrated into the wider region, beginning with a comprehensive and just peace settlement…” 

This statement is not only of dubious veracity—since Israel seems to be thriving rather well without (thankfully) being “integrated into the wider region—but seems to collide with a later contention by Hellyer, who writes elsewhere: “A sustainable peace for Israelis is predicated on their eventual integration into the wider region.”

So there you have it: “Integration into the wider region” must be preceded by “peace”; but “peace” must be predicated on (i.e. preceded by) “integration into the region”.  Thus, resolving the Palestinian issue (a.k.a. “peace”) is presented both as the cause and effect of integration –having to precede it on the one hand, while being predicated on it, on the other. 

Confusing, isn’t it?

Puzzling Pardo

But perhaps one of the most puzzling and perturbing endorsements of the regional-integration paradigm came in a speech delivered by Tamir Pardo the former Head of Israel’s Secret Intelligence Service, Mossad.

In it, Pardo identified the emergence of “a rare confluence of interests between Israel and the moderate Arab states.” 

Pointing to the drawbacks of relations that are entirely covert, he remarked: “Secret relations that take place “under the radar” are by their nature transitory.” Accordingly, he advocated Israel’s overt integration into the region: “The key to regional integration is to build economic and social bridges between countries, facilitating trade and tourism…. The deeper, the more open and above board relations are, the better suited they will be to survive the inevitable shocks and disruptions that take place from time to time…. Israel’s regional integration is a key to its very survival.” 

But he warned “None of this will happen without a resolution of the Palestinian problem.”

There are several disturbing defects—both conceptual and empirical–in this portrayal by Pardo, which seem to indicate that his undoubted ability in covert operations is not matched by a commensurate acumen for political analysis.

So, while Pardo may well be correct in his doubts as to the durability of secret relations, his faith in more overt one seems wildly at odds with Israel’s experience in past decades, causing one to puzzle over what could possibly be the basis  for his unfounded contention, and his reasons for making it.

Indeed, the examples of Iran and Turkey clearly indicate that robust overt “economic and social bridges” as well as “trade and tourism” are of little value if the regime should change. After all, the relations with pre-revolutionary Iran and pre-Islamist Turkey could hardly have been closer or more cordial. 

Yet, with the ascent to power of Khomeini in Iran and Erdogan in Turkey these ties proved, indeed, “transitory”.  Of course, the metamorphosis was particularly dramatic and rapid in Iran, where Israel was transformed from being a trusted ally to a hated enemy almost immediately. In Turkey, the process was more gradual and less drastic, but there can be little comparison between the tight strategic ties of yesteryear and the hostile attitude that prevails today. 

This volatility in relations between nations is one of the most profound flaws in the regional-integration proposal—especially when it is predicated on a resolution of the Palestinian issue. For while it is true that countries like Jordan, under the Hashemite dynasty,  Egypt under Sisi, and the incumbent regimes in the Gulf may face common threats, it would be more than a stretch to characterize this as sharing long-term mutual interests with Israel.

Indeed, a yawning gulf separates between the seminal values that define the differing societies – with regard to individual liberties, gender equality, social diversity, religious pluralism—which clearly portends ample room for renewed adversarial relations once the common threat has been eliminated.

Palmerston…on perpetual allies

Israel would do well to heed the words of British Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston (1784-1865) on the fickleness of nations and their international ties “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow”.This caveat is particularly pertinent in the case of the regional-integration paradigm. For in essence the deal to be struck is as follows: Israel is called upon to make perilous permanent concessions (to resolve the Palestinian issue) in exchange for a temporary alliance, based on the (ephemeral) word of rulers, who head not only some of the most decadent and despotic regimes on the planet, but also some of the most threatened.   

Accordingly, there is little guarantee that the Arab entity that makes commitments toward Israel will be the entity called upon to honor them when need be. After all, what would be the value of any understanding on integration entered into in 2010 with say Syria, or Iraq or Libya…
Moreover, Israel was unable to prevent an Islamist takeover of Gaza.  It is, therefore, highly unlikely that it could prevent an Islamist takeover by a resurgent Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, or an Islamist coup in Jordan.

Thus, given the fact that the concessions Israel is called upon to make to resolve the Palestinian issue, are largely irrevocable, while the pledges given it are largely retractable, any regime change in Cairo and even more so in Amman would have potentially disastrous ramifications. 

With an Islamist state abutting the envisaged Palestinian state from the East, dispatching irredentist insurgents to destabilize any purportedly peaceable Palestinian regime in the territory evacuated by Israel; with a regime in Cairo no longer interested in, or capable of, countering the Jihadi warlords in Sinai, pressing against Israel’s 200 km frontier and the land route to Eilat, Israel is likely to rue any credence it placed in regional integration.  

The most troubling of questions 

But of course the most troubling of questions regarding the regional integration question is this: If the allegedly moderate regimes really desire Israel’s help in confronting formidable common threats (the menace of Jihadi cohorts and the specter of nuclear Iran), why would they predicate that help on precisely the same concessions from Israel that they demanded prior to those threats arising?  And were Israel to refuse those concessions would these “moderates” deny themselves the aid Israel could provide them—for the sake of the Palestinian-Arabs, for whom they have shown consistent disdain and contempt over decades?

Furthermore, if the “moderate” states see Israel’s strength as a determining factor in making it an attractive ally in combating the common threat of radical Islamism, why would they insist on concessions that weaken it, and expose it to greater perils as a precondition to accepting its aid? Why would they press for concessions that are likely to fall—as they did in Gaza—to the very Jihadi elements that both they, and Israel, see as a common enemy?

Indeed one might ask: Why should Israel have to make any concessions so that the Arab states would deign to accept its aid in their battle against a grave common menace?

As Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland once sighed “It would be so nice if something made sense for a change.”   It sure would! Regional integration: What Isaiah would say?

Of course one can only puzzle over what merit proponents of regional integration see in its implementation. Do they really want Israel to be absorbed into the morass of cruelty, corruption and cronyism that is the Middle East?  What values that pervade their Arab neighbors, would they urge it to adopt in order to “integrate”?Misogynistic gender bias? Homophobic persecution of gays? Intolerance of social diversity? Repression of minority religious faiths?  Suppression political dissidence? For were Israel to resist adopting these and other regional values, how on earth could it integrate into the region?

So, with the Mid-East on the cusp of melt-down, one can only imagine what Isaiah (5:20) would say of the proponents of regional integration:  Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter. 
Martin Sherman is the founder and executive director of the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies.

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2)

BREAKING: SHOCK – University Of California Students Vote Against The American Flag 

The University of California, Davis Student Senate voted last Thursday to strike a bylaw requiring the American flag to be displayed at meetings because “the concept of United States of America and patriotism is different for every individual.”

The University of California, Davis Student Senate voted last Thursday to strike a bylaw requiring the American flag to be displayed at meetings because “the concept of United States of America and patriotism is different for every individual.”

From Campus Reform

“It shall not be compulsory for the flag of the United State of America to be displayed at ASUCD Senate meetings,” states Senate Bill 76, introduced by Senator Jose Meneses.

“It should be at the discretion of the Senate whether presenting the flag is presently necessary,” the bill elaborates. “Considering that the flag is seldom present at Senate meetings, it should not be mandated by the Bylaws as a codified practice.”

Senator Michael Gofman, who opposed the bill, posted on Facebook that “the bill will remove the flag of the United States from Senate meetings,” calling it “a political statement” and encouraging those who “feel strongly” about the bill to voice their opinion to him.

“This a Student Senate bill that the Student Senate [voted] on,” a spokesperson for UC-Davis told Campus Reform. “It is a student effort and student decision, and not an administrative one.”

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3)

The next Soros: Here’s the more DANGEROUS leftist billionaire you’ve NEVER heard of 

George Soros has rightfully built himself a reputation as a massive backer of Left wing political causes, donating hundreds of millions of his $25-plus billion (and growing) wealth to a portfolio of leftist think tanks, action groups, political action committees and candidates.

And while he’s often the go-to “boogeyman” for those in the Right when it comes to the influence of money in politics, he’s not the Left’s biggest spender as of late.

Enter, Tom Steyer, another billionaire (net worth: $1.6 billion) owing his wealth to the hedge fund industry.

As for how he compares to Soros, Conservative Review has the stats.

The Washington Post reported Steyer spent $66.3 million helping Democrats in the 2016 cycle, and the Washington Times reports that the final spend was north of $87.6 million. That makes him the largest individual donor of the 2016 election cycle. He spent $75.4 million on federal races in 2014, a year he was also the top donor.

How much did legendary leftist George Soros spend in 2016? A meager $17.5 million.

So who is Tom Steyer?

Steyer is the founder of Farallon Capital, a hedge fund that Fortune reported in 2008 had $33 billion in assets. He has since left the daily management of Farallon to run a non-profit committed to saving the climate, called NextGen Climate. At first it is confusing that on the non-profit’s website it is noted that Steyer “founded a successful California business,” but it doesn’t state that business is Farallon.

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