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BDS attacks misplaced focus. (See 1 below.)
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Every once in a while a politician actually tells the truth. (See 2 below.)
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MLK was one of my heroes and this article suggests he was, in some ways, radical but if there can be good radicals then he heads the top of the list.
As between Obama's Rev/ Wright and my MLK, there is not contest. Wright was everything MLK despised. (See 3 below.)
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Bruce Ohr claims to have told the FBI to be circumspect, before the election, regarding the Steele Dossier. However, the FBI was hell bent on rowing in the direction of betraying their responsibility and the most senior officials corrupted the organization as well as everything they touched including the FISA warrants obtained under false pretenses. (See 4 below.)
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Finally, if truth and evidence still means anything and testimony from a lawyer who betrayed his client can be believed and a rag journal named Buzz Feed
(short for buzzard) is deemed credible then, by all means, impeach Trump.
If sanity and fair minded justice is allowed to prevail then it is time to quit torturing this president and ourselves with false and unreliable evidence because Democrats cannot abide the election results and allow him to get back to his duties and carrying out his, generally worthy, goals for our nation.
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Dick
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1) Academic BDS Should Be Directed Against Turkey and the Palestinians, Not Israel
by Winfield Myers
This article was originally published in The Algemeiner under the title " BDS Is Contemptible, But Academic Boycotts Have Their Place".
Academic boycotts, rightly understood and employed, are an effective means of isolating and stigmatizing universities and other institutions that support authoritarian regimes (like Erdogan's Turkey) or provide a platform for spreading pro-terrorist propaganda (as at An-Najah or Birzeit universities in the West Bank). By refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of universities controlled by regimes that deny basic academic (and human) freedoms, boycotters undermine corrupt systems and lend moral support to academics fighting for their rights and even their lives.
But not all boycotts are defensible. The academic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel provides the most obvious example of an unjust act masquerading as high-minded activism.
Contrary to the claims of BDS advocates, Israel is a free, democratic state with equal representation for all citizens, regardless of their religious or ethnic background. Israeli universities, far from suffering under state or party control, are home to some of Israel's harshest critics, who are free to condemn or praise governments and religious leaders or even question the legitimacy of Israel's existence. They are anything but tools of the state whose livelihood and freedom depend on praising the government or censoring their opinions.
In light of these widely known facts, BDS proponents reveal their antisemitic motivations in a myriad of ways, most obviously in singling out Israel — the world's only Jewish state — for condemnation, while turning a blind eye to genuine human rights abusers such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Cuba, and China. The BDSers' false assertions regarding Israeli history — from denying the long and vibrant history of the ancient Hebrews, to claiming that Israelis are European "settler colonialists" comparable to Nazis — also expose their antisemitism.
These abuses do not, however, invalidate academic boycotts per se. Blanket opposition to boycotts willfully ignores the intellectual and moral corruption of academic institutions in countries controlled by authoritarian regimes. This refusal rests on a moral relativism that treats all regimes and their academic systems equally, regardless of the legitimacy of a nation's academic enterprise.
Far from mounting a brave defense of academic freedom, university presidents and others opposed to all academic boycotts shun their responsibility to make difficult and potentially unpopular decisions on a case-by-case basis. Unfortunately, ours is not the first era in which America's academic leaders have chosen expediency over justice, and hidden behind the cry of "academic freedom."
In their shameful failure to condemn the Nazification of German higher education systems following Hitler's rise to power in 1933, America's academic elite — led by Nicholas Murray Butler and James Bryant Conant, presidents of Columbia and Harvard, respectively — cloaked their antisemitism with high-minded defenses of academic freedom that would ring familiar today. Despite the odious "cleansing process" that legalized firing Jews and political opponents in German academe, plus daily press reports of the persecution of Jews throughout Germany, Butler, Conant, and many others maintained ties with their German counterparts, welcomed Nazi officials to their campuses, sponsored academic exchanges with German universities, and actively suppressed student and faculty demands for boycotts against Germany's once-great academic institutions.
An analogous situation exists today in Turkey, where an Islamist-inspired "cleansing" of academia has occurred since the July 2016 coup attempt. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's regime has fired over 5,000 academics and more than 33,000 teachers, while jailing thousands more. Many were charged with having connections to the Gülen movement, part of a network associated with exiled spiritual leader and former Erdogan ally Fethullah Gülen. As a result, government-backed Islamists control Turkey's universities, where any remaining secularists or moderates must keep a low profile on pain of termination or imprisonment.
Yet many American professors of Middle East studies are mimicking Depression-era academics in their refusal to acknowledge a tyrant's persecution of their colleagues. Last October, specialists from elite universities, including Columbia, Georgetown, UNC-Chapel Hill, and UC-Berkeley, gathered for the Second International Conference on the Muslim Ummah at Istanbul Sabahattin Zaim University. That the conference chair was Sami Al-Arian, who pled guilty to aiding Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a State Department-designated terrorist organization, while teaching at the University of South Florida (and who was subsequently expelled to Turkey and now teaches at Sabahattin Zaim), bothered no one.
Nor were Americans and other Westerners deterred from participating in an earlier Istanbul conference sponsored by the Al Sharq Forum, a defender of Islamism, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Turkey's rulers. In October 2016, scholars from Harvard, Michigan, and UNC-Chapel Hill gathered to hear regime-approved lectures from, among others, Erdogan's chief spokesman Ibrahim Kalin, who earned his Ph.D. in Islamic studies from George Washington University, and is a senior fellow at Georgetown University.
Participants in both conferences didn't travel to Istanbul to speak truth to power by critiquing Erdogan's brutality and challenging the legitimacy of his actions. Rather, they ignored their host's ongoing destruction of academic freedom and, at the 2018 conference, harshly critiqued Israel, America, and the West. Their presence lent a veneer of legitimacy to Turkey's violations of academic rights while ignoring the plight of their colleagues languishing in prison or suffering from unemployment and internal exile.
Excusing the inexcusable was also the goal of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed by San Francisco State University (SFSU) and An-Najah University in the West Bank. Facilitating a series of trips by perennial anti-Israel activist Rabab Abdulhadi, the director of SFSU's Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative, the MOU exists in spite of An-Najah's undeniable ties to Hamas operatives and terrorists. SFSU has also pursued agreements with Bir Zeit University, another West Bank school teeming with Hamas supporters. Such institutional arrangements with American universities serve to normalize the radical, antisemitic, pro-terrorist atmospheres at these schools.
America's university leaders can avoid the errors of their 1930s predecessors by first confronting the morality (or immorality) of any individual boycott effort, including the lies and hatred that drive BDS, and second by severing ties to institutions that have ceased to exist (if they ever did) as independent centers of higher learning.
Dissident academics suffering mass persecution — not the lackeys now running academe in Turkey — deserve the backing of their American colleagues. In the West Bank, universities honeycombed with terrorist supporters should be called out for their systemic corruption and cultivation of bigotry. By refusing to give their moral and intellectual support, American academics can strike a blow against vicious regimes and the academic establishments that support them, while exposing BDS supporters' dark motives.
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2)
WATCH: Ted Cruz Nails It About Why Pelosi Delayed Trump's State Of The Union Address
On Wednesday, asked about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s stance to postpone President Trump’s State of the Union Address and why she would take that position, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) gave a biting answer that was dead right: Pelosi doesn’t want Trump to directly address the American people because then they will get a different message than the mainstream media will give them.
Pelosi wrote to President Trump on Wednesday, "Sadly, given the security concerns and unless government re-opens this week, I suggest we work together to determine another suitable date after government has re-opened for this address or for you to consider delivering your State of the Union address in writing to the Congress on January 29.” She later told CNN, "This is a housekeeping matter in the Congress of the United States, so we can honor the responsibility of the invitation we extended to the President. He can make it from the Oval Office if he wants."
The interviewer started with Cruz by commenting, “So we’re seeing some efforts from House Democratic leadership to either postpone or put off the State of the Union address because of the shutdown.” He asked Cruz, “Does it really make any sense whatsoever to try to do that, and do people honestly believe that they are going to silence President Trump or end the partial shutdown by talking away the House chambers cameras from him?”
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3)
Martin Luther King, Colorblind Radical
He flirted with democratic socialism and opposed the Vietnam War but stood against identity politics.
By Coleman Hughes.
Monday marks Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which means it’s time for the political commentariat to fight its yearly battle for King’s legacy. For critics of identity politics on the left and right, King’s appeals to common humanity over racial division are a rebuke not only to white supremacy but also to the racial ideology of today’s progressives. In this view, King’s dream of a colorblind America—where the content of our character matters more than the color of our skin—is hampered by progressives’ focus on checking white privilege and stoking black grievance.
To progressives, such critics have sanitized King’s legacy, erasing its radical elements to avoid acknowledging persistent racial inequality. Progressives highlight his opposition to the Vietnam War, his advocacy for a full-employment policy and a guaranteed minimum income, and his contempt for the materialism spreading through American culture. King’s progressive admirers see “colorblindness” as a pretext for apathy about the plight of black Americans—apathy that King fought vehemently in his day.
The refrain that “King was a radical” is less an argument against the colorblind ideal than a way of changing the subject. King was a radical, but by today’s standards only on nonracial issues. Yes, he opposed the Vietnam War, flirted with democratic socialism, and abhorred materialism. But he framed these radical positions as elements of a common human struggle. What policy could be more colorblind than guaranteed income for all Americans?
With regard to the role that racial identity should play in politics, King was unequivocal: First and foremost we are human beings, not members of races. The verbal tic of modern racial-justice activists—“As a black man . . .”—would sound foreign on his lips. Even when fighting explicitly racist policies, he deployed universal principles rather than a tribal grievance narrative.
“The problem is not a purely racial one, with Negroes set against whites,” King writes of the civil-rights movement in his 1958 essay “Three Ways of Meeting Oppression.” He adds that “nonviolent resistance is not aimed against oppressors but against oppression. Under its banner consciences, not racial groups, are enlisted.”
King’s contemporary counterpoints were the Nation of Islam and the black-power movement, which emphasized racial division over common humanity. King didn’t mince words when addressing these movements in a 1960 speech at DePauw University. “Black supremacy is as dangerous as white supremacy, and God is not interested merely in the freedom of black men,” he said. “God is interested in the freedom of the whole human race and in the creation of a society where all men can live together as brothers.”
While no one can know what King would have thought about the Black Lives Matter movement, we can take a clue from his speech “Where Do We Go From Here?” given in 1967, a year before his death: “Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody will shout ‘White Power!’—when nobody will shout ‘Black Power!’—but everybody will talk about God’s power and human power.”
If conservatives whitewash King’s opinions on economics and foreign policy, then progressives whitewash his views on race. King discussed many topics that now are considered taboo, if not racist, on the left. Consider the problem of violence in the black community. King lamented “frequently and consistently” seeing “brutal acts and crimes by Negroes against Negroes.” “In many a week in Chicago,” he observed in 1966, “as many or more Negro youngsters have been killed in gang fights as were killed in the riots there last summer.” A glance at today’s homicide statistics in Chicago shows that little has changed since King made that observation, yet such violence gets scant attention from racial-justice activists.
King also highlighted counterproductive behavioral patterns in the black community—the third rail for today’s racial activists. The current view among progressives is that cultural self-criticism is noble when whites do it but “victim blaming” when blacks do it. In contrast, King held that regardless of racial identity, “one of the sure signs of maturity is the ability to rise to the point of self-criticism,” as expressed in a 1960 address.
The final goal King staked for his Southern Christian Leadership Conference was to “reduce the cultural lag” in the black community. And he was clear about the nature of this lag. “Some Negroes have become cynical and disillusioned,” he said in 1960. “So many have used their oppression as an excuse for mediocrity. Many of us live above our means, spend money on nonessentials and frivolities, and fail to give to serious causes, organizations, and educational institutions that so desperately need funds. Our crime rate is far too high.”
King didn’t view himself as an advocate for either political party, but as a “conscience of all the parties and all of the people.” His universalist self image—combined with the fact that his politics can’t be summarized easily in a simple left-right paradigm—suggests it’s a mistake to fight over which half of the political spectrum owns his legacy. It belongs to all those who choose to follow his path and take inspiration from his ideals.
If we use the adjective “radical” to describe King, then we should follow it with the right nouns. King was a radical Christian, as demonstrated by his commitment to loving his enemies no matter how much they hated him. He was a radical truth-teller, whether that meant telling white moderates that blacks wouldn’t wait any longer to be granted full rights, or telling blacks not to make oppression an excuse for failure. Most important, he was a radical advocate, not on behalf of any subdivision of our species, but on behalf of humanity as a whole.
Mr. Hughes is a philosophy undergraduate at Columbia University and a columnist for Quillette.
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4)
What Bruce Ohr Told the FBI
The Justice Department official’s testimony raises new doubts about the bureau’s honesty.
By Kimberley Strassel
Everybody knew. Everybody of consequence at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Justice Department understood fully in the middle of 2016—as the FBI embarked on its counterintelligence probe of Donald Trump—that it was doing so based on disinformation provided by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. That’s the big revelation from the transcript of the testimony Justice Department official Bruce Ohr gave Congress in August. The transcripts haven’t been released, but parts were confirmed for me by congressional sources.
Mr. Ohr testified that he sat down with dossier author Christopher Steele on July 30, 2016, and received salacious information the opposition researcher had compiled on Mr. Trump. Mr. Ohr immediately took that to the FBI’s then-Deputy Director Andy McCabe and lawyer Lisa Page. In August he took it to Peter Strzok, the bureau’s lead investigator. In the same month, Mr. Ohr believes, he briefed senior personnel in the Justice Department’s criminal division: Deputy Assistant Attorney General Bruce Swartz, lawyer Zainab Ahmad and fraud unit head Andrew Weissman. The last two now work for special counsel Robert Mueller.
More important, Mr. Ohr told this team the information came from the Clinton camp and warned that it was likely biased, certainly unproven. “When I provided [the Steele information] to the FBI, I tried to be clear that this is source information,” he testified. “I don’t know how reliable it is. You’re going to have to check it out and be aware. These guys were hired by somebody relating to—who’s related to the Clinton campaign, and be aware.”
He said he told them that Mr. Steele was “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected,” and that his own wife, Nellie Ohr, worked for Fusion GPS, which compiled the dossier. He confirmed sounding all these warnings before the FBI filed its October application for a surveillance warrant against Carter Page. We broke some of this in August, though the transcript provides new detail.
The FBI and Justice Department have gone to extraordinary lengths to muddy these details, with cover from Democrats and friendly journalists. A January 2017 memo from Adam Schiff, the House Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, flatly (and incorrectly) insisted “the FBI’s closely-held investigative team only received Steele’s reporting in mid-September.” A May 2018 New York Times report repeated that claim, saying Mr. Steele’s reports didn’t reach the “Crossfire Hurricane team,” which ran the counterintelligence investigation, until “mid-September.”
This line was essential for upholding the claim that the dossier played no role in the unprecedented July 31, 2016, decision to investigate a presidential campaign. Former officials have insisted they rushed to take this dramatic step on the basis of a conversation involving a low-level campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, which took place in May, before the dossier officially came into the picture. And maybe that is the case. Yet now Mr. Ohr has testified that top personnel had dossier details around the time they opened the probe.
The Ohr testimony is also further evidence that the FBI misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in its Page warrant application. We already knew the bureau failed to inform the court it knew the dossier had come from a rival campaign. But the FISA application additionally claimed the FBI was “unaware of any derogatory information pertaining” to Mr. Steele, that he was “reliable,” that his “reporting” in this case was “credible.” and that the FBI only “speculates” that Mr. Steele’s bosses “likely” wanted to “discredit” Mr. Trump.
Speculates? Likely? Mr. Ohr makes clear FBI and Justice officials knew from the earliest days that Mr. Steele was working for the Clinton campaign, which had an obvious desire to discredit Mr. Trump. And Mr. Ohr specifically told investigators that they had every reason to worry Mr. Steele’s work product was tainted.
This testimony has two other implications. First, it further demonstrates the accuracy of the House Intelligence Committee Republicans’ memo of 2018—which noted Mr. Ohr’s role and pointed out that the FBI had not been honest about its knowledge of the dossier and failed to inform the court of Mrs. Ohr’s employment at Fusion GPS. The testimony also destroys any remaining credibility of the Democratic response, in which Mr. Schiff and his colleagues claimed Mr. Ohr hadn’t met with the FBI or told them anything about his wife or about Mr. Steele’s bias until after the election.
Second, the testimony raises new concerns about Mr. Mueller’s team. Critics have noted Mr. Weissman’s donations to Mrs. Clinton and his unseemly support of former acting Attorney General Sally Yates’s obstruction of Trump orders. It now turns out that senior Mueller players were central to the dossier scandal. The conflicts of interest boggle the mind.
The Ohr testimony is evidence the FBI itself knows how seriously it erred. The FBI has been hiding and twisting facts from the start.
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