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Everything Pelosi does is designed to rid America of Trump:<https://patriotpost.us/opinio
ource=pp.email.4634&utm_campai
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Since we no longer believe history matters , thus, allowing our youth to remain ignorant so they can repeat the mistakes of the past, the chaos folks who hate America, have invaded the Democrat Party, run the departments of many of our Universities and certainly occupy high positions among the mass media crowd, I though this article , sent by a dear friend and fellow memo reader, might/should be of interest. (See 1 below.)
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I do not believe Trump has broken any laws even though he has been somewhat unorthodox in seeking information about how American Foreign Aid has been spent, as he should. I would love for Pelosi's House of Cards to go ahead and impeach Trump, then McConnell should hold a one day discussion about the sham and illegal Schiff face process and return the favor by calling for a vote in The Senate, exonerate Trump so America can get back to returning to the path of greatness.
In other words Quid pro Quo in action.
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This was sent to me by an old and dear friend and proves Trump is so far ahead of the Democrats when it comes to marketing. Dave Bossie told me if Trump moves the black needle 4 or 5% he wins hands down.
"Dick: my opinion if Trump people sit down and develop a real plan to attract
black voters, he will be able to raise the percentage to 25 -30 %.
But it must be a strong , positive and methodical plan that treats the black
segment with respect.
I agree that the best place to start is Atlanta as this is the Mecca of the
black population.
He should engage Tyler Perry to help him. Max"
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Some in the military are out of bounds. If they want to get political then resign and run for office. (See 2 below.)
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Two dire predictions.
No doubt Hamas and Iran can do harm to Israel but Oren has not always been right and Hamas always blows smoke . If Israel is attacked I would hope they would quickly go nuclear and put an end to Iran and Hamas. Bibi would not sure about Gantz. (See 3, 3a and 3a below.)
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What goes around comes around. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1) 1776, not 1619
America’s Founding was not defined by slavery and white supremacy—quite the contrary.
For decades, much of academia, the liberal activist class, and the public school system have operated on the premise that America is fundamentally racist. The latest manifestation of this outlook is the 1619 Project, rolled out last month by the New York Times. Claiming that “anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country,” it “aims to reframe the country’s history” by making 1619—the year slavery was first introduced by the British to Virginia—the year of “our true founding.”
This narrative is akin to the Jacobins’ alteration of the calendar to make their revolution the decisive turning point in human history. Just as they would save France from the monarchy, so, too, will the Times save America from white supremacy. The Times encourages public schools to adopt an accompanying curriculum that spreads the 1619 Project’s message to young Americans. Its goal is to brand our founding documents—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—as immoral and thus unworthy of our allegiance.
To make America’s Founding contemptible, one must hide, ignore, and distort the Founders’ writings and thoughts. Irresponsibly omitted from this narrative is the fact that not a single major Founder endorsed slavery. On the contrary, the Founders unambiguously saw slavery as evil. George Washington said, “there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it,” and Thomas Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence calls the slave trade an “execrable commerce” and an affront “against human nature itself.”
Gouverneur Morris called slavery a “nefarious institution” and “the curse of heaven,” and John Jay said, “It is much to be wished that slavery may be abolished. . . . To contend for our own liberty, and to deny that blessing to others, involves an inconsistency not to be excused.”
Franklin, Madison, Adams, and Hamilton spoke strongly against the institution of slavery, too. One could argue that these are merely hypocritical statements that the Founders did not believe, but they faced no pressure to dissimulate, whether in their private or public writing. Nor do any statements exist from the Founders elaborating a defense of human inequality or arguing that natural rights are based on race. Slavery was a prerevolutionary inheritance that the principles of the American Revolution unequivocally condemned. The Founders were self-consciously creating a nation based on natural human equality, a foundation intended to overturn the old world’s supremacist theories—both feudalism and monarchy. The Revolution’s equality principle, they hoped, formed the basis on which America would eventually abolish slavery.
Nevertheless, the Times— without citations, qualifications, or hesitation—claims that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” Colonial independence from Britain “was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue.”
The Times is apparently referring to the Somerset v. Stewart case—a 1772 British judicial ruling that held that an enslaved person, James Somerset, could not be sold to a plantation in Jamaica against his will. In the decision, Chief Justice Lord Mansfield described slavery as “so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law.” But Mansfield’s ruling did not abolish slavery; it didn’t even have legal standing in the colonies. By this time, colonial resistance against Britain had already begun, and nowhere in the Founders’ writings do they describe the Revolution as being animated by fear that slaves would be taken away. Readers should ask the authors of the 1619 Project: Where in the writings of the leading American revolutionaries do they demand to maintain slavery?
If anything, John Jay notes, the equality principle of the Revolution began to make many Americans antislavery. The most ardently revolutionary region of the country, New England, also led the first abolition movement. Prior to the revolutionary period, few significant public discussions of slavery’s injustice took place. But following the Revolution’s equality principle, eight states—either through their legislatures or their courts—began abolishing slavery after the publication of the Declaration. Vermont did so in 1777, Pennsylvania in 1780, Massachusetts and New Hampshire in 1783, Connecticut and Rhode Island in 1784, New York in 1799, and New Jersey in 1804.
Ample evidence shows that the Founders wished for an end to slavery, contrary to the Times’s assertion that “neither Jefferson nor most of the founders intended to abolish slavery.” John Adams argued, “every measure of prudence, therefore, ought to be assumed for the eventual total extirpation of slavery from the United States.” He hoped that the inequalities of the Old World would eventually disappear. In 1778, Jefferson introduced a bill in the Virginia legislature banning the importation of slavery, which he hoped would lead to the institution’s “final eradication.”
Not only are the Founders evil, the narrative goes—so, too, is their major achievement, the Constitution. As the Times writes, “The framers carefully constructed a document that preserved and protected slavery without ever using the word.” Yet the facts point to the contrary. The Founders laid the constitutional ground for abolishing slavery. One example is Article I, Section 9, Clause 1, which states that Congress could prohibit importation of slaves starting in 1808. On the first day that this clause became operative, Congress passed, and President Thomas Jefferson signed, this prohibition into law. Congress took additional steps to restrict slavery. It passed the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which outlawed slavery in the Northwest Territories. Seven years later, Congress made it illegal to build ships for the purpose of the slave trade.
It is true that, in order to ratify the Constitution, the Founders decided to allow the abhorrent practice of slavery to continue for a limited time. North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, and possibly other states, would never have ratified the Constitution otherwise. This decision was made, however, on what the Founders considered prudential grounds—better to have union than endless wars among the states.
The Constitution of the Confederacy, by contrast, was truly a proslavery constitution, openly stating that no law shall be passed “impairing the right of property in negro slaves.” Contrary to that impulse, James Madison states that the Framers (including himself) omitted the word “slave” or any classification by race from the Constitution in order to underscore the slaves’ humanity—they are “persons,” not chattel. It was “wrong,” he writes, “to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.” Madison wanted the slave to be regarded “as a moral person, not as a mere article or property.”
Fredrick Douglass was right in his belief that the Union was the indispensable condition of abolition. Either northern influence over the South would eventually prevail, as most Founders hoped, or it would end slavery by force in a just war. The South would not have abolished slavery under its own rule.
Another often-ignored fact is that America was home to approximately 60,000 free blacks around the time of the Founding; this number tripled in just 20 years. Black Americans voted in several states, which appears to make America the first nation in recorded history where both races voted side by side. Those free and freed persons represented the beginning of our long and strenuous path toward justice.
Black Americans have been treated in a grossly unjust fashion throughout our history. But the Declaration and the Constitution themselves, according to the Founders’ intentions, contain the principles through which justice would come, as Fredrick Douglass and, later, Martin Luther King, Jr. believed. These countervailing facts and statements, should produce a more balanced view of America’s Founding. Why, then, are they so thoroughly and carefully avoided by today’s narrative-creators, who intend to persuade through distortion?
Rather than
in recrimination, we should follow Lincoln in seeking “to bind up the nation’s wounds” and “to achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves.” Manipulating the next generation to disdain the American Founding will not accomplish this.
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2)The Military-Intelligence Complex
Many retired high-ranking military officers have gone beyond legitimately articulating why President Trump may be wrong on foreign policy, and now feel free to smear him personally or speak openly of removing their commander-in-chief from office. And the media and the bipartisan foreign-policy establishment are with them every step of the way.
Much has been written about the so-called Resistance of disgruntled Clinton, Obama, and progressive activists who have pledged to stop Donald Trump’s agenda. The choice of the noun “Resistance,” of course, conjures up not mere “opposition,” but is meant to evoke the French “resistance” of World War II—in the melodramatic sense of current loyal progressive patriots doing their best to thwart by almost any means necessary the Nazi-like Trump.
We know from a variety of disinterested watchdog institutions and foundations that the media has offered 90 percent negative coverage of the Trump Administration. CNN in its anti-Trump zeal has ruined its brand by serial fabrications and firings of its marquee biased reporters.
An entire array of CNN journalists and analysts either has resigned, been fired, retired, forced to offer retractions, or been disgraced either for peddling ad hominem crude attacks on Trump, displaying unprofessional behavior, concocting or repeating false stories, engaging in obscene commentary, or being refuted, including but not limited at times to Reza Aslan, Carl Bernstein, Donna Brazile, James Clapper, Marshall Cohen, Candy Crowley, Kathy Griffin, Julie Joffe, Michael Hayden, Suzanne Malveaux, Manu Raju, Jim Sciutto, Julian Zelizer, and teams such as Thomas Frank, Eric Lichtblau, and Lex Harris, and Gloria Borger, Jake Tapper, and Brian Rokus.
About every month or so, a Hollywood or entertainment personage offers a new assassination scenario of shooting, torching, stabbing, beating, blowing up, caging, or lynching the elected president.
Likewise, the country witnesses about every six weeks a new “turning point,” “bombshell,” “walls are closing in” effort to subvert the Trump presidency. And the list of such futile and fabricated attempts to abort Trump is indeed now quite monotonous: the efforts to sue three states on false charges of tampered voting machines, the attempt to subvert the voting of the Electoral College, the invocation of the ossified Logan Act, the melodramas concerning the emoluments clause and 25th Amendment, the Mueller’s Dream Team and all-star 22-month failed effort to find collusion and obstruction, the personal psychodramas of Stormy Daniels, Michael Cohen, Michael Avenatti, and the Trump tax returns, the desperate efforts to tar Trump as a “white supremacist,” followed by cries of “Recession! Recession!,” and now, of course, “Ukraine! Ukraine!”
Perhaps these efforts were best summed up by an anonymous New York Times op-ed writer who on September 5, 2018, outlined how officials within the Trump Administration took it upon themselves in the midst of the Mueller investigation to obstruct and impede the workings of the seemingly oblivious cuckold Trump: “The dilemma—which he [Trump] does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations . . . I would know. I am one of them.”
The Normalization of the Coup?
Yet far more disturbing have been the furor of lame-duck and retired intelligence and military officers.
In unprecedented fashion, some have not just disagreed with the commander in chief, but have declared that he is unfit for office and by implication thus should be obstructed and perhaps even removed.
Efforts such as these were recently praised by former acting CIA Director John McLaughlin, who announced to a gathering of former intelligence bureaucrats, “Thank God for the deep state.”
Donald Trump had been in office less than a month when the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. intelligence agencies had decided on their own to withhold information from the recently inaugurated president of the United States: “In some of these cases of withheld information, officials have decided not to show Mr. Trump the sources and methods that the intelligence agencies use to collect information, the current and former officials said.”
What would one call that? Obstruction? A coup? A conspiracy?
Most of the major intelligence heads in the Obama Administration—James Comey, John Brennan, and James Clapper—either leaked classified information aimed at harming candidate and then President Trump, later declared him a veritable traitor and Russian asset, or earlier took measures to monitor his campaign or administration’s communications.
In the coming months, the investigations of Michael Horowitz, the inspector general at the Justice Department, and the department’s own criminal investigations by U.S. Attorney John Durham, may well detail one of the most extensive efforts in our history by the American intelligence agencies and their enablers in the executive branch to subvert a campaign, disrupt a presidential transition, and to abort a presidency.
Just 10 days after Trump was inaugurated, Washington insider lawyer Rosa Brooks—a former adviser in the Obama Administration to Assistant Secretary of State Harold Koh and a former special counsel to the president at George Soros’s Open Society Institute—in Foreign Policy offered formal advice about removing Trump in an article titled, “3 Ways to Get Rid of President Trump Before 2020.”
Brooks needed just over a week to conclude that the elected president had to go by means other than an election. After rejecting the first option of the usual constitutional remedy of waiting until the 2020 election (“But after such a catastrophic first week, four years seems like a long time to wait.”), Brooks offered her three fallback strategies to depose Trump:
1) Immediate impeachment. “If impeachment seems like a fine solution to you, the good news is that Congress doesn’t need evidence of actual treason or murder to move forward with an impeachment,” she wrote. “Practically anything can be considered a ‘high crime or misdemeanor.’”). Brooks did not elaborate on what “anything” might be.
2) Declaring Trump mentally unfit under the 25th Amendment. “In these dark days, some around the globe are finding solace in the 25th Amendment to the Constitution,” she wrote. Brooks did not mention that what non-U.S. citizens abroad may feel about removing Trump as mentally unfit is of no constitutional importance. Yet she was also prescient—given the later McCabe-Rosenstein comical aborted palace coup of ridding the country of a supposedly “sick” Trump.
3) A military coup, which Brooks wrote, “is one that until recently I would have said was unthinkable in the United States of America.” If not a “coup,” then “at least a refusal by military leaders to obey certain orders.” Notice the cheap praeteritio: claim that such an idea should have been previously “unthinkable” as a means to demonstrate just how thinkable it now should be.
In the months and years that followed, Brooks again proved either vatic or had foreknowledge of the sort of “resistance” that would follow.
So it is now the decision of many ex-intelligence heads and flag officers to change the rules of the game. They will live to rue the ensuing harm to the reputations both of the intelligence services and the military at large.
In early March 2017, Evelyn Farkas, an outgoing Obama-appointed deputy assistant secretary of defense, detailed in a weird revelation on MSNBC how departing Obama Administration officials scrambled to leak and undermine the six-week-old Trump Administration. “I was urging my former colleagues and, frankly speaking, the people on the Hill . . .‘Get as much information as you can. Get as much intelligence as you can before President Obama leaves the administration . . . The Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff’s dealing with Russians, [they] would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would no longer have access to that intelligence . . . That’s why you have the leaking.”
In other words, a Pentagon official was illegally leaking documents, apparently classified, in order both to defame the president as a Russian asset and to thwart any investigation of such internal and likely illegal resistance.
The New Retired Military
At various times, an entire pantheon of retired generals and intelligence directors has gone to Twitter or progressive cable channels like CNN and MSNBC to declare the president of the United States either a Russian asset and thus a traitor, or unfit for office, or in some other way to call for his removal before the election of 2020—for some, seemingly in violation of the code of military conduct that forbids even retired officers from defaming the commander-in-chief.
None cited any felonious conduct on Trump’s part; all were infuriated either by presidential comportment and tone or policies with which they disagreed.
Retired four-star general Barry McCaffrey for the past three years has leveled a number of ad hominem charges against the elected president. He essentially called the president a threat to American national security on grounds that his loyalties were more to Vladimir Putin than to his own country. McCaffrey later called the president “stupid” and “cruel” for recalibrating the presence of trip-wire troops in-between Kurdish and Turkish forces. He recently equated Trump’s cancellation of the White House subscriptions of the New York Times and the Washington Post to the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini (“This is Mussolini”).
When a retired military officer decides and announces that the current president is the equivalent of a fascist, mass-murdering dictator who seized power and defied constitutional norms, then what is the signal conveyed to other military officers?
Retired General Stanley McChrystal—removed from command by the Obama Administration for inter alia allegedly referring to the vice president as “Bite Me”—called the president “immoral and dishonest.” Former CIA director Michael Hayden—a four-star Air Force general formerly smeared by the Left for defending supposed “torture” at Guantanamo—compared Trump’s policies to Nazism, when he tweeted a picture of Birkenau to illustrate the administration’s use of detention facilities at the border—a plan inaugurated by the Obama Administration—to deal with tens of thousands of illegal entrants.
One can disagree with Trump’s decision to pull a small contingent of tripwire troops back from the frontlines in Syria as Kurds (our current friends, but not our long-standing legal allies) and Turks (our long-standing legal allies, but not our current friends) fight each other, or see the logic of not putting even small numbers of U.S. troops in the middle of a Syrian quagmire.
The choice is a bad/worse dilemma, one that involves the likelihood either of not defending de facto allies or getting into a shooting scenario against de jure allies. So why would retired General John Allen instead attack the commander-in-chief in moral terms rather than merely criticize the president’s strategic or operational judgment: “There is blood on Trump’s hands for abandoning our Kurdish allies”?
Again, when our best and brightest former generals and admirals inform the nation that the current elected president, with whom they disagree on both Middle East and border security policies, is “immoral” and “cruel” or deserves bloodguilt, or is the equivalent of a fascist dictator or similar to those who set up Nazi death camps, is not the obvious inference that someone must put an end to the supposed fascistic/Nazi takeover of the government?
Apparently so.
In the eeriest series of comments, retired Admiral William McRaven has all but declared Trump a subversive traitor. Apparently in reference to fellow military also working in resistance to the president, Raven remarked, “The America that they believed in was under attack, not from without, but from within.”
In a New York Times op-ed, the decorated retired admiral went further, mostly due to his own disagreements with Trump’s foreign policy, especially toward the Turkish-Kurd standoff in Syria, and his dislike of the president’s style and behavior. Indeed, McRaven seemed to call for Trump to be removed before the 2020 election, “[I]t is time for a new person in the Oval Office—Republican, Democrat or independent—the sooner, the better. The fate of our Republic depends upon it.” (Emphasis added.)
Let us be clear about what McRaven wrote. We are just one year away from a constitutionally mandated election. Yet McRaven now wants a “new person” in the Oval Office and he wants it “the sooner, the better.” And he insists our collective fate as a constitutional republic depends on Trump’s preferable “sooner” removal.
What exactly is the admiral referring to? Impeachment? Invocation of the 25th Amendment? Or the last of Rosa Brooks’ proposals: a forced removal by the military?
Note again, the common thread in all these complaints is not demonstrable high crimes and misdemeanors but rather sharp policy disagreements with the president about the Middle East, or the president’s own retaliatory and sometimes crass pushbacks, usually against prior ad hominem attacks both from serving and retired military officers, or false claims that Trump was a veritable asset, something refuted by Robert Mueller’s 22-month, $35-million-dollar investigation of “collusion.”
An Honorable “Seven Days in May”?
Note that the Left seems either amused or supportive of the current furor of our retired officers and intelligence heads (in a way they were not with General Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security advisor)—a phenomenon that began during the Iraq War when an array of retired officers was canonized by the media and past Pentagon critics for declaring the Bush Iraq War variously stupid, immoral, or doomed to failure.
Apparently, an ascendant progressive view is that our armed forces, CIA, FBI, and NSA are protectors of civil liberties and progressive values, and therefore are to be lauded for almost any rhetorical attacks on the president deemed necessary to remind the country of the danger that Trump supposedly poses.
Gone are the old days when Hollywood’s “Dr. Strangelove” warned us of supposed Curtis LeMay-reactionaries, or the 1964 political melodrama, “Seven Days in May,” that envisioned a future right-wing military coup against an idealistic president in the mold of Adlai Stevenson.
Instead, the military in the present age—or at least its Beltway incarnation—has been recalibrated by the Left as a kindred progressive Washington institution, perhaps because of its necessary ability to enact change by fiat, whether in regard to issues regarding diversity, feminism, global warming, or transgenderism—all without the mess, delay, and acrimony of legislative and executive bickering.
In the past, when retired generals rarely and inappropriately weighed in on the allegedly improper, stupid, or immoral drift of a contemporary progressive president, they were met by a progressive firestorm as potential insurrectionaries. General Douglas MacArthur was roundly hated by the Left for his often boisterous and improper attacks on President Truman’s decision not to expand the war in Korea.
Again, today there has arisen a quite different—and far more dangerous—calculus in which the media canonizes rather than audits retired officers who compare the commander-in-chief to a fascist, declare him unfit, or dream of his “sooner the better” removal.
Had any of the current generals said anything similar about President Obama in the fashion they now routinely attack Trump, their public careers would have been ruined. There would have been Adam Schiff-like progressive congressional inquiries about the current status of the code of military conduct as it pertains, not to quite legitimate political editorialization, but rather to “contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Homeland Security, or the Governor or legislature of any State . . . ”
Attacking Trump in “contemptuous” fashion is not speaking truth to power but a confirmation of the existing status quo of the media, progressive orthodoxy, and the general Washington bipartisan bureaucracy.
The result is that many retired high-ranking officers have made the necessary adjustments. Many have gone well beyond legitimately articulating why Trump may be wrong on foreign policy, and now feel free to malign, insult, and even dream of removing their commander-in-chief, on the grounds that Trump is sui generis, that the media will applaud their efforts, and that the bipartisan foreign-policy establishment will canonize their deep-state bravery.
Perhaps.
But the danger is that half the country will conclude that too many retired generals and admirals are going the way of past CIA and FBI directors—no longer just esteemed professionals, op-ed writers, and astute analysts, but political activists who feel entitled to challenge the very legitimacy of an elected president—a development that is ruinous both for the reputation of a hallowed military and of the country in general.
So it is now the decision of many ex-intelligence heads and flag officers, as retirees, analysts, and business-people, to change the rules of the game. Again fine. But they will live to rue the ensuing harm to the reputations both of the intelligence services and the military at large.
Indeed, the damage is well underway.
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3)
In chilling detail, ex-envoy to US Oren warns of Israel-Iran ‘conflagration’
A minor miscalculation by Jerusalem could lead to devastating war, with rockets raining down on Jewish state and overwhelming its defenses, former ambassador writes in The Atlantic
Former Israeli ambassador to the US Michael Oren has described in chilling detail how a conflict between Israel and Iran could easily be sparked and descend into a massive conflagration, devastating Israel and other countries in the region.
Israel is already girding for a war with the Islamic Republic, and has carried out hundreds of strikes against Iran-linked targets in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. A single miscalculation during one of those airstrikes could draw retaliation by Iran, Oren wrote in a column published in The Atlantic on Monday.
“The senior ministers of the Israeli government met twice last week to discuss the possibility of open war with Iran,” he began. “Israeli troops, especially in the north, have been placed on war footing. Israel is girding for the worst and acting on the assumption that fighting could break out at any time. And it’s not hard to imagine how it might arrive. The conflagration, like so many in the Middle East, could be ignited by a single spark.”
An Israel Defense Forces bombing run could inadvertently hit a sensitive target, or an Israeli official could step out of line and say something to embarrass Iran following an attack, Oren wrote.
“The result could be a counterstrike by Iran, using cruise missiles that penetrate Israel’s air defenses and smash into targets like the Kiryah, Tel Aviv’s equivalent of the Pentagon. Israel would retaliate massively against Hezbollah’s headquarters in Beirut as well as dozens of its emplacements along the Lebanese border. And then, after a day of large-scale exchanges, the real war would begin,” he continued.
Then, rockets would “rain on Israel” at a rate as high as 4,000 a day. The Iron Dome missile defense system would be overwhelmed as projectiles attacked civilian and military targets throughout the country, said Oren, who served in Washington, DC, from 2009 to 2013.
Additionally, Iranian precision-guided missiles could wreak havoc, as the David’s Sling missile defense system that could stop them is untested in combat, and a single interception costs $1 million.
Attacks near Ben Gurion International Airport could shut it down, and the country’s ports could be closed, severing Israel from the outside, and Iranian cyberattacks could turn off the power grid.
In Oren’s bleak scenario, terrorists on the ground would attack border communities, the economy would cease functioning, hospitals would be overwhelmed, and damaged factories and refineries would spew toxic chemicals into the environment.
“Millions of Israelis would huddle in bomb shelters. Hundreds of thousands would be evacuated from border areas that terrorists are trying to infiltrate. The restaurants and hotels would empty, along with the offices of the high-tech companies of the start-up nation. The hospitals, many of them resorting to underground facilities, would quickly be overwhelmed, even before the skies darken with the toxic fumes of blazing chemical factories and oil refineries,” he suggested.
The IDF would be confronted with attackers on Israel’s borders in Lebanon and Gaza, while long-range missiles would fly in from Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Iran — some from outside the range of the Israeli Air Force, which would also be forced to contend with Russian anti-aircraft defenses in Syria.
Israel’s infantry would engage in urban combat in Lebanon and Gaza, its special forces would be sent far from its borders in Syria and Iraq, and its missiles would bombard Iran, Oren wrote.
The Israeli response would cause many civilian casualties, drawing charges of war crimes, while West Bank protests would draw a sharp response from Israeli troops there.
“Does all this seem a little far-fetched?” he asked. “Not to the senior Israeli government ministers who have been contemplating precisely these sorts of scenarios.”
The US response would be a crucial factor, in terms of providing munitions, legal support, and backing after the war in negotiating truces, withdrawals, prisoner exchanges and peace agreements.
The US has historically provided these three pillars of support to Israel during its times of need, Oren wrote, and could be counted on again.
Whether the US would help Israel with any direct military intervention is not certain, he said.
Israel has a strong relationship with the Trump administration and would likely receive significant support if needed, Oren said, but current US politics complicates the situation.
“Back in 1973, Egypt and Syria saw a president preoccupied with an impeachment procedure, and concluded that Israel was vulnerable. In the subsequent war, Israel prevailed—but at an excruciating price. The next war could prove even costlier,” he wrote.
3a) Hamas threatens to shower Israel with rockets for 6 months
By YASSER OKBI/MAARIV,KHALED ABU TOAMEH
Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar said in a speech on Monday that, "we have a military force in the [Gaza] Strip that the enemy is making a big deal for. We have hundreds of kilometers of tunnels, hundreds of control rooms above and below the ground, thousands of anti-tank missiles and thousands of mortar shells." He added that, "we can turn the enemy cities into ghost towns if they decide to attack us."
According to him, what would not happen with words would happen with fire and weapons. "The whole world must know that in Gaza there are about 70,000 armed young men from all the Palestinian factions, and we have young people who believe in the Palestinian cause and [will] achieve the purpose of the people," he said.
Sinwar continued: "We saw that the Zionist enemy was ruled by an extreme Right, seizing the opportunity to make Al Aqsa Mosque Jewish and destroy its foundations from within." He noted that, "the US administration moved its embassy to Jerusalem and declared it the capital of the occupying entity and there were leaks from the century deal, which meant pushing the Palestinian issue."
"The blockade and strangulation on the Gaza Strip has come to kill Gaza and its residents - and yet we have accomplished [a lot] over the last two years," he said.
Sinwar said that Hamas won't allow the "humanitarian crisis" in the coastal enclave to continue. "We won't wait for too long," he said. Israel, he said, "should prepare for something big."
He said that resolving the "humanitarian crisis" in the Gaza Strip should be at the top of the agenda of Israeli leaders. The crisis "has affected all walks of life because of the blockade and sanctions imposed on the Gaza Strip," he added. "The blockade aims to force our people to surrender and revolt against the Palestinian resistance."
Sinwar said that Hamas has told the Egyptian mediators that it will "strike at Tel Aviv for six full months" unless the crisis is resolved. "We have hundreds of kilometers of tunnels and thousands of anti-armored weapons and locally made rockets," the Hamas leader said.
"The missiles manufactured in the Gaza Strip will crush the world's most powerful tanks, [turning them] into burnt iron," Sinwar claimed.
Addressing recent developments in the political field, he said: "Our stance has led to the uprooting of the Israeli government and Liberman, and we brought about a crisis that not even two elections could solve. Maybe they'll have a third one."
Sinwar revealed that Hamas has formed an "operations room" together with 13 Palestinian groups in to repel any Israeli military operation in the Gaza Strip. Iran, he said, deserves big credit for building Hamas's military force.
"We won't hesitate to confront the enemy, and in the past we knew how to manage these confrontations without turning them into all-out wars," Sinwar said. "We heard statements from the leaders of the occupation threatening us, but we will make them curse the day they were born."
The Hamas leader praised Iran, saying that "it has a place of honor in front of God in building and strengthening our power." He added that "had it not been for Iran's financial support, weapons and the transfer of expertise to the resistance in Gaza and Palestine, we would not have reached where we are."
He mentioned the threats made by Blue and White chairman Benny Gantz: "We have heard the threats of the occupation leadership and found that some of their leadership joins the menacing prayer." He then addressed Israel directly: "We are waiting to see if you can form a government – so we can see what it does."
Sinwar said the injuries and siege were only to build a force to humiliate the occupation army. "We have built this power and will continue to build it – not to protect the Strip, not to protect ourselves, but to achieve our people's dream of freedom and return," he concluded.
According to him, what would not happen with words would happen with fire and weapons. "The whole world must know that in Gaza there are about 70,000 armed young men from all the Palestinian factions, and we have young people who believe in the Palestinian cause and [will] achieve the purpose of the people," he said.
Sinwar continued: "We saw that the Zionist enemy was ruled by an extreme Right, seizing the opportunity to make Al Aqsa Mosque Jewish and destroy its foundations from within." He noted that, "the US administration moved its embassy to Jerusalem and declared it the capital of the occupying entity and there were leaks from the century deal, which meant pushing the Palestinian issue."
"The blockade and strangulation on the Gaza Strip has come to kill Gaza and its residents - and yet we have accomplished [a lot] over the last two years," he said.
Sinwar said that Hamas won't allow the "humanitarian crisis" in the coastal enclave to continue. "We won't wait for too long," he said. Israel, he said, "should prepare for something big."
He said that resolving the "humanitarian crisis" in the Gaza Strip should be at the top of the agenda of Israeli leaders. The crisis "has affected all walks of life because of the blockade and sanctions imposed on the Gaza Strip," he added. "The blockade aims to force our people to surrender and revolt against the Palestinian resistance."
Sinwar said that Hamas has told the Egyptian mediators that it will "strike at Tel Aviv for six full months" unless the crisis is resolved. "We have hundreds of kilometers of tunnels and thousands of anti-armored weapons and locally made rockets," the Hamas leader said.
"The missiles manufactured in the Gaza Strip will crush the world's most powerful tanks, [turning them] into burnt iron," Sinwar claimed.
Addressing recent developments in the political field, he said: "Our stance has led to the uprooting of the Israeli government and Liberman, and we brought about a crisis that not even two elections could solve. Maybe they'll have a third one."
Sinwar revealed that Hamas has formed an "operations room" together with 13 Palestinian groups in to repel any Israeli military operation in the Gaza Strip. Iran, he said, deserves big credit for building Hamas's military force.
"We won't hesitate to confront the enemy, and in the past we knew how to manage these confrontations without turning them into all-out wars," Sinwar said. "We heard statements from the leaders of the occupation threatening us, but we will make them curse the day they were born."
The Hamas leader praised Iran, saying that "it has a place of honor in front of God in building and strengthening our power." He added that "had it not been for Iran's financial support, weapons and the transfer of expertise to the resistance in Gaza and Palestine, we would not have reached where we are."
He mentioned the threats made by Blue and White chairman Benny Gantz: "We have heard the threats of the occupation leadership and found that some of their leadership joins the menacing prayer." He then addressed Israel directly: "We are waiting to see if you can form a government – so we can see what it does."
Sinwar said the injuries and siege were only to build a force to humiliate the occupation army. "We have built this power and will continue to build it – not to protect the Strip, not to protect ourselves, but to achieve our people's dream of freedom and return," he concluded.
3b)
War of words is not enough to keep Iran at bay
Tehran is stepping up its efforts to challenge Israel and Iran's enemies in the Persian Gulf by introducing new weapons, tactics and strategies. Warding off threats of this nature requires sending a message to Iran that Israel must be able to back with actions.
More than a few eyebrows were raised last week over the torrent of warnings by senior security and political officials concerning the threats posed to Israel from far and wide, namely from Iran and Iraq to Yemen.
This led many to wonder aloud if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi were indeed warning the public against new dangers, or was this a case of trying to augment existing threats, in the interest of creating media buzz that will serve foreign motives, be they political or budgetary.
Questioning the timing of these statements and any interests they it may serve is reasonable, as all those involved have a proverbial dog in this race: A chaotic security reality serves Netanyahu's narrative of the immediate need for a national unity government, and an raising the alarm certainly serves Kochavi's demand for a significant boost for defense spending.
Former IDF deputy chief of Staff Maj. Gen. (res.) Yair Golan, now a Democratic Union MK, was the first to publically question Netanyahu and Kochavi's assertions, saying that there are no new threats to Israel and no place for warmongering.
"Underscoring these threats at this time stems from the debate about the defense budget and the IDF's multiyear work plan," he argued.
The military's operational work plan, "Momentum," will come into force on Jan. 1, 2020 and will focus on improving the IDF's defensive and offensive capabilities. As such, it will place special emphasis on training in urban warfare tactics, streamlining the collaboration between the various corps and all units, and further enhancing the military's intelligence-gathering and cyber capabilities, as well as its array of weapons.
As a past partner in cabinet discussions about the defense budget, Golan may very well be right in suggesting foreign interests are at play. On the other hand, he may not be privy to the most recent intelligence assessment,
Recent weeks have seen significant changes in the Middle East, including the US's decision to pull its troops from northwest Syria earlier this month and Washington's lack of response to the Sept. 14 Iranian attack on Saudi oil facilities. As a result, the radical elements in the region have been emboldened, at the expense of the moderate ones.
Moreover, Iran has taken multiple steps – only some of them public – to tighten its grip on the Middle East.
The fact that Tehran has deployed precision-guided missiles in Yemen is just the tip of the iceberg. Iran is tirelessly trying to challenge its enemies and it has proven it has no qualms about introducing – and using – new weapons to the equation, namely cruise missiles and long-range attack drones.
Proxy wars intensifying
Yemen is not a new arena for the Iranians, but so far Israel has not had to be particularly concerned about their activities there.
In recent years, Iran has been using Yemen, via its local proxy, the Houthis, as a something of a "combat lab, to test military concepts, weapons and new battlefield tactics in real-world conditions," Dr. Uzi Rubin, former head of the Defense Ministry's Homa Directorate, which oversees the development of missile defenses, wrote in a recent article published by the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security.
Robin extensively reviews the Houthis' operations against Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, including their use of rocket fire, the limited abilities of the Saudi air defense systems seeking to counter them, the growing use of attack drones, and the gradual introduction of advanced combat systems and longer-range missiles with greater accuracy.
He also argues that in all cases, the Houthis used Iranian-made systems that were given other names to so as to allow Iran to maintain deniability about its involvement in the Houthi insurgency in Yemen.
The article presents several interesting conclusions that are very relevant to Israel, including the Iranian success in breaking the naval blockade on Yemen and sending the Houthis weapons, and their dogged determination to establish local missile production lines on Yemeni soil to reduce the Houthis' dependency on external supplies.
The selection of targets for these attacks should also interest Israel – not only civilian population centers but also military bases and national infrastructure facilities, and even attempts to assassinate leaders with cruise missiles and UAVs. But most notably, there is a concentrated effort by the Iranians and their proxies to undermine air defense systems so as to compromise their performance.
Rubin states that Israel must monitor the developments in the Persian Gulf very closely, and argues that "What we are currently seeing in Yemen will be used against Israel next."
He means primarily the weapons that may be deployed against Israel from other sectors, but the new threats presented this week make for a more complex picture whereby Iran may launch such attacks against Israel using not only Hezbollah, its primary proxy in Lebanon, but also from Yemen itself.
Such a move by Iran will aim not only to help Tehran maintain deniability but also to make it exceedingly harder for Israel to respond if nothing else because Yemen – like Iraq, where Iran also backs Shiite militias it could employ against Israel - is not a major focus for the IDF's intelligence-gathering efforts.
This new threat requires Israel to invest in new arenas in intelligence gathering, and the IDF must outline contingencies in case of such an attack – an immediate budgetary need. It also requires increasing political and intelligence coordination with Western and Arab states, especially in the Persian Gulf.
Still, it seems that the real way to face this threat is not but going after every missile-production line and downing every drone in every sector, but rather by sending a clear message to Tehran that any attack in Israel will result in an unprecedented blow to the Islamic republic – a threat Israel must be willing to back with actions.
ISIS: Down, but not out
The escalation in the Shiite threat posed by Iran and its proxies coincides to a certain extent with something of a decline in the threat posed by extreme Sunni groups.
Israel may not have been a primary target for the Islamic State group or al-Qaida before it, but these groups' radical ideology and their physical proximity to us required close monitoring and that, according to foreign media reports, includes, at times, operational activity, especially in southern Syria.
Little has been said about Israel's contribution to the geographical elimination of ISIS. This contribution focused mainly on intelligence-sharing with those fighting it on the ground, as well as assisting in counterterrorism efforts that helped thwart attacks around the world.
In that respect, the elimination of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in an American-led raid in Syria last week does not affect Israel's intelligence assessments, namely that its shrinking geographical presence does not diminish the threat it poses; that the change in its leadership will not affect the groups murderous ideology; and that given the opportunity, al-Baghdadi's successor, Abu Ibrahim Hashimi al-Quraishi, will not hesitate to order the group to target Israel.
If there is anything ISIS' short yet bloody history has proven is that the organization adapts to changes very quickly. It may have lost the so-called "caliphate" it sought to form in parts of Iraq and Syria, but there is no shortage of lawless areas in the Middle East for it to take root in, nor has the support it garners among radical Islamists worldwide.
ISIS activity around the world is also showing no signs of declining. It may have failed its recent attempts to carry out terrorist attacks in the West, but its proxies elsewhere, from East Asia and Afghanistan to Nigeria, Mozambique, and Sinai, are thriving.
Yes, the elimination of Baghdadi – an impressive intelligence and operational achievement by any measure – dealt ISIS a serious blow, but as it is accustomed to decentralized and amorphous activities, it does not spell its demise, especially now that a new leader has been named.
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4)
Obama Couldn’t Get The 2020 Nomination — He’s Not ‘Woke’ Enough J. Frank Bullitt
Posted By Ruth King
To illustrate what sort of zealots now own the Democratic Party, realize that Barack Obama probably wouldn’t be the nominee if he were running for president. It’s a scathing commentary on the left.
It became obvious when, in this age of wokeness, the former president criticized today’s cancel culture, in which the outrage mob turns anyone who holds an unapproved opinion into an instant social and political outcast. Ostracism replaces discussion. There is no debate, the airing of differing opinions is not allowed.
“This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically ‘woke’ and all that stuff,” Obama said last week at an Obama Foundation event, “you should get over that quickly. The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids. And share certain things with you.”
Columnist Mollie Hemingway noted on Fox News that Obama’s “message does not play well in the Democratic primary,” as “the excitement is definitely with the wing of the party that does not want to be open or tolerant to a wide swath of voters.”
Granted, Obama was warning his party comrades about taking things too far, that their fanaticism will hurt them in elections. Yet one callow fellow writing in the NYT suggested Obama holds the same “regressive views” of older Americans who “stubbornly reject progress and refuse to show compassion.” Published comments largely went against the writer, who also caught a fair amount of criticism on his twitter account. But there were enough comments in the Times to show just how militant the left has become:
- “I’m the same age as Obama, but he has clearly been influenced by right-wing propaganda and I suggest he should get away from the Wall Street enablers he has surrounded himself with and start talking to people instead of lecturing them.”
- “He became a coward and now he wants others to follow his lead under the guise of some counterfeit ‘maturity.’”
- “Shame on Obama for his obtuseness.”
- “Obama is a pedantic scold. But he only seems to scold young people and people of color. Mr. Audacity of Hope showed no audacity at all when it came to punishing the crooked bankers.”
- “I voted for that semi-empty suit and never stopped regretting it. Aside from half a medical insurance system named after him, he puttered and putted through eight years of impotence and irrelevance.”
- “The biggest disappointment in my lifetime is Obama’s failure. He had the FDR moment in the palm of his hands and what did he do? Sold us all out and he’s every bit as responsible for Trump as is the DNC and the duplicitous meritocracy who sold our soul to the devil.”
- “Thank you for this, Mr. Owens. … Work(ing) across the isle is nonsense when the Republican Party is founded on racist policies. The Dems aren’t much better, but maybe The Squad can get something done.”
- “If fewer boomers ‘overlooked’ Donald Trump’s corruption, bigotry and narcissism — because he had lots of money and threw good parties — and instead ‘cancelled’ him, maybe we wouldn’t be stuck with this sorry excuse of a human being as our president.”
Obviously these folks don’t recall the man who once said Democrats should take a gun to a knife fight, whose aide told party operatives to “punch back twice as hard,” who didn’t reign in excess when supporters said criticism of his policies was the manifestation of racism and examples of hate speech.
The Barack Obama of 2008 had not yet “evolved” on same-sex marriage, making him a bigot and homophobe today, and also pledged to cut spending. The big-deal health care takeover named after him doesn’t satisfy today’s Democrats because it isn’t Medicare for All. As president he deported too many illegal immigrants, promised that those who weren’t would not get health care benefits, vigorously defended free speech, and supported cutting the corporate tax, which in the Elizabeth Warren-Bernie Sanders era is abomination. These positions would have already disqualified him from contention in the Democratic Party of 2019-20.
Though Obama was rightly critical of the cancel culture, we won’t argue that he didn’t open the door for it.
“The seeds of cancel culture and leftist outrage were undoubtedly planted during his tenure in the White House. Back in 2012, for example, Obama would never have openly called Mitt Romney a racist. But he didn’t have to because surrogates like Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz did it for him,” says Federalist political editor John Daniel Davidson.
Breitbart’s John Hayward tweeted “Obama’s brand of messianic populism was a major ingredient in the development of today’s cancel culture.”
“Everyone who criticized Barack Obama was portrayed as evil, driven by greed, racism, or money from their sinister corporate puppet masters,” Hayward continued. “His early statements as president literally included telling his critics to shut up and go to the back of the bus.”
But faux messiahs are quickly replaced, and the Democrats have already moved on to another redeemer. When that one is no longer radical enough for the agitators, they’ll find someone even more hostile to continue their assault on freedom and mutual respect.
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