by Bob Walsh
The boys decided to tear up five dorms at the California State Prison at Susanville yesterday morning. This used to be a pretty mellow place which operated primarily as a feeder for fire camps. Now most of the actual minimum custody inmates are sentenced under realignment to county jails rather than state prison that is leaving more violent, gang oriented inmates in housing not truly designed for them. This makes I think five significant disturbances in CA state prisons this week.
Two officers were injured in this mess though apparently not critically. Four inmates were hurt bad enough to need to be transported off grounds. Two the them are critical. Several other staff and several more inmates received medical attention at the facility.
The one news article I read on this said that "a group of inmates broke out of a dorm and fought with other inmates." To me, group means "gang", as opposed to, say, the Christian Men's Reading Group.
Speaking of minimum custody, I was told yesterday (single source, unverified) that the DOC now has a specific policy of NOT referring ORWD (off-reservation work detail) walk-aways as escapes because they do NOT want the inmates to get additional time, they want them to do their time and hit street as soon as possible.
Saturday, August 31, 2019
SIRHAN SIRHAN SHANKED IN PRISON
by Bob Walsh
Sirhan Sirhan, the only inmate in the state prison system of whom it can reasonably be said will only get out of prison feet first, was shanked yesterday at the R. J. Donovan Correctional Facility near San Diego. He did need to be transported to an off-grounds hospital for treatment but the wound is not thought to be life threatening. Damn shame.
Sirhan Sirhan, the only inmate in the state prison system of whom it can reasonably be said will only get out of prison feet first, was shanked yesterday at the R. J. Donovan Correctional Facility near San Diego. He did need to be transported to an off-grounds hospital for treatment but the wound is not thought to be life threatening. Damn shame.
DRUNKEN ASSHOLE ARRESTED FOR THUMPING CHILDREN IN LODI, CALIFORNIA TARGET STORE
by Bob Walsh
Jeff Lee Hardcastle, 51, of Galt is apparently a drunk and an asshole. He is now a guest of San Joaquin County facing several felony and a few misdemeanor charges relating to his drunken assholeishness.
It seems that, on Wednesday, Hardcastle walked up to a five-year old and an 11-year old in the Target store and thumped them both in the head with his fist for no obvious reason. He was quickly located behind the store by the cops and arrested. Based on his photo I would say he has a lot of in-custody time, judging by the amount of ink on him.
With any sort of luck he will get a lot of time in the slammer, as opposed to kindness, understanding and treatment for whatever anger issues he has.
Jeff Lee Hardcastle, 51, of Galt is apparently a drunk and an asshole. He is now a guest of San Joaquin County facing several felony and a few misdemeanor charges relating to his drunken assholeishness.
It seems that, on Wednesday, Hardcastle walked up to a five-year old and an 11-year old in the Target store and thumped them both in the head with his fist for no obvious reason. He was quickly located behind the store by the cops and arrested. Based on his photo I would say he has a lot of in-custody time, judging by the amount of ink on him.
With any sort of luck he will get a lot of time in the slammer, as opposed to kindness, understanding and treatment for whatever anger issues he has.
THE MOST ACCURATE INDICATOR OF FUTURE BAD BEHAVIOR
Is Past Bad Behavior
by Bob Walsh
Tyrone McAllister is the son of the former Chief of Police of Union City, CA. On December 11 of last year the young man, 19, was sentenced to a year in county for thumping on an elderly Sikh man in Manteca. A charge of elder abuse was dropped in exchange for his plea. He got out in June, on five years probation, with credit for time served. (His dad retired three days after he was sentenced.)
He and a road dog were just arrested for murder and several counts of robbery in conjunction with a murder in Oakland. There is pretty good surveillance footage of the incident (stupid bastard) so there is little doubt of his guilt.
I wonder how the dead guy's family feels about the plea deal. He had been out about two months when the murder was committed.
by Bob Walsh
Tyrone McAllister is the son of the former Chief of Police of Union City, CA. On December 11 of last year the young man, 19, was sentenced to a year in county for thumping on an elderly Sikh man in Manteca. A charge of elder abuse was dropped in exchange for his plea. He got out in June, on five years probation, with credit for time served. (His dad retired three days after he was sentenced.)
He and a road dog were just arrested for murder and several counts of robbery in conjunction with a murder in Oakland. There is pretty good surveillance footage of the incident (stupid bastard) so there is little doubt of his guilt.
I wonder how the dead guy's family feels about the plea deal. He had been out about two months when the murder was committed.
MOM BUSTED IN TODDLER’S METH DEATH
Autopsy: 2-year-old boy found unresponsive in S. Wichita motel died of 'methadone toxicity'
KWCH
August 28, 2019
WICHITA, Kan. -- Autopsy results show a 2-year-old boy found dead in a south Wichita motel in May had methadone in his system.
According to Sedgwick County District Coroner Timothy Gorrill, 2-year-old Zayden Jaynesahkluah died as a result of methadone toxicity. Gorrill noted that because he did not know how the boy got the narcotic his manner of death is undetermined.
Toxicology results show a juice bottle containing red liquid and a cigarette butt both tested positive for methadone and nicotine. A can of Coke containing a cigarette butt and cigarette ashes also tested positive for methadone, nicotine and caffeine.
The autopsy report goes on to state Zayden was born prematurely. He had been treated for seizures believed to be linked to a viral infection at a local hospital May 2-3, 2019.
The autopsy states Zayden reportedly arrived at the Sunset Motel in the 2300 block of South Broadway around midnight on May 31 because his family's electricity had been cut off. The boy was with his mother, sister and his mother's male friend
Zayden was discovered unresponsive at 9:45 a.m. and 911 was called. When police and EMS arrived on the scene, resuscitation attempts failed and Zayden was pronounced dead at 10:35 a.m.
The report states the boy had 0.82 mg/L of the drug in his femoral blood and 0.50 mg/L in the blood in his heart.
Eyewitness News interviewed Zayden's mother, Kimberly Compass, following the boy's death. At that time, she said got up, saw her son had thrown up and called 911.
"It freaked me out," she told us at the time. "I became hysterical, which of course, I would. He's my son. Then I just waited for them to get there to help."
Compass was arrested on Aug. 15 and charged her with first-degree murder in the son's death. She is being held in the Sedgwick County jail on a $500,000 bond and is scheduled to be back in court in September.
KWCH
August 28, 2019
WICHITA, Kan. -- Autopsy results show a 2-year-old boy found dead in a south Wichita motel in May had methadone in his system.
According to Sedgwick County District Coroner Timothy Gorrill, 2-year-old Zayden Jaynesahkluah died as a result of methadone toxicity. Gorrill noted that because he did not know how the boy got the narcotic his manner of death is undetermined.
Toxicology results show a juice bottle containing red liquid and a cigarette butt both tested positive for methadone and nicotine. A can of Coke containing a cigarette butt and cigarette ashes also tested positive for methadone, nicotine and caffeine.
The autopsy report goes on to state Zayden was born prematurely. He had been treated for seizures believed to be linked to a viral infection at a local hospital May 2-3, 2019.
The autopsy states Zayden reportedly arrived at the Sunset Motel in the 2300 block of South Broadway around midnight on May 31 because his family's electricity had been cut off. The boy was with his mother, sister and his mother's male friend
Zayden was discovered unresponsive at 9:45 a.m. and 911 was called. When police and EMS arrived on the scene, resuscitation attempts failed and Zayden was pronounced dead at 10:35 a.m.
The report states the boy had 0.82 mg/L of the drug in his femoral blood and 0.50 mg/L in the blood in his heart.
Eyewitness News interviewed Zayden's mother, Kimberly Compass, following the boy's death. At that time, she said got up, saw her son had thrown up and called 911.
"It freaked me out," she told us at the time. "I became hysterical, which of course, I would. He's my son. Then I just waited for them to get there to help."
Compass was arrested on Aug. 15 and charged her with first-degree murder in the son's death. She is being held in the Sedgwick County jail on a $500,000 bond and is scheduled to be back in court in September.
IF YOU TELL A LIE BIG ENOUGH AND KEEP REPEATING IT, PEOPLE WILL EVENTUALLY COME TO BELIEVE IT ---JOSEPH GOEBBELS
Puncturing the big lie of Palestinian identity
by Melanie Phillips
Israel Hayom
August 30, 2019
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas recently claimed that the Palestinians were the descendants of the Canaanites. “This land is for its people, its residents and the Canaanites who were here 5,000 years ago – and we are the Canaanites!” he declared, vowing that every Israeli stone and house “built on our land” would end up “in the garbage dump of history.”
Any Western Palestinian supporter might have been left somewhat perplexed. After all, it’s an article of faith among those hostile to Israel that the indigenous inhabitants of the land are Palestinian Arabs who have been supplanted by Jewish occupiers.
Since Canaanites were said to have been conquered by the Jews, Abbas is laying claim to Canaanite ancestry to give the Palestinians a prior right to the land of Israel. But if they were actually Canaanites, then they can’t be Arabs, who many centuries later came, as the name implies, from the Arabian Peninsula, just as the Philistines, from whom in other moods the Palestinians also claim to have descended, came from Crete.
Abbas’s argument is, of course, ludicrous. The fact is that the Jews were the only people for whom the land of Israel was ever their national kingdom, several centuries before the creation of Islam.
The Jews are the only extant indigenous people of the land. Palestinian identity was invented in the 1960s in order to destroy the Jews’ claim to Israel and airbrush them out of their own history.
From time to time, this inconvenient historical truth has been blurted out by Arabs themselves. In 1937, a local Arab leader, Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, told the Peel Commission, which ultimately suggested the partition of Palestine: “There is no such country as Palestine! ‘Palestine’ is a term the Zionists invented!”
In 1977, PLO executive committee member Zahir Muhsein said: “The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. … Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism.”
In 2012, Hamas Interior and National Security Minister Fathi Hammad said: “Brothers, half of the Palestinians are Egyptians and the other half are Saudis. Who are the Palestinians? We have many families called Al-Masri, whose roots are Egyptian. Egyptian! They may be from Alexandria, from Cairo, from Dumietta, from the north, from Aswan, from Upper Egypt. We are Egyptians. We are Arabs. We are Muslims.”
All of this has been totally ignored by Westerners who continue to promote the Palestinians’ fictitious identity. Now, however, a stunning if inadvertent acknowledgment of the truth has emerged from an unlikely source.
Nazmi al Jubeh, an associate professor of history and archaeology at Birzeit University outside Ramallah, told a UN conference last June that there was no evidence linking the Jews to Jerusalem.
Thus far, so predictably mendacious. But thanks to the Elder of Zion website, a piece has now surfaced written by al Jubeh in 2006 in which he demolished the myth of Palestinian identity and made plain that it was invented solely to destroy Zionism and Israel.
Not that he acknowledged the Jews’ own history in the land. He made correct but passing reference to the Romans renaming Judea as “Palestina” in order “to challenge the memory of the Jews” after the Romans put down “the Jewish rebellion.”
Yet he didn’t provide the context for this by explaining that the Romans had crushed the Jewish kingdom, which had existed for centuries before being conquered in turn by successive waves of colonial invaders.
Instead, he claimed that the “Palestinian Jews, an essential component of the Palestinian people, started at the beginning of the twentieth century to identify themselves with the Zionist movement, thus separating themselves from the rest of their own people … ”
Despite this egregious and absurd falsification of Jewish history, the striking element of al Jubeh’s account is his admission of what we know to be objectively true – that, from the earliest times, there was no Palestinian identity.
Those living in Palestine from the time of the Romans, he wrote, were “mostly part of a greater regional or international political entity, which usually housed several nations, ethnic groups, and cultures.”
Similarly, today’s Palestinians, he wrote, “are the result of accumulated ethnic, racial, and religious groups, who once lived, conquered, occupied, and passed through this strip of land.
“Wars and invasions have never totally replaced the local population in any period of history; they rather added to, mixed with and reformulated the local identity. The Palestinian people are the Canaanites, the Philistines, the Jebusites, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Aramaeans, the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Turks, the Crusaders, and the Kurds, who once settled, conquered, occupied or just passed through Palestine.”
What gave the Palestinians their identity, he said, was their “struggle” against Zionism and the State of Israel. “There is no way to understand this identity apart from the conflict.”
It became internationally recognized as “a symbol for liberation and for the anti-colonial struggle.” Only after the 1967 Six-Day War did the Palestinians start trying to flesh this out by self-consciously developing artistic expression, architecture, and local history.
More sharply still, al Jubeh wrote that if the history of the region after the First World War had been different, the Palestinians may not have chosen a state in which to express their identity.
For decades, they marketed the conflict with Israel as “Arab-Israeli” and not as “Palestinian-Israeli.” The idea of a state of Palestine, he wrote, only emerged in the mid-1970s when Palestinian identity became politicized around the heavily promoted image of “a fighting nation seeking freedom.” This aspiration became the major vehicle in forming the Palestinians’ current sense of themselves.
In other words, Palestinian identity has no meaning except as a movement to deny the right of the indigenous Jewish people to their own homeland.
The Palestinians’ claim to be the rightful inheritors of the land lies at the very heart of the Western animus against Israel. It represents one of the most successful, if fiendish, propaganda achievements ever to have been pulled off – to have persuaded millions of people that this ludicrous falsehood is an unchallengeable truth.
All the malicious libels and distortions thrown at Israel by Western foes to delegitimize and destroy it rest on this historical lie. Claims that Israel is occupying another people’s land, that its actions are illegal, that it behaves with the cruelty and ruthlessness associated with colonialist invaders – all of this and more rests upon the belief that the Palestinians are the rightful inheritors of the land.
It is the foundation stone of a cause that Western liberals believe defines them as anti-colonialist defenders of the rights of indigenous peoples.
But it’s the Palestinians – and behind them the Arab and Muslim world – who are intent on colonialism and depriving the Jewish people of their rightful and historic homeland. And it is support for that ignoble cause more than any other that has destroyed the moral compass of the West.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Palestinians make Joseph Goebbels proud.
by Melanie Phillips
Israel Hayom
August 30, 2019
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas recently claimed that the Palestinians were the descendants of the Canaanites. “This land is for its people, its residents and the Canaanites who were here 5,000 years ago – and we are the Canaanites!” he declared, vowing that every Israeli stone and house “built on our land” would end up “in the garbage dump of history.”
Any Western Palestinian supporter might have been left somewhat perplexed. After all, it’s an article of faith among those hostile to Israel that the indigenous inhabitants of the land are Palestinian Arabs who have been supplanted by Jewish occupiers.
Since Canaanites were said to have been conquered by the Jews, Abbas is laying claim to Canaanite ancestry to give the Palestinians a prior right to the land of Israel. But if they were actually Canaanites, then they can’t be Arabs, who many centuries later came, as the name implies, from the Arabian Peninsula, just as the Philistines, from whom in other moods the Palestinians also claim to have descended, came from Crete.
Abbas’s argument is, of course, ludicrous. The fact is that the Jews were the only people for whom the land of Israel was ever their national kingdom, several centuries before the creation of Islam.
The Jews are the only extant indigenous people of the land. Palestinian identity was invented in the 1960s in order to destroy the Jews’ claim to Israel and airbrush them out of their own history.
From time to time, this inconvenient historical truth has been blurted out by Arabs themselves. In 1937, a local Arab leader, Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, told the Peel Commission, which ultimately suggested the partition of Palestine: “There is no such country as Palestine! ‘Palestine’ is a term the Zionists invented!”
In 1977, PLO executive committee member Zahir Muhsein said: “The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. … Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism.”
In 2012, Hamas Interior and National Security Minister Fathi Hammad said: “Brothers, half of the Palestinians are Egyptians and the other half are Saudis. Who are the Palestinians? We have many families called Al-Masri, whose roots are Egyptian. Egyptian! They may be from Alexandria, from Cairo, from Dumietta, from the north, from Aswan, from Upper Egypt. We are Egyptians. We are Arabs. We are Muslims.”
All of this has been totally ignored by Westerners who continue to promote the Palestinians’ fictitious identity. Now, however, a stunning if inadvertent acknowledgment of the truth has emerged from an unlikely source.
Nazmi al Jubeh, an associate professor of history and archaeology at Birzeit University outside Ramallah, told a UN conference last June that there was no evidence linking the Jews to Jerusalem.
Thus far, so predictably mendacious. But thanks to the Elder of Zion website, a piece has now surfaced written by al Jubeh in 2006 in which he demolished the myth of Palestinian identity and made plain that it was invented solely to destroy Zionism and Israel.
Not that he acknowledged the Jews’ own history in the land. He made correct but passing reference to the Romans renaming Judea as “Palestina” in order “to challenge the memory of the Jews” after the Romans put down “the Jewish rebellion.”
Yet he didn’t provide the context for this by explaining that the Romans had crushed the Jewish kingdom, which had existed for centuries before being conquered in turn by successive waves of colonial invaders.
Instead, he claimed that the “Palestinian Jews, an essential component of the Palestinian people, started at the beginning of the twentieth century to identify themselves with the Zionist movement, thus separating themselves from the rest of their own people … ”
Despite this egregious and absurd falsification of Jewish history, the striking element of al Jubeh’s account is his admission of what we know to be objectively true – that, from the earliest times, there was no Palestinian identity.
Those living in Palestine from the time of the Romans, he wrote, were “mostly part of a greater regional or international political entity, which usually housed several nations, ethnic groups, and cultures.”
Similarly, today’s Palestinians, he wrote, “are the result of accumulated ethnic, racial, and religious groups, who once lived, conquered, occupied, and passed through this strip of land.
“Wars and invasions have never totally replaced the local population in any period of history; they rather added to, mixed with and reformulated the local identity. The Palestinian people are the Canaanites, the Philistines, the Jebusites, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Aramaeans, the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Turks, the Crusaders, and the Kurds, who once settled, conquered, occupied or just passed through Palestine.”
What gave the Palestinians their identity, he said, was their “struggle” against Zionism and the State of Israel. “There is no way to understand this identity apart from the conflict.”
It became internationally recognized as “a symbol for liberation and for the anti-colonial struggle.” Only after the 1967 Six-Day War did the Palestinians start trying to flesh this out by self-consciously developing artistic expression, architecture, and local history.
More sharply still, al Jubeh wrote that if the history of the region after the First World War had been different, the Palestinians may not have chosen a state in which to express their identity.
For decades, they marketed the conflict with Israel as “Arab-Israeli” and not as “Palestinian-Israeli.” The idea of a state of Palestine, he wrote, only emerged in the mid-1970s when Palestinian identity became politicized around the heavily promoted image of “a fighting nation seeking freedom.” This aspiration became the major vehicle in forming the Palestinians’ current sense of themselves.
In other words, Palestinian identity has no meaning except as a movement to deny the right of the indigenous Jewish people to their own homeland.
The Palestinians’ claim to be the rightful inheritors of the land lies at the very heart of the Western animus against Israel. It represents one of the most successful, if fiendish, propaganda achievements ever to have been pulled off – to have persuaded millions of people that this ludicrous falsehood is an unchallengeable truth.
All the malicious libels and distortions thrown at Israel by Western foes to delegitimize and destroy it rest on this historical lie. Claims that Israel is occupying another people’s land, that its actions are illegal, that it behaves with the cruelty and ruthlessness associated with colonialist invaders – all of this and more rests upon the belief that the Palestinians are the rightful inheritors of the land.
It is the foundation stone of a cause that Western liberals believe defines them as anti-colonialist defenders of the rights of indigenous peoples.
But it’s the Palestinians – and behind them the Arab and Muslim world – who are intent on colonialism and depriving the Jewish people of their rightful and historic homeland. And it is support for that ignoble cause more than any other that has destroyed the moral compass of the West.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Palestinians make Joseph Goebbels proud.
HITTING THEM IN THE POCKETBOOK MIGHT HURT
US sanctions Lebanese bank for helping Iran-backed Hezbollah
By Deb Riechmann
Associated Press
August 30, 2019
WASHINGTON -- The Treasury Department on Thursday targeted a Lebanese bank the Trump administration calls the "bank of choice" of Hezbollah, Iran's proxy in Lebanon, as part of a maximum pressure campaign against Tehran.
The U.S., in partnership with Oman, also announced sanctions against four individuals Treasury accuses of moving tens of millions of dollars between Iran's elite Quds Force and the military wing of the Islamic militant group Hamas in Gaza.
Treasury sanctioned Jammal Trust Bank, a financial institution based in Lebanon that facilitates banking activities for Hezbollah, and its three subsidiaries. The bank and Hezbollah have been doing business since at least the mid-2000s, Treasury said.
Israel considers Iran to be its greatest enemy and has identified Hezbollah as the most potent military threat on its borders.
"Corrupt financial institutions like Jammal Trust are a direct threat to the integrity of the Lebanese financial system. Jammal Trust provides support and services to Hezbollah's executive Council and the Martyrs Foundation, which funnels money to the families of suicide bombers," said Sigal Mandelker, undersecretary for terrorism and financial Intelligence. "The U.S. will continue to work with the Central Bank of Lebanon to deny Hezbollah access to the international financial system. This action is a warning to all who provide services to this terrorist group."
In the second action, Treasury, in partnership with the Arab nation of Oman, sanctioned Mohammad Sarur, Kamal Abdelrahman Aref Awad and Fawaz Mahmud Ali Nasser for supporting Hamas.
"These facilitators funneled tens of millions of dollars from Iran's Quds Force through Hezbollah in Lebanon to Hamas for terrorist attacks originating from the Gaza Strip. Hamas' continued violent campaign against innocent civilians and the state of Israel is to the great detriment of the people in Gaza," Mandelker said. "Treasury will continue to disrupt terrorist networks by targeting those who generate funds to carry out the Iranian regime's violent agenda."
Thursday's action blocks any property or interests in property that the targets have within U.S. jurisdiction. It also bans Americans from engaging in transactions with them and prohibits transactions involving them from moving through the United States.
By Deb Riechmann
Associated Press
August 30, 2019
WASHINGTON -- The Treasury Department on Thursday targeted a Lebanese bank the Trump administration calls the "bank of choice" of Hezbollah, Iran's proxy in Lebanon, as part of a maximum pressure campaign against Tehran.
The U.S., in partnership with Oman, also announced sanctions against four individuals Treasury accuses of moving tens of millions of dollars between Iran's elite Quds Force and the military wing of the Islamic militant group Hamas in Gaza.
Treasury sanctioned Jammal Trust Bank, a financial institution based in Lebanon that facilitates banking activities for Hezbollah, and its three subsidiaries. The bank and Hezbollah have been doing business since at least the mid-2000s, Treasury said.
Israel considers Iran to be its greatest enemy and has identified Hezbollah as the most potent military threat on its borders.
"Corrupt financial institutions like Jammal Trust are a direct threat to the integrity of the Lebanese financial system. Jammal Trust provides support and services to Hezbollah's executive Council and the Martyrs Foundation, which funnels money to the families of suicide bombers," said Sigal Mandelker, undersecretary for terrorism and financial Intelligence. "The U.S. will continue to work with the Central Bank of Lebanon to deny Hezbollah access to the international financial system. This action is a warning to all who provide services to this terrorist group."
In the second action, Treasury, in partnership with the Arab nation of Oman, sanctioned Mohammad Sarur, Kamal Abdelrahman Aref Awad and Fawaz Mahmud Ali Nasser for supporting Hamas.
"These facilitators funneled tens of millions of dollars from Iran's Quds Force through Hezbollah in Lebanon to Hamas for terrorist attacks originating from the Gaza Strip. Hamas' continued violent campaign against innocent civilians and the state of Israel is to the great detriment of the people in Gaza," Mandelker said. "Treasury will continue to disrupt terrorist networks by targeting those who generate funds to carry out the Iranian regime's violent agenda."
Thursday's action blocks any property or interests in property that the targets have within U.S. jurisdiction. It also bans Americans from engaging in transactions with them and prohibits transactions involving them from moving through the United States.
THE KURDS HAVE BEEN FIGHTING THE WAR AGAINST ISIS FOR US … SO WHY DO WE KEEP PLAYING NICE WITH THAT KURD-HATING ISLAMIST ERDOGAN?
Turkey's Erdoğan says won't allow US stalling in Syria deal
Israel Hayom
August 29, 2019
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Turkey’s deal with the United States to set up a “safe zone” in northeast Syria was a correct step and that Ankara would not let Washington delay the plan, CNN Türk reported on Thursday.
Ankara revealed last weekend that a joint operations center for the proposed zone along Syria’s northeastern border is now fully operational.
Washington and Ankara have been at odds over plans for the region, where the Kurdish YPG militia from the main part of a US-backed force fighting Islamic State. Turkey considers the YPG a terrorist group.
“The agreement which we have reached with the USA is a correct step towards establishing a safe zone and removing the YPG from the east of the Euphrates [river],” Erdoğan told reporters on his way back from meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.
Erdoğan said that Turkey would not accept delays in the plan, comparing it to an earlier deal with Washington to remove YPG fighters from the northern Syrian city of Manbij, which Ankara accused Washington of delaying.
“We will never tolerate a delay like we saw in Manbij. The process must advance rapidly,” Erdoğan was quoted as saying by CNN on Thursday.
The safe zone was proposed last year by US President Donald Trump, who had announced plans to withdraw US special forces from northern Syria but later suspended the plan to ensure that Washington’s Kurdish allies would be protected.
Erdoğan said this week Turkish ground troops would enter the planned safe zone “very soon”, having warned previously that Turkey would mount a cross-border offensive on its own to clear the YPG militia from its border if necessary.
“All the personnel, the armored carriers, all are on the border. That is, we are in a position to do everything at any moment,” Erdoğan was quoted as saying.
Defense cooperation with Russia
On Tuesday, an official in a YPG-led alliance said that the YPG will pull forces and heavy weapons from a strip along Syria’s border with Turkey under US-Turkish deals.
The YPG withdrew from the Tell Abyad and Ras al-Ain border positions in recent days, proving it is serious about ongoing talks, the Kurdish-led authority in north and east Syria said.
US support for the YPG has enraged Turkey, which views the militia as a terrorist organization linked to Kurdish insurgents inside the country.
The two countries have also fallen out over Turkey’s purchase of Russian S-400 missile defense systems, prompting Washington to begin removing Turkey from its program for manufacturing F-35 jets, which Turkey also planned to buy.
Erdoğan visited an aviation fair with Putin during his visit to Moscow. Asked whether Russia’s Sukhoi Su-57 stealth fighter jet and Su-35 aircraft could be among alternatives to the F-35s, Erdoğan said: “Why not? We didn’t come here for nothing.”
The RIA news agency cited a Russian official as saying on Wednesday that the two countries are discussing the possibility of deliveries of the two aircraft to Turkey.
EDITOR’S NOTE: I don’t under stand why Trump keeps playing nice with Erdogan. He is no friend of ours. If he could, he would annihilate the Kurds who have been fighting ISIS for us, and he hates Israel to boot. Now he’s playing Russia against the US. I say let him have all the Russian weapons and aircrafts he wants and let us program our weapons to strike Turkey if he ever uses them against our allies.
We ought to have Turkey kicked out of NATO!
Israel Hayom
August 29, 2019
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Turkey’s deal with the United States to set up a “safe zone” in northeast Syria was a correct step and that Ankara would not let Washington delay the plan, CNN Türk reported on Thursday.
Ankara revealed last weekend that a joint operations center for the proposed zone along Syria’s northeastern border is now fully operational.
Washington and Ankara have been at odds over plans for the region, where the Kurdish YPG militia from the main part of a US-backed force fighting Islamic State. Turkey considers the YPG a terrorist group.
“The agreement which we have reached with the USA is a correct step towards establishing a safe zone and removing the YPG from the east of the Euphrates [river],” Erdoğan told reporters on his way back from meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.
Erdoğan said that Turkey would not accept delays in the plan, comparing it to an earlier deal with Washington to remove YPG fighters from the northern Syrian city of Manbij, which Ankara accused Washington of delaying.
“We will never tolerate a delay like we saw in Manbij. The process must advance rapidly,” Erdoğan was quoted as saying by CNN on Thursday.
The safe zone was proposed last year by US President Donald Trump, who had announced plans to withdraw US special forces from northern Syria but later suspended the plan to ensure that Washington’s Kurdish allies would be protected.
Erdoğan said this week Turkish ground troops would enter the planned safe zone “very soon”, having warned previously that Turkey would mount a cross-border offensive on its own to clear the YPG militia from its border if necessary.
“All the personnel, the armored carriers, all are on the border. That is, we are in a position to do everything at any moment,” Erdoğan was quoted as saying.
Defense cooperation with Russia
On Tuesday, an official in a YPG-led alliance said that the YPG will pull forces and heavy weapons from a strip along Syria’s border with Turkey under US-Turkish deals.
The YPG withdrew from the Tell Abyad and Ras al-Ain border positions in recent days, proving it is serious about ongoing talks, the Kurdish-led authority in north and east Syria said.
US support for the YPG has enraged Turkey, which views the militia as a terrorist organization linked to Kurdish insurgents inside the country.
The two countries have also fallen out over Turkey’s purchase of Russian S-400 missile defense systems, prompting Washington to begin removing Turkey from its program for manufacturing F-35 jets, which Turkey also planned to buy.
Erdoğan visited an aviation fair with Putin during his visit to Moscow. Asked whether Russia’s Sukhoi Su-57 stealth fighter jet and Su-35 aircraft could be among alternatives to the F-35s, Erdoğan said: “Why not? We didn’t come here for nothing.”
The RIA news agency cited a Russian official as saying on Wednesday that the two countries are discussing the possibility of deliveries of the two aircraft to Turkey.
EDITOR’S NOTE: I don’t under stand why Trump keeps playing nice with Erdogan. He is no friend of ours. If he could, he would annihilate the Kurds who have been fighting ISIS for us, and he hates Israel to boot. Now he’s playing Russia against the US. I say let him have all the Russian weapons and aircrafts he wants and let us program our weapons to strike Turkey if he ever uses them against our allies.
We ought to have Turkey kicked out of NATO!
Friday, August 30, 2019
WHAT IS SCARY IS THAT THIS GUY MIGHT BECOME OUR NEXT PRESIDENT
As he campaigns for president, Joe Biden tells a moving but false war story
By Matt Viser and Greg Jaffe
The Washington Post
August 29, 2019
HANOVER, N.H. — Joe Biden painted a vivid scene for the 400 people packed into a college meeting hall. A four-star general had asked the then-vice president to travel to Kunar province in Afghanistan, a dangerous foray into “godforsaken country” to recognize the remarkable heroism of a Navy captain.
Some told him it was too risky, but Biden said he brushed off their concerns. “We can lose a vice president,” he said. “We can’t lose many more of these kids. Not a joke.”
The Navy captain, Biden recalled Friday night, had rappelled down a 60-foot ravine under fire and retrieved the body of an American comrade, carrying him on his back. Now the general wanted Biden to pin a Silver Star on the American hero who, despite his bravery, felt like a failure.
“He said, ‘Sir, I don’t want the damn thing!’ ” Biden said, his jaw clenched and his voice rising to a shout. “’Do not pin it on me, Sir! Please, Sir. Do not do that! He died. He died!’ ”
The room was silent.
“This is the God’s truth,” Biden had said as he told the story. “My word as a Biden.”
Except almost every detail in the story appears to be incorrect. Based on interviews with more than a dozen U.S. troops, their commanders and Biden campaign officials, it appears as though the former vice president has jumbled elements of at least three actual events into one story of bravery, compassion and regret that never happened.
Biden visited Kunar province in 2008 as a U.S. senator, not as vice president. The service member who performed the celebrated rescue that Biden described was a 20-year-old Army specialist, not a much older Navy captain. And that soldier, Kyle J. White, never had a Silver Star, or any other medal, pinned on him by Biden. At a White House ceremony six years after Biden’s visit, White stood at attention as President Barack Obama placed a Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for valor, around his neck.
The upshot: In the space of three minutes, Biden got the time period, the location, the heroic act, the type of medal, the military branch and the rank of the recipient wrong, as well as his own role in the ceremony.
One element of Biden’s story is rooted in an actual event: The vice president did pin a medal on a heartbroken soldier, Army Staff Sgt. Chad Workman, who didn’t believe he deserved the award.
In a statement, Biden’s campaign spokesman Andrew Bates said Workman’s valor was “emblematic of the duty and sacrifice of the 9/11 generation of veterans.”
The campaign did not dispute any of the facts in the Post report.
In an interview with Washington Post opinion columnist Jonathan Capehart after the report was first published, Biden suggested he was telling Workman’s story in New Hampshire, although almost none of the details he offered matched what actually happened to Workman.
“I was making the point how courageous these people are, how incredible they are, this generation of warriors, these fallen angels we’ve lost,” he said. “I don’t know what the problem is. What is it that I said wrong?”
Biden, 76, has struggled during his presidential campaign with gaffes and misstatements that hark back to his earlier political troubles and have put a spotlight on his age. In 1987, Biden dropped out of the presidential race amid charges that he had plagiarized the speeches of a British politician and others.
One big question facing candidates and voters more than 30 years later is whether President Trump’s routine falsehoods have changed the standards by which other presidential aspirants, including Biden, should be judged. From the beginning of his presidency until the middle of last month, Trump has uttered more than 12,000 false or misleading statements, The Washington Post has found. He has continued to add to that total since then.
Biden has used war stories to celebrate military sacrifice and attack Trump’s version of patriotism, built around ferocity and firepower. The former vice president, like Trump, never served in the military. But Biden’s son Beau Biden, who died of brain cancer in 2015, deployed to Iraq as an Army lawyer in 2008, and the candidate ends almost all of his speeches with the refrain: “May God protect our troops.”
Embedded in Biden’s medal story are the touchstones of his long career: foreign policy expertise, patriotism and perseverance through grief.
Biden’s first public recounting of his trip to Kunar province, made shortly after his return in early 2008, was largely true, but not nearly as emotionally fraught as the versions he would later tell on the campaign trail. In 2008, then-Sen. Biden, along with Sens. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) and John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), flew by helicopter to Forward Operating Base Naray, not far from Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan. There, they watched as Maj. Gen. David Rodriguez presented a Bronze Star for valor to Spec. Miles Foltz, who braved heavy Taliban fire to rescue a wounded soldier. Spec. Tommy Alford had been manning his machine gun atop a hill when a Taliban bullet sliced through his jaw and neck. Foltz pulled Alford behind a nearby rock, stanched his bleeding and then took over his friend’s weapon. Two soldiers were killed during the ambush, but Alford survived and even returned to the unit a few months later to finish his combat tour.
“It was pretty ballsy, what Foltz did that day,” said retired Col. Chris Kolenda, who was Foltz’s commander in Afghanistan. “It was pretty awesome. . . . He saved a lot of lives.”
For Foltz, the memory of Biden’s visit and the Bronze Star remain bittersweet. “I wrote about it for an English class when I was going through college,” he said. “I can’t remember how I phrased it, but it’s like the medal helps hold down all the guilt for all the things I didn’t do that day.”
Biden returned home from his trip in 2008 worried that the United States was losing the war and moved by the battlefield award ceremony. “I know it sounds a little corny,” he said in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, “but I don’t think there was a dry eye in the house.”
Biden seemed to stop telling the story until the summer of 2016, when the presidential campaign was in full swing and Trump was surging to the top of the polls. In July of that year, he told it at a World War II ceremony in Australia. In this version, Foltz, a young soldier, had been replaced by the apocryphal and much older Navy captain who in Biden’s telling “climbed down about 200 feet” into a ravine and retrieved his wounded friend who died. The Bronze Star was upgraded to a Silver Star.
This time, Biden said he was the one who pinned the medal on the officer, not the general. “Sir, with all due respect, I do not want it,” Biden recalled the officer saying.
Months later, as the angry and divisive 2016 presidential campaign kicked into high gear, Biden’s story of the medal ceremony grew more harrowing and less accurate. He told it at an October rally for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in response to comments from Trump suggesting that some troops weren’t mentally strong enough to handle the rigors of combat. “Where the hell is he from?” Biden asked of Trump that day in Florida.
This time, Biden shifted the setting from Afghanistan to Iraq. Instead of rappelling down a ravine, an Army captain pulled a dead soldier out of a burning Humvee.
“He died. He died, Mr. Vice President,” Biden recalled the officer saying. “I don’t want the medal.”
Biden jabbed at the air with his index finger and yelled, “How many nights does that kid go to sleep seeing that image in his head, dealing with it?”
The Pentagon has no record of an Army captain receiving a Silver Star in Iraq during the time period Biden describes.
Three weeks later, stumping for Jason Kander, an Afghan War veteran running for the Senate in Missouri, Biden told both the Iraq and Afghanistan versions back to back in a single speech. First it was the Navy captain who rappelled down the ravine in Kunar. “He died. He died. I don’t deserve it,” Biden quoted the medal recipient as saying. Then he segued to the Army officer, the burning Humvee and Iraq. “This is the God’s truth,” Biden said. “As I approached him in a full formation . . . ‘Sir,’ he whispered to me, ‘Sir, please don’t. Please don’t pin that on me. He died, Sir. He died. I didn’t do my job. He died.’ ”
Then, on Friday, came New Hampshire. The setting was a town hall meeting about health care. Someone asked a question about mental health and Biden started talking about post-traumatic stress disorder and the heavy toll of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He pulled his daily schedule from the pocket of his blue blazer, an American flag pin affixed to its lapel. For the past 13 years, Biden’s rundown has included a daily tally of the dead and wounded from the war zones.
“I call every morning to the Defense Department — not a joke — to learn exactly how many women and men have been killed in Afghanistan or Iraq,” he told the crowd. “Nothing bothers me more than when someone says approximately 6,000 died. No, it is 6,883 as of this morning.”
Then Biden told the latest, and perhaps most inaccurate, version his Afghanistan story.
“I’ve been in and out of Afghanistan and Iraq over 30 times,” he said. (His campaign later clarified that the correct number is 21.) He talked about Kunar province, the Navy captain — “Navy, Navy” he repeated for emphasis — the deep ravine, the dead friend and the moment of reckoning when Biden pinned the medal on the officer’s uniform.
The version of Biden’s story that’s true — and just as heart-rending — is one he rarely tells. The setting was not Kunar province, but Wardak, just southwest of Kabul. The medal recipient was Workman, 35, who had run into a burning vehicle to save his dying friend. By the time Workman had pried open the door and plunged into the flames, it was too late.
“I never pulled him out because he was melting,” Workman recalled in a phone interview earlier this week from Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma, Wash.
Workman’s company commander told him that the vice president was going to pin a Bronze Star on him for his heroism. “I tried to get out of going,” recalled Workman, who has since been promoted to first sergeant. “I didn’t want that medal.” Nevertheless on Jan. 11, 2011, a cold, gray day, Workman stood at attention as Biden pinned the medal to his chest. The moment is memorialized in a White House photo and in a 2016 interview that Biden did with National Geographic.
Here’s how Biden remembered it: “You see the look on his face — he says, ‘Sir, I don’t want it. I don’t want it. He died. He died.’ ”
Workman’s version is the same, but with one added detail. He recalled Biden meeting his gaze. Workman told the vice president that he didn’t want the medal.
“I know you don’t,” Biden replied softly.
Eight years later, Workman still remembers how Biden looked at him.
“He has that look where his eyes can see into your eyes,” Workman said. “I felt like he really understood.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: This reminds me of Hillary’s phony 2008 story that she came “under sniper fire” in Bosnia.
By Matt Viser and Greg Jaffe
The Washington Post
August 29, 2019
HANOVER, N.H. — Joe Biden painted a vivid scene for the 400 people packed into a college meeting hall. A four-star general had asked the then-vice president to travel to Kunar province in Afghanistan, a dangerous foray into “godforsaken country” to recognize the remarkable heroism of a Navy captain.
Some told him it was too risky, but Biden said he brushed off their concerns. “We can lose a vice president,” he said. “We can’t lose many more of these kids. Not a joke.”
The Navy captain, Biden recalled Friday night, had rappelled down a 60-foot ravine under fire and retrieved the body of an American comrade, carrying him on his back. Now the general wanted Biden to pin a Silver Star on the American hero who, despite his bravery, felt like a failure.
“He said, ‘Sir, I don’t want the damn thing!’ ” Biden said, his jaw clenched and his voice rising to a shout. “’Do not pin it on me, Sir! Please, Sir. Do not do that! He died. He died!’ ”
The room was silent.
“This is the God’s truth,” Biden had said as he told the story. “My word as a Biden.”
Except almost every detail in the story appears to be incorrect. Based on interviews with more than a dozen U.S. troops, their commanders and Biden campaign officials, it appears as though the former vice president has jumbled elements of at least three actual events into one story of bravery, compassion and regret that never happened.
Biden visited Kunar province in 2008 as a U.S. senator, not as vice president. The service member who performed the celebrated rescue that Biden described was a 20-year-old Army specialist, not a much older Navy captain. And that soldier, Kyle J. White, never had a Silver Star, or any other medal, pinned on him by Biden. At a White House ceremony six years after Biden’s visit, White stood at attention as President Barack Obama placed a Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for valor, around his neck.
The upshot: In the space of three minutes, Biden got the time period, the location, the heroic act, the type of medal, the military branch and the rank of the recipient wrong, as well as his own role in the ceremony.
One element of Biden’s story is rooted in an actual event: The vice president did pin a medal on a heartbroken soldier, Army Staff Sgt. Chad Workman, who didn’t believe he deserved the award.
In a statement, Biden’s campaign spokesman Andrew Bates said Workman’s valor was “emblematic of the duty and sacrifice of the 9/11 generation of veterans.”
The campaign did not dispute any of the facts in the Post report.
In an interview with Washington Post opinion columnist Jonathan Capehart after the report was first published, Biden suggested he was telling Workman’s story in New Hampshire, although almost none of the details he offered matched what actually happened to Workman.
“I was making the point how courageous these people are, how incredible they are, this generation of warriors, these fallen angels we’ve lost,” he said. “I don’t know what the problem is. What is it that I said wrong?”
Biden, 76, has struggled during his presidential campaign with gaffes and misstatements that hark back to his earlier political troubles and have put a spotlight on his age. In 1987, Biden dropped out of the presidential race amid charges that he had plagiarized the speeches of a British politician and others.
One big question facing candidates and voters more than 30 years later is whether President Trump’s routine falsehoods have changed the standards by which other presidential aspirants, including Biden, should be judged. From the beginning of his presidency until the middle of last month, Trump has uttered more than 12,000 false or misleading statements, The Washington Post has found. He has continued to add to that total since then.
Biden has used war stories to celebrate military sacrifice and attack Trump’s version of patriotism, built around ferocity and firepower. The former vice president, like Trump, never served in the military. But Biden’s son Beau Biden, who died of brain cancer in 2015, deployed to Iraq as an Army lawyer in 2008, and the candidate ends almost all of his speeches with the refrain: “May God protect our troops.”
Embedded in Biden’s medal story are the touchstones of his long career: foreign policy expertise, patriotism and perseverance through grief.
Biden’s first public recounting of his trip to Kunar province, made shortly after his return in early 2008, was largely true, but not nearly as emotionally fraught as the versions he would later tell on the campaign trail. In 2008, then-Sen. Biden, along with Sens. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) and John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), flew by helicopter to Forward Operating Base Naray, not far from Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan. There, they watched as Maj. Gen. David Rodriguez presented a Bronze Star for valor to Spec. Miles Foltz, who braved heavy Taliban fire to rescue a wounded soldier. Spec. Tommy Alford had been manning his machine gun atop a hill when a Taliban bullet sliced through his jaw and neck. Foltz pulled Alford behind a nearby rock, stanched his bleeding and then took over his friend’s weapon. Two soldiers were killed during the ambush, but Alford survived and even returned to the unit a few months later to finish his combat tour.
“It was pretty ballsy, what Foltz did that day,” said retired Col. Chris Kolenda, who was Foltz’s commander in Afghanistan. “It was pretty awesome. . . . He saved a lot of lives.”
For Foltz, the memory of Biden’s visit and the Bronze Star remain bittersweet. “I wrote about it for an English class when I was going through college,” he said. “I can’t remember how I phrased it, but it’s like the medal helps hold down all the guilt for all the things I didn’t do that day.”
Biden returned home from his trip in 2008 worried that the United States was losing the war and moved by the battlefield award ceremony. “I know it sounds a little corny,” he said in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, “but I don’t think there was a dry eye in the house.”
Biden seemed to stop telling the story until the summer of 2016, when the presidential campaign was in full swing and Trump was surging to the top of the polls. In July of that year, he told it at a World War II ceremony in Australia. In this version, Foltz, a young soldier, had been replaced by the apocryphal and much older Navy captain who in Biden’s telling “climbed down about 200 feet” into a ravine and retrieved his wounded friend who died. The Bronze Star was upgraded to a Silver Star.
This time, Biden said he was the one who pinned the medal on the officer, not the general. “Sir, with all due respect, I do not want it,” Biden recalled the officer saying.
Months later, as the angry and divisive 2016 presidential campaign kicked into high gear, Biden’s story of the medal ceremony grew more harrowing and less accurate. He told it at an October rally for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in response to comments from Trump suggesting that some troops weren’t mentally strong enough to handle the rigors of combat. “Where the hell is he from?” Biden asked of Trump that day in Florida.
This time, Biden shifted the setting from Afghanistan to Iraq. Instead of rappelling down a ravine, an Army captain pulled a dead soldier out of a burning Humvee.
“He died. He died, Mr. Vice President,” Biden recalled the officer saying. “I don’t want the medal.”
Biden jabbed at the air with his index finger and yelled, “How many nights does that kid go to sleep seeing that image in his head, dealing with it?”
The Pentagon has no record of an Army captain receiving a Silver Star in Iraq during the time period Biden describes.
Three weeks later, stumping for Jason Kander, an Afghan War veteran running for the Senate in Missouri, Biden told both the Iraq and Afghanistan versions back to back in a single speech. First it was the Navy captain who rappelled down the ravine in Kunar. “He died. He died. I don’t deserve it,” Biden quoted the medal recipient as saying. Then he segued to the Army officer, the burning Humvee and Iraq. “This is the God’s truth,” Biden said. “As I approached him in a full formation . . . ‘Sir,’ he whispered to me, ‘Sir, please don’t. Please don’t pin that on me. He died, Sir. He died. I didn’t do my job. He died.’ ”
Then, on Friday, came New Hampshire. The setting was a town hall meeting about health care. Someone asked a question about mental health and Biden started talking about post-traumatic stress disorder and the heavy toll of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He pulled his daily schedule from the pocket of his blue blazer, an American flag pin affixed to its lapel. For the past 13 years, Biden’s rundown has included a daily tally of the dead and wounded from the war zones.
“I call every morning to the Defense Department — not a joke — to learn exactly how many women and men have been killed in Afghanistan or Iraq,” he told the crowd. “Nothing bothers me more than when someone says approximately 6,000 died. No, it is 6,883 as of this morning.”
Then Biden told the latest, and perhaps most inaccurate, version his Afghanistan story.
“I’ve been in and out of Afghanistan and Iraq over 30 times,” he said. (His campaign later clarified that the correct number is 21.) He talked about Kunar province, the Navy captain — “Navy, Navy” he repeated for emphasis — the deep ravine, the dead friend and the moment of reckoning when Biden pinned the medal on the officer’s uniform.
The version of Biden’s story that’s true — and just as heart-rending — is one he rarely tells. The setting was not Kunar province, but Wardak, just southwest of Kabul. The medal recipient was Workman, 35, who had run into a burning vehicle to save his dying friend. By the time Workman had pried open the door and plunged into the flames, it was too late.
“I never pulled him out because he was melting,” Workman recalled in a phone interview earlier this week from Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma, Wash.
Workman’s company commander told him that the vice president was going to pin a Bronze Star on him for his heroism. “I tried to get out of going,” recalled Workman, who has since been promoted to first sergeant. “I didn’t want that medal.” Nevertheless on Jan. 11, 2011, a cold, gray day, Workman stood at attention as Biden pinned the medal to his chest. The moment is memorialized in a White House photo and in a 2016 interview that Biden did with National Geographic.
Here’s how Biden remembered it: “You see the look on his face — he says, ‘Sir, I don’t want it. I don’t want it. He died. He died.’ ”
Workman’s version is the same, but with one added detail. He recalled Biden meeting his gaze. Workman told the vice president that he didn’t want the medal.
“I know you don’t,” Biden replied softly.
Eight years later, Workman still remembers how Biden looked at him.
“He has that look where his eyes can see into your eyes,” Workman said. “I felt like he really understood.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: This reminds me of Hillary’s phony 2008 story that she came “under sniper fire” in Bosnia.
RED BILL MOVES TO HOMOGENIZE SCHOOLS IN N Y C
by Bob Walsh
Like all good commie bastards, Bill de Blasio likes equality, or at least the appearance of equality, so everybody is equally mediocre and miserable.
He has therefore decreed that all gifted and special placement programs and the testing system that supports any such program is now dead. He is also moving to make charter schools as difficult as possible to operate in New York City.
One of the interesting items of fallout from this will be the High School of the Performing Arts, an internationally known public school in New York City. Students who want in MUST AUDITION and must keep up their academic work in addition to whatever performing classes and skills they might have. This program will KILL OFF the audition process. It won't directly kill off the school, but it will certainly turn it into a mediocrity.
It is barely possible that this one item MIGHT generate enough screaming from powerful people in the performance arts that it might kill the whole idea. I am, however, not going to bet any money on it.
Like all good commie bastards, Bill de Blasio likes equality, or at least the appearance of equality, so everybody is equally mediocre and miserable.
He has therefore decreed that all gifted and special placement programs and the testing system that supports any such program is now dead. He is also moving to make charter schools as difficult as possible to operate in New York City.
One of the interesting items of fallout from this will be the High School of the Performing Arts, an internationally known public school in New York City. Students who want in MUST AUDITION and must keep up their academic work in addition to whatever performing classes and skills they might have. This program will KILL OFF the audition process. It won't directly kill off the school, but it will certainly turn it into a mediocrity.
It is barely possible that this one item MIGHT generate enough screaming from powerful people in the performance arts that it might kill the whole idea. I am, however, not going to bet any money on it.
IS NASCAR LOSING THEIR BALLS ?
Short Answer, YES
by Bob Walsh
NASCAR is apparently "shifting" its position on support of the Second Amendment and is now refusing to accept advertising from many (though not all) firearms manufacturers. They are still open to taking money from advertisers for "less controversial gun accessories."
I am not a huge fan of "drive fast, turn left, repeat" race car driving (I do like their two road courses) but if I was a fan this would make me much less inclined to spend money with them. I wonder how the real fan base will feel about this.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Short answer, the rabid fans won't give a shit.
As for NASCAR disassociating itself from gun manufacturers, they're just aligning themselves with the majority of Americans who now favor repealing the right to bear arms.
by Bob Walsh
NASCAR is apparently "shifting" its position on support of the Second Amendment and is now refusing to accept advertising from many (though not all) firearms manufacturers. They are still open to taking money from advertisers for "less controversial gun accessories."
I am not a huge fan of "drive fast, turn left, repeat" race car driving (I do like their two road courses) but if I was a fan this would make me much less inclined to spend money with them. I wonder how the real fan base will feel about this.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Short answer, the rabid fans won't give a shit.
As for NASCAR disassociating itself from gun manufacturers, they're just aligning themselves with the majority of Americans who now favor repealing the right to bear arms.
CALIFORNIA’S BIGGEST CITIES CONFRONT A ‘DEFECATION CRISIS’
Lawmakers ban plastic straws as a far worse kind of waste covers the streets of San Francisco and L.A.
By Charles Kesler
The Wall Street Journal
August 16, 2019
They say there’s a smartphone app for everything, and doubters should know there are now at least two dealing with excrement on the sidewalks of San Francisco. The city has its official SF311 app, part of its “San Francisco at your Service” program, and last year a private developer introduced Snapcrap, which allows residents to upload a photo of an offending specimen directly to the SF311 website. This alerts the city’s new five-person “poop patrol,” which will follow up, presumably, with a smile.
Then there are the maps. At least three maps charting the location of “poop complaints” in the city have been assembled, the latest and best by the nonprofit Open the Books. Their map shows most of the city covered by brown pin dots, each marking a report to the Department of Public Works.
The website RealtyHop.com dubs San Francisco “the doo-doo capital of the U.S.” They noted that the city’s poop reports almost tripled between 2011 and 2017.
The problem draws attention because the poop increasingly comes not from dogs but from humans. In partial defense of his city, Curbed SF’s Adam Brinklow explains that the reports submitted to the city didn’t distinguish between human and dog excrement, and that there were 150,000 dogs and fewer than 10,000 homeless people within city limits. But he admits that homelessness was probably the leading edge of the problem in San Francisco as well as Los Angeles, where 36,000 people live on the streets, and many do their business there.
The majority of the nation’s homeless people now live in California. There are myriad causes at work, no doubt. But there was no “defecation crisis”—a term usually associated with rural India—in the 1930s, even with unemployment at 25%, vagabonds roaming the country, and shantytowns and “Hoovervilles” springing up everywhere. Today’s homeless and the hobos of the Great Depression are different in many ways. The triple scourges of drug abuse, mental illness and family breakdown have produced anomie and derangements far deeper than those seen in the 1930s, when the widely shared nature of the economic and psychological distress provided its own grim comfort.
In California at least, one is struck by the contrast between the fastidious attention paid to the social duty of scooping up and disposing of dog feces, and the rather more paralyzed and guilty reaction to the plague of human feces. The former is treated as a moral imperative among the enlightened—and the thin plastic bags used as the means to this moral end have so far escaped the fate of plastic straws, well on their way to being outlawed as an environmental outrage. Even social-justice warriors don’t consider it their personal duty, however, to tidy up after their fellow human beings on the streets.
Confronted on the sidewalk with a nasty fait accompli, most people are indignant. But the questions they then ask often diverge. Those of a more traditional disposition might wonder, “What is wrong with these people?” Those of a more progressive mind-set might exclaim, “Why hasn’t the government designed a program to solve this?”
Each is sincere, and society will have to try to answer both to make things better. But it’s the former inquiry, prepared to make some difficult and unfashionable moral distinctions, that needs encouragement in deep-blue California. “Homeless” was originally an adjective. It became a collective noun, denoting the victims of homelessness, only later, under the influence of the 20th century’s confidence that the first step in solving a social problem is to name it. Not all problems are social, however, and few if any social problems can be “solved,” in the strong sense of the term.
Without wishing to return to the Elizabethan Poor Laws, we ought to consider what was lost when the courts discouraged Americans from thinking of “homelessness” in light of the old laws against vagrancy. Under that understanding, no one had a right to camp out indefinitely on public property, much less to defecate on it. Public property belonged to the public—to everyone—and couldn’t be privatized for the benefit of one or more vagrants, however poor or sick. Though that principle would need to be applied to modern circumstances, it is the indispensable starting point for thinking about the shocking problems of the Golden State.
EDITOR’S NOTE: What a pile of shit!
By Charles Kesler
The Wall Street Journal
August 16, 2019
They say there’s a smartphone app for everything, and doubters should know there are now at least two dealing with excrement on the sidewalks of San Francisco. The city has its official SF311 app, part of its “San Francisco at your Service” program, and last year a private developer introduced Snapcrap, which allows residents to upload a photo of an offending specimen directly to the SF311 website. This alerts the city’s new five-person “poop patrol,” which will follow up, presumably, with a smile.
Then there are the maps. At least three maps charting the location of “poop complaints” in the city have been assembled, the latest and best by the nonprofit Open the Books. Their map shows most of the city covered by brown pin dots, each marking a report to the Department of Public Works.
The website RealtyHop.com dubs San Francisco “the doo-doo capital of the U.S.” They noted that the city’s poop reports almost tripled between 2011 and 2017.
The problem draws attention because the poop increasingly comes not from dogs but from humans. In partial defense of his city, Curbed SF’s Adam Brinklow explains that the reports submitted to the city didn’t distinguish between human and dog excrement, and that there were 150,000 dogs and fewer than 10,000 homeless people within city limits. But he admits that homelessness was probably the leading edge of the problem in San Francisco as well as Los Angeles, where 36,000 people live on the streets, and many do their business there.
The majority of the nation’s homeless people now live in California. There are myriad causes at work, no doubt. But there was no “defecation crisis”—a term usually associated with rural India—in the 1930s, even with unemployment at 25%, vagabonds roaming the country, and shantytowns and “Hoovervilles” springing up everywhere. Today’s homeless and the hobos of the Great Depression are different in many ways. The triple scourges of drug abuse, mental illness and family breakdown have produced anomie and derangements far deeper than those seen in the 1930s, when the widely shared nature of the economic and psychological distress provided its own grim comfort.
In California at least, one is struck by the contrast between the fastidious attention paid to the social duty of scooping up and disposing of dog feces, and the rather more paralyzed and guilty reaction to the plague of human feces. The former is treated as a moral imperative among the enlightened—and the thin plastic bags used as the means to this moral end have so far escaped the fate of plastic straws, well on their way to being outlawed as an environmental outrage. Even social-justice warriors don’t consider it their personal duty, however, to tidy up after their fellow human beings on the streets.
Confronted on the sidewalk with a nasty fait accompli, most people are indignant. But the questions they then ask often diverge. Those of a more traditional disposition might wonder, “What is wrong with these people?” Those of a more progressive mind-set might exclaim, “Why hasn’t the government designed a program to solve this?”
Each is sincere, and society will have to try to answer both to make things better. But it’s the former inquiry, prepared to make some difficult and unfashionable moral distinctions, that needs encouragement in deep-blue California. “Homeless” was originally an adjective. It became a collective noun, denoting the victims of homelessness, only later, under the influence of the 20th century’s confidence that the first step in solving a social problem is to name it. Not all problems are social, however, and few if any social problems can be “solved,” in the strong sense of the term.
Without wishing to return to the Elizabethan Poor Laws, we ought to consider what was lost when the courts discouraged Americans from thinking of “homelessness” in light of the old laws against vagrancy. Under that understanding, no one had a right to camp out indefinitely on public property, much less to defecate on it. Public property belonged to the public—to everyone—and couldn’t be privatized for the benefit of one or more vagrants, however poor or sick. Though that principle would need to be applied to modern circumstances, it is the indispensable starting point for thinking about the shocking problems of the Golden State.
EDITOR’S NOTE: What a pile of shit!
Thursday, August 29, 2019
PROGRESSIVES ARE WAGING WAR AGAINST THOSE WHO PROTECT US
The war on the police started in 2009 when President Obama played the race card after cops arrested his friend, Harvard Professor Henry Gates, and it has escalated ever since
By Howie Katz
Big Jolly Times
August 28, 2019
These are troubling times for the police with cops under siege. Progressives have been waging a relentless war against the police and it all started in 2009 when President Obama declared the “police acted stupidly” in arresting his friend, Harvard Professor Henry Gates and suggested his friend was a victim of historical racial profiling by the police.
In July 2009, Gates was arrested at his Cambridge, Mass. home by the local police after they received a 9-1-1 call of an attempted burglary in progress. Gates had just returned from a trip to China and was unable to unlock his front door. While he and his driver were trying to force the door open, neighbors reported it to the police. Gates gave the cops a lot of lip and he was hauled off to the pokey for disorderly conduct. The charges were then dropped.
President Obama was a friend of Professor Gates. He issued a statement saying: “I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that. But I think it's fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home, and, number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there's a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately.”
Obama was correct in saying any of us would be pretty angry if getting busted for trying to get inside our own home. And the arrest was pretty stupid. But by playing the race card, Obama started a war on the police that has been waged by Progressives ever since.
The war began to peak in 2014 with the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown at the hands of the police.
In July 2014, Eric Garner died in a struggle with NYPD cops who were trying to arrest him for selling ‘loosies’, cigarettes sold individually without city and state taxes. He had a history of arrests for selling loosies and, at the time, was out on bail for that charge. The police responded to a complaint by store owners that Garner was selling the cigarettes in front of their businesses. When four cops tried to arrest him, the 395-pound black man told them he was tired of being “harassed” by them and kept shoving the officers away. In a struggle on the ground, officer Daniel Pantaleo appeared to be putting a choke hold on Garner who told the officers several times he could not breathe. Garner died and his death led to demonstrations all over the country with mobs shouting “I can’t breathe.”
An autopsy indicated that Garner's death resulted from a choke hold, compression of chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police. Asthma, heart disease, and obesity were cited as contributing factors.
Garner’s death led to the prominence of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, whose police-hating rhetoric incited the assassination of five Dallas police officers and the wounding of nine others in in July 2016.
In August 2014, 18-year-old Michael Brown, an unarmed black youth, was shot dead in Ferguson, Missouri by a white cop. Brown, who had just committed a strong-arm robbery of a convenience store clerk, when he was spotted by Ferguson PD Officer Darren Wilson. A physical struggle occurred between the white officer and the black thug which led to Wilson shooting Brown dead. A Brown friend told everyone who would listen that Brown had his hands up in surrender or said "don't shoot" before he was shot. An FBI investigation showed this was not true.
Rioting occurred in Ferguson with members of the mob shouting “Hands up, don’t shoot.” Wilson was forced to resign in order to placate ‘the community’. A grand jury refused to indict Wilson and after a long investigation by the FBI, the Justice Department announced there was no cause to take any action against Wilson. Even though the shooting of Brown was justified, Wilson’s career was irreparably ruined.
President Obama stoked the flames in the war on cops with this remark about the shooting of Michael Brown: “In too many communities around the country, a gulf of mistrust exists between local residents and law enforcement. Too many young men of color feel targeted by law enforcement — guilty of walking while black or driving while black, judged by stereotypes that fuel fear and resentment and hopelessness.”
In the Garner death, a grand jury refused to indict Pantaleo and the Justice Department announced there were no grounds to charge the officer criminally. That led to at least 50 demonstrations nationwide against police brutality. Two police officers in Brooklyn, Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, were ambushed and shot dead just weeks after a grand jury cleared Pantaleo.
Obama also stoked the flames in responding to the Pantaleo grand jury decision and, among other remarks, said: “We are going to take specific steps to improve the training and the work with state and local government when it comes to policing in communities of color. We are going to be scrupulous in investigating cases where we are concerned about the partiality and accountability that's taking place.”
Apparently, Obama and the Progressives, a euphemism for Liberals, are not concerned about a big thug attacking Officer Wilson or about Garner resisting a lawful arrest. To them it’s white cops killing black men just because they are black. They feed off of the rare shootings by bad white cops of black men that are undeniably unjustified such as the 2014 shooting of Laquan McDonald in Chicago and the 2015 shooting of Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina.
With liberal DAs filing charges against cops in response to demonstrations or in order to head them off, the war against cops was in full swing.
In 2015, Baltimore DA Marilyn Mosby charged six officers for their role in the arrest and death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who died while in police custody after he suffered a fatal spinal injury while being transported in the back of a police van. A judge dismissed charges against three of the officers. Mosby then decided not to pursue the remaining three cases. It was clear she should never have charged the officers in the first place.
In 2016, a wave of liberal prosecutors funded by George Soros were elected nationwide in major jurisdictions including Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Orlando, Tampa, Jacksonville, St. Louis and Houston. Soros donated $500,000 to Kim Ogg’s campaign in Houston. Several of them quickly charged police officers in order to mollify crowds accusing cops of police brutality. New York Post columnist Miranda Devine says “In district attorneys’ offices across the country, plans are underway to dismantle the criminal justice policies that have served us so well for a generation.”
This brings me back to the Eric Garner case. For five years the wolves led by Garner’s family and rabble rouser Al Sharpton, have been howling for the blood of the arresting officers. When they could not get Pantaleo charged with murder, they demanded he be fired. Uber-liberal, Sandinista-loving Mayor Bill de Blasio, who had previously warned his son about trigger-happy cops shooting young black men, made it clear he wanted Pantaleo fired. Thus, fearing for his job, Police Commissioner James O’Neill committed a grave injustice against Pantaleo by firing the officer on August 19.
That wasn’t enough. Garner’s family, Sharpton and the other wolves keep howling for the blood of all officers involved in his arrest. De Blasio was heckled at a town hall meeting even though he had called for and got Pantaleo’s scalp because the other officers were still at work.
The fallout from the Pantaleo firing was swift. Patrick Lynch, the Police Benevolent Association boss, urged cops to “proceed with the utmost caution in this new reality, in which they may be deemed ‘reckless’ just for doing their job.” Joseph Imperatrice, founder of pro-cop group Blue Lives Matter, said “The days of proactive policing are completely done.” Sergeants Benevolent Association president Ed Mullins said, “The NYPD is falling apart at the seams.”
But one NYPD cop put it more succinctly by saying, “Policing is dead. Morale was already low. This was just the nail in the coffin.” NYPD’s morale began its spiral downward when Red Bill became mayor in 2014.
Indeed, cops in New York are now slow in responding to calls and are making fewer arrests. Arrests dropped 27% between Aug. 19 — the day Pantaleo was fired — and Aug. 25 compared to the same period in 2018, with police making 3,508 busts compared to 4,827.
The firing of Pantaleo has not only affected NYPD officers, but it has also been noted by cops all over the country. They are troubled that police can no longer count on being backed up by the brass and feel that cops have to protect themselves because no one else is going to protect them.
With the Progressive’s war on cops, people have felt free to douse NYPD cops in Manhattan and Brooklyn with water and to throw objects at them. And in Philadelphia crowds cheered on a cop killer.
Whenever you hear a Democratic political candidate say he or she supports the police, you are hearing the words of a hypocrite. You won’t hear them condemning their fellow Progressives who are waging the war started by President Obama against those who protect us.
By Howie Katz
Big Jolly Times
August 28, 2019
These are troubling times for the police with cops under siege. Progressives have been waging a relentless war against the police and it all started in 2009 when President Obama declared the “police acted stupidly” in arresting his friend, Harvard Professor Henry Gates and suggested his friend was a victim of historical racial profiling by the police.
In July 2009, Gates was arrested at his Cambridge, Mass. home by the local police after they received a 9-1-1 call of an attempted burglary in progress. Gates had just returned from a trip to China and was unable to unlock his front door. While he and his driver were trying to force the door open, neighbors reported it to the police. Gates gave the cops a lot of lip and he was hauled off to the pokey for disorderly conduct. The charges were then dropped.
President Obama was a friend of Professor Gates. He issued a statement saying: “I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that. But I think it's fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home, and, number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there's a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately.”
Obama was correct in saying any of us would be pretty angry if getting busted for trying to get inside our own home. And the arrest was pretty stupid. But by playing the race card, Obama started a war on the police that has been waged by Progressives ever since.
The war began to peak in 2014 with the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown at the hands of the police.
In July 2014, Eric Garner died in a struggle with NYPD cops who were trying to arrest him for selling ‘loosies’, cigarettes sold individually without city and state taxes. He had a history of arrests for selling loosies and, at the time, was out on bail for that charge. The police responded to a complaint by store owners that Garner was selling the cigarettes in front of their businesses. When four cops tried to arrest him, the 395-pound black man told them he was tired of being “harassed” by them and kept shoving the officers away. In a struggle on the ground, officer Daniel Pantaleo appeared to be putting a choke hold on Garner who told the officers several times he could not breathe. Garner died and his death led to demonstrations all over the country with mobs shouting “I can’t breathe.”
An autopsy indicated that Garner's death resulted from a choke hold, compression of chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police. Asthma, heart disease, and obesity were cited as contributing factors.
Garner’s death led to the prominence of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, whose police-hating rhetoric incited the assassination of five Dallas police officers and the wounding of nine others in in July 2016.
In August 2014, 18-year-old Michael Brown, an unarmed black youth, was shot dead in Ferguson, Missouri by a white cop. Brown, who had just committed a strong-arm robbery of a convenience store clerk, when he was spotted by Ferguson PD Officer Darren Wilson. A physical struggle occurred between the white officer and the black thug which led to Wilson shooting Brown dead. A Brown friend told everyone who would listen that Brown had his hands up in surrender or said "don't shoot" before he was shot. An FBI investigation showed this was not true.
Rioting occurred in Ferguson with members of the mob shouting “Hands up, don’t shoot.” Wilson was forced to resign in order to placate ‘the community’. A grand jury refused to indict Wilson and after a long investigation by the FBI, the Justice Department announced there was no cause to take any action against Wilson. Even though the shooting of Brown was justified, Wilson’s career was irreparably ruined.
President Obama stoked the flames in the war on cops with this remark about the shooting of Michael Brown: “In too many communities around the country, a gulf of mistrust exists between local residents and law enforcement. Too many young men of color feel targeted by law enforcement — guilty of walking while black or driving while black, judged by stereotypes that fuel fear and resentment and hopelessness.”
In the Garner death, a grand jury refused to indict Pantaleo and the Justice Department announced there were no grounds to charge the officer criminally. That led to at least 50 demonstrations nationwide against police brutality. Two police officers in Brooklyn, Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, were ambushed and shot dead just weeks after a grand jury cleared Pantaleo.
Obama also stoked the flames in responding to the Pantaleo grand jury decision and, among other remarks, said: “We are going to take specific steps to improve the training and the work with state and local government when it comes to policing in communities of color. We are going to be scrupulous in investigating cases where we are concerned about the partiality and accountability that's taking place.”
Apparently, Obama and the Progressives, a euphemism for Liberals, are not concerned about a big thug attacking Officer Wilson or about Garner resisting a lawful arrest. To them it’s white cops killing black men just because they are black. They feed off of the rare shootings by bad white cops of black men that are undeniably unjustified such as the 2014 shooting of Laquan McDonald in Chicago and the 2015 shooting of Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina.
With liberal DAs filing charges against cops in response to demonstrations or in order to head them off, the war against cops was in full swing.
In 2015, Baltimore DA Marilyn Mosby charged six officers for their role in the arrest and death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who died while in police custody after he suffered a fatal spinal injury while being transported in the back of a police van. A judge dismissed charges against three of the officers. Mosby then decided not to pursue the remaining three cases. It was clear she should never have charged the officers in the first place.
In 2016, a wave of liberal prosecutors funded by George Soros were elected nationwide in major jurisdictions including Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Orlando, Tampa, Jacksonville, St. Louis and Houston. Soros donated $500,000 to Kim Ogg’s campaign in Houston. Several of them quickly charged police officers in order to mollify crowds accusing cops of police brutality. New York Post columnist Miranda Devine says “In district attorneys’ offices across the country, plans are underway to dismantle the criminal justice policies that have served us so well for a generation.”
This brings me back to the Eric Garner case. For five years the wolves led by Garner’s family and rabble rouser Al Sharpton, have been howling for the blood of the arresting officers. When they could not get Pantaleo charged with murder, they demanded he be fired. Uber-liberal, Sandinista-loving Mayor Bill de Blasio, who had previously warned his son about trigger-happy cops shooting young black men, made it clear he wanted Pantaleo fired. Thus, fearing for his job, Police Commissioner James O’Neill committed a grave injustice against Pantaleo by firing the officer on August 19.
That wasn’t enough. Garner’s family, Sharpton and the other wolves keep howling for the blood of all officers involved in his arrest. De Blasio was heckled at a town hall meeting even though he had called for and got Pantaleo’s scalp because the other officers were still at work.
The fallout from the Pantaleo firing was swift. Patrick Lynch, the Police Benevolent Association boss, urged cops to “proceed with the utmost caution in this new reality, in which they may be deemed ‘reckless’ just for doing their job.” Joseph Imperatrice, founder of pro-cop group Blue Lives Matter, said “The days of proactive policing are completely done.” Sergeants Benevolent Association president Ed Mullins said, “The NYPD is falling apart at the seams.”
But one NYPD cop put it more succinctly by saying, “Policing is dead. Morale was already low. This was just the nail in the coffin.” NYPD’s morale began its spiral downward when Red Bill became mayor in 2014.
Indeed, cops in New York are now slow in responding to calls and are making fewer arrests. Arrests dropped 27% between Aug. 19 — the day Pantaleo was fired — and Aug. 25 compared to the same period in 2018, with police making 3,508 busts compared to 4,827.
The firing of Pantaleo has not only affected NYPD officers, but it has also been noted by cops all over the country. They are troubled that police can no longer count on being backed up by the brass and feel that cops have to protect themselves because no one else is going to protect them.
With the Progressive’s war on cops, people have felt free to douse NYPD cops in Manhattan and Brooklyn with water and to throw objects at them. And in Philadelphia crowds cheered on a cop killer.
Whenever you hear a Democratic political candidate say he or she supports the police, you are hearing the words of a hypocrite. You won’t hear them condemning their fellow Progressives who are waging the war started by President Obama against those who protect us.
I JUST WATCHED THE ABSOLUTE WORST THING I EVER SAW ON TV IN MY LIFE
by Bob Walsh
I just finished watching (not completely voluntarily) something called Mountain Monsters. It was even worst than the worse Grade D movie I ever saw IN MY LIFE.
It was a pack of hillbilly rednecks, or actors playing rednecks very convincingly, who were hunting for a 7-foot tall wolf that walks on two legs in Butthole, West Virginia. Each scene had two or three repeats, holes in the story big enough to drive a large truck thru and scripting that would make a junior high school English class embarrassed. If it wasn't for the fact I was half medicated and 2/3 asleep I would have considered it to be a 100% waste of my evening. As it was it was only about an 85% waste of my evening.
This thing made The Terror From Tiny Town or Plan 9 From Outer Space look like high art with excellent production values. If it hadn't been for the fact I was loaded on Percocet and Valium washed down with some Hennessy 5-Star I would have been offended that it was even on TV. As it is I am not completely sure I didn't just imagine it. It was that bad.
I just finished watching (not completely voluntarily) something called Mountain Monsters. It was even worst than the worse Grade D movie I ever saw IN MY LIFE.
It was a pack of hillbilly rednecks, or actors playing rednecks very convincingly, who were hunting for a 7-foot tall wolf that walks on two legs in Butthole, West Virginia. Each scene had two or three repeats, holes in the story big enough to drive a large truck thru and scripting that would make a junior high school English class embarrassed. If it wasn't for the fact I was half medicated and 2/3 asleep I would have considered it to be a 100% waste of my evening. As it was it was only about an 85% waste of my evening.
This thing made The Terror From Tiny Town or Plan 9 From Outer Space look like high art with excellent production values. If it hadn't been for the fact I was loaded on Percocet and Valium washed down with some Hennessy 5-Star I would have been offended that it was even on TV. As it is I am not completely sure I didn't just imagine it. It was that bad.
SEND OMAR’S ANTI-SEMITIC ASS BACK TO SOMALIA
Alabama Republicans approve resolution calling for Omar to be expelled from Congress
By Justin Wise
The Hill
August 27, 2018
Alabama’s Republican Party is urging the state’s congressional delegation to begin the process of expelling freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) from Congress.
The state GOP supported a resolution calling for the congresswoman's ouster at its summer meeting in Auburn this past weekend, according to Al.com. The committee reportedly approved the resolution on a voice vote after it was introduced by state Rep. Tommy Hanes.
The resolution calls on Alabama's congressional delegation to "proceed with the expulsion process in accordance to Article 1, Section 5 of the U.S. Constitution."
Omar, a Somali refugee who last year became one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress, has sparked criticism from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle over her comments about issues tied to U.S.-Israeli relations.
The resolution backed by Alabama Republicans condemns Omar for what it calls her "disturbing record of using anti-Semitic language that includes alleging Jewish money is used to buy American influence regarding its policy toward Israel."
The state Republicans also voiced opposition to Omar's public support of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement that presses Israel on human rights issues in its conflict with the Palestinians and accused the congresswoman of engaging in "rhetoric that explicitly runs counter to American values and patriotism."
The resolution alleges Omar "dismissed" the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and “sympathized with a convicted terrorist” by pushing for “sentencing leniency.”
Omar in a tweet ripped the Alabama GOP for seeking her removal, noting that Republicans in the state had nominated Roy Moore for the Senate in 2017.
"Sorry, [Alabama GOP], but this is a representative democracy," Omar tweeted. "I was elected with 78% of the vote by the people of Minnesota's 5th District, not the Alabama Republican Party."
"If you want to clean up politics, maybe don’t nominate an accused child molester as your Senate candidate," she added.
In a statement to The Hill, Hanes said the Constitution allows for the removal of a member of Congress who is disloyal to the United States.
“There is precedence for Article 1, Section 5 of the Constitution being invoked to expel members of Congress based on disloyalty to the United States," Hanes said in the statement"[Omar] has dismissed and minimized the magnitude of the 9/11 terror attacks. Omar also demonized the brave war veterans who fought to liberate her people. Omar is ungrateful to the United States and the opportunities that have been afforded to her. Her rhetoric is despicable and unpatriotic.
"The left wing mob has accused our effort of being bigoted and driven by race. I will not stand by and allow my fellow Republican patriots to be slandered. Rep. Omar’s race and religion are irrelevant," Hanes continued. "Lady Liberty welcomes those who seek to live the American Dream and assimilate to our freedom loving culture. What is important is her love of country, her loyalty to the United States. Anyone that holds contempt for America ought not serve this great nation as a member of Congress.”
The resolution's approval comes less than two weeks after Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) were denied entry to Israel over their support for the BDS movement. Israel announced its decision just hours after President Trump said the country would show "great weakness" by admitting them.
Omar has come under heavy scrutiny from Trump and other Republicans throughout her first term in Congress. She prompted widespread backlash earlier this year after suggesting lawmakers support Israel because of the money they receive from lobbyists. She prompted similar outrage after saying that those who support the country have “dual loyalty.”
Alabama’s Republican Party is urging the state’s congressional delegation to begin the process of expelling freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) from Congress.
The state GOP supported a resolution calling for the congresswoman's ouster at its summer meeting in Auburn this past weekend, according to Al.com. The committee reportedly approved the resolution on a voice vote after it was introduced by state Rep. Tommy Hanes.
The resolution calls on Alabama's congressional delegation to "proceed with the expulsion process in accordance to Article 1, Section 5 of the U.S. Constitution."
Omar, a Somali refugee who last year became one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress, has sparked criticism from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle over her comments about issues tied to U.S.-Israeli relations.
The resolution backed by Alabama Republicans condemns Omar for what it calls her "disturbing record of using anti-Semitic language that includes alleging Jewish money is used to buy American influence regarding its policy toward Israel."
The state Republicans also voiced opposition to Omar's public support of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement that presses Israel on human rights issues in its conflict with the Palestinians and accused the congresswoman of engaging in "rhetoric that explicitly runs counter to American values and patriotism."
The resolution alleges Omar "dismissed" the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and “sympathized with a convicted terrorist” by pushing for “sentencing leniency.”
Omar in a tweet ripped the Alabama GOP for seeking her removal, noting that Republicans in the state had nominated Roy Moore for the Senate in 2017.
"Sorry, [Alabama GOP], but this is a representative democracy," Omar tweeted. "I was elected with 78% of the vote by the people of Minnesota's 5th District, not the Alabama Republican Party."
"If you want to clean up politics, maybe don’t nominate an accused child molester as your Senate candidate," she added.
In a statement to The Hill, Hanes said the Constitution allows for the removal of a member of Congress who is disloyal to the United States.
“There is precedence for Article 1, Section 5 of the Constitution being invoked to expel members of Congress based on disloyalty to the United States," Hanes said in the statement"[Omar] has dismissed and minimized the magnitude of the 9/11 terror attacks. Omar also demonized the brave war veterans who fought to liberate her people. Omar is ungrateful to the United States and the opportunities that have been afforded to her. Her rhetoric is despicable and unpatriotic.
"The left wing mob has accused our effort of being bigoted and driven by race. I will not stand by and allow my fellow Republican patriots to be slandered. Rep. Omar’s race and religion are irrelevant," Hanes continued. "Lady Liberty welcomes those who seek to live the American Dream and assimilate to our freedom loving culture. What is important is her love of country, her loyalty to the United States. Anyone that holds contempt for America ought not serve this great nation as a member of Congress.”
The resolution's approval comes less than two weeks after Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) were denied entry to Israel over their support for the BDS movement. Israel announced its decision just hours after President Trump said the country would show "great weakness" by admitting them.
Omar has come under heavy scrutiny from Trump and other Republicans throughout her first term in Congress. She prompted widespread backlash earlier this year after suggesting lawmakers support Israel because of the money they receive from lobbyists. She prompted similar outrage after saying that those who support the country have “dual loyalty.”
Trump has frequently lashed out at Omar. In July, he said the lawmaker and other progressive congresswomen of color should "go back" to where they came from.
Omar has been outspoken in her opposition to Trump, saying last month that she believed the president was a "fascist."
__________
Ilhan Omar is accused of illegally using campaign cash to pay for her 'lover' to travel with her - as she DENIES she's dating outside her marriage despite claims by aide's estranged wife
Daily Mail
August 28, 2019
Ilhan Omar, 37, has been accused of illegally using campaign funds to pay for her alleged lover Tim Mynett to travel with her in a complaint to the Federal Election Commission from a conservative group.
The Minnesota congresswoman has paid Mynett more than $250K in consulting fees and travel within a year, with around $21.5K spent solely on travel expenses.
DailyMail.com revealed this month that Mynett, 38, had been seen getting up close and personal with Omar, even seen on a romantic dinner date in March. The affair was confirmed by Mynett's wife Beth, 55, who said in divorce documents filed Tuesday that Mynett told her in April that he and Omar were 'romantically involved' and he was 'in love' with her.
Omar denied that she was dating outside of her marriage to her husband Ahmed Hirsi, then refused to comment further on the matter.
By Justin Wise
The Hill
August 27, 2018
Alabama’s Republican Party is urging the state’s congressional delegation to begin the process of expelling freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) from Congress.
The state GOP supported a resolution calling for the congresswoman's ouster at its summer meeting in Auburn this past weekend, according to Al.com. The committee reportedly approved the resolution on a voice vote after it was introduced by state Rep. Tommy Hanes.
The resolution calls on Alabama's congressional delegation to "proceed with the expulsion process in accordance to Article 1, Section 5 of the U.S. Constitution."
Omar, a Somali refugee who last year became one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress, has sparked criticism from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle over her comments about issues tied to U.S.-Israeli relations.
The resolution backed by Alabama Republicans condemns Omar for what it calls her "disturbing record of using anti-Semitic language that includes alleging Jewish money is used to buy American influence regarding its policy toward Israel."
The state Republicans also voiced opposition to Omar's public support of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement that presses Israel on human rights issues in its conflict with the Palestinians and accused the congresswoman of engaging in "rhetoric that explicitly runs counter to American values and patriotism."
The resolution alleges Omar "dismissed" the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and “sympathized with a convicted terrorist” by pushing for “sentencing leniency.”
Omar in a tweet ripped the Alabama GOP for seeking her removal, noting that Republicans in the state had nominated Roy Moore for the Senate in 2017.
"Sorry, [Alabama GOP], but this is a representative democracy," Omar tweeted. "I was elected with 78% of the vote by the people of Minnesota's 5th District, not the Alabama Republican Party."
"If you want to clean up politics, maybe don’t nominate an accused child molester as your Senate candidate," she added.
In a statement to The Hill, Hanes said the Constitution allows for the removal of a member of Congress who is disloyal to the United States.
“There is precedence for Article 1, Section 5 of the Constitution being invoked to expel members of Congress based on disloyalty to the United States," Hanes said in the statement"[Omar] has dismissed and minimized the magnitude of the 9/11 terror attacks. Omar also demonized the brave war veterans who fought to liberate her people. Omar is ungrateful to the United States and the opportunities that have been afforded to her. Her rhetoric is despicable and unpatriotic.
"The left wing mob has accused our effort of being bigoted and driven by race. I will not stand by and allow my fellow Republican patriots to be slandered. Rep. Omar’s race and religion are irrelevant," Hanes continued. "Lady Liberty welcomes those who seek to live the American Dream and assimilate to our freedom loving culture. What is important is her love of country, her loyalty to the United States. Anyone that holds contempt for America ought not serve this great nation as a member of Congress.”
The resolution's approval comes less than two weeks after Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) were denied entry to Israel over their support for the BDS movement. Israel announced its decision just hours after President Trump said the country would show "great weakness" by admitting them.
Omar has come under heavy scrutiny from Trump and other Republicans throughout her first term in Congress. She prompted widespread backlash earlier this year after suggesting lawmakers support Israel because of the money they receive from lobbyists. She prompted similar outrage after saying that those who support the country have “dual loyalty.”
Alabama’s Republican Party is urging the state’s congressional delegation to begin the process of expelling freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) from Congress.
The state GOP supported a resolution calling for the congresswoman's ouster at its summer meeting in Auburn this past weekend, according to Al.com. The committee reportedly approved the resolution on a voice vote after it was introduced by state Rep. Tommy Hanes.
The resolution calls on Alabama's congressional delegation to "proceed with the expulsion process in accordance to Article 1, Section 5 of the U.S. Constitution."
Omar, a Somali refugee who last year became one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress, has sparked criticism from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle over her comments about issues tied to U.S.-Israeli relations.
The resolution backed by Alabama Republicans condemns Omar for what it calls her "disturbing record of using anti-Semitic language that includes alleging Jewish money is used to buy American influence regarding its policy toward Israel."
The state Republicans also voiced opposition to Omar's public support of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement that presses Israel on human rights issues in its conflict with the Palestinians and accused the congresswoman of engaging in "rhetoric that explicitly runs counter to American values and patriotism."
The resolution alleges Omar "dismissed" the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and “sympathized with a convicted terrorist” by pushing for “sentencing leniency.”
Omar in a tweet ripped the Alabama GOP for seeking her removal, noting that Republicans in the state had nominated Roy Moore for the Senate in 2017.
"Sorry, [Alabama GOP], but this is a representative democracy," Omar tweeted. "I was elected with 78% of the vote by the people of Minnesota's 5th District, not the Alabama Republican Party."
"If you want to clean up politics, maybe don’t nominate an accused child molester as your Senate candidate," she added.
In a statement to The Hill, Hanes said the Constitution allows for the removal of a member of Congress who is disloyal to the United States.
“There is precedence for Article 1, Section 5 of the Constitution being invoked to expel members of Congress based on disloyalty to the United States," Hanes said in the statement"[Omar] has dismissed and minimized the magnitude of the 9/11 terror attacks. Omar also demonized the brave war veterans who fought to liberate her people. Omar is ungrateful to the United States and the opportunities that have been afforded to her. Her rhetoric is despicable and unpatriotic.
"The left wing mob has accused our effort of being bigoted and driven by race. I will not stand by and allow my fellow Republican patriots to be slandered. Rep. Omar’s race and religion are irrelevant," Hanes continued. "Lady Liberty welcomes those who seek to live the American Dream and assimilate to our freedom loving culture. What is important is her love of country, her loyalty to the United States. Anyone that holds contempt for America ought not serve this great nation as a member of Congress.”
The resolution's approval comes less than two weeks after Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) were denied entry to Israel over their support for the BDS movement. Israel announced its decision just hours after President Trump said the country would show "great weakness" by admitting them.
Omar has come under heavy scrutiny from Trump and other Republicans throughout her first term in Congress. She prompted widespread backlash earlier this year after suggesting lawmakers support Israel because of the money they receive from lobbyists. She prompted similar outrage after saying that those who support the country have “dual loyalty.”
Trump has frequently lashed out at Omar. In July, he said the lawmaker and other progressive congresswomen of color should "go back" to where they came from.
Omar has been outspoken in her opposition to Trump, saying last month that she believed the president was a "fascist."
__________
Ilhan Omar is accused of illegally using campaign cash to pay for her 'lover' to travel with her - as she DENIES she's dating outside her marriage despite claims by aide's estranged wife
Daily Mail
August 28, 2019
Ilhan Omar, 37, has been accused of illegally using campaign funds to pay for her alleged lover Tim Mynett to travel with her in a complaint to the Federal Election Commission from a conservative group.
The Minnesota congresswoman has paid Mynett more than $250K in consulting fees and travel within a year, with around $21.5K spent solely on travel expenses.
DailyMail.com revealed this month that Mynett, 38, had been seen getting up close and personal with Omar, even seen on a romantic dinner date in March. The affair was confirmed by Mynett's wife Beth, 55, who said in divorce documents filed Tuesday that Mynett told her in April that he and Omar were 'romantically involved' and he was 'in love' with her.
Omar denied that she was dating outside of her marriage to her husband Ahmed Hirsi, then refused to comment further on the matter.
ATTACK OF THE KILLER DRONES ….. AND THIS IS NOT A HILARIOUS MOVIE
From Star Wars to real life: Drone war takes flight
Israel Hayom
August 27, 2019
From the vast deserts of Saudi Arabia to the crowded neighborhoods of Beirut, a drone war has taken flight across the wider Middle East, raising the stakes in the ongoing tensions between the US and Iran.
Since the US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal last year, there has been an increasing tempo of attacks and alleged threats, notably this weekend, from unmanned aircraft flown by Tehran’s and Washington’s allies in the region.
The appeal of the aircraft – they risk no pilots and can be small enough to evade air-defense systems – fueled their rapid use amid the maximum pressure campaigns of Iran and the US. As these strikes become more frequent, the risk of unwanted escalation becomes greater.
The US military nearly launched airstrikes against Iran after a US military surveillance drone was shot down in June. Meanwhile, strikes attributed to Israel are carried out on targets in Syria on an almost weekly basis, including on Saturday night. Israel’s reason for the latest bombing: To thwart what it called a planned Iranian drone strike.
Israeli aircraft then buzzed over Beirut on Sunday after allegedly losing two drones only hours earlier, raising the risk of a wider conflict between it and Hezbollah. On Sunday evening, another drone strike hit an Iran-backed paramilitary force in Iraq, killing one commander and wounding another, members of the group said. It was not immediately clear who carried out the strike.
Amid the escalation, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif made a surprise trip Sunday to the G-7 summit in France, at the invitation of the French president.
The mounting tensions are rooted in the US withdrawal in May 2018 from Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers. Under the deal, Tehran limited its enrichment of uranium in exchange for sanctions relief. In response to Washington’s withdrawal, Iran initially sought diplomatic support from European partners still in the accord, but ever-increasing US sanctions choked off its sale of crude oil in the international market.
This May, the US sent nuclear-capable B-52 bombers, fighter jets, an aircraft carrier, and additional troops to the region over what it described as threats from Iran. Mysterious explosions struck oil tankers near the Strait of Hormuz.
Coordinated drone attacks followed, first from the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels of Yemen. Major attacks targeted the kingdom’s oil infrastructure – one on a crucial East-West Pipeline, the other in a major facility deep in the desert of Arabian Peninsula’s Empty Quarter.
Saudi Arabia immediately tied the attacks to Iran, its longtime Middle East rival. While Iran denies arming the Houthis, the West and United Nations experts say that drones used by the rebels mirror models used by the Islamic Republic.
Meanwhile, a suspected Israeli strike in Iraq last month targeted a base of Shiite militias allied to Iran – in what would be the first attack to be carried out by Israel in Iraq since 1981. Israel remained mum, and US officials who linked the strike to Israel did not say if drones were involved.
Israel, meanwhile, acknowledged striking Syria on Saturday night, in what it described as a pre-emptive attack. The military said that it prevented an effort by Iran to position so-called killer drones ahead of an attack on Israel.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah disputed the Israeli version in a speech later Sunday, saying that Israeli strikes hit a Hezbollah rest house and killed two of the group’s members. He said that going forward, any Israeli drones that enter Lebanon would be shot down.
The drones Israel says it was targeting in Syria are known to experts as loitering munitions and are similar to the ones being used by the Houthis. The bomb-carrying drone flies to a destination, likely programmed before its flight, and either explodes in the air over the target or on impact against it.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is seeking re-election in September, paraphrased a Talmudic passage on self-defense after the attack: “If someone rises up to kill you, kill him first.”
Israel’s military released a map Sunday of what it said were the Iranian supply routes to deliver the planes to Syria. This included what Israel described as the planned drone launch site in the Syrian village of Aqraba, as well as another location in the village of Arneh where a previous launch attempt was allegedly thwarted last Thursday.
IDF Spokesman Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus said that Israel had been monitoring the activity for weeks and struck when it became clear that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards planned to launch the aircraft. He said it is easier to destroy the drones, which are agile and hard to detect once airborne, while they are still on the ground.
“We know the Quds Force spent a lot of effort and time trying to execute this plan,” he said. The Quds, or Jerusalem, Force is the Guard’s expeditionary unit.
Iran denied Israel’s strikes in Syria did any damage to its forces.
“It is a lie,” Guard Gen. Mohsen Rezaei said, according to Iran’s semi-official ILNA news agency. However, Rezaei added that the “defenders of Syria and Iraq will soon give an answer,” without elaborating.
Rezaei’s response shows the escalatory danger of drone strikes. Overnight in Lebanon, one alleged Israeli drone crashed in Beirut while another exploded, authorities there said, calling it an Israeli act of aggression and a violation of Lebanese sovereignty.
In his speech, Nasrallah said that one of the drones had been flying low among buildings.
Israel did not acknowledge the incident.
Hezbollah was quick to say that it did not fire on any of the drones, underscoring the group’s keenness to avoid further escalation with its southern neighbor.
The developments, however, present a direct challenge to the group, which is still recovering from a bruising years-long conflict in neighboring Syria that saw thousands of its fighters killed and wounded while fighting alongside President Bashar Assad’s forces.
Hezbollah, which is part of a fragile national unity government already struggling to deal with a serious economic and financial crisis, does not wish to be seen as dragging the country into another ruinous war with Israel, but may be feeling pressured to respond to perceived Israeli provocations.
In the overnight incident, the first drone, apparently unarmed, crashed onto the roof of a Beirut building where Hezbollah’s media office is located and caused damage to the group’s offices.
Israel Hayom
August 27, 2019
From the vast deserts of Saudi Arabia to the crowded neighborhoods of Beirut, a drone war has taken flight across the wider Middle East, raising the stakes in the ongoing tensions between the US and Iran.
Since the US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal last year, there has been an increasing tempo of attacks and alleged threats, notably this weekend, from unmanned aircraft flown by Tehran’s and Washington’s allies in the region.
The appeal of the aircraft – they risk no pilots and can be small enough to evade air-defense systems – fueled their rapid use amid the maximum pressure campaigns of Iran and the US. As these strikes become more frequent, the risk of unwanted escalation becomes greater.
The US military nearly launched airstrikes against Iran after a US military surveillance drone was shot down in June. Meanwhile, strikes attributed to Israel are carried out on targets in Syria on an almost weekly basis, including on Saturday night. Israel’s reason for the latest bombing: To thwart what it called a planned Iranian drone strike.
Israeli aircraft then buzzed over Beirut on Sunday after allegedly losing two drones only hours earlier, raising the risk of a wider conflict between it and Hezbollah. On Sunday evening, another drone strike hit an Iran-backed paramilitary force in Iraq, killing one commander and wounding another, members of the group said. It was not immediately clear who carried out the strike.
Amid the escalation, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif made a surprise trip Sunday to the G-7 summit in France, at the invitation of the French president.
The mounting tensions are rooted in the US withdrawal in May 2018 from Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers. Under the deal, Tehran limited its enrichment of uranium in exchange for sanctions relief. In response to Washington’s withdrawal, Iran initially sought diplomatic support from European partners still in the accord, but ever-increasing US sanctions choked off its sale of crude oil in the international market.
This May, the US sent nuclear-capable B-52 bombers, fighter jets, an aircraft carrier, and additional troops to the region over what it described as threats from Iran. Mysterious explosions struck oil tankers near the Strait of Hormuz.
Coordinated drone attacks followed, first from the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels of Yemen. Major attacks targeted the kingdom’s oil infrastructure – one on a crucial East-West Pipeline, the other in a major facility deep in the desert of Arabian Peninsula’s Empty Quarter.
Saudi Arabia immediately tied the attacks to Iran, its longtime Middle East rival. While Iran denies arming the Houthis, the West and United Nations experts say that drones used by the rebels mirror models used by the Islamic Republic.
Meanwhile, a suspected Israeli strike in Iraq last month targeted a base of Shiite militias allied to Iran – in what would be the first attack to be carried out by Israel in Iraq since 1981. Israel remained mum, and US officials who linked the strike to Israel did not say if drones were involved.
Israel, meanwhile, acknowledged striking Syria on Saturday night, in what it described as a pre-emptive attack. The military said that it prevented an effort by Iran to position so-called killer drones ahead of an attack on Israel.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah disputed the Israeli version in a speech later Sunday, saying that Israeli strikes hit a Hezbollah rest house and killed two of the group’s members. He said that going forward, any Israeli drones that enter Lebanon would be shot down.
The drones Israel says it was targeting in Syria are known to experts as loitering munitions and are similar to the ones being used by the Houthis. The bomb-carrying drone flies to a destination, likely programmed before its flight, and either explodes in the air over the target or on impact against it.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is seeking re-election in September, paraphrased a Talmudic passage on self-defense after the attack: “If someone rises up to kill you, kill him first.”
Israel’s military released a map Sunday of what it said were the Iranian supply routes to deliver the planes to Syria. This included what Israel described as the planned drone launch site in the Syrian village of Aqraba, as well as another location in the village of Arneh where a previous launch attempt was allegedly thwarted last Thursday.
IDF Spokesman Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus said that Israel had been monitoring the activity for weeks and struck when it became clear that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards planned to launch the aircraft. He said it is easier to destroy the drones, which are agile and hard to detect once airborne, while they are still on the ground.
“We know the Quds Force spent a lot of effort and time trying to execute this plan,” he said. The Quds, or Jerusalem, Force is the Guard’s expeditionary unit.
Iran denied Israel’s strikes in Syria did any damage to its forces.
“It is a lie,” Guard Gen. Mohsen Rezaei said, according to Iran’s semi-official ILNA news agency. However, Rezaei added that the “defenders of Syria and Iraq will soon give an answer,” without elaborating.
Rezaei’s response shows the escalatory danger of drone strikes. Overnight in Lebanon, one alleged Israeli drone crashed in Beirut while another exploded, authorities there said, calling it an Israeli act of aggression and a violation of Lebanese sovereignty.
In his speech, Nasrallah said that one of the drones had been flying low among buildings.
Israel did not acknowledge the incident.
Hezbollah was quick to say that it did not fire on any of the drones, underscoring the group’s keenness to avoid further escalation with its southern neighbor.
The developments, however, present a direct challenge to the group, which is still recovering from a bruising years-long conflict in neighboring Syria that saw thousands of its fighters killed and wounded while fighting alongside President Bashar Assad’s forces.
Hezbollah, which is part of a fragile national unity government already struggling to deal with a serious economic and financial crisis, does not wish to be seen as dragging the country into another ruinous war with Israel, but may be feeling pressured to respond to perceived Israeli provocations.
In the overnight incident, the first drone, apparently unarmed, crashed onto the roof of a Beirut building where Hezbollah’s media office is located and caused damage to the group’s offices.
Wednesday, August 28, 2019
NOW COPS HAVE TO PROTECT THEMSELVES BECAUSE NO ONE ELSE IS GOING TO PROTECT THEM
The ‘Pantaleo Effect’: NYPD arrests plummet in wake of firing
By Larry Celona and Craig McCarthy
New York Post
August 26, 2019
The number of arrests and criminal summonses handled by city cops last week plummeted compared to the same period in 2018 — and law enforcement sources warn it’s the “Pantaleo Effect.’’
Officer Daniel Pantaleo was fired by NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill on Aug. 19 over his role in the fatal takedown of Staten Island cigarette peddler Eric Garner, enraging police officers and their union leaders, who argue the cop was simply doing his job during an arrest.
Police Benevolent Association chief Patrick Lynch responded by angrily telling his members to “proceed with the utmost caution’’ when answering calls — and new statistics obtained by The Post on Monday suggest officers are heeding his warning.
Arrests dropped 27% between Aug. 19 — the day Pantaleo was fired — and Aug. 25 compared to the same period in 2018, with police making 3,508 busts compared to 4,827.
The number of criminal summonses issued fell nearly 29% over the same period, going from 1,655 to 1,181, the figures show.
Multiple law enforcement sources told The Post that while there is no organized slowdown, cops on the street clearly feel that the department doesn’t have their backs, so why should they needlessly put themselves on the line?
“Who wants to be the last cop standing?” a Manhattan cop said. “If someone’s in trouble and needs help or if a cop’s in trouble, obviously, you do what you have to do as a police officer. But if it’s discretionary, why put yourself in harm’s way?’’
An NYPD supervisor in Brooklyn said, “Of course it has to do with what happened to Pantaleo — cops are frustrated, upset. They feel they don’t have the backing of downtown, Police Headquarters and City Hall.
“It all goes back to cops feeling like they’re out on the street alone.’’
A Bronx cop said the stats are lower partly because officers are taking more time with calls after Pantaleo.
“They want to be more careful. They have to protect themselves because no one else is going to protect them,’’ the source said.
The Manhattan source said Garner’s case would never have happened today — because the city has told officers to back down on making such quality-of-life busts.
The Police Department said in a statement, “The brave women and men who joined the NYPD did so with a solemn promise to help people, to fight crime, and to keep New York City safe. These dedicated officers practice precision policing — focusing on the offenders who commit crimes, not the accumulation of raw numbers.”
EDITOR'S NOTE: With respect to NYPD's lame statement, let me repeat what I frequently say: You can't make chicken soup out of chicken shit.
By Larry Celona and Craig McCarthy
New York Post
August 26, 2019
The number of arrests and criminal summonses handled by city cops last week plummeted compared to the same period in 2018 — and law enforcement sources warn it’s the “Pantaleo Effect.’’
Officer Daniel Pantaleo was fired by NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill on Aug. 19 over his role in the fatal takedown of Staten Island cigarette peddler Eric Garner, enraging police officers and their union leaders, who argue the cop was simply doing his job during an arrest.
Police Benevolent Association chief Patrick Lynch responded by angrily telling his members to “proceed with the utmost caution’’ when answering calls — and new statistics obtained by The Post on Monday suggest officers are heeding his warning.
Arrests dropped 27% between Aug. 19 — the day Pantaleo was fired — and Aug. 25 compared to the same period in 2018, with police making 3,508 busts compared to 4,827.
The number of criminal summonses issued fell nearly 29% over the same period, going from 1,655 to 1,181, the figures show.
Multiple law enforcement sources told The Post that while there is no organized slowdown, cops on the street clearly feel that the department doesn’t have their backs, so why should they needlessly put themselves on the line?
“Who wants to be the last cop standing?” a Manhattan cop said. “If someone’s in trouble and needs help or if a cop’s in trouble, obviously, you do what you have to do as a police officer. But if it’s discretionary, why put yourself in harm’s way?’’
An NYPD supervisor in Brooklyn said, “Of course it has to do with what happened to Pantaleo — cops are frustrated, upset. They feel they don’t have the backing of downtown, Police Headquarters and City Hall.
“It all goes back to cops feeling like they’re out on the street alone.’’
A Bronx cop said the stats are lower partly because officers are taking more time with calls after Pantaleo.
“They want to be more careful. They have to protect themselves because no one else is going to protect them,’’ the source said.
The Manhattan source said Garner’s case would never have happened today — because the city has told officers to back down on making such quality-of-life busts.
The Police Department said in a statement, “The brave women and men who joined the NYPD did so with a solemn promise to help people, to fight crime, and to keep New York City safe. These dedicated officers practice precision policing — focusing on the offenders who commit crimes, not the accumulation of raw numbers.”
EDITOR'S NOTE: With respect to NYPD's lame statement, let me repeat what I frequently say: You can't make chicken soup out of chicken shit.
ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
by Bob Walsh
In 1941 the Gestapo murdered 23,000 Hungarian Jews in the occupied Ukraine. That, boys and girls, is true racism and anti-Semitism and Donald Trump didn't have a goddamn thing to do with it.
I am a more-or-less normal, socialized person and I confess to having a huge problem comprehending how fucked up a group of people have to become to permit them to engage in this sort of hideous behavior.
In 1941 the Gestapo murdered 23,000 Hungarian Jews in the occupied Ukraine. That, boys and girls, is true racism and anti-Semitism and Donald Trump didn't have a goddamn thing to do with it.
I am a more-or-less normal, socialized person and I confess to having a huge problem comprehending how fucked up a group of people have to become to permit them to engage in this sort of hideous behavior.
A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME WOULD SMELL AS FOUL
by Bob Walsh
A while back the SAT people decided to tweak the final scores of applicants using an "adversary score." This would give SOME students, primarily those who are socially or economically disadvantaged, some credit on their SAT for being socially or economically disadvantaged. I think that's sweet, but it does not necessarily test for academic achievement accurately.
So, yesterday the SAT people announced they were NOT proceeding with this. They are, however, moving forward with a "LANDSCAPE" tweak. This scheme would monitor social and economic factors (such as free school lunch participation, school size, class size, etc.) on a non-individual bases.
Presumably this would give a bump to large numbers of students at shit schools in shit districts with shit teachers and shit administrators.
I am still not sure this will assist in the accurate testing of academic achievement, but then again it isn't intended to, is it? It shows how WOKE they are. Let's hear it for Virtue Signalling. I'm more woke than you, so you can go fuck yourself.
A while back the SAT people decided to tweak the final scores of applicants using an "adversary score." This would give SOME students, primarily those who are socially or economically disadvantaged, some credit on their SAT for being socially or economically disadvantaged. I think that's sweet, but it does not necessarily test for academic achievement accurately.
So, yesterday the SAT people announced they were NOT proceeding with this. They are, however, moving forward with a "LANDSCAPE" tweak. This scheme would monitor social and economic factors (such as free school lunch participation, school size, class size, etc.) on a non-individual bases.
Presumably this would give a bump to large numbers of students at shit schools in shit districts with shit teachers and shit administrators.
I am still not sure this will assist in the accurate testing of academic achievement, but then again it isn't intended to, is it? It shows how WOKE they are. Let's hear it for Virtue Signalling. I'm more woke than you, so you can go fuck yourself.
UNCONSCIOUS FOR 6 YEARS, OFFICER FINALLY DIES
California LEO Dies After Losing Consciousness 6 Years Ago During SWAT Tryout
LAPPL News Watch
August 27, 2019
An Orange County, Calif., sheriff’s deputy who collapsed and lost consciousness six years ago during tryouts for the SWAT team has died, officials said.
Carlos Cammon, 35, died Friday night after succumbing to his injuries, Sheriff Don Barnes announced Saturday on his Twitter page.
He collapsed during the tryout session July 18, 2013, and never regained consciousness, the sheriff said.
Cammon distinguished himself during his six years on the department, he said. “In 2010, Deputy Cammon received the Medal of Courage after he and three other off-duty deputies subdued a man with a knife assaulting a woman at a restaurant in Orange,” Barnes said. “Our department family joins the Cammon family in grieving the loss of this brave young man.”
LAPPL News Watch
August 27, 2019
An Orange County, Calif., sheriff’s deputy who collapsed and lost consciousness six years ago during tryouts for the SWAT team has died, officials said.
Carlos Cammon, 35, died Friday night after succumbing to his injuries, Sheriff Don Barnes announced Saturday on his Twitter page.
He collapsed during the tryout session July 18, 2013, and never regained consciousness, the sheriff said.
Cammon distinguished himself during his six years on the department, he said. “In 2010, Deputy Cammon received the Medal of Courage after he and three other off-duty deputies subdued a man with a knife assaulting a woman at a restaurant in Orange,” Barnes said. “Our department family joins the Cammon family in grieving the loss of this brave young man.”
HE APPARENTLY MISUNDERSTOOD THE 8TH COMMANDMENT
Former Los Angeles Church Chairman Charged With Stealing Over $11 Million In Church Funds
LAPPL News Watch
August 27, 2019
The former board chairman for the Fifth Church of Christ, Scientist, Los Angeles, was arrested Monday on suspicion of stealing more than $11 million in church money and using it to purchase a home, a membership at Disneyland’s exclusive dining club and pay other personal expenses.
Charles Thomas Sebesta, 54, of Huntington Beach, is charged in a federal indictment with six counts of wire fraud, five counts of bank fraud and two counts of aggravated identity theft, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
He pleaded not guilty Monday to the charges in the indictment. Trial was set for Oct. 22 and a detention hearing was scheduled for Tuesday in downtown Los Angeles.
According to the indictment, Sebesta was hired in 2001 as the church’s facilities manager and ultimately joined the church in 2005 and served as its local chairman. In that capacity, he controlled the church’s financial assets and operations, including at least five of its bank accounts, according to the indictment.
LAPPL News Watch
August 27, 2019
The former board chairman for the Fifth Church of Christ, Scientist, Los Angeles, was arrested Monday on suspicion of stealing more than $11 million in church money and using it to purchase a home, a membership at Disneyland’s exclusive dining club and pay other personal expenses.
Charles Thomas Sebesta, 54, of Huntington Beach, is charged in a federal indictment with six counts of wire fraud, five counts of bank fraud and two counts of aggravated identity theft, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
He pleaded not guilty Monday to the charges in the indictment. Trial was set for Oct. 22 and a detention hearing was scheduled for Tuesday in downtown Los Angeles.
According to the indictment, Sebesta was hired in 2001 as the church’s facilities manager and ultimately joined the church in 2005 and served as its local chairman. In that capacity, he controlled the church’s financial assets and operations, including at least five of its bank accounts, according to the indictment.
NEW ALLEGATIONS TIE JOE BIDEN DIRECTLY TO BROTHER JAMES’ QUESTIONABLE PRIVATE DEALINGS
Execs claim Biden’s brother offered Biden’s help promoting business venture
By Ben Schreckinger
Politico
August 26, 2019
Joe Biden’s younger brother told potential business partners that the former vice president would help their firm land business with court systems and would incorporate their health care model into his 2020 presidential campaign, according to new allegations made in a court filing in Tennessee.
The allegations are consistent with others made over the years that relatives of Biden have sought to enrich themselves off of his public service. But they go further, representing the first explicit claims that James Biden offered to have the former vice president use his clout to further private business interests.
The allegations come in sworn declarations made by executives at firms suing Biden’s brother that were filed in federal court on Friday. They do not allege any wrongdoing by Joe Biden or indicate that the former vice president had knowledge of his brother’s alleged promises.
Neither George Mesires, a lawyer for James Biden, nor Andrew Bates, a spokesman for the Biden campaign, immediately responded to a request for comment on the new allegations.
The firms, Azzam Medical Services and Diverse Medical Management, provide rural health care solutions. They sued James Biden and his business partners in June, claiming that, beginning in 2017, the group offered disingenuously to partner with the firms as part of a fraudulent scheme to bankrupt them and steal their business models.
In the Friday filing, three executives at the firms allege new details about their interactions with James Biden.
According to one of the declarations, by Diverse Medical Management’s CEO Michael Frey, James Biden suggested he would enlist his older brother’s help in landing the firm contracts for court-ordered outpatient care.
Frey describes meeting James Biden in January 2018 at a hospital in Pineville, Kentucky, where Frey was asked to make a presentation about his firm’s operating model.
"During my presentation regarding intensive outpatient treatment, James Biden interrupted me to say, ‘My brother needs to have you in every court system in America,’” Frey alleges, adding, “I left the meeting very excited and optimistic about the future of DMM [Diverse Medical Management].”
According to another declaration, by Mohannad Azzam, in the lead-up to Biden’s presidential campaign launch, James Biden promised in a phone call “that the DMM psychiatric care model would be used by Joe Biden as part of his campaign.”
Azzam alleges that in another phone call last fall, “James Biden mentioned that his brother’s connections to labor unions and the Department of Veterans Affairs would help DMM expand its model nationwide.”
Similarly, in a third declaration, Mitchell Cohen, Diverse Medical Management’s former general counsel, alleges that at a dinner outside of Philadelphia around early September 2018, James Biden said that his brother’s connections at the Department of Veterans Affairs could help the firm land VA contracts.
Cohen also alleged that James Biden “stated that he could facilitate contracts between DMM and first responders based on the relationships that his brother had with certain labor unions.”
Those allegations echo the accounts that former executives at Paradigm Global Advisors, a defunct hedge fund firm once owned by James Biden and the former vice president’s son, Hunter Biden, have previously given to POLITICO.
The former Paradigm executives said James and Hunter spoke of their plans to capitalize on Joe Biden’s ties to unions, including firefighters unions, to land investments from union pension funds, although Paradigm did not successfully land such investments.
In a response to the original complaint, James Biden and his associates have denied engaging in any fraudulent scheme.
James “Biden and his wife, Sara, have a long-held and passionate commitment to finding solutions for the improved treatment of both substance abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder and the linkage between them, particularly in rural areas where so many local hospitals are failing,” according to the response.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Joe not only doesn’t know where he is at – Vermont or New Hampshire – but he also has a crooked brother.
By Ben Schreckinger
Politico
August 26, 2019
Joe Biden’s younger brother told potential business partners that the former vice president would help their firm land business with court systems and would incorporate their health care model into his 2020 presidential campaign, according to new allegations made in a court filing in Tennessee.
The allegations are consistent with others made over the years that relatives of Biden have sought to enrich themselves off of his public service. But they go further, representing the first explicit claims that James Biden offered to have the former vice president use his clout to further private business interests.
The allegations come in sworn declarations made by executives at firms suing Biden’s brother that were filed in federal court on Friday. They do not allege any wrongdoing by Joe Biden or indicate that the former vice president had knowledge of his brother’s alleged promises.
Neither George Mesires, a lawyer for James Biden, nor Andrew Bates, a spokesman for the Biden campaign, immediately responded to a request for comment on the new allegations.
The firms, Azzam Medical Services and Diverse Medical Management, provide rural health care solutions. They sued James Biden and his business partners in June, claiming that, beginning in 2017, the group offered disingenuously to partner with the firms as part of a fraudulent scheme to bankrupt them and steal their business models.
In the Friday filing, three executives at the firms allege new details about their interactions with James Biden.
According to one of the declarations, by Diverse Medical Management’s CEO Michael Frey, James Biden suggested he would enlist his older brother’s help in landing the firm contracts for court-ordered outpatient care.
Frey describes meeting James Biden in January 2018 at a hospital in Pineville, Kentucky, where Frey was asked to make a presentation about his firm’s operating model.
"During my presentation regarding intensive outpatient treatment, James Biden interrupted me to say, ‘My brother needs to have you in every court system in America,’” Frey alleges, adding, “I left the meeting very excited and optimistic about the future of DMM [Diverse Medical Management].”
According to another declaration, by Mohannad Azzam, in the lead-up to Biden’s presidential campaign launch, James Biden promised in a phone call “that the DMM psychiatric care model would be used by Joe Biden as part of his campaign.”
Azzam alleges that in another phone call last fall, “James Biden mentioned that his brother’s connections to labor unions and the Department of Veterans Affairs would help DMM expand its model nationwide.”
Similarly, in a third declaration, Mitchell Cohen, Diverse Medical Management’s former general counsel, alleges that at a dinner outside of Philadelphia around early September 2018, James Biden said that his brother’s connections at the Department of Veterans Affairs could help the firm land VA contracts.
Cohen also alleged that James Biden “stated that he could facilitate contracts between DMM and first responders based on the relationships that his brother had with certain labor unions.”
Those allegations echo the accounts that former executives at Paradigm Global Advisors, a defunct hedge fund firm once owned by James Biden and the former vice president’s son, Hunter Biden, have previously given to POLITICO.
The former Paradigm executives said James and Hunter spoke of their plans to capitalize on Joe Biden’s ties to unions, including firefighters unions, to land investments from union pension funds, although Paradigm did not successfully land such investments.
In a response to the original complaint, James Biden and his associates have denied engaging in any fraudulent scheme.
James “Biden and his wife, Sara, have a long-held and passionate commitment to finding solutions for the improved treatment of both substance abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder and the linkage between them, particularly in rural areas where so many local hospitals are failing,” according to the response.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Joe not only doesn’t know where he is at – Vermont or New Hampshire – but he also has a crooked brother.
IF SOMEONE RISES UP TO KILL YOU, KILL HIM FIRST
How Iran and Israel Came Close to War, Again
By Yochanan Visser
Israel Today
August 26, 2019
At 11 o’clock on Saturday night, this reporter sat on the roof terrace of a house in northern Israel when a number of Israeli warplanes flew towards the Lebanese border where they subsequently extinguished their lights before entering the airspace of Lebanon.
A few minutes later, the first reports about loud explosions in the vicinity of the Syrian capital Damascus came in.
It later became clear a base of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps in the Syrian village of Aqraba was the target of the Israeli Air Force (IAF).
One Iranian and two Hezbollah terrorists were reportedly killed in the IAF attack, which was carefully planned and which thwarted a major terrorist attack on civilians in northern Israel.
IDF spokesperson Brigade General Ronen Manelis announced that a number of Iranian unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) loaded with explosives had been destroyed during the attack.
The UAVs would be operated by members of the Quds Force who planned to send them to northern Israel where they should have blown up targets in residential areas with the aim of making as many civilian casualties as possible.
The entire Iranian operation was reportedly overseen by Qassem Soleimani, the cunning commander of the Quds Force and the man responsible for exporting the Islamic Revolution to countries such as Syria and Iraq.
Soleimani, in turn, had carefully prepared the planned attack on Israeli villages and towns and began preparations several months ago.
Manelis said the same type Iranian UAVs are also in use by the Ansar Allah (Houthi) militia in Yemen to carry out attacks on Saudi Arabia.
The Israeli military in northern Israel was subsequently put on high alert out of fear the Iranians might launch a retaliatory attack.
Later on Saturday night reports came in about a new IAF action this time against Hezbollah in Beirut, Lebanon.
The Lebanese army (LAF) announced that two Israeli UAVs had exploded near Hezbollah’s media center and in the Dahiyeh district where the terrorist organization has its headquarters.
According to the LAF and Hezbollah, one of the two Israeli drones was loaded with explosives, probably the one that seriously damaged the Hezbollah media center in the Moawwas district.
The surprise attack on Hezbollah in Beirut was not claimed by the IDF as opposed to the IAF attack on Aqraba which was openly discussed by Manelis, IDF Chief of Staff Kochavi and Prime Minister Netanyahu in his capacity as Defense Minister.
The Israeli silence had most likely something to do with the wish to de-escalate the situation.
“In a major operational effort, we have thwarted an attack against Israel by the Iranian Quds force and Shi’ite militias. I reiterate: Iran has no immunity anywhere. Our forces operate in every sector against Iranian aggression. ‘If someone rises up to kill you, kill him first ‘” PM Netanyahu said in a statement using a well-known Talmudic saying about the right to neutralize an attacker before he can execute his murderous plan.
Minister Tzachi HaNegbi later announced that Iran had attempted to open a third front against Israel from the Syrian Golan Heights.
The Israeli army has carried out hundreds of airstrikes on Iranian and Hezbollah targets in Syria since 2013.
This, however, has not prevented Iran from slowly turning Syria into a proxy state from which Shiite militias, along with Hezbollah and the Quds Brigade will open a new front against Israel in the future.
Two Israeli researchers with extensive military experience recently published a very alarming report on Iran’s activities in Syria.
The two, Colonel (Res.) Jaques Neriah and Brigade General (Ret.) Shimon Shapira wrote that Soleimani chaired a secret meeting in 2013 in Iran which was also attended by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
During that meeting, a plan was discussed to form a 150,000-strong Shiite force which would eventually heat up the border with Israel on the Golan Heights.
Today, this plan has become reality as Hezbollah has taken control of the area along the Israeli border on the Golan Heights. The Hezbollah deployment is contrary to a 2018 agreement between Russia and Israel that provided for the creation of an 80-kilometer-wide buffer zone along the Israeli border where no Iran-related forces would be allowed.
The Quds Force and Hezbollah now have bases in various regions in Syria.
Some of them are located in the Suweida province in southern Syria, which is also referred to as Har HaDruzi (Druze Mountain) in Israel.
In 2018 alone, Hezbollah also recruited 3,500 Arabs in southern Syria for the formation of the new force against Israel
Hezbollah commanders, furthermore, command Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s army units and the Lebanese terror group has established four bases near the Israeli border.
According to Neriah and Shapira, Hezbollah is now also commanding five Shiite militias in southern Syria which are being prepared for war against Israel.
Since the end of 2018, the Quds Brigade and Hezbollah established radar and eavesdropping posts close to the Israeli border and are gathering information about the movements of the IAF on the Golan Heights.
Ethnic cleansing of southern Syria where the armed Sunni uprising against Assad began in 2011 is another means that must allow Iran to open a front against Israel on the Golan Heights.
Sunni Syrian Arabs who fled their homes during the now eight-year war may not return home unless they convert to the Shiite version of Islam adhered to by the Iranian regime.
Iran also makes use of NGOs that provide humanitarian and financial assistance to the poverty-stricken Syrian population in order to expand their influence over the originally Sunni country.
Hezbollah officials, furthermore, use straw men to purchase land near the Israeli border.
Neriah and Shapiro say that Iran, and not Assad runs the state of Syria, and that the Israeli effort to prevent this had partial results only.
Assad is only a pawn in the hands of Tehran, the Israeli experts said.
By Yochanan Visser
Israel Today
August 26, 2019
At 11 o’clock on Saturday night, this reporter sat on the roof terrace of a house in northern Israel when a number of Israeli warplanes flew towards the Lebanese border where they subsequently extinguished their lights before entering the airspace of Lebanon.
A few minutes later, the first reports about loud explosions in the vicinity of the Syrian capital Damascus came in.
It later became clear a base of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps in the Syrian village of Aqraba was the target of the Israeli Air Force (IAF).
One Iranian and two Hezbollah terrorists were reportedly killed in the IAF attack, which was carefully planned and which thwarted a major terrorist attack on civilians in northern Israel.
IDF spokesperson Brigade General Ronen Manelis announced that a number of Iranian unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) loaded with explosives had been destroyed during the attack.
The UAVs would be operated by members of the Quds Force who planned to send them to northern Israel where they should have blown up targets in residential areas with the aim of making as many civilian casualties as possible.
The entire Iranian operation was reportedly overseen by Qassem Soleimani, the cunning commander of the Quds Force and the man responsible for exporting the Islamic Revolution to countries such as Syria and Iraq.
Soleimani, in turn, had carefully prepared the planned attack on Israeli villages and towns and began preparations several months ago.
Manelis said the same type Iranian UAVs are also in use by the Ansar Allah (Houthi) militia in Yemen to carry out attacks on Saudi Arabia.
The Israeli military in northern Israel was subsequently put on high alert out of fear the Iranians might launch a retaliatory attack.
Later on Saturday night reports came in about a new IAF action this time against Hezbollah in Beirut, Lebanon.
The Lebanese army (LAF) announced that two Israeli UAVs had exploded near Hezbollah’s media center and in the Dahiyeh district where the terrorist organization has its headquarters.
According to the LAF and Hezbollah, one of the two Israeli drones was loaded with explosives, probably the one that seriously damaged the Hezbollah media center in the Moawwas district.
The surprise attack on Hezbollah in Beirut was not claimed by the IDF as opposed to the IAF attack on Aqraba which was openly discussed by Manelis, IDF Chief of Staff Kochavi and Prime Minister Netanyahu in his capacity as Defense Minister.
The Israeli silence had most likely something to do with the wish to de-escalate the situation.
“In a major operational effort, we have thwarted an attack against Israel by the Iranian Quds force and Shi’ite militias. I reiterate: Iran has no immunity anywhere. Our forces operate in every sector against Iranian aggression. ‘If someone rises up to kill you, kill him first ‘” PM Netanyahu said in a statement using a well-known Talmudic saying about the right to neutralize an attacker before he can execute his murderous plan.
Minister Tzachi HaNegbi later announced that Iran had attempted to open a third front against Israel from the Syrian Golan Heights.
The Israeli army has carried out hundreds of airstrikes on Iranian and Hezbollah targets in Syria since 2013.
This, however, has not prevented Iran from slowly turning Syria into a proxy state from which Shiite militias, along with Hezbollah and the Quds Brigade will open a new front against Israel in the future.
Two Israeli researchers with extensive military experience recently published a very alarming report on Iran’s activities in Syria.
The two, Colonel (Res.) Jaques Neriah and Brigade General (Ret.) Shimon Shapira wrote that Soleimani chaired a secret meeting in 2013 in Iran which was also attended by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
During that meeting, a plan was discussed to form a 150,000-strong Shiite force which would eventually heat up the border with Israel on the Golan Heights.
Today, this plan has become reality as Hezbollah has taken control of the area along the Israeli border on the Golan Heights. The Hezbollah deployment is contrary to a 2018 agreement between Russia and Israel that provided for the creation of an 80-kilometer-wide buffer zone along the Israeli border where no Iran-related forces would be allowed.
The Quds Force and Hezbollah now have bases in various regions in Syria.
Some of them are located in the Suweida province in southern Syria, which is also referred to as Har HaDruzi (Druze Mountain) in Israel.
In 2018 alone, Hezbollah also recruited 3,500 Arabs in southern Syria for the formation of the new force against Israel
Hezbollah commanders, furthermore, command Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s army units and the Lebanese terror group has established four bases near the Israeli border.
According to Neriah and Shapira, Hezbollah is now also commanding five Shiite militias in southern Syria which are being prepared for war against Israel.
Since the end of 2018, the Quds Brigade and Hezbollah established radar and eavesdropping posts close to the Israeli border and are gathering information about the movements of the IAF on the Golan Heights.
Ethnic cleansing of southern Syria where the armed Sunni uprising against Assad began in 2011 is another means that must allow Iran to open a front against Israel on the Golan Heights.
Sunni Syrian Arabs who fled their homes during the now eight-year war may not return home unless they convert to the Shiite version of Islam adhered to by the Iranian regime.
Iran also makes use of NGOs that provide humanitarian and financial assistance to the poverty-stricken Syrian population in order to expand their influence over the originally Sunni country.
Hezbollah officials, furthermore, use straw men to purchase land near the Israeli border.
Neriah and Shapiro say that Iran, and not Assad runs the state of Syria, and that the Israeli effort to prevent this had partial results only.
Assad is only a pawn in the hands of Tehran, the Israeli experts said.
Tuesday, August 27, 2019
ANOTHER WOLF HOWLS FOR THE BLOOD OF NYPD COPS WHO ATTEMPTED TO ARREST ERIC GARNER
De Blasio heckled about Eric Garner during a live CNN town hall even though the mayor had called for and got Officer Pantaleo’s scalp
By Marisa Schultz and Julia Marsh
New York Post
August 26, 2019
Mayor Bill de Blasio was heckled during a CNN town hall event Sunday when a protester demanded action on the “other officers” involved in the arrest of Eric Garner.
“You waited five years and you did nothing,” activist Julianne Hoffenberg shouted while the mayor was speaking about last week’s firing of NYPD cop Daniel Pantaleo.
Hoffenberg mentioned other officers who attempted to detain Garner during the July 2014 incident — calling the tragic event a “cover-up.”
The cops — Lt. Christopher Bannon and patrol officers Mark Ramos, Craig Furlani and Justin Damico — have not been disciplined for their roles in the arrest.
Police Commissioner James O’Neill said on Monday that Pantaleo “can no longer effectively serve as a New York City police officer,” ending his career at the NYPD.
O’Neill was following up on a recommendation by the judge who presided over the officer’s departmental trial.
NYPD Sgt. Kizzy Adonis, who was the supervisor at the time of the event, was required last week to forfeit 20 vacation days as a disciplinary action for the arrest.
By Marisa Schultz and Julia Marsh
New York Post
August 26, 2019
Mayor Bill de Blasio was heckled during a CNN town hall event Sunday when a protester demanded action on the “other officers” involved in the arrest of Eric Garner.
“You waited five years and you did nothing,” activist Julianne Hoffenberg shouted while the mayor was speaking about last week’s firing of NYPD cop Daniel Pantaleo.
Hoffenberg mentioned other officers who attempted to detain Garner during the July 2014 incident — calling the tragic event a “cover-up.”
The cops — Lt. Christopher Bannon and patrol officers Mark Ramos, Craig Furlani and Justin Damico — have not been disciplined for their roles in the arrest.
Police Commissioner James O’Neill said on Monday that Pantaleo “can no longer effectively serve as a New York City police officer,” ending his career at the NYPD.
O’Neill was following up on a recommendation by the judge who presided over the officer’s departmental trial.
NYPD Sgt. Kizzy Adonis, who was the supervisor at the time of the event, was required last week to forfeit 20 vacation days as a disciplinary action for the arrest.
CRAZY BERNIE AND POCAHONTAS IN A THREE-WAY WITH SENILE JOE
No, Not That Kind. It's A Three Way Tie For King Of The Dumpster Fire
by Bob Walsh
One major poll reported that the three top clowns in the Democrap race for El Presidente are in what is for all practical purposes a dead heat, at 20% each more or less. If the talking heads are to believed (a dubious pastime at best) the actual power structure of the Democrap party may be having serious doubts about Senile Joe the hair-sniffer's physical and / or mental ability to get to the finish line.
Boy, how fucked up do things have to be when Pocahontas Warren is looking like having a quasi-realistic chance of grabbing the brass ring? If it wasn't a little bit scary it would be a lot funny.
by Bob Walsh
One major poll reported that the three top clowns in the Democrap race for El Presidente are in what is for all practical purposes a dead heat, at 20% each more or less. If the talking heads are to believed (a dubious pastime at best) the actual power structure of the Democrap party may be having serious doubts about Senile Joe the hair-sniffer's physical and / or mental ability to get to the finish line.
Boy, how fucked up do things have to be when Pocahontas Warren is looking like having a quasi-realistic chance of grabbing the brass ring? If it wasn't a little bit scary it would be a lot funny.
MEMBERS OF CONGRESS ARE ‘PROBABLY THE BIGGEST INSTIGATORS OF HATE AND RACISM AND VIOLENCE IN THE COUNTRY RIGHT NOW’
Jim DeMint: Mass shootings driven more by 'culture' than lack of gun control, can't be solved by Congress
By Nick Givas
Fox News
August 25, 2019
Following increased calls for gun control after the shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, former U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint said Sunday that gun violence is a cultural issue that cannot be solved through federal regulation and legislation.
"It's more symptomatic of a decline in our culture -- I'm not sure any new laws are going to help that," DeMint said on "America's News HQ."
"Congress could do more than anything else by setting a better example of how to treat people... They're probably the biggest instigators of hate and racism and violence in the country right now," he continued. "So, they need to look inward at just how they behave."
DeMint expressed skepticism about red-flag laws that would allow for the temporary suspension of certain people's Second Amendment rights and said the issue of gun violence remained at the heart of American culture.
"More federal laws are very unlikely to help... Red flag laws, 15 states already have them... and we see that they’re not working," he said. "They actually give someone who has a grudge against you the ability to send police to your house, to take your guns away, [and] drag you into court."
DeMint also commented on the rallying cry to ban "weapons of war" and said if guns were outlawed, mentally unstable people would still find ways to forge weapons and hurt innocent bystanders.
"We don’t have [any] indication that trying to pass laws to keep certain types of guns away from people -- they’ll just move to another type of gun, and we've seen that," he said.
DeMint added, "If they can’t get a gun, they'll use a knife -- they'll create bombs... as long as you’re trying to look at federal laws that target everybody, you generally miss the criminals... I want to stop this, but I don’t see any evidence that federal laws can do it."
EDITOR’S NOTE: Earlier this month, Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., said there is a political movement brewing in the United States to try and overturn the Second Amendment in its entirety, and do away with a citizen's right to keep and bear arms.
By Nick Givas
Fox News
August 25, 2019
Following increased calls for gun control after the shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, former U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint said Sunday that gun violence is a cultural issue that cannot be solved through federal regulation and legislation.
"It's more symptomatic of a decline in our culture -- I'm not sure any new laws are going to help that," DeMint said on "America's News HQ."
"Congress could do more than anything else by setting a better example of how to treat people... They're probably the biggest instigators of hate and racism and violence in the country right now," he continued. "So, they need to look inward at just how they behave."
DeMint expressed skepticism about red-flag laws that would allow for the temporary suspension of certain people's Second Amendment rights and said the issue of gun violence remained at the heart of American culture.
"More federal laws are very unlikely to help... Red flag laws, 15 states already have them... and we see that they’re not working," he said. "They actually give someone who has a grudge against you the ability to send police to your house, to take your guns away, [and] drag you into court."
DeMint also commented on the rallying cry to ban "weapons of war" and said if guns were outlawed, mentally unstable people would still find ways to forge weapons and hurt innocent bystanders.
"We don’t have [any] indication that trying to pass laws to keep certain types of guns away from people -- they’ll just move to another type of gun, and we've seen that," he said.
DeMint added, "If they can’t get a gun, they'll use a knife -- they'll create bombs... as long as you’re trying to look at federal laws that target everybody, you generally miss the criminals... I want to stop this, but I don’t see any evidence that federal laws can do it."
EDITOR’S NOTE: Earlier this month, Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., said there is a political movement brewing in the United States to try and overturn the Second Amendment in its entirety, and do away with a citizen's right to keep and bear arms.
‘THE NEW YORK TIMES HAS BECOME A CESS-PIT OF HATRED AND BIGOTRY’ … DR. SEBASTIAN GORKA
New York Times editor deletes and apologizes for past 'offensive' tweets
By Joe Concha
The Hill
August 22, 2019
A senior editor at the New York Times apologized Thursday for "offensive" tweets from nearly a decade ago, as one Republican lawmaker called for his firing.
“I have deleted tweets from a decade ago that are offensive. I am deeply sorry,” New York politics desk editor Tom Wright-Piersanti said on Twitter after Breitbart News drew attention to the tweets.
The tweets, which were deleted late Wednesday, include one from Jan. 1, 2010, in which Wright-Piersanti referred to a "Crappy Jew Year."
“I was going to say ‘Crappy Jew Year,’ but one of my resolutions is to be less anti-Semitic. So… HAPPY Jew Year. You Jews," he wrote in one tweet.
Another, from December 2009, referred to the “Jew-police.”
“We are aware of these tweets, which are a clear violation of our standards. We are reviewing next steps," The New York Times said in a statement.
Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.), who is Jewish, has called on Wright-Piersanti to be fired.
“An editor from the New York Times is scrubbing his [Twitter] account, this guy Tom Wright-Piersanti, because he was self-describing himself as an anti-Semite and he was going after Jews and others,” Zeldin said on Fox News Thursday morning before saying he “should be fired.”
Wright-Piersanti also deleted other offensive tweets.
“There are four indian guys with mohawks in this one class, and each one is a douche in his own awful way. I hate mohawk Indians,” reads one tweet dated Dec. 8, 2009.
“I don’t hate Mohawk Indians, though. I love those guys. I just hate Indians with mohawks. Different indians, different mohawks,” he wrote in another tweet that same day.
The Hill has reached out to Wright-Piersanti for comment.
Earlier this month the Times demoted its deputy Washington editor, Jonathan Weisman, over a pair of controversial tweets, removing him as a congressional editor and saying he will no longer be active on social media.
EDITOR’S NOTE: In 2014, Sarah Jeong, a Korean-American member of the editorial board at The New York Times, tweeted “Dumbass fucking white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.”
Dr. Sebastian Gorka, a former White House adviser who currently hosts a nationally syndicated radio program, told Breitbart News that “the New York Times has become a cess-pit of hatred and bigotry.”
By Joe Concha
The Hill
August 22, 2019
A senior editor at the New York Times apologized Thursday for "offensive" tweets from nearly a decade ago, as one Republican lawmaker called for his firing.
“I have deleted tweets from a decade ago that are offensive. I am deeply sorry,” New York politics desk editor Tom Wright-Piersanti said on Twitter after Breitbart News drew attention to the tweets.
The tweets, which were deleted late Wednesday, include one from Jan. 1, 2010, in which Wright-Piersanti referred to a "Crappy Jew Year."
“I was going to say ‘Crappy Jew Year,’ but one of my resolutions is to be less anti-Semitic. So… HAPPY Jew Year. You Jews," he wrote in one tweet.
Another, from December 2009, referred to the “Jew-police.”
“We are aware of these tweets, which are a clear violation of our standards. We are reviewing next steps," The New York Times said in a statement.
Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.), who is Jewish, has called on Wright-Piersanti to be fired.
“An editor from the New York Times is scrubbing his [Twitter] account, this guy Tom Wright-Piersanti, because he was self-describing himself as an anti-Semite and he was going after Jews and others,” Zeldin said on Fox News Thursday morning before saying he “should be fired.”
Wright-Piersanti also deleted other offensive tweets.
“There are four indian guys with mohawks in this one class, and each one is a douche in his own awful way. I hate mohawk Indians,” reads one tweet dated Dec. 8, 2009.
“I don’t hate Mohawk Indians, though. I love those guys. I just hate Indians with mohawks. Different indians, different mohawks,” he wrote in another tweet that same day.
The Hill has reached out to Wright-Piersanti for comment.
Earlier this month the Times demoted its deputy Washington editor, Jonathan Weisman, over a pair of controversial tweets, removing him as a congressional editor and saying he will no longer be active on social media.
EDITOR’S NOTE: In 2014, Sarah Jeong, a Korean-American member of the editorial board at The New York Times, tweeted “Dumbass fucking white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.”
Dr. Sebastian Gorka, a former White House adviser who currently hosts a nationally syndicated radio program, told Breitbart News that “the New York Times has become a cess-pit of hatred and bigotry.”
THE LAND OF ISRAEL: GOD’S PROMISE TO ABRAHAM AND HIS DESCENDANTS WAS FOR ALL TIME
As U.S. Jews Cool To Israel, Evangelicals Flock There As Tourists
By Tom Gjelten
NPR
August 25, 2019
President Trump's evident desire to identify who's most "loyal" to Israel has a clear winner: U.S. evangelicals.
Not only do they outpace U.S. Jews in their support for policies that favor the Israeli government, but U.S. evangelicals have also become the fastest-growing sector of the Israeli tourism market. The developments may even be related.
"I'd say close to 100% of our travelers come back extremely pro-Israel in their political views," says Andy Cook, a pastor who leads evangelical tours of the Holy Land twice a year.
Back to its roots
Tourist travel to Israel is growing about 10% a year, according to Eyal Carlin, the incoming North America director of the Israeli Tourism Ministry, with evangelical Christians a growing share of U.S. visitors.
"More and more companies are entering each year with faith-based or evangelical packages," Carlin says. "The evangelical world is going back to its roots."
The trend coincides with growing evangelical support for Trump's embrace of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his hard-line policies, even as U.S. Jews have grown more critical.
A recent Pew Research Center survey found that 42% of U.S. Jews say Trump "favors the Israelis too much," while just 15% of U.S. evangelicals agreed with that statement.
Evangelical leaders of the Christian Zionism movement, from Jerry Falwell Sr. to John Hagee, have attributed their fervent support for the state of Israel to their own Holy Land travel, according to Daniel Hummel, author of Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and U.S.-Israeli Relations.
"They say visiting Israel was a key part of their political awakening," Hummel says, "and this goes down to the rank-and-file people in their organizations."
A prime Israeli selling point for evangelical tourism is the opportunity "to walk where Jesus walked." The highlight for Robert Bowman, who visited Israel on an evangelical tour in 2017, was a visit to the dungeons in Jerusalem where Jesus is said to have been imprisoned while he awaited crucifixion.
"We saw the rooms where he was flogged, and it was very emotional for us," Bowman says. "We were all in tears, thinking about what the Lord Jesus went through and seeing the actual place where this happened."
Bowman, who pastors a small church in Riverside, Calif., said the trip made the Bible come newly alive for him. "I read about it all my life, and then I go there and it's, 'Oh, this is what it means!' " he says. "You can see it, which you can't do when you just read it, except in your imagination."
For Sharon Litton of Shreveport, La., the most memorable moment of her 2018 tour was the opportunity to be rebaptized by immersion in the Jordan River, where Jesus himself is said to have been baptized.
"When that was offered to us, something inside of me said, 'You got to go,' " she says. "It was just so dear to me, to be able to get in the water and be baptized, in the same water that Jesus was. It was incredible."
Controlled and curated
The Holy Land tours may have the effect of deepening the visitors' Christian faith, according to evangelical-tour leader Cook, who says he has taken 22 trips to Israel.
"The location of all those Bible stories is always right where they're supposed to be," he says. "When people come home, they want to read more of their Bible. They've seen the locations, and they see the stories in the Bible as what they are, as history."
It's not just the New Testament stories that come alive for the evangelical visitors. Many want to see the places mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, and tour packages that are custom designed for evangelicals now include a larger share of those sites.
Israeli authorities are especially eager to accommodate this interest in ancient Israel, according to Hummel, knowing that it supports their territorial claims.
"Most of these tours are very highly controlled and curated to convey a particular sense of Israel," Hummel says, "and that's to emphasize the Jewishness of the land, that this is the homeland of the Jewish people, that the history that matters is the history that's in the Bible."
Hummel, who spent a year in Israel researching his book and now teaches in the history department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says the tours designed for evangelicals generally have minimal contact with Palestinians, even with Palestinian Christians. Most tours include a stop in Bethlehem, which is in Palestinian-controlled territory, but it's only a day trip.
The tours that Cook leads also include a stop in Jericho, also in a Palestinian area, but Cook acknowledges that outreach to Arab Christians is not a high priority
"You may be talking about Orthodox Christians, or Catholics, or Christians for whom it's a national identity," he says. "It's so, so different. At times it does not even appear to be the Christianity we would recognize at home."
Not surprisingly, many evangelical tourists return to the United States with greater sympathy for Israelis in their conflict with Palestinians.
"I tend not to trumpet the political part of the trip. That's not our purpose," Cook says. "But it's invariable that people are going to come away feeling something. When you're in the land and you hear the stories, it's hard not to admire the fact that this country has survived, surrounded by so many people that would not like them to survive."
Only a small percentage of U.S. evangelicals have traveled to Israel, but the views of those who make the trip apparently resonate with evangelicals at large. A 2017 survey of evangelicals by LifeWay Research found that 80% believe that "God's promise [of land] to Abraham and his descendants was for all time." By a 46% to 19% margin, the surveyed evangelicals disagreed with the notion that Palestinians have any such "historic right."
Notably, LifeWay found that 80% of the surveyed evangelicals believe that the modern rebirth of Israel and the return of millions of Jews to that land are a fulfillment of Bible prophecy and show "we are getting closer to the return of Jesus Christ." Some evangelicals say that prophecy includes a belief in a final battle of Armageddon that concludes with Jews accepting Jesus Christ as their savior.
Notwithstanding such apocalyptic evangelical visions, Israeli authorities have welcomed evangelical tourism.
"There is definitely an understanding on the Israeli government side that tourism is a key way to connect with American evangelicals," says Hummel, "and a lot of the pro-Israel groups in the United States see tourism as a key way to shape evangelical attitudes toward Israel."
As evangelical attitudes toward Israel grow increasingly positive, the views of U.S. Jews are cooling. Recent surveys by the American Jewish Committee showed a decline in the share of U.S. Jews who say that "caring about Israel is a very important part of my being a Jew," down from 70% in 2018 to 62% in 2019.
Trump may argue that U.S. Jews are "disloyal" to Israel because more than 70% generally vote for Democrats and rate his presidency unfavorably in spite of his strong pro-Israel policies, but he can count on support for those policies among evangelical voters.
Christians United for Israel, an evangelical group, now claims to have 7 million members. That's about the size of the entire U.S. Jewish population.
By Tom Gjelten
NPR
August 25, 2019
President Trump's evident desire to identify who's most "loyal" to Israel has a clear winner: U.S. evangelicals.
Not only do they outpace U.S. Jews in their support for policies that favor the Israeli government, but U.S. evangelicals have also become the fastest-growing sector of the Israeli tourism market. The developments may even be related.
"I'd say close to 100% of our travelers come back extremely pro-Israel in their political views," says Andy Cook, a pastor who leads evangelical tours of the Holy Land twice a year.
Back to its roots
Tourist travel to Israel is growing about 10% a year, according to Eyal Carlin, the incoming North America director of the Israeli Tourism Ministry, with evangelical Christians a growing share of U.S. visitors.
"More and more companies are entering each year with faith-based or evangelical packages," Carlin says. "The evangelical world is going back to its roots."
The trend coincides with growing evangelical support for Trump's embrace of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his hard-line policies, even as U.S. Jews have grown more critical.
A recent Pew Research Center survey found that 42% of U.S. Jews say Trump "favors the Israelis too much," while just 15% of U.S. evangelicals agreed with that statement.
Evangelical leaders of the Christian Zionism movement, from Jerry Falwell Sr. to John Hagee, have attributed their fervent support for the state of Israel to their own Holy Land travel, according to Daniel Hummel, author of Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and U.S.-Israeli Relations.
"They say visiting Israel was a key part of their political awakening," Hummel says, "and this goes down to the rank-and-file people in their organizations."
A prime Israeli selling point for evangelical tourism is the opportunity "to walk where Jesus walked." The highlight for Robert Bowman, who visited Israel on an evangelical tour in 2017, was a visit to the dungeons in Jerusalem where Jesus is said to have been imprisoned while he awaited crucifixion.
"We saw the rooms where he was flogged, and it was very emotional for us," Bowman says. "We were all in tears, thinking about what the Lord Jesus went through and seeing the actual place where this happened."
Bowman, who pastors a small church in Riverside, Calif., said the trip made the Bible come newly alive for him. "I read about it all my life, and then I go there and it's, 'Oh, this is what it means!' " he says. "You can see it, which you can't do when you just read it, except in your imagination."
For Sharon Litton of Shreveport, La., the most memorable moment of her 2018 tour was the opportunity to be rebaptized by immersion in the Jordan River, where Jesus himself is said to have been baptized.
"When that was offered to us, something inside of me said, 'You got to go,' " she says. "It was just so dear to me, to be able to get in the water and be baptized, in the same water that Jesus was. It was incredible."
Controlled and curated
The Holy Land tours may have the effect of deepening the visitors' Christian faith, according to evangelical-tour leader Cook, who says he has taken 22 trips to Israel.
"The location of all those Bible stories is always right where they're supposed to be," he says. "When people come home, they want to read more of their Bible. They've seen the locations, and they see the stories in the Bible as what they are, as history."
It's not just the New Testament stories that come alive for the evangelical visitors. Many want to see the places mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, and tour packages that are custom designed for evangelicals now include a larger share of those sites.
Israeli authorities are especially eager to accommodate this interest in ancient Israel, according to Hummel, knowing that it supports their territorial claims.
"Most of these tours are very highly controlled and curated to convey a particular sense of Israel," Hummel says, "and that's to emphasize the Jewishness of the land, that this is the homeland of the Jewish people, that the history that matters is the history that's in the Bible."
Hummel, who spent a year in Israel researching his book and now teaches in the history department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says the tours designed for evangelicals generally have minimal contact with Palestinians, even with Palestinian Christians. Most tours include a stop in Bethlehem, which is in Palestinian-controlled territory, but it's only a day trip.
The tours that Cook leads also include a stop in Jericho, also in a Palestinian area, but Cook acknowledges that outreach to Arab Christians is not a high priority
"You may be talking about Orthodox Christians, or Catholics, or Christians for whom it's a national identity," he says. "It's so, so different. At times it does not even appear to be the Christianity we would recognize at home."
Not surprisingly, many evangelical tourists return to the United States with greater sympathy for Israelis in their conflict with Palestinians.
"I tend not to trumpet the political part of the trip. That's not our purpose," Cook says. "But it's invariable that people are going to come away feeling something. When you're in the land and you hear the stories, it's hard not to admire the fact that this country has survived, surrounded by so many people that would not like them to survive."
Only a small percentage of U.S. evangelicals have traveled to Israel, but the views of those who make the trip apparently resonate with evangelicals at large. A 2017 survey of evangelicals by LifeWay Research found that 80% believe that "God's promise [of land] to Abraham and his descendants was for all time." By a 46% to 19% margin, the surveyed evangelicals disagreed with the notion that Palestinians have any such "historic right."
Notably, LifeWay found that 80% of the surveyed evangelicals believe that the modern rebirth of Israel and the return of millions of Jews to that land are a fulfillment of Bible prophecy and show "we are getting closer to the return of Jesus Christ." Some evangelicals say that prophecy includes a belief in a final battle of Armageddon that concludes with Jews accepting Jesus Christ as their savior.
Notwithstanding such apocalyptic evangelical visions, Israeli authorities have welcomed evangelical tourism.
"There is definitely an understanding on the Israeli government side that tourism is a key way to connect with American evangelicals," says Hummel, "and a lot of the pro-Israel groups in the United States see tourism as a key way to shape evangelical attitudes toward Israel."
As evangelical attitudes toward Israel grow increasingly positive, the views of U.S. Jews are cooling. Recent surveys by the American Jewish Committee showed a decline in the share of U.S. Jews who say that "caring about Israel is a very important part of my being a Jew," down from 70% in 2018 to 62% in 2019.
Trump may argue that U.S. Jews are "disloyal" to Israel because more than 70% generally vote for Democrats and rate his presidency unfavorably in spite of his strong pro-Israel policies, but he can count on support for those policies among evangelical voters.
Christians United for Israel, an evangelical group, now claims to have 7 million members. That's about the size of the entire U.S. Jewish population.
LEBANESE PRESIDENT BELIEVES HE CAN MAKE ISRAELIS SHAKE IN THEIR BOOTS
Israeli Actions in Lebanon a ‘Declaration of War,’ President Aoun Says
by Benjamin Kerstein
The Algemeiner
August 26, 2019
Lebanese President Michel Aoun on Monday called recent Israeli actions in his country’s territory “a declaration of war.”
On Sunday, a drone crashed in a Hezbollah stronghold in southern Beirut.
Hezbollah claimed the drone was Israeli, though this has not been confirmed.
The Israeli news site Walla reported that Aoun, seen as an ally of Iran-backed Hezbollah, met with the UN representative in Lebanon and called the drone incident an “Israeli attack” and a “declaration of war.”
Another strike in Lebanon took place early Monday morning, targeting the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley.
Israel refused to comment on whether it was responsible for the incident, which reportedly involved the use of drones.
The PFLP-GC, however, blamed Israel for the attack, saying, “The new aggression is within the framework of the escalating Zionist strike against the axis of resistance and forces led by Syria, Hezbollah, and the Popular Front.”
The occurrence came after a violent two days to Israel’s north, which also included an IDF strike in Syria that thwarted a Hezbollah-Iran attempt to target northern Israel with explosive drones.
Walla reported that, in the wake of the attacks, the IDF has sent reinforcements to the northern border in case of retaliatory attacks.
by Benjamin Kerstein
The Algemeiner
August 26, 2019
Lebanese President Michel Aoun on Monday called recent Israeli actions in his country’s territory “a declaration of war.”
On Sunday, a drone crashed in a Hezbollah stronghold in southern Beirut.
Hezbollah claimed the drone was Israeli, though this has not been confirmed.
The Israeli news site Walla reported that Aoun, seen as an ally of Iran-backed Hezbollah, met with the UN representative in Lebanon and called the drone incident an “Israeli attack” and a “declaration of war.”
Another strike in Lebanon took place early Monday morning, targeting the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley.
Israel refused to comment on whether it was responsible for the incident, which reportedly involved the use of drones.
The PFLP-GC, however, blamed Israel for the attack, saying, “The new aggression is within the framework of the escalating Zionist strike against the axis of resistance and forces led by Syria, Hezbollah, and the Popular Front.”
The occurrence came after a violent two days to Israel’s north, which also included an IDF strike in Syria that thwarted a Hezbollah-Iran attempt to target northern Israel with explosive drones.
Walla reported that, in the wake of the attacks, the IDF has sent reinforcements to the northern border in case of retaliatory attacks.
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