DEBKA

Oct 29, 2019 @ 7:38

Danon tells Security Council that Ankara is persecuting Kurds in Turkey and sending troops ‘to massacre Kurdish people in Syria as well’

By AGENCIES and TOI STAFF

Israel’s Ambassador Danny Danon speaks in the Security Council at United Nations headquarters, Monday, April 29, 2019. (AP/Richard Drew)

Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations on Monday blasted Turkey’s invasion of Syria, and accused Ankara of promoting anti-Semitism and the ethnic cleansing of Kurds.

Danny Danon told the Security Council’s monthly Middle East meeting that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan “has been destabilizing the region through violence and supporting terror organizations,” adding that Turkey’s “shocking” incursion into Syria had come as no surprise.

Once-warm relations between Israel and Turkey have greatly deteriorated since Erdogan came to power. The Islamist leader is a vocal critic of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians, particularly in Gaza, and he has good relations with the territory’s terrorist Hamas rulers.
Read more…

Pentagon chief says that he has seen no sign of Syrian or Russian forces challenging U.S. control of Syrian oil fields

The Associated Press and Haaretz Oct 29, 2019

Pivoting from the dramatic killing of the Islamic State’s leader, the Pentagon is increasing U.S. efforts to protect Syria’s oil fields from the extremist group as well as from Syria itself and the country’s Russian allies. It’s a new high-stakes mission even as American troops are withdrawn from other parts of the country.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper says the military’s oil field mission also will ensure income for Syrian Kurds who are counted on by Washington to continue guarding Islamic State prisoners and helping American forces combat remnants of the group — even as President Donald Trump continues to insist all U.S. troops will come home.

Read more…

T. Belman.  Trump has always said that we must defeat “the Islamists and their ideology”.  He repeated this refrain in 2017 when speaking to a conference of Islamic countries in Riyadh at which timethe Islamic countries committed themselves to it.

JIHAD WATCH

[..]

The problem is, neither the President nor the Congressman (nor most other politicians and pundits, for that matter) is looking for the nest from which the hornets continue to be hatched and sent. Until the nest is found and destroyed, the incursions will continue. What Western leaders desperately need to understand is that ISIS, Boko Haram, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and its brood of viper organizations, al-Qaeda, AQAP, al-Shabaab, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the IRGC, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Hizb-ut-Tahrir, Abu Sayyaf and scores of other Muslim jihadi groups are only symptoms, not the source. They are merely angry hornets, looking for whomever they can sting, but destroying them will not rid the world of Islamic terrorism. To do that, we must destroy the nest which endlessly produces them.

Read more…

“Just when you thought Bernie Sanders couldn’t get any more radical, he outdid himself,” Nikki Haley, former US ambassador to the UN, tweeted on Monday. Sanders, who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, said to a J Street audience: “It is not anti-Semitism to say the Netanyahu government has been racist. That’s a fact.” He suggested that the US aid to Israel be redirected to Gaza instead. Halley shot back: “He wants the money we give to Israel to defend itself from terrorists and give it to Gaza, which is run by terrorists. Unreal. Why isn’t every other Dem presidential candidate saying he’s wrong?”

Winning 23.4 percent of the vote in Sunday’s parliamentary election, the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany, or AfD party — propelled by male voters and those under the age of 60 — is now the second strongest party in the former east German state of Thuringia.

DW looks at the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, the third-largest group in the Bundestag. Its main appeal is its opposition to Angela Merkel’s welcoming policy toward migrants.

From anti-EU to anti-immigration

When it was formed in 2013, the AfD’s main thrust was its opposition to bailouts of indebted European Union member states like Greece. But over time, it has become, first and foremost, an anti-immigration party.

The AfD completely rejects Chancellor Angela Merkel’s welcoming policy toward refugees, particularly from the Arab world, which saw more than 1.5 million migrants arrive in Germany since 2015. The party wants to change Germany’s constitution to get rid of the right to an individual hearing in asylum cases and would seek to immediately deport all those whose applications to remain in Germany are rejected, regardless of whether the countries to which deportees are sent back are safe or not. It also advocates foreigners who commit crimes in Germany being sentenced to prisons outside the country and treating minors as young as 12 as adults for certain offenses.
Read more…

President Trump should immediately convene an emergency NATO Ministers meeting.

By Mark Langfan, INN

With President Donald Trump as our Intelligence analyst, who needs all the hundreds if not thousands of CIA and Military Intelligence personnel? President Trump is a one-man real-time military intelligence laboratory.

If not for Trump’s move, think how many conferences would have taken place, how many secret and totally misguided intelligence briefs would have been written on whether Turkey had fully evolved into an Islamic caliphate and an implacable arch-enemy of NATO. Turkey is a member of NATO and therefore supposed to be an ally, not a genocidal Islamic regime.

Strategic practical businessman Donald Trump cuts through all the fog of US and Turkish military alliance inertia, and gives Turkey’s would-be “Caliph” Erdogan all the rope he needs to hang himself, exposing Turkey for what that country has become – the principal enemy of NATO at the gates of Europe.
Read more…

By Abraham H. Miller, AMERICAN THINKER

The quip among Jewish Republicans about President Obama’s trafficking with anti-Semites was that he was so popular with American Jews that had he nuked Tel Aviv, he would have lost no more than 30% of the Jewish vote.

The affinity for American Jews for the Democrat Party has long been a political curiosity. The distinguished essayist Milton Himmelfarb observed that in America, Jews had attained the socioeconomic status of Episcopalians, but for some reason they continued to vote like Puerto Ricans.

Nothing seems to dissolve the sinew that ties Jews to the Democrats. President Obama’s association with the anti-Semitic Rev. Jeremiah Wright brought a collective yawn. Photos of Barrack Obama embracing the Rev. Louis Farrakhan, who compared Jews to termites, did not concern them.
Read more…

By Behnam Ben Taleblu, FDD  Thursday, 10 October 2019

Protesters in Iraq are fighting against government corruption and Iran’s malign influence, which is built on hard power, not public good will. Tehran has a lot to lose.

“Iran and Iraq are two nations whose hearts & souls are tied together,” tweeted Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on Sunday, as protests raged in neighboring Iraq. Alleging that the protests are a foreign plot, Khamenei continued, “Enemies seek to sow discord but they’ve failed & their conspiracy won’t be effective.”

Khamenei’s response is proof of panic. Iraq is a pivotal part of Iran’s political project in the Middle East, and a friendly government in Baghdad cannot afford to be lost.

Read more…

Nationwide demonstrations continue after scores of Iraqis were killed in clashes with security forces over two days.

AL JAZEERA

Mon Oct 28 2019 02:30:23
The protests are a continuation of the economically driven demonstrations that began in early October [Murtadha Sudani/Anadolu]

In the maelstrom of Trump-hatred, the pundits have focused on the 2% negative and ignored the 98% positive effects of Trump’s withdrawal.

By Mark Langfan, INN

All the Trump-Haters, and not a few Trump supporters, have gone completely hysterical over President Trump’s decision to have  American forces retreat from Northern Syria.  In reality, Pres. Trump’s Syria withdrawal, and its likely concomitant redeployment to western Iraq, is a genius-level strategic move that will, in the short to medium term, stabilize Syria, and present Iran with great difficulties.

In the maelstrom of Trump-hatred, the pundits have focused on the 2% negative and ignored the 98% positive effects of Trump’s withdrawal. In the big picture of Syria, however, one has to take three steps back and realize that in Syria we are only in Act 2 of a 5 act play and there is no question that Trump’s move has achieved a major win for America in the entire Syrian drama.

The mother of all the Syrian myths is that Trump has allowed “Assad to win.”  It was President Obama who almost ensured an Assad “win” in the medium term when he reneged on his “red line” and openly invited Putin and Russia into Syria.  Once America had sanctioned Russia’s protection of Assad, how was America going to then get rid of Assad without starting a war with Russia? And once Putin became the protector of Assad, Putin became the protector of the genocidal murderer of hundreds of thousands of Sunni Arabs.
Read more…

By Jim Hanson, FOX NEWS

T. Belman. “Hate speech” was criminalized many years ago in Canada where it includes an incitement to violence. Absent the call to violence, what is “hate speech”? This is not easily answered especially in a world where feelings matter and truth is irrelevant.

They also believe that  “government should be able to take action against newspapers and TV stations that publish content that is biased, inflammatory, or false.”  All three of these terms are difficult to define.  I have no trouble with “false” except that who is to decide what is true and what is false.  There is nothing wrong with “inflamatory” comments if they are true but today truth is no defense. Bias is impossible to prevent.

51 percent of Millennials want fines or jail time for ‘hate speech’

By Collin Anderson, WASH FREE BEACON

A majority of Americans believe the First Amendment should be rewritten and are willing to crack down on free speech, as well as the press, according to a new poll.

More than 60 percent of Americans agree on restricting speech in some way, while a slim majority, 51 percent, want to see the First Amendment rewritten to “reflect the cultural norms of today.” The Campaign for Free Speech, which conducted the survey, said the results “indicate free speech is under more threat than previously believed.”

“The findings are frankly extraordinary,” executive director Bob Lystad told the Washington Free Beacon. “Our free speech rights and our free press rights have evolved well over 200 years, and people now seem to be rethinking them.”
Read more…

By Jared Harris, WESTERN JOURNALISM

A woman who escaped a Chinese “reeducation” camp gave a damning testimony that makes it clear the shocking lengths the country’s regime will go to force communist values on its people.

Sayragul Sauytbay spoke to Haaretz about her time in the Chinese camps. Although she had a position that allowed her some minor comforts, she witnessed many of the horrors there firsthand.

Sauytbay and her family lived in Xinjiang province, in the remote northwest reaches of China. The province is home to the Uighurs, a minority ethnic group that Sauytbay belongs to.

Although many in the region dream of independence, there is a very small number who actually commit violence to achieve it. For this, the Chinese government is now engaged in a clandestine campaign to wipe the entire culture from the face of the earth. Read more…

T. Belman. Separating the wheat from the chaf. This is excellent.

By Dr. Alex Joffe   October 27, 2019

BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,324, October 27, 2019

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The American withdrawal from Syria has produced chaotic results – but as with many aspects of President Trump’s presidency, it offers an opportunity to view realities with a new clarity. The nature of Turkey under Erdo?an, European weakness, and the unwillingness of America to support indecisive military missions have been revealed. These realities demand new approaches to European defense and to Middle Eastern engagement and disengagement.

One of the many startling attributes of the Trump presidency is the tendency his statements and policy decisions have to produce inadvertent moments of clarity. By cutting through practical and rhetorical niceties, Trump forces the US and the world to confront inconsistent and malfunctioning policies, often creating new ones in the process. The invariable outrage forces situations to be looked at directly, as does the reactive antipathy from Trump’s many adversaries. Syria is no exception. Read more…