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Tuesday, Mar. 13, 2018
All Gave Some~Some Gave All
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Life before the presidency...The Donald had good taste…
Warren on Taking DNA Test to Prove Native American Heritage: ’I Know Who I Am’
by PAM KEY
Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said she knew who she was when host Chuck Todd when pressed her on her claims of a Native-American heritage.
When asked about taking a DNA test, Warren said, “Look, I do know. I know who I am and never used it for anything. Never got any benefit from it anywhere.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
The Big Con and Abortion
By Jack Kerwick
Big Conservatism, or the Big Con, having long ago fused with the GOP, embodies its vision in the Republican Party platform. One of the planks of the latter is the Big Con’s “pro-life” position on abortion.
Now, the most fundamental reason for opposing abortion is that it consists in the killing of an innocent, defenseless human being, a yet-to-be-born child. This being so, the circumstances in which a child in the womb is conceived are about as morally relevant to the fate of that child as are the circumstances surrounding the conception of the reader of this essay morally relevant to determining his fate.
The circumstances of a human being’s entrance into this world have utterly zero relevance to whether he should live or die.
Yet the merchants of the Big Con, for all of their rhetorical hosannas (particularly during election season) to the sanctity of human life, have a decidedly different track record.
Take the Big Con’s Patron Saint, Ronald Reagan. The 40th POTUS continues to be tirelessly depicted as pro-life. Yet Reagan opposed abortion except for when he didn’t oppose it. In other words, he claimed to oppose abortion in all instances except those of rape, incest, and when the life of the mother is endangered.
Unsurprisingly, this tends to be the Big Con’s default position on abortion. That it is at once a cop-out and inconsistent should be obvious to anyone who slows down the three seconds necessary to see it for what it is. It is the logical and moral equivalent of the view that the death penalty is wrong—except for when it is administered to murderers, rapists, and child sex predators, etc.
Obviously, anyone who holds this view is not opposed to the death penalty. Since the whole point of capital punishment is to reserve its use only for those who are convicted of the most egregious of offenses, anyone who favors its use in these “exceptional” cases is a proponent, not an opponent, of it.
Similarly, the whole point of opposing abortion is to protect innocent human life. Thus, those who claim to be protectors of the most innocent and defenseless among us while simultaneously relinquishing that protection due to circumstances—like the violence in which conception occurred—that don’t in any way undercut that innocence and defenselessness undermine the principle reason for opposing abortion in the first place.
This, though, was Reagan’s position.
Nor should this surprise anyone when it is considered that as governor of California—several years before Roe v. Wade, mind you—Reagan legalized abortion via the “Therapeutic Abortion Act.” Courtesy of the Gipper’s move, approximately one million babies were killed in their mothers’ wombs.
Reagan would later blame this ghastly phenomenon on…doctors, physicians who he insisted misinterpreted the law that he signed. Yet even before the legalized slaughtering got under way and after he had signed the bill into law, Reagan remarked that had he been more experienced in the art of governing, he would not have signed it.
Lou Cannon, a Reagan biographer, said that Reagan did in fact come to regret his decision. It’s not clear, though, exactly what it is about this decision that Reagan regretted, for Cannon quickly added that Reagan “knew that the [previous] California law [on abortion] was overly restrictive” and “was particularly bothered that it made no exception for rape or incest” (emphases added).
Furthermore, for the eight years of his Presidency, Reagan proposed not a single piece of pro-life legislation.
George W. Bush, another two-term “conservative” Republican president who was widely hailed as a champion of the unborn, was no more pro-life than Reagan. It’s true that he signed a ban on so-called “partial-birth abortion,” as well as signing the Born Alive Infants Protection Act and the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, none of these actions made an iota’s worth of difference when it came to preventing a single scheduled abortion.
But matters were even worse than this.
For starters, Bush continually insisted throughout his presidency that he does not have a “litmus” test for nominating judges. In other words—follow the logic here—although he ostensibly viewed abortion, the killing of a defenseless child in the womb, as a great evil, Bush refused to hold it against judicial prospects if they disagreed with him on this score.
Although he supposedly regarded the act of destroying innocent human beings as unjust, Bush had no moral or other objections to endowing judges with the authority and power to rule in favor of those who would destroy these human beings.
If you can’t see that this position is as intellectually incoherent as it is morally contradictory, then there’s nothing more that can be said to you.
Second, Bush refused to lend support to South Dakota’s ban on abortion in all instances except for when the mother’s life was endangered by her pregnancy. As he told ABCnews at the time: “Well…my position has always been three exceptions: rape, incest and the life of the mother.”
The South Dakota ban, in short, was too “restrictive” for Bush’s taste.
Now, while this view of Bush’s is fatally problematic for the reasons already disclosed, it’s likely deceptive by design. To put it another way, that Bush—like Big Cons generally—is driven primarily by political considerations, not moral conviction, is all but obvious given that South Dakota legislators did wind up adding his exceptions to their legislation.
The President, though, still refused to come out in support of their ban.
Jack Kerwick [send him mail] received his doctoral degree in philosophy from Temple University. His area of specialization is ethics and political philosophy. He is a professor of philosophy at several colleges and universities in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Jack blogs at Beliefnet.com: At the Intersection of Faith & Culture.
Why Do Non-Muslims Convert To Islam?
Article by Amil Imani
“The Muslim population in the U.S. is growing and highly diverse, made up largely of immigrants and the children of immigrants from all across the world. Indeed, respondents in the survey hail from at least 75 Nations.”
The number of non-Muslims who are converting to Islam is rapidly growing. In the U.S., the majority are African-Americans (a third of all US Muslims according to most authorities), but there have also been significant numbers of others to convert as well, many of them well-educated. Muslims in non-Muslim lands proselytize relentlessly and convert others while any Muslim who leaves Islam is judged as an apostate and automatically condemned to death.
Islam actively suppresses and even prohibits the practice of other religions, including those of the “People of the Book,” Jews and Christians. There is not a single church or synagogue in the cradle of Islam, Saudi Arabia, while thousands of mosques dot the tolerant and welcoming non-Muslim lands. Islamic countries that allow for Jewish and Christian places of worship subject these “People of the Book” to numerous subtle and not-so-subtle forms of persecution.
With each passing day, Islamic ideology is making inroads in traditionally non-Muslim lands. Here we must ask ourselves, why Muslim countries do not replicate America’s lenient laws to build churches or synagogues in a non-Christian land? As much as President Trump has a passion for the economic trade deficit, wouldn’t it also be reasonable to commit to the same type of arrangement with Islamic countries in an equitable and comparable trade with regard to churches and mosques?
Question: Why is it that the Muslims are so hell-bent on passing laws and resolutions of the sort they are pushing?
Answer: Because Islam is loaded with faulty and bizarre beliefs as well as many primitive, discriminatory and shameful practices. So, they need to build a steel fence around their corral of absurdity to protect it and them from crumbling under the assault of truth. They have much to hide and fear exposure the most.
Question: Why is it that these followers of Allah don’t mention any other religions besides Islam for the privilege they are seeking?
Answer: Because to Muslims, Islam is the super-religion and final religion of Allah. Judaism and Christianity are the only other two religions that are granted a grudging minimal recognition by Islam. All other religions and those without religion are considered blasphemy and blasphemous by the faithful.
In a non-Muslim land, Muslims are completely taking advantage of US laws and the Constitution. They use the same provisions of the law that are intended to protect a legitimate religion and enhance liberty, but in reality, subverts democracy and freedom.
Needless to say, presently, America is faced with a Trojan horse called “Islam.” Regrettably, America, with a long history of protecting religious freedom, still clings to the “hands off” practice of leaving alone any doctrine or practice billed as religion. A thorny problem is in deciding what constitutes a religion and who is to make that call. This is an important question that must be researched, evaluated and provides the result to the American people.
What Attracts People to Islam?
Excellent question and hard to answer. i.e., an Irishwoman on converting to Islam: ‘It excited me.”
Many may not quite understand, but Islam is like a contagious disease. Once it invades the mind of its victims, it is capable of transforming them to helpless pawns that have no choice but to execute what they are directed to do.
It’s true that the vast majority of the victims of Communism were people living in Communist states. Some 38 million Soviets were killed (this number fluctuates from 10 to 60 million depending on the source) because of Communism. Close to 65 million Chinese citizens were killed because of Communism. That the victims of Communism were largely members of socialist societies says a great deal about the ideology itself.
Nearly 270 million people have been murdered since the inception of Islam, 1400 Years. It is also true with Islam. Muslims are the main victims of Islamic ideology. The political nature of Islam, just like fascism and communism, is a dysfunctional ideology that needs to be discarded. Islam’s charter Quran is the root cause of Islamic violence, just as Marxism was the root cause of international Communist totalitarianism. Of the reported 1.5 billion Muslims in the world, millions are already trapped in the terminal stages of this affliction, while millions more are rapidly joining them while still other millions are being proselytized.
Islam Is a Mental Disease
The people enslaved with the extreme cases of Islamic mental disease are highly infectious. They actively work to transmit the disease to others, while they themselves engage in horrific acts of mayhem and violence to demonstrate their unconditional obedience to the dictates of the Islamic cult. A devout Muslim does not and cannot believe in freedom of choice. In the ideology of Islam, “submission,” leads everything up to Allah, as clearly and repeatedly stipulated in the Quran. The raison d’être for the Muslim is unconditional submission to the will and dictates of Allah.
Islam’s Attraction to African-Americans
An article in Christianity Today (Aug 20,1990) reported that in the U.S., the average age of those converting to Islam (31) is about twice that for conversion to the Christian faith (age 16). It listed the main reasons given for becoming Muslim: Islam’s doctrine is simple and rational, all believers are equal, it is a “practical” religion, and lacks a priesthood. I have heard the same things from African-Americans in Philadelphia more than once. But first on their list is perceived racism in the church.
Roughly summarizing
“The discrimination that we feel makes Islam attractive to us because it’s a way of rejecting the culture that will not have us. In sociological terms, I think that one of the reasons that many African-Americans go to Islam as opposed to Christianity.”
Here is the what the leader of the Islamic revolution of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini said many years ago: “Allah did not create man so that he could have fun. The aim of creation was for mankind to be put to the test through hardship and prayer. An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious. Islam does not allow swimming in the sea and is opposed to radio and television serials. Islam, however, allows marksmanship, horseback riding and competition. Meeting in Qom ”
Broadcast by radio Iran from Qom on 20 August 1979.” quoted in Taheri, The Spirit of Allah (1985) p.259). [ref]
Commonly, the Quran is full of black and white, right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable verses. When men didn’t convert to Islam, they were labeled infidels and were slaughtered; their women and children were taken along with all their belongings as booty. It was either Islam’s way or the highway. This radicalism is very much in evidence today.
Deciding to join Islam, means committing oneself to the creed and its goal. One cannot join an order without adhering to its precepts and practices. It is absurd, for instance, for a person to voluntarily join the military while saying that he doesn’t believe the military’s objective of killing an enemy. All these Muslims who are not rabid advocates of jihad are in clear violation of their creed. Even these people are complicit in the mayhem and murderous acts of their co-religionists by financial support and in other ways.
Jimmy Carter
The truth in this entire nightmare can be traced back to the liberal democratic policies of Jimmy Carter, who created a firestorm that destabilized our greatest ally in the Muslim world, the Shah of Iran, in favor of a religious fanatic, the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Islam, by its very nature, is patriarchal and authoritarian. Once liberty is surrendered for submission, a host of serious consequences present themselves. The individual becomes little more than a passive obedient vessel of Allah and his perspective of himself and life drastically changes. Once he submits to the all-powerful, all-knowing, he is absolved of the responsibility of having to chart his own way in life.
What to Do?
A few short answers:
It is important to understand that the human mind is not a perfect discerner of objective reality. In actuality, reality is in the mind of the beholder. The outside world only supplies bits and pieces of raw material that the mind puts together to form its reality. Depending on the type and number of bits and pieces that a given mind receives, its reality can be very different from that of another mind.
You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to know that Islam has been in violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for its wanton behavior toward others from the day of its inception to the present.
Resist Multiculturalism
For a variety of reasons, during the past decades, Western societies opened their doors to a flood of Muslims from Islamic lands. In so doing, they aimed to make the newcomers feel at home, retain their way of life, and live in harmony with the indigenous population. Some call it a practice in Christian charity. But good-heartedness not only failed, it boomeranged and severely hurt the welcoming hosts. It is wonderful to be charitable. It is great to be good-hearted. But being charitable and accommodating evil can empower evil to literally tear out your good heart.
Islamism and jihadism are on the rampage playing out all over the world and literally tearing out the hearts of innocent people, many of them Muslims. We don’t want to repeat European mistakes. We want no multicultural fantasy to create a nightmare reality. Muslims who live here must become part and parcel of America just like all the other diverse people who have come to this wonderful land. Muslims must abide and honor the same values and laws that have made this nation a beneficent refuge for all people. No separate but equal foolishness that was the banner cry of the segregationists, for Muslims. It must be together, equal, and under the same law.
Challenge the Politicians
The gospel truth is that some politicians are paid agents. They do and say what gets them elected and keeps them in office. As a voter and fund contributor, you are important. Let them know how you feel and how you are going to treat them if they sell their services and become Islam apologists and enablers. Hold them accountable at all levels of government, from the local city council to the resident in the White House
In short, we have a great country, deprived by numerous challenges. We can ill afford to become complacent or disheartened. If we band together in a common cause with devotion to our nation’s principles, values and the Constitution, we can meet and defeat any threat of any type or magnitude. Past generations of Americans have always done so successfully and this generation of Americans must do no less.
What Every Utah Voter Needs To Know About Mitt Romney
By Gregg Jackson
Mitt Romney announced his candidacy for the United States Senate yesterday. Having covered him closely as a radio talk show host on WRKO in Boston while Mr. Romney was governor of Massachusetts, I know his record inside and out. Mr. Romney claims to be a social and fiscal conservative. But his actual record demonstrates that he is nothing more than Ted Kennedy in a Ronald Reagan costume. Utah voters deserve to know the documented truth about Mr. Romney. Here it is.
Mitt Romney, Fiscal and Social Liberal:
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Illegally & unconstitutionally instituted same-sex “marriage” falsely claiming the Massachusetts Supreme Court “ordered him to.” Proof here and here
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Signed $50 tax-subsidized abortions into law (2 years AFTER his fake “pro-life conversion.” Proof here
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Boosted funding for homosexual “education” starting in kindergarten. Proof here
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Opposes a ban on homosexual scoutmasters. Proof here
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Promised the homosexual Republican “Log Cabin Republicans” he wouldn’t oppose “gay marriage” in return for their endorsement. Proof here
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Instituted a quasi-socialist healthcare plan endorsed by Hillary Clinton, Teddy Kennedy and Planned Parenthood that destroyed the Massachusetts’ economy. Proof here and here.
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Increased taxes and fees by close to a billion dollars which destroyed the Massachusetts’ economy and opposed the Bush Tax Cuts. Proof here
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Voted # 8 RINO by Human Events. Proof here.
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Passed over Republican lawyers for three quarters of the 36 judicial vacancies he faced and nominated 2 open homosexuals. Proof here
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Criticized Joint Chief’s of Staff, Peter Pace for saying that homosexual acts were “immoral.” Proof here
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Supports passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act which would force churches and other religious organizations to hire homosexuals and transvestites or face criminal fines and prosecution. Proof here
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Romney supported McCain-Feingold “campaign finance reform”, McCain-Kennedy “comprehensive immigration reform” (i.e. amnesty), and parts of the McCain-Lieberman “carbon cap and trade” bill and opposed the Bush Tax Cuts. Proof here
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Romney supported McCain-Feingold “campaign finance reform”, McCain-Kennedy “comprehensive immigration reform” (i.e. amnesty), and parts of the McCain-Lieberman “carbon cap and trade” bill and opposed the Bush Tax Cuts. Proof here
Union President Drops Trump Bombshell… Democrats’ Worst Fears Are Coming True
Unions have been seen as the foundation of Democrat election victories for decades. The loyalty of those workers to vote blue has been taken for granted by liberal politicians since at least the 1960’s… but that could now be changing.Donald Trump’s tariff proposals have generated serious controversy, with some critics calling them “protectionism.” The economic soundness of the president’s plan is still up for debate, but as a political move it might have been genius.
A major union has just revealed that they’re warming to Trump, and their traditionally blue votes could be switching to red very soon.
During a Thursday interview with the decidedly anti-Trump MSNBC network, the president of United Steelworkers had shockingly positive words to say about Trump and his tariff plan.
“Gerard praised Trump for making it clear he is going to ‘tackle trade deficits’ which he called a ‘wealth transfer’ because they are ‘taking good jobs away,'” reported Real Clear Politics.
“It’s going to make it very hard for our members to ignore what he just did and what makes me sad is we’ve been trying to get Democrats to this for more than 30 years,” Gerard told MSNBC host Chuck Todd.
That statement could be huge: United Steelworkers is the largest industrial labor union in the entire country, with close to a million members. The union also has close connections to other groups, including AFL-CIO, a powerful lobbying and voting bloc.
It’s worth noting that not only did the president of one of America’s largest unions essentially endorse Trump, but he also slammed Democrats for their failed promises in the same breath.
Could "blue" unions flip for Trump in 2020?
“The president has made it really clear that he’s going to tackle the trade deficits,” Gerard explained. “It is unacceptable that America would have an $800 billion trade deficit but when you subtract services, roughly $600 billion annual trade deficit.”
Gerard almost seemed to be repeating Trump’s own talking points. “That’s a wealth transfer and you can’t argue that those trade deficits are creating good jobs,” he stated. “Those trade deficits are taking good jobs away.”
The union boss again slammed Democrats — something that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago — and again voiced his trust in Trump.
“All we’re asking for is a level playing field and with the president has done is send a signal that he’s going to help us get a level playing field,” Gerard said.
“And we gave the Republicans and we gave the Democrats — we’ve given every government since before Clinton hope that they would do something.”
Those words echoed a similar sentiment from another voter group that has traditionally gone Democrat: Immigration advocates. Just yesterday, we reported that Dreamers are starting to call out the left for years of promises and no progress. Sound familiar?
While the media is busy slamming President Trump and calling his supporters crazy, actual Americans are seeing the positives from his first year in office. They’re receiving bonuses and promotions from the tax cut, and signs of an optimistic economy that is ready to explode.
The jury is still out on Trump’s specific tariff plans, but one thing is certain: Democrats may be in for a surprise in the 2018 and 2020 elections.
FOR ELLISON, 4 PINOCCHIOS DOWN…
On Friday Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler took a look Minnesota Fifth District/DNC Vice Chairman Rep. Keith Ellison’s statements about his relationship with hate cult leader Louis Farrakhan. Ellison’s relationship with Farrakhan goes way back, but it turns out that Farrakhan has several fans in the Democrats’ Congressional Black Caucus as well. This long suppressed 2005 photograph of Farrakhan & Friends was only recently disclosed. “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…”
In his Wall Street Journal column last month, Jeryl Bier reported that Ellison and Farrakhan had a reunion of sorts in September 2013 with a follow-up meeting in Farrakhan’s hotel room when Farrakhan visited Washington in 2015. I noted Ellison’s responses in “Ellison speaks…a little,” in “Ellison speaks…a little more” and, most recently, in “Ellison explains: Dems don’t care.”
Kessler doesn’t specifically credit Bier, yet he takes up the question raised by Bier’s column and considers Ellison’s recent statement implying that he has no relationship with Farrakhan. Kessler finds that Ellison has not been entirely straightforward on the matter. He gently judges that Ellison “needs to provide a better explanation for what he was doing in Farrakhan’s hotel suite in 2016 and what they discussed.” Yet in assessing the number of Pinocchios to be awarded Ellison, Kessler does not hold back. He awards Ellison four Pinocchios.
To borrow a resonant phrase, I find it gratifying to see Ellison’s chickens coming home to roost. Ellison is not accustomed to such scrutiny from the local press or the mainstream media. At the Daily Caller, Peter Hasson notes CNN’s blackout on the Democrats’ Farrakhan scandal. With rare exceptions, the mainstream press has turned a blind eye to Farrakhan & Friends. Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass calls out the left on this score. The mainstream press is the left’s media adjunct.
I have written a lot about Ellison since he emerged as a Democratic candidate for Congress in 2006, some of which I summarized in “Louis Farrakhan’s first congressman” and “Keith Ellison for dummies” as well as in “The Ellison elision.” This is my point, and I do have one. Ellison has built his whole damn career on lying about his relationship with Farrakhan. The Four Pinocchios Kessler awards to Ellison leave about 3,996 to go.
My Grandfather admonished me that I would be judged in life by the company I kept. It would be a wise suggestion for Congressman Ellison...Moe Lauzier
FORGET RUSSIA, WHAT ABOUT QATAR?
Is Mueller colluding with the Muslim Brotherhood’s 9/11 backers?
Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.
There hasn’t been a sudden explosion of paranoia and fear about Russia like this since Sputnik.
In the ‘12 election debates, Obama had breezily dismissed Romney’s suggestion that Russia was the leading geopolitical threat. “You said Russia. Not al Qaeda. You said Russia," he sneered. "And the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back, because the Cold War's been over for 20 years."
Obama was nearly right.
Russia is a serious geopolitical threat, but despite Putin’s imperial ambitions and the malicious actions of a regime run by former KGB operatives, it falls far behind the threat posed by the People’s Republic of China. The Cold War is over and Russia lost. That may be of small comfort to Ukraine or Georgia, and the other former subject nations of the Soviet Union that it threatens, but it’s no real threat to us.
China isn’t our leading geopolitical foe either.
Obama mentioned Al Qaeda in his attack on Romney. The Islamic terrorist group was already largely irrelevant. But the terror kingdom behind it is more dangerously relevant than ever.
According to the intelligence community, Abdullah bin Khalid al-Thani, a member of the Qatari royal family, its former interior minister and minister of Islamic affairs, was an Al Qaeda sympathizer who had harbored Khalid Sheikh Muhammad. When the FBI arrived in Qatar to arrest him, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks was transported away on a special Qatari government jet with blacked out windows.
But Qatar these days is far more of a threat than it was on 9/11. Its close ties to terror have made it a pariah nation in the region even as its support for Islamic theocracy crosses all factional lines.
It’s the main patron of the Muslim Brotherhood, an international Jihadist network, and has close ties to Iran. It spreads terrorist propaganda through Al Jazeera while subverting friendly governments. It seeks to influence American policy through think tanks like Brookings while spying on Americans.
Russia’s backing for the Shiite axis in Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen has been destabilizing, but not nearly as destabilizing as Qatar’s backing for the Islamist militias that wrecked Syria, Yemen, Libya, Egypt and much of the region. Qatar’s Iranian allies may be the final winners of the Arab Spring’s humanitarian catastrophe, but it was Qatari propaganda and weapons that kickstarted the region’s unholy wars.
While Qatar’s Al Jazeera terror network undermined governments, the terror kingdom shipped massive amounts of weapons to its Islamic terrorist allies. The Obama administration colluded with Qatar’s arms shipments to terrorists by instructing NATO forces not to interdict these shipments which later ended up in the hands of Jihadists in Libya and Mali. Qatar bought weapons from the genocidal Muslim Brotherhood regime in Sudan, whose leader is wanted by the ICC for crimes against humanity, and shipped them to Jihadists in Syria through the terror state of Turkey.
Secretary of State John Kerry even winked at Qatar's funding of Hamas, another genocidal Muslim Brotherhood regime. This is the sort of serious collusion that we should be discussing.
But while Qatar funds terrorists, its massive propaganda operation also attempts to influence Americans. The terror kingdom acquired Current TV from Al Gore for $500 million. But the terror network failed to attract viewers. Al Jazeera America was sued for fraud by Gore, and its female and Jewish employees began coming forward with accusations of sexism and anti-Semitism.
But while Al Jazeera America failed, Al Jazeera remains the world’s most influential hostile state propaganda service, far more so than Russia’s RT. And it hasn’t given up on influencing Americans.
Al Jazeera recently boasted of having sent in an operative to secretly record pro-Israel activists. The terror network dispatched letters to pro-Israel groups and it’s believed by some that their existence is being used to pressure figures in the Jewish community into playing along with Qatar’s public relations effort. If Russia were similarly spying on and blackmailing Americans, there would be outrage.
Unfortunately, Qatar has burrowed deeply into the media and the political infrastructure of the left.
Al Jazeera is not the only vector for Qatari propaganda. The Brookings Institution, one of the most influential think tanks in the country, is subservient to Qatar. "[T]there was a no-go zone when it came to criticizing the Qatari government," a Brookings Doha Center fellow revealed.
And then there’s The Intercept. The pro-terror site funded by a Persian billionaire has become notorious for its distribution of Qatari propaganda. The site, whose leading figure is Hamas apologist Glenn Greenwald, is a perfect forum for publishing smears, innuendo and even hacked documents. The Intercept frequently features attacks on the UAE, a Qatari rival, and Americans friendly to it, such as Jared Kushner, so that its contents appears to curiously echo those of Qatar’s PR and Al Jazeera.
Qatar’s influence operations took an ominous turn when Elliott Broidy, a top Trump donor, had his emails hacked by individuals he alleges were Qatari agents. The leaked emails play into Qatar’s conflict with the UAE. The emails have predictably popped up on Al Jazeera and Broidy had previously been targeted by The Intercept for a panel at which Steve Bannon had criticized Qatar.
"We have reason to believe this hack was sponsored and carried out by registered and unregistered agents of Qatar seeking to punish Mr Broidy for his strong opposition to state-sponsored terrorism," Broidy's spokesman said.
These two incidents of alleged Qatari espionage against Americans in order to influence our foreign policy raise serious questions. Yet the same media that obsessively searches for Russian bots on Reddit and Facebook seems entirely disinterested in discussing the subject. Skeptics of Russian influence have been told to put country ahead of party, but when will the left finally put country ahead of Qatar?
Perversely, instead of investigating the role of Qatar in influencing American elections, Mueller is reportedly taking the Qatari propaganda at face value and directing his investigation accordingly.
President Trump has been critical of Qatar. If Mueller uses Qatari opposition research to undermine a sitting president on behalf of a terror state, he will actually doing what Trump has been accused of.
Mueller had been accused of covering for the Muslim Brotherhood’s activities in America before. But now he risks being guilty of colluding with the Brotherhood’s Qatari backers to bring down an anti-Qatari president for the terror state that shielded the mastermind of the September 11 attacks.
There could be no greater act of treason than that.
Qatar’s domestic influence operation is far deeper and more dangerous than anything waged by Russia. Al Jazeera is infinitely more sophisticated than RT. The influence enjoyed by Qatar through Brookings has no Russian parallel. Its narrative on Yemen, Libya, Gaza, Burma and Egypt is the only story you will see in the media. The media in the United States hardly ever runs stories critical of Qatar anymore.
But if the latest allegations are true, Qatar’s terror backing and fake news operations have been supplemented by a domestic spying and blackmail operation against Americans.
And that cannot be tolerated.
Qatar is tiny compared to Russia. It’s a slave state of 200,000 masters and large numbers of foreign workers, many of them worked to death and treated little better than slaves. But yet it’s enormously wealthy and beneath its façade of moderation, it seeks to export Islamic supremacism around the world.
When we talk about Al Qaeda or Hamas, when you hear about the Arab Spring or the civil war in Yemen, when mention is made of the illegal invasion of Libya, the fighting in Syria, the real topic is Qatar.
Americans who collude with Russia should be held accountable. So should those who collude with Qatar.
And often they are one and the same.
Qatar, like Russia, is an ally of Iran. Like Russia, it arms and trains Islamic terror groups, seeks to undermine America, Israel and the West, and represents a major geopolitical threat.
Islamic terrorism is our leading geopolitical enemy. Its distribution and diversity makes it more difficult to pin down than the linkage between Communism and the Soviet Union. But the closest thing to the USSR of Islamic terror today is Qatar. When Democrats demand to know what Republicans are ready to do about Russia, Republicans should ask them what they are willing to do about Qatar?
The Venona Men
The Venona Men
The Venona Men
Review of 'In the Enemy’s House' By Howard Blumum
HARVEY KLEHR / FEB. 20, 2018
More than 30 years have passed since the former FBI agent Robert Lamphere detail-ed his key role in uncovering major Soviet espionage networks in The FBI-KGB War. That book provided the first detailed (but truncated) account of the Venona Project, the most successful American counterintelligence operation of the Cold War. Hidden from historians and the public for decades, Venona provided the key leads that resulted in the convictions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Judith Coplon in the United States and Klaus Fuchs in Great Britain by making it possible for FBI agents to read thousands of high-level Soviet communications. Venona also exposed hundreds of other Soviet spies, most of whom could not be prosecuted since independent evidence was lacking and it was thought inexpedient to reveal Venona in court.
Nearly a decade would pass until the FBI and NSA began to release the actual Venona transcripts in 1995. In the years since, a number of books (including several co-authored by me) have analyzed the Venona revelations, while others have mined Communist International files and the KGB archives. Virtually all the major mysteries about Soviet espionage in the United States have been resolved by these once-secret documents. In addition to confirming the guilt of the Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, and virtually every other person accused of spying in the 1940s by the ex-spies Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, these books have exposed several important and previously unknown agents such as Theodore Hall, Russell McNutt, and I.F. Stone. Indeed, the only accused spy who turns out to have been innocent (although he was a secret Communist almost up until the day he took charge of developing an atomic bomb) was J. Robert Oppenheimer.
A handful of espionage deniers, centered around the Nation magazine, continue to argue, against all evidence and logic, that Alger Hiss is still innocent. The Rosenberg children continue to distort their mother’s role in espionage. And some hard-core McCarthyites still demonize Oppenheimer. But in truth, the bloody battle over who spied is over.
Lamphere’s book emphasized his collaboration with the Army cryptographer Meredith Gardner in the hard work of unraveling the spy rings using the Venona cables. Employing those 1986 recollections as a template, the Vanity Fair contributor Howard Blum has now given us In the Enemy’s House, an overly dramatized but largely accurate account of the friendship between the outgoing, hard-driving, atypical G-man Lamphere and the shy, scholarly, soft-spoken Gardner as they worked together to find and prosecute those Americans who had betrayed their nation.
Blum intersperses the American hunt for spies with the recollections of Julius Rosenberg’s KGB controller, Alexander Feklisov, who ran Rosenberg in 1944 and 1945 and supervised Fuchs in Great Britain from 1947 to 1949. Feklisov watched with mounting dread as the KGB’s atomic spy networks were exposed, both because of Venona and the KGB’s own blunders—most notably because the Russians used Harry Gold, Fuch’s contact, to pick up espionage material from David Greenglass, who was Julius Rosenberg’s brother-in-law and part of his spy ring.
Blum also uses information from many of the scholarly accounts that have already appeared, although not always carefully. His only new source of data comes from interviews with members of the Lamphere and Gardner families and access to their personal notebooks. But while he provides a list of his sources for each chapter, Blum does not use footnotes, so that although many of the personal and emotional reactions to the investigation he attributes to people, and especially to Lamphere, presumably come from these sources, it is never clear whether they are based on contemporaneous written notes or third-party recollections of events more than 50 years in the past.
Such objections are not mere academic carping. While Blum successfully turns this oft-told story into an interesting and suspenseful narrative, his approach comes at a cost. For example: He is eager to transform Lamphere from a diligent and resourceful FBI investigator who often chafed at the bureaucracy and petty rules that governed the agency into a full-blown rebel who almost singlehandedly forced the FBI to take up the problem of Soviet espionage. To do so, Blum suggests that until the FBI received an anonymous letter in Russian in August 1943 alleging widespread spying and naming KGB operatives, the Bureau regarded the investigation of potential Soviet spies as useless because allies did not spy on each other.
This is wrong. In fact, the FBI had already mounted two large-scale investigations—one of Comintern activities in the United States undertaken in 1940 and the other of attempted espionage directed at atomic-bomb research at the Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, which began in early 1943. Both had unearthed information on atomic espionage. These included discomfiting details about Robert Oppenheimer’s Communist connections; efforts by Steve Nelson, a CPUSA leader in the Bay Area in contact with known Soviet spies, to obtain atomic information; and contacts between a Soviet spy and Clarence Hiskey, a chemist on the Manhattan Project.
At one point, Blum renders one of Hiskey’s contacts, Zalmond Franklin, as Franklin Zelman and mischaracterizes him as “a KGB spook working under student cover.” In fact, Franklin was a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade working as a KGB courier. In any event, the FBI neutralized this threat by transferring Hiskey from Chicago to a military base near the Arctic Circle, thereby scaring his scientific contacts (whom he had introduced to a Soviet agent) into cooperating with the Bureau.
There are other occasions where Blum demonstrates an uncertain grasp of the history of Soviet intelligence. He misstates Elizabeth Bentley’s motives for defecting; angry at being pushed aside by the Soviets, she feared she was under FBI surveillance. And he claims that only three witnesses testified against the Rosenbergs (Ethel’s brother and sister-in-law and Harry Gold), which leaves off others (Bentley, Max Elitcher, and the photographer who had taken passport photos for the family just prior to their arrests).
Blum’s account of the way the KGB encoded and enciphered its messages is oversimplified. The mistake that made it possible for American counterintelligence to break into the Soviet messages was their intelligence services’ use of some one-use-only pads a second time. Not all of the one-time pads were used twice, and only if such a pad was used twice could the FBI strip the random numbers from the message sent by Western Union. That process allowed Gardner to attempt to break the underlying code. The vast majority of the Soviet cables remained unbreakable, and many could be only partially decrypted. And most of the decrypted cables had nothing to do with atomic espionage but concerned the stealing of diplomatic, political, industrial, and other military secrets.
Partly to heighten suspense, Blum misrepresents or distorts the timelines on matters involving Klaus Fuchs and the Rosenberg ring. He harps on Lamphere’s frustration about not being able to use the decrypts in court, but the FBI had concluded it was highly unlikely that they could be legally introduced into evidence without exposing valuable cryptological techniques, a conflict Lamphere surely understood. That very problem helps explain the FBI’s inability to prosecute Theodore Hall, the youngest physicist at Los Alamos, who had been exposed as a Soviet spy. Blum mistakenly suggests that the FBI agent in Chicago who investigated Hall was unaware of Venona. But that agent did know; the problem was that when the FBI began its investigation in the spring of 1950, Hall had temporarily ceased spying. He was eventually brought in for questioning, but neither he nor his one-time courier and friend, Saville Sax, broke and confessed. Lacking independent evidence, the FBI was stymied.
The most significant flaw of In the Enemy’s House is its assertion that Ethel Rosenberg’s conviction and execution were monumental acts of injustice that disillusioned both Lamphere and Gardner, soured their sense of accomplishment, and left them consumed by guilt. It is true that Lamphere had opposed Ethel’s execution and had drafted a memo that J. Edgar Hoover sent to the judge urging she be spared as the mother of two young sons. Gardner had translated one Venona message that indicated Ethel knew of her husband’s espionage but because of her delicate health “did not work,” which Gardner interpreted to mean she was not part of the spy ring. But, as Lamphere pointed out in his own book, her brother David Greenglass had testified to her involvement in his recruitment. And KGB messages available following the collapse of the Soviet Union now make clear that Ethel had played a key role in persuading her sister-in-law, Ruth Greenglass, to urge her husband to spy.
In The FBI-KGB War, Lamphere never evinced deep moral qualms about their fate. He expressed a more complex set of emotions. “I knew the Rosenbergs were guilty,” he writes, “but that did not lessen my sense of grim responsibility at their deaths.” And he calls claims that the case was a mockery of freedom and justice both “abominable and untruthful.” Blum insists that Gardner was “stunned” by their deaths and quotes him as saying somewhere: “I never wanted to get anyone in trouble” (which would suggest a monumental naiveté if true).
Blum’s claim that Lamphere and Gardner had condemned themselves “to another sort of death sentence” for their roles is a wild exaggeration. So, too, is his charge that Lamphere believed that in the Rosenberg case the United States “might prove to be as ruthless and vindictive as its enemies.”
Finally, Blum links Lamphere’s decision to leave the FBI for a high-level position in the Veteran’s Administration to a sense of lingering guilt. But in his own book, Lamphere attributes the move to the frustration he felt once he realized he would be stuck as a Soviet espionage supervisor for years to come. Blum links Gardner’s brief posting to Great Britain to work with its code-breaking agency as an effort to escape his guilt, but he never mentions that Gardner returned to work at the National Security Agency for many years.
Retired intelligence agents friendly with both men have no recollection of their expressing regret about their role in the Rosenberg case. It is possible that they may have made some such comment to a family member or jotted down something in a notebook, but without very specific and sourced comments, the idea that they ever regretted their work exposing Soviet spies is nonsense that mars Blum’s otherwise entertaining account.
G’ day…Ciao…Helen and Moe Lauzier
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