IS THE TRUMP PROBE REALLY ABOUT RUSSIA OR THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD?

Robert A. Taft

          In 1989, head of the Global Muslim Brotherhood, Yusuf Qaradawi, announced the Brotherhood’s 30-year plan to take over the United States from within. Working through front organizations, like the Islamic Society of North America (INSA), the Brotherhood has strategically infiltrated all levels of Government, especially at the top from the Clintons to the Obamas.

          In the 2009 Holy Land Foundation case, a cabal of MB front organizations, including the ISNA, were found guilty of financing terrorism. Despite these findings, John Brennan attended many ISNA events and was the keynote speaker at their convention that year.

          Much has been rumored about whether Obama and Brennan are Muslims. While declaring himself a Christian, Obama learned Islam early on in Indonesia, was the son and stepson of Muslim men, and attacked the Bible, Christians and Jews over 100 times during his administration while 99 percent of the refugees he permitted to come here were Muslims compared to less than one percent Christian.

          While serving as CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia, Brennan became so enamored by Muslim practices that a fellow agent claimed the man converted to Islam during that period.

          Whether or not these men are really Muslim is immaterial. What matters is that both men were incredibly close to an organization that still wants to take down America. John Brennan fit in perfectly as Obama’s CIA director as both men allowed the Brotherhood not only to influence but indeed guide many actions and policy decisions of the presidency. While many U.S. allies were condemning the Brotherhood, these men embraced the group.

          Consequently the Obama administration was riddled with Brotherhood members, who helped shape everything from the Arab Spring to Common Core. One staffer, Raschid Hussain, helped draft the Cairo speech which launched Obama’s foreign policy and Brotherhood stalwarts helped fashion the disastrous Arab Spring where “moderate” Brotherhood leaders were to replace selected Middle Eastern dictators. Despite its miserable failure, Obama and Brennan stuck firm with the Brotherhood, ardently defending the group and erasing terms like “radical Islam,” “jihad” and other inflammatory words from the government vernacular. In speech after speech, both men tried to separate Islam from the violence it precipitated, even though a senior Hezbollah leader refuted the CIA chief’s claims.

          With MB relationships firm, Obama and Brennan, who had been pushing for an Iranian-American dialog since 2008, used Secretary of State, John Kerry, to engineer the notorious Iran nuclear deal, the crown jewel in Obama’s foreign policy agenda. With that jewel well in place, the Obama administration, along with the Muslim Brotherhood, saw a continuation of Brotherhood principles should Hillary Clinton, under the tutelage of Huma Abedin, ascend to the presidency.

          But in December 2015, Donald Trump, demanded a ban on Muslim immigrants following the terrorist shooting in San Bernardino. This announcement, coupled with Trump’s relentless bashing of the Iran deal, alienated the Muslim Brotherhood and would lead to the destruction of the Obama international legacy. The brash New Yorker and nationalist outsider led in the polls and had to be stopped. But how? Hillary Clinton actually provided the answer.

          The intelligence community has always known that the Russians try to disrupt American elections. In March of 2016 though, the Clinton campaign paid a foreign agent to develop Russian “dirt” on Trump, an illegal act. When Brennan and Obama discovered this, they knew they had to turn the tables to protect Clinton and finally put a dagger into the Trump campaign. Working with NSA chief, James Clapper, and FBI boss, James Comey, Brennan mobilized the Deep State to pursue a Trump-Russian probe, ultimately justifying it by using the fallacious Hillary-financed Trump dossier.

          In 2017 Michael Flynn encouraged the new president to declare the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, a designation that would severely weaken MB leaders. Brennan’s CIA operatives vehemently protested the recommendation, pitting themselves against their new boss, an anti-Brotherhood congressman, Mike Pompeo. Not surprisingly, special counsel, Robert Mueller, fresh out of the gate falsely accused Flynn of lying to the FBI.

          With Obama’s blessing, John Brennan masterminded the Russian probe. Throughout, his key claim is that Vladimir Putin preferred to see Trump win over Clinton, a laughable assertion none of the other intelligence agencies could confirm. Starting with the Uranium One fiasco and followed by the whimsical Russian reset button, Obama’s pledge to Putin to be more flexible in his second term, and of course the Iran nuclear deal, the stars were well aligned for Putin, Iran – and the Muslim Brotherhood – if Hillary became president.

          Compared to the Muslim Brotherhood, the Russians were small potatoes. But in purposely trying to dislodge the new president, mounting a case about Russian collusion would be significantly more palatable and potentially devastating than simply accusing Trump of trying to stifle Obama-Brennan friends in Iran and the Brotherhood.

By Bob Taft

            Is Trump a fascist?

            True, he’s a nationalist. Democrats believe he is a demagogue because he is trying to do what’s best for the country. He’s racist because he wants immigrants to enter the country legally, but Latino and Black unemployment is the lowest ever and he has signed a law for prison reform and an executive order to urge companies to help minority neighborhoods economically.

            Democrats can’t accuse him of being anti-democratic and anti-religious – both of which fascists are – since he believes in God and staunchly upholds the Constitution. And he neither wants to nor can be a dictator since he already takes no salary for his efforts and can’t get the military to even obey his orders to secure the southern border.

            Further and by design Democrats constantly berate the president with “fake news,” trying desperately to paint him as an emerging dictator set on destroying the media. But he hasn’t taken the bait.

            So while they would like to depict the president as the ultimate fascist, frankly they can’t. But a closer look at what fascism actually tries to accomplish shows that in all likelihood a brand of fascism is alive and well in America. 

            1. Structure: Democrats have the globalist infrastructure to promote their principles. Their extended organization includes lobbyists, the media, Congress (the Establishment), the Deep State, the entertainment industry, and academia, K through college. President Trump has no such structure.

            2. Silence the Opposition: Democrats have a two-pronged strategy to silence their opposition. First, they use Herbert Marcuse’s tolerance interpretation: be tolerant of those on the left, but not those on the right because they are intolerant. In other words they disguise their intolerance by blaming the other side of intolerance. Second, they use Saul Alinsky’s rules of radicals: a) if you tell a lie often enough, people will begin to believe it, and b) to those who don’t believe, freeze, personalize, polarize and ridicule them until they go away. This bullying tactic works quite well.

            There are daily occurrence of this on college campuses, but over the past several years Democrats, have tried to silence Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, among others. President Obama tried to exclude Fox News from press conferences and spied on certain conservative reporters. The Democrat National Committee now wants Fox News not to participate in the 2020 presidential debates, leaving only progressive stations to develop questions for candidates and monitor the events.  

            This leftist bullying tactic has led to the censoring of conservatives – a la social media – punishing conservatives – a la Michael Flynn and others – while liberal malfeasance passes with impunity. This double standard, prevalent in past fascist regimes, is becoming increasingly symptomatic in modern-day America.

            3. Attack the Fundamentals of the Country – Family and Religion:  Both Alinsky’s and Marcuse’s called for the stripping of morals and ethics since these hindered true personal freedom and change could not come about without such freedom. The Democrat ‘War on Poverty” made Black families dependent on welfare, enabling many African American fathers to flee the home and creating a generation of babies out of wedlock. Coincidentally, for a variety of reasons, many men left the workforce which made way for greater female employment and the women’s liberation movement. Woman equal rights has become a sore point between the sexes resulting in a further breakdown of the family unit.

            From 1960 to 2010 the number of children living in households headed by a married couple fell from 66 percent to 45 percent. Divorce has doubled since 1970 and 40 percent of kids today are born to unmarried women. Children raised by one parent are “more likely to drop out of high school, to become teenage and single mothers, and have trouble finding and keeping a steady job.” Compounding the changing structure of the family is an increasing scarcity of parental role models and the high percentage of illiteracy in the United States. Nearly 20 percent of high school graduates cannot read and 43 percent of adults are at the lowest reading level.

            A significant number of people born after 1980 didn’t grow up with much family structure. Kids need to feel like they have a spiritual home, but children of divorce struggle to do this. Divorce without regular religion forces children to go it alone, figure out life for themselves. Consequently it is not surprising that the fastest growing religion in America is nones – atheists, agnostics and those who claim to be “nothing in particular.”The percentage who believe in God has dropped from 70 percent 61 percent in just seven years. Over 35 percent of millennials are religiously unaffiliated and fewer than six in ten identify with any branch of Christianity. According to PEW Research, the religiously unaffiliated will grow faster in the United States than anywhere else in the world.

            4. Fundamental Change of the Constitution and Rule of Law: The breakdown of the family and religion sets the stage for the similar erosion of the Constitution and rule of law. President Obama took every opportunity to marginalize that document: e.g. the IRS scandal targeting conservatives illegally; changes he made to the Affordable Healthcare Law without Congressional approval; EPA regulations that violated the Clean Air Act; the DACA scheme that violated existing immigration law, etc.

            Obama also knew the best way to marginalize the Constitution was to weaponized The First Amendment, key to everything in the Bill of Rights. Obama used the tenet to undercut it. Demonstrations, acts of assembly under the First Amendment, featured outright violence. But rather than condemning the actions of the activists, he celebrated them in the White House. If a few people found historical monuments, not just religious symbols, offensive, these monuments too were forcibly removed with little or no consequence.

            In virtually every case involving the police, Obama sided quickly with the victims involved.  These “rush to judgment” declarations, made the perpetrator the victim and the victim the perpetrator. He used this ploy to convince America that our society was in decline, largely because of the victimization of the underclass.

            Having compromised the rule of law, the president used the First Amendment to do the same with religion. He used the clause “separation of Church and State” – which was NOT part of the amendment – to prevent the teaching of Christianity and Judaism while allowing Islam in public schools. He also attacked Christians, Jews and the Bible over 100 times. When he accepted Middle East refugees into the country, over 99 percent were Muslim and less than one percent Christian, the ones who really were being persecuted abroad.

            By denigrating the police, celebrating victims and violence, and outwardly challenging the rule of law Obama set up the Constitution for major change. This erosion has emboldened Democrats to use fascist bullying techniques as Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and Eric Holder’s and Maxine Water’s inciting their constituencies. The erosion of the rule of law has also given room to such radical concepts as socialism, open borders, infanticide, not to mention the weaponizing of the FBI, Justice Department and intelligence community. Perhaps worst of all, as seen in the Kavanaugh hearing, a person was forced to prove his innocence instead of found “innocent until proven guilty.”

            Taken together, these tactics constitute a well-devised strategy to break down America’s moral firewall, which in turn softens up the country for fundamental change. Such a strategy of status quo destruction was key to the success of early fascist regimes.

            5. Destruction of the Existing Economic Structure: In the mid-1960’s two Columbia University professors concocted the Cloward and Piven plan. Essentially they espoused that the government had to be overwhelmed with a massive welfare system that would cause the collapse of the capitalist economic system. Such is the case with the Democrat New Green Deal. While the latest estimated price tag for this progressive program is $9.4 trillion per year for the next 10 years, Democrats are pushing this economic wrecking ball in their 2020 presidential pitches. They also want  If the underclass believes this narrative, bolstered by the media’s constant reinforcement of it and the hope that illegals and 16-year-olds to vote in the next election, Democrats believe they can win handily not only in 2020 but all subsequent elections. This populist approach again is a core measure of fascism.

            6. Indoctrination: Starting in in the late sixties, the Department of Education with certain liberal universities and foundations revamped teacher training. Democrats wanted State DOEs to act as enforcers for Federal compliance and to get kids to act, think and feel a certain way as the result of learning a specific unit of instruction. This began Federal dominance in state and local education and serious scientific social engineering and implemented by progressive public school unions.

            The Clintons launched the School-to-Work program that would guide a person from cradle to grave. Obama and George Soros poured funds into the Center for American Progress (CAP) so three and four-year old kids could attend a full-day public preschool program. Arne Duncan, the secretary of education at the time, said because “parents will have to be working two to three jobs in the future to support their families,” public schools will become the hub of every community open 24/7, providing meals and health care – and constant indoctrination – and  managed by a progressive, non-government organization.

            At the collegiate level, indoctrination run by progressive teachers has become the method of instruction.  A 2016 Econ Journal Watch study exposed that of over 7,000 professors, progressives outnumbered conservatives by over 11 to 1 and in history departments, where increasingly the United States is demonized, and the ratio had soared to over 33 to 1.

            Further, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) ranks colleges and universities in terms of their openness to free speech. Their 2017 report revealed that nearly half of 440 colleges and universities “seriously infringe(d) upon the free speech rights of students,” while 34 percent limited free speech and only 16 percent did not. The president now has had to implement an executive order to force colleges and universities allow for free speech

            7. Totalitarianism:  Nazism expert Carl Schmitt characterized the fascist state as wanting to “guarantee a totality of political unity transcending all diversity.”  Ironically Democrats use identity politics as a two-edged sword to achieve this goal. First they frame “white male Christians” as evil, the oppressors everyone else a victim. It’s politically correct and logical to defend the victim and malign the oppressor.  They use this technique to accuse Trump of being a white supremacist based on a staged event in Charlottesville Virginia.

            There a so-called white supremacist group led by Robert Spencer faced off against a left group, Antifa. The problem is both groups were left. Spencer, who is seen as the premier white supremacist today, attended the University of Virginia, a liberal institution, and his favorite presidents were all Democrats.  Antifa is a thug organization funded by left-wing radical George Soros.

            Since the 1890s Democrats have attempted ethnic cleansing. From 1907 to 1932, progressives advocated for the rooting out the “unfit,” such as criminals, imbeciles, “useless” or inferior people, much like Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” of today. Progressives founded several eugenic organizations calling for laws to sterilize “criminals, idiots, imbeciles and rapists.” Democrat-controlled Southern state legislatures passed laws prohibiting interracial marriages. In 1924 progressives pushed for and saw enacted an immigration law intended to keep undesirable migrants out of the country. And eight years later Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, petitioned the government to set up a code “for the better distribution of babies…to protect society against the propagation and increase of the unfit.”    

            Democrats also use identity politics to push for a homogeneous society. They try to convince the public that everyone should be equal, economically and racially. And the best way to reach that goal is to eliminate whiteness and become a “mocha” society. This sells particularly well to minorities and millennials who have been indoctrinated with identity politics and the evils of Americanism.

Democrats are trying to create a permanent underclass while educating students – the leaders of tomorrow – to believe government must lead this class to succeed.

            8. The Environment: Nazi Germany led the world in green. The Reich Nature Protection law was sweeping legislation to protect the environment, promoted organic farming, reforestation and all the conservation issues modern environmentalists espouse. Today conservation is used by progressives to bash capitalism with dubious weather models. And in many developing countries elites use conservation to justify displacing poor folks for parkland.

By Bob Taft

Part 2 – The Left Side

The midterms showed the Left Side of Congress that all of their anti-Trump energy had paid off. They recaptured the House by a sizable margin and were fully prepared to run with what was clearly their new mandate. Nancy Pelosi was back at the helm, the exhausting, non-stop Trump probes were taking shape, and all was right with the Establishment world.

The Hijacking

For about a week. That’s when the Left Side was co-opted by a small outside group of radicals called the Justice Democrats, a new brand of puppeteer. While they endorsed 78 midterm candidates, they actually held auditions and recruited 12 more. Of that select group, only Ocasio-Cortez made it to Washington, but she did so by beating a well-entrenched Democrat in the primary which sent a signal to the Left Side. Go further left or we’ll replace you.

The Big Three of this movement are Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.  Their collective contributions to the legal process to date have been the introduction of a ten-year $94 trillion New Green Deal that would eliminate airplanes and cows while strangling corporate America; a cry to impeach the M…F…ing president; and a series of anti-Semitic slurs.  In response, most Democrat senators fear that Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will call for a vote on the first item; House speaker Nancy Pelosi has said “no impeachment,” but the young bucks of the party openly say otherwise; and a resolution originally designed to censure Ms. Omar became a watered-down document condemning all forms of hatred.

It appears that the old guard of the Established Left Side are no match for the upstart freshmen.

In the next few years, expect more of this new breed to encroach upon Washington with the Justice Democrats and their fellow radical LLCs in total control. For example, one of the founders of this movement, Sakat Chakabarti, serves as AOC’s chief of staff. While he has already come under scrutiny for campaign funds violations, he orchestrates his puppet’s every move and cringes when she goes off script.

Their goal is to recruit candidates, train them, run their campaigns, and push centrist Democrats aside. So far discombobulated Democrats apparently are letting them do it. The group is building a stronger base and fund-raising mechanism and want to toss 100 such candidates into the ring in 2020. They want to pack the Supreme Court with activist judges and by 2024 put their own Manchurian candidate in the White House. To ensure such an early victory, they want to lower the voting age to 16, have illegal immigrants vote and rid the country of the Electoral College.

Defying the Global Establishment, candidates will be told to reject corporate and lobbying contributions and swear allegiance to the JD platform, including disbanding ICE, promoting open borders, ensuring free universal health care, pushing for free higher education, ending the death penalty, and calling for the absolute end to environmental damage in this country. Already the freshmen bucks are threatening to make lists of and promise retaliation against any Congressional Democrat who dares to oppose this ambitious agenda.

The Left Side of Capitol Hill, which has been bullying their Right Side counterparts for years, are finally being bullied themselves…and they don’t like it. It’s one thing for a nationalist outsider to come to Washington to disrupt the status quo. Years of investigations can put the brakes on the damage a guy like Trump can do. But it’s quite another matter – and one potentially much more dangerous – for a subgroup of their own party to intimidate them so. Yet the Justice Democrats have a sense of urgency about them. They don’t want to wait years to become the focal point of politics. They believe time is of the essence and they are already seizing the moment.

Radical Conformity Settles In

So the Left Side is in a quandary. They desperately hate the president and want him gone, but what he’s managed to get accomplished in spite of Congress has been amazing. Thus the Left Side can’t criticize the economy or the improvement in the quality of life since the Obama days. Trumps’ accomplishments and the Justice Democrat’s push to the far left has forced the Left Side to adopt a radical agenda for the upcoming 2020 elections. Each of the 20 or so candidates tries to outdo the other daily with the full assortment of far left goodies from third-term abortions to freebies across the board for all. The Left Side is falling in lock-step with the Justice Democrats.

Such is the condition of the Left Side of Congress.  If poor Mrs. Pelosi thought riding donkeys was hard, now she knows what it’s like to bounce around on bucking broncos.

Despite their late arrival, it appears the new puppeteers learn fast and are stringing their puppets quite well. 

By Bob Taft

Part 1: The Right Side

Democrats took the majority from Republicans in Congress, but so what?  Let’s be honest about who runs the country. Not Republicans. Not Democrats. But the Globalist Establishment led by puppeteers.

Actually the Congress is one big Puppet Party, consisting of the Right Side and the Left Side. In Part 1 of this article, we will deal predominately with the Right Side; but first let’s take a closer look at the Puppet Party itself.

            The Puppet Part – Overview

Once their constituents back home voted them into office, the members, now nestled inside the Capital Beltway, become the property of lobbyists. Currently there are 23 lobbyists for each member of Congress and that number only goes up each year. And of the retiring members in 2014 and 2016, over one-third found careers on K Street.

Since the early 1980’s, lobbying costs ballooned from about $200 million to nearly $4 billion a year and K Street pushes an all-globalist narrative. The Right Side of Congress answers to Big Business – the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, and major corporations.  The Left Side reports to law associations, technology companies, banks, hospital and medical service providers, unions, the Internet providers and educational groups. Nearly everyone is covered except the constituents that put these people into office.

To solidify this culture, Chief Justice John Roberts opened the floodgates for campaign contributions. Since then, the vast majority of the Congressional largess comes from big donors with deep pockets, with actual constituents trailing far behind. In the 2016 election alone, 1,724 rich donors spent over $274 million, an average contribution that was five times more than the household income of a typical American family.

The Threat to The Right

Donald J. Trump was not supposed to win the 2016 presidential election. When he did, it tossed the Right Side into a quandary. How could they be loyal to a Republican president when he was a nationalist and they were globalists? Their K Street and Wall Street bosses cared only about maximizing profits in a global economy and talk of challenging China, NAFTA and trans-Atlantic trade was a definite threat.

The globalist puppeteers had to stop the man who wanted to make America great again.    The Right Side quickly jumped into action. When it appeared certain that Trump would beat Ted Cruz for the Republican nomination, Mitch McConnell huddled with Senator Jeff Sessions who agreed to be a key Trump supporter. If Trump were to somehow win the election, Sessions would lobby for the position of Attorney General. Trump won and Sessions predictably became head of the Justice Department where he handed off the reins to an Obama holdover. Rod Rosenstein promptly recommended the firing of the controversial head of the FBI, James Comey. He then hired a special counsel to investigate the firing, creating a witch hunt based on a salacious dossier concocted and paid for by the Hillary Clinton team which has plagued the president ever since.

Within the Congress itself, though, the Right Side had a dicier time of it. After passing the biggest tax bill in history, Never Trumper and ardent globalist, Paul Ryan, promised the president that he would get the money for the much needed border wall in September of last year if Trump would approve the heavily-Left Side budget in March. He of course lied to the president, called it quits instead and presided over the House as a lame duck for the better part of nine months. Rather than supporting Trump’s agenda, he came up with one of his own, criticized the president, and thwarted any effort to get to the bottom of DOJ malfeasance.

On the senate side, despite all the talk about repealing Obamacare, the late John McCain singlehandedly blocked that initiative. Even to this day members of the president’s party claim to stand with him. But in reality they listen only to their puppeteers as the Dirty Dozen did in undercutting Trump’s national emergency declaration. For Trump, his options are clear: either be slapped in the face by the opposition or stabbed in the back by his conniving colleagues.      

There were nearly 40 Republicans who elected not to run for their Congressional seats in the midterms. Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan did nothing to persuade members to run. Knowing that Republicans faced an uphill battle in the midterms, especially newcomers, these leaders of the Right Side purposely tried to swing the Congress back to the Left Side. Consequently, since nothing of note got done in Congress in 2018, Ryan’s efforts paid off as Democrats won back the House in last year’s midterms.

The Right Side’s Comfort Zone

As globalists, the Right Side just wants to stay in the back seat of Congress, blame the left for all the craziness and wait for a globalist to return to the Oval Office. Being in the minority they don’t feel as exposed or responsible for Congressional inaction. They can tell their constituents back home that the obstructionist Left Side are to blame for the ineptitude in Washington and try to convince their voters that Republicans are all fighting the good fight. But since they fought so poorly when they were in control, their words are quite empty and their voters knew it by not giving them another victory last November.

 Ironically Paul Ryan’s counter plan to Trump’s focused on cutting the government deficit; yet throughout the former Bush and Obama administrations, the Right Side were as eager to spend as the Left Side. And while they claim to want border security and to improving health care – the major issues on the Congressional table – they team with their alleged opponents across the aisle to block the president on both counts.

Their puppeteers have trained them well.

By Bob Taft

After WWI the British arm of the Rothschild family wanted to settle the Jewish people in the former Ottoman Empire land of Palestine. (1) While the Arabs universally rejected the idea, the family of Saud agreed to support it and for their support, the British granted most of the Arabian Peninsula to the Sauds. In 1932 they established a new country in their name: Saudi Arabia.

Just when the Palestinians were coming together after World War I, the British decreed that their homeland would be split. Although 90 percent of Palestine was Arab, the British referred to them as “non-Jewish communities.” The massive influx of Jewish immigrants and sudden British control sparked an Arab uprising. Arabs throughout the Middle East were outraged at the West for partitioning Palestine, even though the incoming Jews provided employment opportunities which boosted the Palestinian quality of life. Nonetheless when Israel declared its independence in 1948, war broke out in a vain attempt to stop the move. Israel won the battle against several surrounding Arab neighbors which only exacerbated the situation.

Again in the 1960s more trouble for the Israelis brewed. Vowing to destroy Israel, the Jordanians and Egyptians set their weaponry on Israeli targets and Palestinians raided the Jews often. Syria tried to cut off Israel from their water supply. Egypt ordered out UN peacekeepers stationed in the Sinai and the UN secretary general at the time meekly complied.  Bolstered by the UN’s quick submission, Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, a clear violation of international law. On May 30, 1967, King Hussein of Jordan announced that “All of the Arab armies now surround Israel.” (2)

But the following month Israel launched a surprise attack. They defeated the Syrians, Jordanians and Egyptians, wrestling East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan, the Gaza Strip from Egypt and the Golan Heights from Syria. Israel claimed these territories to protect isolated Jewish communities in the region and to expand their territory to defend themselves better against neighboring enemies. Their expansion beyond the limits of the 1947 partition though alienated UN members and incensed Middle East countries, which intensified their vow to eliminate Israel.

Moreover, not too long ago, it appeared that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas had resolved his differences with Hamas, the terrorist organization in Palestine which continues to use rockets and mortars against Israel and whose charter calls for the destruction of the Jewish state. For a while Abbas tooted that the PA and Hamas complemented each other. This new alliance bolstered the world narrative: the Palestinians were the “victims” of Israel and Hamas attacks were strictly defensive measures to retaliate against big bad Israel.

Abbas pushed this message of the victims versus the oppressive occupiers. And the world bought it ignoring, of course, that the Jewish people originally lived across the entire area only to be shoved out in a bloodbath around 600 B.C. and that the United Nations created the current situation in the first place. 

It is perhaps marginally understandable that this narrative plays well when the PA and Hamas are on the same frequency. But currently they are not. Israel left Gaza voluntarily in 2005, a move both the PA and Hamas did not interpret as a sign of peace, but one of weakness. Since Hamas took over the region in 2007, the relationship between the PA and Hamas has been rocky at best. The thaw described above, however, dissolved rather quickly and hostility between the two tenuous partners escalated even faster. Ironically it peaked when Abbas stopped paying Israel to supply Gaza with electricity. Abbas claimed that he was done propping up the Palestinian Authority’s political rival. For good measure, he also slashed the salaries of thousands of Gazan employees working in his government. (3)

Mahmoud Abbas (and the PA which controls the West Bank) wants to reassert his authority over Gaza and scuttle any US or Israeli-backed peace plan that would cut the PA out of the West Bank. Hamas, on the other hand, wants Abbas to resign. That terrorist organization claims East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza – territories under Israel’s control since the 1967 Six Day War – for their future state. (4) Abbas is seeking total control of the territory. In short, both parties want all of what they believe is the future Palestinian state for their own.

But where does that leave the Palestinian people? They have been used by both the PA and Hamas. They have been trained to show allegiance to Palestine, view Israel as their mortal enemy and fight to destroy them. Recently Israeli and Palestinian woman marched in solidarity for better relations between the two peoples. Curiously the Palestinians scorned these women, but turned around and called Hamas “heroes.” Palestinian conditioning seems to be working quite well.

So how do the Palestinians exist? Quite horribly and it’s not Israel’s fault. The PA gives about  $100 million in aid to the two million Palestinians in Gaza each month. Nonetheless, “unemployment exceeds 50 percent, tap water is undrinkable and electricity is only available for a few hours every day.” (5) Israel and Egypt have maintained a blockade of Gaza since Hamas seized power to prevent Hamas from importing weaponry. But by slashing the salaries of former government workers in Gaza much less cutting fuel subsidies to pay for electricity, Abbas has worsened the situation for purely political reasons.

Where does the PA get the money to fund Gaza at the tune of $100 million a month?

They rely primarily on the ample donations they receive from international institutions, like the $221 million President Obama gave them just before he left office and the billions the European Union has poured into their institutional building. The fact is Hamas and the PA have done little to advance the economy of Palestine. Perhaps because of this significant investment, the West has to prop up Palestine and blame Israel for the region’s misery. Fact be known – which is frequently ignored, overlooked or simply denied these days – Palestine doesn’t have the critical mass and resources to become an independent state.

Further the rest of the Middle East generally doesn’t give a whit about the stateless Palestinians. Most of the countries there see Palestine as the spearhead of Arab animus not just toward Israel, but the West. Saudi Arabia claims to be opposed to fighting Israel while arch enemy Iran wants the country gone for good. As Saudi Arabia and Iran battle for hegemony in the Middle East, the Palestine-Israeli conflict will continue to be a major rallying point.  Several attempts at peace have failed mainly because the Palestinians will only agree to a settlement where Israel is eliminated, a condition even the EU won’t accept.

The only real interest the Middle East has in Palestine is not the welfare of the people there, but the continued war with the West. Any peace process has always failed because the Palestinian bar is set way too high and Abbas and Hamas, along with Iran and others, know it. Israelis and Palestinians are but pawns in a conflict through which the PA hopes to secure broad-based sympathy and support, while nations like Iran hope never gets resolved.

Meanwhile although the United Nations created this seemingly endless conflict, members increasingly condemn Israel which daily must fight to keep their independence. The West, especially Europe, saves face for their fiasco by making the traditional victim, Israel, their scapegoat.

NOTES

1. Bitcom Briefing, “Causes and Consequences of the Six-Day War (1967),” March 10, 2017

     2.  Toameh, Klaled Abu, “The Palestinian Jihads against Israel,” Gatestone Institute, December 13, 2016

     3.  Rubin, Shira, “Palestinians have spent decades battling Israel. Now they’re battling each other,” Vox, August 22, 2017

     4. Agencies, “In role reversal, Abbas pressures Hamas as Israel allows aid,” The Times of Israel, January 2019

By Bob Taft

Bowing to the insistence of the United Nations, Congress passed the Higher Education Act of 1965.  Under Title VI of that law, U.S. taxpayers began subsidizing Middle East Studies Centers at various universities, which also received, and still do, funding from several Middle East countries, led by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Iran. (1) There are now nearly 130 centers across the country. By law they must conduct outreach to the public, including designing seminars on the Middle East. The heavily subsidized centers pass out teaching materials that receive no scrutiny whatsoever. Saudi-funded foundations design the materials and train the “outreach coordinators.” The gist of the Saudi & Co. agenda is to paint Islam in glowing colors, criminalize Israel and demonize America for crimes against humanity. (2)

Since 1981 the Muslim Brotherhood has played a big role in turning American and global academia to their views. They created the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) with its headquarters in Virginia with branch offices in key cities around the globe.

Its goal: the Islamization of the social sciences worldwide. While the Brotherhood claimed their objective here was “to peacefully get inside the United States government and American universities,” their former director of academic research, Sayyid Syeed, said “Our job is to change the Constitution of America.” Their stated goals capture the organization’s true intent: “direct research and studies to develop Islamic thought and the Islamization of knowledge.”

They do this by holding specialized intellectual and cultural conferences, seminars and study circles to support researchers and scholars in universities and research centers. The IIIT operates through agreements with colleges and universities across the country, setting up conferences and establishing Muslim academic chairs in various college departments.

The most egregious and anti-Semitic example of Islamic propaganda in colleges and universities is the Boycott Divestment Sanctions program. This initiative is sponsored by American taxpayers through Title VI of the Education Act, Middle East Studies Centers, the schools themselves and Saudi Arabia through Aramco World and Iran via its Alevi Foundation. (3) 

BDS is an anti-Israeli initiative which began nearly twenty years ago at Harvard and since has spread to campuses not just across this country, but across the planet. Both the Students for Justice in Palestine and the Muslim Student Associations (MSA) also contribute to BDS pro-boycott activities. The MSA is an original Muslim Brotherhood front group which serves as an umbrella group in 52 Muslim countries.

In fact, BDS is a marketing tool for the Palestinian Authority and the terror organization Hamas. (See the Israeli-Palestine Conflict.) Both groups want to destroy Israel, which is actually stated on the BDS website. The organization’s one-sided narrative tries to gain sympathy from the global community for the purpose of delegitimizing the state of Israel and encouraging its destruction through boycotting and sanctioning the entire nation. Ironically the founder of BDS, Omar Barghouti, moved to Israel in 1994 and has lived there ever since. He even pursues his PhD. at Tel Aviv University, an institution he espouses to boycott. (4)

Since the mid-1990’s, though, colleges across the country have put on BDS events with enthusiastic support from progressive professors. There is never an attempt to discuss the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict or debate its history as a liberal education is supposed to do. Instead for the past twenty some years, academia has been simply bashing Israel.

Despite the fact that the movement is backed by terrorist groups and sponsors like Iran, BDS was nominated for the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize. In considering their nomination, hopefully the august Nobel commission considered some of the consequences of BDS propaganda, such as the following.

Last year Cape Town, South Africa, had been suffering from an incredible drought. Water has literally dried up and water taps, showers, and toilets were to shut down completely. Day Zero for them was within a couple of months. Hearing of this crisis, Israel, which had developed technology to recycle nearly 90 percent of its water through sophisticated desalination processes, volunteered to help remedy Cape Town’s problems. When a conference was called to discuss possible steps to take, a pro-BDS professor refused to attend because an Israeli had also been invited. Immediately afterward, the BDS movement successfully lobbied the South African government to cancel the conference. Because of growing Muslim influence in the city, the leaders sided with BDS and rejected the Israeli offer. South Africans were said to have rejoiced at their ability to “tell off the Israelis,” ignoring the fact that such a bravado refusal could very well have led to a widespread calamity.

But the larger and more telling conundrum is this: how can an organization like BDS, whose hostility for a foe trumps salvation of a country, dupe the “intellectual” world that considered this group for the highest peace prize on earth?  

Getting back to America, what started over 50 years ago to give American education an international face-lift through the Higher Education Act has morphed into a propaganda machine for Middle East countries which frankly want to bring America down. Yet progressive universities from coast to coast, led by Harvard, proudly wear the BDS banner and fervently promote the Islamic message.

Founded by Jews and named after the first Jewish Supreme Court justice, Louis Brandeis, Brandeis University rescinded an honorary degree to a critic of radical Islam while granting one to a notoriously anti-Semitic playwright. Professors have also exchanged a series of emails where they have attacked Israel and supported a program sponsored by the Muslim Brotherhood. (7) San Francisco State University authorized the president of a Hamas-backed group called the General Union of Palestinian Students to post several social media notes threatening pro-Israel students and praising not only Hamas but also another militant group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. (8) And liberal professors are all too pleased to give speeches at IIII- sponsored events well beyond the borders of their campuses.

The Islamic message, with the Muslim Brotherhood leading the way and well-backed by Saudi Arabia and their arch-foe Iran, echoes across global academia quite well. Since the West fears terrorism and sharia law, the key selling point has been the need to destroy Israel. And while Israel is the only real democracy in the Middle East and the strongest ally of the West, many in the West, because of the baseless yet quite effective BDS narrative, have turned on Israel and the Jewish people. With the overwhelming influx of Muslim refugees, Europe has become openly hostile toward the Jewish state. Here in America, university indoctrination has turned many millennials against Israel as well and the Democrat party is obediently falling into that line as well.

Consequently we saw the Democrats in Congress refuse to condemn anti-Semitism. Noted commentator and judge, Jeanine Pirro, may have lost her job for finally telling the truth about Islam and calling out Congressman Omar for her condemnation of Israel and the wearing of Islamic garb in the halls of Congress.

Even Chelsea Clinton has been thrashed for speaking her mind in a country where free speech used to be sacrosanct. It only shows that to blast Israel and the Jews is perfectly acceptable. But doing the same to Muslims condemn you as an Islamophobe. Political correctness, if that’s what spurs this perverted phenomenon, has turned our values upside down and enemies of those values know it. 

And so the animus toward our true friends grows.

1. Maccabee Task Force, “What is BDS and Who’s Behind It”
2. Ibid.
3. Kurtz, Stanley, Saudi in the Classroom, National Review, July 25, 2007
4. Maccabee
5. Blech, Rabbi Benjamin, “The Cape Town Water Crisis and Hating Israel,” Aishe.com, February 11, 2018
6. Mauro, Ryan, “Muslim Brotherhood Inside American Colleges,” The Clarion Project, May 16, 2013. Other colleges listed include George Mason, Nazareth, Shenandoah, Hartford Seminary, Binghamton, Eastern Mennonite, Delaware and American, et al.
7. David Horowitz Freedom Center, “Ten Top American Universities Most Friendly to Terrorists,”October 28, 2015. Ten schools include: Brandeis, Columbia, Harvard, Rutgers, San Francisco State, University of California, Irvine, Los Angeles and San Diego, et al.
8. Ibid.
9. Gallup News, Israel Maintains Positive Image in U.S.,” February 15, 2017
10. Kurtz, Stanley, “Saudi in the Classroom,” National Review, July 25, 2007