Category Archives: Issues

Kim says North Korea close to testing inter-continental missile

The Washington Post reports: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said his country is in the “last stage” of preparations to test-fire an intercontinental ballistic missile, refusing to slow his nuclear-arms development as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office in Washington.

Kim made his remarks in a New Year’s televised address as he outlined his country’s military achievements for the past year, the country’s official Korean Central News Agency said Sunday. North Korea has conducted three nuclear tests under Kim and launched long-range rockets.

North Korea “will continue to strengthen its ability based on nuclear might to mount a preemptive attack,” Kim said during a half-hour speech that touched on a variety of issues, including economic policy and relations with South Korea.

Since taking power in late 2011, the North Korean leader has concentrated on developing nuclear-armed missiles that could reach the United States. The country has refused to accept U.S. demands to freeze its arms development before the two sides can resume international disarmament talks.

Trump, who takes office Jan. 20, likened Kim to a “maniac” during his campaign while suggesting that he could meet with the North Korea leader for nuclear talks. While Kim made no mention of Trump in his speech, his comments released Sunday signal that North Korea might seek to test-fire a long-range missile around the time of the U.S. presidential inauguration to raise stakes ahead of potential talks with the Trump administration. [Continue reading…]

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In year of anti-Muslim vitriol, brands promote inclusion

The New York Times reports: The gentle piano music starts as the doorbell chimes. A white-haired Christian pastor greets his friend, a Muslim imam, and the two converse and laugh over a cup of tea, wincing about their creaky knees as they prepare to part ways. Later, it spurs the same idea in each for a gift: kneepads sent via Amazon Prime. (It is a commercial, after all.)

The piano notes accelerate as the men open their deliveries with smiles, and then each uses the item to kneel in prayer: one at a church, the other at a mosque. The final chords fade.

The ad from Amazon and its message of interfaith harmony became a viral sensation this holiday season, at the end of a year in which talk involving Muslims became particularly ominous. Amazon — which aired the commercial in England, Germany and the United States — cast a practicing vicar and Muslim community leader in the lead roles and consulted with several religious organizations to ensure the ad was accurate and respectful.

“This type of a project is definitely a first for us,” said Rameez Abid, communications director for the social justice branch of the Islamic Circle of North America, one group Amazon worked with. “They were very aware that this was going to cause controversy and might get hate mail and things like that, but they said it’s something that they wanted to do because the message is important.”

 

A slew of major American brands — including Honey Maid, Microsoft, Chevrolet, YouTube and CoverGirl — prominently featured everyday Muslim men, women and children in their marketing last year. While such ads were apolitical in nature, focused on themes of community and acceptance, they were viewed as bold, even risky, in a year when there were campaign statements by Donald J. Trump about a Muslim registry and a ban on Muslim immigrants. [Continue reading…]

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The roots of implicit bias

Daniel A. Yudkin and Jay Van Bavel write: During the first presidential debate, Hillary Clinton argued that “implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police.” Her comment moved to the forefront of public conversation an issue that scientists have been studying for decades: namely, that even well-meaning people frequently harbor hidden prejudices against members of other racial groups. Studies have shown that these subtle biases are widespread and associated with discrimination in legal, economic and organizational settings.

Critics of this notion, however, protest what they see as a character smear — a suggestion that everybody, deep down, is racist. Vice President-elect Mike Pence has said that an “accusation of implicit bias” in cases where a white police officer shoots a black civilian serves to “demean law enforcement.” Writing in National Review, David French claimed that the concept of implicit bias lets people “indict entire communities as bigoted.”

But implicit bias is not about bigotry per se. As new research from our laboratory suggests, implicit bias is grounded in a basic human tendency to divide the social world into groups. In other words, what may appear as an example of tacit racism may actually be a manifestation of a broader propensity to think in terms of “us versus them” — a prejudice that can apply, say, to fans of a different sports team. This doesn’t make the effects of implicit bias any less worrisome, but it does mean people should be less defensive about it. [Continue reading…]

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A crisis of liberal democracy? More of liberalism than of democracy

Kenan Malik writes: Welcome to 2017. It will be just like 2016. Only more so. This will be the year in which Donald Trump formally enters the White House, and Theresa May (probably) begins Brexit negotiations. It will be the year in which elections in Germany, the Netherlands and France, and possibly Italy, are likely to see rightwing populists gain ground, even triumph.

In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’s anti-Muslim, anti-immigration Party for Freedom(PVV) leads the polls and may help form the government in March. In France, in May, Marine Le Pen of the far-right Front National should reach at least the second-round run-off in the presidential election and may even win. In Germany, Angela Merkel could hang on as chancellor after September’s vote, but the far-right AfD will almost certainly have dozens of Bundestag seats.

And, so, 2017 will also be the year when fears for the future of liberal democracy will reach a new pitch. Such fears will, however, be only half-justified. Democracy is in rude health. It is liberalism that is in trouble.

Democracy does not require that the “right” result be delivered every time. The whole point of the democratic process is that it is unpredictable. The reason we need democracy is that the question of what are “right” policies or who is the “right” candidate is often fiercely contested. Donald Trump or Le Pen may be reactionary, and their policies may help unpick the threads of liberal tolerance, but their success reveals a problem with politics, not democracy. [Continue reading…]

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Anthony Bourdain on Trump and privileged Eastern liberals

Alexander Bisley interviews Anthony Bourdain, host of CNN’s Parts Unknown: Bisley: What concerns you about Trump?

Bourdain: What I am not concerned about with Trump? Wherever one lives in the world right now I wouldn’t feel too comfortable about the rise of authoritarianism. I think it’s a global trend, and one that should be of concern to everyone.

Bisley: You’re a liberal. What should liberals be critiquing their own side for?

Bourdain: There’s just so much. I hate the term political correctness, the way in which speech that is found to be unpleasant or offensive is often banned from universities. Which is exactly where speech that is potentially hurtful and offensive should be heard.

The way we demonize comedians for use of language or terminology is unspeakable. Because that’s exactly what comedians should be doing, offending and upsetting people, and being offensive. Comedy is there, like art, to make people uncomfortable, and challenge their views, and hopefully have a spirited yet civil argument. If you’re a comedian whose bread and butter seems to be language, situations, and jokes that I find racist and offensive, I won’t buy tickets to your show or watch you on TV. I will not support you. If people ask me what I think, I will say you suck, and that I think you are racist and offensive. But I’m not going to try to put you out of work. I’m not going to start a boycott, or a hashtag, looking to get you driven out of the business.

The utter contempt with which privileged Eastern liberals such as myself discuss red-state, gun-country, working-class America as ridiculous and morons and rubes is largely responsible for the upswell of rage and contempt and desire to pull down the temple that we’re seeing now.

I’ve spent a lot of time in gun-country, God-fearing America. There are a hell of a lot of nice people out there, who are doing what everyone else in this world is trying to do: the best they can to get by, and take care of themselves and the people they love. When we deny them their basic humanity and legitimacy of their views, however different they may be than ours, when we mock them at every turn, and treat them with contempt, we do no one any good. Nothing nauseates me more than preaching to the converted. The self-congratulatory tone of the privileged left — just repeating and repeating and repeating the outrages of the opposition — this does not win hearts and minds. It doesn’t change anyone’s opinions. It only solidifies them, and makes things worse for all of us. We should be breaking bread with each other, and finding common ground whenever possible. I fear that is not at all what we’ve done. [Continue reading…]

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The most powerful men in the world

Masha Gessen writes: Russian President Vladimir Putin’s mode of public communication is the very opposite of Donald Trump’s: rather than tweet 140-character bursts, he stages elaborate, laboriously choreographed affairs that far outlast anyone’s attention span. He holds one press conference and one televised call-in show a year. Participants are pre-screened, question topics are pre-cleared, and many are pre-scripted. Each event usually lasts more than four hours. Each usually contains a memorable and informative passage that summarizes Putin’s current vision of himself in the world. There have been times when he positioned himself as the savior of a country on the brink of catastrophe, a conqueror, a victor. This year, in his press conference on December 23, he positioned himself as the most powerful man in the world.

Here is Putin’s scripted exchange with a state-media journalist (I am quoting both sides at length precisely because this is pre-written dialogue):

Journalist: Vladimir Vladimirovich, the world is undergoing a global transformation. We are witnessing nations expressing their will, voting against old political concepts, against the old elites. Britain voted to leave the EU, though we still don’t know how it’s going to play out. Many people are saying that Trump won because people were voting against the old elites, against faces that they are tired of seeing, among other reasons. Have you and your colleagues discussed these changes? What will the new global order be like? Remember, at the General Assembly, on the seventieth anniversary [of the United Nations], you said, “Can’t you see what you’ve done?” Where are we going? At this point we are still in the context of confrontation. The back-and-forth yesterday about whose military is stronger. During his last press conference your still-colleague Barack Obama said that 37 percent of Republicans like you and that Ronald Reagan is probably turning over in his grave.

Putin: What was that?

Journalist: 37 percent of Republican voters like you.

Putin: Really?

Journalist: Yes, and if Ronald Reagan knew, he’d be turning over in his grave. By the way, we as your voters are very pleased that you have such power, that you could even reach Ronald Reagan. Our Western colleagues often tell us that you can manipulate the world, pick presidents of your choosing, intervene in elections wherever you want. How does it feel to be the most powerful man in the world? Thank you.

Putin: I have addressed this issue on numerous occasions. But if you think that I need to do it one more time, fine, I will say it one more time. The current US government and the leadership of the Democratic Party are trying to blame all their failures on outside forces. I have some questions and a few ideas regarding this.

The Democratic Party lost not only the presidential election but also the election to the Senate, where Republicans have the majority, and to Congress, where Republicans have the majority. I wonder if that’s my accomplishment too. [Here Putin cracks a joke with a reference to a Soviet-era film about a hapless college student who gets in trouble and takes the blame for things he did as well as things he didn’t do.] None of this is true. All of it is testament to the fact that the current administration is facing systemic problems. I have talked about this before.

I think there is a gap between the elites and the broad masses, as we used to say in Soviet times, regarding what’s right and what’s wrong. The fact that a significant portion of, let’s say, Republican voters are supporting the Russian president is not something I take personal credit for. You want to know what I think? I think a large number of Americans share our ideas of what the world should be like, what we should be doing, where we face common dangers and problems. It’s good that there are people who share our understanding of traditional values, because it’s a good start for building relations between two countries as powerful as Russia and the United States, on this basis, the basis of mutual admiration of the people.

I wish they wouldn’t dredge up the names of their former leaders. I don’t know who would be turning over in his grave. I think Reagan would rejoice in the victory of his party and would be happy for the newly elected president, who had a fine understanding of societal mood and worked in that paradigm and went to the very end even though no one, except you and me, believed that he would win.

At this point Putin is interrupted by applause. After the break, he continues by chiding Democrats for being sore losers. Later in the press conference he dismisses the conclusions of the CIA that Russian intelligence services threw the American election through hacking, claiming (much as Donald Trump has done) that the hackers could have been anyone, including “someone lying on the couch or in bed.” But Putin is reveling in the idea that he is “the most powerful man in the world.” He is right: it doesn’t matter if Russian hacks were decisive in the election—what matters is that many people believe that they were. If Americans perceive Putin as the ultimate winner of the presidential race, then that is what he is. [Continue reading…]

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NASA’s overlooked duty to look inward

Elisa Gabbert writes: In 1942, not long after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the poet Archibald MacLeish wrote an essay called “The Image of Victory,” in which he asked what winning the Second World War, the “airman’s war,” would mean for posterity. MacLeish believed that pilots could do more than bring victory; by literally rising above the conflicts on the ground, they could also reshape our very understanding of the planet. “Never in all their history have men been able truly to conceive of the world as one: a single sphere, a globe, having the qualities of a globe, a round earth in which all the directions eventually meet, in which there is no center because every point, or none, is center — an equal earth which all men occupy as equals,” he wrote. The airplane, he felt, was both an engine of perspective and a symbol of unity.

MacLeish could not, perhaps, have imagined the sight of a truly whole Earth. But, twenty-six years after his essay appeared, the three-man crew of Apollo 8 reached the highest vantage point in history, becoming the first humans to witness Earth rising over the surface of the moon. The most iconic photograph of our planet, popularly known as “The Blue Marble,” was taken by their successors on Apollo 17, in 1972. In it, Earth appears in crisp focus, brightly lit, as in studio portraiture, against a black backdrop. The picture clicked with the cultural moment. As the neuroscientist Gregory Petsko observed, in 2011, in an essay on the consciousness-shifting power of images, it became a symbol of the budding environmentalist movement. “Our whole planet suddenly, in this image, seemed tiny, vulnerable, and incredibly lonely against the vast blackness of the cosmos,” Petsko wrote. “Regional conflict and petty differences could be dismissed as trivial compared with environmental dangers that threatened all of humanity.” Apollo 17 marked America’s last mission to the moon, and the last time that humans left Earth’s orbit.

It was always part of NASA’s mission to look inward, not just outward. The National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, which established the agency, claimed as its first objective “the expansion of human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere and space.” NASA’s early weather satellites were followed, in the seventies and eighties, by a slew of more advanced instruments, which supplied data on the ozone layer, crops and vegetation, and even insect infestations. They allowed scientists to recognize and measure the symptoms of climate change, and their decades’ worth of data helped the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change conclude, in 2007, that global warming is “very likely” anthropogenic. According to a report released last month by NASA’s inspector general, the agency’s Earth Science Division helps commercial, government, and military organizations around the world locate areas at risk for storm-related flooding, predict malaria outbreaks, develop wildfire models, assess air quality, identify remote volcanoes whose toxic emissions contribute to acid rain, and determine the precise length of a day. [Continue reading…]

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How Russians pay to play in other countries

The New York Times reports: For a brief moment, it seemed that the powerful adviser’s head might roll at the Castle. After he lost his long legal battle over a hefty state fine, the Czech president warned him to pay up or lose his post.

Then a guardian angel materialized from Moscow.

Lukoil, the largest private Russian oil company in an industry dependent on Kremlin approval, stepped in to pay the nearly $1.4 million fine owed to a Czech court.

The aide, Martin Nejedly, stayed on as economic adviser to the Czech president, Milos Zeman, and vice chairman of his party. Perhaps more important, he retained his office right next to the president’s in the Castle, the official palace that looms over the capital, Prague.

But the payment last spring raised questions about Russian influence-buying in the Castle, where Mr. Zeman has staked out a position as one of the Kremlin’s most ardent sympathizers among European leaders.

“Unfortunately in the Czech Republic, some advisers to the president or the prime minister are willing to cooperate with the Russians,” said Karel Randak, who retired as head of the Czech foreign intelligence service in 2007. “I am not saying that they are Russian agents — but unfortunately for some people, the money is more important than the security of the Czech Republic.” [Continue reading…]

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The world has finally called Israel’s bluff on its non-existent Palestinian peace process

Tony Karon writes: Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long based his settlement strategy on the assumption that the international community will ignore the plight of the Palestinians. But the United Nations proved him wrong on Dec. 23, passing Security Council resolution 2334, which reaffirms the longstanding UN ruling that all Israeli settlements built outside Israel’s pre-1967 borders violate international law.

Israel has reacted with predictable fury to the UN resolution, with Netanyahu engaging in theatrical attempts to humiliate the resolution’s supporters. Netanyahu has also jousted verbally with US secretary of state John Kerry over the Obama administration’s reasons for withholding its veto, presumably hoping to impress his domestic political audience with an almost comical display of assumed international authority.

But even though Israel has made it clear that the non-binding resolution won’t restrain its continued settlement construction on the ground, the tone of its response reflects a well-grounded anxiety over the potential consequences of renewed international engagement on the conflict.

Despite Netanyahu’s confidence that the incoming Trump administration will back Israel on its settlement enterprise, the fact that not a single Israeli ally voted against the resolution deals a staggering blow to the prime minister’s core belief that Israel can normalize its international standing while denying the rights of millions of Palestinians. Netanyahu frequently boasts of Israel’s diplomatic gains, claiming it has made common cause with Sunni Arab states against Iran. But these statements are based on the unspoken assumption that amid more dramatic developments elsewhere, the world will simply forget about the Palestinians’ plight. [Continue reading…]

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U.S.-Venezuela relations will probably deteriorate under Trump. Ask ExxonMobil why

Timothy M. Gill writes: President-elect Donald Trump recently nominated ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson to be secretary of state. That company and Venezuela have been hostile toward each other over the past decade — which means Tillerson’s nomination suggests that the United States and Venezuela have a tense relationship ahead.

Venezuela is in a stunning economic crisis, with triple-digit inflation, scarce food and medicine, and a weakening currency. The Venezuelan government blames all this on “economic war” waged by the United States and the Venezuelan opposition.

Over the past two decades, the United States and Venezuela have had a difficult relationship. Since the 1998 election of Hugo Chávez as president, Venezuela has criticized U.S. foreign policy, including the “war on terror”; promoted socialist and left-wing governments throughout Latin America; and sought to create a multipolar world by embracing anti-U.S. leaders in Belarus, Cuba, Iran and Russia. [Continue reading…]

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Turkish authorities detain Wall Street Journal staff reporter Dion Nissenbaum for 2½ days

The Wall Street Journal reports: Turkish authorities detained a Wall Street Journal staff reporter for 2½ days this past week, without permitting him contact with his family or attorneys before releasing him.

The reporter, Dion Nissenbaum, 49 years old, left Turkey to return to the U.S. on Saturday. Police took Mr. Nissenbaum from his Istanbul apartment on Tuesday evening. He was released from a detention center on Friday morning.

A person familiar with the matter said he was held for allegedly violating a government ban on publication of images from an Islamic State video.

“While we are relieved that Dion was released unharmed after nearly three days, we remain outraged at his peremptory detention, without any contact with his family, legal counsel or colleagues,” said Gerard Baker, editor in chief of the Journal. [Continue reading…]

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Netanyahu corruption probe expected within days

Ynet reports: An Israeli TV channel reported Thursday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is suspected of receiving valuable gifts from two businessmen.

The Channel 2 segment was the latest in a series of reports in Israeli media saying that police are close to opening a criminal investigation against the prime minister.Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit is expected to order the head of police investigations to open the probe into allegations of bribe-taking and aggravated fraud leveled against Netanyahu.

The station said Netanyahu had accepted large-scale “favors” from businessmen in Israel and abroad. It said there had been a breakthrough in the case three weeks ago, but gave no further details.

Channel 2 said Netanyahu was the central suspect in a second investigation that also involves members of his family. It said some 50 witnesses were involved in the case.

The station, along with the Ynet news site, said a formal criminal probe is expected to be opened next week. [Continue reading…]

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Trump and the climate: His hot air on warming is far from the greatest threat

By Andrew Revkin, ProPublica, December 29, 2016

President-elect Donald J. Trump has long pledged to undertake a profound policy shift on climate change from the low-carbon course President Obama made a cornerstone of his eight years in the White House.

“This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop,” Trump tweeted a year ago.

In recent weeks, Trump doubled down, nominating champions of fossil fuels to several cabinet positions and peppering his transition team with longtime opponents of environmental regulations.

Both the rhetoric and the actions have provoked despair among many who fear a Trump presidency will tip the planet toward an overheated future, upending recent national and international efforts to stem emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from burning coal, oil and natural gas.

But will a President Trump noticeably affect the globe’s climate in ways that, say, a President Hillary Clinton would not have?

In recent weeks, a variety of consultants tracking climate and energy policy have used models to help address that question. ProPublica asked Andrew P. Jones at Climate Interactive, a nonprofit hub for such analysis, to run one such comparison.

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If Donald Trump targets journalists, thank Obama

James Risen writes: If Donald J. Trump decides as president to throw a whistle-blower in jail for trying to talk to a reporter, or gets the F.B.I. to spy on a journalist, he will have one man to thank for bequeathing him such expansive power: Barack Obama.

Mr. Trump made his animus toward the news media clear during the presidential campaign, often expressing his disgust with coverage through Twitter or in diatribes at rallies. So if his campaign is any guide, Mr. Trump seems likely to enthusiastically embrace the aggressive crackdown on journalists and whistle-blowers that is an important yet little understood component of Mr. Obama’s presidential legacy.

Criticism of Mr. Obama’s stance on press freedom, government transparency and secrecy is hotly disputed by the White House, but many journalism groups say the record is clear. Over the past eight years, the administration has prosecuted nine cases involving whistle-blowers and leakers, compared with only three by all previous administrations combined. It has repeatedly used the Espionage Act, a relic of World War I-era red-baiting, not to prosecute spies but to go after government officials who talked to journalists.

Under Mr. Obama, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. have spied on reporters by monitoring their phone records, labeled one journalist an unindicted co-conspirator in a criminal case for simply doing reporting and issued subpoenas to other reporters to try to force them to reveal their sources and testify in criminal cases. [Continue reading…]

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Trump could be Israel’s worst nightmare

Gregg Carlstrom writes: Netanyahu is a cautious politician. He prefers the status quo to dramatic steps. For all their personal animosity, Obama was actually a great help in this respect: Netanyahu invoked his name in Cabinet meetings like a father warning his unruly children about the boogeyman. He used the specter of an American response to deter the far-right impulses of his coalition partners. With Trump in office, he loses that ability.

In order to stay in power, Netanyahu will have to appease the growing chorus of voices on his right. Some of the extreme views in his Cabinet are no longer so extreme. For example, a November poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found that 44 percent of Israeli Jews support annexation of the full West Bank, with just 38 percent opposed. Perhaps more striking, a plurality does not believe the Palestinians living there should be granted equal rights. “That is, a small but significant minority of the Jewish public supports a situation that the international community regards as apartheid,” the pollsters noted.

Any move toward annexation would cause irreparable harm to Israel’s relationships with its closest allies. As Kerry said in his speech [on Wednesday], “if the choice is one state, Israel can either be Jewish or democratic, it cannot be both.”

In September, Netanyahu announced at the General Assembly that Israel had broadened its diplomatic relations, not just with traditional allies in the West, but with emerging powers and markets in Africa, Asia and Latin America. But many of these “new allies” were part of the 14 nations that voted unanimously for the resolution last week. Netanyahu speaks with Vladimir Putin more frequently than any Western leader, but Moscow voted in favor. He has spent years cultivating ties with tiny Senegal, which benefits from a major Israeli agricultural aid program. When it came time to vote at the Security Council, though, they supported the resolution.

And, at a news conference last year, Bennett said that Asian countries could become Israel’s closest friends, because they “lack a heritage of anti-Semitism” found in the West. But China and Japan backed the resolution, too. In fact, Asian diplomats in Tel Aviv tend to laugh when asked whether they would play a role as Israel’s protectors at the United Nations. “We’re not a very active player in this conflict, and I think that would continue to be the case,” one high-ranking Asian diplomat told me. “We want to maintain our distance and focus on other issues.”

Israel’s newest allies, in other words, are happy to increase trade, tourism and security cooperation — but when it comes to diplomacy, they won’t stick their necks out. And if the Netanyahu government provokes a stronger reaction from the U.N., they might even retreat.

Even more worrisome for Israel, however, is the growing alienation of American Jews, who find it more and more difficult to support a religious, right-wing government that they perceive as supporting Israeli racism and endless occupation. The tension between liberalism and Zionism, always lingering below the surface, has become more pronounced. And the Israeli government’s embrace of a president-elect (and his controversial political coterie) loathed by the vast majority of American Jews will only widen the chasm. [Continue reading…]

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How Donald Trump served as a willing accomplice in the Russian email hacking operation

David Frum writes: The content of the Russian-hacked emails was actually remarkably unexplosive. Probably the biggest news was that Hillary Clinton had expressed herself in favor of a hemispheric common market in speeches to Wall Street executives. Otherwise, we learned from them that some people at the Democratic National Committee favored a lifelong Democrat for their party’s nomination over a socialist interloper who had joined the party for his own convenience. We learned that many Democrats, including Chelsea Clinton, disapproved of the ethical shortcomings of some of the people in Bill Clinton’s inner circle. We learned that Hillary Clinton acknowledged differences between her “public and private” positions on some issues. None of this even remotely corroborated Donald Trump’s wild characterizations of the Russian-hacked, Wikileaks-published material.

These Wikileaks emails confirm what those of us here today have known all along: Hillary Clinton is the vessel for a corrupt global establishment that is raiding our country and surrendering our sovereignty. This criminal government cartel doesn’t recognize borders, but believes in global governance, unlimited immigration, and rule by corporations.

Or:

The more emails WikiLeaks releases, the more lines between the Clinton Foundation, the secretary of state’s office and the Clintons’ personal finances—they all get blurred … I mean, at what point—at what point do we say it? Hillary Clinton is the most corrupt person ever to seek the office of the presidency.

Without Trump’s own willingness to make false claims and misuse Russian-provided information, the Wikileaks material would have deflated of its own boringness. The Russian-hacked material did damage because, and only because, Russia found a willing accomplice in the person of Donald J. Trump. [Continue reading…]

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Obama targets Putin’s spies over DNC hack

Michael Weiss reports: In the last news conference of his administration two weeks ago U.S. President Barack Obama said that he warned Russian President Vladimir Putin to refrain from any further hacking of the U.S. election. In Obama’s words, he told Putin to “cut it out” during a tense tête-à-tête at a summit in China just weeks before the national vote that saw a prominent Putin-flatterer win the White House. Obama intimated that the hacking was also done with Putin’s express permission, if not indeed ordered by him personally. The goal of the digital tradecraft, the CIA and the FBI now agree, was to further the election of Donald Trump.

Whether the former KGB spy accused by the British government of “probably” approving the murderous irradiation of a Russian dissident at a central London hotel was impressed by “cut it out” remains unclear. But intensified sanctions may be a very different matter. And the stage is now set in the United States for a potential showdown between the Republican controlled Congress and the new Putin-apologist Republican president.

On Thursday, Obama announced that by executive order he has sanctioned nine entities and individuals over the Russian government’s alleged cyber-espionage against the Democratic Party in general and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in particular. He has also given 35 unnamed Russian intelligence operatives 72 hours to leave the United States, and has ordered restricted access to two Russian-government-run compounds, one in Long Island, the other in Maryland.

The Obama administration sanctioned both Russia’s domestic and military intelligence services, the FSB and GRU, respectively, on Thursday. The U.S. also targeted four top-ranking officials of the latter organization, including its current chief, Igor Valentinovich Korobov, and three of his subordinates — Sergey Aleksandrovich Gizunov, Igor Olegovich Kostyukov, and Vladimir Stepanovich Alekseyev. None of these men is known to be a frequent or even occasional traveler to the United States, however, and so the punishment is largely symbolic. [Continue reading…]

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