The enigmatic Gulf emirate of Qatar, which is obscenely wealthy due to its fortuitous location above the world&#8217;s largest natural gas field, has a longstanding problem with Sunni jihadism. The wealthy petrochemical sheikh minority of the <a href="https://dailycaller.com/2019/08/03/qatar-travel-ban-billionaires-slaves-trapped-middle-east/">majority slave state</a> Qatari populace is, along with Recep Tayyip Erdogan&#8217;s Turkey, disproportionately responsible for funding and exporting more radical Sunni Islamism than any other cloistered clerisy the world over. The Qatari ruling class <a href="https://www.meforum.org/57690/ensconced-doha-islamists">proudly hosts</a> Islamist cleric Yusuf Al Qaradawi, the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-designating-muslim-brotherhood-terrorist-josh-hammer">Muslim Brotherhood</a>&#8216;s de facto global caliph, and has long been the preeminent state <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/palestinians/.premium-hamas-officials-expect-30-million-transfer-from-qatar-within-several-days-1.7222696">bankroller</a> of Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Pro-terror network <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-al-jazeeras-disgraceful-holocaust-denying-josh-hammer">Al Jazeera</a> also serves as a state-run Qatari propaganda outfit, and it is the evil bile spewing from Al Jazeera&#8217;s airwaves that led more moderate Sunni Gulf states, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, to boycott and embargo Qatar in 2017. Counter-jihadist activist David Reaboi <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/feb/17/qatar-a-hospitable-base-for-the-muslim-130932598/">put it well</a> at The Washington Times in February:
<blockquote>Al Jazeera is the world’s most successful, sophisticated and influential state-directed information operation.
It is remarkably aggressive in service of Qatar’s foreign policy interests, which include four key elements: (1) undermining the stability of its neighbors, especially Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates; (2) promoting Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood in vulnerable, Western open societies; (3) financially and diplomatically supporting violent terrorist groups like Hamas, al Qaeda and the Taliban; and (4) assisting the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, Iran, in evading US sanctions as it seeks to develop nuclear weapons.</blockquote>
Now, according to an <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/world/qatar-iran-attack-vessels-intelligence-allies">exclusive Fox News report</a> from this past weekend, Qatar — which, despite alienating its fellow Sunni Gulf states, maintains a cozy relationship with the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-iranian-revolution-forty-years-old-stand-josh-hammer">terror-supporting</a> Iranian mullahs — has once again revealed its true colors for the world to see. As reported by Benjamin Weinthal, Fox News obtained a report alleging that &#8220;Qatar had advance knowledge on an Iranian attack on four commercial vessels in the Gulf of Oman in May and may have failed to warn its U.S., French, and British allies.&#8221; In other words, Qatar duplicitously sided with the world&#8217;s number one state sponsor of terrorism over its purported Western &#8220;allies.&#8221;
The only thing that is surprising about such Qatari duplicity is that anyone in the West is still surprised by it. Qatar has long been the proverbial <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/qatar-is-the-weakest-link-in-an-arab-nato/">&#8220;weakest link&#8221;</a> of the Sunni world, utilizing aggressive governmental lobbying, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/fashion/qatar-luxury-fashion-national-museum-blockade.html">outlandish flaunting</a> of its petro-infused wealth to sic more A-list politicos onto its dole, and intensive funding of American <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/center/brookings-doha-center/">think tank</a> and higher education institutions to inculcate an insidious pro-Qatar message. As reported by the <a href="https://dailycaller.com/2018/12/16/qatar-georgetown-texas-university/">Daily Caller</a>, Qatar was the number one foreign state funder of U.S. institutions of higher education from 2011 t0 2016 — surpassing some states even hundreds of times its size, such as China.
Weinthal&#8217;s report ought to serve as a much-needed wakeup call for the more sclerotic elements of our bipartisan foreign policy ruling class. That ruling class is oftentimes overly deterred from meaningfully cracking down on Qatar by the U.S. military presence at Qatar&#8217;s Al Udeid Air Base. But it is ultimately myopic to permit our military&#8217;s presence at Al Udeid to pose an impregnable barrier to attempt to rein in this tiny but destructive nation. It is long past time for policymakers and the chattering class alike to arrive at the conclusion that Qatar is not our friend — at all.

Doha, Qatar

HAMMER: Terror-Funding Qatar Once Again Proves It Is Not America’s Friend

Al Jazeera

Foreign Policy

Hamas

Iran

Middle East

Qatar

Radical Islam

Radical Islamic Terror

Recep Tayyip Erdogan

Saudi Arabia

Since December 2017, a sort of “rolling rebellion” has been occurring across Iran. It is bigger, deeper and stronger than the Green Revolution of 2009 and taking place in great measure outside Tehran, <a href="https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/2017/01/04/non-persian-iran/">where the population is more diverse</a>. There have been strikes of truckers, bazaar shopkeepers, teachers, farmers, and students. See #WhiteWednesday on Twitter to watch brave Iranian women go into the streets and take off their head coverings. Sometimes they dance. Sometimes their husbands, fathers, and brothers go with them. Sometimes they are arrested and sometimes they go to jail. Unfortunately, it took the <a href="https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2019-10-04/death-of-irans-blue-girl-casts-spotlight-on-iranian-women-and-a-growing-movement-for-equality">suicide of a young woman</a> facing seven years in prison for attending a soccer match to get the attention of the Western press.
In May of this year, <a href="https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/2019/05/03/the-iranian-mullahs-are-nervous/">widespread upheaval</a> convulsed the country and thousands were arrested. This weekend, news of increasing protest in Iran comes from the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) — an organization with a mixed record of acceptance by the U.S. government, but with indisputable reach inside the country. According to NCRI’s Washington office, at least 65 cities have seen violent demonstrations, with people killed and injured by authorities. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/Mojahedineng/videos">Videos, presumably from cell phones</a>, show that pictures of the Ayatollah Khameini have been set on fire and demonstrators are chanting “Death to the Dictator” and “Death to Rouhani.” You can follow <a href="https://twitter.com/AlirezaNader">@AlirezaNader</a> for more.
As Iran spreads its tentacles abroad and builds its illegal nuclear capability, it is clear that the regime cannot fund domestic priorities and international revolution on the same budget — especially as that budget contracts.
Imperial overreach was the ruin of the Roman Empire, the Byzantines, Egyptians, Ottomans, Nazis, and Soviets. Could it be catching up with Iran? Wait, you say, Iran isn’t an empire. Not in the traditional sense. But it was always the belief of the hegemonic mullahs that instability across large regions, managed with a relatively small group of well-trained Iranian professionals and a lot of proxy fighters, would create a world in which Shiite supremacism held sway.
And it was working.
The Shiite Crescent — from Iran through Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon to the Mediterranean — was a “lid” over Iran’s Sunni enemies Saudi Arabia and Jordan, plus Israel. It was also a wedge between Sunni Turkey and the Sunni countries below — Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the Gulf states. Most of the proxy soldiers were Iraqi militias, Lebanese Hezbollah, and Pakistanis and Afghans brought to Syria under the command of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The result was millions of Sunni Syrian refugees in the Middle East and Europe.
Sunni Hamas and Shiite Palestinian Islamic Jihad were both recipients of Iranian funds, weapons, and training to harass Israel.
There is also an underside Crescent, which is less well understood. It encircles the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia in the Gulf of Aden with a base in Yemen and a Houthi proxy at the bottom of the Red Sea, threatening the Bab el Mandeb Straits and the exit of Israel, Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia to the Gulf and the Indian Ocean. And the American base in Djibouti.
And Africa. Iran incubated Sunni jihadists in the poor, corrupt, and vulnerable states of the second tier — Sudan, Chad, Niger, and Mali. The result was waves of migrants headed north. The North African countries — Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria — were all in the NATO Mediterranean Dialogue group that helped control safety and security in the sea until the Obama administration toppled the Libyan government in 2011. Libya, no longer a member of the Dialogue, has become a hole in the dam through which hundreds of thousands of African migrants reached Europe.
But has the empire reached too far?
American-led sanctions have been an enormous financial blow to the mullahs, but sanctions are misunderstood. Not a mechanism for toppling a government, they are a means of forcing a government to make choices — between, revolution and agriculture, between weapons and water and sewer systems, between Palestinian jihadists and schools, and so forth. That is what Iran faced in 2011 and that is what led to the Iran/P5+1 negotiations. The fact that President Obama collapsed and paid off the mullahs allowed them to avoid those very choices and set back the operation by years and millions of deaths in the Middle East and Africa.
The restoration of sanctions means Iran has less to pay off its proxies — as well as less for its own people. European businesses, and even China, are leaving Iran and taking their money. Iran tried to compensate by stealing Iraqi oil.
And that’s where empire begins to break down.
There are explicitly anti-Iranian <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/bryen-missing-the-point-of-the-latest-middle-east-protests">riots in Lebanon and Iraq</a>. Hezbollah fighters have announced they will <a href="https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2019/1112/Inside-Hezbollah-How-Lebanon-protests-are-breaking-fear-barrier">refuse to return to Syria</a> for Iran. Iraqis have <a href="https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/2019/10/29/missing-the-point-of-the-latest-middle-east-protests/">attacked Iranian bases and depots</a>. Follow <a href="https://twitter.com/HeshmatAlavi">@HeshmatAlavi</a> for the latest Iraqi moves and Iranian counter-moves. But most of the mainstream press isn’t there.
But the biggest changes may be coming in Iran itself.
&nbsp;
Shoshana Bryen is senior director of <a href="https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/">The Jewish Policy Center</a>. Portions of this article appeared in the Jewish Policy Center magazine, inFOCUS Quarterly.

Iranian flag on conference table

BRYEN: Has The Iranian Empire Overreached?

Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps

Iraq

Israel

Lebanon

Nuclear Weapons

On Thursday, outgoing U.S. Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt posted a video indicative of how much has changed in the Middle East in recent years, with a Saudi citizen singing the moving Jewish prayer “Avinu Malkeinu,” which is sung frequently during the ten days between Rosh Hashanah, which marks the Jewish New Year and was celebrated at the beginning of this week, and Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, in which Jews ask God for forgiveness for their sins.
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Inspiring to see <a href="https://twitter.com/mohsaud08?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@mohsaud08</a> sing these words during the Days of Repentance between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The times are changing indeed! Let’s all keep moving in a positive direction&#8230;. <a href="https://t.co/yEL1s0G2B6">https://t.co/yEL1s0G2B6</a>
&mdash; Jason D. Greenblatt (@jdgreenblatt45) <a href="https://twitter.com/jdgreenblatt45/status/1179793394215915520?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 3, 2019</a></blockquote>
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Mohammed Saud was singing the version of “Avinu Malkeinu” written by the composer Max Janowski.
According to Jewish belief, on Rosh Hashanah God opens the book of life and death to decide who will live or die in the coming year; he closes the book on Yom Kippur, making the ten days noteworthy for serious introspection. On Yom Kippur, Jews are permitted to ask for forgiveness for their sins against God and sins they are unaware they have committed, but any sins against their fellow man must be dealt with by having apologized to the person who was hurt in the process and asking for their forgiveness personally.
The text of the prayer begins: “Our Father, our King, we have sinned before You. Our Father our King, we have no King except You. Our Father, our King, deal with us kindly for the sake of Your Name. Our Father, our King, bless us with a good year. Our Father, our King, annul all harsh decrees concerning us.”
In an astonishing historical turn of events, the machinations of the Obama Administration as former President Barack Obama seemingly supported Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, triggered a massive shift in the alliances of the Middle East, as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, traditionally enemies of Israel, tacitly joined Israel out of common concern regarding Iran.
Those alliances have created an opportunity for dialogues to take place that once would have been considered unthinkable. As <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/saudi-crown-prince-recognizes-israels-right-to-exist-talks-up-future-ties/">The Times of Israel</a> reported in April 2018. &#8220;Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, in an interview published Monday, recognized Israel’s right to exist and extolled the prospect of future diplomatic relations between his kingdom and the Jewish state.” Bin Salman stated, “Our country doesn’t have a problem with Jews. Our Prophet Muhammad married a Jewish woman. Not just a friend — he married her. Our prophet, his neighbors were Jewish. You will find a lot of Jews in Saudi Arabia coming from America, coming from Europe. There are no problems between Christian and Muslims and Jews. We have problems like you would find anywhere in the world, among some people. But the normal sort of problems.”
Bin Salman said of Iran’s Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei:
<blockquote>Hitler didn’t do what the supreme leader is trying to do. Hitler tried to conquer Europe. This is bad. But the supreme leader is trying to conquer the world. He believes he owns the world. They are both evil guys. He is the Hitler of the Middle East. In the 1920s and 1930s, no one saw Hitler as a danger. Only a few people. Until it happened.</blockquote>
For the full version of the Janowski Avinu Malkeinu as sung by the legendary tenor Jan Peerce, see <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU5x5UuIFjE">here</a>.

Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur series

Times Are A Changin’: Saudi Citizen Sings Jewish Prayer Marking Jewish New Year

Judaism

The recent attack on Saudi Arabian oil is a watershed moment in the Middle East balance of power. It is also an opportunity.
It is yet unclear what exactly happened. A combination of drones and missiles coming directly from Iran or from their associates — the Houth rebels in Yemen — struck at the Khurais oil field and the al-Abqaiq facility, Saudi Arabia’s largest oil processing plant. The strike may have knocked out potentially half of the Saudi oil production, and has already affected global crude oil prices.
Sword Dancing is Not Enough
The danger of the Persian war machine, about which Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and former U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton have repeatedly warned, is once again rearing its ugly head. No longer content with small attacks against Israel from proxies in Gaza and Southern Lebanon, Iran is now brazenly striking the strategic installations of its most hated foe — Saudi Arabia.
The greatest ire of Iran’s Shiite leaders is not reserved for the Jewish state. Rather, the mullahs crave control of the Arabian peninsula&#8217;s Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina in order to prove that their interpretation of Islam has Allah’s mandate. The Sunni House of Saud is thus the Iranian mullahs&#8217; ultimate target.
Indeed, the Saudis know all too well how serious the Iranian threat is — and they understand the brilliant way in which Iran has learned to use proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah against Israel. Now, with the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula being infiltrated by the Houthis, the Saudis feel the Iranian noose tightening around their necks. And while the Saudis are the world’s third largest military spenders and are pretty good at doing the proverbial sword dance with dignitaries, the truth is that the Kingdom is just not that good at actually fighting.
Filling the American Power Vacuum
For years, the American defense umbrella has been the real protection of the Saudi kingdom. The deal was straightforward: The Saudis provide steady oil and buy expensive military hardware and America provides defense. But now things are changing. America’s shale oil revolution has transformed the U.S. into a leading oil producer and, consequently, Saudi oil reserves are simply less critical to the U.S. than they have been in the past. Coupled with the Trump administration’s &#8220;America First&#8221; mantra and a concomitant disinclination to be the world’s police force, a reality has emerged in which U.S. forces may be less likely to come to Saudi aid.
For the Saudis, Kuwaitis, Emiratis, and denizens of other smaller Sunni states, the Iranian attack on the Saudi oil installations — and the thus-far weak American response — is a harbinger of a horrific and not-so-distant future. If left unchecked, it could mean a historic change in the regional balance of power with the aggressive Shiite movement overshadowing historic Sunni regional domination.
The West, the Sunni Arab states, and Israel cannot allow Iran to fill the regional power vacuum that may be left in America’s wake. The solution to the crisis may be an Israeli defense umbrella.
Israel is the natural candidate to become the regional power broker, peacekeeper, and defense provider for Saudi Arabia and the Sunni states. Israel has the intelligence capability, the firepower, the air force, and even the naval capacity to contain the Iranian regime and help maintain a healthy regional balance.
Instead of the U.S. global policing model, Israel would take its place locally as a regional power that is closely allied with the U.S.
A Change in Arab Thinking
To achieve an Israeli defense umbrella, the Saudis are going to have to swallow their religious and nationalistic pride and accept the Jews as, well, their de facto saviors.
This is not such a stretch, since the House of Saud was able to stomach American (Christian) military defense. Israeli (Jewish) power may therefore not be all that different. Moreover, Israel is a better bet for Saudi defense, considering that it is closer and more nimble in dealing with Iran.
The change in Saudi attitudes toward Israel, furthermore, is already taking place with bloggers and broadcasters making overt comments of acceptance towards the Jewish state.
A Change in Jewish Thinking
Israel has long self-identified as a small, defensive minority in the Middle East. The Jewish state would have to mentally adjust to a more robust and muscular disposition in order for regional realignment to work.
Israel possesses the military might and has already engaged Iran in various ways, including bombings of secret Iranian weapons shipments to Syria. However, the mindset of the big boy on the block — the regional leader, the keeper of the peace — is not yet fully developed in Israel.
The Cost of Israeli Protection
Israel has a self-interest in pushing Iran back. But still, saving the House of Saud is not a foregone conclusion. If Israel is to spread its defense umbrella over the Sunni states, it should demand payment in kind.
The price for Israeli protection? Getting rid of the Palestinian-Arab problem.
The Saudis must commit to ending support for the &#8220;two-state solution,&#8221; which calls for an independent Palestinian-Arab state on Jewish land. Among other alternatives, the Saudis can force their own Jordanian Hashemite family to give back to Palestinians the Jordanian citizenship that was taken away from them in 1988 by Jordan&#8217;s King Abdullah. Under this approach, Palestinians can continue to live in the Israeli territories as Israeli residents, but would exercise their right to vote in the nearby Jordanian kingdom.
And obviously, if the Saudis want Israeli defense, they must dry up all remaining funding for jihadist education throughout the Arab world and abroad.
In the end, an Israeli defense umbrella would allow for steady oil flow, would mitigate the Iranian threat, and would lead to a Middle East that is more stable, more prosperous, and more cooperative. However, the Arabs, the Jews, and the Americans alike would have to break out of calcified notions of the past in order to make room for an advantageous regional realignment of the future.
Yishai Fleisher is the International Spokesman for the Jewish Community of Hebron.

MBS Saudi Arabia

FLEISHER: The Much-Needed Israeli Defense Umbrella

Palestinians

Speaking on CNN on Tuesday, Democratic presidential candidate Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) argued that the United States was the cause of the attack on the Aramco oil facility in Saudi Arabia which the United States has said was launched by Iran. Referring to the tough sanctions placed on Iran by the United States, Gabbard stated, &#8220;This latest attack on Saudi Arabia is a retaliatory attack because of all the sanctions in place that are essentially blocking Iran from selling their oil on the market.”
Gabbard, whose history includes support for the Syrian regime that is allied with Iran, also attacked President Trump, claiming, “He is treating our troops as though we are something that can be pawned off or prostituted off to the highest bidder.”
The exchange prompting Gabbard’s claim that the U.S. caused Iran to launch their attack started with the CNN host asking, “You’re running for president. If you were president right now, how would you deal with Iran?&#8221;
Gabbard answered:
<blockquote>I would see the situation for what it is, which is this latest attack on Saudi Arabia is a retaliatory attack because of all the sanctions in place that are essentially blocking Iran from selling their oil on the market. So by recognizing this is a retaliatory attack, that we cannot continue this cycle of retaliation that can only lead to an all-out inferno of a war, both in Iran and across the region that would be so costly and devastating that would make the war we served in in Iraq look like a picnic in comparison in lost American lives, trillions of taxpayer dollars, exacerbating already a terrible refugee crisis. This is not serving the interests of our people nor is it serving the interests of our national security. As president right now what I would do is re-enter the Iran nuclear agreement, take away those &#8212; those sanctions that have been put in place so that Iran is brought back into an agreement where they are complying. We have inspectors going in — because every single day this doesn’t happen, Iran is moving forward towards developing a nuclear weapon.&#8221;</blockquote>
The CNN host then referred to Gabbard’s remarks on September 16 in which she tweeted at Trump, “Despicable. Offering to place our military assets under the command of a foreign country—Saudi Arabia—is a disgrace and betrayal of my patriotic brothers and sisters in uniform and to our Constitution. We are not your prostitutes. You are not our pimp.”
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.<a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@realDonaldTrump</a> Despicable. Offering to place our military assets under the command of a foreign country—Saudi Arabia—is a disgrace and betrayal of my patriotic brothers and sisters in uniform and to our Constitution. We are not your prostitutes. You are not our pimp. <a href="https://t.co/Cu1OewEMOC">pic.twitter.com/Cu1OewEMOC</a>
&mdash; Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) <a href="https://twitter.com/TulsiGabbard/status/1173723701373591552?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 16, 2019</a></blockquote>
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The CNN host asked,  “Do you regret the “Pence and prostitute language?”
Gabbard boasted:
<blockquote>Not at all. That is exactly what Trump is doing. He is treating our troops as though we are something that can be pawned off or prostituted off to the highest bidder. Our troops deploying now to Saudi Arabia at his direction are not there serving the interests of the American people or our own national security. In  his administration’s own words they are going to protect Saudi Arabia’s oil, Saudi Arabia’s infrastructure protecting them, which undermines the whole reason why we take this oath willing to lay our lives down for our country and he is sending them to protect a country that is allied with our enemy, Al Qaeda.</blockquote>
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Democratic Presidential Candidate Tulsi Gabbard Visits &#8220;FOX &amp; Friends&#8221;

WATCH: Gabbard Blames United States For Suspected Iranian Attack On Saudi Oil Facility

Donald Trump

Tulsi Gabbard

On Thursday&#8217;s episode of &#8220;The Andrew Klavan Show,&#8221; Klavan talks about President Trump&#8217;s response to Iranian agression and Tim Kaine&#8217;s accusation that Trump is lying about Iran. Video and partial transcript below: 
Donald Trump has a tendency, as we all know, to react big. The first thing out of his mouth when this bombing took place in Saudi Arabia is, &#8220;We&#8217;re locked and loaded.&#8221; Then he starts to [think], &#8220;Wait a minute, ehhh I don’t know.&#8221;
He&#8217;s not a war guy. He doesn&#8217;t want to go to war and who can blame him? Who does? &#8230; John Bolton has been talking behind closed doors and saying how dumb Trump is about not standing up to Iran, and if we don&#8217;t stand up to them, they just get worse. There&#8217;s some wisdom to that. But Trump tries to figure this out, and what&#8217;s interesting about Trump, and what gives him such problems, is that he thinks out loud.
He doesn&#8217;t go into his room and stroke his chin and consider — as you&#8217;ve got the microphone in his face, you&#8217;re listening to the guy&#8217;s mind work. So here he is talking about why he appointed O&#8217;Brien.
<blockquote>REPORTER: [Unintelligible].
TRUMP: No, I actually think it&#8217;s a sign of strength. We have the strongest military in the world now, and I think it&#8217;s a great sign of strength. It&#8217;s very easy to attack, but if you ask Lindsey [Graham], ask him, &#8220;How did going into the Middle East, how did that work out? And how did going into Iraq work out?&#8221; So we have a disagreement on that and you know, there&#8217;s plenty of time to do some dastardly things. It&#8217;s very easy to start, and we&#8217;ll see what happens. We&#8217;ll see what happens. I think we have a lot of good capital. If we have to do something, we&#8217;ll do it without hesitation.</blockquote>
&#8230; You know he&#8217;s thinking out loud, which is always kind of unnerving with Trump. He&#8217;s always kind of going back and forth and we hear him going back and forth, and again, that&#8217;s unnerving. It&#8217;s unsettling. But basically what he&#8217;s saying, Mike Pompeo, the secretary state behind the scenes, is trying to build a coalition with the U.N. trying to work with our allies to get some help on this. The Israelis are starting to say, you know, Iran is a real threat to us and we may have to go in and Pompeo is telegraphing, saying out loud that we will support the Israelis, they have a right to defend themselves, we&#8217;re on their team no matter who wins the election over there; no matter who builds the coalition, we&#8217;re going to be with Israel. Trump said we&#8217;re with Israel, not with Netanyahu — we support Israel. He&#8217;s going to stick with that, obviously.
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Big choices. It&#8217;s never cut and dry, it&#8217;s never black and white, you never know when to go in and when not to. We certainly should not be on the ground at war with Iran, but whether we punish them, whether we start to get a little tough with them, is an open question, especially if we can get allies involved on a strike. Again, there&#8217;s absolutely no way we want to be invading Iran — that would be a terrible, stupid thing to do. But still, you know, some targeted airstrikes might not be a bad idea.
But compare all that [with] Democrats. Compare this to Tim Kaine? This guy came within an ounce of being Vice President of the United States of America, all right. Listen to whose fault he thinks it is.
<blockquote>KAINE: They&#8217;re going around saying the attack was unprovoked. The U.S. is provoking Iran. We were in a diplomatic deal with them that allowed them to sell their oil. We pulled out of the deal, the U.S. pulled out, and we&#8217;ve punished their oil economy and so Iran — again, Iran’s not a good actor. You don&#8217;t have to like this, but we are provoking Iran every day with the sanctions and with military action, and they&#8217;re responding. We need to stop the provocation and the United States needs to return to trying to be a diplomatic broker.
INTERVIEWER: Are you suggesting that Iran had to do this attack, when you&#8217;re saying the attack was somehow provoked, do you somehow victim blame for this?
KAINE: No, what I&#8217;m saying is — I have voted for sanctions on Iran in the past and they&#8217;re a bad actor. But when the administration says the attack was unprovoked, that&#8217;s what LBJ said about the Gulf of Tonkin back in Vietnam, and it was a lie. And the administration is lying to the American public by saying this was an unprovoked attack.</blockquote>
The guy reminds me of Alvin the Chipmunk, except without the testicles. I mean, the guy is really, you know, he uses this opportunity to attack the president, who is certainly the one person who is not to blame here. I don&#8217;t know what he&#8217;s trying to get across there, that we&#8217;re not supposed to put sanctions on Iran? That we&#8217;re supposed to follow through with Obama&#8217;s plan to give them a path to nuclear weapons? That we&#8217;re just supposed to be resigned to that and let that go and not try to bring them into line by force because they&#8217;re not going to understand it?
Let&#8217;s take a look at the Iranians, for a minute. Let&#8217;s take a look at Iran&#8217;s foreign minister Mohammad Zarif, he was asked — this is a CNN exclusive. He was asked how he would respond to an attack, and just listen. I mean, when you look at this guy — and again remember, Yemen is a proxy war — when you look at this guy, is this the sort of guy that we want to make excuses for?
<blockquote>REPORTER: What would be the consequence of an American or a Saudi military strike on Iran now?
ZARIF: An all-out war.
REPORTER: You make a very serious statement there, sir.
ZARIF: Well, I make a very serious statement about defending our country. I&#8217;m making a very serious statement that we don&#8217;t want war, we don&#8217;t want to engage in a military confrontation. We believe that a military confrontation based on deception is awful. We&#8217;ll have a lot of casualties, but we won&#8217;t blink to defend our territory.
REPORTER: Put yourself in Saudi Arabia&#8217;s shoes. If there was an attack on Iranian sovereign territory, with cruise missiles launched from Saudi Arabia, what would Iran&#8217;s response be?
ZARIF: Well, they&#8217;re making that up. Why do they want to make that up that it was from Iranian territory? The Yemenis have announced responsibility for that, they have provided information about that. They have answered all the Saudi disinformation campaign about the fact that they launched this attack against Saudi Arabia in self-defense.</blockquote>
I always wonder why these guys don’t just burst into flame. You know, just look at that man with his dead eyes saying, &#8220;We will kill everyone and it&#8217;s a lie.&#8221; And we never do anything but we, yes well we fired off, &#8220;Why would they make that up?&#8221; That we fired the rockets from our territory, just because we fired the rockets from our territory?
I mean these guys are like almost like some kind of cartoon villain, and Tim Kaine is blaming Donald Trump, who he just hates, using this for political capital. It really is awful &#8230;
Trump speaks out loud, and thinks out loud, and it is very unnerving to watch him do it — it creates a lot of uncertainty, and it creates a lot of trouble. He&#8217;s actually doing the right thing. You do not want to strike until it&#8217;s absolutely necessary. It’s still an open question whether it&#8217;s absolutely necessary. Obviously, Iran wants us to hit them and wants to draw us into this fight, so I don&#8217;t think that that&#8217;s necessarily the right thing to do. If you do finally decide you gotta pull your gun: Pull [it] and kill him, and get out and walk away.
<a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-andrew-klavan-show/id1045171376?mt=2">Listen to full episodes of &#8220;The Andrew Klavan Show&#8221; on iTunes. </a>
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/show/andrew-klavan-show">Watch &#8220;The Andrew Klavan Show&#8221; on-demand!</a>

Tim Kaine

KLAVAN: Trump Thinks Out Loud, So Tim Kaine Stops Thinking

Conservatism

It is <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/51924/mike-pence-warns-iran-were-locked-and-loaded-jacob-airey">increasingly likely</a> that Saudi Arabia and Iran, longtime regional foes and proxies for the broader Sunni/Shiite theological divide in the Islamic world, <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-saudi-aramco-iran-rouhani/irans-rouhani-says-aramco-attacks-were-a-reciprocal-response-by-yemen-idUSKBN1W12AE">could be heading for war</a>. Both nations are governed by sharia-based legal regimes, and each has a troubled history when it comes to promoting, financing, and exporting Islamist extremism over the course of the past century. At first glance, one might be inclined to look at this internecine Islamic spat and conclude as Sarah Palin <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/sarah-palin-let-allah-sort-it-out-096128">once did</a>: &#8220;Let Allah sort it out.&#8221;
But cynicism of this magnitude is not actually warranted. The United States has a clear and strategically unmistakable interest in any potential armed conflict that were to escalate between the Saudis and the Iranians. That interest, put simply, is to stand firmly with our <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/10/media-war-saudi-arabia/">Saudi allies</a>.
For decades, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was the preeminent funder and exporter of radical Sunni jihadism. The hardline Wahhabist- and Salafist-inspired brand of Sunni Islam that dominated the Saudi clerisy resulted in tangible detrimental outcomes for the liberal West. The Saudis funded more radical Sunni madrasas the world over than any other Arab nation and were oftentimes the leading miscreants in the Arab world&#8217;s decades-long (technically, still ongoing) <a href="http://www.sixdaywar.org/content/khartoum.asp">diplomatic</a> campaign against the legitimacy of Israel. Concomitantly, the Saudis were long viewed as the leading Arab cheerleaders for Yasser Arafat and his <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/46068/hammer-yes-united-states-was-right-deny-entry-bds-josh-hammer">inherently jihadist</a> &#8220;Palestinian liberation&#8221; cause. The Kingdom funded and promoted the global <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/46714/hammer-designating-muslim-brotherhood-terrorist-josh-hammer">Muslim Brotherhood</a>, the 20th-century progenitor of contemporary Sunni jihadism and the over-arching organization for which the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/44732/hammer-israel-must-destroy-hamas-once-and-all-josh-hammer">genocidal death cult</a> of Hamas merely serves as the Palestinian-Arab branch. Many Saudi elites and clerics famously <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/documents/evidence-of-financial-links-between-saudi-royal-family-and-al-qaeda">mollycoddled</a> al-Qaeda in the years leading up to <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2013/07/27/us/september-11th-hijackers-fast-facts/index.html">September 11, 2001</a>. And so forth.
That is all undoubtedly very, very, very bad. But it is crucial to recognize that much has changed in the Islamic world over the past decade or two.
Over the past ten to fifteen years, and rapidly accelerating under the recent leadership of the more forward-thinking and realpolitik-inclined Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), the Kingdom has taken tremendous steps to diminish the influence of the Wahhabist clerics, to cease the funding and exportation of radical madrasas abroad, and to unequivocally distance itself from the Muslim Brotherhood. MBS has even gone so far as to (accurately) <a href="http://www.egypttoday.com/Article/1/46574/Bin-Salman-Muslim-Brotherhood-incubator-for-terrorists">dub</a> the Brotherhood an &#8220;incubator for all terrorists.&#8221; Jared Kushner and other Trump administration officials, seeing a natural anti-Islamist ally in the crown prince, have <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/03/jared-kushner-saudi-arabia-mbs-meeting">cultivated and nourished</a> a reinvigorated bilateral relationship. The Saudis have also <a href="https://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Palestinians-in-bid-to-avert-real-crisis-with-Saudi-Arabia-597538">all but completely forsaken</a> the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48018/hammer-jared-kushner-right-palestinians-do-not-josh-hammer">noxious</a>, anti-Jewish Palestinian-Arab &#8220;liberation&#8221; cause, preferring instead to dramatically warm up to Israel in hitherto unimaginable ways. The Saudis, while still prone to military and strategic crassness, are more so than ever before manifestly allied with the United States on our key geopolitical interests and priorities in the Middle East.
The elephant in the room for much of the Middle East&#8217;s broader realignment is, of course, the so-called &#8220;Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action&#8221; — then-President Barack Obama&#8217;s harrowing nuclear deal capitulation to the mullahs of the world&#8217;s <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/43339/hammer-iranian-revolution-forty-years-old-stand-josh-hammer">number one state sponsor of jihadism</a>, Iran. Obama, under the cataclysmic &#8220;guidance&#8221; of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/magazine/the-aspiring-novelist-who-became-obamas-foreign-policy-guru.html">failed novelist</a> Ben Rhodes, sought to reorient America&#8217;s interests in the Middle East away from Israel and its historic Sunni allies — namely, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt — and toward Iran and the <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/mohamed-morsi-who-brought-the-muslim-brotherhood-to-the-egyptian-presidency">Muslim Brotherhood</a>. In addition to empowering the terrorist, jihad-exporting mullocracy in Tehran, Obama&#8217;s disastrous shift strategic also unshackled the region&#8217;s preeminent funders of the Brotherhood and Hamas: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/47456/hammer-al-jazeeras-disgraceful-holocaust-denying-josh-hammer">Qatar</a> and <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/44954/report-ilhan-omar-met-2017-infamous-islamist-josh-hammer">Turkey</a>. The increasingly public thawing of tensions between the Saudis and the Emiratis — each of whom considers Iran to be something akin to an existential hegemonic threat — and Israel, in addition to the still-ongoing <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017–2019_Qatar_diplomatic_crisis">embargo</a> implemented (primarily) by the Saudis and Emiratis against the <a href="https://www.meforum.org/57690/ensconced-doha-islamists">Brotherhood-funding</a> Qataris, can only be <a href="http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/israel/2019-08-05/friends-caveats">understood through this broader prism</a>.
Iran, furthermore, is as malevolent and vicious a global actor as ever before. The mullahs still seek nuclear weapons, routinely preach &#8220;death to America&#8221; and &#8220;death to Israel,&#8221; fund Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthi rebels, and all sorts of other jihadist outfits the world over, plot <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/20190109-eu-sanctions-iran-over-assassinations-peoples-mujahedeen-france-bomb-plot">targeted assassinations</a> across Europe and the broader West, and engage in deeply hostile and destructive acts of <a href="https://www.euronews.com/2019/09/16/iran-seizes-oil-tanker-allegedly-smuggling-diesel-fuel-to-uae-isna">aggression</a> and <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-tells-saudi-arabia-oil-attacks-were-launched-from-iran-11568644126">war</a> against regional foes. The Islamic Revolutionary Iranian regime has been in a state of war against the West ever since the ayatollahs&#8217; takeover in 1979, and Iran today remains one of the world&#8217;s two most rogue geopolitical actors, along with North Korea. It is a deeply hostile and repressive theocracy that has never missed an opportunity to fund jihadism against the West. Countering and thwarting Iran, in addition to the Brotherhood, is <a href="http://www.dailywire.com/news/43151/hammer-ted-cruzs-non-interventionist-hawk-foreign-josh-hammer">very much</a> in America&#8217;s <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/51661/hammer-never-forget-911-we-need-rethink-how-we-josh-hammer">strategic interest</a>.
Fundamentally, the bipartisan Wilsonian foreign policy ruling class must be tempered. There is a role for morality in foreign policy, but that role is minuscule when compared with the foremost goal of a nation narrowly pursuing its own self-interest. Yes, the Saudi regime is sharia-based and is oppressive in many ways. But no, that ultimately should not deter our pursuit and defense of an indispensable strategic alliance. As I <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/45699/hammer-america-needs-re-think-its-global-alliances-josh-hammer">wrote</a> in April:
<blockquote>[C]onservatives must articulate a hard-headed foreign policy that, if need be, subordinates amorphous &#8220;values&#8221;-based concerns in favor of much more tangible — and much more legitimate — concerns about prioritizing and maximizing America&#8217;s national security. And in so doing, American foreign policy hands ought not to elevate the interests and clout of unaccountable transnational institutions. &#8230;
America ought to ally with self-sufficient nation-states who care about their sovereignty and share our core national security interests in deterring Russian hegemony, Chinese ambitions, and/or Islamist aggression. &#8230; [I]n the Islamic world, that means focusing more on nations like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates than it does on Islamist-exporting, Muslim Brotherhood-cozy states like Turkey and Qatar.</blockquote>
Americans should not be duped by <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/10/media-war-saudi-arabia/">well-oiled Qatari duplicity</a> or the Iran nuclear deal&#8217;s subversive <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2017/10/13/iran-deal-supporters-willing-sell-u-s-jihadists/">Obama bro echo chamber</a>. With Saudi-Iranian tensions flaring, America has an unambiguous interest in standing firmly with MBS and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Trump MBS Oval Office.jpg

HAMMER: The U.S. Must Side With Saudi Arabia Against Iranian Aggression

Barack Obama

Islam

United Arab Emirates (UAE)

President Trump on Wednesday said he has ordered the Treasury Department to &#8220;substantially increase&#8221; sanctions on Iran after drone attacks on two oil facilities in Saudi Arabia.
&#8220;I have just instructed the Secretary of the Treasury to substantially increase Sanctions on the country of Iran!&#8221; Trump wrote on Twitter.
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">I have just instructed the Secretary of the Treasury to substantially increase Sanctions on the country of Iran!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1174305447513186304?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 18, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
It was not immediately clear exactly what he instructed Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to do. The U.S. has long had punitive sanctions in place against Iran.
Trump&#8217;s move comes after drone strikes on Saturday that severely damaged a crude-processing plant and oil field in Saudi Arabia, which is the largest in the world. The U.S. and the Saudis have accused Iran of perpetrating the attacks.
The drone strikes prompted an immediate spike in crude prices, which experts said could soon raise the price of gas by 20 cents or more in the U.S. After Trump&#8217;s announcement on Wednesday, oil prices fell.
After the attack, Trump said U.S. authorities suspected Iran. &#8220;It&#8217;s certainly looking that way at this point,&#8221; Trump said Monday, although he steered clear of directly blaming Iran.
&#8220;Do I want war? I don&#8217;t want war with anybody,&#8221; Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday, adding: &#8220;We have the strongest military in the world.&#8221;
&#8220;I don&#8217;t want war with anybody but we are prepared more than anybody &#8230; We have a lot of options but we are not looking at options right now,&#8221; he said. &#8220;That was a very large attack and it could be met with an attack many, many times larger very easily by our country, but we are going to find out who definitively did it first,&#8221; he added.
&#8220;We have a lot of options, but I&#8217;m not looking at options right now. We want to find definitively who did this,&#8221; Trump said.
Iranian president Hassan Rouhani said Monday the attacks were a &#8220;reciprocal response&#8221; to Saudi aggression against Yemen, but claims they came from Yemen, not Iran. Meanwhile, Iranian-backed rebels in Yemen have claimed responsibility for the attacks.
Trump was more aggressive on Sunday when he said the U.S. was &#8220;locked and loaded.&#8221;
&#8220;Saudi Arabia oil supply was attacked. There is reason to believe that we know the culprit, are locked and loaded depending on verification, but are waiting to hear from the Kingdom as to who they believe was the cause of this attack, and under what terms we would proceed!&#8221; he wrote on Twitter.
<a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-says-he-told-mnuchin-substantially-increase-sanctions-iran-n1055781">NBC News</a> reported on Tuesday that the Trump administration was considering a range of options to retaliate against Iran, &#8220;including a cyberattack or physical strikes, U.S. officials briefed on recent deliberations said. Military leaders presented Trump with multiple possible actions in a national security meeting Monday, but Trump asked for additional choices, people briefed on that meeting said.&#8221;
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has also blamed Iran for the attacks. He is currently heading to Saudi Arabia to meet with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to &#8220;coordinate efforts to counter Iranian aggression in the region,&#8221; the State Department said in a statement.
&#8220;The Pentagon is preparing a report on who was responsible and intends to make it public within 48 hours, a U.S. defense official said Tuesday,&#8221; <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-18/iran-says-it-s-not-looking-for-war-warns-u-s-against-action">Bloomberg News</a> reported. &#8220;The official couldn’t confirm or deny a CBS News report that the U.S. has identified locations in southern Iran from which it believes more than 20 drones and cruise missiles were launched.&#8221;

djt_2

BREAKING: Trump Orders New Sanctions Against Iran After Saudi Oil Attacks

Yemen

A coordinated attack on Saudi Arabia&#8217;s oil industry Saturday had a history-making impact on oil prices on Monday, sending Brent crude futures spiking by nearly 20% before contracting somewhat by the afternoon.
In what <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/15/us-crude-oil-jumps-15percent-after-drone-strikes-disrupt-saudi-crude-production.html">CNBC</a> notes is the sharpest intraday spike in oil prices in history, Brent crude futures rose as much as 19.5% on Monday following the attacks on Saudi Arabia&#8217;s oil processing facility in Abqaig and the Khurais oil field on Saturday.
The pair of attacks forced the oil-rich Middle Eastern country to shut down half of its national oil output — the facility and field accounting for nearly 6 million barrels of crude every day — a seismic development for the international oil market. The result was skyrocketing oil futures and other countries, particularly the U.S., preparing to take measures to stabilize the industry.
&#8220;Brent crude futures, the international benchmark, rose as much as 19.5% to $71.95 per barrel at the open, the biggest intraday jump on record,&#8221; CNBC reported Monday. &#8220;By early afternoon, the contract was at $68.45, up $8.23 or 13.67%. U.S. West Texas Intermediate futures climbed as much as 15.5% to $63.34. The contract was later at $62.32, up $7.47 or 13.6%.&#8221;
In response to the attack on Saudi Arabia, President Trump authorized the release of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, &#8220;if needed.&#8221;
&#8220;Based on the attack on Saudi Arabia, which may have an impact on oil prices, I have authorized the release of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, if needed, in a to-be-determined amount sufficient to keep the markets well-supplied,&#8221; Trump wrote Sunday (tweets below). &#8220;I have also informed all appropriate agencies to expedite approvals of the oil pipelines currently in the permitting process in Texas and various other States.&#8221;
Though the president has authorized the use of the oil to keep the market &#8220;well-supplied,&#8221; Energy Secretary Ricky Perry said Monday that the U.S. is not sure yet if it is necessary. &#8220;I think we&#8217;re yet a little premature in making in comments on &#8230; whether or not the SPR&#8217;s going to be needed until we get a real handle on the length of time that this facility is going to be down,&#8221; Perry told CNBC&#8217;s &#8220;<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/squawk-on-the-street/" target="" data-type="" rel="noopener noreferrer">Squawk on the Street</a>&#8221; Monday.
While Saudi Arabia&#8217;s national oil company, Saudi Aramco, says it plans to restore about 2 million barrels of output by Monday, CNBC notes that some reports indicate that it could take &#8220;weeks&#8221; before it&#8217;s back to producing at full capacity.
In his series of tweets on the Saudi attack Sunday, Trump also indicated that the U.S. knows who was behind it, writing, &#8220;There is reason to believe that we know the culprit, are locked and loaded depending on verification, but are waiting to hear from the Kingdom as to who they believe was the cause of this attack, and under what terms we would proceed!&#8221;
Soon after the attacks on Saturday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pointed the finger directly at Iran. &#8220;Tehran is behind nearly 100 attacks on Saudi Arabia while Rouhani and Zarif pretend to engage in diplomacy,&#8221; he wrote in a pair of tweets (below). &#8220;Amid all the calls for de-escalation, Iran has now launched an unprecedented attack on the world&#8217;s energy supply. There is no evidence the attacks came from Yemen. We call on all nations to publicly and unequivocally condemn Iran&#8217;s attacks. The United States will work with our partners and allies to ensure that energy markets remain well supplied and Iran is held accountable for its aggression.&#8221;
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/51798/trump-signals-military-action-over-attack-saudi-ryan-saavedra">Trump Signals Military Action Over Attack On Saudi Oil Sites: ‘Locked And Loaded’</a>
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">Based on the attack on Saudi Arabia, which may have an impact on oil prices, I have authorized the release of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, if needed, in a to-be-determined amount&#8230;.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1173354644636127232?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 15, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-conversation="none" data-lang="en">&#8230;.sufficient to keep the markets well-supplied. I have also informed all appropriate agencies to expedite approvals of the oil pipelines currently in the permitting process in Texas and various other States.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1173354645642764289?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 15, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">Saudi Arabia oil supply was attacked. There is reason to believe that we know the culprit, are locked and loaded depending on verification, but are waiting to hear from the Kingdom as to who they believe was the cause of this attack, and under what terms we would proceed!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1173368423381962752?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 15, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">Tehran is behind nearly 100 attacks on Saudi Arabia while Rouhani and Zarif pretend to engage in diplomacy. Amid all the calls for de-escalation, Iran has now launched an unprecedented attack on the world’s energy supply. There is no evidence the attacks came from Yemen.
— Secretary Pompeo (@SecPompeo) <a href="https://twitter.com/SecPompeo/status/1172963090746548225?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 14, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-conversation="none" data-lang="en">We call on all nations to publicly and unequivocally condemn Iran’s attacks. The United States will work with our partners and allies to ensure that energy markets remain well supplied and Iran is held accountable for its aggression
— Secretary Pompeo (@SecPompeo) <a href="https://twitter.com/SecPompeo/status/1172963091660910593?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 14, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>

saudi_arabia_attack_gi.jpg

Crude Oil Prices Make History: Spike Most Ever After Attacks On Saudi Sites

Trump Administration

On Saturday, an attack was launched against the Aramco oil facility; according to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeUvp6-xSx0">CBS News</a>, 17 structures were hit with 19 points of impact. Saudi Arabian officials said cruise missiles were used. The same day, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in blunt language that Iran was responsible for the attack, tweeting, &#8220;Tehran is behind nearly 100 attacks on Saudi Arabia while Rouhani and Zarif pretend to engage in diplomacy. Amid all the calls for de-escalation, Iran has now launched an unprecedented attack on the world’s energy supply. There is no evidence the attacks came from Yemen.&#8221;
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">Tehran is behind nearly 100 attacks on Saudi Arabia while Rouhani and Zarif pretend to engage in diplomacy. Amid all the calls for de-escalation, Iran has now launched an unprecedented attack on the world’s energy supply. There is no evidence the attacks came from Yemen.
— Secretary Pompeo (@SecPompeo) <a href="https://twitter.com/SecPompeo/status/1172963090746548225?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 14, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
As <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-tells-saudi-arabia-oil-attacks-were-launched-from-iran-11568644126">The Wall Street Journal</a> reported on Monday, American intelligence indicated that the attack, which wiped out a whopping 5% of the world’s oil supply, was launched from Iranian soil. The Journal added, &#8220;The U.S. has already <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/suspicions-rise-that-saudi-oil-attack-came-from-outside-yemen-11568498542?mod=article_inline">dismissed a claim by Houthi militants</a> in Yemen that they sent 10 drones to attack the Saudi oil sites, which crippled the kingdom’s petroleum industry and sent <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-stock-futures-retreat-as-oil-prices-jump-11568603822?mod=article_inline">energy markets </a>into a tailspin.&#8221;
After the attack on Saturday, President Trump tweeted, &#8220;There is reason to believe that we know the culprit, are locked and loaded depending on verification, but are waiting to hear from the Kingdom as to who they believe was the cause of this attack, and under what terms we would proceed!&#8221;
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">Saudi Arabia oil supply was attacked. There is reason to believe that we know the culprit, are locked and loaded depending on verification, but are waiting to hear from the Kingdom as to who they believe was the cause of this attack, and under what terms we would proceed!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1173368423381962752?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 15, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, who has been an apologist for the Assad regime in Syria, which is closely aligned with Iran, took the opportunity to attack the president, using coarse language to do so, tweeting, &#8220;Trump awaits instructions from his Saudi masters. Having our country act as Saudi Arabia&#8217;s bitch is not &#8216;America First.'&#8221;
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">.<a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@realDonaldTrump</a>
Trump awaits instructions from his Saudi masters. Having our country act as Saudi Arabia&#8217;s bitch is not &#8220;America First.&#8221; <a href="https://t.co/kJOCpqwaQS">https://t.co/kJOCpqwaQS</a>
— Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) <a href="https://twitter.com/TulsiGabbard/status/1173434704302751744?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 16, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
Gabbard’s attack prompted a withering reply from radio host Mark Levin, who fired back on Twitter, &#8220;Tulsi Gabbard, another clown. This isn’t about Saudi Arabia, moron. Iran is threatening world’s oil supply, navigable waters, killed hundreds of American soldiers, building ICBM’s for nuclear warheads, threatens to destroy the U.S., etc. you’re unfit to lead our country. You’re a dangerous fool.&#8221;
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">Tulsi Gabbard, another clown. This isn’t about Saudi Arabia, moron. Iran is threatening world’s oil supply, navigable waters, killed hundreds of American soldiers, building ICBM’s for nuclear warheads&#8230;
— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) <a href="https://twitter.com/marklevinshow/status/1173618550709399554?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 16, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">&#8230;, threatens to destroy the U.S., etc. you’re unfit to lead our country. You’re a dangerous fool.<a href="https://t.co/WzRhZZB9uE">https://t.co/WzRhZZB9uE</a>
— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) <a href="https://twitter.com/marklevinshow/status/1173618551728594946?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 16, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
This is not the first time Gabbard has said Trump was being &#8220;Saudi Arabia’s b****.&#8221; In November 2018, Trump<a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-trump-saudi-arabia-20181121-story.html"> stated</a>, &#8220;If we abandon Saudi Arabia, it would be a terrible mistake. We may never know all of the facts surrounding the murder of Mr. Jamal Khashoggi. In any case, our relationship is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. They have been a great ally in our very important fight against Iran.&#8221;
Gabbard tweeted, &#8220;Hey <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump">@realdonaldtrump</a>: being Saudi Arabia’s bitch is not &#8216;America First.'&#8221;
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">Hey <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@realdonaldtrump</a>: being Saudi Arabia’s bitch is not “America First.”
— Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) <a href="https://twitter.com/TulsiGabbard/status/1065289231977738240?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 21, 2018</a></blockquote>
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As <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/trump-is-saudi-arabias-bitch-democratic-congresswoman-says">The Washington Examiner</a> pointed out, Gabbard had some shaky ground she was standing on, considering she met with Syrian President Bashar Assad in January 2017 and later publicly doubted claims that Assad had used chemical weapons on his own citizens. Gabbard’s defense of Assad came in the face of the U.S. and its allies agreeing that Assad had indeed used chemical weapons on his own people. Additionally, Syria is in league with Iran, a vehement foe of Saudi Arabia.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) fired back at Gabbard, &#8220;And how would you describe your fondness for Assad? Asking for the 500,000 Syrians he murdered &#8230; including the 50,000 children who gasped their last breath because of him.&#8221;
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">And how would you describe your fondness for Assad? Asking for the 500,000 Syrians he murdered&#8230; including the 50,000 children who gasped their last breath because of him. <a href="https://t.co/5Ezre1lWwO">https://t.co/5Ezre1lWwO</a>
— Adam Kinzinger (@RepKinzinger) <a href="https://twitter.com/RepKinzinger/status/1065307218155905024?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 21, 2018</a></blockquote>
</div>

Gabbard

Gabbard Says Trump Making U.S. ‘Saudi Arabia&#8217;s B****.’ Mark Levin Hammers Her With 2 Tweets.

Rebels used drones to set fire to the world’s largest oil processing facility and a Saudi Arabian oil field early Saturday morning.
Fox News <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/world/drone-attack-saudi-oil-facility-iran-rebels.amp">reported</a> that the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels allegedly claimed responsibility for the fires and said more attacks were to come.
“The military spokesman Yahia Sarie said in a short address aired by Houthi’s Al-Masirah satellite news channel that the group launched 10 drones in a coordinated attack on the sites,” Fox reported. Sarie reportedly added: “The only option for the Saudi government is to stop attacking us.”
From Fox:
<blockquote>The Khurais oil field is believed to produce over 1 million barrels of crude oil a day. It has estimated reserves of over 20 billion barrels of oil, according to Aramco.
The plant has been targeted in the past by militants. Al Qaeda claimed suicide bombers tried but failed to attack the oil complex in February 2006.
The U.S. Embassy in Riyadh said it was unaware of any injuries to Americans. Saudi Aramco employs a number of U.S. citizens, some of whom live in guarded compounds in the kingdom near the site.</blockquote>
The Wall Street Journal <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/drone-strikes-spark-fires-at-saudi-oil-facilities-11568443375">reported</a> that the Saudi government planned to cut its oil output by half following the attacks – “a loss of five million barrels a day,” the Journal reported. That’s about 5% of the world’s daily production of crude oil. Crude oil is then processed into sweet crude at the processing facility targeted by the drones. The oil is then transported through the Persian Gulf and Red Sea.
John Abizaid, the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia and a former Army general, said: “These attacks against critical infrastructure endanger civilians, are unacceptable, and sooner or later will result in innocent lives being lost.&#8221;
More from Fox:
<blockquote>The Saudi-led coalition has been battling the rebels since March 2015. The Iranian-backed Houthis hold Yemen&#8217;s capital, Sanaa, and other territory in the Arab world&#8217;s poorest country.
The war has become the world&#8217;s worst humanitarian crisis. The violence has pushed Yemen to the brink of famine and killed more than 90,000 people since 2015, according to the U.S.-based Armed Conflict Location &amp; Event Data Project, or ACLED, which tracks the conflict.</blockquote>
The drone strikes mark the latest attacks from Iran and Iranian-backed organizations such as the Houthis. In June, Iran shot down a large, expensive U.S. drone. President Donald Trump initially planned to retaliate, but cancelled an air strike at the last minute claiming he worried lives could be lost when no lives were taken by the drone attack.
In late August, The Daily Wire’s Ryan Saavedra <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/51210/iranian-president-hassan-rouhani-america-must-bow-ryan-saavedra">reported</a> that Iranian President Hassan Rouhani suggested the U.S. would have to “lift all the sanctions and bow down before the Iranian people” in order to solve the problems between the two countries.
“Those who have imposed sanctions on our people, and have carried out economic terrorism – any change in our conduct toward them must start with their repentance,” Rouhani <a href="https://www.memri.org/tv/iranian-president-hassan-rouhani-america-west-lift-sanctions-repent-reject-change-attitude/transcript">said</a> in a translated video. “They must return to their obligations, and change the erroneous path they have chosen. They must act in the service of the world&#8217;s interests and security, while maintaining respect for the other. They must recognize our revolution, our regime, and the rights of our people, and they must reject their mistakes. With regard to the relations between Iran and America – unless America gives up the sanctions and rejects the erroneous path it has chosen, we will see no positive change.”

Saudi Arabia oil field

Iranian-Backed Rebels Set Fire To Saudi Arabian Oil Field, World’s Largest Oil Processing Facility

Eighteen years ago today, in what would be the deadliest assault by a geopolitical foe on U.S. soil since the War of 1812, the global jihad struck the most lethal blow in the history of its wretched movement. The 9/11 airline hijackers were largely trained and funded by Wahhabist/Salafist Sunni zealots based in <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jul/19/911-report-details-saudi-arabia-funding-of-muslim-/">Saudi Arabia</a>, were substantially aided by the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/43339/hammer-iranian-revolution-forty-years-old-stand-josh-hammer">terrorist</a> <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-10/iran-told-to-pay-10-5-billion-to-sept-11-kin-insurers">Iranian</a> regime, and were protected and mollycoddled by Taliban Islamists.
It was not amorphous &#8220;terrorism&#8221; — an easily <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/51440/hammer-san-francisco-has-beclowned-itself-labeling-josh-hammer">malleable</a> linguistic concept — in the abstract that killed those <a href="https://theresurgent.com/2019/09/11/remember-2/">three thousand people</a> on 9/11. It was a much more clearly identifiable and unmistakable foe: genocidal Islamic jihadism.
It is astonishing to ponder that those born now will be eligible to serve in the U.S. military despite being born after 9/11. For those fresh new military recruits, 9/11 will be ingrained in their consciences as but one of many distant historical events — akin to the Vietnam War, the Pearl Harbor attacks, or perhaps even the Battle of Gettysburg. That is a downright harrowing thought for those of us for whom 9/11 was a seminal — perhaps life-changing or career trajectory-altering — event.
Crucially, these impressionable 18-year-old military recruits have grown up thinking of 9/11 and the corresponding bipartisan military adventurism overseas as inextricably linked. It is, of course, true that the Taliban in Afghanistan harbored the al-Qaeda militants who took down the Twin Towers. But it is also true that Afghanistan has already become this generation&#8217;s Vietnam: A seemingly interminable struggle in a faraway land for which there seems no way out.
While there is a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/43151/hammer-ted-cruzs-non-interventionist-hawk-foreign-josh-hammer">prudent and responsible &#8220;third way,&#8221;</a> far too often our foreign policy and national security discourse in the post-9/11 era has been oversimplified to a most regrettable dichotomy: That between George W. Bush-era moralistic interventionist neoconservatism and a fanatical isolationism that has never seen a foreign threat worth seriously engaging. For the young generation that has intellectually matured in the proverbial shadow of this oversimplified discourse, 9/11 and our subsequent campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq are solidified in the mind as part and parcel of Bush-era military interventionism.
As <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/30/us/politics/us-soldier-killed-afghanistan.html">Americans continue to die</a>, eighteen years later, fighting in third-world sharia hellholes to try to quixotically impose Madisonian democracies upon Islamists who effectively live in the seventh century, the public will to fiscally fund and morally support our campaigns naturally wanes. While that support wanes, the isolationist <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/fox-news-tucker-carlson-reportedly-at-center-of-trump-s-decision-not-to-bomb-iran-1.7403783">Tucker Carlson wing</a> of the foreign policy Right <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/51610/hammer-bad-trump-presidents-dismissal-john-bolton-josh-hammer">markedly ascends</a>. But Tucker Carlson-esque thinking on foreign policy is exceedingly dangerous. If 9/11 taught us anything, it taught us that real evil exists in this earthly realm — and that evil must be soberly assessed and unambiguously thwarted, lest we succumb to its tyranny. Evil loves a geopolitical vacuum, and there is no greater vacuum than when the post-World War II United States entirely withdraws itself from the world.
The problem is that, no matter its flaws, Carlson&#8217;s isolationism will continue to gain momentum so long as it is juxtaposed with the overly sanguine Pollyannaism of those who would moralistically intervene and seek to build Enlightenment-style Western nation-states in <a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/libya/2019-02-18/obamas-libya-debacle">sharia-governed desert backwaters</a>. The onus, therefore, falls on those of us <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/43151/hammer-ted-cruzs-non-interventionist-hawk-foreign-josh-hammer">true, non-neoconservative counter-jihadi hawks</a> to articulate and advocate for a compelling foreign policy vision that both soberly reflects upon the excesses of bipartisan moralistic interventionism gone awry and rejects the unyielding demands of the &#8220;bring America home&#8221; isolationists.
There is much to be said about what this vision looks like, and my hope is that future columns will help further contribute to the development of this &#8220;third way.&#8221; But instead of deploying U.S. military assets for dictator-toppling and nation-building purposes, a &#8220;third way&#8221; hawkish foreign policy would focus upon utilizing the tools of soft power, &#8220;draw and strike&#8221;-style lesser hard power maneuvering, hard deterrence (e.g., strategic naval asset deployment), statecraft, and sanctions/finances to achieve its goals: To thwart jihadism and deter the hegemonic ambitions of other non-jihadist geopolitical foes, such as Russia and <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/47057/hammer-china-americas-greatest-21st-century-threat-josh-hammer">China</a>.
The U.S. should label the leading Mexican cartels as State Department-recognized <a href="https://www.conservativereview.com/news/time-designate-mexican-cartels-terrorist-organizations/">foreign terrorist organizations</a>. The U.S. must label the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/46714/hammer-designating-muslim-brotherhood-terrorist-josh-hammer">Muslim Brotherhood</a>, which is the intellectual progenitor of all contemporary Sunni jihad, as a terrorist group. The U.S. must <a href="https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/07/01/cutting-us-aid-to-the-lebanese-army-would-increase-pressure-on-the-iran-hezbollah-axis/">defund the Lebanese Armed Forces</a>, given that the entire Lebanese military apparatus has been overrun by Hezbollah. The U.S. must amp up pressure on Qatar and Turkey, which have both long surpassed Saudi Arabia as the leading global bankrollers of the Muslim Brotherhood and radical Sunni madrasas alike.
In terms of immigration, the U.S. must focus not just on a border wall but also on <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/42539/hammer-border-wall-nice-interior-enforcement-nicer-josh-hammer">interior enforcement</a>: After all, two of the 9/11 hijackers — who should, of course, have never received visas in the first instance — were present in the country on that fateful day due to overstaying their visas. Two of the 9/11 hijackers, in other words, were illegal aliens still presently in the country due to a lack of robust interior enforcement.
Why on Earth, for that matter, has the U.S. continued to implement a lax immigration policy that continues to voluntarily <a href="https://www.conservativereview.com/news/aimless-fighting-in-afghanistan-while-we-bring-afghanistan-to-our-shores/">bring the very problem we claim to be fighting overseas</a> to our own shores? Has the development of Rep. Ilhan Omar&#8217;s (D-MN) large Somali immigrant community into the <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/us/how-rep-ilhan-omars-minnesota-district-became-the-terrorist-recruitment-capital-of-the-us-officials-highly-concerned">nation&#8217;s largest terrorist recruitment hub</a> taught us nothing? Why are we not implementing an immigration policy for the Islamic world that, while allowing for dispensations, starts from a default baseline level of effectively zero? None of the 9/11 hijackers should have been in the United States and, distressingly, our inadequate immigration &#8220;vetting&#8221; procedures are oftentimes hopeless in attempting to prevent the next importations of jihadist evil.
But a true &#8220;third way&#8221; foreign policy approach — a common-sense approach that can repel the nostrums of Tucker Carlson&#8217;s isolationism and moralistic interventionism alike — must begin with a sober assessment of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. There is no reason whatsoever for the U.S. to <a href="https://www.conservativereview.com/news/now-pull-the-plug-on-afghanistan/">still deploy large swaths of troops</a> to Afghanistan. Our fanciful efforts to democratize a seventh century-dwelling bastion of Islamism has manifestly failed, and will never succeed. But even more germanely, there is no present security threat from Afghanistan itself. Unlike Iran, the world&#8217;s most dangerous Islamist nation and number one global funder of jihad, Afghanistan has no nuclear weapon program or expressed desire to develop intercontinental ballistic missile technology, does not fund jihadist outfits or targeted assassinations overseas, and poses no genuine threat to American interests other than the radicalization of Afghans themselves.
It turns out that there is a much simpler and more cost-effective method of dealing with the Afghanistan problem than a seemingly endless military presence — with the concomitant constant risk of <a href="https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2017/03/21/green-on-blue_attacks_in_afghanistan_the_data_111015.html">&#8220;green-on-blue&#8221; violence</a>. Instead, U.S. policymakers ought to simply amp up border security, interior enforcement, and set Afghan visas to zero. A meaningful withdrawal from Afghanistan, furthermore, would allow genuine counter-jihadi hawks to demonstrate to isolationists that they have no interest in occupying or democratizing every sharia hellhole the world over. And it would save much-needed intellectual, moral, financial, and military capital that must be conserved for a potential showdown with genuine jihadi state actor threats, such as Iran.
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">My argument has always been that hawks themselves should support getting out of Afghanistan. We waste intellectual, moral, fiscal, physical, and human capital that we’d be better off saving for fighting adversaries that are actually strategically necessary. <a href="https://t.co/Q6fcyK9HmW">https://t.co/Q6fcyK9HmW</a>
— Josh Hammer (@josh_hammer) <a href="https://twitter.com/josh_hammer/status/1160333751118913536?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 10, 2019</a></blockquote>
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<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">You want to know how to solve the Afghanistan issue?
Set Afghan visas to zero. Maybe leave a few drones for easy aerial operations.
Done.
— Josh Hammer (@josh_hammer) <a href="https://twitter.com/josh_hammer/status/1160352043191717888?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 11, 2019</a></blockquote>
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By recalibrating our post-9/11 counterterrorism strategy to focus less on nation-building and more on genuine deterrence, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48120/hammer-d-day-was-good-versus-pure-evil-our-josh-hammer">clearly defining military missions for our men and women in uniform</a>, amping up border security at home, cutting immigration from the Islamic world, and conserving financial and military capital for future showdowns with the Iran-Muslim Brotherhood-Qatar-Turkey axis of Islamism, hawks will go a long way toward showing that they have learned the lessons of moralistic interventionism gone awry. In so doing, they will also begin the process of repelling the noxious rise within the conservative movement of those pernicious isolationists whose discredited ideas risk such profound harm.

9/11 Twin Towers

HAMMER: Never Forget 9/11. But We Need To Rethink How We Fight Radical Islamic Jihad.

Afghanistan

Al Qaeda

George W. Bush

Illegal Immigration

Immigrants

Immigration

In reporting on apparent foreign influence within the president’s circles, The New York Times has raised questions about foreign influence inside of its own newsroom.
Last week, the Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/13/us/politics/elliott-broidy-trump.html?register=email&amp;auth=register-email">published</a> a highly-publicized “scoop” on the supposed nefarious activities of Trump fundraiser and GOP mega donor Elliot Broidy, creating a narrative that accused the venture capitalist of improperly using his connections to the president to score major contracts for his work with the United Arab Emirates, among other countries.
Writers Ken Vogel, David Kirkpatrick, and Declan Walsh, who reported the piece, claimed to have exclusive access to private documents and emails that show evidence of improper behavior. They did not reveal how they got access to all of the private documents, particularly his personal communications.
Last year, Broidy <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-24/broidy-s-expanded-hack-allegations-fault-ex-spy-emir-s-brother">sued</a> the nation of Qatar, alleging that hackers working for the Qatari government stole emails and other communications from him. Some of the stolen documents have surfaced in a variety of media outlets, with many focusing on his relationship with Qatar’s regional rivals, such as Israel and other U.S. Gulf allies.
In response to The Times piece, Broidy’s team alleged that the stolen documents were “altered and cherry-picked out of context to present a false narrative about his business activities and public educational efforts that were entirely legitimate and legal.” The Times does not present the documents in their original form, so it’s not possible for the reader to decide whether or not they are authentic or providing an accurate and complete summary.
The Times also does not tell its readers that all three of the reporters on the byline of the story had earlier this year been contacted by foreign agents for the government of Qatar about the very topics that they all happen to be reporting on together.
According to March 2019 Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) <a href="https://efile.fara.gov/docs/6572-Supplemental-Statement-20190307-1.pdf">filings</a>, Vogel, Kirkpatrick, and Walsh, the three reporters on the story, were contacted by foreign lobbyists for Qatar specifically about the Broidy case. Of course, this does not provide definitive proof that Vogel and his colleagues got their scoop directly from Qatar. But their lack of transparency about their private communications with elements of the regime should certainly raise eyebrows about the objectivity and neutrality of their reporting.
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">I found docs showing both u &amp; the 2 other journos on this piece all communicated w/ Qatari lobbyists for their DC embassy prior to publishing story. Shouldn&#8217;t NYT readers know what foreign regimes u are getting info from when reporting on MidEast affairs?<a href="https://t.co/wFxJ8X5lM1">https://t.co/wFxJ8X5lM1</a>
— Jordan Schachtel (@JordanSchachtel) <a href="https://twitter.com/JordanSchachtel/status/1161349795023339520?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 13, 2019</a></blockquote>
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I asked Kenneth Vogel, the first reporter on the byline of the story, to comment on The Times reporters’ unreported communications with Qatar. He did not respond. Vogel has a history of biased reporting. He once infamously <a href="https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/289150-politico-reporter-sent-story-to-dem-committee-for-pre-publication">submitted a draft</a> of a story to the DNC before publishing it with his former employer. David Kirkpatrick, another reporter on the Broidy story, has a long history of <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/272935/egypt-bans-new-york-times-pro-muslim-brotherhood-daniel-greenfield">cozying</a> up to Qatar and providing fodder for the Islamist <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/world/middleeast/trump-muslim-brotherhood.html">organizations</a> it funds and supports, such as the Muslim Brotherhood.
At a bare minimum, The Times owes it to its readers to acknowledge that lobbyists for Qatar were communicating with Times reporters about the man upon whom the Times now reports. To not include that in their report adds to suspicions that Qatar — which again, is accused of hacking Broidy — may have been the source for their “scoop” on his personal and professional dealings.
The nation’s “paper of record” has a demonstrated track record of extreme hostility to the president and to our critical allies in the Middle East. The hit piece on Broidy, which is a combined assault on the president and our Gulf allies, seems to benefit both of those goals.
The Foreign Agents Registration Act was enacted in 1938 — just three years prior to the U.S. entry into World War II — with the <a href="https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2016/a1624.pdf">goal</a> to hold individuals and companies accountable for working for the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Today, the FARA system provides a database of individuals and organizations that lobby on behalf of foreign nations, regardless of whether they are allies or adversaries. Today, FARA is to thank for holding biased journalists accountable, too.
Jordan Schachtel is a foreign policy analyst and investigative reporter.

New York Times

SCHACHTEL: The New York Times&#8217; Latest Anti-Trump Hit Piece Stinks Of Foreign Propaganda

Media

Media Bias

Republican Party

“Peace to Prosperity” was the name of the economic “workshop” organized by Jared Kushner, Jason Greenblatt and Steven Mnuchin in Bahrain. The topic was bettering the Palestinian economy with the hope of creating a more congenial atmosphere for co-existence between Israel and the Palestinian-Arabs living in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) and Gaza.
The event was plush, with Gulf Arabs dressed in pristine white tunics and <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/.premium-in-bahrain-air-of-israeli-arab-normalization-and-a-message-to-iran-1.7410754">where</a> “Israeli and Arab businessmen openly mingled at the non-alcoholic cocktail parties.&#8221; Fortune magazine <a href="https://fortune.com/2019/06/30/bahrain-summit-middle-east/">described</a> the global gathering: “Over 300 top delegates came from 30 countries, from Australia and Argentina; Dubai and Delhi; Nigeria and Norway; and even such unlikely pairings as Saudi Arabia and Qatar or Greece and Turkey.”
Almost all observers agreed that there was hope in the air.
Palestinians Are Not Buying What Jared Kushner Is Selling
However, while some Palestinian-Arab business leaders did come to Bahrain, the Palestinian Authority (PA) boycotted the event, and Time magazine summarized their feeling with the <a href="https://time.com/5617713/kushner-deal-century-manama-palestinians/">headline</a>: “Palestinians Are Not Buying What Jared Kushner Is Selling.”
Indeed, judging by the lack of progress in actual Israeli-Palestinian relations, the conference was an ostensible failure. But, as is often true in the Middle East, there was an unspoken agenda at the Bahrain “workshop” — and seen by that light, the gathering was a monumental success.
The Subtext of Bahrain: Normalization of Israel
While the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was the context of the Bahrain gathering, the subtext, and maybe bigger story, was the normalization of Israel among the elites of the Arab states.
First, there was the welcoming atmosphere for all participants, which should not be taken for granted since Israelis, until very recently, were barred from entering Bahrain at all.
Then, Bahraini Foreign Minister Khalid bin Ahmed Al Khalifa <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/bahrain-fm-to-times-of-israel-israel-is-here-to-stay-and-we-want-peace-with-it/">spoke</a> with Israeli press on the sidelines of the workshop and told them: “Israel is a country in the region &#8230; and it’s there to stay, of course &#8230; we want better relations with it, and we want peace with it.”
Later, in a classic Middle East double-speak, the same Al Khalifa, when talking with the Saudi-owned Al-Arabiya news channel <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/bahrains-khalifa-says-interviews-to-israelis-nowhere-near-normalization/">said</a>: “There are those who say this is normalization. This is not normalization. This is not even a step toward normalization.”
But it was too late: The normalization cat was out of the bag.
Tracks for Regional Peace in Abu Dhabi 
The Bahrain workshop was soon followed by yet another high-level meeting between Israeli officials and Gulf state leaders. Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz took part in a U.N. climate conference in Abu Dhabi and met with an unnamed “senior U.A.E. official” to discuss “regional issues and relations between the countries” — a victory in and of itself, given that Israel and the U.A.E. do not maintain formal diplomatic ties.
The meeting focused on “the need to deal with the Iranian threat and Iran’s support for terrorism in the region.” The two officials also discussed cooperation and economic ties, and finally, Katz presented his “Tracks for Regional Peace” initiative — a proposal to link Israel’s rail network through Jordan to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.
If accepted, the plan would open up the region for travel, give Arab states access to Israel’s Mediterranean ports, and grant Israel trade access to the Arab world.
The message out of Abu Dhabi was the same as the one out of Bahrain — Israel’s normalization in Arab eyes.
The End of the 100-Year War
The Arab world has been fighting against the existence of a Jewish State since the British empire in 1917 issued the famous Balfour Declaration, which stated that &#8220;His Majesty&#8217;s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.&#8221;
In the failed hopes of destroying the small Jewish State, many wars have been fought and much blood has been spilled in the last century. But today, there are three reasons why powerful Arab states are looking to bury the hatchet with the people they attempted to destroy not so long ago:
The first reason is the grudging recognition that Israel has simply been victorious. The Arabs have failed to destroy Israel, and the Jewish State is flourishing in almost every parameter, successfully settling its people on the land that it claims.
The second reason is connected to the first — “if you can&#8217;t beat &#8217;em, join &#8217;em.” Many Arabs have begun realizing that since the war against the Jews hasn&#8217;t brought any real results, except regional stagnation, they ought to shift gears out of war and into business and prosperity.
And the third — and most visceral — reason that Arabs states are looking favorably upon Israel is the Iranian threat.
Everyone knows Iran endangers Israel, but Shiite Iran is much hungrier to take over the lands of the Sunni Arabs and the holy cities Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia than it is to enter into a nuclear standoff with the Jewish State. For a long time, Gulf Arabs relied on the U.S. for defense, but now, with a sense that America is less interested in being their bodyguard, the Arab eyes are, ironically, looking to the military power of Israel for their protection. The enemy of my enemy, as it is said, is my friend.
For many Arabs, it is obvious that the century-long war against Israel has yielded nothing. So instead of the war and the resulting stagnation, regional prosperity is the new focus. Additionally, the only regional force that can contain the aggressiveness of Iran is Israel.
Therefore, regional realignment and the normalization of Israel is now in the Arab world&#8217;s collective interest.
Those Who Never Miss an Opportunity
Israel’s former representative at the U.N., Abba Eban, said years ago that “the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” and Bahrain workshop was no different.
The PA boycotted the event, threatened anyone who would support it, and heartlessly refused to discuss a $50 billion plan to alleviate the suffering of its own governed people.
For the PA/PLO and Hamas, war with Israel is their raison d&#8217;etre — and a key fundraising strategy from patrons like Qatar, Iran, and some European countries who pay for the continued war on Israel in the guise of “humanitarian” assistance.
But for many Arabs states, the Palestinians have become a group who stands between them and normalization with Israel — something which would give them regional prosperity and personal security — and the end of the failed 100-year war.
Yishai Fleisher is the International Spokesman of the Jewish community of Hebron and an Israeli broadcaster.

FLEISHER: The End Of The 100-Year Arab-Israeli War

Jared Kushner

Steve Mnuchin

The realignment of the 21st century Middle East can more easily be understood by separating the countries that have chosen to embrace nationalism versus those that have doubled down on the doctrine of Islamic supremacism &#8212; otherwise known as Islamism. U.S. Arab allies in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, and others have collectively moved in near lockstep with President Trump&#8217;s foreign policy doctrine, as expressed in his landmark <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-trumps-speech-arab-islamic-american-summit/">Riyadh speech</a>, in which the commander-in-chief called upon our regional partners to &#8220;drive out&#8221; the radicals in the Middle East and from within their own governments. Other paper allies, like Qatar and Turkey, have chosen to embrace those radicals, fund their revolutionary movements, and stir broader regional chaos.
The nationalist movement in the Middle East has convinced many of our Arab allies to largely abandon past policies that involved aiding and abetting troublesome regional groups and Islamist movements. Saudi Arabia, once a noted regional troublemaker, has largely returned to a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/24/i-will-return-saudi-arabia-moderate-islam-crown-prince">&#8220;moderate Islam&#8221;</a> that disavows the fundamentalist radical movements both inside and outside Riyadh. Additionally, our regional allies have invested heavily in internal development and advancement, which has tremendously bolstered individual rights and other human freedoms (including the advancement of women&#8217;s rights) inside of their respective nations. These policies have encouraged cooperation and healthy competition between fellow partner nations. The embrace of the concept of sovereignty has become a regional gamechanger for the promise of long-term peace and security, but that doesn&#8217;t mean there aren&#8217;t any holdouts.
Qatar has outright refused to embrace the regional nationalist movement. Instead, Doha continues to not-so-quietly abuse the sovereignty of its neighbors, meddle in their affairs, and incite Islamist rebellions throughout the entire region. Though Qatar claims to be a U.S. ally in good standing, evidence remains plentiful that the ultra-wealthy ruling family in Doha continues to <a href="https://www.counterextremism.com/countries/qatar">harbor</a> international terrorists, give major media platforms to anti-American <a href="http://www.arabnews.com/node/1475626/middle-east">hate preachers</a>, and provide regular aid and support for U.S.-designated terrorist organizations. This is because Islamic supremacism remains the core ideology of Qatar&#8217;s ruling class.
This developing nationalist-Islamist divide in the Gulf has acted to separate Qatar from its once-reliable regional partner and push the country even further into Iran&#8217;s orbit.
Yes, the rulers of Qatar are Sunni fundamentalists, while the mullahs in Tehran are Shia supremacists. But this is only a minor hurdle when compared to the higher-level competing ideologies of Islamist revanchism and reformist nationalism. Iran and Qatar remain ideologically linked through their shared principle of Islamic supremacism, and a shared disdain for the West and its values.
Perhaps the most well-known modern example of this Sunni-Shia extremist partnership is the long-running alliance between Al Qaeda and Iran, which have on many occasions <a href="https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2018/08/08/the-al-qaeda-iran-connection/">collaborated</a> in terrorist attacks and long-term plots against their common enemies. In a 2007 <a href="https://www.unitedagainstnucleariran.com/AlQaeda">letter</a>, since-killed Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden infamously described Iran as &#8220;our main artery for funds, personnel, and communication.&#8221;
While there&#8217;s no discounting the ideological connection in the Qatar-Iran nexus, the two nations also have overwhelming economic links, starting with their shared territorial occupation of the <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-northfield-qatar/factbox-qatar-iran-share-worlds-biggest-gas-field-idUSTRE66P1VV20100726">world&#8217;s largest gas field</a>. With its economic ties to Tehran in mind, Qatar has consistently <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-iran-oil-qatar/qatar-says-tightening-iran-sanctions-harms-oil-consuming-nations-idUSKCN1S747K">pushed back</a> at the idea that Iran should face any economic sanctions over its support for terrorism. In May, Qatar&#8217;s foreign minister advised that <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-iran-oil-qatar/qatar-says-tightening-iran-sanctions-harms-oil-consuming-nations-idUSKCN1S747K">&#8220;dialogue,&#8221;</a> not sanctions, is the answer to the Iran issue. Qatar itself has regularly thwarted U.S. sanctions against Iran to continue to do business with the regime. In fact, Qatar values trade with Iran to such a degree that Doha has publicly stated it would <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/thebakersinstitute/2018/12/04/qatar-to-saudi-arabia-we-would-rather-quit-opec-than-cut-relations-with-iran-or-shutter-al-jazeera/#33bfebfc222b">quit the powerful OPEC cartel</a> before severing ties with Iran. During the recent Gulf Cooperation Council blockade against Qatar, Iran (alongside Turkey) served as an integral <a href="https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/facing-embargoes-iran-and-qatar-deepen-trade-ties">lifeline</a> for Qatar, allowing the regime to thwart a regional trade embargo. Since 2016, trade between Iran and Qatar has <a href="https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/iransource/gcc-dispute-pushes-iran-and-qatar-closer-but-with-caveats">doubled</a> or more across several sectors.
Both Iran and Qatar have dedicated much of the past few years to sowing chaos across the Middle East. Iran, for its part, has launched direct attacks (through its proxies) against Arab nations. Iran&#8217;s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hezbollah have accelerated the ongoing genocide in Syria. Iran-backed Houthi insurgents in Yemen are launching direct attacks upon Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations. Iran-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas are antagonizing Egypt and Israel by banging the war drums in Gaza. Yet through it all, Doha has <a href="https://financialtribune.com/articles/national/96373/doha-calls-for-strong-relations-with-tehran">continued</a> to insist upon closer relations with Iran. The Qatar-Iran relationship has not at all been fazed by recent direct Iranian militant and proxy attacks upon Arab oil tankers and vessels &#8212; and even the shooting down of an American unmanned aerial vehicle in the Gulf. Earlier this month, as the U.S. and our allies formally condemned Iran for its state-sponsored terror, Qatari leaders were <a href="https://www.rferl.org/a/iran-qatar-saudi/29978053.html">singing the praises</a> of the Tehran regime. Doha even explicitly rejected the outcome of an emergency Arab summit condemning Iran in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the Gulf vessels and Houthi rocket strikes against an international airport in Saudi Arabia.
Qatar and Iran have a shared ideological commitment to imposing regional carnage. And these shared principles make up the DNA of their respective leaderships. The Middle East has separated into two primary ideological camps. To Qatar and Iran, Islamic supremacism &#8212; and not reformist nationalism &#8212; is the way forward for the region. Qatar has remained incredibly resilient in rejecting pressure from America and our regional partners. It&#8217;s time we recognize that Qatar, by cozying up to Iran and its terrorist allies, has breached the point of no return.

Jordan Schachtel is a foreign policy analyst and investigative reporter.

SCHACHTEL: The Iran-Qatar Axis Of Islamism Stands Against America And Our Sunni Arab Allies

Terrorism

On <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/2323471524380525/?acontext=%7B%22source%22%3A5%2C%22action_history%22%3A%5b%7B%22surface%22%3A%22page%22%2C%22mechanism%22%3A%22main_list%22%2C%22extra_data%22%3A%22%5C%22%5b%5d%5C%22%22%7D%5d%2C%22has_source%22%3Atrue%7D">June 2</a> at 1:00 PM local time, six men performed Islamic prayers on the sidewalk in front of an emerald green building in Los Angeles&#8217; Japantown neighborhood.
They waited for more people to gather, until a small crowd of approximately 25 Muslim-American men and women and a handful of non-Muslim supporters had gathered outside the local consulate of Saudi Arabia. The group began unfurling signs and chanting slogans in defense of &#8220;our scholars&#8221; who were scheduled to be executed by the Saudi government.
&#8220;Not another nickel, not another dime, no more money for Saudi&#8217;s crimes!&#8221; &#8220;Rest in peace Jamal Khashoggi!&#8221; &#8220;Down! Down! With [Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman]!&#8221; &#8220;Free expression, no oppression!&#8221; And, of course, the traditional activist chant: &#8220;No justice! No peace!&#8221;
These protestors were not just ordinary Muslim-Americans, however, but members of the Muslim American Society&#8217;s Greater Los Angeles chapter (MAS-GLA). And the scholars were leading clerics with a history of ties to Islamic extremism and terror: <a href="https://www.nysun.com/foreign/islamist-threat-arrives-in-switzerland/55439/">Salman al-Odah</a>, who issued calls for killing American troops in Iraq and was linked by Spanish prosecutors to the 2004 Madrid train bombing carried out by al-Qaeda; Ali al-Omari, a member of the <a href="http://www.newageislam.com/current-affairs/a-public-apology-by-aidh-al-qarni,-salafi-scholar,-sheds-a-light-on-mohammed-bin-salman&#8217;s-version-of-&#8216;moderate-islam/d/118847">International Union of Muslims Scholars</a>, which the Saudi government has designated as a terrorist organization and which called for the <a href="https://www.memri.org/reports/reactions-sheikh-al-qaradhawis-fatwa-calling-abduction-and-killing-american-civilians-iraq">killing of Americans in Iraq in 2004</a>, and <a href="https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/defenddemocracy/uploads/documents/facebook_fatwa_low_res_2.pdf">Awad al-Qarni</a>, who once offered $100,000 to any Palestinian who successfully kidnapped an Israeli soldier.
Why did this particular organization come out in support of these radical three clerics?
First, MAS has been named by federal prosecutors as the &#8220;<a href="http://www.investigativeproject.org/documents/case_docs/542.pdf">overt arm</a>&#8221; of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in the United States, and the group often does little to hide its radical sympathies. MAS was <a href="https://gulfnews.com/uae/government/uae-publishes-list-of-terrorist-organisations-1.1412895">designated a terrorist group</a> in 2014 by the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Describing the <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/world/qatar-terror-ties-friend-foe-or-both">decision to designate</a> MAS and similar groups, UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al-Nahyan said that the small Gulf state &#8220;&#8230; cannot accept incitement or funding&#8221; of terrorism.
At last year&#8217;s <a href="http://www.maslaconvention.org/">MAS&#8217;s west coast convention</a>, the keynote speaker was Tareq Al-Suwaidan, a Kuwaiti-based Brotherhood leader and open <a href="https://www.memri.org/reports/kuwaiti-muslim-brotherhood-leader-and-director-saudi-al-risala-tv-tareq-al-suwaidan-tours">anti-Semite</a> &#8212; who, incidentally, is <a href="https://gulfnews.com/world/gulf/kuwait/kuwaiti-preacher-barred-from-makkah-pilgrimage-1.1238437">banned</a> from entering both Saudi Arabia and <a href="https://www.pressreader.com/uk/the-sunday-telegraph/20100124/282209416988562">the United States</a> &#8212; who spoke via Skype. Suwaidan has previously called for jihad to liberate Palestinians, including once <a href="https://www.investigativeproject.org/documents/case_docs/2439.pdf">boasting</a> that &#8220;the Jews will meet their end at our hands.&#8221;
Both Suwaidan and al-Odah are leading members of the Global Anti-Aggression Campaign (GAAC), a <a href="https://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/NGO_Doha_Terror.pdf">Qatari sponsored network</a> of radical clerics, which includes multiple MB acolytes and other Islamist clerics. It was this association that formed part of the justification for the <a href="https://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/2017/09/28/saudi-university-dismissing-muslim-brotherhood-linked-academics/">arrest</a> of the three clerics and 27 others in September of 2017.
It should come as no surprise that MAS&#8217;s declaration of the three imams as &#8220;our scholars&#8221; indicates a shared association with the Brotherhood.
And the ties are even more direct in the case of al-Qarni, who has had previous involvement with MAS. <a href="https://www.investigativeproject.org/3864/cair-protests-saudi-radical-exclusion-from-us">In December 2012</a>, al-Qarni was scheduled to speak at MAS&#8217;s annual national convention but was blocked from entering the country because of his inclusion on the U.S.&#8217;s no-fly list &#8212; a direct result of his advocacy for jihad.
The protests were led by five California-based Islamist activists, most notably Yasmeen Azam, a <a href="https://www.facebook.com/yasmeen.azam.5/about?section=contact-info&amp;lst=20704912%3A100003030329134%3A1560447252">23-year-old activist</a> who <a href="https://www.facebook.com/yasmeen.azam.5/about?section=education&amp;lst=20704912%3A100003030329134%3A1560447252">currently works</a> as the assistant regional coordinator for MAS-GLA. She was among the protest&#8217;s primary organizers. It is worthwhile to learn about Azam and keep an eye on her now, as she is just beginning to establish herself as an activist &#8212; rather than waiting until she becomes more prominent and effective. Opponents of the domestic Islamist movement in America do not need another Zahra Billoo or Linda Sarsour.
Azam has been making a name for herself in L.A. Islamist circles for years now, including a <a href="https://www.facebook.com/notes/cair-greater-los-angeles/cair-las-socal-muslim-of-the-week-yasmeen-azam/10153973288967831/">profile</a> in September 2016 as the Greater Los Angeles chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations&#8217; &#8220;SoCal Muslim of the Week.&#8221; The fawning write-up noted that Azam gave a speech at the United Nations based on an essay she submitted into a contest, &#8220;The Call to Light,&#8221; which described &#8220;her personal spiritual awakening.&#8221; It also noted Azam&#8217;s involvement with <a href="https://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2014/2/2/the-ten-worst-u-s-purveyors-of-antisemitism-2-students-for-justice-in-palestine?print=true&amp;singlepage=true">Students for Justice in Palestine</a> and the MSA chapter at California State University Long Beach, for which she would serve as president. Today the MSA is <a href="http://www.nypdshield.org/public/SiteFiles/documents/NYPD_Report-Radicalization_in_the_West.pdf">described</a> by law enforcement as a &#8220;radicalization incubator.&#8221; Azam is also a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, with her anti-Israel campus activism documented in an <a href="https://canarymission.org/individual/Yasmeen_Azam">extensive profile</a> at the indispensable Canary Mission website.
Others who led the group, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=392262191631804">giving speeches</a> and booming slogans through the bullhorn, included such familiar voices in Southern California Islamist circles as Dr. Khaled Abou El Fadl (described by Daniel Pipes in 2004 as a <a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/1841/stealth-islamist-khaled-abou-el-fadl">&#8220;stealth Islamist&#8221;</a>), <a href="https://shuracouncil.org/muslim-of-the-week/imad-bayoun">Imad Bayoun</a> (a regular MAS lecturer who has <a href="https://www.investigativeproject.org/7003/cal-state-professor-bin-laden-islamist">praised</a> MB founder Hassan al-Banna and defended MB theorist and jihad apologist Sayyid Qutb), Shakeel Syed (who has <a href="https://www.meforum.org/campus-watch/25693/shakeel-syed-wants-tariq-ramadan-freed">advocated</a> for the release of al-Banna&#8217;s Islamist intellectual leader grandson Tariq Ramadan, who is currently held in France on rape charges), and MAS-GLA&#8217;s Director Tareq Purmul.
Putting together these varied data points from the protests, the promotion of international MB figureheads, and the activist priorities of Azam, MAS&#8217;s role in Islamist activism comes into clearer focus: Much more so than other groups, MAS takes a particular concern in international issues and strives to provoke American Muslims to see themselves as one part of a global <a href="https://www.thefreedictionary.com/Ummah">&#8220;ummah.&#8221;</a> What&#8217;s so problematic about this is that in MAS&#8217;s formulation, this ummah is one that consists of MB activists and ideologues linked with terrorists &#8212; and is dead set on the destruction of Israel, to boot.

David M. Swindle is the Southern California associate for the <a href="https://counterislamist.org/">Counter-Islamist Grid</a>. He also works as the Director of Research for <a href="https://theisraelgroup.org/">The Israel Group</a>. Follow him on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/daveswindle">@DaveSwindle</a>.

SWINDLE: California Islamist Activists Protest At Saudi Consulate In Support Of Terror-Linked Clerics

CAIR

California

Los Angeles

Muslims

Protest

Bahrain is set to be the center of the Middle East on June 25-26 when the country&#8217;s capital, Manama, hosts an economic investment conference intended to inject wealth into the Palestinian economy and lay the foundation for President Donald Trump&#8217;s upcoming &#8220;deal of the century&#8221; proposal between Israel and the Palestinians. The Bahraini &#8220;Peace to Prosperity&#8221; economic workshop announced on May 19 is a dual effort between the U.S. and Bahrain to <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/joint-statement-united-states-america-kingdom-bahrain/">&#8220;galvanize support for potential economic investments and initiatives&#8221;</a> and <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/joint-statement-united-states-america-kingdom-bahrain/ents and initiatives">&#8220;facilitate discussions on an ambitious, achievable vision and framework for a prosperous future for the Palestinian people and the region.&#8221;</a>
Participating countries include Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, and a large contingent of the Gulf Cooperation Council &#8212; Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Global powers Russia and China will not partake in the conference. Israel is yet to be formally invited to the summit, with senior adviser Jared Kushner <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/two-weeks-out-from-bahrain-summit-israel-said-yet-to-receive-official-invite/">reportedly</a> delaying an official invitation until the list of Arab states in attendance is finalized.
Notably boycotting the workshop is the Palestinian Authority, which, despite being the focal point and ultimate beneficiaries of the event, rejects the legitimacy of the conference because <a href="https://www.nad.ps/en/media-room/press-releases/dr-saeb-erekat-manama-economic-meeting">&#8220;Palestine&#8217;s full economic potential can only be achieved by ending the Israeli occupation,&#8221;</a> according to Dr. Saeb Erekat, a Palestine Liberation Organization diplomat. Various Palestinian trade organizations &#8212; accounting for nearly <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-23/palestinian-business-groups-say-they-won-t-go-to-bahrain-summit">80% of the Palestinian GDP</a> &#8212; have likewise declined invitations to attend, similarly objecting due to the lack of promise of <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-23/palestinian-business-groups-say-they-won-t-go-to-bahrain-summit">&#8220;freedom and sovereignty for Palestinians.&#8221;</a>
The Palestinian leadership and major trade organizations are outright refusing to even entertain an influx of wealth into their impoverished land &#8212; as though a revitalized economy is a detriment to the well-being of the Palestinian people. Given the utter impossibility of the Palestinians&#8217; demand of full control over all of the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, the unwillingness of the Palestinian leadership to hear out the economic plan at the summit appears to be deeply cynical.
What government would blatantly reject a plan intended to augment the country&#8217;s economic standing? None, excepting the Palestinian leadership, because to do so is possibly the most obvious disservice to Palestinian denizens and industry alike. Yet for the Palestinians, this is part of a much larger play.
The Palestinian &#8220;struggle,&#8221; which has garnered so much favor among mainstream media and international supporters, thrives exclusively on the plight of the Palestinians and the intense suffering that continues to be passed off as an outcome of alleged Israeli interventionism and discrimination. To the Palestinian leadership, a revitalized economy and regional stability would run wholly counter to the messages of despair at the hands of Israelis and would distract from their prime objective of the destruction of Israel altogether. As evidenced by their attempt to <a href="https://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/Palestinians-urge-Egypt-Jordan-to-reconsider-going-to-US-led-conference-592252">block</a> the summit, the Palestinian government does not strive for a better society. Instead, the Palestinian government mobilizes its populace and the international community against Israel &#8212; at Palestinians&#8217; own expense.
Due to this, terrorism in Palestinian society is incentivized instead of the promotion of beneficial public works programs. Anti-Semitism, furthermore, is a state-sponsored cause. Rather than fund secular schooling for Palestinians, the Palestinian Authority commits significant resources to the delegitimization of Israel in school settings. Only <a href="http://www.thetower.org/article/the-palestinian-textbook-fiasco/">7% of photographs</a> in Palestinian textbooks recognize any Israeli claim to territory. A U.S. State Department-funded study revealed that <a href="http://www.thetower.org/article/the-palestinian-textbook-fiasco/">87% of Palestinian books</a> depict Israel and Israelis in a negative characterization, and almost all &#8212; excepting a singular instance &#8212; depict Judaism in a negative light. The Palestinian education system demonstrates another facet of its over-arching hatred and incompetence: Educational advancement is sacrificed for indoctrination and hatred.
The Palestinian Authority also directly funds terrorist activities and diverts sizable quantities of funds from beneficial government activities in order to do so. In March 2018, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas <a href="https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/palestinian-authority-payments-to-terrorists">approved</a> the allocation of $360 million &#8212; 7% of the GDP of the government &#8212; towards the compensation of terrorists and families funneled through two government institutions: The Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs and the Fund for Families of Martyrs and the Injured. Since 2013, these payments have in sum <a href="https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/palestinian-authority-payments-to-terrorists">exceeded $1.5 billion</a>. In 2017, these payments accounted for a whopping <a href="https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/palestinian-authority-payments-to-terrorists">49.6% of the foreign humanitarian aid</a> received by the Palestinian Authority.
The persistent pattern of the Palestinian Authority to slander and physically harm Israelis has culminated in the outright rejection of the Bahrain summit. No proposal for peace or economic prosperity will satisfy the Palestinian leadership. Ideals of rejectionism and confrontation with Israelis are so firmly engrained in Palestinian society, reaching children in schools and accounting for immense amounts of the national economy. The fundamental fault for a continued conflict lies not with Israel or with any particular United States plan, but with a culture of bigotry and state-sponsored incitement adopted by the Palestinians.

PHILLIPS: Upcoming Bahrain Summit Yet Again Showcases Palestinians&#8217; Refusal To Negotiate

Egypt

Two oil tankers are now adrift in the Gulf of Oman, one ablaze and both abandoned, after what the shipping firms say are attacks involving a magnetic mine and a torpedo. The crews of both tankers &#8212; one Norwegian-owned, the other Japanese &#8212; have been rescued, the U.S. Navy aiding in the effort.
&#8220;The Front Altair, carrying petrochemical feedstock, was on fire in waters between Gulf Arab states and Iran after an explosion that a source blamed on a magnetic mine. The Norwegian owner said its crew were safe,&#8221; <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-tanker/two-tankers-struck-in-suspected-attacks-in-gulf-of-oman-sources-idUSKCN1TE0OI">Reuters</a>. &#8220;A second Japanese-owned tanker was abandoned after being hit by a suspected torpedo, the firm that chartered the ship said. The crew were also picked up.&#8221;
The Front Altair, owned by Norway&#8217;s Frontline, is believed to have been &#8220;hit by a torpedo&#8221; at around 0400 GMT, Taiwan&#8217;s state oil refiner said. The ship was carrying 75,000 tonnes of petrochemical feedstock to Taiwan.
The Japanese-owned Kokuka Courageous is believed to have been struck by a magnetic mine, suffering damage above the water line. The owner says the ship was hit twice over a three-hour period. The ship is currently &#8220;adrift without any crew on board,&#8221; a source told Reuters.
Iranian international news network Press TV has posted footage of the Front Altair ablaze, as well as photos of the Kokuka Courageous:
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
Aerial footage shows one of the oil tankers targeted in the Sea of Oman<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/SeaofOman?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#SeaofOman</a> <a href="https://t.co/mdvEPPT3J4">pic.twitter.com/mdvEPPT3J4</a>
&#8212; Press TV (@PressTV) <a href="https://twitter.com/PressTV/status/1139139212308099079?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 13, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
These photos show Panama-flagged Japanese-owned <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Kokuka?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Kokuka</a> Courageous tanker hours after attacked in the Sea of Oman. The vessel is apparently unharmed after the fire has been put off.<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/TheSeaofOman?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#TheSeaofOman</a> <a href="https://t.co/ojKMNw4CxZ">pic.twitter.com/ojKMNw4CxZ</a>
&#8212; Press TV (@PressTV) <a href="https://twitter.com/PressTV/status/1139165239637938176?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 13, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
The U.S. Navy fleet based in Bahrain is assisting the two tankers. &#8220;We are aware of the reported attack on tankers in the Gulf of Oman. U.S. Naval Forces in the region received two separate distress calls at 6:12 a.m. local time and a second one at 7:00 a.m.,&#8221; the Fifth Fleet&#8217;s Joshua Frey said, <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/world/uk-maritime-groups-warns-of-incident-in-gulf-of-oman">Fox News</a> reports.
The U.S. has not yet assigned blame for the attacks, but Reuters notes that they are the second in a month near the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world&#8217;s most important oil supply waterways. Four tankers were damaged by limpet mines in May, attacks the U.S. and its regional ally Saudi Arabia have blamed on Iran, who denies involvement.
The attacks follow Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe&#8217;s visit to Tehran in which he called on both sides to deescalate the increasingly tense situation, which involves more severe sanctions imposed by the U.S.
&#8220;Tensions have risen since President Donald Trump, who has demanded Tehran curb its military programs and influence in the Middle East, pulled the United States out of a deal between Iran and global powers to curb Tehran&#8217;s nuclear ambitions,&#8221; reports Reuters.
In late May, the U.S. military determined that Iran&#8217;s Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) were responsible for attacks on four ships in the Persian Gulf earlier in the month. &#8220;The attack against the shipping in Fujairah we attribute it to the IRGC,&#8221; <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/47656/us-military-says-iran-responsible-tanker-attacks-ryan-saavedra">said </a>Joint Staff director Rear Admiral Michael Gilday. The U.S. designated the IRGC as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in April.
&#8220;Gulf officials have characterized the damage to the tankers as sabotage,&#8221; the <a href="http://apnews.com/d5884f62de8c4f9d955684ea71c90c01">Associated Press</a> reported. &#8220;Two Saudi oil tankers, a Norwegian-flagged vessel, and a bunkering tanker flagged in Sharjah, one of the UAE&#8217;s seven emirates, all suffered similar damage Sunday.&#8221;
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48163/iran-seeking-arsenal-nuclear-bombs-netanyahu-says-josh-hammer">Iran Is Seeking An &#8216;Arsenal Of Nuclear Bombs,&#8217; Netanyahu Says</a>
This article has been expanded to include more information.

VIDEO: Oil Tanker Ablaze After Suspected Attacks In Gulf Of Oman

As The Daily Wire <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/42632/iranian-nuclear-chief-again-confirms-iran-josh-hammer">reported</a> back in January, the Iranian nuclear chief confirmed that the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/43339/hammer-iranian-revolution-forty-years-old-stand-josh-hammer">terrorist mullocracy that rules Iran</a> flagrantly violated the terms of the harrowing capitulation to fundamentalist jihadist evil known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (i.e., the &#8220;Iran nuclear deal&#8221;). As the Middle East Media Research Institute, which is committed to translating into English otherwise-hidden primary source material from the Arab and Muslim world, <a href="https://www.memri.org/tv/iranian-atomic-energy-chief-ali-akbar-salehi-secret-purchase-nuclear-tubes-jcpoa-destroy-yellowcake-propulsion-arak-reactor/transcript">reported</a> at the time:
<blockquote>
Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, was interviewed on Channel 4 TV (Iran) on January 22, 2019. He said that the negotiations surrounding the JCPOA had required Iran to destroy the Arak reactor&#8217;s calandria by filling it with cement, but that Iran had secretly acquired replacement tubes ahead of time so that the reactor&#8217;s functionality would not be ultimately affected. He also said that pictures that had circulated that showed the Arak reactor&#8217;s pit filled with cement had been photoshopped. He explained that Iran has no intention to build a nuclear weapon, and that the Arak reactor is nonetheless incapable of producing weapons-grade plutonium. In addition, Salehi said that the yellowcake production facilities in Ardakan are operational and that Iran has been authorized to produce two additional IR-8 centrifuges. Salehi added that Iran has advanced rapidly in the field of nuclear propulsion.
</blockquote>
Now, a former deputy head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is the United Nations&#8217; nuclear watchdog agency, is sounding the alarm by stating that Iran &#8212; even four years after the U.S., under then-President Barack Obama, entered into the purportedly tension-defusing nuclear agreement with Tehran &#8212; has a nuclear breakout time today of only six to eight months. Per <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/iran-could-make-nuclear-weapon-in-6-8-months-says-former-iaea-deputy/">The Times of Israel</a>:
<blockquote>
A former deputy head of the UN&#8217;s atomic watchdog said Wednesday that Iran is capable of producing a nuclear bomb in six to eight months.
In an interview with Israel&#8217;s Army Radio, Olli Heinonen said that Israel and the Gulf states &#8220;have a reason to worry.&#8221;
Heinonen said that despite assertions to the contrary by the current leadership of the UN&#8217;s International Atomic Energy Agency, which he left in 2010, Tehran has not been adhering to the 2015 nuclear deal.
&#8220;Iran is actually weaponizing uranium enrichment without making a weapon,&#8221; he claimed.
</blockquote>
President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear deal in May 2018, shortly after Israel&#8217;s stunning revelation of a Mossad intelligence operation that revealed the extent of Iran&#8217;s decades-long commitment to acquiring nuclear weapons. Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/30045/iran-lied-netanyahu-reveals-israel-smuggled-100000-ben-shapiro">opined</a>, at the time, on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu&#8217;s revelation of the intelligence:
<blockquote>
According to Netanyahu, Iran had a comprehensive program, Project Amad, to design and develop nuclear weapons, and they have now disassembled the program for later reassembly. The specific goal of Project Amad: designing nuclear weapons; developing nuclear cores; preparing nuclear implosions; preparing nuclear tests; integrating nuclear warheads on missiles. Iran devised a plan after the beginning of the Second Gulf War to further develop its nuclear weapons program in secret &#8212; and to form new organizations to continue the work of Project Amad. Today, Netanyahu said, the work was carried out inside the Iranian Defense Ministry, and many of Amad&#8217;s key personnel continued to work on the project. The Iranians did not declare their program to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Iran instead denied the existence of a program and specifically denied the Amad plan.
This presentation was undoubtedly carried out with the knowledge of the United States; Netanyahu said that the information had been shared with the United States.
</blockquote>

Former U.N. Deputy: Iran Could Make Nuclear Bomb In Six To Eight Months

United Nations

On Friday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the Trump administration, determined not to let Iran target America&#8217;s allies in the Middle East, is declaring an emergency and accelerating the process so that U.S. allies will receive arms sales more quickly.
Pompeo released a <a href="https://www.state.gov/emergency-notification-of-arms-sales-to-jordan-the-united-arab-emirates-and-saudi-arabia/">statement</a> explaining the action that read:
<blockquote>
Today, I made a determination pursuant to section 36 of the Arms Export Control Act and directed the Department to complete immediately the formal notification of 22 pending arms transfers to Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia totaling approximately $8.1 billion to deter Iranian aggression and build partner self-defense capacity. These sales will support our allies, enhance Middle East stability, and help these nations to deter and defend themselves from the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Delaying this shipment could cause degraded systems and a lack of necessary parts and maintenance that could create severe airworthiness and interoperability concerns for our key partners, during a time of increasing regional volatility.
</blockquote>
Pompeo continued by slamming Congress for its recalcitrance in addressing the issue:
<blockquote>
These national security concerns have been exacerbated by many months of Congressional delay in addressing these critical requirements, and have called into doubt our reliability as a provider of defense capabilities, opening opportunities for U.S. adversaries to exploit. The equipment notified today includes aircraft support maintenance; intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR); munitions; and other supplies. Today&#8217;s action will quickly augment our partners&#8217; capacity to provide for their own self-defense and reinforce recent changes to U.S. posture in the region to deter Iran.
</blockquote>
Confronting criticism that the Trump administration was acting unilaterally without Congressional approval, Pompeo noted that the circumstances required a one-time intercession, and also stated pointedly that this kind of action the Trump administration is taking has plenty of precedents:
<blockquote>
I intend for this determination to be a one-time event. Section 36 is a long-recognized authority and has been utilized by at least four previous administrations since 1979, including Presidents Reagan and Carter. This specific measure does not alter our long-standing arms transfer review process with Congress. I look forward to continuing to work with Congress to develop prudent measures to advance and protect U.S. national security interests in the region.
The United States is, and must remain, a reliable security partner to our allies and partners around the world. These partnerships are a cornerstone of our National Security Strategy, which this decision reaffirms.
</blockquote>
Section 36 of the Arms Control Act gives the president authority to declare an emergency to expedite delivery of arms. It <a href="https://legcounsel.house.gov/Comps/Arms%20Export%20Control%20Act.pdf">states</a>: &#8220;If the President states in his certification that an emergency exists which requires the immediate approval of the agreement in the national security interests of the United States, thus waiving the requirements of paragraph (4), he shall set forth in the certification a detailed justification for his determination, including a description of the emergency circumstances which necessitate the immediate approval of the agreement and a discussion of the national security interests involved. Approval for an agreement subject to paragraph (1) may not be given under section 38 if the Congress, within the 15-day or 30-day period specified in paragraph (2)(A) or (B), as the case may be, enacts a joint resolution prohibiting such approval.&#8221;
As The Congressional Research Service<a href="https://fas.org/sgp/crs/weapons/RL31675.pdf"> explains</a>: &#8220;In general, the executive branch, after complying with the terms of applicable U.S. law, principally contained in the AECA, is free to proceed with an arms sales proposal unless Congress passes legislation prohibiting or modifying the proposed sale. Under current law Congress faces two fundamental obstacles to block or modify a presidential sale of military equipment: it must pass legislation expressing its will on the sale, and it must be capable of overriding a presumptive presidential veto of such legislation.&#8221;
On Friday, President Trump announced that an additional 1,500 U.S. troops are being sent to the Middle East in the effort to deal with Iranian aggression in the region.

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