By Aaron Kliegman • Washington Free Beacon
To Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), American support for Israel is based on Jewish money. Seriously, she actually said that on Twitter. On Sunday, the first-term Democrat accused American politicians of supporting the Jewish state because of the “Benjamins”—that is, money. When a journalist followed up by asking Omar who is paying American leaders to be pro-Israel, the lawmaker simply responded, “AIPAC.”
It’s all about the Benjamins baby 🎶 https://t.co/KatcXJnZLV
— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) February 10, 2019
AIPAC! https://t.co/UdzaFUEfrh
— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) February 11, 2019
If those tweets seem anti-Semitic, it is because they are. The notion that Jews use their wealth to acquire and wield their nefarious, outsized influence is one of the oldest anti-Semitic canards. Also implicit in Omar’s tweets is the charge of dual loyalty—the idea, in this context, that Jewish Americans put Israel’s interests above America’s. Continue reading
By • Frontiers of Freedom
The long overdue actions taken by the European Parliament on September 12, 2018, and by the United States Senate through Resolution 30 of January 25, 2019, authored by Senators Feinstein, Durbin and Murphy, condemn in no uncertain terms the Viktor Orban led government’s dismantling of Hungary’s fledgling democracy. Based on the Sargentini Report, the European Union charged the Hungarian government with political as well as economic and financial corruption. Pursuant to this Report, since 2010, Hungary has increasingly become a rogue state. Actually, Hungary has been taken over by political gangsters, headed by the Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, who have shamelessly robbed the Hungarian people blind. Democracy has been replaced by “illiberal democracy”, meaning the personal cult of Viktor Orban. The Alliance of Young Democrats (Hungarian acronyms: FIDESZ) dominated Parliament passed a new constitution which was already amended seven times to accommodate the changing needs of the Prime Minister and his accomplices. This new constitution has curtailed the independence of the judiciary, has made a mockery of the freedom of expression, the freedom of religion, the freedom of association, the right of equal treatment, the right of minorities, and has practically abolished the main economic and social rights. Continue reading
By Bill Gertz • Washington Free Beacon
Chinese military forces have deployed multiple units armed with anti-satellite (ASAT) missiles that can destroy scores of American satellites, according to a Pentagon intelligence report.
The new report by the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, known as NASIC, revealed that People’s Liberation Army units have begun training with the satellite-killing missiles.
The report warns that China, along with Russia, has developed an array of space arms designed to challenge U.S. space superiority. The report was made public last month.
The report for first time reveals that Chinese military units already are conducting training for space attacks with anti-satellites missiles. Russia also is developing a new anti-satellite missile the report said. Continue reading
Historically speaking, political hatred had been as old a human phenomenon as prostitution, alcoholism and drug consumption. Moreover, political hatred had always been destructive and never constructive. Finally, the most glaring characteristic of all politicians practicing politically motivated hatred had been their nauseating hypocrisy.
Since the unexpected election triumph of Donald J. Trump over Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democrats have resolved not to accept the will of the American voters. Consequently, they declared total resistance to the Trump presidency. As a start, they have invented the myth about the “Russian Collusion.” Never mind that the real conspiracy was perpetrated by the Clinton campaign that commissioned and fully paid for the so-called Steele dossier. Never mind that the Obama FBI spied on the Trump campaign illegally. Never mind that high officials at the Department of Justice, the FBI, and heads of several intelligence agencies repeatedly lied and thus misled the FISA courts.
Never mind that the former head of the FBI and his friends have employed illegal deceptions to fabricate the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the duly elected president without even a single circumstantial evidence. Never mind that this ongoing investigative farce has divided the nation into two opposing political camps. Never mind that the international reputation of the United States of America as a constitutional republic and the shining example of a nation characterized by absolute respect for the rule of law has been gravely damaged. Never mind that the politicians who insist upon this macabre persecution of the highest office holder are considered to be both at home and abroad America’s useless idiots. Never mind that the near paralysis of legislative branch has perpetuated the maladies of the country and simultaneously has rendered both Houses of Congress dangerously ineffective. Never mind that this situation has forced President Trump to mostly govern by executive orders. Finally, never mind that the majority of Americans have gradually been radicalized and the federal government has been falling victim of a permanent lie.
By • Newsmax
The U.S. Air Force just changed the game when it comes to global air mobility by signing off on first delivery for Boeing’s KC-46A Pegasus aerial refueling tanker. The first KC-46 Pegasus Tankers will begin arriving at McConnell Air Force Base in Kansas in the coming weeks, where Airmen will begin training for their future mission.
The success and safety of our military forces responding to constantly evolving threats and crises around the world relies on our Air Force’s global reach, giving us the ability to hit targets and deliver troops and supplies anywhere in the world. Our global reach and that of our allies would not be possible without America’s superior air refueling capability — a capability that is limited and jeopardized by our current fleet of Eisenhower-era tankers.
The aerial refueling tankers our Air Force operates now are mostly KC-135s that date back a half-century. The fleet’s last real update was the KC-10 procurement over thirty years ago. These aircraft face serious limitations in responding to modern threats. Continue reading
Crowley Maritime Corp. on Saturday christened its Commitment Class combination container and roll-on/roll-off ship El Coquí, which is among the first of its kind to be powered by liquefied natural gas.
Crowley said the ship is a key component in its supply chain transformation in the U.S. mainland-Puerto Rico trade.
A crowd of more than 350 people, including White House officials, U.S. congressional members, local dignitaries, representatives from shipbuilder VT Halter Marine and Eagle LNG joined Crowley employees, vessel crew members and other industry and union representatives to celebrate christening. Continue reading
The history of the 20th and 21st centuries’ Syria has provided the most convincing proof that the intellectual maturity of a state’s alternating leaderships as well as its people depends to an overwhelming degree on their understanding of the inherent incompatibility of excepted societal morality based on customs and traditions, and of political immorality maintained by gross despotism.
The roots of the current civil war that started in the beginning of 2011, go way back to the mid-9th century when a man by the name Ibn Nusayr declared himself the “BAB” – the “gateway to truth.” Proclaiming his teachings to be the only true religion, Ibn Nusayr preached a Muslim Holy Trinity of the Prophet Muhammad, his cousin and son in law Husayn Ibn Ali, and Salman al-Farisi, a freed Persian slave of Muhammad’s. In addition, he elevated Ali to a Jesus-like incarnation of divinity. Moreover, borrowing further from Christianity, he made the symbolic presentation of bread and wine an integral part of religious services, in which the wine represents Allah himself. To add more heretic insult to multiple Muslim religious injuries, the Nusayris, also called Alawis or Ansaris, celebrate almost all Christian festivals and holidays by worshiping most of the Christian saints. Finally and most egregiously for all faithful Muslims, Ibn Nusayr denied the five pillars of Islam listed in the famous Hadith of the angel Gabriel, and rejected the Shari’a in its entirety.
In that strange ancient land called Hungary, the past has never died. It just has retreated from time to time into hibernation. The reason for this state of affairs has always been that Hungarians of successive generations have failed to learn from the past. More recently, the Trianon Peace Treaty of June 4, 1920, reduced to territory of the Hungarian Kingdom by 67% and its population by 57%. In addition to being bad students of history, Hungarians have become paranoid and their society schizophrenic. Then, the seventy years history of maladministration by the Horthy administration as well as the Communists, combined to lay the foundation for a politically idiotic and geopolitically dangerous revanchism.
When national independence finally came in the spring of 1990, Hungarians again failed to realize that freedom can be a very dangerous commodity. As so often in history, national liberation in Hungary has been followed by long periods of political and economic instability.
The first free government of Jozsef Antall, a highschool teacher, was a collection of hapless amateurs. After four years of nostalgia and attempts to restore the pre-World War II Hungary, they were booted out of power. The former Communists who were voted in with absolute majority, were afraid of decisive governance. Four years later, Hungarians voted for a coalition of the untested Alliance of Young Democrats and the Smallholders’ Party, both led by incompetent megalomaniacs. What followed was a rapid centralization of power in the hands of the Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, and the rise of limitless as well as arrogant corruption.
“There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin!”
That was June 1963 in West Berlin where President John F. Kennedy gave one of his most memorable addresses. The speech was a stirring defense of liberty and a pointed critique of communism.
Whether you agree with Kennedy broadly or narrowly, I’ve rediscovered that speech and find it to relate now more than ever to the unfolding drama in the country of my birth, Venezuela. My family and I left Venezuela when I was 10. We had every intention of returning. Then Hugo Chavez took power, promising to usher in shared prosperity for all with his “21st century socialism.” We never went back. Continue reading
A week and half after President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping met to smooth over trade disputes, China announced it will buy more foreign goods , including U.S. soybeans. At the same time, it vowed to completely retool its “Made In China 2025” program, intended to make China the world’s most powerful economy. Nice gestures, but whether China follows through is a big question.
Reuters reports that Chinese state-owned firms snapped up more than half a million tons of U.S. soybeans on Wednesday to show they mean business. But the Made In China 2025 reversal, if sincere, is even more significant. It would mark a major shift in China’s guiding economic philosophy, a strange melding of top-down communist political control with free-market tenets.
“The revised plan would play down China’s bid to dominate manufacturing and be more open to participation by foreign companies,” The Wall Street Journal reported, citing “people briefed on the matter” as the source. Continue reading
The situation is extremely critical. The Ukrainian people are freezing. In the cities of Cherkasky, Hmelnickiy, Herson, and Kharkov the authorities have been forced to declare emergencies. People all over Ukraine have gone to the streets to protest the inhuman conditions. The civil movement called the Organization of Ukrainian Mothers has called for nationwide protests. Its leader, Natalia Korolevskaya has announced that they will protest in front of the Parliament building and other government installations. Most of the protesting mothers have carried signs claiming that not starvation, in Ukrainian golodomor, but the threat of freezing to death, in Ukrainian holodomor will kill their children.
In fact, Ukraine is frozen both literally as well as figuratively speaking. Because of serial non-payments for Russian gas, Gazprom has stopped deliveries. Simultaneously, Ukraine cancelled the bilateral agreement on gas deliveries. More importantly, since its independence on August 24, 1991, Ukraine has failed spectacularly to build a politically stable and economically prosperous state. Its politicians have used their anti-Russian rhetoric to build up their individual fiefdoms and in many cases their criminal organizations. Simultaneously, they have abused Ukrainian nationalism to suppress the sizable ethnic Russian community, allegedly as a payback for the Russian oppression prior to the country’s independence.
Historically, attempts to create new states in Europe in the 20th century by the dominant European and the non-European powers ended, without exception, in failures, and subsequently in the necessary restoration of the status quo ante. Judged by the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia in the late 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century neither the United States of America nor the dominant member states of the European Union learned the lessons from the forced and artificial unifications of the Czechs and the Slovaks, and the multitude of ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia after the end of World War I.
Between the two World Wars Yugoslavia was held together by the joint vision of the Serbs and the Croats to establish a strong state of the southern Slavs. After 1945, Josip Broz Tito’s ethos as the anti-German and anti-Soviet hero provided the political glue that held Yugoslavia together, albeit barely. The dictatorship that Tito invented was based on allowing the Croats and the Slovens to get rich, while financing and thus taming the Serbs militaristic ambitions. The rest of the republics and the two autonomous regions were kept relatively placid by showering them with the money left from arming the Serbs.
By • The Hill
Virtually every argument against the Jones Act is falsely premised on the notion that it increases consumer prices and that it impeded emergency supplies from getting to Puerto Rico after last year’s hurricanes. Some have even argued that Puerto Rico’s decade long recession is the fault of the Jones Act — despite the fact that it was enacted almost 100 years ago. Simply stated, there is no factual evidence to support these claims.
The Jones Act, or more precisely, the “Merchant Marine Act of 1920,” simply requires goods shipped between two or more U.S. ports to be shipped on vessels that are American built, owned and crewed. But it does not prohibit foreign vessels from bringing goods to a U.S. port.
Because of the Jones Act, foreign flagged ships with unknown and unvetted foreign crews cannot deliver goods to New Orleans and then sail up the Mississippi River deep into the American heartland. Continue reading
by David Rutz • Washington Free Beacon
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Iran of having a “secret atomic warehouse” in Tehran for its illicit nuclear weapons program during a speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday.
Netanyahu castigated what he called “inaction” by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.’s atomic watchdog, in the face of Israeli intelligence about Iranian clandestine nuclear work, adding that he would reveal a new finding to the world by Israel in its battle to keep Iran’s nuclear ambitions at bay. Continue reading
If the 1986 Challenger disaster taught us anything it was – “Don’t put all your Space Launch eggs in one basket.” After that accident and the other ones that grounded all of America’s older space launch vehicles for about two years, NASA and the Air Force decided to build two sets of rockets under the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program.
The EELV program has been a success. Both Atlas V and the various Delta rockets, especially Delta Heavy, have been putting America’s important science and military payloads into space for roughly a quarter of a century. Continue reading
