CAIR Florida’s Hassan Shibly Supports Horrific Islamic Apostasy Laws

This video exposes the duplicity of Hassan Shibly, the Council on American Islamic Relation (CAIR), and most importantly the true insidious nature of Islamic apostasy laws.

Hassan Shibly after hearing the gut wrenching story of how a young Dr. Masood was nearly killed by his parents and neighbors for converting to Christianity was handed a softball question by Mr. Kornman.

Hassan Shibly had the opportunity to condemn the Islamic apostasy laws that have brought much pain and suffering to millions over the last 1400 years. Instead Mr. Shibly chose to imply that Dr. Masood was a liar and confirmed this by running away from Dr. Masood rather than engaging him in honest dialogue for the world to see.

I have heard Hassan Shibly and many other followers of Islam tell Western audiences that Islam is a religion of tolerance and peace because the Qur’an says there is no compulsion in religion.

Former Muslims around the world will tell real life stories much like Dr. Masood’s making people like Hassan Shibly and Muslim Brotherhood leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi uncomfortable to the core of their beings.

In an Egyptian TV interview Yusuf al-Qaradawi and one of the most respected leaders in Sunni Islam said, ” If they had gotten rid of the apostasy punishment, Islam wouldn’t exist today. Islam would have ended since the death of the prophet, peace be upon him. Opposing apostasy is what kept Islam to this day.”

Throughout the Islamic world and also here in America for a Muslim to leave Islam for another faith or no faith at all is a serious crime against Islam in both the religious and political sense.

It is these very same Islamic apostasy laws that hold Islam together through fear. For a Muslim to leave Islam has grave consequences for the apostate.

If the apostate is not killed for his apostasy it is likely his/her family will disown them severing every familial and business lifeline the individual has ever known inside their community.

The fear of death for apostasy is a very strong motivator to keep the Ummah in line to this day.

U.S. troops face eating, drinking restrictions during Ramadan

Do U.S. troops fast during Yom Kippur? Lent? No? Why not? “U.S. Troops Face Eating, Drinking Restrictions During Ramadan,” by Jeryl Bier, Weekly Standard, June 26, 2015 (thanks to Pamela Geller):

A top commander in southwest Asia reminded U.S military personnel stationed in Muslim countries in the Middle East of the restrictions placed on them during Ramadan. According to a report by the U.S. Air Forces Central Command Public Affairs, Brig. Gen. John Quintas, 380th Air Expeditionary Wing commander in Southwest Asia, said that the U.S. is “committed to the concepts of tolerance, freedom and diversity.” But he added that soldiers should “become more informed and appreciative of the traditions and history of the people in this region of the world… [R]emember we are guests here and that the host nation is our shoulder-to-shoulder, brothers and sisters in arms, risking their lives for our common cause to defeat terrorism.”

During the 30-day religious celebration of Ramadan, even non-Muslims are expected to obey local laws regarding eating, drinking, and using tobacco in public. Violators can be fined up to $685 or receive two months in jail. A spokesperson for United States Central Command [CENTCOM] said that “we are not aware of any specific instances of anyone being arrested” for such violations.

\For [sic] military personnel outside of U.S.-controlled areas, the only exceptions for the rules are for those “performing strenuous labor.” Such personnel are “authorized to drink and consume as much food as they need to maintain proper hydration and energy.” It is unclear what constitutes “strenuous labor” or whether additional exceptions might be made during a heatwave affecting some areas of the region that has taken hundreds of lives.

When asked if the restrictions were new or simply a continuation of past policy, a CENTCOM spokesperson replied:

There has been no change in policy… [W]hile the US does not have a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the UAE, it is common practice to ensure all Soldiers, Sailors, Airman, and Marines deployed to Muslim countries are culturally aware that during the month of Ramadan, practicing Muslims do not consume anything from sunrise to sunset as a pillar of their faith. Commanders throughout the AOR create policies to ensure their subordinates respect the laws and culture of our hosts at all times….

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Where’s the Pope’s Encyclical on Christian Persecution? by Raymond Ibrahim

Pope Francis recently released a new encyclical. Portions of it deal with environmentalism, global warming, and climate change. Naturally, this has prompted controversy.

It’s noteworthy that Francis didn’t merely make a passing comment on global warming during this or that sermon, but that he issued a papal encyclical on the matter. Encyclicals are much more formal and significant than remarks made during mass. They are letters written by a pope and sent to bishops all around the world. In turn, the bishops are meant to disseminate the encyclical’s ideas to all the priests and churches in their jurisdiction, so that the pope’s teaching reaches every church-attending Catholic.

All this leads to the following question: Where is Pope Francis’ encyclical concerning the rampant persecution that Christians—including many Catholics—are experiencing around the world in general, the Islamic world in particular?

To be sure, the pope has acknowledged it. On April 21, during mass held at Casa Santa Marta, Francis said that today’s church is a “church of martyrs.” He even referenced several of the recent attacks on Christians by Muslims (without of course mentioned the latter’s religious identity).

Said Pope Francis:

In these days how many Stephens [early Christian martyred in Book of Acts] there are in the world! Let us think of our brothers whose throats were slit on the beach in Libya [by the Islamic State]; let’s think of the young boy who was burnt alive by his [Pakistani Muslim] companions because he was a Christian; let us think of those migrants thrown from their boat into the open sea by other [African Muslim] migrants because they were Christians; let us think – just the day before yesterday – of those Ethiopians assassinated because they were Christians… and of many others. Many others of whom we do not even know and who are suffering in jails because they are Christians… The Church today is a Church of martyrs: they suffer, they give their lives and we receive the blessing of God for their witness.

The pope is acquainted with the reality of Christian persecution around the world.  So why isn’t he issuing an encyclical about it?  Such an encyclical would be very useful.

The pope could instruct bishops to acknowledge the truth about Christian persecution and to have this news spread to every Catholic church.  Perhaps a weekly prayer for the persecuted church could be institutionalized—keeping the plight of those hapless Christians in the spotlight, so Western Catholics and others always remember them, talk about them, and, perhaps most importantly, understand why they are being persecuted.

Once enough people are familiar with the reality of Christian persecution, they could influence U.S. policymakers—for starters, to drop those policies that directly exacerbate the sufferings of Christian minorities in the Middle East.

Whatever the effects of such an encyclical—and one can only surmise positive ones—at the very least, the pope would be addressing a topic entrusted to his care and requiring his attention.

As recent as 1958, Pope Pius XII issued an encyclical that addressed the persecution of Christians.  A portion follows:

We are aware—to the great sorrow of Our fatherly heart—that the Catholic Church, in both its Latin and Oriental rites, is beset in many lands by such persecutions that the clergy and faithful … are confronted with this dilemma: to give up public profession and propagation of their faith, or to suffer penalties, even very serious ones.

[…]

Missionaries who have left their homes and dear native lands and suffered many serious discomforts in order to bring the light and the strength of the gospel to others, have been driven from many regions as menaces and evil-doers…

Note that Pius does not mention the burning and bombing of churches, or the abduction, rape, enslavement, and slaughter of Christians.  The reason is that Christians living outside the West in 1958 rarely experienced such persecution.  In other words, today’s global persecution of Christians is exponentially worse than in 1958.  Pius complained about how Christianity was being contained, not allowed to spread and win over converts…

Keep reading

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The Industrial Manifesto

In the wake of two recessions following two fleeting, largely service-sector bubbles—the dot-com bubble and the housing/financial bubble—America’s intellectual and political leaders are championing the need for industrial progress.

The ubiquitous Thomas L. Friedman takes on the subject of industrial progress in his latest book, That Used to Be Us, coauthored by political scientist Michael Mandelbaum. The book begins by describing a China full of fast trains, stupendous buildings, and an aura of dynamism—and contrasting it to an America in which repairing a subway is a multi-year project. Such images resonate with readers and voters, who wonder with frustration why so much industrial innovation, production, and job-creation is happening overseas rather than in America.

In President Obama’s recent address on jobs, he angrily complained about the state of American industry:

Our highways are clogged with traffic. Our skies are the most congested in the world. It’s an outrage.

Building a world-class transportation system is part of what made us an economic superpower. And now we’re going to sit back and watch China build newer airports and faster railroads?

Obama is right about this much; the state of American industry is an outrage. America has enormous, incalculable, untapped potential to make industrial progress—to radically increase our standard of living through far greater productivity in energy production, in manufacturing, in construction, in mining, in transportation. Unfortunately, the statist philosophy of Obama, Friedman, et al leads them to speciously attribute the problem to lack of government—despite the unprecedented expansion of government over the last 50 years. They propose still more increases in government spending and controls, as if some magic manipulation is going to spark the next industrial revolution.

At the same time, they ignore the most blatant impediment to industrial progress—an impediment caused by policies they support. This impediment is an open secret readily discoverable by asking American industrialists what is holding them back.

When I do this, I hear one theme repeated over and over: it is ruinously difficult to start new industrial projects because of our anti-industrial, “green” policies.

Consider the plight of the modern industrialist. Whether he wishes to construct a new apartment complex, open a coal mine, site a nuclear power plant, build a new factory, drill for oil, he cannot count on clear, objective laws to protect his right to develop. Instead, he must deal with open-ended environmental laws and near-omnipotent regulatory agencies that can forbid any project that is regarded as insufficiently “green.”

The industrialist is virtually guaranteed to face a labyrinth of opposition by environmental bureaucrats, controls, lawsuits, NIMBYs, and activist groups. Every step of the labyrinth costs time and money, and there is no guarantee a project will emerge alive; vital industrial projects can and have been shut down to preserve the likes of kangaroo rats and two-toed sloths.

Given this industrial climate, it is a wonder that any industrial development occurs in this country. Ask any leader of an industrial project how much opposition he faces in refining the fuel we use to drive, in fracking for the gas that heats our homes, in building the coal or nuclear plants that keep the power on, and you will marvel at the inhuman endurance our industrialists possess—an endurance we can’t, and shouldn’t have to, count on.

The “green” labyrinth goes far beyond traditional environmentalist targets such as coal and oil. The DC Metro subway system that Friedman and Mandelbaum complain about has been enmeshed in controversy for years over adding a new “Purple Line” to its system, with rabid opposition. Any proposed new road in California, the home of some of the country’s worst traffic, faces an uphill, if not impossible, battle.

Even allegedly “green” solar and wind projects frequently face environmentalist opposition. Environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the biggest opponent of Cape Wind, a windmill project off the coast of Nantucket. Environmentalists were the first to object to a giant solar project in the middle of the Mojave Desert in California.

What is so remarkable about the “green” opposition to industrial projects is that Americans, who supposedly want industrial progress, are so accepting of it. Based on the “green” movement’s actions, one might expect its goals and policies to be viewed with suspicion if not derision.

Instead, the idea of “going green” has never been more popular, with practically every businessman, schoolteacher, and politician trying to prove his “green” chops, in his personal life or at the ballot box. And thus, countless industrial projects continue to be deferred and destroyed.

If we are to make industrial progress, we need to seriously question the idea of “going green,” and its role in our government.

The “Green” Ideal

What does “green” really mean? It is most commonly associated with a lack of pollution and other environmental health hazards, but this is both far too narrow and highly misleading. Consider the range of actions that fall under the banner of “green.” As industrialists experience, it is considered “green” to object to crucial industrial projects, from power plants to dams to apartment complexes, on the grounds that some plant or animal will be impacted—plants and animals that take precedence over the human animals who need or want the projects.

It is considered “green” to oppose not only fossil fuel plants (which produce 86% of the world’s energy), but hydroelectric plants and nuclear plants—which all told means 98% of the world’s energy production. It is considered “green” to turn off the heat or air-conditioning, even at the price of personal discomfort.

It is considered “green” to do less of anything industrial—from driving to flying to using a washing machine to using disposable diapers to consuming pretty much any modern product (there is now an attack on iPhones for being insufficiently “green” given the various materials that must be mined to make them).

Often the same activity will be characterized as both “green” and non-“green”—just ask the proponents and opponents of any given solar farm. The proponents will say that the installation is “green” because it doesn’t use fossil fuels (except, they evade, to mine, fabricate, transport and assemble it), it isn’t mining the earth’s precious “natural resources” (except, they evade, for enormous amounts of steel, concrete, and various rare and toxic elements), etc. The opponents will point to the fact that solar farms, because they use a diffuse, intermittent energy source, take up an enormous “footprint” on nature, that they require prominent, long-distance transmission lines to take to their customers, that they require large-“footprint” backup systems to store energy or fossil fuel plants to serve as backups, etc.

Clearly, “going green” is not primarily about human health—indeed, in its opposition to just about anything industrial, it threatens the industrial foundations of modern health and sanitation. The essence of “going green,” the common denominator in all its various iterations, is the belief that humans should minimize their impact on nature.

“Green” leaders and followers may disagree on how to implement this ideal, and they certainly do not follow it consistently, but nevertheless it is uncontroversial that minimizing impact is the ideal.

But if we take ideas seriously, then the “green” ideal should be more than controversial. It should be jettisoned, as it is squarely opposed to the requirements of human life, including the requirements of a healthy human environment.

The Industrial Ideal

Human beings survive by transforming nature to meet our needs. The higher our level of survival, the more we must transform nature. In other words, we survive to the extent we depart from the “green” ideal.

Nature does not provide us with the wealth or the environment we need to live long, healthy, happy lives; hence the historical life expectancy of 30. To live and thrive, we must create wealth and create a livable environment.  And every new  act of creation, from building a fire to building an air-conditioned home to building the Internet, requires additional impacting—transforming—nature.

The fundamental reason for today’s incredibly high standard of living is that thanks to industrialization—the pervasive use of man-made power to fuel industrial machines—human beings can do hundreds of times more work to transform nature than we could even 200 years ago. But if our ancestors had followed “green” strictures, industrialization would have never got off the ground.

When the early oil industry turned night into day by making cheap illumination available to millions, they did it by drilling thousands of deep holes in rural Pennsylvania, extracting the black gold beneath, refining it into various useful substances, burning kerosene to create light, and dealing with whatever waste products emerged. J. J. Hill’s Great Northern Railway, a private transcontinental railroad that revolutionized American transportation and commerce, required men to mine iron ore from the ground, to combine it with carbon to make steel, to mine and use coal to power the steel furnace, to pour the mixture into molds, to use the molds to make railroad tracks, to lay the railroad tracks across patches of wilderness, to displace various plants and animals that stood in the way, and many more changes to the status quo.

Fast forwarding to today, the Chinese airports and buildings that many marvel at also transform nature on a massive scale—from the magnitude of the physical structures themselves to the coal plants, gas plants, factories, mining operations, oil rigs, oil refineries, and heavy machinery that went into building them, not to mention the industrial transportation system that keeps them maintained and stocked with supplies.

Industrial progress is not “green.” “Going industrial” requires a commitment to impacting nature as much as necessary to make it more hospitable to human life. And it is no accident that in generations past, Americans viewed industrial progress, not industrial abstention, as an ideal to strive for. Earlier generations took pride in transforming nature—in being a people that “tamed a continent,” that built new factories, that paved new roads, that drilled new wells, that mined the earth for resources. Whole towns would celebrate when a new bridge was built, when a factory was erected. They would proudly drive their automobiles, fly in planes, support new railroads, build new roads—without a shred of guilt over the fate of the two-toed sloth.

What about “green” support for “green energy” and a “green economy”? Is this not just a new, superior form of industry? Far from it. Any talk of green industry is ultimately contradictory, which is why such industries never materialize on a significant scale. All energy production requires an enormous amount of industrial development, both in its production and in its consumption.

Thus, environmentalists frequently oppose every power source, including solar and wind, for their various impacts. (They complain that solar and wind farms have the largest land “footprint” of any form of energy generation, which is true.) Similarly, for all the talk of “green construction,” “green building,” and “green jobs,” any activity with a major industrial presence will draw “green” opposition—as the valuable website www.projectnoproject.comaptly details.

The more consistent anti-industrialists are explicit about their goal, including its ultimate implication: de-development and depopulation. Stanford environmentalist celebrity Paul Ehrlich, who likens population growth to a “cancer,” “A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the United States. De-development means bringing our economic system into line with the realities of ecology and the world resource situation.” Billionaire Ted Turner, a “mainstream” figure, says: “A total [world] population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”

The true nature of “green” emerged particularly clearly in a debate over nuclear fusion in the late 1980s. Some uninformed news reports announced that fusion—which, if it worked, would be the cheapest, cleanest, most plentiful source of energy every created—was on its way to commercial reality. Many expected environmentalists to embrace this development. They condemned it.

“It’s the worst thing that could happen to our planet,” said leading environmentalist Jeremy Rifkin. Ehrlich memorably said that allowing human beings to use fusion was “like giving a machine gun to an idiot child.” Environmentalist icon Amory Lovins stresses he would oppose any fusion-like energy breakthrough: “Complex technology of any sort is an assault on human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it.”

Do not make the mistake of writing off these anti-industrialists as “extremists” who don’t reflect on “moderate” greens. While the “extremists” are more consistent than the “moderates,” they share the same ideal—the anti-impact ideal that destroys industrial progress to whatever extent it is practiced.

But what about the “environmental impact” of industrial development? Isn’t the “green” movement providing a salutary influence us by helping us combat that problem? Again, no.

The idea of “environmental impact” is what philosopher Ayn Rand called an “intellectual package-deal.” Such a concept dishonestly packages together two very different things—the impact of development on the human environment and the impact of development on the non-human environment. Industrial development will certainly often harm various non-human environments—but it is a godsend to the human environment. By lumping together concern with the non-human environment (e.g., displacing some caribou to get billions of barrels of the lifeblood of civilization) and the human environment (e.g., air quality), anti-industrialists are able to dupe Americans into thinking that sacrificing to caribou somehow benefits them.

Historically, industrial progress brought with it a radical improvement of the human environment. Indeed, industrial progress essentially is the improvement of the human environment. The reason we develop is to make our surroundings better so that our lives are better, cleaner, healthier safer—in the face of a natural environment that is often hostile to human life.

Contrary to “green” mythology, man’s natural environment is neither clean nor safe. In a non- industrialized, “natural” state, men face all sorts of health dangers in the air and water, from the choking smoke of an open fire made using plant matter (a cause of over a million deaths a year to this day) to the feces-infested local brook that he must share with farm animals. Industrial development gives men the technology and tools to make their environment healthier—from sanitation systems to sturdier buildings to less onerous job conditions to comfortable furniture to having healthy, fresh food at one’s disposal year round, to the wealth and ability to preserve and travel to the most beautiful parts of nature. And so long as we embrace policies that protect property rights, including air and water rights, we protect industrial development and protect individuals from pollution.

As for the “sustainability” of industrial progress, an accusation that dates back to Marx, this fails to recognize the fact (elaborated on by Julian Simon and Ayn Rand) that man has an unlimited capacity to rearrange nature’s endless stockpile of raw materials into useful resources—which is why the more resources we use, the more resources we have.

Human life requires changing nature on a massive scale. Any cause that holds minimal impact as an ideal is anti-human and an enemy of the human environment.

Today’s anti-industrial movement is not new in this respect. Throughout history, there have been major, anti-industrial groups or movements. The basic premise they have in common is that it is arrogant and wrong for man to transform nature as he sees fit. Man, they believe, should not tame nature but exist in some sort of mystical “harmony” with it (how he is supposed to cope with nature’s dangers and a life expectancy of 30 is rarely specified). Perhaps the iconic anti-industrialist was the 18th Century’s Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who worshiped nature untouched by man and regarded the transformation of nature in his time (let alone the then-unimaginable transformation that is our modern world) as evil.

But the modern-day followers of Rousseau know they cannot succeed by being directly anti-industrial. So they create a false association between themselves and environmental progress, and a false opposition between industrial progress and environmental progress.

Part of this false conceptualization has been achieved by using an old socialist trick to obscure the massive environmental improvement that industrial capitalism brought. The trick is to criticize something by comparison to a nonexistent and impossible utopia.

Socialists used this technique to criticize capitalism for causing poverty, even though capitalism inherited poverty–and cured it. Yet Marxists would attack capitalism’s incredible contribution to human life, including to the life of laborers, by comparing that contribution, not to its predecessors and not to any known alternatives, but to a fictional socialist utopia whose advertised results contradicted everything known (even then) about socialism’s destructive nature.

Environmentalists have done the equivalent to industrial progress. Instead of comparing the human environment pre-industrial and post-industrial, they compared the post-industrial environment to a non-existent pollution-free utopia achieved by man living in “harmony” with nature. They did this in spite of conclusive historical evidence that living in “harmony” with nature means living very briefly. Historically, to the extent humans didn’t mine, didn’t burn fuels, didn’t develop, and were unwilling or unable to control or displace other species where necessary, they died early and often. The modern standard of living is an unprecedented, singular achievement that continues only so long as men are free to command nature on a large scale.

Early environmentalists cursed the coal fumes of newly industrial cities, evading the wood fumes, dung fumes, and starvation coal had replaced–and the work-hours it saved and years of life it added to human life. They cursed smog, evading that it replaced rampant airborne disease from horse-drawn society. And when increased production of coal and oil and natural gas produced the energy and technology to develop ways to radically reduce their pollution, environmentalists took credit–as if laws against pollution weren’t essential to capitalism, the system where protection of all forms of property is sacrosanct.

Development, industrial progress, and capitalism promote a human environment. The anti-industrial “green” movement opposes it. This is a truth that Americans desperately need to understand. At present, the philosophical confusion caused by anti-industrialists causes Americans who are genuinely concerned about their health and well-being to embrace the ideas and policies of those who want to sacrifice that health and well-being to the non-human. We are taught to denigrate fossil fuels, which have doubled the human life expectancy, and to strive for a mythical “green energy” economy, powered by fuel sources that have failed for decades. We are not taught that industrialization has enabled man to be orders of magnitude less vulnerable to climate, but that a degree rise in temperature over 150 years portends catastrophe. With proposals on the table such as 80% cuts in CO2 emissions, “green” confusion could mean economic suicide.

Such is the power of moral idealism and philosophical corruption. The ideal—and the corruption—need to be replaced.

Industrial Progress: A New Cultural Ideal for America

The only solution to a false ideal put forward by philosophical corruption is a true ideal put forward with philosophical clarity.

We need to embrace, unambiguously, the never-ending project that is the industrial revolution: the transformation of nature on a massive scale, with the unlimited potential to produce more energy, create more wealth, create more productivity, increase leisure time, transport things more quickly, conduct more complex scientific experiments, build sturdier, more comfortable places to live. We can travel farther and faster. We can live longer and better.

For the same reasons, we need to embrace, unambiguously, the harmony of industrial progress and the human environment. Industrial progress should be celebrated in classrooms, on YouTube, on t-shirts. Americans should think of fracking with the same excitement they feel for iPhones.

It is a moral embarrassment that in today’s world, where billions die for lack of energy, where Americans still have so much untapped potential, that what passes for idealism is driving a battery-powered car or sorting through one’s trash to make sure everything is in its “proper” bin. What does it say about our cultural self-esteem when we believe it is wrong to do something as necessary as generate trash—which simply amounts to taking some matter from the earth, making profitable use of it, and putting its waste product in a safe place?

For too long, Americans have taken industrial progress for granted, and carelessly embraced “going green” as an ideal–expecting that the unprecedented standard of living we had would automatically continue, even though we permitted environmentalists to oppose new energy production and new development at every turn. Today, we are paying the price, with an economy whose productive fundamentals are less and less sound.

So long as the anti-industrialists have the moral high ground, they can inspire support for their suicidal “green economy,” and inspire guilt to gain power and thwart the opposition. Way too much of free-market criticism of environmentalism bends over backwards to declare itself “green” and mouth environmentalist terminology such as “protect the environment”—as if the kangaroo rat environment and the human environment are interchangeably valuable.

Thus, we must clearly identify and steadfastly reject any trace of the “green” ideal: to sacrifice the human environment to the non-human environment. And any trace of “green” must be removed from politics. The one and only industrial policy that is needed is the proper definition and protection of property rights for individuals and companies. Human ingenuity directed toward the improvement of human life, will do the rest.

In the past, Americans’ unprecedented industrial freedom and growth depended on a certain industrial philosophy. With industrial progress as our ideal, and with policies that fully respect property rights and fully allow free markets, the brilliantly talented individuals of this great country can lead us to the next industrial renaissance and an ever-improving environment.

Don’t “go green.” Go industrial.

VIDEO: Senator Ted Cruz on Washington, Congress and “The Age of Cronyism”

U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) delivered a speech at The Heritage Foundation revealing the cronyism that runs deep in Washington, powered by the Washington Cartel of establishment politicians and corporate lobbyists who continue to benefit big government and big business at the expense of millions of Americans.

“Washington has done a great job of one thing – picking winners and losers, except it’s clear each time who the losers are: American families, who are struggling to pay skyrocketing health care premiums and tuition costs; it’s our community banks and marketplaces that are going out of business; it’s young entrepreneurs and small business owners.”

“What’s happening in Washington is no accident,” Sen. Cruz said. “It is a concerted effort by corporate lobbyists and establishment politicians. Lobbyists and career politicians make up the Washington Cartel. Let me explain to you how it works: A bill is set to come before Congress, and career politicians’ ears and wallets are open to the highest bidder. Corrupt backroom deals result in one interest group getting preferences over the other, although you give the other a chance to outbid them. Or even worse, a very small interest group getting special carve-outs at the expense of taxpayers.”

Sen. Cruz discussed four examples of the Washington Cartel at work:

Regarding the Export-Import Bank, Sen. Cruz said:

“It is hard to imagine an institution that is more emblematic of cronyism than the Export-Import Bank…. The Export-Import Bank kills American jobs, and often favors foreign investment over American investment. It also has this terrible record of subsidizing unfriendly regimes with problematic human rights records. In 2013, just one year, the Ex-Im bank streamed $35 million to Venezuela banks and investors; $335 million to Argentina; $1 billion to Russian financiers; and $2.7 billion to communist China.”

Regarding renewable energy mandates, Sen. Cruz said:

“A two-year extension of wind credits alone costs taxpayers more than $13 billion, which is enough to pay the monthly electricity bills for 124 million Americans. How about putting that up for a referendum? Do we continue to benefit one favored industry, or do we pay the electricity bill for 124 million Americans? You know, I don’t think that would be a close vote for the American people. And what’s interesting: it’s not a close vote in Washington. Because the only people voting in Washington are the lobbyists with bags of cash. And the lawmakers in both parties eager to get that cash.

“For decades, the federal government has teamed up with specific industries to pick winners and losers in the energy industry. Aside from further complicating an already Byzantine tax code, this type of corporate welfare has only distorted the price of energy and empowered failed companies like Solyndra.”

Regarding sugar subsidies, Sen. Cruz said:

“This form of subsidy seems particularly un-American. After all, before the Tea and Stamp Act came the Sugar Act in 1764… and it was then that the cry of ‘no taxation without representation’ was widely voiced by the colonists. You know what, we do have representation, but our representatives are not representing us.

“The Wall Street Journal reported last December that at the time, sugar was 58 percent more expensive here at home than at the global market…. This price control increases food costs for businesses and families, particularly low-income households…. From 1997 to 2011, nearly 127,000 jobs were lost in domestic sugar-using industries.”

Regarding the Internet sales tax, Sen. Cruz said:

“The Internet has been an incubator for new ideas. It has been a haven for entrepreneurial opportunity. It has allowed millions of people to create small businesses…. Today, parents can purchase Christmas presents for their kids with the click of a button; a teenager can design an app that revolutionizes the way things were done; a mom can sell her hand-made cards on Etsy; with a few taps, an Uber can come to your doorstep.

“And yet Congress is talking about passing the Orwellian-named Marketplace Fairness Act, we’ve seen the pattern of Washington fairness. What is Washington fairness? Hammer the little guy, help the big guy… [The Marketplace Fairness Act] would take every online retailer in America and tell them you must now collect sales taxes for over 9,600 different tax jurisdictions all across the country.”

Sen. Cruz concluded, “How do you break the Washington Cartel? You make the political price of doing the wrong thing higher than the price of doing the right thing, and that can only come from ‘we the people.’”

Here is the full speech by Senator Cruz at the Heritage Foundation:

Transcript of Sen. Cruz’s Remarks at the Heritage Foundation:

Thank you for the warm welcome. It is great to be with so many friends back at Heritage yet again. Today, what I want to address is the people versus the Washington Cartel. Restoring liberty in an age of cronyism. I want to start by thanking my friend Jim DeMint, who’s a big part of the reason that all of us are talking about Washington’s cronyism. Jim, when he was in the Senate, saw his colleagues eagerly packing pork into just about every bill. And he stood up and led a valiant fight against earmarks. When Jim started that fight, it was viewed as Don Quixote: tilting at windmills. And yet, today, thanks to his leadership, a Republican conference has officially sworn off earmarks.

But yet, that hasn’t solved the problem of cronyism in Washington. Indeed, just yesterday, the Senate voted for cloture for the Trade Promotion Authority Act. To leadership’s dismay, yesterday, I voted against it. Now I have always been for free trade, I campaigned on free trade. Free trade, I believe, creates more opportunities for Americans; when we open up foreign markets, it helps farmers, and ranchers, and manufacturers. And so I intended to support TPA. Indeed, when it first came up for a vote a couple of months ago, I did support TPA. But unfortunately when the package came back to the Senate floor, it had gone far beyond simply being about trade.

Once again, Congress has become enmeshed in backroom deals, and they were using TPA as an opportunity to promote, among other things, reauthorizing the Ex-Im bank and potentially even enabling President Obama’s illegal expansion of immigration.

And this seems to be an all-too-common trend in Washington. That whatever is happening, corrupt backroom deals dominate the end product.

When American families, when small businesses, and when the most vulnerable among us are hurting, Washington has a tendency to jump to action – but not to help those who need it the most. Washington is looking for solutions – for Washington. Not solutions that empower citizens across the nation to succeed.

Instead, Washington’s solutions invariably help the rich and well connected.

When the 2008 housing crisis hit millions of Americans leaving families with real estate at a fraction of the value, sunken savings accounts, and mortgages they couldn’t pay back, what did Congress do? Bail out big business. It handed out hundreds of billions of dollars to banks and institutions that were deemed “too big to fail.” Sadly the American workers is never deemed too big to fail.

This enabled the banks to concentrate even more power and, in fact, to buy out “weaker banks.” For example, PNC received $7.5 billion while National City didn’t receive anything, which then gave PNC the advantage, and then they turned around and bought out National City.

Since 2008, the big banks have only gotten bigger: As the Fed noted at the end of 2011, five banks held more than 8.5 trillion in assets… equal to 56 percent of the U.S. economy and that’s up from 43 percent five years earlier. Remember, Dodd-Frank was sold to the American people as stopping “too big to fail”. What do we see today? The big banks are even bigger.

As car-owners struggled with high gas prices in 2009, the federal government responded by handing over $80 billion to GM and Chrysler and its suppliers.

In 2010, as many hard-working Americans crawled out from under the financial crisis to revive their communities and regain their financial footing, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act, with 19,000 pages of regulations. No bill that large, no regulation that voluminous, could possibly be good for any small institutions. And since then, hundreds of community and regional banks have closed.

Now it’s important to understand, that was not an unintended consequence. That wasn’t, “oops, we didn’t know that was going to happen.” The lobbyists for big banks were sitting at the table when Dodd-Frank was written. It was designed by Washington to favor the big guys over the little guys. And I would note, the proponents of that regulations, inevitably, they claim they’re helping the little guy. Now, either they’re not telling the truth, or they’re really, really bad at what they do. Because every single time they jump in with massive regulations, it helps the giant corporations, and the people that get hammered are the little guys.

In 2013, When Obamacare went into effect it imposed huge burdens on small business owners and young people, union bosses and members of Congress received special favors and exemptions. The very people who wrote the law-Harry Reid and the Senate Democrats–they wanted out of it- and this administration was only too happy to oblige. Today, the taxpayers subsidize their platinum plans while millions of Americans across this country have lost their jobs, have been forced into part-time work, have lost their health insurance, have lost their doctors, are facing skyrocketing premiums. Members of Congress retain their illegal exemptions from Obamacare.

Washington’s favors have gone on for far too long.

If you take a look at a map of the U.S., our office took every county in the country and color coded it, for whether median income had gone up or gone down. It’s quite striking, that map looks almost exactly like a geological map of shale formations across this country. Indeed on the Senate floor, I put that map up with a clear plastic overlay of the shale formations. You can see up in the Bakken, North Dakota, the counties, all of those counties median income is static. You can see the Barnett shale, and the Permian and the Eagle Ford, median income has skyrocketed, you can see the Marcellus shale, median income has skyrocketed.

Although it’s interesting; Marcellus shale doesn’t end at the Pennsylvania border, the jobs do. Because the politicians in New York have decided, apparently, New Yorkers don’t want jobs, they don’t want to provide for their family; or their idiot politicians are going to stand in the way and prohibit them. So even though they have resources in New York, the very same resources that are in Pennsylvania, the line between the states is like the finger of God drew in on the ground. South of that line, there are jobs, median income has gone up. North of that line, not a single one of those counties’ median income has gone up.

You look at the Monterey shale in California-abundant resources. None of those counties have gone up because the California politicians, just like the New York politicians, think California men and women don’t want to provide for their families. But do you know the one notable exception to that rule? The counties in and around Washington, D.C. are bright, bright green. Six of the 10 most affluent counties in the country are located in the D.C. metropolis. Those who live off the federal government are getting fat and happy, and almost every other county in America, median income has stagnated.

Washington has done a great job of one thing: picking winners and losers. Except, it’s all too clear who the losers are each time; it’s American families, who are struggling to pay skyrocketing health care premiums and tuition costs; it’s our community banks and marketplaces that are going out of business; it’s young entrepreneurs and small business owners.

The majority of Americans don’t have the time, don’t have the resources to lobby Washington politicians. They are too busy going about their daily lives, working hard to provide for their families and take care of their kids.

For example, when Tesla successfully lobbied Washington for a $1.3 billion taxpayer subsidy, average Americans were hard at work, and certainly weren’t spending their time thinking about the need to subsidize rich yuppies to spend $100,000 to buy an electric car. Look, If rich people want to buy an electric car, knock yourself out. But why should we be hammering hard working taxpayers to add another car to the 4-car garage? That doesn’t make any sense.

While big government looks out for the powerful and well-connected, average Americans, over and over again, get the short end of the stick. With a ruling expected any day now in King v. Burwell, the Obama Administration has already, at the behest of the insurance companies, crafted a contingency plan that allows insurers to cancel plans in the event that their subsidies go away. But the fat cat insurers are taken care of by big government. ‘You guys are fine, here’s the contingency plan.’ But the average American taxpayer? They don’t have a contingency plan. The Obama Administration has no credible claim whatsoever for the millions of Americans who will be left to pay the full price of Obamacare’s big-government mandates.

The rich and well-connected keep getting more and more favors at the behest of hard-working Americans. And we have got to stop this. Here is a very simple rule of thumb, and it is contrary to everything our friends in the media tell us. Big government benefits big business. Small government benefits small business and hard working men and women. You will never hear that on the nighttime news because the purveyors of big government always promise they’re helping the little guy, and yet they keep getting the fat cats richer and richer and richer.

Lobbyists and career politicians today make up what I call the Washington Cartel. And it operates very much like other cartels. It operates like OPEC. I don’t know, like sheikhs, if they actually wear robes. But they nonetheless, on a daily basis are conspiring against the American people. Let me explain to you how it works:

A bill is set to come before Congress, and career politicians’ ears and wallets are open to the highest bidder. Corrupt backroom deals result in one interest group getting preferences over the other–although you give the other a chance to outbid them–or even worse, a very, very small interest group getting special carve-outs at the expense of taxpayers.

And those who don’t oblige, well, they are shunned by the Cartel – effectively locked out.

Just this week, we saw a shameful example of this as House leadership threw Representative Mark Meadows out of his chairmanship because of his principled objections to TPA. Just this morning, news broke that leadership is seeking to strip Ken Buck, another conservative in the House, of his leadership position. Why is it that Republican leadership always, always, always cuts deals with the Democrats, and with Washington, and throws overboard the conservatives that, come October and November in an election year, they are desperately asking to turn out at an election?

The Washington Cartel has amassed more and more power at the expense of the American taxpayer with the same recipe repeated over and over again.

So today, I want to look at four examples of the Washington Cartel at work. I want to talk about who their schemes are hurting. And how we can restore freedom, bring back jobs and growth and opportunity, and how we can defeat the Washington Cartel.

It is hard to imagine an institution that is more emblematic of cronyism than the Export-Import Bank.

The Export-Import Bank is essentially welfare for big corporations, both foreign and domestic.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who as you all know is the source of much of progressivism, instituted the Bank.

What does the bank actually do? It provides loans and loan guarantees to hand-picked corporations. It’s one of the favored methods of cronyism: Washington handing out taxpayer money to selected giant corporations.

Now, on principle, there’s nothing wrong with loans being given except it’s not private investment. It’s not people actually risking their own capital and assessing the risk and reward. Rather, it’s funded on the taxpayer’s dime. Prior loan guarantees from the Export-Import Bank have benefited such paragons of corporate virtue as Enron and Solyndra. As it stands now, taxpayers are currently on the hook for over $100 billion in loan guarantees. If the projects succeed, the giant corporations make a profit. If they fail, the taxpayers foot the bill. Now those are pretty good odds. In Vegas, that’s called playing with the house.

As it stands, today the Ex-Im Bank funds roughly 2 percent of American exports.

And yet, of that 2 percent, from 2007 to 2013, the majority of the benefits have gone to 10 select companies. It’s good to be the king and it’s good to be a major donor to the king and to be gathering billions of taxpayer dollars because of it. Along with subsidies that support foreign companies it’s not just domestic companies. Foreign companies do very well with the Ex-Im bank, at our expense.

For example: Air India, a state-owned company, that’s right now putting at risk approximately 7,500 American jobs with the help of Ex-Im. Or Australian Roy Hill mine, to the detriment of our manufacturers and ultimately resulting in an estimated loss of $1 billion of iron ore sales here in America. That’s the taxpayers funding the government, funding foreign corporations, to hurt American workers.

Ex-Im kills American jobs, and often favors foreign investment over American investment.

It also has this terrible record of subsidizing unfriendly regimes with problematic human rights records.

In 2013, just one year, the Ex-Im bank streamed $35 million to Venezuela banks and investors, $335 million to Argentina, $1 billion to Russian financiers, and $2.7 billion to communist China. Mind you, this is at the same time Russia is invading Ukraine. We’re saying, “this is unacceptable, by the way, here’s a billion dollars.” That sort of makes the foreign policy protestations of the administration a little bit hollow.

Several companies that have received taxpayer-backed Ex-Im financing even admitted to previously doing business in Iran through their subsidiaries, undercutting efforts to sanction the Iranian regime. Moreover, the Justice Department recently indicted former Ex-Im loan officer Johnny Gutierez, with bribery chargers. More charges could be coming. And this very institution, Heritage Foundation, uncovered some 74 cases of fraud and corruption at the Ex-Im since 2009.

The Washington Cartel’s favoritism and cronyism inevitably breeds corruption. When you have government officials giving out billions of dollars of taxpayer money, suddenly the people who want that taxpayer money have every incentive in the world to further that corruption both latent and blatant.

And yet, the process of passing TPA, it appears that Senate and House leadership have made a deal to schedule a vote to reauthorize the Export-Import bank, that that was part of the price of TPA. That was a major reason why I voted, “No.” Now, in response to my criticism, leadership in both chambers have said, there is no deal. Excellent. If there is no deal, we should let Ex-Im expire and let it stay expired. For once, all Congress has to do is do nothing and if Congress is good at anything, it’s doing nothing. If leadership, as it says this week, “there is no deal on Ex-Im,” then simply do nothing, let it expire, and end the gravy train for Washington lobbyists on the Export-Import Bank.

A second example, renewable energy mandates are arbitrary government regulations that distort the free markets and artificially raise the cost for American families and job opportunities.

In 2005, Congress passed the Energy Policy Act, and one of the provisions in it was the Renewable Fuel Standard, which requires that renewable fuels be mixed into our gasoline supply.

Now, I support renewable fuels, I support biofuels, but I don’t support policies from Washington that pick winners and losers in the market.

One of the mandates included was the ethanol mandate. Over the years, it has been proven there is a demand for ethanol in the market, but ethanol should stand on its own, not atop the footstool of the government.

The ethanol mandate requires 16 billion gallons of biofuels, requiring a plot of farmland roughly equal to the size of the state of Kentucky, as a result, that has diverted corn from livestock and the food supply, and has contributed to increased food prices.

Several months ago, there was an agriculture summit in the state of Iowa. Most of the Republican candidates for president attended that summit. Every single candidate but one pledged his support for continuing the Iowa ethanol mandate. It’s very easy for conservative politicians to talk about ending cronyism, but when you’re standing in front of people who are the beneficiaries, that’s when you separate talk from action.

Big government energy mandates don’t stop with ethanol. There are tax credits for almost every form of energy. Each designed to give one industry a leg up over the other. There’s enhanced oil recovery credits for producing oil and gas from marginal wells. There’s an advanced nuclear power generation credit. Clean coal investment credits. And a credit for plugging electric and fuel cell vehicles. And of course the infamous wind energy credit.

Talking about wind: A two-year extension of wind credits alone costs taxpayers more than $13 billion, which is enough to pay the monthly electricity bills for 124 million Americans. How about putting that up for a referendum? Do we continue to benefit one favored industry, or do we pay the electricity bill for 124 million Americans? You know, I don’t think that would be a close vote for the American people. And what’s interesting: it’s not a close vote in Washington. Because the only people voting in Washington are the lobbyists with bags of cash, and the lawmakers in both parties eager to get that cash.

For decades, the federal government has teamed up with specific industries to pick winners and losers in the energy industry. Aside from further complicating an already Byzantine tax code, this type of corporate welfare has only distorted the price of energy and empowered failed companies like Solyndra.

My good friend, Senator Mike Lee, has taken the lead in previous Congresses to level the playing field, to end the special interest handouts, and stop the energy cronyism. How about instead of picking one industry after the other after the other, and benefitting them all to compete against each other, we take the taxpayer out of the game and let them fight it out on a fair field. Senator Lee has introduced the Energy Freedom and Economic Prosperity Act-a bill designed to eliminate all energy tax credits, and a bill that Senator Jim DeMint championed before Mike took lead.

A third example: sugar subsidies that artificially drive prices higher for the benefit of the few.

It should come as no surprise that another poster child for big government picking winners and losers traces its origins back to the New Deal. The Sugar Act imposed quotas on U.S. sugar production and restrictions on imports of sugar all while subsidizing U.S. production.

Now, I will note, this form of cronyism seems particularly un-American. After all, before the Tea and Stamp Act, came the Sugar Act in 1764. You’ll recall, we fought kind of a bloody revolution over that. And it was then that the cry of “no taxation without representation” was widely voiced by the colonists.

Well you know what, we, do have representation now, but our representatives aren’t representing us. They’re representing large corporations and lobbyists rather than the American people. And it’s the exact same circumstance of no taxation without representation. How about the representatives in Washington actually represent the men and women back home that we’re supposed to be working for?

The sugar program imposes restrictions on how much sugar can be sold-it provides a “benevolent” allotment for each processor and makes it illegal to sell more than the government’s designated amount.

Now, one could be forgiven for thinking this kind of centralized planning came from former Soviet apparatchiks: “You go sell that! You go sell that!” I mention the cartel. It’s what OPEC does every year. They sit around a table and say, “you go sell that. You go sell that, we’re going to conspire against the American taxpayers.” Both cartels, by the way, have the same principal victims.

Unfortunately, both Republican and Democrat administrations have kept this program essentially unchanged for eighty years-increasing the cost of sugar for Americans.

The Wall Street Journal reported last December that at the time, sugar was 58 percent more expensive here at home than at the global market. Why should Americans pay 58 percent more for sugar than people in the rest of the world? Only because the Washington cartel is taking that additional money and giving it to the select few favored lobbyists. And it’s not just sugar that you put into your coffee or your tea. Sugar is an ingredient in a great amount that we eat. From pastries to sodas-and as my two little girls will tell you, treats on a nightly basis.

And this price controlling increases food costs for businesses and families, particularly low-income households. If you’re a single mom struggling to make ends meet, if you see the food costs when you go to the grocery store and try to feed your kids, prices go up and up and up and your salary doesn’t seem to match it, part of the reason is that the Washington cartel isn’t listening to you, and they’re happy to take money from your paycheck and make fat cats even fatter. That’s the corrupt game that’s going on.

In fiscal year 2013, the average price for American raw sugar was 6 cents per pound higher than the average world price. As a result, Americans paid an unnecessary $1.4 billion extra for sugar. Now, there’s some Americans who don’t even make 1.4 billion in a year. That’s real money. And every time Washington picks winners and losers, the winners are concentrated, but the losers you could identify.

From 1997 to 2011, nearly 127,000 jobs were lost in domestic sugar-using industries. 127,000 jobs-think of the men and women who were working in chocolate factories, working in bakeries, working in soda factories, who now are unemployed, and one of the reasons is, the federal government is driving up the cost of their inputs, and valuing the interests of the lobbyist more that your job.

According to a 2006 study by the U.S. Department of Commerce, for every sugar-growing job that stems from artificially high sugar prices, approximately three manufacturing jobs are lost. Now that’s math that makes sense only in Washington, D.C.

And here’s the kicker – you want to understand the concentration: Sugar companies make up just 0.2 percent of the farms in America, anyone know what percentage of the crop industries total lobbying expenditures come from sugar? 40 percent. 0.2 percent of the farms generate 40 percent of the lobbying. Why?

Because if your lobbying is yielding 1.8 billion dollars, that’s good math. And the single mom who’s paying higher food prices, the chocolate factory owner who’s laying off, neither one of them have lobbyists. Neither one of them have a whole lot of representatives who are listing to them.

The fourth and final example: Internet sales tax.

We’ve looked at one example of how the Washington Cartel helps foreign nations and foreign investors, how it chooses winners and losers among American industries.

Now let’s look to an industry that’s been-blessedly-largely free from government regulators: the Internet. I want to turn to how it wants to make its network even broader and more intrusive – what’s the one thing that’s been left largely unmitigated by the government until now – the Internet.

The Internet has been an incubator for new ideas, it has been a haven for technological creativity. It is allowing millions of people to create small businesses. And by the way, the people who are the most freed up on the internet are the most vulnerable. It’s young people, Hispanics, African Americans, single moms, people who want a better life.

You know, it used to be, 20 years ago, if you wanted to start a business, you needed some capital. You needed to be able to buy an inventory. You needed a warehouse. You needed a distribution system. That took money. If you’re just getting started, if you’re a teenage immigrant, like my dad was in 1957, washing dishes, making 50 cents, an hour you’re not likely to have the capital to start a business. What does the internet do? It transform it. You have a good or service you want to sell– You can set up a website and suddenly you have a worldwide market. Someone clicks on the website says, “I want to buy your good or service, you can send it on Fed-Ex and boom, you can send it anywhere in the world, You know who that terrifies? Politicians in Washington. This freedom thing is very, very scary for politicians in Washington. Washington is all about power.

Today, parents can purchase Christmas presents for their kids with the click of a button. A teenager can design an app that revolutionizes the way things are done. A mom can sell her hand-made cards on Etsy. Or with a few taps, an Uber can come to your doorstep.

And by the way, the next time you take Uber-I’ll let you know, I don’t have a car in Washington. Uber is transformational. The next time you take an Uber, ask the Uber driver how he or she likes his job. I have yet to find an Uber driver who isn’t thrilled at the freedom of becoming a small business owner that the Internet has enabled.

And yet, what is Congress talking about doing ? It’s talking about passing the Orwellian-named Marketplace Fairness Act. Now, we’ve seen the pattern of Washington fairness. What is Washington fairness? Hammer the little guy, help the big guy. That’s very fair to lobbyists.

What would the Marketplace Fairness Act do? It would take every online retailer in America and tell them you must now collect states taxes for over 9,600 taxing jurisdictions all across this country, in real time. I want you to think about it. Let’s suppose you’re that single mom who started the business you’re selling online. You’re supposed to collect the Albany school taxes. Now Bret, do you know what the Albany school tax is? Do you know there’s a hearing scheduled next week to try to change it? Well, if you decide to start a small business, you’re expected to know.

And you could face an audit from 9,600 jurisdictions across this country if you haven’t correctly collected the Albany school tax, and you don’t know that they raised it by a quarter point in their last vote., which I have no idea if they did or not.

Why does the Marketplace Fairness Act have support? It has support because it’s a perfect storm for lobbyists. Number one, the Big Box stores, a major bricks and mortar retailers, they want to hammer the heck out of these online retailers. But here’s the interesting thing that’s shifted, so do the big online retailers. Of the 20 largest online retailers, 19 of them have physical presences, and so collect sales taxes in each of the states that has sales taxes. So suddenly you have the big box stores, the brick and mortar retailers, the big guys, and the giant online retailers, joining forces and suddenly they have a common enemy: all of these pesky little startups that have the temerity to try to take their customers.

And in Washington, there’s nothing more beautiful than when the lobbyists all align. When all the money is pointing in the same direction. Suddenly you see Republicans, and Democrats saying, “that is an inspired policy.” And yet, all of the millions of young people, of entrepreneurs, of people with an idea that want to topple the next giant company, they don’t have a single lobbyist. The American people are with us on this. The 2013 Gallup poll showed 57 percent of likely voters opposed taxing the Internet. Among young people, the demographic that represents the future of this country, 73 percent oppose a tax on the Internet. We should stand with the people. It is time to break the Washington Cartel.

We should stand with the people. It is time to break the Washington Cartel.

Instead of cutting blue-collar jobs by investing millions in foreign mining corporations, we should welcome jobs and production here at home. Instead of giving ethanol producers an automatic check, we should let the market determine their viability, and stop hurting farms from Connecticut to California. Instead of forcing restaurants and bakers and families to pay more for sugar – and undercut competition – we should welcome lower prices. And instead of handing over more power to big corporations and regulators, let’s keep the Internet free and encourage young entrepreneurs to keep innovating and to keep government’s hands off the Internet.

How we beat back the Washington Cartel, how do we restore power to the people?

The answer is simple – Americans across the country rise up, they engage on the issues, and we bring back the voice of the people.

The book of Ecclesiastes tells us there’s nothing new under the sun. I think where we are today is very much like the late 1970s. I think the parallels between Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama are uncanny: the same failed domestic policy, the same misery, stagnation, and malaise, and the same feckless and naiveté foreign policy. In fact, the very same countries, Russia and Iran, openly laughing at and mocking the President of the United States. The one person in America thrilled with the job Barack Obama’s doing is Jimmy Carter.

Why does that analogy give me so much hope? Because we know what comes next. The late ‘70s and 1980s, there was a grassroots movement of millions of men and women who rose up and became the Reagan revolution, and it didn’t come from Washington – Washington despised Ronald Reagan. If you see a candidate who Washington embraces, run and hide. And in 1980, Reagan rose up to break the Washington Cartel. How did he do it? He changed the rules: 1978, 1979, Reagan didn’t get on a plane and fly to Washington and sit down with the old bulls in Congress, sit down with Republicans and say, come on guys, you got to stand for something. He recognized that then and now they weren’t listening to the American people. Instead, he took the case to the American people. And it transformed this nation. How do you change, how do you break the Washington Cartel. You change the rules. You know, there’s an old saying that politics is Hollywood for ugly people.

But there is nothing that focuses the minds of elected politicians like the prospect that they might be voted out of office and have to find an honest job. How do you break the Washington Cartel? You make the political price of doing the wrong thing higher than the political price of doing the right thing, and that can only come from ‘we the people.’ It’s the only power strong enough. That’s what the Reagan revolution demonstrated. Washington despised Reagan until the revolution swept in, and suddenly a bunch of politicians said holy cow, ‘I’m not messing with that,’ and magically they supported lower taxes and lower regulations and stopped the favoritism and standing up and defeating the Soviet Union.

I think 2016 will be an election like 1980. As Reagan said, we win by painting in bold colors and not pale pastels.

I am going to close with a story.

We all know the story of the Wright brothers.

But a name we don’t as often hear is that of Samuel Langley. The Department of War gave him $50,000 to create a flying machine. Upon its launch, “it fell like a ton of mortar,” according to one reporter.

On December 17, 1903, only 9 days after Langley’s second experiment failed, two young Ohio boys with only $2,000 set out at Kitty Hawk, and to become the first men to sail in the air.

$50,000 on failed government programs picking winners and losers versus two entrepreneurs, two brothers with a vision and a dream and just $2,000. One a miserable failure; the other transformed the world.
That is power of American innovators free from the government. It’s the can-do spirit that has propelled scientists and entrepreneurs and immigrants who came with nothing, pioneers, and farmers to make this land the greatest nation on earth.

And it remains just that if we come together and break the Washington Cartel that is telling us far too much about what we can do and can’t do. And if we instead return the power to the people so they can do what they have always done best – achieve the unimaginable and leave a landscape of greater opportunities for generations to come.

Bi-Partisan Policy Group Blasts Obama Iran Nuclear Deal and Middle East Strategy

The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) released a major policy statement signed by a bi-partisan group of former nationally prominent legislators, Bush and Obama Administration national security, diplomatic officials and the former deputy of the UN International Atomic Energy Agency blasting the emerging P5+1 nuclear deal with Iran, perhaps just days away from  possibly being concluded on June 30th. The statement also condemned the Administration appeasement of Iran’s state-sponsored regional hegemony and the failure to develop a coherent strategy to combat the rise of Daesh, the Islamic State. The WINEP statement encompassed policy recommendations on these important national security issues. Among the signatories are former U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT), former California U.S. Representative Howard Berman (D-CA), former CIA Director Gen. David Petreaus, former special negotiator Ambassador Dennis Ross, former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, James Cavanaugh, Olli Heinonen, former Deputy Director of the IAEA, Stephen Hadley, former Bush Administration National Security Director, WINEP own experts and its executive director, Robert Satloff.

Among the key points in the WINEP-sponsored statement addressing the problems with the emerging P5+1 nuclear deal with Iran is the following:

  1. Monitoring and Verification: The inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (the “IAEA”) charged with monitoring compliance with the agreement must have timely and effective access to any sites in Iran they need to visit in order to verify Iran’s compliance with the agreement. This must include military (including IRGC) and other sensitive facilities. Iran must not be able to deny or delay timely access to any site anywhere in the country that the inspectors need to visit in order to carry out their responsibilities.
  2. Possible Military Dimensions: The IAEA inspectors must be able, in a timely and effective manner, to take samples, to interview scientists and government officials, to inspect sites, and to review and copy documents as required for their investigation of Iran’s past and any ongoing nuclear weaponization activities (“Possible Military Dimensions” or “PMD”). This work needs to be accomplished before any significant sanctions relief.
  3. Advanced Centrifuges: The agreement must establish strict limits on advanced centrifuge R&D, testing, and deployment in the first ten years, and preclude the rapid technical upgrade and expansion of Iran’s enrichment capacity after the initial ten-year period. The goal is to push back Iran’s deployment of advanced centrifuges as long as possible, and ensure that any such deployment occurs at a measured, incremental pace consonant with a peaceful nuclear program.
  4. Sanctions Relief: Relief must be based on Iran’s performance of its obligations. Suspension or lifting of the most significant sanctions must not occur until the IAEA confirms that Iran has taken the key steps required to come into compliance with the agreement. Non-nuclear sanctions (such as for terrorism) must remain in effect and be vigorously enforced.
  5. Consequences of Violations: The agreement must include a timely and effective mechanism to re-impose sanctions automatically if Iran is found to be in violation of the agreement, including by denying or delaying IAEA access. In addition, the United States must itself articulate the serious consequences Iran will face in that event.

The group also addressed the inchoate Middle East strategy addressing Iran’s regional support for state terrorism and the failed strategy to combat the Islamic State:

  1. In Iraq: Expand training and arming not only of Iraqi Security Forces but also Kurdish Peshmerga in the north and vetted Sunni forces in the West. Allow U.S. Special Forces to leave their bases and help coordinate air strikes and stiffen Iraqi units. Sideline Iranian-backed militia and separate them from Shiite units (“popular mobilization units”) that are not under Iranian control.
  2. In Syria: Expand and accelerate the U.S. train and equip programs. Work with Turkey to create a safe haven in northern Syria where refugees can obtain humanitarian aid and vetted non-extremist opposition fighters can be trained and equipped. Capitalize on Bashar al-Assad’s increasing weakness to split off regime elements and seek to join them with U.S. trained opposition elements. Interdict the transshipment of Iranian weapons into Syria in coordination with the Kurds and Turkey, and consider designating as terrorist organizations Iranian-backed Shiite militias responsible for egregious atrocities.
  3. In Yemen: Expand support for Saudi Arabia and the UAE in pressuring the warring parties to the negotiating table while seeking to split the Houthi elements away from Iran.
  4. Regionally: Interdict Iranian arms bound for extremist groups and continue to counter its efforts to harass commercial shipping and our naval forces. Reaffirm U.S. policy to oppose Iran’s efforts to subvert local governments and project its power at the expense of our friends and allies.

The WINEP statement concludes:

Collectively, these steps also strengthen U.S. capability against Daesh (the misnamed “Islamic State”). Acting against both Iranian hegemony and Daesh’s caliphate will help reassure friends and allies of America’s continued commitment. And it will help address Israel’s legitimate concerns that a nuclear agreement will validate Iran’s nuclear program, further facilitate its destabilizing behavior, and encourage further proliferation at a time when Israel faces the possible erosion of its “qualitative military edge.” We urge the U.S. administration to create a discreet, high-level mechanism with the Israeli government to identify and implement responses to each of these concerns.

Taking the actions we propose while the nuclear negotiations continue will reinforce the message that Iran must comply with any agreement and will not be allowed to pursue a nuclear weapon. This will increase, not decrease, the chance that Iran will comply with the agreement and may ultimately adopt a more constructive role in the region. For the U.S. administration’s hopes in this respect have little chance so long as Iran’s current policy seems to be succeeding in expanding its influence.

The President’s ideological  mindset regarding a rapprochement with an untrustworthy Islamic Regime in Tehran coupled with  Secretary of State Kerry’s appeasement of the red-lines diktats issued  by Supreme Ruler Ayatollah Khamenei portend a disastrous emerging agreement, should one be concluded in its current form.  We fully anticipate the Administration will issue its own statements rejecting these compelling and cogent recommendations contained in the WINEP statement signed off by a broad array of bi-partisan national security experts, diplomatic negotiators, former national legislators and international nuclear weapons inspectors.  With the clock winding down on a final Joint Plan of Action,  Americans of all political stripes and Members of Congress  should heed the WINEP-sponsored recommendations concerning the emerging P5+1 agreement under the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act  (INARA) of 2015.  The Congress will have a daunting task to respond in less than 30 days under INARA with the President poised to veto any negative vote, not easily overridden.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review.

Sam Pimm to Head Ben Carson for President Super PAC

MERRIFIELD, Va., /PRNewswire/ — The 2016 Committee, a political action committee raising awareness and support for Dr. Ben Carson’s candidacy for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, today announced that Sam Pimm, an experienced campaign manager and expert political consultant, will serve as the Committee’s executive director.

“Sam brings over 30 years of high level campaign and political experience to our committee,” said John Philip Sousa IV, national chairman for The 2016 Committee. “He understands that in order to succeed you need a plan, a strategy, tactics and objectives. In coordination with National Director Vernon Robinson and our regional directors, Sam will immediately begin developing a tight business plan around our existing strategies to help ensure success.”

As executive director for the Committee, Pimm will report directly to the board and oversee all field activities in support of the 2016 Committee’s efforts to send Dr. Carson to the White House. He will be responsible for grassroots organization and provide oversight and strategy for state and regional directors across the country, including in early primary states.

Pimm is the owner and founder of Consultant in a Can, a firm that leverages Pimm’s 36 years of campaign experience to provide consulting services on an affordable basis for state and local Republican candidates. His extensive campaign experience includes hundreds of state legislature campaigns, as well as congressional, senate, and presidential campaigns including Ronald Reagan, Fred Thompson, Phil Gramm and Newt Gingrich.

“I’m excited to join the 2016 Committee and be part of its important mission because I know Dr. Ben Carson is the best hope we have for healing America’s deep economic and social wounds,” Pimm said. “I’m looking forward to working with John Sousa, Vernon Robinson, Chuck Muth, the Committee’s staff and our thousands of amazing grassroots volunteers across the country to win Dr. Carson the keys to the White House.”

Dr. Carson has repeatedly polled at or near the top of a crowded field of Republican candidates in presidential polls around the country. A recent Monmouth University poll showed Dr. Carson leading all other GOP candidates among Republican and Republican-leaning voters.

About the 2016 Committee

The 2016 Committee is a political action committee formed to draft Dr. Ben Carson into the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. It was founded in August 2013 by John Philip Sousa IV and Vernon Robinson as the National Draft Ben Carson for President Committee, and works to raise awareness of Dr. Carson’s qualifications and to engage grassroots conservative activists in clamoring for Dr. Carson to run for president. For more information, visit www.2016committee.org or connect on Twitter @DraftRunBenRun or Facebook/RunBenRun.org.

VIDEO: Apocalyptic Iran — 9 Minimum Requirements!

Today is part 3 of a 5 part series on the absolute BAD deal that the United States of America is negotiating with the Islamic Republic of Iran regarding the nuclear weapon capability of Iran. Our big idea is that the U.S. must get at least 9 minimum requirements from Iran in order to agree to this critical deal that determines the stability of the Middle East and indeed the complete world.

We feature a video from the Clarion Project that presents the “Neville Brothers,” (Chamberlain, Clinton and Obama) as “successful” world negotiators who got duped by Germany, North Korea and Iran.

In addition we feature retired Admiral “Ace” Lyons as he implicates former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the Benghazi disgrace, which furthered the growth of the Islamic State in the Middle East. Finally, we introduce a frightening survey conducted by the Center for Security Policy which reveals the level of violence that American Muslims are willing to advance in order to advance Islam in America.

You will not believe this survey!

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Uganda: Muslim in-laws poison mother of 11, who converted from Islam to Christianity

Obama laments “distorted impression” many Americans have of Muslims

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ISIS BLOWS UP ANCIENT Shrines in Palmyra, Syria

What Can the Government Steal? Anything It Pays For! by Daniel Bier

“…Nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” – Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution 

On Monday, I wrote about the Supreme Court’s decision in the case of Horne v. USDA, in which the Court ruled almost unanimously against the government’s attempt to confiscate a third of California raisin farmers’ crops without paying them a dime for it.

The confiscation was part of an absurd FDR-era program meant to increase the price of food crops by restricting the supply; the government would then sell or give away the raisins to foreign countries or other groups.

Overall, this ruling was a big win for property rights (or, at least, not the huge loss it could have been).

But there’s one issue that’s been overlooked here, and it relates to the Court’s previous decision in Kelo v. City of New London, the eminent domain case that also just turned 10 horrible years old yesterday.

In Horne, eight justices concluded that physically taking the farmers’ raisins and carting them away in trucks was, in fact, a “taking” under the Fifth Amendment that requires “just compensation.”

That sounds like common sense, but the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled that the seizure wasn’t a taking that required compensation because, in their view, the Fifth Amendment gives less protection to “personal property” (i.e., stuff, like raisins or cars) than to “real property” (i.e., land).

The Court thankfully rejected this dangerous and illogical premise.

But while eight justices agreed on the basic question of the taking, only five agreed on the matter of just compensation.

The majority concluded that the government had to pay the farmers the current market value of the crops they wanted to take, which is standard procedure in a takings case (like when the government wants to take your home to build a road).

Justices Breyer (joined by Ginsburg and Kagan) wrote a partial dissent, arguing the federal government’s claim that the question of how much the farmers were owed should be sent back to the lower court to calculate what the farmers were owed.

Their curious reasoning was that, since the government was distorting the market and pushing up the market price of raisins, they should be able to subtract the value the farmers were getting from the artificially inflated price from the value of the raisins that were taken. The government argued that the farmers would actually end up getting more value than was taken from them, under this calculation.

Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, derided this argument: “The best defense may be a good offense, but the Government cites no support for its hypothetical-based approach.”

But the most interesting part of this subplot came from Justice Thomas. Thomas fully agreed with Roberts’ majority opinion, but he wrote his own a one-page concurrence on the question of how to calculate “just compensation,” and it went right at the heart of Kelo.

In Kelo, a bare majority of the Court ruled that the government could seize people’s homes and give them to private developers, on the grounds that the government expected more taxes from the new development.

Marc Scribner explains how the Court managed to dilute the Fifth Amendment’s “public use” requirement into a “public purpose” excuse that allows the government to take property for almost any reason it can dream up.

Thomas’s concurrence disputes Breyer’s argument about calculating “just compensation” by pointing out that, had Kelo had been correctly decided, the government wouldn’t be allowed to take the farmers’ crops at all — even if it paid for them.

Thomas wrote (emphasis mine),

The Takings Clause prohibits the government from taking private property except “for public use,” even when it offers “just compensation.”

And quoting his dissent in Kelo:

That requirement, as originally understood, imposes a meaningful constraint on the power of the state — ”the government may take property only if it actually uses or gives the public a legal right to use the property.”

It is far from clear that the Raisin Administrative Committee’s conduct meets that standard. It takes the raisins of citizens and, among other things, gives them away or sells them to exporters, foreign importers, and foreign governments.

To the extent that the Committee is not taking the raisins “for public use,” having the Court of Appeals calculate “just compensation” in this case would be a fruitless exercise.

Unfortunately, Chief Justice Roberts is already writing as though the “public use” requirement was a dead letter, writing at one point in his opinion: “The Government correctly points out that a taking does not violate the Fifth Amendment unless there is no just compensation.”

But that isn’t true. A taking violates the Fifth Amendment, first and foremost, if it is not taken for “public use.” And confiscating raisins and giving them to foreign governments in order to keep the price of raisins in the United States artificially high does not, in any sane world, meet that standard.

What Thomas didn’t say, but clearly implied, was that the Court should have struck down the raisin-stealing scheme entirely, rather than just forcing the government pay for the crops it takes.

The Horne decision was good news, but it didn’t go far enough by actually imposing a meaningful limit on what counts as “public use.” The Court could have done that in this case, by overturning Kelo or at least adding somelimitations about what governments can lawfully take private property for.

Happily, Justice Thomas isn’t throwing in the towel on Kelo, and Justice Scalia has predicted that the decision will eventually be overturned.

So can the government still take your property for no good reason? Yes, for now. But at least they have to pay for it.

That’s not nothing. And for raisin farmers in California, it’s a whole lot.


Daniel Bier

Daniel Bier is the editor of Anything Peaceful. He writes on issues relating to science, civil liberties, and economic freedom.

Obama and Hillary Compromised: Iran’s Nukes Fully Intact

The Obama Administration says Iran’s chants of “Death to America” are “not helpful,” but won’t have impact on nuke talks.

Retired Admiral “Ace” Lyons says, “The core elements of the Iranian nuclear program are fully intact and have increased 20-40% since these sham negotiations started.

It all begins in 2008 when then candidate Sen. Barak Obama, according to Michael Levine, opened secret negotiations with the Ayatollah’s. The message was don’t sign any agreements with the Bush Administration you will get a better deal from me when I’m President, I am a friend of Iran. This borders on treason! Mind boggling.

Let’s talk about Benghazi. This is a Hillary scenario, Hillary is a pathological liar. Hillary’s emails – You know everyone of our enemies have hacked into her emails, they have the full book on her. She (Hillary Clinton) is totally compromised, she is damaged goods. There’s no way she can be allowed back into the White House.

  • 4:25 – Things were working out in Libya until she met with a Muslim Brotherhood operative at the Paris Westin Hotel for a 45 minute meeting. After that meeting Hillary canceled our negotiations with Gaddafi despite every military leader and intelligence experts advice not too.
  • 5:30 A few words on Christopher Stevens. DIA had 10 days warning the Benghazi attacks were going to happen. If you were SECDEF would you not put countermeasures in place to defend your Ambassador?
  • 7:50 If I had to speculate I’d say this was an operation that went terribly wrong. If you remember in the Summer of 2012 Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood President Mohammad Morsi came to DC with one main objective.

Morsi’s #1 objective was to get the release of The Blind Sheikh, currently sitting in a U.S. Federal Penitentiary for masterminding the first 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

My view was Benghazi was all about the kidnapping Christopher Stevens (Libya Ambassador) and exchanging him for the blind sheikh – when you put it all together nothing makes sense to me.

When you start analyzing all the email that are coming out now it lends more substance to this theory.

Admiral ‘Ace’ Lyons (Ret.) was the Commander Of The Pacific Fleet. He knows first hand our military capabilities and geo political strategic analysis. Admiral Lyons also has a clear understanding of how Washington DC politics works when it comes to national security matters.”

We owe a great deal of gratitude to Rabbi Jonathan Hausman for bringing Admiral Lyons (Ret.) to his Synagogue for his ongoing Lecture Series.

Iran is an enemy of the United States of America. When Iran chooses its time and place to announce they have a nuclear capability the world as we know it will forever change for the worse.

Just as Israel destroyed Sadam Hussein’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981 effectively buying the world three decades of a non-nuclear Middle East, It may be time for Israel to save the world again from a Nuclear Iran.

The Left Will Always Blame the GOP on Obamacare

With the 2016 elections right around the corner, conservatives must begin immediately preparing to rebut the massive Democratic Party/mainstream media, symbiotic messaging operation. I read a piece this week by the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent that summarizes the far Left’s new Obamacare messaging strategy in the event of a Supreme Court loss in the King v. Burwell (Obamacare subsidies) case.

Here is a short summary of where we are. The far Left is terrified that the Supreme Court is going to rule against the Obama administration in King v. Burwell, essentially voiding the Obamacare subsidies in the states using the federal exchange even though the legislative language in the law regarding the “subsidies” was written this way to punish states for failing to set up state exchanges. The far Left and the Obama administration are disputing this point despite clear, videotaped evidence of Professor Jonathan Gruber, one of Obamacare’s lead architects, stating otherwise.

Now, the Obama administration has never let videotaped evidence of their prior contradicting statements dissuade them from continuing to lie to the American people (i.e. “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan. Period.”) but, in this case, their lies are especially egregious because their plan to withhold subsidies from states that refused to set up a state exchange was designed to punish the citizens of that state for not complying with Obamacare. When the punishment backfired because of public opposition to Obamacare, and support for the governors and legislators who refused to comply with its exchange language only increased, they went with plan B: lie. As usual, after their strategic miscalculation they are desperately trying to find a way to blame Republicans for this disaster, although not one Republican in the House or Senate voted for the final version of Obamacare.

The far Left’s messaging strategy to avert political disaster because of their tactical miscalculation regarding the Obamacare subsidies is to say that the Republicans have “taken away” the subsidies and pin the blame on Republicans if the court rules against the Obama administration. But, here’s the catch; the Dems destroyed our already-troubled healthcare system all by themselves by unilaterally supporting Obamacare. The reason the Obamacare “subsidies” (which are your tax payer dollars given back to you after the government takes a cut) are necessary is because insurance costs are exploding because Obamacare forces Americans to buy expensive insurance they do not want and do not need. And the reason these “subsidies” may be taken away is because the Democrats unilaterally wrote and passed the law this way to punish Americans for resisting this legislative debacle.

Unsurprisingly, when you combine the mandate to purchase health insurance policies, which included multiple unwanted and unneeded services with the community rating and guaranteed issue provisions designed to redistribute costs according to government edicts, you have a recipe for explosive healthcare cost growth. Of course, none of this was a mystery to the Republican Party when they warned America about the coming storm of healthcare premium hikes, a warning the mainstream media largely downplayed to ensure the “wizard” stayed well-hidden behind the curtain.

So here it is in a nutshell: Obamacare was shoved down your throats using parliamentary trickery. Obamacare forced you to buy expensive insurance you don’t want or need at dramatically inflated costs to compensate for the redistributive, big-government, effort to price-control the health insurance market. Obamacare taxed you to gather a honey pot of money. Obamacare then used this honey pot of taxpayer money to “give back” to Americans to pay for their new, and more expensive insurance.

You will never fix this legislative disaster by doubling down on absurdity. The economics won’t work because they can’t work. The Republican Party must prepare their counter message right now to explain to the American people the horrible tsunami that Obamacare has created. If we allow the far Left to continue to distort markets, engage in massive income redistribution operations, and instill more big-government coercion schemes to force compliance on the American people by simply pledging to prolong the misery by “fixing” the subsidy system and continuing the misery, then we are no better than the president who lied to us to sell us this jalopy.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the Conservative Review. The feature image of the Supreme Court building is by Tom Williams | AP Photo.

Islam a la Fiorina

There was once a civilization that was the greatest in the world.”

And so began a mythical, deceptive tale by Carly Fiorina, when she spoke in praise of Islam within a mere two weeks of their bombing the World Trade Center. The concern is not that she was attempting to deceive others, but that she, a person who aspires to the presidency of the United States, was herself deceived regarding the true nature of Islam, and that she has never retracted her statements.

“[Islam’s] armies were made up of many nationalities . . . [Islam] was able to create a continental super-state . . . within its dominion lived hundreds of millions of people, of different creeds and ethnic origins,” and “the reach of this civilization’s commerce. . .”*

As a religious leader, Mohammed converted few followers. As political and military leader, he was far more successful – torturing and beheading 700 stalwart Medinan Jews, raping and enslaving women, and conscripting the survivors for jihad (holy war). Thus he dominated different creeds and ethnic origins, replenishing his army with many nationalities, and increasing his wealth with booty.

“Within its dominion” is Fiorina’s euphemism for “living under domination.” All non-Muslims, slaves and women were treated with contempt, unequal under law but economically necessary. Although specific enmity was directed against Jews and Christians, the severe “jizya” tax was imposed on “infidels” as humiliation and punishment for rejecting Mohammed. This tax and many other discriminatory laws extended through the centuries to Nestorians, Syrians, and Romans of newly conquered empires, and further to animists, Buddhists, Hindus, Mongols, Greeks, and Armenians (the Armenian Genocide), who suffered torture and death.

Jews held trades and occupations that Muslims judged inferior – including “this civilization’s commerce,” diplomacy, banking, brokerage, espionage, working in gold and silver, and cleaning cesspools. The inevitable deterioration of relations between Muslims and the outside world meant more restrictions and social segregation for non-Muslims (dhimmis), but the subservient and useful survived.

“. . . its military protection allowed a degree of peace and prosperity that had never been known.”

“Peace,” as the absence of discord, existed, depending on the beneficence of the ruling caliphate and internal/external changes, but from the twelfth to thirteenth centuries onward, tolerance decreased; intellectual, social and commercial life depreciated, and ever-increasing restrictions and deprivation for dhimmis were imposed.

“And this civilization was driven more than anything, by invention. Its architects designed buildings that defied gravity.”

The inventions and contributions were made by victims of the Muslim jihadists who invaded the “infidel” world over 1400 years, enslaving, slaughtering, and plundering. Islam is antithetical to creativity, but based on envious resentment of the accomplishments of others. Their greatest achievement was their ability to expropriate every creative, innovative groundbreaking device of Islam’s victims and to fraudulently claim each as their own.

Fiorina’s reference to “buildings that defied gravity,” as in “air-borne,” surely defies logic, but she doubtless refers to the arches, which were already in use in prehistoric times by ancient Egyptians, Babylonians and Greeks. With the help of concrete made from lime and volcanic sand, Roman arches could support huge weight, and were soon adopted by Byzantine and Romanesque architects, evolving into the groundbreaking inventions of the Gothic arch and flying buttress in northern (Christian) Europe. Meanwhile, the Muslims also adopted the Syrian styles, followed with Greek, Byzantine and Persian, and later Chinese and Indian, architecture, to develop pointed, scalloped and horseshoe arches for mosques and palaces. Even the vaulted and hemispherical (domed) ceilings were invented by the non-Muslim Romans.

“Its mathematicians created the algebra and algorithms that would enable the building of computers, and the creation of encryption.”

The first positional numerical system was developed in 2nd millennium BCE Babylon, over 800 years before Islam; the first true “zero” was developed by mathematicians in the Indian Subcontinent. Persian and Arab mathematicians are believed to have adopted the Hindu-Arabic numerical system in India. The work of Italian scholar, Fibonacci, was crucial in bringing them to Europe and the world. Francois Viete, French lawyer, mathematician and privy councilor to Henry III and Henry IV, provided the step from “new algebra” to modern algebra.

Only an Islamist steeplechaser could leap from working with numbers to creating computers and encryptions centuries later. English polymath Charles Babbage, mathematician, philosopher, inventor, and mechanical engineer, conceived the first programmable computer (1830). Alan Turing laid the groundwork for computational science; Korad Zuse is credited as “the first freely programmable computer.”

The earliest form of cryptography is on stone in Egypt (190 BCE), long before Islam. Ciphers were used by the Spartan military and in the 2000-year-old Kamasutra of India. It wasn’t until the 9th century that Arab mathematicians and polymath Al-Kindi worked with cryptography.

“Its doctors examined the human body and found new cures for diseases.”

Arabs had no scientific traditions; their scientists were largely Jews who were forcibly converted as a result of Islam’s rampaging throughout the Near East, Egypt, and Libya. As a typical example, Jews and Berbers, who lived together harmoniously in North Africa, were overcome by 60,000 Islamic troops in 694, and the descendants of those who survived the massacre became “Arabic” philosophers and scientists.

A great physician, Egyptian Jew, Isaac Israel of Kairouan, immigrated to West Africa. His surviving works on logic, Aristotelian physics, and pharmacology became the standard for medical history, and it was from him that the greatest of “Arab” scientists, Avicenna (980-1037), drew inspiration. Known as the Aristotle of the East, Avicenna wrote in Arabic and became a vizier in Persia, but he was born near Bokhara, then heavily populated by Jews, and was probably of Jewish origin. Even so, physicians who attended lords and kings of Islam and Christendom were largely Jews.

“Its astronomers looked into the heavens, named the stars, and paved the way for space travel and exploration.”

Jewish savants were largely responsible for the invention and development of instruments and astronomical tables that facilitated world-girdling sea voyages. The Jerusalem Talmud (tractate Avodah Zarah, Ch.3, fol.,42c) strongly implies the spherical nature of the earth. The astrolabe, used by Islamic astronomers as a guide to the sky and to tell time by the position of heavenly bodies, was introduced into the Arab-speaking world by a “remarkable Jewish genius, Mashala of Mosul, the phoenix of his age.” Astronomical tables, compiled by the Jew, Joseph ben Wallar at Toledo (1396), and in Aragon by Judaic specialists, including Emanuel ben Jacob (aka Bonfils de Tarascon), were used with the astrolabe.

The Jews were among the most notable cartographers, the most advanced being a Jew forcibly converted to Christianity. Christopher Columbus’s cartographers and other companions may have been conversos. The most reputable astronomer of the day, Abraham Zacuto (1452-1515), instructed Columbus on using the perfected astrolabe, also used by Vasco de Gama and Amerigo Vespucci.

In all these areas, Fiorina makes the absurd leap from recognizing Muslims as merely a people who used a product to being an innovative people who “paved the way” for the future. She made a similar leap of dissonance when she made corrupt trade agreements with Iran in violation of US trade sanctions, resulting in 30,000 workers laid off at Hewlett-Packard, and jobs shipped to China. We could remark in passing that, at the same time, her salary and perks also leaped – they more than tripled.

“When censors threatened to wipe out knowledge from past civilizations, this civilization kept the knowledge alive and passed it on to others.”

How much creativity, ingenuity and innovation might we have had from those 400 million people slaughtered by jihadists over 1400 years? What greatness is Islam passing on to civilization now, beyond a high illiteracy rate, great intolerance and aggression? Their history is one of perpetual massacre, encouraged in their Qur’an and taught from early childhood. Their culture is one of unrest, riots and wars; and women’s fears of female genital mutilation, forced marriages, rape, and death for male honor. Their homes are microcosms of the greater tyrannical regimes.

Had Muslims the knowledge to be kept alive, how might it have been done? Of the 1.4 billion Muslims, 800 million are illiterate (60 percent cannot read). In Christendom, the adult literacy rate stands at 78 percent. Of the ten most literate countries, not one is Islamic. Muslims are the world’s poorest, weakest and illiterate. The combined annual GDP of 75 Muslim countries is under $2 trillion; America’s is worth $10.4 trillion. Muslims are 22 percent of the world population, yet produce less than five percent of global GDP, and diminishing all the time.

Over the past 105 years, 1.3 billion Muslims produced eight Nobel Laureates (only two won for physics and chemistry); compare this with a mere 14 million Jews (0.23% of the world population) who produced 170 Nobel Laureates.

Islam’s militaristic, supersessionist ideology that began 1400 years ago has remained unchanged. We know of no event that sparked the glory they claim, and no catastrophic event that might have forced a decline. Carly Fiorina is severely misinformed about the civilization that embraces our death and destruction and she confuses politically-correct theories for hard facts – no point from which to hold the highest-ranking position in the United States of America.

“The President that Couldn’t”: Why Obama’s Agenda Failed by Thomas A. Firey

With time running out on his administration, President Obama has embarked on a sort of “apology tour” to disillusioned supporters. They are frustrated that he hasn’t delivered on many of their favored policies, from gun control to single-payer health care to carbon controls.

With candidates queuing up to replace him — many with very different policy goals than his — he apparently feels the need to rally the disaffected behind a successor who would carry on his agenda.

His message to the disheartened supporters is simple: The political failures aren’t his fault. He’s tried hard to deliver, but “Congress doesn’t work” and American government “is broken.” According to Obama:

As mightily as I have struggled against that… it still is broken. … When I ran in 2008, I, in fact, did not say I would fix it. I said we could fix it. I didn’t say, “Yes, I can”; I said — what? … “Yes, we can.”

Washington Post columnist Chris Cillizza, writing about the apology tour, throws some shade at the president, claiming that he did in fact promise to change policy. But ultimately Cillizza agrees with Obama, writing that the American “political system is … more broken than any one person — no matter who that person is or the circumstances that surround that person’s election — could hope to solve.”

But both the president and Cillizza are completely wrong; the American political system assuredly is not broken. The system was designed — and we should all be very grateful that it was designed — to not allow the radical change that Obama’s supporters — or supporters of other politicians across the political spectrum — want.

It is the rare times when such change does occur — think Franklin Roosevelt’s expansion of national government or George W. Bush’s anti-terrorism initiatives and war in Iraq — that American governance had failed and very bad things happen.

Today the United States is a nation of more than 320 million remarkably different people, living in unique situations, having highly individual concerns, desires, and risk preferences, and holding a wide variety of mostly noble values. They each operate in a world of uncertainty and limited resources. Given those dramatically varied circumstances, any national policymaking is likely to harm and anger tens of millions of people.

For that reason, the Framers (who likewise lived in an incredibly diverse nation for their era) designed American government to elevate private action and decentralize governance while limiting national policy to matters of broad consensus and compromise.

Because few of the policy goals advocated by President Obama and his “progressive” supporters have such support or allow for serious compromise (even the signature item that he did manage to enact), it shouldn’t be surprising that few of those goals have been achieved. That doesn’t mean American government is broken — quite the opposite! — but rather that Obama’s conception of governance is.

Perhaps the next president will better appreciate the genius of American government’s design and work within that design for policy change that he or she believes is important. But it’s clear from President Obama’s comments that he is not up to that task.

For the reason, we should all be very grateful that, no, he couldn’t.

Thomas A. Firey

Thomas A. Firey is a Maryland Public Policy Institute senior fellow, and also is managing editor of Regulation magazine, the Cato Institute’s quarterly review of business in government.

EDITORS NOTE: This first appeared at MDpolicy.org.

Dems, Republicans and Experts Question Terms of Iran Deal

Politicians and experts from across the political spectrum are calling into question the proposed nuclear agreement with Iran. The two primary issues – verifiability and the possibility of military dimensions (PMD) of the Iranian nuclear program – threaten to derail the agreement.

A report, “Verifying a Final Nuclear Deal with Iran,” written by the former deputy director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Olli Henomen, states that for the agreement to be effective in real terms, verifiability must be a function of “unfettered,” “anywhere, anytime” access and not subject to any bureaucratic procedures which would give Iran time to alter the results of any inspections.

The report, signed by 20 foreign policy experts including Democrats and Republicans, criticizes the Obama administration for drawing up an agreement that essentially lets Iran remain a “nuclear threshold state,” specifically noting the fact that the agreement does not resolve any issues having to do with PMD and that sanctions relief will come without any of the above issues being resolved. In addition, the proposed verification provisions fall significantly short, meaning that there is no assurance that Iran’s nuclear program will stay contained within the limitations set out by the agreement.

Other damning reports recently released have come to the same conclusions:

  • A report titled “Necessary Safegurads for a Final Deal with Iran” by Eric Edelman – a career foreign service officer, ambassador and under-secretary of defense for policy — and the president’s former senior adviser Dennis Ross, says “it is uncertain whether the potential monitoring and verification regime adumbrated in the White House factsheet would be remotely sufficient for this task.”
  • Another report titled “Sunsets and Snapbacks: The Asymmetry Between an Expanding Iranian Nuclear Program and Diminishing Western Leverage” by Mark Dubowitz and Annie Fixler questions wisdom of  making an agreement with Iran before the issue of PMD is resolved, thereby giving up any leverage the West may have. In addition, the report makes the case that it is folly to believe that sanctions can realistically be “snapped back” once international companies have invested billions of dollars in Iran.  The report notes that “international sanctions regime took decades to put in place and to have an impact on Iran’s economy and decision making.” Any snap-backs, if possible, will not be felt immediately. Given that the breakout time to create a bomb is estimated at one year, snap-backs offer no real deterrance to Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon.

Meanwhile, the Iranian parliament voted to take away their power to veto of any nuclear agreement drawn up with world powers. In amending their own previous legislation, the lawmakers put the veto power into the hands of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), a group made up of ministers and military commanders chosen by Iran’s Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and headed by Iranian President Hasan Rouhani.

“Whatever decision the leader takes in this regard, we should obey in parliament,” said speaker of the parliament Ali Larijani . “We should not tie the hands of the leader.”

However, the lawmakers did reject any inspections of the country’s nuclear program that are not “conventional” visits, effectively banning inspection of military sites.

At the same time, France’s Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said “at the point where we are, things are not clear [in terms of whether an agreement with Iran] can be reached. There is a need to clarify, make precise and ensure the deal is robust.”

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is a look inside of a nuclear reactor. Photo: © Reuters.

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Is Kurdistan Rising?

In the Wall Street Journal Weekend edition, June 20-21, 2015, Yaroslav Trofimov writes of the possible rise of an independent Kurdistan, “The State of The Kurds”. An independent Kurdistan was promised by the WWI Allies in the Treaty of Sevres that ended the Ottoman Empire in 1920. That commitment was dashed by the rise of Turkish Republic under the secularist Kemal Atatürk confirmed in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne denying an independent Kurdistan in what is now Eastern Turkey. Combined a future Kurdistan encompassing eastern Turkey, Northern Syria, northwest Iran and northern Iraq might comprise a landlocked republic of 30 million with significant energy and agricultural resources. The rise of Kurdistan is reflected in these comments in the Trofimov WSJ review article:

Selahattin Demirtas, Chairman of the HDP party in Turkey:

The Kurds’ existence was not recognized; they were hidden behind a veil. But now, after being invisible for a century, they are taking their place on the international stage. Today, international powers can no longer resolve any issue in the Middle East without taking into account the interests of the Kurds.

Tahir Elçi, a prominent Kurdish lawyer and chairman of the bar in Diyarbakir, Turkey:

In the past, when the Kurds sought self-rule, the Turks, the Persians and the Arabs were all united against it. Today that’s not true anymore—it’s not possible for the Shiite government in Iraq and Shiite Iran to work together against the Kurds with the Sunni Turkey and the Sunni ISIS. In this environment, the Kurds have become a political and a military power in the Middle East.

Elçi, amplifies a concern that Sherkoh Abbas, leader of the Kurdish National Syria Assembly (KURDNAS) has expressed in several NER interviews an articles with him:

The PKK has made important steps to adopt more democratic ways. But you cannot find the same climate of political diversity in [Kurdish] Syria as you find in [northern Iraq], and this is because of PKK’s authoritarian and Marxist background. This is a big problem.

As effective as the KRG government and peshmerga have been in pushing back at ISIS forces threatening the capital of Erbil, the real problem is the divisiveness in the political leadership. That is reflected in the comment of  Erbil province’s governor, Nawaf Hadi cited by Trofimov:

For 80 years, the Arab Sunni people led Iraq—and they destroyed Kurdistan. Now we’ve been for 10 years with the Shiite people [dominant in Baghdad], and they’ve cut the funding and the salaries—how can we count on them as our partner in Iraq?” All the facts on the ground encourage the Kurds to be independent.

That renewed prospect reflects the constellation of  events in Turkey, Syria and Iraq.

The fall of the AKP government in the Turkish Election of June 7, 2015

There was  the  stunning  defeat of the 13 year reign of  the Islamist AKP headed by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan by the trio of secular, nationalist and upstart Kurdish parties, the CHP, HNP and HDP that might form a minority ruling coalition 45 days from the June 7, 2014 parliamentary elections. These minority parties garnered a plurality of 299 seats in the Ankara Parliament.  That is if these parties can coalesce. If not Islamist figurehead President Erdogan seek new elections if they can’t put together a new ruling government.  A Washington, D.C. forum on what the results of the Turkish  election convened by the Foundation for Defense  of Democracies (FDD) forum presented nuanced views. Watch this C-Span video of the FDD forum.

FDD Senior Counselor John Hannah moderated the discussion with former U.S. ambassador to Turkey and FDD Senior Advisor  former US Ambassador to Turkey Eric Edelman and FDD Non-Resident Fellow and former member of Turkish parliament Ayman Erdemir.

John Hannah

June 7 in my opinion was an inspiring performance, a much needed triumph of the spirit of liberal democracy in a Middle East landscape currently inundated with way too much bad news.

For those of us who have watched over the past decade with great dismay the slow drip of Turkey’s democracy being drained away by Erdogan’s creeping Islamism and authoritarianism, we frankly weren’t sure anymore if the Turkish people had this kind of an election in them.

Aykan Erdemir

My take-home message would be that we should not read these elections too much with a progressive, liberal-democratic interpretation. But we should not underemphasize the importance of it either, because ultimately June 7 proved to us that there could be a return from competitive authoritarianism, where an incumbent with huge advantages nevertheless can suffer a relative defeat in the ballot box.

I have always argued that Erdogan’s policies and politics cannot be interpreted within the nation-state borders. Erdogan’s policies right from the start have been transnational; it has always been a Muslim Brotherhood-oriented policy, whether in Syria, Jordan, or Egypt. He is a visionary transnationalist politician.”

Ambassador Edelman

Turkey is a deeply polarized society, and the bad news there is that the AKP is the only party that is competitive across the nation.

Erdogan will not see this vote in any way as inhibiting him in creating an executive presidency. …My suspicion is that Erdogan does not want to see a government formed within the 45-day period set by the constitution and would like to see the country go back to elections. He thinks that if he could apply the ‘keep voting until I get the right answer’ standard, there is a chance he will do better in a second election, get at least a governing majority if not the super-majority.

Dr. Harold Rhode, former Turkish and Islamic Affairs expert in the Office of the Secretary of Defense held a more optimistic view cited in a JNS.org article on the Turkish Elections, “noting that he personally knows pro-American and pro-Israel officials “within the senior leadership of all three of the [non-AKP] parties.”

Syrian YPG Fighters capture Tal Abyad  Reuters

Syrian YPG fighters capture Tal-Abyad from ISIS, June 2015. Source: Reuters.

Syrian Kurdish YPG victory at strategic border town of  Tal-Abyad

The second development was the victory by Syrian Kurdish PYG fighters , Christian Assyrian and secular  FSA militias  wresting the strategic border gateway of Tal-Abyad  from  ISIS with support from  US coalition air strikes. This followed the  January 2015 victory in  the siege at the border  city of Kobani. The Syrian PYG, affiliated with the Turkish PKK, a  terrorist group designated by  Turkey, EU and the US, whose leader Abdullah Ocalan is under house arrest in Turkey,  has been assisted  by fighting units of the Iraqi Peshmerga from the adjacent Kurdish Regional Government  (KRG)in northern Iraq.  The third development was the KRG Peshmerga wresting   control  of Kirkuk and its vast  oil field. Kirkuk, as Trofimov noted  is considered  the “Kurdish Jerusalem” .  Not to be outdone by Kurdish compatriots in Syria and Iraq, in mid-May 2015, Iranian Kurdish  Party of Free Life in Kurdistan ( PJAK)  forces in northwestern Iran’s Zagros mountain  fought  Iranian security forces in Mahabad.  Mahabad  was the capital of the short-lived State of Republic  Kurdistan established with Soviet Russian support in  Iran in 1945- 1946.

KRG Delegation meets with resident Obama VO Biden and National Security Council May 2015

Kurdish President Barzani and KRG delegation meet President Obama and VP Biden May 2015.

KRG Meets with President to Free up Arms Deliveries

The KRG quest for independence has been stymied by the Baghdad government of PM Haidar al-Abadi.  The Baghdad  government has not lived up to its agreement reached in December 2014 to provide regular payments to the KRG amounting  to nearly $5.7 billion in exchange for selling 550,000 barrels of oil. The result has been that KRG government  and the 160,000 Peshmerga force have not been paid in months.  More troubling has been the current agreements between the Obama Administration  and  the al-Abadi government for allocation and deliveries of heavy weapons that have not found their way to the highly effective Peshmerga fighting force. This is especially galling given the thousands of Humvees, mobile artillery, anti-tank, main battle tanks and MRAP vehicles abandoned by fleeing Iraqi national security forces in the conquest of Mosul in June 2014 and Ramadi in late May.

A  meeting occurred in Washington in early May 2015 with  KRG President Barzani and senior officials with President Obama, Vice President Biden and members of the National  Security Staff seeking resolution of this impasse.   Michael Knights of the Washington Institute for Near Policy wrote about this in a May 15, 2015 Al Jazeera, article, “A big win for Kurds at the White House”:

From May 3-8, 2015, Washington D.C. hosted a high-powered delegation from the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). KRG President Massoud Barzani was flanked by Deputy Prime Minister Qubad Talabani, National Security Chancellor Masrour Barzani and Minister of Peshmerga Affairs Mustapha Sayyid Qadr, among other KRG ministers and officials.  [The delegation was originally scheduled for a five minute meeting with President Obama, instead the session lasted an hour].

In particular, the Kurds complained that Washington has allocated too small a proportion of its $1.6bn Iraq Train and Equip Fund (ITEF) assistance to Kurdistan.

Slow and indirect delivery of US weapons systems is a connected concern. Washington has chosen to funnel most weapons shipments via the federal Iraqi Ministry of Defense, the only entity entitled by US law to sign end-user certificates (EUCs) for the weapons.

[…]In reaction to these views, the House Armed Services Committee of the US Congress introduced clauses into the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the Pentagon’s budget, in an attempt to protect the Kurds’ fair share of US weapons.

The draft NDAA for Fiscal Year 2016 was amended by congress to include a clause (Section 1223) that named the Peshmerga as one of a number of security forces collectively entitled to “not less than 25 percent” of the annual $715m of US support.

Most controversially the amendment would allow the KRG “as a country” to “directly receive assistance from the United States” if Baghdad failed to meet the aforementioned condition, a clause that sparked security threats from Shia militia leaders against US trainers in Iraq.

Baghdad protested the language, and US Vice President Joe Biden signaled one day before the Kurdish delegation landed that “all US military assistance in the fight against [ISIL] comes at the request of the Government of Iraq and must be coordinated through the Government of Iraq”.

[…]

Instead of trying to force the White House to do Kurdistan’s bidding through pressure politics, Barzani seems to have adopted a longer-term view in his dealings with the US on defense.

Section 1223 did not give the Kurds a great deal – sharing a quarter of US material collectively with Sunni Arab paramilitary recipients – but it would have soured relations with the Obama administration at a critical time.

Israeli Support for an Independent Kurdistan

One  Middle East nation that  supports an independent Kurdistan  is Israel . As exemplified by comments from  Israeli Prime Minister  Netanyahu, Israel supports the creation of an independent Kurdistan in  Iraq.  There is a long connection between the Kurds and the Jewish nation. There is  an estimated 150,000 Kurdish Jewish  population in Israel that has fostered  cultural –linguistic exchanges with Iraqi Kurdistan.  Iraqi and Iranian kurds smuggled Iraqi Jews to freedom via Iran, during the days of the late Shah, to Israel and the West.  Iranian Kurds continued that effort despite  the Islamic republic facilitating the departure of Iranian Jews  via Turkey to reach  Israel.  From the 1950’s to the mid-70’s Israel provided covert military training and  equipment  to Iraqi Kurds  against the Ba’athist regime of the late Saddam Hussein.  That ended with a treaty between the late Shah of Iran and Hussein orchestrated by Henry Kissinger in 1975.  During the 1980’s Hussein took his revenge on Iraqi kurds during the  Iran-Iraq War  in a series of genocidal revenge campaigns including a massive gas attack that killed thousands decimating Kurdish villages.   Israel currently hosts the huge U.S. War Reserve Stock for use in Middle East conflicts. Perhaps, the Obama Administration might relent on the current agreements with the Baghdad government and permit transfers from the US War Reserve Stock   in Israel of much needed weapons, equipment and munitions to the Peshmerga in Iraq and the Syrian Kurdish militias fighting ISIS.  Israel is less than several hundred miles from Erbil.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review. The featured image is of supporters cheering Selahattin Demirtas, co-chair of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party, HDP, in Istanbul, Turkey, in May, 2015. Source: Emrah Gurel/AP.