Trump’s New Foreign Policy of ‘Principled Realism’ by José Azel

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The new U.S.-Cuba policy emphasizes our democratic values, but allows for negotiations responsive to the requirements of U.S. national interests. It is a policy of principled realism. The symbolism of a change to a policy that now embraces our values was richly expressed by U.S. Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart: “We will no longer have to witness the embarrassing spectacle of an American president doing the wave at a baseball game with a ruthless dictator.”

American foreign policy has historically fluctuated between two competing approaches that transcend our left-right political spectrum. Political scientists label these schools of thought Idealism and Realism.

Idealism holds that the purpose of U.S. foreign policy is to advance American values by fomenting freedom and democracy throughout the world. The ultimate goal of Idealism is to bring about a just and peaceful world by ending tyrannies. In the idealist view, the United States should engage in humanitarian missions, military interventions, and nation building, to advance this goal. Idealists believe that U.S. foreign policy should not be determined by what is best for the United States, but by what is, morally, the right thing to do.

In contrast, Realism holds that the purpose of U.S. foreign policy is to secure America’s national interest. Realists believe that moral principles are incompatible with the protection of our national interest. Interests come before values, and U.S. foreign policy should set aside moral considerations, and focus on whatever works.

Because interests are placed before values, foreign policy Realism enables policymakers to immorally embrace tyrannical regimes as President Obama did with Iran and Cuba in the name of the national interest.

President Trump has been very critical of Obama’s realist-inspired foreign policy as well as of the idealistic interventions favored by President Bush. President Trump’s foreign policy will not follow the Idealist approach of military interventions or nation building designed to foment freedom and democracy throughout the world. Nor will his foreign policy pursue national interests devoid of moral principles as in the Realist tradition.

President Trump’s foreign policy breaks from Idealism and Realism into a new foreign policy doctrine the President has labeled “Principled Realism.” Two recent overt military actions are illustrative of what the President means by principled realism.

First, the attack with Tomahawk cruise missiles on the Al Shayrat airbase, home of the Syrian warplanes that had carried out chemical attacks against civilians; the attack was timely, focused and proportional.

Second, the first use ever, in eastern Afghanistan, of the Massive Ordinance Air Blast (MOAB) that targeted an ISIS tunnel and cave complex; according to military analysts, the MOAB was precisely the right weapon for that target.

Independently of their military efficacy, both of these actions signaled an approach that, while in-line with our values, does not commit U.S. resources beyond what is necessary to protect our national interest and to make a point.

And, on June 16, the President, outlining his new U.S.-Cuba policy, explicitly referred to his Cuba foreign policy approach as: “the United States is adopting a principled realism, rooted in our values, shared interests, and common sense. We will not be silent in the face of communist oppression any longer…America will expose the crimes of the Castro regime and stand with the Cuban people in their struggle for freedom.”

Given Cuba’s intransigence, the new policy is an intelligent, measured, and practical approach that, while not prohibiting travel to, or doing business in Cuba, forbids Americans from doing business in partnership with the Cuban military. The policy focuses directly on the adversary: The Cuban military.

In practice, American travelers will not be able to stay in the hotels of the Cuban Armed Forces but can stay in individually owned facilities. Doing business with the Cuban people is encouraged, but doing business with the military dictatorship is prohibited. The policy seeks to limit cash flows to the military enterprises while increasing cash flows to the people. Symbolically and practically, it embraces the oppressed and not the oppressors.

Principled realism opens up diplomatic possibilities anchored on the intersection of our values and our interests. President Trump’s foreign policy will not be one that puts fear in the minds of oppressive regimes as some had hoped. Dictatorships offend our values, but not necessarily our national interests.

The new U.S.-Cuba policy emphasizes our democratic values, but allows for negotiations responsive to the requirements of U.S. national interests. It is a policy of principled realism.

The symbolism of a change to a policy that now embraces our values was richly expressed by U.S. Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart: “We will no longer have to witness the embarrassing spectacle of an American president doing the wave at a baseball game with a ruthless dictator.”

ABOUT JOSE AZEL

José Azel arrived in the U.S. in 1961 from communist Cuba as a 13 year-old political exile with Operation Pedro Pan, the largest unaccompanied child refugee movement in the history of the Western Hemisphere. He is currently a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies (ICCAS) at the University of Miami. Dr. Azel earned a Masters Degree in Business Administration and a Ph.D. in International Affairs from the University of Miami, and is author of Mañana in Cuba: The Legacy of Castroism and Transitional Challenges for Cuba, and Reflections on Freedom. He is also a contributor to SFPPR News & Analysis of the online-conservative-journalism center at the Washington-based Selous Foundation for Public Policy Research.

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VIDEO: America Under Siege — Soviet Islam

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In my December 2015 column “The neo-Democrat Party: Devout followers of Marx, Mao and Mohammed” I wrote:

Numerous writers and political pundits have written on President Obama’s pledge to “fundamentally transform America” when elected in 2008.

I believe what President Obama has truly done is fundamentally transformed the Democratic Party of JFK to the Democrat Party of BHO. I use the word Democrat because the Party of Obama is not Democratic, as envisioned by Thomas Jefferson. The membership of the neo-Democrat Party are made up primarily of the devout followers of Marx, Mao and Mohammed.

Those who oppose Obama and the neo-Democrat Party, including JFK Democrats, are subject to ridicule, rejection and bullying.

Extremism in the name of the collective is the over riding strategy of the neo-Democrat. Radicalism is the tactic. The more extreme the ideal, the more it is embraced. This leads to what some have labeled a form of political insanity. I call it political suicide. History teaches us that tyrants and tyranny ultimately lose the support of the masses. Why? Because the policies implemented harm the masses.

Trevor Loudon has released a new episode in the America Under Siege series titled “Soviet Islam.” Loudon writes:

“Soviet Islam” is the second episode in the five-part “America Under Siege” documentary web-series releasing over the course of 2017. Each episode profiles the influence of radical Marxists on various segments of American society.

The film uncovers the secret history of how the Soviet Union used Islamists and dictators in the Middle East to further its objectives and how Vladimir Putin’s Russia continues this strategy today, endangering Americans and all freedom-loving peoples.

After World War II, the Soviet Union used Muslim intelligence assets to subvert neighboring Muslim-majority nations. Putin’s Russia continues to infiltrate Islamic communities around the world, including Chechnya, Iran, Syria, and Palestine, and also at home in the United States, where Islamists and communists have joined in an unlikely alliance.

Please watch Trevor Loudon’s latest documentary “America Under Siege: Soviet Islam”:

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EDITORS NOTE: The film is narrated and written by conservative author Trevor Loudon, directed by Judd Saul, and produced by Cohesion Films in partnership with Dangerous Documentaries, a project of the Capital Research Center.

VIDEO: If I Were the Devil

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In 1965 Paul Harvey, an American radio broadcaster for the ABC Radio Networks and author who wrote Our Lives, Our Fortunes, Our Sacred Honor, did one of his “The Rest of the Story” broadcasts addressing what he would do if he were the devil. Harvey’s words have today become reality, the new-normal, the doctrine preached in our public schools and in the public square. His words were a warning, they are worth hearing over and over again.

Time to take back America. Time to make America great, again, by embracing God. As President Trump said in Warsaw, Poland, “‘Together, let us all fight like the Poles—for family, for freedom, for country and for God’.

Joe Donahue writes:

Dear American Citizen: Most would agree the reach of the Federal Government is simply too big, and has lacked true accountability by the press – Yet now the mainstream media (seemingly) is beginning to show signs of investigative journalism. And they should! Admittedly, the IRS has been targeting “Pro-America, Patriot, less Government, more God” non-profit groups. Using Paul Harvey’s words and images from our current culture, this video has a message that clearly speaks into the souls of American citizens.

America is not lazy. America is not apathetic. America is not complacent. Yes, some American’s are lazy, complacent and apathetic. Some choose laziness and complacency over hard work and creativity. Some stumble through this life completely dependent upon the government, faith based organizations, and the kindness of neighbors…and as American’s we support them, not because we have to – but because we want to. We want to help our fellow countryman. But their comes a point where a line must be drawn. There comes a time when we say, “We will go this far, but no further.” We cannot carry you forever. You must “want it” yourself. You must begin to walk…and run – on your own. And in time, you will see, that you must begin to help others as well.

And the hard workers? Yes, we dream. We work. We keep the country rolling. We give financially to our churches. We help our neighbors. We pay our taxes. Not out of any sense of shame or compulsion but because we WANT to…

Between the two Paul Harvey Videos I have made they have been viewed over 2,000,000 times. Not bad for a video I put together for our student ministry…but future America needs your help today in spreading the message of this video.

Please share, post, embed, re-post, email and get this message into the hands of Americans. This is not about an election. This is about fighting for the Heart of America…Freedom. You would be surprised who may watch this video and begin to reject complacency and dependency upon the government…together we can slowly rise to rebuild America.

RELATED ARTICLE: ACADEMIA – Discover the Networks

The Attack on Hobby Lobby Is Incoherent and Unjust by Jeffrey A. Tucker

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The mainstream press has accused Hobby Lobby, a great and beloved American company, of hypocrisy, unchristian behavior, smuggling, stealing, and even funding terrorism. As punishment, and concluding an investigation that has been going on for six years, the US government has extracted from the company a fine of $3 million, and the company is sending to the government property it bought fair and square.

What horrible things did the company do? It purchased from sketchy sources in the Middle East thousands of ancient artifacts, including extremely rare cuneiform tablets. The purpose of such purchases – the Green family that owns Hobby Lobby spent its own money – is to complete an exciting project in the nation’s capital, the building of a new museum called the Museum of the Bible that will be open to the public in November.For its efforts to save ancient historical artifacts and put them on display for educational purposes, the company has been declared guilty of trafficking war loot. And the property it bought? It is presumably going to be owned now by the US government – and maybe put in a warehouse and forgotten, like the disgraceful scene from the Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The War Caused This

And yet, it was the chaos of the Iraq War itself that brought these artifacts to the black markets to begin with. Previously, one supposes, they were claimed by Saddam Hussein as the national property of the government that the U.S. overthrew. They were pillaged by traders in the midst of the confusion that the US had not properly prepared for. This was nearly 15 years ago, and, presumably, the artifacts have changed hands many times.

Given how valuable these items are, and how little care the US government showed them, there is a sense in which the black market deserves praise. There was no longer a regime in place to claim ownership. The treasures were not destroyed or forgotten. Rather, they were preserved in the care of new owners and traders who understood their value – far more so than the marauding occupiers who allowed a birthplace of civilization to be pillaged without a thought.Hobby Lobby – scrupulously and motivated by genuine piety – was only seeking to recover them and put them on display to increase public awareness of their value and what they represent. It is not the company’s fault that these treasures were floating around and changing hands all over the Middle East. Hobby Lobby didn’t cause the war. It didn’t steal a single thing from anyone. What the company was doing was systematically buying them from criminals, gangs, and shadowy forces with an eye toward keeping them safe and showing them to the public.

Hobby Lobby deserves praise, not condemnation, for these actions.

The most preposterous claim is that what the company did was unchristian. This is a jab at the company culture, of course, which is openly evangelical and has otherwise embroiled the company in public controversy. The Supreme Court decided in favor of its claim that it should not be forced to provide medical services to its employees. It was the first time in US history that the courts said that a for-profit company enjoys certain rights to religious liberty – and the partisans of Obamacare have never forgiven the company for that reason.

It’s like the whole of the social-democratic opinion cartel got on board with a plan: get Hobby Lobby!

False Records

What about the claim that there was fraud involved in the shipping of items themselves? According to reports, the company acquiesced to falsified shipping records in order to disguise the contents of the packages.

This strikes me not as fraud – who is actually being defrauded here? – but rather very smart and strategic behavior. What was the company to do? Put a big stamp on the packages that says PRICELESS ARTIFACTS FROM ANTIQUITY INSIDE? The efforts to disguise the contents were consistent with the care that the company was taking with the property that it justly acquired on the market.In fact, by not insuring the contents as much as the shippers might have been willing to cover, the company was bearing the full liability that would have been associated with theft. Therefore it had every incentive to obscure the nature of the contents. No one got hurt by their doing so.

Making the Market

But there is yet another claim making the rounds. In the words of professional Hobby Lobby haters Joel Baden and Candida Moss:

The black market has done more for the cause of historical preservation than either Saddam Hussein or the occupying military forces ever did.

If collectors like the Green family were unwilling to purchase unprovenanced antiquities — items that do not have a clear and clean history of discovery and purchase — the black market would dry up. As long as there are buyers, there will be sellers. It is because collectors like Hobby Lobby are willing to pay a premium and look the other way that looting continues. They dramatically expanded the market for biblical antiquities in the late 2000s.This is just crazy talk. Are we really supposed to believe that if the Greens had not put a value on ancient Mesopotamian artifacts that these items would thereby fall in value for everyone else? This is preposterous actually. And think about this: if the treasures actually fall to zero price, there would be no incentive to care for them and display them for the public. It is precisely because The Green family and so many others value them that they have been preserved.

These writers are living in a fantasy world. Actually, the black market has done more for the cause of historical preservation than either Saddam Hussein or the occupying military forces ever did.

Ownership Records

There is the final matter of ownership records. These are obviously controversial for property that is, after all, thousands of years old. What to do? Hobby Lobby had the right solution: they should be owned by the highest bidder and displayed for the edification of the public. As a private enterprise, it could have experimented with using the right technology – blockchain – to create immutable records, along with the complete history. That way, there would never again be a controversy.

Much the same is already being done in the art world to prevent forgeries, track ownership, and verify the authenticity of works of art. This process needs to commence with ancient artifacts too, for the sake of posterity and the future.

What Hobby Lobby was doing could have finally saved this sacred history on behalf of the whole of humanity. Sadly, it will not be so, simply because some bureaucrats and petty pundits are working through their resentments of the company, fining them and dragging its reputation through the mud. Hobby Lobby wasn’t stealing; it is being stolen from.

Jeffrey A. Tucker

Jeffrey A. Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is Director of Content for the Foundation for Economic Education. He is also Chief Liberty Officer and founder of Liberty.me, Distinguished Honorary Member of Mises Brazil, research fellow at the Acton Institute, policy adviser of the Heartland Institute, founder of the CryptoCurrency Conference, member of the editorial board of the Molinari Review, an advisor to the blockchain application builder Factom, and author of five books. He has written 150 introductions to books and many thousands of articles appearing in the scholarly and popular press.

VIDEO: Obamacare’s ‘People Will Die’ Canard by Charles Blahous

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Passions are high in the national health care debate. Some supporters of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) have taken to asserting that hundreds of thousands of “people will die” if it is repealed or significantly altered. These claims do not withstand scrutiny, and those who wish their policy arguments to be taken seriously would be well advised to avoid them.

These sensational claims rest on fallacious reasoning, which I’ll describe later in this piece. But first let’s acknowledge that neither I, you, nor anyone else has any idea how many Americans will live or die under alternative federal health care policies. It’s an inherently fruitless exercise to attempt to quantify these effects. However, if one seriously wished to attempt it, one would not do so via the methods now being employed to promulgate the “people will die” claim.

Effects of the ACA

The claims are based on extolling a single effect of the ACA: increasing health insurance coverage, which is said to reduce mortality. Of course, the ACA didn’t magically produce its coverage increase out of thin air. To finance it, the law included several features that likely have countervailing effects on mortality.

Below is a partial list of such effects, provided with the caveat that it would be just as silly to charge the ACA with killing people as it is to attribute deaths to its possible repeal:

  • CBO also found the ACA to reduce workforce participation. Although there is a fierce national debate over the effects and causes of unemployment, there is broad understanding that unemployment correlates with worsened health.
  • The ACA imposed substantial taxes on medical devices and drugs, inhibiting their development and use. We do not know how many lives these products would otherwise have saved.
  • Most of the ACA’s coverage expansion occurred through Medicaid, which has a limited supply of providers and services. Those who gained Medicaid coverage via the ACA gained access to subsidized health services. But unless the number of providers, facilities and services accessible through Medicaid grew at least as fast as enrollment did, there has been a corresponding reduction in health service availability to people previously on Medicaid.

What Studies Show

But even a balanced attempt to weigh the ACA’s net effects on longevity would be inherently problematic under the methods currently being employed to estimate them.

The widely-circulated figures for deaths supposedly caused by replacing the ACA are extrapolated from a study of the Massachusetts health reform experience. That study found that post-reform (2007-10) mortality rates in Massachusetts improved relative to pre-reform (2001-05) mortality rates more than was the case in other US counties after controlling for demographic and economic conditions.

The study is credible, interesting, and suggestive, but does not offer any generalizable proofs of the effects of national health policy on longevity. To the contrary, the authors state that “Massachusetts results may not generalize to other states.”

The study merely shows that longevity improved within Massachusetts after health legislation, more than can be accounted for by economic and demographic trends. This indeed might plausibly have happened because of Massachusetts’s particular health reforms but as the authors acknowledge, it could also have arisen from any of countless factors specific to Massachusetts.

Indeed, a similar study of Oregon’s experience with Medicaid expansion “did not detect clinical improvements other than depression reduction.” In any case, the Massachusetts study only tells us what didn’t cause its longevity improvement; it cannot definitively explain what did.

Killing Your Credibility

But the biggest problem with the “people will die” claim is that it rests on a fundamental logical fallacy. It is related to the familiar “Fallacy of Composition,” which any discerning interlocutor will call you on if you commit it. An oft-cited example of the fallacy is that just because a standing spectator can see a baseball game better than the patrons seated near him, this doesn’t imply that everyone will see better if they all stand up.

The application of the fallacy to health insurance is straightforward. One cannot leap solely from the observation that “having health insurance. . . results in better health” to the conclusion that “the more we expand health insurance, the healthier we all will be.”

Health insurance reduces the out-of-pocket costs individuals face when they buy health services. Expanded insurance coverage increases health service consumption which, considered by itself, should improve health. But it also increases cost growth, an effect widely recognized in health expenditure forecasting. People with insurance feel this cost growth through rising premiums, but the cost inflation is felt especially keenly by the uninsured, who must pay more whenever they buy health services (or receive less care for what they pay).The observation that the insured are relatively healthier doesn’t by itself imply that expanding coverage will save lives.

Thus, even if health insurance did absolutely nothing to improve national health outcomes, we’d still expect the insured to be healthier than the uninsured. Thus, the observation that the insured are relatively healthier doesn’t by itself imply that expanding coverage will save lives.

There are countless potential examples of the fallacy in operation. For example, consider the current tax preference for employer-sponsored insurance (ESI). Those who receive health insurance through their employer enjoy an advantage in these benefits’ exemption from taxation. This tax preference steers additional health benefits to these individuals. However, this does not mean improved health for the nation as a whole. To the contrary, the ESI tax preference is widely recognized as a driver of health market inefficiency, reducing the value of health services relative to dollars spent.

An even simpler example: the government could easily add to the wealth of ten individuals by sending them each a million-dollar check. It is a non-sequitur to infer from this that the national wealth would be increased by the government’s sending a million-dollar check to every American.

In short, the “people will die” argument is premised on an easily-recognized logical fallacy. Don’t use it if you want to convince others to adopt your health care policy views. If you do, the only thing certain to die will be your credibility.

Reprinted from Economics 21.

Editor’s Note: Check out this hilarious video, parodying the “people will die” argument.

Charles Blahous

Charles Blahous

Charles Blahous is a senior research fellow for the Mercatus Center, a research fellow for the Hoover Institution, a public trustee for Social Security and Medicare, and a contributor to e21.

Actor Clooney flees Europe: Do as I say, not as I do!

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These super rich Lefty celebrities have no shame!

In 2016, Clooney and his wife praise German Chancellor Angela Merkel [pictured right] for her welcome to the migrant invaders (not using those words of course!). Italy as an escape? Maybe not so much!

George Clooney is reportedly moving his young family to his Los Angeles mansion which is deemed safer (from Jihadists) than is his property in the UK or his Italian get-away mansion at Lake Como.

From Breitbart (hat tip: Brenda):

Report: Open Borders Advocate George Clooney Moving Family Back to Trump’s America for ‘Security Reasons’

Actor and immigration activist George Clooney will move to Los Angeles with his wife Amal and newborn twins Ella and Alexander due to security concerns at his England estate, according to a report.

Life & Style magazine reported last week that the 56-year-old Oscar-winner will move his newly-expanded family to his mansion in Studio City, California, after deeming his 17th century mansion in Sonning, England to be not sufficiently safe for them.

“As soon as Amal found out she was pregnant, he hired former Secret Service agents to assess all his properties and make recommendations for improvement,” an unnamed Clooney “insider” told the magazine. “His mansion in Studio City [Calif.] was deemed the most secure, and it’s within minutes of an LAPD station.”

[….]

In May, British government officials disclosed that 23,000 known jihadi terrorists are believed to be residing in Britain, far more than the 3,000 that had initially been reported.

[….]

In February of last year, the actor met privately with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and praised the German leader’s acceptance of refugees from Syria and other countries. The same month, Clooney told Sky News in an interview that the United States is not doing “enough” to help Syrian refugees, and that 10,000 refugees per year was too low a figure to be admitting into the country.

[….]

In July of last year, a makeshift refugee camp was established in Lake Como after the Swiss government decided to close its southern border with Italy. Dozens of refugees arrived from African and Asian countries were housed in tents close to the Clooneys’ home, with a local tour guide telling the Daily Mail that the refugee camps were a “big problem because of the huge numbers [of refugees] who are arriving all the time.”

More here.

Bill Gates woke up and smelled the coffee, any chance Clooney will get it?

This post is filed in my ‘Laugh of the day’ category.  I have another good laugh for later (or tomorrow), so come on back!

Click here for my complete archive on the Invasion of Europe.

President Trump in Poland: ‘Our Civilization Will Triumph’

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A far cry from Obama’s avowal that Islamic civilization will triumph. My latest in FrontPage:

Interrupted repeatedly by chants of “Donald Trump! Donald Trump! Donald Trump!” as he was speaking in Poland on Thursday, President Trump delivered a ringing affirmation that he would defend Western civilization: “Just as Poland could not be broken, I declare today for the world to hear that the West will never, ever be broken. Our values will prevail, our people will thrive, and our civilization will triumph.”

Now, we’re used Presidents affirming that civilization will triumph. Barack Obama did it, too. Trump’s remarkable innovation here, and sharp departure from the example his predecessor set, is in declaring that Western civilization would triumph. Barack Hussein Obama, by contrast, was famous for declaring the triumph of Islamic civilization, most notably when he told the United Nations General Assembly on September 25, 2012: “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”

If the future is not to belong to those who are perceived as slandering the prophet of Islam, Sharia blasphemy laws criminalizing criticism of Islam will have to have been imposed; people aren’t likely to give up criticizing Muhammad voluntarily, especially as jihad terror attacks incited by his teachings become an ever more common feature of life in the West. Thus if the future doesn’t belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam, it will be because the freedom of speech has been extinguished and Islamic values have prevailed: Islamic civilization will have triumphed.

If that was not what Barack Obama wanted, he never gave any indication of it during eight years in the White House. The Democrats constantly pointed to his killings of bin Laden and al-Awlaki as indication that he was tough on terrorism, but amid foreign and domestic policies indefatigably supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and its auxiliaries in the United States, unstinting opposition to the freedom of speech regarding criticism of Islam, and an appalling deal that gave aid and comfort to the Islamic Republic of Iran, those killings only made clear that while Obama evidently opposed violent jihad, he had no serious objection to other methods of Sharia imposition and Islamization.

In Warsaw Thursday, Trump offered a radically different vision. “We are fighting hard against radical Islamic terrorism,” he declared. “And we will prevail. We cannot accept those who reject our values and who use hatred to justify violence against the innocent.”

“We cannot accept those who reject our values.” After eight years of Obama acting as if the freedom of speech and the right to bear arms were burdens to be cast off rather than rights to be defended, this is an extraordinary statement. It is also one of the reasons why Trump’s notorious “travel ban” contains a little-noted directive that is clearly designed to preserve American values. The March 6 executive order states:

To be more transparent with the American people and to implement more effectively policies and practices that serve the national interest, the Secretary of Homeland Security, in consultation with the Attorney General, shall, consistent with applicable law and national security, collect and make publicly available the following information:…information regarding the number and types of acts of gender-based violence against women, including so-called “honor killings,” in the United States by foreign nationals.

Muslims commit 91 percent of honor killings worldwide. A manual of Islamic law certified as a reliable guide to Sunni orthodoxy by Al-Azhar, the most respected authority in Sunni Islam, says that “retaliation is obligatory against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right.” However, “not subject to retaliation” is “a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers) for killing their offspring, or offspring’s offspring.” (Reliance of the Traveller o1.1-2). In other words, someone who kills his child incurs no legal penalty under Islamic law. In this case the victim was the murderer’s daughter, a victim to the culture of violence and intimidation that such laws help create.

The Palestinian Authority gives pardons or suspended sentences for honor murders. Iraqi women have asked for tougher sentences for Islamic honor murderers, who get off lightly now. Syria in 2009 scrapped a law limiting the length of sentences for honor killings, but “the new law says a man can still benefit from extenuating circumstances in crimes of passion or honour ‘provided he serves a prison term of no less than two years in the case of killing.’” And in 2003 the Jordanian Parliament voted down on Islamic grounds a provision designed to stiffen penalties for honor killings. Al-Jazeera reported that “Islamists and conservatives said the laws violated religious traditions and would destroy families and values.”

Until the encouragement Islamic law gives to honor killing is acknowledged and confronted, more women will suffer. President Trump is trying to keep women from suffering in this way in the United States.

That element of the executive order is the kind of thing that is involved in ensuring that “our civilization will triumph”: stopping the encroachment of Sharia values in the United States. Trump in Warsaw wasn’t just paying lip service to unattainable ideals, any more than Obama was when he said that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” Obama worked very hard to make sure that would be true, and now his successor is working very hard to ensure that Judeo-Christian civilization survives instead. Americans can be grateful that we do not, for the moment, have (as Trump as said) a President of the world, but a President of the United States.

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VIDEO: Linda Sarsour Inciting Islamic Violence [jihad] Against the President of the United States

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Linda Sarsour’s jihad against Trump: here’s why she really is inciting violence.

My latest over at the Geller Report:

Linda Sarsour said it at the convention of the Hamas-linked Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) over the July 4 weekend. She denounced the Trump administration, saying: “Why, sisters and brothers, why are we so unprepared? Why are we so afraid of this administration and the potential chaos that they will ensue on our community?” Invoking Muhammad, she said: “A word of truth in front of a tyrant ruler or leader, that is the best form of jihad.” She added: “I hope that when we stand up to those who oppress our communities, that Allah accepts from us that as a form of jihad, that we are struggling against tyrants and rulers not only abroad in the Middle East or the other side of the world, but here in these United States of America, where you have fascists and white supremacists and Islamophobes reigning in the White House.”

She also went on to say:

“Our number one and top priority is to protect and defend our communities. It is not to assimilate and to please any other people in authority…Our top priority, even higher than all those priorities, is to please Allah, and only Allah.”

Sarsour’s words were highly charged, and have understandably caused a controversy. Sarsour herself claimed that the widely-circulated clip of her calling for jihad against Trump was misleadingly edited: “Right wing tries to demonize my leadership. Editing videos is their favorite pasttime” — and she tweeted a link to her full speech. In another Tweet, she claimed the mantle of Martin Luther King: “My work is CRYSTAL CLEAR as an activist rooted in Kingian non-violence. This is y my teams r effective cause we r powerful w/o violence.” And in keeping with the tried-and-tested practice of Islamic supremacists all over the West, she claimed victim status: “Stay focused and pray for the protection of those on the front lines of the movements for justice. We are under threat.”

Meanwhile, the Leftist media, ever ready to circle the wagons and rally around one of their own, no matter how egregious the offense committed, is pulling out all the stops to defend Sarsour and heap contempt on the racist, right-wing yahoos who dare to think that her words constitute an incitement to violence against President Trump.

“Women’s March Organizer Linda Sarsour Spoke of ‘Jihad.’ But She Wasn’t Talking About Violence,” Time Magazine reassures us. The Wrap tells us about “3 Things Conservatives Got Very Wrong About Linda Sarsour’s Speech.” The Huffington Post affected a gloat: “Linda Sarsour Said ‘Jihad’ In A Speech And Conservatives Freaked Out.” Chris Geidner of BuzzFeed tweeted a transcript of Sarsour’s remarks, with the comment: “Hey you people scare-sharing Linda Sarsour’s speech, read this transcription, which I just made because you all are trash misquoting her.”

CNN commentator Marc Lamont Hill tweeted: “The people disagreeing with @lsarsour clearly don’t understand what Jihad means.” The Huffington Post likewise said that those who were concerned about Sarsour’s words were ignorant fools:

The word “jihad” has long been misused and misunderstood by both Muslim extremists and people seeking to spread hatred against Muslims. But for the majority of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims, “jihad” is a word that literally means “to struggle.” It’s a concept within Islam that represents a commitment to serve God, and to be good to yourself and your neighbors. It can be personal, like struggling to get through a rough workday, or overarching, like striving to seek justice for all people.

As Sarsour recounted in her speech, the Prophet Muhammad is said to have described the best form of jihad as “a word of truth in front of a tyrant, ruler or leader.”

Likewise The Wrap:

Many non-Muslims mistakenly believe the word “jihad” means “holy war,” when in fact, it means “struggle” or “striving,” according to the Islamic Supreme Council of America. “It can refer to internal as well as external efforts to be a good Muslims or believer, as well as working to inform people about the faith of Islam,” the Council said. “Jihad is not a violent concept. [It] is not a declaration of war against other religions.” Also, “The concept of jihad has been hijacked by many political and religious groups over the ages in a bid to justify various forms of violence … Scholars say this misuse of jihad contradicts Islam.”

In her speech, Sarsour quoted a passage in the Quran where the Prophet Muhammad explains that the best form of jihad or struggle is “a word of truth in front of a tyrant rule or leader …” Sarsour followed with, “I hope that when we stand up to those who oppress our communities, that Allah accepts that from us as a form of jihad, that we are struggling against tyrants and rulers…” She then cited “fascists and white supremacists and Islamophobes reigning in the White House.”

Though she did make a not-so-subtle reference to President Trump and his constituents, Sarsour in no way incited violence against them. In using the word “jihad,” she merely encouraged her audience to stand up to discrimination.

Yes, in Islam jihad is a spiritual struggle. The Shafi’i legal manual (the Shafi’is are a school of Islamic jurisprudence) ‘Umdat al-Salik (Reliance of the Traveller), which has been certified by al-Azhar, the foremost authority in Sunni Islam, as conforming to the “practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni community,” devotes one paragraph to jihad as spiritual struggle. Then it spends seven pages on jihad as warfare. It makes it quite clear that jihad is warfare against non-Muslims:

Jihad means to war against non-Muslims, and is etymologically derived from the word ‘mujahada’, signifying warfare to establish the religion. And it is the lesser jihad. As for the greater jihad, it is spiritual warfare against the lower self (nafs), which is why the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said as he was returning from jihad,

“We have returned from the lesser jihad to the greater jihad.”

The scriptural basis for jihad, prior to scholarly consensus is such Koranic verses as:

(1) “Fighting is prescribed for you” (Koran 2:216);
(2) “Slay them wherever you find them” (Koran 4:89);
(3) “Fight the idolators utterly” (Koran 9:36);

and such hadiths as the one related by Bukhari and Muslim that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said:

“I have been commanded to fight people until they testify that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, and perform the prayer, and pay zakat. If they say it, they have saved their blood and possessions from me, except for the rights of Islam over them. And their final reckoning is with Allah.”

and the hadith reported by Muslim,

“To go forth in the morning or evening to fight in the path of Allah is better than the whole world and everything in it.’”

What’s more, if jihad is simply a word spoken against a tyrant, then why is there an entire chapter of the Qur’an entitled “Booty” or “The Spoils of War” (al-Anfal). What spoils ensue from a word of truth spoken in front of a tyrant ruler or leader? If jihad is simply a word of truth spoken in front of a tyrant, how is a Muslim supposed to make Jews and Christians “pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued” (Qur’an 9:29)? If jihad is simply a a word of truth spoken in front of a tyrant, why have thousands upon thousands of Muslims worldwide joined violent jihad groups? Why are there any violent jihad groups at all? Why is this misunderstanding of jihad so widespread?

Now: does the centrality in Islamic law of jihad as warfare against unbelievers mean that Sarsour was inciting violence against Trump? Not directly. But Linda Sarsour isn’t stupid. Nor is she unaware of what Muslims are doing in the name of jihad around the world today. When she says, “I hope that when we stand up to those who oppress our communities, that Allah accepts from us that as a form of jihad,” she herself may mean a non-violent standing up, but she has to know that when other Muslims who know the real meaning of jihad in Islam hear that, they will hear it as a call to violence. She must know that when she says that “our number one and top priority is to protect and defend our communities” and that “our top priority, even higher than all those priorities, is to please Allah, and only Allah,” that some Muslims will think of how pleased Allah is with the deaths of unbelievers, since he has guaranteed Paradise to those who “kill and are killed” for him (Qur’an 9:111).

All the damage control of the Leftist media, heaping contempt upon conservatives for being so stupid as to think that jihad involves violence, is simply more of the denial and willful ignorance regarding jihad that the political and media elites constantly force upon us. The truth they refuse to realize, and smear us as “Islamophobes” for realizing, is that Muslims worldwide who commit violence against unbelievers regard that violence as a form of jihad, and know that the Qur’an and Sunnah teach warfare against unbelievers.

Linda Sarsour no doubt knows this as well, and as such, knew just how incendiary her words really were. And if a Muslim decides to wage jihad, in its Qur’anic and traditional sense, against President Trump, she should be held legally responsible for this incitement.

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RELATED VIDEO: Linda Sarsour: The Enemy of the State.

Why the Secret Plan of the Bashir Regime Demands Reinstating Sanctions Against Sudan

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President Bashir of Sudan, African Union Summit, South Africa 2015. Source (AFP)

On January 13, 2017 former President Obama signed Executive Order No. 13761 temporarily lifting  20 year old sanctions against Sudan led by International Criminal Court indicted war criminal President Omar Hassan al-Bashir. The Executive Order had a look back period of 180 days which ends on July 12th, whereupon the Trump Administration might permanently lift sanctions.  This comes at a time when new evidence surfaced that a strategic policy group of the Bashir regime in Khartoum continued genocide against the indigenous black African people in Darfur, Nuba Mountains, South Kordofan  and the Blue Nile region.

The rancorous dispute between Qatar and four Arab nations, over alleged support for Islamic terrorism and the Muslim Brotherhood, has placed Bashir in a difficult position, as he has been asked by Saudi Arabia to take sides.  The government of neighboring Chad issued a statement cutting diplomatic relations with Qatar. Chadian President Idriss Deby Itno has long been waiting for this moment. Qatar has hosted and supported Chadian Islamist groups who have been recruited for Sudan President Omar al-Bashir’s Rapid Support Force (RSF)/Janjaweed militias.

In one embarrassing episode in mid-June 2017 General Taha Osman al Hussein, State Minister in the Presidency and  Director General of the Presidential Palace in Khartoum, allegedly had been arrested in an failed attempted coup to overthrow President Bashir of Sudan.  General al Hussein is a dual Sudan and Saudi Arabia citizen. Subsequent news reports said that General al Hussein and his wife had left the Sudan for Saudi Arabia after he had volunteered to allegedly lead an overthrow of Qatar.

Sudan had initiated an influence campaign in Washington retaining the services of the lobbying firm of Squire Paton Boggs at $40,000 per month to roll back the sanctions permanently. The objective was to make a convincing case that Sudan, despite its terrible human rights record, had nevertheless co-operated in providing useful counterterrorism intelligence on the whereabouts of the notorious Joseph Kony of the Lord’s Resistance Army.  In fact one of the co-authors, General Abdallah of the Sudan United Movement (SUM), had provided information on Kony’s whereabouts to US AFRICOM.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee rebuts recommendation of former US Sudan Envoys

The controversy over lifting Sudan Sanctions rose to a peak in late June 2017, when a noted US Sudan human rights activist Eric Reeves issued a scathing rebuttal letter.  It challenged a letter sent to the US House Foreign Affairs Committee by former Special Envoys to Sudan Princeton Lyman and Donald Booth, along with former U.S. Charge d’Affaires in Khartoum, Jerry Lanier, suggesting there was evidence to lift sanctions.

Reeves wrote:

In this almost three decades of brutal, tyrannical, and serially genocidal rule, this regime has not changed in any significant way. It has certainly not changed in ways claimed as possible by Lyman in December 2011:

We [the Obama administration] do not want to see the ouster of the [Khartoum] regime, nor regime change. We want to see the regime carrying out reform via constitutional democratic measures.” (Interview with Asharq al-Awsat, December 3, 2011).

One hardly knows where to begin in parsing the absurdity of this statement, justifying the Obama administration’s opposition to regime change. [Regime change] overwhelmingly favored by the vast majority of Sudanese and indeed now the linchpin of political and military opposition to the regime throughout Sudan.

Reeves then proceeded to document the escalation of genocidal ethnic cleansing against the indigenous black African people in Darfur, Nuba Mountains and the Blue Nile region since the Obama Executive Order went into effect.

On June 30, 2017,  members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee responded by sending a signed letter to President Trump. It recommended that any decision to lift Sudan sanctions be deferred for at least a year past the July 12th. That would allow a new Special Envoy and team to be appointed and conduct investigations. The letter clearly stated the reasons for their recommendation to the President:

There has been substantial fighting [by] Sudan in Darfur in recent months, including evidence of targeting civilians by Sudanese armed forces and their affiliated militias.  As expected, no humanitarian access has been granted to South Kordofan and Blue Nile states, and only limited access to Darfur.

While the Sudanese government may seem cooperative on counterterrorism efforts, we believe they continue regularly scheduled support for violent non-state armed groups, like the former combatants of the Islamist group, Seleka, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). Other similar violent actors [are] operating in northern and central Africa, the Middle East and neighboring countries.

As the look back date of July 12th looms there were further troubling disclosures.

The Top Secret Minutes of the Sudan Security Intelligence and Political Committee

Amidst the swirl of events concerning the lifting of sanctions against the Sudan regime of President al-Bashir were stunning revelations contained in the “Top Secret” minutes of The Security Intelligence and Political Committee of Crisis Management held in the Office of the Director of the Sudan National Intelligence and Security Services (NISS) on June 18, 2017.  The secret document had been obtained by a reliable informed source and was translated.

Attending the Khartoum meeting were the power elite of the reigning National Congress Party (NCP) regime: President Bashir, Vice President Backri Hassan Salih, Foreign Minister Ibrahim Gandur, Minister of Defense Awad bn Ouf, Hamid Momtaz Secretary of NCP political affairs, and  State Minister in the Ministry of foreign affairs, General Mohamed Atta al Mola Director of NISS, General Ibrahim Mohamed al Hassan, Commander of Military Intelligence,  Ibrahim Mhamud Vice President of NCP and Professor Ibrahim Ahmed Omer President of Parliament.

The minutes of this Crisis Management Committee revealed the broad sweep of plans for assassination of a major Sudan resistance commander in the Nuba Mountains and senior Officers supporting him. It also addressed sponsorship of international ISIS terrorist activities in the Sahel region of Africa, especially in Libya, and the global Muslim Brotherhood Organization.  It elucidated web of deception in the Bashir regime’s influence campaign in Washington, DC to lift sanctions by the Trump Administration.

These top secret minutes also reflect the Bashir regime’s position in the current dispute between Qatar and four Arab Countries: Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirate, Bahrain and Egypt. It reveals that relations with Iran secretly continue despite the public cutoff in 2015.

The revelations in this NISS document further the case of the letter signed by Members of the US House Foreign Affairs Committee sent to President Trump. The following is a digest of key recommendations of the Sudan NISS Crisis Management Committee at the June 18, 2017 meeting.

Elimination of Nuba Mountains Resistance SPLA/N Commander General Abdalaziz Adam Alhilu

The Committee sought to isolate and eliminate Nuba Mountains SPLA/N Commander General Abdulaziz Adam Alhilu, through use of all government institutions, political, military, intelligence and propaganda. They also will promote Malik Agar, Governor of the Blue Nile State and a leader of the SPLM/N, through an extensive media campaign  focusing the African Union’s position supporting his legitimacy as SPLM/N head. Allegedly, the Committee minutes contend the South Sudan government does not support Abdulaziz. They would create internal problems for Abdulaziz through tribal conflicts using Nuba people opposing him to foment conflicts inside SPLA/N to weaken and totally destroy it. They indicated that Churches are the main places where communities are gathering in Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile; so they want to use highly trained people to infiltrate into Christian religious communities and create problems for Abdulaziz and SPLM/N. They plan to assassinate officers supporting Abdulaziz using military force through the support of the Agar faction and tribes of Angassana to remove him from the Nuba Mountains.

Recruitment and Infiltration of ISIS fighters to support African and Global Islamic Terrorism

They will continue support for the Global jihad objectives of the Islamic State and the Muslim Brotherhood. To that end they indicated that ISIS fighters in Iraq and Syria were defeated and the desert terrain is not suitable for continued warfare.  They would relocate ISIS fighters from Iraq and Syria and infiltrate them into the areas of Bahr al Gazal and Equatorial regions in the South Sudan. The areas of Bahr al Gazal and Equatorial regions would allow ISIS fighters to establish linkage with Boko Haram in Nigeria in the West through  the Central African Republic and  with Al Shebaab of Somalia in the East.  They would infiltrate ISIS fighters into neighboring Libya to reinforce ISIS affiliate groups there seeking to defeat the Libyan National Army regime of General Khalifa Haftar to prevent him from attaining power, as they view him as a threat to their regime. They believe that South Sudan President Salva Kiir supports the overthrow of the Khartoum regime, thus they want to overthrow the regime of President Kiir. To that end they would train Southern Sudanese youth, people from West Africa and Nigerian students supporting Boko Haram as they resemble the South Sudanese Africa tribal people in the capital of Juba.  They would infiltrate them into South Sudan as secret agent provocateurs to raise resentment against the regime of President Kiir, seeking its overthrow.

Support for Qatar and Renewal of Iran relations

The Committee minutes indicated that Saudi Arabia is trying to force them to leave Qatar.  However, they are not going to leave Qatar because it has been supporting the regime both ideologically and financially.  They contend, without the support of Qatar they would have been overthrown and imprisoned. They would reestablish their relations with Iran because of shared Islamic Jihad goals. Qatar, Iran and Turkey have established a relationship which has become a main point of contention raised by the Saudi Arabia and the three other Arab states. As we have written previously, Qatar has provided $200 million under the guise of education reform to Sudan that was diverted to funding the recruitment, training and equipping of more than 24,000 Rapid Support Forces (RSF)/Janjaweed militia.  They are under the control of the NISS in 16 camps in the region around Khartoum. These RSF forces were immediately deployed to Darfur and the Nuba Mountains to accelerate the ethnic cleansing of native black African peoples in those conflict zones.

Campaign to influence the Trump Administration’s lifting of Sanctions

Prior to the July 12th review by the Trump Administration they allegedly could stop two planned terrorist attacks on American interests in the world to convince Americans of Sudan’s seriousness of helping the US in combating global terrorism to justify lifting the sanctions.

They want to prevail on Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to put pressure on the US to lift sanctions. Saudi Arabia had urged President Obama to sign the temporary lifting of Sudan sanctions with his Executive Order. They also think  they have co-opted the US Intelligence Community because they understood the way the US intelligence Community think and operate.  They contend they have given counterterrorism intelligence information that no other country in the world had given them.  In return the US Intelligence Community has very little information about what is happening in Sudan.

Conclusion

This secret document reinforces our earlier contentions based on the captured Arab Coalition Plan. The Bashir regime’s objective is to recruit a jihad army of upwards of 150,000 from across the African Sahel region, ISIS Middle East and foreign fighters. The objective is to create a Caliphate ruled under Islamic Sharia law from Khartoum sponsoring global Islamic terrorism in consort with Muslim Brotherhood sponsoring regimes like Qatar and in renewed relations with Shiite Iran.  That is reflected in the Libyan National Army discovery of documents attesting to the collusion of Sudan, Qatar and Iran in fostering ISIS terrorists seeking to dismantle the Libyan National Army led by General Haftar.  Given these secret document revelations, President Trump would be well advised to accept the recommendation in the letter from the  US House Foreign Affairs Committee. That would entail  deferring  consideration of lifting sanctions for at least a year until a new Special Envoy of Sudan and South Sudan is appointed and team  assigned to obtain facts  that might verify the revelations of the secret June 2017 Sudan Crisis Management Committee minutes. A vital first step would be the appointment of a knowledgeable Special Envoy with plenipotentiary powers to investigate and expose the Bashir regime genocidal jihad objectives.  Another would be promoting regime change.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Lt. Gen. Abakar M. Abdallah Lt. Gen. Abdallah is Chairman of the Sudan Unity Movement (SUM). He is a native of North Darfur who joined the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in 1984 and became active in the Nuba Hills and Darfurian resistance movements. In 1989 he joined the Patriotic Salvation Movement in neighboring Chad based in Darfur. He served as an officer in the Chadian army for 23 years. He held senior intelligence and counterterrorism posts including as Coordinator of the Multi-National Joint Task Force of Nigeria, Chad and Niger. He was Coordinator of Pan-Sahel Initiative (PSI) Anti-Terrorism Unit of Chad and Commander of PSI Anti-Terrorism Battalion of Chad 2004. He is a December 2002 graduate of the Intelligence Officers’ Advanced and Combating Terrorism Courses, US Army Intelligence Center and Schools, Fort Huachuca, Arizona. He was a Counter Terrorism Fellow and a Graduate of the College of International Security Affairs, National Defense University, Washington, DC, 2005. He was an International Fellow and Graduate of the US Army War College, Class of 2008.

Jerry Gordon is a Senior Editor at the New English Review.

Deborah Martin is a 35 year veteran Sudan linguistic and cultural affairs consultant

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

Why the Swiss Health Care Model Will Never Work in America by Kevin D. Williamson

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If you’re wondering what in Hell is actually going on with U.S. health-care policy, the short version is this: Policymakers in both parties are trying to replicate Swiss policies in a country that isn’t Swiss.

The Affordable Care Act was, as thinkers as different as Paul Krugman and Avik Roy both observed, an attempt to Swiss up the U.S. health-insurance and health-care markets. (Obligatory reiteration: Those are not the same thing.) The Swiss system, Santésuisse, achieves one big progressive goal — universal health-insurance coverage — while offering much to please conservatives: a private market for health insurance and health care, consumer choice, and relatively low government spending on health care.

Obamacare vs. Santésuisse

Santésuisse is, in its broadest strokes, a lot like the model established by the so-called Affordable Care Act — a model that is kept in large part by the Republicans’ “repeal-and-replace” proposal, which neither repeals nor replaces the Affordable Care Act, though it does make some substantial changes to it.

Like Obamacare, Santésuisse mandates that all citizens purchase insurance from private insurance companies; establishes by law a minimum package of acceptable benefits to satisfy that mandate; subsidizes health-insurance premiums for lower-income people, with a goal of keeping their insurance premiums to less than 10 percent of their incomes; mandates coverage of preexisting conditions and imposes “community rating,” which means that low-risk insurance buyers pay higher premiums to allow for high-risk buyers to pay lower premiums, though the Swiss do make some adjustments for age and sex (!); it imposes controls on procedure costs and reimbursement for providers.

The Swiss model also does a few things that ACA does not: It requires that insurance companies offer their minimal policies on a nonprofit basis; it is structured around relatively high out-of-pocket expenses (high copays and deductibles) in order to encourage consumers to spend soberly; and, perhaps most important, it does this in the context of a health-insurance market that is entirely individual: There are no employer-based health-insurance plans in Switzerland. Everybody buys his own health insurance, the same way people buy everything from tacos to mobile-phone service. Swiss regulations also mandate that prices be made public, which helps consumer markets to function.

The Cost of Health Care

In terms of government spending on health care, Switzerland isn’t terribly different from the United States. Indeed, with the exception of high-spending Norway, per-capita government spending on health care is pretty consistent across a selection of advanced countries with very different health-care systems: Switzerland, the United States, the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, and Denmark all have similar per-capita outlays. Interestingly, none of those countries has a national single-payer system: Sweden and Denmark have largely public systems, but they are run mostly by local governments rather than by the national government.

Among countries with single-payer systems, there is a fair amount of variability in per-capita spending: Australia, for example, has lower government spending than does the United Kingdom.

In terms of total spending — government and private spending together — countries with quite different systems lead the pack: The United States spends the most, followed by Switzerland, Norway, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Ireland, Austria, Denmark, Belgium, and Canada. (These are OCED statistics from 2014.) The lack of a robust relationship between health-care systems, health-care expenses, and health-care outcomes suggests that the most powerful determinants of these are exogenous to policy, things like national demographic characteristics and economic conditions: Older people with lots of disposable income will tend to spend more on medical services, the Swedes and Okinawans have been healthy and long-lived under a number of different health-care systems, etc.

Which is to say, one of the reasons the Swiss and the Americans spend relatively large sums on health care may be the structure of the insurance markets; it might simply be that they are rich countries in which consumers choose to consume more health care, which would explain why Sweden and Canada are in the club of relatively big spenders. And low medical spending is not necessarily a sign of health: They don’t spend very much on health care in Cameroon.

Cultural Differences Matter

As Avik Roy and others have pointed out, trying to build Swiss health-care architecture on American foundations is a project by no means guaranteed to succeed. Switzerland, for example, has enjoyed very strong compliance with its national health-insurance mandate. Part of that is cultural (the Swiss are rule-following people), and part of it is that Swiss government: If you fail to comply with the mandate, the Swiss government will garnishee your wages and charge you a penalty equivalent to the cost of the premiums plus up to 50 percent, and, if you persist, the government will sign you up for an insurance policy and allow the provider to sue you for back premiums covering the period during which you were uninsured.

The American version is a little less robust, to say the least: The ACA mandate is “enforced” with a very small penalty that in most cases is nowhere near as expensive as signing up for insurance. That is, the Swiss have a system under which compliance makes economic sense, and we have a system under which non-compliance makes economic sense.

The Affordable Care Act was designed in a dishonest way, front-loading the revenue and backing in the expenses in order to get a nice budget score from the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO rolled its institutional eyes at this, and its report suggested very strongly that its analysts did not believe a word of what they were writing, inasmuch as the most popular parts of ACA were likely to be enforced while the unpopular bits — like the “Cadillac tax” — would be put off or softened, resulting in a program that in reality cost much more and produced less revenue than it did in the model version that CBO scored.

Sure enough, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bernie Sanders both campaigned against the Cadillac tax (it hits their union foot soldiers first and hardest) while the House and Senate Republican plans would keep in, in theory, but put off collecting it until 2025 — at which point the smart money would be on its being put off again.

If you want a Swiss health-care system, then you have to be willing to accept ruthlessly efficient Swiss enforcement and an unsentimental Swiss bottom-line view of the program. Neither party is interested in that: The new Republican health-care plan would formally do away with the individual mandate while keeping a form of the preexisting-coverage rule, which is, the protestations of the bill’s drafters notwithstanding, probably going to be unworkable.

As long as you have a mandate that insurance companies cover preexisting conditions (i.e., that they place bets against events that already have happened) then you really have to have the mandate that people buy insurance, too; otherwise you create incentives to forgo buying insurance until you are actually sick, creating insurance markets composed mostly of sick people, a model that is not economically sustainable. If you want to cover preexisting conditions, then you have to have a mandate and enforce it strongly — Switzerland’s compliance rate is about 99.5 percent.

For comparison, the United States mandates that drivers carry automotive insurance, and about one in five drivers fails to comply with that mandate. And while the enforcement is tougher, the subsidies are less generous. Two-thirds of the Swiss receive no health-insurance subsidies at all, and the subsidies that are received tend to be relatively small except for the very poor.

But what is most critical may be that the Swiss model is free of one big problem that most Americans do not see as a problem at all: employer-based health-insurance programs. The Swiss market is an individual market, but most insured Americans get their insurance from their employers. Doing away with that would provide real benefits, but it would also bring a great deal of stress to risk-averse Americans who are, in large part, satisfied with their employer-based insurance plans. A Swiss system in the United States might — might — be a good idea, or at least better than the status quo ante of 2009.

A Swiss system with no real enforcement, sloppy economic thinking, and no dynamic, consumer-driven insurance market? A Swiss system that replaces Swiss efficiency with American sentimentality? It didn’t work when it was called Obamacare. It won’t work when it’s called Trumpcare or Ryancare or McConnellcare, either.

Reprinted from National Review. 

Kevin D. Williamson

Kevin D. Williamson

Kevin D. Williamson is roving correspondent for National Review.

Tech is Drastically Disrupting Local Taxes — Can Government Respond? by Jim Ley

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In 1994 I gave a speech to a large gathering at the National Association of Counties asking the question “Will You be Roadkill on the Information Superhighway?” The Internet as an everyday thing was new and just beginning to gain some relevance. But those of us who liked to look to the future saw a lot that was going to impact public policy.

On that day I asked them the simple question — how will you tax a box the size of your kitchen table (OK, be fair, file servers were a lot larger then, but I was looking to the future) that produces all of the sales transactions that used to be produced by your local mall — at the time the arguably largest single property tax generator in most urban counties?

I look back on that presentation and realize that as close as I was to defining a set of specific challenges that might take place, I wasn’t even in the ballpark of being able to see the systematic influence that technology would drive across the board.

I find it interesting that much of the policy discussion today regarding technology is centered on the theme of “coping with disruptive technology trends.” Just the use of the word “disruptive” to describe the challenge shows how difficult it is for government and society to identify and adapt to changes in the status quo. How tied to the status quo we can become!

The way of systemic adaptation

Amazon is now the large retailer in the world.

The online shopping experience, having started in 1995, has hit its stride and has become more a part of our everyday consuming life than we could ever have suspected. Online fulfillment companies like Amazon have evolved through multiple phases of connection with their customers and have now begun to address the subliminal emotional aspects of the shopping experience.

Within 10 years even more will change as regards the online shopping experience. You won’t have to shop, as in searching and then browsing through endless pages looking for what you want. Your desires will be presented to you directly, just like you have your own digital personal shopper. Your shopping experience will become the guide to anticipating your purchasing needs.

Your closet, pantry and refrigerator will tell your computer, and that of your online retailer, how old your clothes are, when you wore an item last, and what food staples you are in need of. Your purchasing habits, social media and on line habits will be mined to produce a customized shopping experience geared just to you. The local retail store will increasingly become a thing of the past, replaced by an outlet where you may be able to try out virtual goods or where you can have them delivered in the form of 3D printed consumables. With a personal shopping list having been organized for you without much thought on your part, the push of a button will bring your groceries and supplies to your door.

Other things will change as a result.

The commercial real estate market will begin to shrink, maybe even dramatically. The need for large and small strip malls will be greatly diminished, limited in some respects to places that house grocery stores — to the degree they will be needed as grocery needs can also be algorithmically anticipated — and small offices and boutique local retail.

Personal shopping automobile trips will, over time, be reduced dramatically, and more and more people will begin to abandon personal automobile ownership in favor of car sharing services that will evolve from the current Uber model to the point where you can simply call for a self-driving vehicle on your smartphone or similar device.

Automobile sales as the significant source of state and local sales tax revenue they now are will begin to decline under this scenario. Bulk delivery services like FedEx and UPS will be replaced with drones and Uber like personalized delivery. The Amazon-type fulfillment center will become the largest building in a region — until it too is made obsolete.

A radical impact on funding governments

All of this will radically transform the property tax base, with commercial space being devalued sharply. It is this commercial and office space in the shape of downtowns and dense (not suburban) clusters that, until now, has produced the large tax premium  — defined as producing taxes over and above the average per acre — that the rest of the community uses as a dividend to keep its public services funded at a sustainable level.

Maintaining a sustainable property tax base will become a topic at every City Council and County Commission meeting as the commercial tax base absorbs this “disruptive” result. The shape of communities will change, creating large opportunities for redevelopment, always with an emphasis on propping up the property tax base. A strategy of density oriented tax farming will become more obvious as a means of maintaining the flow of public revenue while limiting costs required to provide for the basics of public service. It will no longer be a question of what is the most valuable parcel in a county or city tax base (like “the mall”) but instead it will be all about the taxes generated per acre of development. Density, a dirty word used in land-use hearings today, will be the byword for financial survival.

Collectively these trends should work to influence land-use policy now and lead to a redefinition of urban space, their collective interaction producing the catalyst that moves the market back to a more walkable and intimate urban and suburban form in our activity centers.

The question is: Are the statehouses and local council chambers that set the policies that manage our communities capable of identifying these trends and managing the political discussions and decisions required to adapt? What principle will be applied in attempts to cope? Will it be a principle of regulate-and-control that protects the status quo, or a principle of identify-and-adapt, seeking to engage and inform investment and real estate interests who themselves will have to adapt or perish?

The states and cities that can think forward like the Amazons and Apples of the private sector, will be in position to thrive in the new economy. The rest…

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on The Revolutionary Act.

The ‘Black Pope’ is reaping what he has sown: Sodomy in the Vatican

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Bishop Jorje Mario Brogoglio now Pope Francis I.

As a Catholic is pains me to write this column. It truly breaks my heart.

In A.D. 1139, Saint Malachy received a vision in which it was revealed to him that there would be 112 more Popes, with the last one being the “black Pope.” Pope Francis I is Pope number 112 after Saint Malachy’s vision. Pope Francis I, being a Jesuit, traditionally wore a black cassock when he was Bishop Jorje Mario Brogoglio.

In July 2013 Pope Francis I, when asked about gay priests during a spontaneous exchange with the press, he responded, “If they [gay priests] accept the Lord and have goodwill, who am I to judge them? They shouldn’t be marginalized. The tendency [same-sex attraction] is not the problem… they’re our brothers.”

Galatians 6:7-8 reads:

Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting.

Cardinal George Pell. Photo: The Guardian

Today Pope Francis I is reaping what he has sown with his words. Question: Is he Saint Malachy’s Black Pope?

In July 2017, four years after the Pope spoke about homosexual priests, there have been two scandals which have rocked the Vatican and cast a shadow on those bishops chosen by Pope Francis to serve as his closest advisors.

In the Guardian column Cardinal George Pell: Vatican official charged with multiple sexual offences Melissa Davey in Melbourne and Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Rome reported:

Cardinal George Pell, Australia’s most senior Catholic and the third-ranking official in the Vatican, has been charged with multiple sexual offences by police.

The charges were served on Pell’s legal representatives in Melbourne on Thursday and they have been lodged also at Melbourne magistrates court. He has been ordered to appear at the court on 26 July.

“Cardinal Pell is facing multiple charges … and there are multiple complainants,” Victoria police’s deputy commissioner Shane Patton said. The charges were “historical sexual assault offences”.

Read more.

Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmierio

In the article Vatican police ‘break up drug-fuelled gay orgy at home of secretary of one of Pope Francis’s key advisers’ Julian Robinson writes:

Vatican police have broken up a gay orgy at the home of the secretary to one of Pope Francis’s key advisers, it has been reported.

The flat belonged to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is in charge of tackling clerical sexual abuse.

When police showed up, they found drugs and a group of men engaged in sexual activity, local reports state.

Reports in Italy claim the occupant of the apartment is allegedly the secretary to Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio – a key aide to the 80-year-old Pope.

Coccopalmerio heads the Pontifical Council for Legislative texts and was said to have once recommended his secretary for a promotion to bishop.

The explosive claims were made in the Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano.

Read more:

The Catechism of the Catholic Church 2357-2359 deals with chastity and homosexuality. This catechism applies to all Catholics and the Catholic clergy at every level, including the Pope. It reads as follows:

2357 Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex. It has taken a great variety of forms through the centuries and in different cultures. Its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained. Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.” They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.

2358 The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God’s will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord’s Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition.

2359 Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.

[Emphasis added]

Perhaps Pope Francis I should embrace these words, and the teachings of Holy Bible on sodomy, and purge the Church of homosexuals, lest he truly become the “Black Pope.”

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President Trump: ‘Together, let us all fight like the Poles—for family, for freedom, for country and for God’

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Trump sitting next to a portrait of King Jan III Sobieski.

President Trump’s decision to visit Poland, a country from which my family emigrated from to America, was inspired and his speech in Warsaw was inspirational.

The title of this column is a quote from President Trump’s speech in Krasinski Square in Warsaw to the Western world. In a Daily Signal article titled “Trump Says West Must ‘Fight Like the Poles.’ Meet the Polish Soldier Who Fought for Our Freedom” Jarrett Stepman wrote:

Those were the words of President Donald Trump as he delivered a speech at Warsaw’s Krasinski Square in central Poland. Trump highlighted both the longstanding connection between the United States and Poland, as well as the enduring need for the West to stand strong in the face of tyranny.

In a clear reference to the menace of Islamist terrorism, Trump said: “Our own fight for the West does not begin on the battlefield—it begins with our minds, our wills, and our souls.”

Poland knows what it means to encounter a threat. It faced the twin evils of Nazism and communism during the 20th century, starting when Germany and the USSR invaded in 1939 and ending with the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1991.

These two monstrous ideologies were defeated by both force of arms and, more importantly, the force of ideas.

Many Americans do not understand the contribution made by the Polish people to the founding of this nation. President Trump mentioned many but two, Tadeusz Kościuszko and Kazimierz Pułaski stand out as heroes of the American Revolution. Thomas Jefferson describe Tadeusz Kościuszko, “As pure a son of liberty, as I have ever known…”

Wikipedia notes:

In 1798 Kościuszko decided to leave the United States and return to the Russian-controlled sector of Poland. His friend Thomas Jefferson provided him with a passport in a false name and arranged for his secret departure to France. Before leaving that same year (1798) he wrote out a will, which he entrusted to Jefferson as executor. In the document, Kościuszko, over six decades before the American Civil War, pleaded for the emancipation of America’s Negro slaves.

President Trump pointed out that the West is once again in a historic clash of civilizations. The President said, “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.”

Perhaps President Trump was referring to The Other September 11th when on, “September 11th, 1683, the day when an alliance of Christian armies led by Jan III Sobieski, the King of Poland, arrived at the Gates of Vienna.” As the Gates of Vienna website reports:

At about the same time the King of Poland, in the van with the fearsome Winged Hussars and with 20,000 men behind him, led a cavalry charge down the hill into the right flank of the Ottoman army. The Hussars were one of the most formidable fighting forces of the time, and the sound of the wind through the feathers of their artificial wings was said to unnerve the enemies’ horses and drive superstitious soldiers into a panic.

The battle was over in three hours. The King drove through the Turkish lines, and, seeing his success, the Vienna garrison sallied forth from the city and hit the Turks from the rear. Demoralized by these attacks and their failure to breach the wall, the Turks fled eastwards in haste, abandoning their tents, weapons, battle standards, provisions, and slaves.

Europe is facing another onslaught of Islam known as the great Muslim migration (hijrah). Only Poland and a few other Eastern European countries have held closed the gates thereby saving their civilization.

The West is truly in a clash of civilizations. The question is does the West have the will to survive?

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The siege of Vienna was remembered in Poland yesterday

Remarks by President Trump to the People of Poland | July 6, 2017

Krasiński Square
Warsaw, Poland

MRS. TRUMP:  Hello, Poland!  Thank you very much.  My husband and I have enjoyed visiting your beautiful country.  I want to thank President and Mrs. Duda for the warm welcome and their generous hospitality.  I had the opportunity to visit the Copernicus Science Centre today, and found it not only informative but thoughtful, its mission, which is to inspire people to observe, experiment, ask questions, and seek answers.

I can think of no better purpose for such a wonderful science center.  Thank you to all who were involved in giving us the tour, especially the children who made it such a wonderful experience.

As many of you know, a main focus of my husband’s presidency is safety and security of the American people.  I think all of us can agree people should be able to live their lives without fear, no matter what country they live in.  That is my wish for all of us around the world.  (Applause.)

Thank you again for this wonderful welcome to your very special country.  Your kindness and gracious hospitality will not be forgotten.  (Applause.)

And now it is my honor to introduce to you my husband, the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump.  (Applause.)

PRESIDENT TRUMP:  Thank you very much.  That’s so nice.  The United States has many great diplomats, but there is truly no better ambassador for our country than our beautiful First Lady, Melania.  Thank you, Melania.  That was very nice.  (Applause.)

We’ve come to your nation to deliver a very important message:  America loves Poland, and America loves the Polish people.  (Applause.)  Thank you.

The Poles have not only greatly enriched this region, but Polish-Americans have also greatly enriched the United States, and I was truly proud to have their support in the 2016 election.  (Applause.)

It is a profound honor to stand in this city, by this monument to the Warsaw Uprising, and to address the Polish nation that so many generations have dreamed of:  a Poland that is safe, strong, and free.  (Applause.)

President Duda and your wonderful First Lady, Agata, have welcomed us with the tremendous warmth and kindness for which Poland is known around the world.  Thank you.  (Applause.)  My sincere — and I mean sincerely thank both of them.  And to Prime Minister Syzdlo, a very special thanks also.  (Applause.)

We are also pleased that former President Leck Walesa, so famous for leading the Solidarity Movement, has joined us today, also.  (Applause.)  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.

On behalf of all Americans, let me also thank the entire Polish people for the generosity you have shown in welcoming our soldiers to your country.  These soldiers are not only brave defenders of freedom, but also symbols of America’s commitment to your security and your place in a strong and democratic Europe.

We are proudly joined on stage by American, Polish, British, and Romanian soldiers.  Thank you.  (Applause.)  Thank you.  Great job.

President Duda and I have just come from an incredibly successful meeting with the leaders participating in the Three Seas Initiative.  To the citizens of this great region, America is eager to expand our partnership with you.  We welcome stronger ties of trade and commerce as you grow your economies. And we are committed to securing your access to alternate sources of energy, so Poland and its neighbors are never again held hostage to a single supplier of energy.  (Applause.)

Mr. President, I congratulate you, along with the President of Croatia, on your leadership of this historic Three Seas Initiative.  Thank you.  (Applause.)

This is my first visit to Central Europe as President, and I am thrilled that it could be right here at this magnificent, beautiful piece of land.  It is beautiful.  (Applause.)  Poland is the geographic heart of Europe, but more importantly, in the Polish people, we see the soul of Europe.  Your nation is great because your spirit is great and your spirit is strong.  (Applause.)

For two centuries, Poland suffered constant and brutal attacks.  But while Poland could be invaded and occupied, and its borders even erased from the map, it could never be erased from history or from your hearts.  In those dark days, you have lost your land but you never lost your pride.  (Applause.)

So it is with true admiration that I can say today, that from the farms and villages of your countryside to the cathedrals and squares of your great cities, Poland lives, Poland prospers, and Poland prevails.  (Applause.)

Despite every effort to transform you, oppress you, or destroy you, you endured and overcame.  You are the proud nation of Copernicus — think of that — (applause) — Chopin, Saint John Paul II.  Poland is a land of great heroes.  (Applause.)  And you are a people who know the true value of what you defend.

The triumph of the Polish spirit over centuries of hardship gives us all hope for a future in which good conquers evil, and peace achieves victory over war.

For Americans, Poland has been a symbol of hope since the beginning of our nation.  Polish heroes and American patriots fought side by side in our War of Independence and in many wars that followed.  Our soldiers still serve together today in Afghanistan and Iraq, combatting the enemies of all civilization.

For America’s part, we have never given up on freedom and independence as the right and destiny of the Polish people, and we never, ever will.  (Applause.)

Our two countries share a special bond forged by unique histories and national characters.  It’s a fellowship that exists only among people who have fought and bled and died for freedom.  (Applause.)

The signs of this friendship stand in our nation’s capital.  Just steps from the White House, we’ve raised statues of men with names like Pułaski and Kościuszko.  (Applause.)  The same is true in Warsaw, where street signs carry the name of George Washington, and a monument stands to one of the world’s greatest heroes, Ronald Reagan.  (Applause.)

And so I am here today not just to visit an old ally, but to hold it up as an example for others who seek freedom and who wish to summon the courage and the will to defend our civilization.  (Applause.)  The story of Poland is the story of a people who have never lost hope, who have never been broken, and who have never, ever forgotten who they are.  (Applause)

AUDIENCE:  Donald Trump!  Donald Trump!  Donald Trump!

PRESIDENT TRUMP:  Thank you.  Thank you so much.  Thank you.  Thank you so much.  Such a great honor.  This is a nation more than one thousand years old.  Your borders were erased for more than a century and only restored just one century ago.

In 1920, in the Miracle of Vistula, Poland stopped the Soviet army bent on European conquest.  (Applause.)  Then, 19 years later in 1939, you were invaded yet again, this time by Nazi Germany from the west and the Soviet Union from the east.  That’s trouble.  That’s tough.

Under a double occupation the Polish people endured evils beyond description: the Katyn forest massacre, the occupations, the Holocaust, the Warsaw Ghetto and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the destruction of this beautiful capital city, and the deaths of nearly one in five Polish people.  A vibrant Jewish population — the largest in Europe — was reduced to almost nothing after the Nazis systematically murdered millions of Poland’s Jewish citizens, along with countless others, during that brutal occupation.

In the summer of 1944, the Nazi and Soviet armies were preparing for a terrible and bloody battle right here in Warsaw. Amid that hell on earth, the citizens of Poland rose up to defend their homeland.  I am deeply honored to be joined on stage today by veterans and heroes of the Warsaw Uprising.  (Applause.)

AUDIENCE:  (Chanting.)

PRESIDENT TRUMP:  What great spirit.  We salute your noble sacrifice and we pledge to always remember your fight for Poland and for freedom.  Thank you.  Thank you.  (Applause.)

This monument reminds us that more than 150,000 Poles died during that desperate struggle to overthrow oppression.

From the other side of the river, the Soviet armed forces stopped and waited.  They watched as the Nazis ruthlessly destroyed the city, viciously murdering men, women, and children.  They tried to destroy this nation forever by shattering its will to survive.

But there is a courage and a strength deep in the Polish character that no one could destroy.  The Polish martyr, Bishop Michael Kozal, said it well:  “More horrifying than a defeat of arms is a collapse of the human spirit.”

Through four decades of communist rule, Poland and the other captive nations of Europe endured a brutal campaign to demolish freedom, your faith, your laws, your history, your identity — indeed the very essence of your culture and your humanity.  Yet, through it all, you never lost that spirit.  (Applause.)  Your oppressors tried to break you, but Poland could not be broken.  (Applause.)

And when the day came on June 2nd, 1979, and one million Poles gathered around Victory Square for their very first mass with their Polish Pope, that day, every communist in Warsaw must have known that their oppressive system would soon come crashing down.  (Applause.)  They must have known it at the exact moment during Pope John Paul II’s sermon when a million Polish men, women, and children suddenly raised their voices in a single prayer.  A million Polish people did not ask for wealth.  They did not ask for privilege.  Instead, one million Poles sang three simple words:  “We Want God.”  (Applause.)

In those words, the Polish people recalled the promise of a better future.  They found new courage to face down their oppressors, and they found the words to declare that Poland would be Poland once again.

As I stand here today before this incredible crowd, this faithful nation, we can still hear those voices that echo through history.  Their message is as true today as ever.  The people of Poland, the people of America, and the people of Europe still cry out “We want God.”  (Applause.)

Together, with Pope John Paul II, the Poles reasserted their identity as a nation devoted to God.  And with that powerful declaration of who you are, you came to understand what to do and how to live.  You stood in solidarity against oppression, against a lawless secret police, against a cruel and wicked system that impoverished your cities and your souls.  And you won.  Poland prevailed.  Poland will always prevail.  (Applause.)

AUDIENCE:  Donald Trump!  Donald Trump!  Donald Trump!

PRESIDENT TRUMP:  Thank you.  You were supported in that victory over communism by a strong alliance of free nations in the West that defied tyranny.  Now, among the most committed members of the NATO Alliance, Poland has resumed its place as a leading nation of a Europe that is strong, whole, and free.

A strong Poland is a blessing to the nations of Europe, and they know that.  A strong Europe is a blessing to the West and to the world.  (Applause.)  One hundred years after the entry of American forces into World War I, the transatlantic bond between the United States and Europe is as strong as ever and maybe, in many ways, even stronger.

This continent no longer confronts the specter of communism.  But today we’re in the West, and we have to say there are dire threats to our security and to our way of life.  You see what’s happening out there.  They are threats.  We will confront them.  We will win.  But they are threats.  (Applause.)

AUDIENCE:  Donald Trump!  Donald Trump!  Donald Trump!

PRESIDENT TRUMP:  We are confronted by another oppressive ideology — one that seeks to export terrorism and extremism all around the globe.  America and Europe have suffered one terror attack after another.  We’re going to get it to stop.  (Applause.)

During a historic gathering in Saudi Arabia, I called on the leaders of more than 50 Muslim nations to join together to drive out this menace which threatens all of humanity.  We must stand united against these shared enemies to strip them of their territory and their funding, and their networks, and any form of ideological support that they may have.  While we will always welcome new citizens who share our values and love our people, our borders will always be closed to terrorism and extremism of any kind.  (Applause.)

AUDIENCE:  Donald Trump!  Donald Trump!  Donald Trump!

PRESIDENT TRUMP:  We are fighting hard against radical Islamic terrorism, and we will prevail.  We cannot accept those who reject our values and who use hatred to justify violence against the innocent.

Today, the West is also confronted by the powers that seek to test our will, undermine our confidence, and challenge our interests.  To meet new forms of aggression, including propaganda, financial crimes, and cyberwarfare, we must adapt our alliance to compete effectively in new ways and on all new battlefields.

We urge Russia to cease its destabilizing activities in Ukraine and elsewhere, and its support for hostile regimes — including Syria and Iran — and to instead join the community of responsible nations in our fight against common enemies and in defense of civilization itself.  (Applause.)

Finally, on both sides of the Atlantic, our citizens are confronted by yet another danger — one firmly within our control.  This danger is invisible to some but familiar to the Poles:  the steady creep of government bureaucracy that drains the vitality and wealth of the people.  The West became great not because of paperwork and regulations but because people were allowed to chase their dreams and pursue their destinies.

Americans, Poles, and the nations of Europe value individual freedom and sovereignty.  We must work together to confront forces, whether they come from inside or out, from the South or the East, that threaten over time to undermine these values and to erase the bonds of culture, faith and tradition that make us who we are.  (Applause.)  If left unchecked, these forces will undermine our courage, sap our spirit, and weaken our will to defend ourselves and our societies.

But just as our adversaries and enemies of the past learned here in Poland, we know that these forces, too, are doomed to fail if we want them to fail.  And we do, indeed, want them to fail.  (Applause.)  They are doomed not only because our alliance is strong, our countries are resilient, and our power is unmatched.  Through all of that, you have to say everything is true.  Our adversaries, however, are doomed because we will never forget who we are.  And if we don’t forget who are, we just can’t be beaten.  Americans will never forget.  The nations of Europe will never forget.  We are the fastest and the greatest community.  There is nothing like our community of nations.  The world has never known anything like our community of nations.

We write symphonies.  We pursue innovation.  We celebrate our ancient heroes, embrace our timeless traditions and customs, and always seek to explore and discover brand-new frontiers.

We reward brilliance.  We strive for excellence, and cherish inspiring works of art that honor God.  We treasure the rule of law and protect the right to free speech and free expression.  (Applause.)

We empower women as pillars of our society and of our success.  We put faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, at the center of our lives.  And we debate everything.  We challenge everything.  We seek to know everything so that we can better know ourselves.  (Applause.)

And above all, we value the dignity of every human life, protect the rights of every person, and share the hope of every soul to live in freedom.  That is who we are.  Those are the priceless ties that bind us together as nations, as allies, and as a civilization.

What we have, what we inherited from our — and you know this better than anybody, and you see it today with this incredible group of people — what we’ve inherited from our ancestors has never existed to this extent before.  And if we fail to preserve it, it will never, ever exist again.  So we cannot fail.

This great community of nations has something else in common:  In every one of them, it is the people, not the powerful, who have always formed the foundation of freedom and the cornerstone of our defense.  The people have been that foundation here in Poland — as they were right here in Warsaw — and they were the foundation from the very, very beginning in America.

Our citizens did not win freedom together, did not survive horrors together, did not face down evil together, only to lose our freedom to a lack of pride and confidence in our values.  We did not and we will not.  We will never back down.  (Applause.)

AUDIENCE:  Donald Trump!  Donald Trump!  Donald Trump!

PRESIDENT TRUMP:  As long as we know our history, we will know how to build our future.  Americans know that a strong alliance of free, sovereign and independent nations is the best defense for our freedoms and for our interests.  That is why my administration has demanded that all members of NATO finally meet their full and fair financial obligation.

As a result of this insistence, billions of dollars more have begun to pour into NATO.  In fact, people are shocked.  But billions and billions of dollars more are coming in from countries that, in my opinion, would not have been paying so quickly.

To those who would criticize our tough stance, I would point out that the United States has demonstrated not merely with words but with its actions that we stand firmly behind Article 5, the mutual defense commitment.  (Applause.)

Words are easy, but actions are what matters.  And for its own protection — and you know this, everybody knows this, everybody has to know this — Europe must do more.  Europe must demonstrate that it believes in its future by investing its money to secure that future.

That is why we applaud Poland for its decision to move forward this week on acquiring from the United States the battle-tested Patriot air and missile defense system — the best anywhere in the world.  (Applause.)  That is also why we salute the Polish people for being one of the NATO countries that has actually achieved the benchmark for investment in our common defense.  Thank you.  Thank you, Poland.  I must tell you, the example you set is truly magnificent, and we applaud Poland.  Thank you.  (Applause.)

We have to remember that our defense is not just a commitment of money, it is a commitment of will.  Because as the Polish experience reminds us, the defense of the West ultimately rests not only on means but also on the will of its people to prevail and be successful and get what you have to have.  The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.  Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost?  Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders?  Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?  (Applause.)

We can have the largest economies and the most lethal weapons anywhere on Earth, but if we do not have strong families and strong values, then we will be weak and we will not survive.  (Applause.)  If anyone forgets the critical importance of these things, let them come to one country that never has.  Let them come to Poland.  (Applause.)  And let them come here, to Warsaw, and learn the story of the Warsaw Uprising.

When they do, they should learn about Jerusalem Avenue.  In August of 1944, Jerusalem Avenue was one of the main roads running east and west through this city, just as it is today.
Control of that road was crucially important to both sides in the battle for Warsaw.  The German military wanted it as their most direct route to move troops and to form a very strong front.  And for the Polish Home Army, the ability to pass north and south across that street was critical to keep the center of the city, and the Uprising itself, from being split apart and destroyed.

Every night, the Poles put up sandbags amid machine gun fire — and it was horrendous fire — to protect a narrow passage across Jerusalem Avenue.  Every day, the enemy forces knocked them down again and again and again.  Then the Poles dug a trench.  Finally, they built a barricade.  And the brave Polish fighters began to flow across Jerusalem Avenue.  That narrow passageway, just a few feet wide, was the fragile link that kept the Uprising alive.

Between its walls, a constant stream of citizens and freedom fighters made their perilous, just perilous, sprints.  They ran across that street, they ran through that street, they ran under that street — all to defend this city.  “The far side was several yards away,” recalled one young Polish woman named Greta.  That mortality and that life was so important to her.  In fact, she said, “The mortally dangerous sector of the street was soaked in the blood.  It was the blood of messengers, liaison girls, and couriers.”

Nazi snipers shot at anybody who crossed.  Anybody who crossed, they were being shot at.  Their soldiers burned every building on the street, and they used the Poles as human shields for their tanks in their effort to capture Jerusalem Avenue.  The enemy never ceased its relentless assault on that small outpost of civilization.  And the Poles never ceased its defense.

The Jerusalem Avenue passage required constant protection, repair, and reinforcement, but the will of its defenders did not waver, even in the face of death.  And to the last days of the Uprising, the fragile crossing never, ever failed.  It was never, ever forgotten.  It was kept open by the Polish people.

The memories of those who perished in the Warsaw Uprising cry out across the decades, and few are clearer than the memories of those who died to build and defend the Jerusalem Avenue crossing.  Those heroes remind us that the West was saved with the blood of patriots; that each generation must rise up and play their part in its defense — (applause) — and that every foot of ground, and every last inch of civilization, is worth defending with your life.

Our own fight for the West does not begin on the battlefield — it begins with our minds, our wills, and our souls.  Today, the ties that unite our civilization are no less vital, and demand no less defense, than that bare shred of land on which the hope of Poland once totally rested.  Our freedom, our civilization, and our survival depend on these bonds of history, culture, and memory.

And today as ever, Poland is in our heart, and its people are in that fight.  (Applause.)  Just as Poland could not be broken, I declare today for the world to hear that the West will never, ever be broken.  Our values will prevail.  Our people will thrive.  And our civilization will triumph.  (Applause.)

AUDIENCE:  Donald Trump!  Donald Trump!  Donald Trump!

PRESIDENT TRUMP:  Thank you.  So, together, let us all fight like the Poles — for family, for freedom, for country, and for God.

Thank you.  God Bless You.  God bless the Polish people.  God bless our allies.  And God bless the United States of America.

Thank you.  God bless you.  Thank you very much.  (Applause.)

July 4th: Dreams From Our Forefathers

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The birth of a country like the birth of a child is a wondrous thing. Some births are easy and some are fraught with complications but all are accompanied by the hopes and dreams of the parents.

The preamble to the United States Constitution declares the purposes, principles, and hopes for the future of the United States of America from our forefathers. It tells us what our forefathers dreamed for America:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Like many children who grow up determined to parent differently than their own parents, our forefathers were determined to created a ”more perfect union.” They intended to create a secure nation based on equality, justice, and upward mobility very different from the infrastructure of England’s monarchy. Our forefathers’ purpose was clear – to create a democratic society of the people, not a monarchy of the aristocracy.

Historical context is extremely important when examining social policy. Our forefathers fought for their independence from England 241 years ago when slavery was an immoral fact of life worldwide. Slavery did not exist in early hunter-gatherer societies because there was no need for a work force – families and tribes divided the work of hunting, gathering, and caring for the children among themselves. As societies grew and agrarian societies developed into trade societies the need for workers was created and the slave trade began.

A slave is defined as “a person who is the legal property of another and is forced to obey them.” Every ancient civilization had a slave trade. It was an evil and immoral element of social organization from its inception. Slaves were often the spoils of war. Conquering tribes or nations enslaved the defeated population and used the men for labor and the women for pleasure. The idea of owning another human being is anathema in contemporary Western society yet the slave trade continues to exist.

Slavery has many faces – it is not only a matter of race. In America, we focus on the black community and their history of enslavement. Blacks in America waited almost 100 years until January 1, 1863 when President Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation declaring that all people held in slavery in the rebel states were free and that freed slaves were welcome to serve in the US army and navy. 100 years after that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were signed by President Lyndon Johnson and our forefathers’ principles of justice and equality under the law came closer to achievement.

Women were enslaved in most societies around the world including America until the 20th century when women’s suffrage finally secured their voting rights. Until then women and children were the property of their husbands – they were chattel without any individual rights or protections. Women did not receive the right to vote and acquire property in America until 1920 when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified – women waited 144 years after the declaration of independence to be free. American democracy moved slowly but steadily forward toward a more perfect Union of freedom and equality for all American citizens until now.

Islamic countries and communities governed by sharia law continue to openly and unapologetically endorse human slavery. Sex slavery, child marriage, forced marriage, wives and children property of their husbands and fathers, and enslavement of infidels are all government sanctioned forms of human slavery practiced unapologetically in Islamic countries and communities. Saudi Arabia boasts that women have the right to vote. In fact, the meaningless elections for municipal councils in 2015 were the first elections in which Saudi women were permitted to vote, allowed to run for office, or be elected as politicians. Municipal councils have little power or authority in Saudi Arabia which is an absolute monarchy.

The Declaration of Independence shattered the yolk of English monarchical power and established American democracy in the United States. The Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil Rights Act, the Voters Rights Act, and Women’s Suffrage shattered the yolk of slavery and emancipated women and blacks in the United States. All the freedoms fought for and won by courageous Americans pursuing the dreams from our forefathers to create a more perfect Union are being threatened today by the “resistance” movement of the radical left-wing Democratic Party. WHY?

The first question that must be answered is,

“Why are the progressive Left leaders of the Democratic party ignoring the slavery and savagery codified in Islamic sharia law?”

Answer: Obama and his ongoing “resistance” movement of left-wing liberals in the Democratic Party are colluding with the media mogul globalists to foment social chaos in a deceitful effort to overthrow the duly elected government of President Donald Trump, destroy American democracy, and replace it with socialism. The useful idiots who participate in the “resistance” have not realized that socialism is yet another form of slavery. When there is no private property the government owns the fruits of your labor which means you are enslaved by the government.

Ayn Rand explained the concept this way:

“When you consider socialism, do not fool yourself about its nature. Remember that there is no such dichotomy as “human rights” versus “property rights.” No human rights can exist without property rights. Since material goods are produced by the mind and effort of individual men, and are needed to sustain their lives, if the producer does not own the result of his effort, he does not own his life. To deny property rights means to turn men into property owned by the state. Whoever claims the “right” to “redistribute” the wealth produced by others is claiming the “right” to treat human beings as chattel.”

This brings us to the second question that must be answered is,

“Why is the Left so eager to allow illegals into the United States with open border policies and to protect illegal felons in sanctuary cities?”

The answer is always the same: to create divisiveness and social chaos.

This brings us to the third and final question that must be answered is,

“Why would the Leftist leaders seek to foment divisiveness and social chaos?”

Answer: The Islamists and their savagery, barbarity, and enslavement are useful idiots who are being deliberately imported into America by Leftist leaders to create overwhelming social chaos. Obama’s open-border policy is not a humanitarian effort it is the sinister strategy of a radical socialist who knows that social chaos is the requirement for seismic social change. Martial law (complete government control) will be imposed to restore order and then socialism (institutionalized complete government control) will follow.

Social chaos is the necessary condition for the imposition of socialism. Socialism is the necessary condition for the imposition of one-world government. One-world government is the new world order that the globalist elite intend to rule – it is a binary socio-political system of masters and slaves. One-world government is the goal and the underlying motive of the campaign to destroy America from within. American democracy is the single greatest existential threat to one-world government and President Donald Trump is its leader. If the globalist elite are successful in overthrowing the government of President Donald Trump then the dreams of our forefathers for American democracy and a more perfect Union will be dead after 241 years. The world will be returned to the dystopian existence of masters and slaves and the greatest experiment in human freedom will end.

Since 2002, 61 U.S. refugees have engaged in terrorist activities

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Sheila Mastropietro, a resettlement worker in Lancaster, PA yesterday called it “ridiculous” that a refugee could be a terrorist.

Here is Leo Hohmann at World Net Daily on the Heritage Foundation report entitled, “The U.S. Refugee Admissions Program: A Roadmap for Reform.”

(Also, Fox News wrote about the report here as well.)

Hohmann:

Mastropietro is front row right without head covering in NYT story featuring Lancaster

At least 61 people who came to the United States as “refugees” engaged in terrorist activities between 2002 and 2016, according to a new report authored by the Heritage Foundation.

The report comes in the wake of the Supreme Court’s reinstatement of much of President Trump’s travel ban, and it also suggests that it’s impossible to vet Muslim refugees who may have no connections to known terrorist organizations but get radicalized after they arrive in the United States.

The Heritage Foundation identified scores of refugees, including many who came prior to 2002, as having taken part in activities ranging from lying to investigators about terror plots, to actually taking part in them. The report, aimed at reforming the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, or USRAP, calls for stricter limits and restrictions on refugees.

Under the current system, set by the Refugee Act of 1980, the president sets the annual cap on numbers of refugees allowed into the U.S. and Congress provides the funding. The State Department then contracts with nine private resettlement agencies, paying them millions of dollars per year to seed U.S. cities with Third Worlders.***

Since 1980 more than 3 million refugees [Ten Pittsburghs!—ed] have come to the United States, and more than 1 million of them have come from Muslim-dominated countries such as Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Sudan. Countries such as Burma and Australia have been more recently unloading their unwanted Muslim minorities on the U.S. and other Western countries.

“The U.S. Refugee Admissions Program should not be used as pretext to advocate for a global right to migrate nor is it a solution to conflict,” the study concludes. “Instead, the U.S. refugee admission program should be reformed to better advance U.S. interests.”

Continue here as Hohmann lists some of the refugee Islamic terrorist cases.

I confess, I haven’t read the report.  Would someone tell me if it includes any mention of the system where contractors are paid by the head to place refugees in unsuspecting cities and towns.  If these middlemen are not removed from the process there will NEVER be real reform.

Tell the President what you think!

***Federal contractors/middlemen/lobbyists/community organizers paid by you to place refugees in your towns and cities:

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