By: Amir Taheri

Journalists across the globe have always regarded this time of the year, the heart of the summer, as the silly season in which nothing of much interest happens, at least on the political front. The silly season is filled with news of the birth of double-headed sheep in New Zealand, the discovery of the remains of Atlantis, the lost continent, in the Algerian Sahara or, to add a bit of spice, the suicide of a pedophile billionaire in a high-security prison in America.

Thus, one might say that the G7 summit in the French resort town of Biarritz, starting Saturday, is an exception to the silly season rule. Or is it?

The summit was the brainchild of French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing who first hosted it as a G6 in 1975 with Britain, Italy, Japan, West Germany, and the US attending.

The original idea was to focus on global economic issues in the aftermath of the recession triggered by the oil shocks of 1971 and 1973. Within a year or two, however, the summit, now also including Canada and the European Economic Community, the future European Union, had expanded its remit to include major political issues. By 1978, when the group met in Guadeloupe, G7 had morphed into an international politburo pretending to set the tune for the whole world.

In one of those delicious ironies that add flavor to history, as the group, which ended up including Russia after the fall of the USSR, saw its real power to affect global trends decline while its ambitions to rule the world spiraled. The group could do nothing about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the disintegration of the USSR, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, the seizure of power by the mullahs in Iran, China shifting gears towards a capitalist system, the wars triggered by Saddam Hussein and the rise of international terrorism in the name of religion. More importantly, perhaps, the “global politburo” had no role in the dramatic technological changes that dragged the world into something bigger than the Industrial Revolution.

By the mid-1990s the G8 summit, as it was before Russia was kicked out, had morphed into a talking shop and a photo-op for political leaders in search of relevance in a new world they could no longer control. In one of the summits, hosted in Lyon by France, the participants made “decisions” on almost everything under the sun, knowing all along that they had neither the intention nor the power to act on any of them.

Well, how relevant is the G7 today?

The short answer is: not very much. That became clear in last year’s summit hosted by Canada when Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Emmanuel Macron tried to “educate” President Donald Trump on the facts of political life as they saw it, only to provoke the American into counterattacking with one of is typical ripostes. The whole thing ended up as a farce when Canada’s youthful and inexperienced Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tried one of his shenanigans by interpreting the final communiqué in a distinctly mischievous manner.

Hearing of this, Trump, then aboard his presidential aircraft, tweeted his rejection of the whole communiqué. In normal circumstances that should have meant the end of a charade that started almost half a century ago. That it did not is due to the notorious tenacity of bureaucracies that, once given life, refuse to die.

This weekend’s summit is supposed to focus on three issues. The first is the quest for some kind of international law and order in the digital world that transcends both the nation-state and groupings such as the European Union. As things stand, it is unlikely that anything that is said or “decided” in Biarritz would create the kind of control that bureaucrats in major capitals dream of.

The second issue is the perennial one of combating terrorism. The Lyon summit in 1996 enacted 45 measures that, apart from having to take off our shoes at checkpoints in airports, none was implemented. Terrorist groups are today as alive, if not more, as they were in those days when President Jacques Chirac boasted he would wipe them out in a year or two.

The third issue is what to do about an increasingly shaky but still aggressive Islamic Republic that still controls Iran. The Europeans, perhaps minus Britain under Boris Johnson, but plus Canada and possibly Japan, wish to continue paying lip service to the dead “nuke deal” inherited from President Barack Obama in the hope of avoiding a major crisis in the Middle East. Plagued by economic slowdown and Brexit, the EU is pressing for a pause in pushing the mullahs across the precipice. At the same time, however, the EU lacks the courage to throw a buoy to the drowning Khomeinist cabal in Tehran.

The Trump administration, or rather Trump himself, however, need do nothing more, as the sanction snap-back begins to make a real impression on the Khomeinist regime.

The fourth issue is that of the so-called trade war between China and the US. There, too, there is almost nothing that G7 can do to affect the course of events, let alone their outcome. Economic reality is beginning to set the contours of Trump’s strategy of tariff warfare against China, which, when all is said and done, is, in fact, subsidizing the American consumer both through lower prices for its goods and the massive purchase of US treasury bonds.

The Biarritz summit may end with the fixing of the date and place for another summit next year. It may also provide an opportunity for Britain’s new Prime Minister Johnson to get to know Trump better while also lobbying Merkel and Macron for help to extricate the UK from the tangled web of Brexit it has woven over the past three years.

Even if Trump demands that Russia and China be invited to join the group, it is unlikely that the event will regain whatever relevance it once had.

In the meantime, deprived of significant news, reporters can enjoy one of the world’s best cuisines in the resort city’s top hotel. Count it as a bright moment in the silly season.

            (Gatestone Institute)

Amir Taheri was the executive editor-in-chief of the daily Kayhan in Iran from 1972 to 1979. He has worked at or written for innumerable publications, published eleven books, and has been a columnist forAsharq Al-Awsat since 1987. He is the Chairman of Gatestone Europe.

This article was originally published by Asharq al-Awsat and is reprinted by kind permission of the author.

Confronting the History

By: Edwin Black

“Area C,” which comprises some 60 percent of the West Bank, also known as Judea and Samaria, is making news these days. This time, the hot button issue is illegal Palestinian settlements sprouting across the region, shredding the last vestige of the Oslo Accords, which, for a generation, propelled the “two-state solution.”

Most observers of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis are accustomed to hearing talk of “illegal Jewish settlements” on slivers of land comprising one to two percent of the West Bank, mostly near the green line of Israel proper. But, attention now focuses on an explosion of thousands of illegal Palestinian constructions: village clusters, agricultural tracts, water networks, roads, and general infrastructure crisscrossing Area C of the West Bank. All of this violates the 1993 and1995 Oslo Accords, which specify full Israeli administrative control in Area C. Under the international agreement, only the Israeli Civil Administration can authorize new construction in the zone—for Israeli and Arab alike. However, continuous waves of recent Palestinian settlements are being established without permits—often without even bothering to apply. One senior official of the Israeli security apparatus called it “the wild west.”

According to Israeli activist watchdog groups, such as Regavim, in the past half-decade, illegal Palestinian settlements and infrastructure have sprawled across more than 9,000 dunams in more than 250 Area C locations, supported by more than 600 kilometers of illegally constructed access roads and more than 112,000 meters of retaining walls and terracing. This massive works project is being conducted in broad daylight, often heralded by tall announcement placards and proud press releases.

When questioned, various Israeli government officials did not dispute the Regavim numbers. In exasperation, one military spokesman close to the Area C files located at Bet El estimated “close to 10,000” illegal construction efforts are now underway—adding they felt “powerless to stop them.” The rapid build-up is funded by hundreds of millions of euros annually, funneled by the European Union and individual European nations into scores of building and infrastructure projects.

Understanding the tortuous history that created the current sovereignty vacuum in Area C can be daunting and confusing.

Leaving out 99 percent of everything … the indigenous Israelites of Canaan were expelled starting in 70 C.E. by the Romans, who renamed the region “Syria-Palaestina”—or Palestine,for the Philistine sea invaders from the Greek Islands. In about 637 C.E., the Islamic invasion swept up from the Arabian Peninsula to conquer and convert. For about four centuries, the Turkish Ottoman Empire governed until its 1918 defeat in World War I. After WWI, the Allies dismembered Ottoman colonies throughout the Middle East and concomitantly encouraged self-determination for ethnic peoples across the Levant. The League of Nations, in association with 51 countries and competing nationalist groups, eventually established five modern Arab countries: Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, modern Hejaz (Arabia) and post-colonial modern Egypt, plus one democratic and pluralistic Jewish State in Palestine. The original 1920 “Mandate” boundaries of the modern Jewish State extended from the Mediterranean Sea across the area now known as Jordan—a country which then did not exist.

The Arabs were shortchanged by the French in their quest for an Arab Kingdom in Syria. So, in recompense, the British modified the Palestine Mandate in September 1922 by virtue of an official memorandum, carving off some 70 percent of the intended Jewish nation to invent Trans-Jordan (now Jordan)—the territory extended from the Jordan River east to the borders of Iraq and what is now Saudi Arabia. For decades, co-existence between Arabs and Jews in the former Turkish colony could not be achieved. In 1947, the non-binding UN Resolution 181—known as Partition—recommended side-by-side Jewish and Arab states. In those days, the identity of the two peoples was “Arab” and “Jewish,” as local Arabs did not adopt the identity of “Palestinian” until about 1964.

Israel accepted Partition, but the Arabs refused. The surrounding League-created Arab nations attacked the newly declared Jewish State. In 1948, Jordan (created by the British memo) illegally invaded and annexed the area west of the Jordan River, including East Jerusalem, thus coining the new term, “West Bank” for the still-disputed former Turkish colonial provinces.

In 1967, when Israel fought its preemptive Six Day War, expelling Jordan, the Jewish State occupied this same disputed former Turkish colonial region, still called the West Bank. In 1988,Jordan rescinded any claim of sovereignty, deepening the sovereignty vacuum.

In 1993 and 1995, after years of diplomatic wrangling, Israel and the avowed terror group Palestine Liberation Organization signed the Oslo Accords, envisioning a peaceful two-state solution. Under the complex Oslo Accords, and subsequent modifications at Wye, Sharm el-Sheikh, and elsewhere, the “West Bank” is divided into three separate administrative zones, Areas A, B and C.

Area A is reserved for Palestinian civil and administrative control and seats the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah. Area B is governed by Palestinian civil control under a joint Israeli-Palestinian security apparatus.

Area C —also called Judea and Samaria—comprises roughly 60 percent of the West Bank. It more closely resembles the Biblical and original international demarcation of a Jewish State during the initial League of Nations mandate—but is now considered occupied by the international community. The majority of Area C residents are Israelis—an estimated 325,000 alongside some 300,000 Arabs. In essence, Oslo normalized and structured the Israeli occupation and administration of the disputed former Turkish lands.

But by virtue of a cumulative multibillion-euro effort, European capitals are working hard to destabilize the last pillars of the Oslo Accords. Thus, these countries seek to create a Palestinian state along the 1948 armistice line — also known as the 1967 lines— without further consulting the Jewish State. This ensures the Palestinian Authority knows it need not negotiate with Jerusalem—even as the United States and Gulf countries make a daring dash to achieve peace.

As the urgency of Area C is becoming clearer, still murky is the source of the diverse European funding that enables this conflict and the routes those billions of euros take across the Mediterranean. What’s more, there is widespread fear that millions in funds are continuously funneled through entities openly accused of being affiliated with established terrorist organizations.

(Front Page Mag)

A normal person wouldn’t be running for president, he’d be in prison

By: Daniel Greenfield

Don’t drink the water in Newark.

The only thing worse than the crime and corruption in the New Jersey city that gave the nation Cory Booker is its drinking water. First, they found lead in the water in schools and then in people’s homes.

In some homes the lead content in the water is four times higher than the federal limit.

And Cory Booker, the Senator from New Jersey, running to run the country, is blaming racism.

“Newark’s water emergency demands our federal government’s immediate attention. Everyone deserves clean, safe water–it’s shameful that our national crisis of lead-contaminated water disproportionately hits poor black and brown communities like my own,” Booker tweeted.

Did a “national crisis” cause Newark’s clean water crisis?

Booker probably forgot that he had served as the ex-officio chairman of the Newark Watershed Conservation and Development Corporation. It’s understandable that Spartacus forgot all about it because while he was running Newark, he never actually attended a single NWCDC meeting.

And, after a while, he stopped even pretending to send a representative.

The NWCDC was being paid $10 million a year to manage Newark’s water.

Linda Watkins-Brashear, a Booker ally and donor, worked as the director of the NWCDC. At least until she was arrested, tried and convicted in a $1 million kickback scheme. The scandal broke during Booker’s final year in office. And the NWCDC, Board of Trustees, which he was supposed to be overseeing, took swift action by dissolving the board, and writing a $450,000 check to Brashear.

It was Brashear’s second severance package. The first one, of $200,000, came when she left for three weeks while still continuing to receive her salary. That was the same year Booker took office.

Nice work if you can get it.

By the end, Booker hadn’t even bothered sending representatives to NWCDC board meetings, which were being illegally decided by three people, while handing his political ally years of no-bid contracts.

Brashear had donated thousands of dollars to Booker and volunteered on his campaign. And she used the organization that was supposed to oversee Newark’s clean water to write $200,000 in checks to herself, lose $558,000 in high risk margin trading, give her ex-husband a $332,000 no-bid interior design contract, loan $20,000 to the National Black United Fund, and cover a lobster and cognac dinner.

And now, mysteriously and inexplicably, there’s a “national crisis” of lead in Newark’s water.

You can have clean water for the people or cognac for Democrat fixers, but not both.

It truly is shameful that this “national crisis” of Cory Booker’s corrupt political allies stealing money meant to ensure clean water “disproportionately hits poor black and brown communities”.

President Cory Booker will make sure that the “national crisis” will affect people of all races when his crooked Democrat associates are running the country the way that they ran Newark.

Booker is black. As is Brashear.

As is Donald Bernard Sr., the senior projects manager of NWCDC, who was sentenced to 8 years in prison after pleading guilty to accepting $1 million in bribes from contractors.

Clearly, this is a national crisis of environmental racism.

How did the NWCDC get away with this for so long?

Its general counsel, Elnardo Webster II, was Booker’s former law partner, friend and advisor. Elnardo was working for Trenk, DiPasquale, Della Fera & Sodono, which was also Booker’s former law firm. While the firm was making a fortune from city contracts, including for NWCDC, it was paying Booker $700,000.

A judge levied major fines against Booker’s former law firm over its NWCDC work.

Yes, this “national crisis” of Cory Booker’s sleaziness must be urgently addressed as he now holds an office in the national government and would like an even bigger national office.

“Newark’s water emergency demands our federal government’s immediate attention,” insists Booker, who never attended a single meeting of the organization that was supposed to be overseeing it.

And which he was supposed to be overseeing.

According to Booker, who spent most of his time in office alternating between Twitter and Oprah, he just couldn’t find the time. Clean water never got his attention, immediate or otherwise.

Back in May, Cory Booker had introduced the Water Infrastructure Funding Transfer Bill to help Newark move money around. “Communities across the country don’t have clean drinking water, and those communities are disproportionately low-income and communities of color,” he claimed.

“This is an environmental justice issue.”

It’s not an environmental justice issue. It’s a criminal justice issue.

A normal person who chaired a board of trustees that committed flagrant illegalities, overseeing an organization where millions of dollars were stolen by one of his donors, and received hundreds of thousands of dollars from a disgraced law firm connected to the scandal, all of which put the public at risk, would not be appearing running for President. He would be in prison.

The environment didn’t cause this. It’s not a national crisis that somehow “hit” Newark. It’s not racial discrimination against “communities of color”.

Cory Booker keeps trying to blame racism for the actions of his corrupt political associates. And the Democrats keep acting as if their corruption is some sort of national problem to be blamed on us all.

Edward McRae, an NWCDC employee, set up a landscaping company to get NWCDC contracts, even though he had no experience in landscaping.

He didn’t even buy landscaping equipment until he got the landscaping contract.

How did Eddie get so lucky?

McRae said that he met Brashear while working on an unstated political campaign and heard that it was raining contracts. It’s unknown whose campaign it was, but it was certainly a Democrat campaign.

While Booker’s pals were robbing the NWCDC blind, they knew better than to actually drink the water.

The OSC investigation found that public funds weren’t just being used to buy lobster, filet magnon and cognac, but $534 for imported drinking water from Florida.

Booker is right. It is shameful.

It’s shameful that the former party of segregation fastened on to black communities like a leech while blaming its corruption on racism and an imaginary national crisis. It’s shameful that the media promoted Booker’s routine as a progressive social media guru while failing to hold him accountable.

And it’s shameful that Booker and his political allies have no shame.

Instead of apologizing, Cory Booker is trying to shift the blame for his action and inaction to all Americans. He’s trying to blame racism, instead of blaming his thieving donors and allies.

When the NWCDC was stealing money meant for clean water, Booker pretended he knew nothing. Now he knows that bottled water is being handed out in Newark because of a national crisis of racist water.

Before Brashear was sentenced to 8 years in prison for stealing almost $2 million, her lawyer claimed that, “there is no crime here”.

Hundreds of cities, and thousands of agencies and organizations across the country have been robbed by Democrat politicians, donors and activists, the same way that Booker’s pals robbed Newark.

But there’s never a crime. It’s always a “national crisis” that gets blamed on social problems and racism.

When the schools don’t work (the $100 million that Mark Zuckerberg plugged into Newark’s schools on Booker’s behalf might as well have been set on fire), and the power is out, and there’s no clean water, when residents aren’t evacuated ahead of a hurricane and the buildings are falling apart, it’s racism.

It’s never the fault of the Democrats who are responsible for the schools, the buildings and the water.

If only we cared enough, the media tells us, children wouldn’t be drinking water with lead. If only we paid higher taxes and sacrificed more, Booker’s associates would have been able to drink twice as much cognac and gorge on twice as much lobster, king crab and filet mignon.

And now, despite years of EPA warnings, Booker is demanding that the federal government get involved. He’s right again. The federal government ought to get involved. And it ought to involve handcuffs.

Cory Booker doesn’t belong in the White House. He belongs in prison.

             (Front Page Mag)

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Am I a victim of viewpoint discrimination?

By: Larry Elder

My radio colleague Dennis Prager heads a nonprofit, tax-exempt charitable organization called Prager University. It shares five-minute educational videos from a conservative perspective. There have been over 2 billion views. No sex. No profanity. No chase scenes. But YouTube has placed restrictions on over 100 videos, including videos on the Ten Commandments, according to Allen Estrin of PragerU. YouTube also restricted one I wrote and narrated, “Is America Racist?” in which I refute the narrative that police engage in “institutional racism” against blacks.

In a 2016 press release, PragerU said: “YouTube is censoring these videos by placing them under ‘restricted mode.’ Many families and schools enable restricted mode in order to keep inappropriate language, and explicit adult and sexual content away from children — not to prevent them from watching animated, age-appropriate, educational videos on topics ranging from economics and history to happiness and philosophy.” In response, Google, which owns YouTube, said, “We don’t censor anyone,” adding that they “take into consideration” the video’s “intent” and its “focus.”

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on “Stifling Free Speech: Technological Censorship and the Public Discourse,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said, “What makes the threat of political censorship so problematic is the lack of transparency, the invisibility, the ability for a handful of giant tech companies to decide if a particular speaker is disfavored.”

Now it appears I might well be a victim of viewpoint discrimination. Tell me I’m wrong or paranoid and there’s a simple explanation. Here’s my case.

I began taking Instagram seriously sometime around March of this year. Someone had set up an account for me years earlier, and I think I may have posted about 10 pictures. It was dormant and had 3.3K followers, about the same number that had quickly followed the account when it was set up. There was virtually no growth because I posted no new pictures.

But a social media-savvy Gen Zer convinced me I should use the platform, as a huge number of people who share my views don’t use Twitter but prefer Instagram. So I got serious, as mentioned, in March. Since then, I’ve posted several items a day, nearly every day. No vulgarity. No nudity. Just pictures and memes from a conservative perspective — oh, and plenty of sarcasm skewering Democrats, socialists and collectivists.

The results were immediate.

As with Twitter and Facebook, I began getting hundreds of new followers per day. My Instagram followers grew from 3K at the beginning of March to 68.9K as of two weeks ago. I’m told that’s pretty impressive daily growth. Every day, without fail, I got hundreds of new Instagram followers, averaging 400 to 500 a day. The pace suggested I’d reach well over 100K by year’s end.

But as of about two weeks ago, my number of Instagram followers came to a standstill at 68.9K. Dead stop. Same number every day. Meanwhile, on Twitter and Facebook, I’m still getting hundreds of new followers per day. But on Instagram, 68.9K. Same number every day.

Instagram allows users to submit complaints, and I’ve sent several. No response.

When I complained about Instagram on Twitter a few days ago, several people suggested Instagram had “bottle-capped” me, a term I’d never heard of. I learned that bottle-capping someone means placing a ceiling on that person’s followers, presumably to limit that person’s presence and clout on social media — an action I didn’t think Instagram would be so brazen to take. But 68.9K every day for two weeks while, over the same two-week period, my growth on Twitter and Facebook continued at its usual rate?

Instagram is owned by Facebook. In response to allegations of anti-conservative bias, Facebook commissioned a study headed by Republican then-Sen. Jon Kyl. His report found “concerns,” noting that the social media platform intends to “create a board that would review the most difficult and nuanced content decisions with independent judgment.” The report also says that in recent months Facebook hired staff for the purpose of “working with third-party groups … including staff dedicated to working with right-of-center organizations and leaders.”

OK, so what to make of my Instagram followers, stuck now for two weeks at the very same number? Scratch that. As of yesterday morning, my number of Instagram followers has declined by 100! Now I’m at 68.8K. So not only am I no longer gaining Instagram followers, I’m losing them.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Advice?

             (Front Page Mag)