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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; North Korea</title>
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		<title>Hollywood’s Last Stand</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/hollywoods-last-stand/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hollywoods-last-stand</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/hollywoods-last-stand/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 30 Dec 2014 05:50:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-American]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hollywood]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[movie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[North Korea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[the interview]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[villains]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=248360</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Americans are the only safe villains left.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/article-2656810-1EB7C4F100000578-425_634x351.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-248363" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/article-2656810-1EB7C4F100000578-425_634x351-450x249.jpg" alt="article-2656810-1EB7C4F100000578-425_634x351" width="331" height="183" /></a>Americans are the only people in the world who go to see movies in which they are the villains.</p>
<p>Russians stayed away from Jack Ryan Shadow Recruit with its Slavic villains (though Chinese audiences liked it well enough). And movies with Chinese villains can’t get made because the People’s Republic has more devastating penalties for offending studios than a mere hacking. Instead of leaking private emails, the studios simply aren’t allowed to release their movies in the world’s second biggest film market.</p>
<p>Hollywood’s titans take a break from patting themselves on the back for their commitment to freedom of expression and eagerly rush to work with the censors of the Chinese Communist Party to make their movies acceptable to China.</p>
<p>Muslim villains can’t appear in movies at all since September 11. The last time a movie had a villain named Mohammed, the filmmaker ended up hauled out of his home and tossed into jail. Hillary Clinton, Hollywood’s choice, <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/white-house-ordered-prosecution-of-mohammed-filmmaker/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">had assured grieving Benghazi family</span></a> members that instead of punishing their son’s killers, she would “have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video.”</p>
<p>With script control like that, it’s no wonder that you don’t see many Muslim movie villains. Not when Hillary is planning her presidential victory tour.</p>
<p>What does all that leave Hollywood scriptwriters with? Aliens, comic book villains and North Korea.</p>
<p>North Korea is a perfect villain because it isn’t a film market. Even possession of an American film can mean death. You can’t release the next weepy melodrama or comic book movie there which makes it fair game. And so a small nasty country with no sense of humor became the favorite movie villain of a gutless entertainment industry.</p>
<p>James Bond took on North Koreans in Die Another Day, the North Koreans invaded the White House in Olympus Has Fallen (or rather a radical faction of North Koreans, even before the Sony hack Hollywood was staking out a cautious position) and took over America in the Red Dawn remake.</p>
<p>These cinematic victories over North Koreans (or North Korean extremists) were hollow displays of Hollywood cowardice and the panicked response to The Interview stripped the hollow pretense of that courage away. And all that remains is the Great American Villain.</p>
<p>If Hollywood can’t even pick on North Korea, a country with no political or economic influence in the West, then it has no safe targets left. All that Hollywood can do is continue exporting anti-Americanism in movies which make the American military and American traditionalists into the villains.</p>
<p>Anti-American movies are a safe export. By making anti-American movies, Hollywood saves Russia and China a lot of money on propaganda. Instead of having to manufacture their own stories about the Yankee Devils, they can buy them directly from the Yankee Devils.</p>
<p>Or as Lenin was said to have put it, “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”</p>
<p>The entertainment industry has made anti-Americanism into its biggest export. In another age, Hollywood exported the values of a vibrant and promising nation. Now it exports dystopian fantasies, post-apocalyptic societies, corporate made satires about corporations and other narratives which depict the collapse and fall of America as the inevitable outcome of its dysfunctional society and warped values.</p>
<p>North Korea could never make better anti-American movies than Hollywood does. It’s one reason why Hollywood movies play to large audiences in countries like China and Russia where America is disliked.</p>
<p>This is the courageous storytelling that the entertainment industry prides itself on as it cringes before dictators while abusing Americans. But courage was never Hollywood’s strength. Before Hollywood studios were allowing Chinese Communists to censor their movies, they had extended that same privilege to Nazi Germany.</p>
<p>Joe Kennedy warned Hollywood, “You guys are going to be responsible for pushing the United States into war against the Nazis unless you stop your anti-Nazi films, your anti-Hitler propaganda.”</p>
<p>But Joe was wasting his time. Between Hollywood’s Communists (the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League changed its name to American Peace Mobilization once Hitler and Stalin made their dirty deal) and the native cowardice of the studio bosses, there wasn’t much to censor.</p>
<p>The Nazi as the standby villain had to wait until the actual Nazis had been defeated. Real Nazis were too dangerous to offend. So were Communists and Islamic terrorists. And now even North Koreans.</p>
<p>Regardless of who was behind the Sony hack, the industry reacted with kneejerk appeasement. That was the way that MGM had reacted to Nazi demands for censorship. Before theaters were turning their backs on The Interview, British theaters were turning up their noses at Chaplin’s self-financed The Great Dictator because it might offend Hitler at a time when appeasement was still the watchword.</p>
<p>While The Interview has been compared to The Great Dictator, Chaplin made his movie because he genuinely thought that Hitler needed to be opposed. By contrast The Interview is a typically ironic muddle with no moral center whose only reason for existing is its own miserably unfunny absurdity.</p>
<p>What Chaplin had was a point of view. Hollywood tends to have a political agenda, but nothing it will fight for or defend. Nothing that it truly believes in.</p>
<p>Hollywood has a long history of pandering to totalitarian regimes and ideologies. The difference is that it no longer does so under American colors. Instead it pretends to speak truth to power with its anti-Americanism while pandering to every dictator abroad.</p>
<p>With its British stars, Australian locations and Qatari investors, there isn’t much American about Hollywood these days except its anti-Americanism. That is one reason why Hollywood movies often perform better abroad than they do at home. Hollywood is becoming irrelevant in America. North American box office receipts fell 5 percent this year and 15 percent during the summer.</p>
<p>But that doesn’t matter because the international box office is holding strong.</p>
<p>A post-American entertainment industry naturally draws on American villains. Its stock of foreign villains is now exhausted. After the Sony hack, studios rushed to cancel North Korean themed movies before even waiting for the outcome of the investigation. And without North Korean villains to implausibly seize the White House and invade America, that leaves Americans as the villains.</p>
<p>At a time when few countries are willing to tolerate being ‘villainized’ in Hollywood films, Americans are still expected to subsidize their own demonization.</p>
<p>Unlike North Korea, Hollywood doesn’t take them seriously.</p>
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		<title>The Sony Cyberattack: A Preview of Things to Come</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-klein/the-sony-cyberattack-a-preview-of-things-to-come/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-sony-cyberattack-a-preview-of-things-to-come</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 24 Dec 2014 05:55:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cyber war]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hacking]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[North Korea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Seth Rogen]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sony]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[the interview]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=248053</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the North Korean hacking incident was no mere act of "vandalism." ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/rtr4h6b5.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-248059" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/rtr4h6b5-389x350.jpg" alt="rtr4h6b5" width="351" height="316" /></a>The FBI accused the North Korean government last week of perpetrating the devastating cyberattacks against Sony’s computer network for which a group calling itself the Guardians of Peace took responsibility. The North Korean government denied the charge and warned of serious consequences if the United States launched any counter-attack. President Obama ignored the threat, declaring that the U.S. would respond “proportionally” to what he characterized as cyberspace “vandalism.”</p>
<p>This Monday, North Korea experienced a total Internet outage for a bit less than ten hours. “I haven’t seen such a steady beat of routing instability and outages in KP before,” Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at DYN Research, told North Korea Tech, referring to North Korea’s Internet country code top-level domain. “Usually there are isolated blips, not continuous connectivity problems. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are absorbing some sort of attack presently.”</p>
<p>North Korea’s Internet access, which it obtains through China-based facilities, has since been restored.</p>
<p>Some observers have attributed the temporary Internet outage to the fulfillment, in part or in whole, of Obama’s “proportional” response, which a White House National Security spokeswoman would neither confirm nor deny. Whether China may have played a role in the temporary outage is unknown, but doubtful.</p>
<p>The FBI said that its evidence of North Korean complicity in the Sony hacking was based in part on similarities between the malware found to be used in the Sony hacking and software used in previous cyberattacks carried out by North Korea — “similarities in specific lines of code, encryption algorithms, data deletion methods, and compromised networks.” While some cybersecurity experts have questioned the FBI’s findings, North Korea certainly has a self-declared motive for going after Sony and it has sophisticated cyberattack capabilities. Moreover, it would not be North Korea’s first time engaging in such tactics. Last spring, South Korea concluded that North Korea was responsible for the hacking of several South Korean banks and media outlets that, along with another attack last year, were estimated to have caused damages in the neighborhood of $800 million.</p>
<p>The cyberattacks against Sony were evidently in retaliation for a movie called <i>The Interview</i> Sony was planning to release that depicted a mission to assassinate North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. His regime demanded that the U.S. government ban the film, characterized it as an act of war in a letter to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon last June and threatened a “merciless and resolute” response. In addition to the cyberattacks which resulted in the release of sensitive and sometimes embarrassing confidential information and internal Sony communications, the attackers issued threats of terrorist attacks against theaters that dared to display the film. An e-mail of theirs warned: &#8220;The world will be full of fear. Remember the 11th of September 2001.&#8221;</p>
<p>Theater owners cowered in the face of these threats. Sony withdrew its planned Christmas Day release of the movie, although it now claims it will make the film available to the public after all.</p>
<p>It would be easy to dismiss this latest incident as yet another in a long series of spats between the United States and the North Korean regime, precipitated in this case by a movie studio’s decision to produce and release a tasteless farce offensive to the megalomaniac North Korean dictator. President Obama played into this trivialization by downplaying the cyberattack as a mere act of “vandalism.”  Instead, it should be seen as a preview of what is likely to come as rogue states such as North Korea and Iran, as well as technology savvy jihadists such as ISIS, focus on this alternative form of warfare and intimidation to censor speech they find offensive.</p>
<p>Rep. Patrick Meehan, chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security’s Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, warned the “attack on Sony is the latest high-profile example of the growing danger of the cyber threat, and it won’t be the last. American businesses, financial networks, government agencies and infrastructure systems like power grids are at continual risk. They’re targeted not just by lone hackers and criminal syndicates, but by well-funded nation-states like North Korea and Iran. A lack of consequences for when nation states carry out cyberattacks has only emboldened these adversaries to do more harm.”</p>
<p><i>Reuters</i> quoted a South Korean specialist in nuclear designs, South Korea University’s Su Kune-yull, as saying, following the recent hacking of computer systems at South Korea’s nuclear plant operator:</p>
<p>“This demonstrated that, if anyone is intent with malice to infiltrate the system, it would be impossible to say with confidence that such an effort would be blocked completely. And a compromise of nuclear reactors&#8217; safety pretty clearly means there is a gaping hole in national security.”</p>
<p>The control systems of the U.S. electric bulk power distribution system, the electrical grid, is particularly vulnerable to cyberattacks without adequate defenses, which are sorely lacking today. As Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., President of the Center for Security Policy, warned:</p>
<p>“The vulnerability of America’s electric grid is a ticking time-bomb…Many of our foes are aware both of the grid’s susceptibility to attack and the potentially catastrophic consequences for this country and its people should it happen.”</p>
<p>Cyberattack is one of the means available to our enemies to exploit the electric grid’s vulnerability and create a literal nightmare for the nation’s population so dependent on electricity for their day-to-day lives.</p>
<p>Congress passed earlier this month the Cybersecurity and Critical Infrastructure Protection Act, which President Obama is expected to sign. While the legislation is a step in the right direction of enlisting government and private enterprise resources to enhance the nation’s cyber defenses and awareness, it is not enough. It must be accompanied by forceful actions by the Commander-in-Chief to deter any future cyberattacks against sensitive systems and infrastructures. Our enemies are watching. As U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power told the UN Security Council during its open debate on December 22<sup>nd</sup> regarding North Korea’s abysmal human rights record, “Dictators who see threats are an effective tool for silencing the international community tend to be emboldened and not placated.”</p>
<p>Slaps on the wrist, like the type of temporary Internet outage that the Obama administration may or may not have caused to North Korea’s Internet access, are woefully insufficient. We cannot give even the appearance of being intimidated by thug regimes and terrorists who want to bully us into suppressing the fundamental right of free expression in our own country. In addition to restoring North Korea to the list of state sponsors of terrorism, further counter-measures should be seriously considered now.  These may include cutting off North Korea’s access to global finance as completely as possible and targeting critical pieces of North Korea’s military infrastructure control systems with viruses of the sort used to infiltrate and incapacitate some of Iran’s centrifuges. Another counter-measure worth pursuing is the launching of a massive propaganda counter-offensive, using the Internet and social media to which North Korean elites and military officers have access to sow further doubts they may already be harboring in Kim Jong-un’s leadership.</p>
<p>Less rhetoric and more action from President Obama is what is needed. As Teddy Roosevelt said: “Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.”</p>
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		<title>North Korea&#8217;s War on Sony</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mark-tapson/north-koreas-war-on-sony/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=north-koreas-war-on-sony</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2014 05:24:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cyberwar]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hacking]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kim Jong-Un]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[North Korea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sony]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[War]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247991</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why pop culture matters.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/north-korea-kim-jong-un.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247994" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/north-korea-kim-jong-un-450x338.jpg" alt="north-korea-kim-jong-un" width="292" height="219" /></a>If anyone still needs convincing that pop culture matters, that even the frivolous fluff can impact politics and world affairs, here is dramatic evidence: an otherwise unremarkable Hollywood comedy that hasn’t even been released yet has led to the crippling cyber-hacking of a major corporation, threats of 9/11-style terrorism against movie theaters and other targets including the White House, self-censorship by the entertainment industry, and increased tension between the U.S. and North Korea’s already unstable and belligerent Kim Jong Un, each of whom blames the other while a suspiciously quiet China watches from the sidelines. And the fiasco isn’t over yet.</p>
<p>For those who haven’t been following the story, it began in recent weeks when a hacker group calling itself Guardians of Peace cyber-attacked Hollywood’s Sony studios and released thousands of the production company’s private emails and other confidential information like employee Social Security numbers. It’s been devastating in a number of ways, including internal turmoil arising out of embarrassing emails that may end in the sacking of film chairman Amy Pascal – not to mention an estimated $100 million blow to Sony.</p>
<p>The instigation for the hacking seems to be an upcoming Sony comedy called <i>The Interview</i>, starring James Franco and Seth Rogan as talk show hosts who are coerced by the CIA into assassinating tyrant Kim Jong Un during a trip to North Korea to interview him. Kim was not amused by the concept; neither were many progressives who felt that a comedy about killing a head of state was in poor taste and that Sony brought the subsequent hacking upon itself (of course, these are the same people who thought that a 2006 <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-405644/George-Bush-assassination-film-wins-award.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">feature film about the assassination of George W. Bush</span></a> was just dandy). Class action lawsuits from Sony employees who were affected by the cyber attack are <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/new-lawsuit-claims-sony-s-758443"><span style="color: #0433ff;">gearing up</span></a>, claiming that “Sony knew it was reasonably foreseeable that producing a script about North Korea&#8217;s leader Kim Jong Un would cause a backlash.”</p>
<p>After an investigation, the FBI officially <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2014/12/17/us-government-saw-interview-approved-theaters-upping-security/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">declared</span></a> that North Korea was behind the hacking (while not necessarily originating from inside its borders), which Obama called an act not of war, but of vandalism; he promised a “proportional response.” The totalitarian state took great umbrage at the accusation; it not only denied the attack, it generously offered to help the U.S. ferret out the real culprit, much like O.J. Simpson offered to help find his wife’s killer. The North Korean news media even <a href="https://docs.zoho.com/writer/ropen.do?rid=b6wwvb9f5be98f2b840829a0785b152ed84b9#bookmark="><span style="color: #0433ff;">accused</span></a> the U.S. of “gangster-like behavior” and claimed to have evidence that our government itself was deeply involved in the production of <i>The Interview</i>. “Toughest counteraction will be taken against the White House, the Pentagon and the whole US mainland, the cesspool of terrorism,” threatened a statement from North Korea.</p>
<p>The Guardians of Peace followed up the cyber-attack by issuing a threat of possible terrorist activity against any theaters that dared screen <i>The Interview</i>. “The world will be full of fear,” read their English-challenged message:</p>
<blockquote><p>We will clearly show it to you at the very time and places “The Interview” be shown, including the premiere, how bitter fate those who seek fun in terror should be doomed to. Soon all the world will see what an awful movie Sony Pictures Entertainment has made…</p>
<p>Remember the 11th of September 2001. We recommend you to keep yourself distant from the places at that time. (If your house is nearby, you’d better leave.) Whatever comes in the coming days is called by the greed of Sony Pictures Entertainment. All the world will denounce the SONY.</p></blockquote>
<p>The Department of Homeland Security <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/sony-hack-no-evidence-active-758460"><span style="color: #0433ff;">said</span></a> that there was “no credible intelligence to indicate an active plot against movie theaters within the United States.” But stars Seth Rogan and James Franco <a href="http://variety.com/2014/film/news/seth-rogen-and-james-franco-cancel-all-media-appearances-for-the-interview-1201380917/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">cancelled</span></a> all media appearances in the wake of the controversy. Most theater chains <a href="http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/12/18/theater-chains-opting-not-to-show-the-interview"><span style="color: #0433ff;">opted</span></a> not to show the film, and then Sony <a href="http://variety.com/2014/film/news/sony-has-no-further-release-plans-for-the-interview-1201382167/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">decided</span></a> against releasing <i>The Interview</i> at all in any form — including VOD or DVD.</p>
<p>(This wasn’t the only film shut down by the recent North Korean displeasure. Shooting of actor Steve Carell’s thriller <i>Pyongyang</i>, about a Westerner in North Korea who is accused of espionage, <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/steve-carells-north-korea-thriller-758901"><span style="color: #0433ff;">has been cancelled</span></a> as well.)</p>
<p>President Obama threw Sony under the bus, claiming that they should have called him first rather than set a bad precedent by backing down to North Korea. (This is the same President whose administration blamed the murder of Ambassador Chris Stevens in Benghazi on an unknown YouTube trailer for an utterly incompetent movie about the life of the Muslim prophet Muhammad. Hillary Clinton <a href="http://hotair.com/archives/2012/10/25/father-of-seal-killed-in-benghazi-hillary-told-me-we-will-make-sure-that-the-person-who-made-that-film-is-arrested-and-prosecuted/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">told</span></a> the father of one of the Benghazi victims, “We will make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted.”) Sony responded by claiming that it <i>did</i> contact the White House first.</p>
<p>Regardless, human rights activists <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/sony-hack-activists-drop-interview-758529?facebook_20141216"><span style="color: #0433ff;">are planning</span></a> to airlift DVDs of <i>The Interview</i> into Kim country via hydrogen balloons. Fighters for a Free North Korea, run by a former government propagandist who escaped to South Korea, has for years used balloons to get transistor radios, DVDs and other items into North Korea in order to open up the outside world to the news-deprived masses. Thor Halvorssen’s Human Rights Foundation in New York has been helping to finance the balloon drops, and will add DVD copies of <i>The Interview </i>as soon as possible.</p>
<p>Halvorssen says that Hollywood is largely unaware that its movies and TV shows are being used so effectively in this manner. The past dozen or so drops, for example, have included copies of <i>Braveheart</i>, <i>Battlestar Galactica </i>and <i>Desperate Housewives</i>. “Viewing any one of these is a subversive act that could get you executed,” Halvorssen says, “and North Koreans know this, given the public nature of the punishments meted out to those who dare watch entertainment from abroad.” [<a href="http://acculturated.com/freedom-and-the-power-of-pop-culture/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">I have written elsewhere</span></a> about these risks that the freedom-starved North Koreans undertake just to watch a contraband film] “<i>The Interview</i> is tremendously threatening to the Kims,” Halvorssen continues. “They cannot abide by anything that portrays them as anything other than a god. This movie destroys the narrative” – much like the satirical 2004 film <i>Team America: World Police</i> famously lampooned Kim Jong Un’s monstrous father.</p>
<p>While our tabloid news media seem obsessed with the more inconsequential and gossipy aspects of this affair – like the emails in which Sony executives disparage Angelina Jolie’s talent and make racial jokes at Obama’s expense – there are serious ramifications of the cyber-hacking mystery. The entertainment industry as a whole, for example, failed to show a quick and united resistance to the threats of a foreign tyrant. But more significantly, the Guardians of Peace exposed America’s vulnerability to the warfare of the future – cyberwar.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss Shillman Journalism Fellow <strong>Mark Tapson</strong> on the <strong>Glazov Gang</strong> discussing<strong> Fighting the Culture War</strong>:</em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/v5gR4E5UPB8" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.</b></p>
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		<title>Obama: Against Free Speech Before He Was For It</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/robert-spencer/obama-against-free-speech-before-he-was-for-it/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-against-free-speech-before-he-was-for-it</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 22 Dec 2014 05:08:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Robert Spencer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free Speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hack]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[North Korea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sony]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247884</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[As long as Muslims aren’t offended, he’s a free speech champion.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="color: #0433ff;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/gall.obama_.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247885" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/gall.obama_-406x350.jpg" alt="gall.obama" width="302" height="260" /></a><a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2014/12/19/sony-the-interview-hackers-gop/20635449/">As far as Barack Obama is concerned,</a></span> Sony was wrong to capitulate to threats from North Korean hackers and pull the movie <i>The Interview</i>. “I wish they had spoken to me first,” said the free speech champion. “I would have told them do not get into a pattern in which you’re intimidated by these kinds of criminal attacks.”</p>
<p>Remember: this is the same man who <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/09/25/remarks-president-un-general-assembly"><span style="color: #0433ff;">said this</span></a> at the United Nations on September 25, 2012.  “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”</p>
<p>Why did he say this? Because he was blaming a video about Muhammad for the murderous jihad attacks on September 11, 2012 in Benghazi. In that same speech, he called the video “crude and disgusting” and said: “I know there are some who ask why we don’t just ban such a video. And the answer is enshrined in our laws: Our Constitution protects the right to practice free speech.”</p>
<p>Yet this was just empty verbiage. Before he made that speech, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/14/white-house-innocence-of-_n_1885684.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">the Obama White House asked Google to remove the Muhammad video from YouTube</span></a>. In fact, this was one of the first things the White House did, even as the Benghazi jihad attack was still going on. <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2014/05/white-house-contacted-youtube-during-benghazi-attack-darrell-issa-says/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">ABC News</span></a> reported that “a still-classified State Department e-mail says that one of the first responses from the White House to the Benghazi attack was to contact YouTube to warn of the “ramifications” of allowing the posting of an anti-Islamic video, according to Rep. Darrell Issa, the Republican chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The memo suggests that even as the attack was still underway — and before the CIA began the process of compiling talking points on its analysis of what happened — the White House believed it was in retaliation for a &#8220;controversial video.”</p>
<p>And it didn’t just believe this – it acted upon this belief. An email circulated among Obama Administration officials while the attack was still going on, entitled, “Update on Response to actions – Libya,” stated: “White House is reaching out to U-Tube [sic] to advice ramification of the posting of the Pastor Jon video.”</p>
<p>So the first thing Obama did in response to the Benghazi jihad attack was move to restrict the freedom of speech, and protect Muslims from material that some of them found offensive. Google refused this preposterous and unconstitutional request on free speech grounds, although later a court ordered the video removed.</p>
<p>In those days, Obama never warned anyone not to “get into a pattern in which you’re intimidated by these kinds of criminal attacks.”</p>
<p>Indeed, the most ominous aspect of the Benghazi jihad attack for the long term health of the United States as a free society was the Obama Administration’s desire to blame it all on our freedom of speech. Obama’s declaration that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam” was essentially a call for the U.S. to censor itself and voluntarily restrict our freedom of speech so as not to say anything that offends Muslims.</p>
<p>Yet restriction of the freedom of speech creates a protected class (whichever group cannot be criticized), thereby destroying the principle of equality of rights for all people before the law, and paves the way for tyranny by making it possible to criminalize dissent.</p>
<p>But now that a free speech case doesn’t have to do with outraged Muslims, Obama is suddenly a champion of free expression. This isn’t about endangering people, either: the North Koreans are just as capable of going on a bloody rampage as Islamic jihadists are.</p>
<p>For whatever reason, Obama shows a strange solicitude for the sensibilities of Muslims that he doesn’t appear interested in offering to the North Koreans. And as long as he opposes the freedom of speech in any context, his support for it in any other context rings hollow.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.</b></p>
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		<title>White House Promises &#8220;Proportional Response&#8221; to Sony Hack</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/white-house-promises-proportional-response-to-sony-hack/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=white-house-promises-proportional-response-to-sony-hack</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 18 Dec 2014 21:26:07 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[North Korea]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247739</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Do we hack one of their movie studios and post private correspondence from their party bosses? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Obama-Talks-Sony.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-247740" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Obama-Talks-Sony-450x279.jpg" alt="Obama-Talks-Sony" width="450" height="279" /></a></p>
<p>The White House and its media corps lambasted Israel for disproportionately bombing Hamas in response to its murders of Israelis and rocket attacks. The criticism however makes no sense.</p>
<p>And yet the White House is promising a <a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2014/12/18/earnest_on_sony_hack_attack_there_will_be_a_proportional_response.html">proportional response to the Sony hack</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>White House press secretary Josh Earnest addressed the cyber-attack against Sony over the movie The Interview at Thursday&#8217;s daily briefing. Earnest promised a &#8220;proportional response.&#8221;</p>
<p>REPORTER: What is the United States going to do about it?</p>
<p>JOSH EARNEST, WHITE HOUSE: Well, before we start publicly speculating about a response, it&#8217;s appropriate that we allow the investigation to move forward. I do understand that the investigation is progressing, and that as the members of the national security team meet to discuss the matter, they are considering a range of options. As they do so, though, they are mindful of a couple of things.</p>
<p>First of all, as we would be in any scenario, sort of strategic scenario like this, they would be mindful of the fact that we need a proportional response. And also mindful of the fact that sophisticated actors, when they carry out actions like this are often times &#8212; not always, but often &#8212; seeking to provoke a response from the United States of America. They may believe that a response from us in one fashion or another would be advantageous to them. And so we want to be mindful of that, too, and the president&#8217;s national security team is mindful of those two important strategic considerations as they consider a range of available responses</p></blockquote>
<p>To parse the last part of that gibberish, Obama&#8217;s smart liberal power tells us not to respond to North Korea because that will just give it what it wants.</p>
<p>But as for the rest of it, what is a proportional response to unconventional warfare anyway?</p>
<p>Do we hack one of the movie studios they don&#8217;t have and post private correspondence from the party bosses who run it and then threaten that if the release of Yankee American Devils Go to Hell goes forward that we might possibly bomb their theaters?</p>
<p>This situation reminds us that the whole talking point of the proportional response is meaningless concept that has no application, especially when dealing with terrorists.</p>
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		<title>Torture and Police Brutality in a Real Police State</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/faith-j-h-mcdonnell/torture-and-police-brutality-in-a-real-police-state/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=torture-and-police-brutality-in-a-real-police-state</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 17 Dec 2014 05:46:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Faith J. H. McDonnell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[brutality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[North Korea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Senate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Torture]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247513</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Where is Senate and media outrage about brutalized North Koreans?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/kj1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247515" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/kj1.jpg" alt="kj" width="279" height="157" /></a><em>The police beat them with clubs and metal brushes. Some of the teenagers were beaten so badly that their heads were covered with bald spots because the hair would no longer grow back from the trauma. </em>(“MJ” a missionary who with his wife sheltered North Korean orphans)</p>
<p>On December 10, 2014, Human Rights Day, the American media was salivating over the Senate Democrats’ report about enhanced interrogation of terrorists, raging over the U.S. government’s violation of jihadists’ human rights. At the same time, condemnation of America’s police forces continued to spread throughout the country, leading to well-orchestrated protests this past weekend. Meanwhile, a Capitol Hill <a href="http://www.nkfreedom.org/Events/2014-International-Human-Rights-Day.aspx">press conference</a> sought to open the eyes of the world to true torture and real police brutality.</p>
<p>The press conference, was sponsored by the <a href="http://www.nkfreedom.org">North Korea Freedom Coalition</a> (NKFC), under the chairmanship of Dr. Suzanne Scholte. The NKFC was joined by U.S. Representatives <a href="http://foreignaffairs.house.gov/press-release/chairman-royce-applauds-house-passage-north-korea-sanctions-legislation">Ed Royce</a> (R-CA) and <a href="http://democrats.foreignaffairs.house.gov/press_display.asp?id=1378">Eliot Engel</a> (D-NY) to focus on the circumstances of <a href="http://www.nkfreedom.org/UploadedDocuments/2014_PhotoLaosNinePhotos.pdf">nine North Korean teenagers</a> who were <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324682204578514772761682396">forced back</a> to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in May 2013 by the Laotian and Chinese governments. Their whereabouts has been unknown since the repatriation, but recent rumors have suggested that at least some of the seven boys and two girls may have been executed as punishment for leaving Kim Jong Un’s wonderland.</p>
<p>The young people are known as the “Laos Nine” because it was from Laos that they were returned to China and repatriated to North Korea. They had been part of the <em>kkotjebbi</em> (homeless North Korean children living on the streets in China). They were taken in by <a href="http://www.nkfreedom.org/UploadedDocuments/2014_Testimonial_MJ.pdf">a missionary “MJ” and his wife</a>, who have saved the lives of many North Korean children, in spite of the risk to themselves.</p>
<p>Police brutality is a daily reality for the <em>kkotjebbi</em> according to MJ. In a statement for the press conference, he revealed that “most of the children were eating what they could find in trash cans and were sleeping in the sewers in freezing conditions,” all the while trying to avoid the notice of the brutal Chinese border patrol guards who beat them with clubs and metal brushes.</p>
<p>MJ said that the children “had no access to medical care and begged on the streets with frostbitten and infected feet.” And yet for North Korean escapees, even facing beatings from the Chinese police and freezing to death are preferable than being caught by the Chinese government and forcibly repatriated to the police state of North Korea.</p>
<p>The missionary couple feared to remain in China with “their children.” Although North Korean defectors are recognized internationally as refugees, China routinely violates its obligations to respect the principle of non-refoulement under international refugee and human rights law and sends North Koreans back to certain imprisonment and probable death. So in April of 2013, MJ, his wife, and the nine teens began a journey from China to North Korea. After they crossed the Chinese/Laotian border they were arrested by the Laotian authorities and instead of accommodating their safe passage to South Korea, the Laotian government collaborated with the Chinese government to send the teens back to China from which they were returned to North Korea.</p>
<p>In February 2014, a <a href="http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/CoIDPRK/Pages/ReportoftheCommissionofInquiryDPRK.aspx">report</a> issued by the <a href="http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/CoIDPRK/Pages/CommissionInquiryonHRinDPRK.aspx">Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea</a> echoed what human rights organizations have been saying for years. The COI’s report, under the authority of the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, thoroughly details the deplorable conditions for the citizens of Kim Jong Un’s regime, and the unspeakable torture that those confined to one of the prison camps in the vast network across the DPRK. In Section 60, “Arbitrary detention, torture, executions, and prison camps,” the report reveals:</p>
<blockquote><p><em>In the political prison camps of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the inmate population has been gradually eliminated through deliberate starvation, forced labour, executions, torture, rape and the denial of reproductive rights enforced through punishment, forced abortion and infanticide. The commission estimates that hundreds of thousands of political prisoners have perished in these camps over the past five decades. The unspeakable atrocities that are being committed against inmates of the kwanliso political prison camps resemble the horrors of camps that totalitarian States established during the twentieth century.</em></p></blockquote>
<p>Congressman Royce, the Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, opened the December 10 press conference on the Laos Nine. He and all of the other speakers referred to COI’s report. Royce echoed the COI’s recommendations that the UN General Assembly consider a resolution to condemn North Korea for human rights abuses and crimes against humanity, and that North Korea be referred to the International Criminal Court. The Chairman also stressed the immediate need for the Senate to take up a <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/1771?q=%7B%22search%22%3A%5B%22H.R.+1771%22%5D%7D">piece of legislation (H.R. 1771)</a> that was passed unanimously by the House of Representatives, calling for strong sanctions against North Korea.</p>
<p>H.R. 1771, the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act, according to the NKFC, “calls for the harnessing of the Treasury Department’s regulatory oversight of the hub of the global financial system, blocking the accounts and revenue streams that sustain Kim Jong Un’s oppression and control of the North Korean people, along with his weapons programs, arms trafficking, proliferation, and money laundering.” The NKFC also says that the bill “blocks the funds of third-country entities that knowingly facilitation North Korea’s crimes against humanity, and its violations of U.N. Security Council sanctions.” If the members of the Senate Intelligence Committee responsible for the recent shameful report really care about human rights and stopping torture, they would work to pass immediately H.R. 1771, the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act.</p>
<p>Engel, the Ranking Member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has worked in partnership with Royce for a number of years on a variety of human rights issues. He repeated his House colleague’s call for action in both the United Nations and the U.S. Congress. Engel also noted that the decision of the Laotian government to send the nine orphans back to China and then back to North Korea <a href="http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2010/09/north-korea-human-rights-cohen">violates international law</a>.</p>
<p>Thankfully, as the North Korea Freedom Coalition pointed out in a <a href="http://www.nkfreedom.org/UploadedDocuments/2014_NKFCLaos20141210.pdf">letter</a> addressed to Laotian President Lt. Gen. Choummaly Sayasone, since the incident with the Laos Nine, the Laotian government has <em>not </em>forced any other North Korean refugees – either adult or children – back to North Korea. “We urge you to continue this humanitarian policy which is consistent with international refugee law and we urge you to work with the Republic of Korea and other nations on the safe resettlement of North Korean refugees until conditions improve in that country,” the Coalition wrote.</p>
<p>Following the remarks by the members of Congress, NKFC advocates displayed photos of the nine children and told their story as told by missionary MJ. The first speaker, NKFC Vice Chairman, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Associate Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, declared that it was important for the children and other North Koreans longing for freedom to know that they “are not forgotten.” Cooper held the photo of the oldest of the North Korean orphans, Moon-Chul, who was 19 at the time of repatriation. According to the little bit of biographical information, this young man:</p>
<blockquote><p><em>. . . suffered frostbite on his feet. There was no place where he could receive medical care so he had to cut his own three frostbitten toes off. Despite his difficulty walking due to his injuries and all that he suffered, he always had a kind heart which led him to take care of the young kkotjebbis and give them food that was found first. Because of Moon-Chul’s kindness in caring for Ryu Kwong-Hyuk, who was much weaker, Kwong Hyuk survived.</em></p></blockquote>
<p>Another one of the NKFC advocates followed up with a photo of Ryu Kwong-Hyuk, 17 at the time of repatriation, and told of him:</p>
<blockquote><p><em>This young man was unable to beg or steal for food because he felt great shame for his condition. When Moon-Chul found him he was nearly starved to death, but Moon-Chul kept Kwong-Hyuk alive making sure he had food. Kwong-Hyuk’s dream is to get an education and one day serve the poor.</em></p></blockquote>
<p>If the mainstream media is so morally scrupulous that it is appalled by enhanced interrogation of radical jihadists, it should be doubly appalled by the deliberate starvation of human beings by their own government and the imprisonment of 100,000 men, women, and children in political prison camps under horrific conditions.</p>
<p>If the Senate Intelligence Committee could spend some $50 million to condemn the waterboarding of the mastermind of 9/11, who sawed the head of Danny Pearl…could they spare a little compassion for Noh Yea Ji, a 14 year old North Korean orphan girl who was sold as a slave in China three times, rescued along with the rest of the Laos Nine, and who has now disappeared in the torture chamber that is North Korea?</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>While North Koreans Starve, Kim Jong Un Gets Fat</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/while-north-koreans-starve-kim-jong-un-gets-fat/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=while-north-koreans-starve-kim-jong-un-gets-fat</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/while-north-koreans-starve-kim-jong-un-gets-fat/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 25 Sep 2014 15:24:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kim Jong-Un]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Michelle Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[North Korea]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=241438</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Maybe we can send Michelle Obama over ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/ni-july6-p.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-241440" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/ni-july6-p-450x256.jpg" alt="North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un visits the Kaeson Bread Restaurant in the Kaeson Youth Park Funfair in this undated picture released by the North's official KCNA news agency in Pyongyang" width="450" height="256" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/544020-120402-nkorea.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-241441" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/544020-120402-nkorea-450x253.jpg" alt="544020-120402-nkorea" width="450" height="253" /></a></p>
<p>In the camps, North Korean families starve. And <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/02/05/the-cannibals-of-north-korea/">during the worst of the famines</a>, it wasn&#8217;t just in the camps.</p>
<blockquote><p>There were times and places in North Korea in the mid-1990s, as a great famine wiped out perhaps 10 percent of the population, that children feared to sleep in the open.</p>
<p>North Korea&#8217;s famine is over, but the stories of desperate men and women, driven so insane by starvation that they consume their own children, have resurfaced. Last week, Asia Press published a report alleging that thousands recently died of starvation in a North Korean province, a trend that is sometimes called a micro-famine. The story was sourced to Rimjingang, a collection of underground North Korean journalists whose work is generally considered reputable. According to Rimjingang&#8217;s sources, the famine, like others before it, had led to cannibalism. One man, they said, had been arrested and executed for killing and eating his children.</p></blockquote>
<p>But as always<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/08/opinion/pyongyangs-hunger-games.html"> the elites of the left live well</a>, while they starve their own people.</p>
<blockquote><p>$645,800,000. That is what the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, is said to have squandered in 2012 on “luxury goods,” including cosmetics, handbags, leather products, watches, electronics, cars and top-shelf alcohol. In that same year, Mr. Kim also spent $1.3 billion on his ballistic missile programs.</p>
<p>$150 million. That is what the United Nations World Food Program asked donor nations to give for food and other humanitarian aid for North Koreans in 2013.</p></blockquote>
<p>And Kim Jong-un <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2760492/Is-Kim-Jong-ill-North-Korean-dictator-poor-health-weight-ballooned-thanks-obsession-cheese.html">faces a serious health problem</a>. Obesity.</p>
<blockquote><p>Kim Jong-un is putting his health at serious risk due to his dangerously high consumption of Emmental cheese, it has been claimed.</p>
<p>The 31-year-old North Korean leader got a taste for the cheese while a student in Switzerland &#8211; and is understood to love it so much that he imports vast quantities despite Western sanctions.</p>
<p>A unhealthy appetite for Emmental, also known as Swiss cheese, is believed to be a key factor in Kim&#8217;s weight ballooning so in recent months that he now walks with a limp.</p></blockquote>
<p>Maybe we can send Michelle Obama over for a little bout of &#8220;Let&#8217;s move.&#8221;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
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		<title>Hamas Finds New Way to be Evil, Allies with North Korea</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/hamas-finds-new-way-to-be-evil-allies-with-north-korea/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hamas-finds-new-way-to-be-evil-allies-with-north-korea</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/hamas-finds-new-way-to-be-evil-allies-with-north-korea/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 27 Jul 2014 14:00:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[North Korea]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=237177</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[“North Korea is an obvious place to seek supplies."]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/236712_5_.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-237178" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/236712_5_.jpg" alt="236712_5_" width="387" height="291" /></a></p>
<p>Hamas is trying to innovate. Whether it&#8217;s long range missiles or tunnels, it keeps trying to remain on the cutting edge of evil. And <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/palestinianauthority/10992921/Hamas-and-North-Korea-in-secret-arms-deal.html">where better to go to the cutting edge of evil than</a>&#8230; North Korea.</p>
<blockquote><p>Hamas terrorists are attempting to negotiate a new arms deal with North Korea for missiles and communications equipment that will allow them to maintain their offensive against Israel, according to Western security sources.</p>
<p>Security officials say the deal between Hamas and North Korea is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and is being handled by a Lebanese-based trading company with close ties to the militant Palestinian organisation based in east Beirut.</p>
<p>Hamas officials are believed to have already made an initial cash down payment to secure the deal, and are now hoping that North Korea will soon begin shipping extra supplies of weapons to Gaza.</p>
<p>“Hamas is looking for ways to replenish its stocks of missiles because of the large numbers it has fired at Israel in recent weeks,” explained a security official. “North Korea is an obvious place to seek supplies because Pyongyang already has close ties with a number of militant Islamist groups in the Middle East.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Also North Korea will give Hamas stuff that Qatar and Iran won&#8217;t. Iran and Qatar are using Hamas in their own power plays, but North Korea doesn&#8217;t care. It will sell Hamas anything it wants if it can produce the cash.</p>
<p>And speaking of a terrorist group that suddenly came into a lot of money and probably has quite a shopping list&#8230; ISIS.</p>
<p>But nothing to worry about. Obama and Kerry will just pressure Israel into surrendering again while they go on ignoring ISIS until it finally picks up that nuke it always had its eye on.</p>
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		<slash:comments>3</slash:comments>
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		<title>More to &#8216;Hard Choices&#8217; than Benghazi</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lloyd-billingsley/more-to-hard-choices-than-benghazi/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=more-to-hard-choices-than-benghazi</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lloyd-billingsley/more-to-hard-choices-than-benghazi/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 19 Jun 2014 04:35:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Lloyd Billingsley]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Benghazi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[book]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Castro]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cuba]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hard choices]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hillary Clinton]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Huma Abedin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[North Korea]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=234358</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Hillary Clinton's delusions on North Korea, Cuba, Islamists and more. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #1a1a1a;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/140617_hillary_clinton_hard_choices_ap_605.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-234359" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/140617_hillary_clinton_hard_choices_ap_605.jpg" alt="HiIlary Rodham Clinton" width="259" height="209" /></a>Hillary Rodham Clinton’s new book has been in the spotlight over what she says about Benghazi. That chapter, which starts on page 382, is not the only fascinating passage in Hard Choices. Consider, for example, what Hillary says about Islamists.</p>
<p style="color: #1a1a1a;">“The term Islamist generally refers to people and parties who support a guiding role for Islam in politics and government. It covers a wide spectrum, from those who think Islamic values should inform public policy decisions to those who think that all laws should be judged or even formulated by Islamic authorities to conform to Islamic law. Not all Islamists are alike. In some cases, Islamist leaders and organizations have been hostile to democracy, including some who have supported radical, extremist, and terrorist ideology and actions. But around the world, there are political parties with religious affiliations – Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Muslim – that respect the rules of democratic politics, and it is in America’s interest to encourage all religiously based political parties and leaders to embrace inclusive democracy and reject violence. Any suggestion that faithful Muslims or people of any faith cannot thrive in a democracy is insulting, dangerous and wrong.”</p>
<p style="color: #1a1a1a;">Here readers see the straw man at his finest. Nobody is contending that people of any faith “cannot thrive in a democracy.” The issue is whether Islam itself has a problem with democracy, multi-party elections, free speech, women’s rights, gay rights, diversity, co-education and so forth. The evidence suggests that it does.</p>
<p style="color: #1a1a1a;">Islamists want more than a “guiding role” for Islamic law. They want an exclusive, dominating role. In Islamist regimes non-Islamic groups are second- or third-class citizens. In more than 600 pages Hillary includes nothing on the Islamist group Boko Haram, fond of kidnapping hundreds of girls and burning boys alive.</p>
<p style="color: #1a1a1a;">Some readers will be familiar with Huma Abedin, Hillary’s deputy chief of staff and her ties to Islamic supremacism. Consider how Hard Choices handles the matter.</p>
<p style="color: #1a1a1a;">In one meeting in Cairo, an agitated participant brought up an “especially outrageous canard. He accused my trusted aide <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/jamie-glazov/huma-abedin-islamist-connections-and-willful-blindness/">Huma Abedin</a>, who is Muslim, of being a secret agent of the Muslim Brotherhood. This claim circulated by some unusually irresponsible and demagogic right-wing political and media personalities in the United States, including members of Congress. . .” Hillary includes no background information on Abedin and her main argument is that Sen. John McCain has publicly defended her.</p>
<p style="color: #1a1a1a;">So has president Obama, who calls Abedin “an American patriot and an example of what we need in this country.” The president issued that praise “at the White House’s annual Iftar dinner to break the Ramadan fast.”</p>
<p style="color: #1a1a1a;">Readers of Hard Choices are told that in North Korea the political oppression is “nearly” total. Actually, the oppression is total. “Famine is frequent,” she writes, and many of the people “live in abject poverty” but she does not tie that poverty to oppressive Marxist rule and a command economy, or compare the forced famines in China and Ukraine.</p>
<p style="color: #1a1a1a;">Hillary writes that “for fifty years Cuba had been ruled as a Communist dictatorship by Fidel Castro.” Fidel and brother Raul “continue to rule Cuba with absolute power.” As Humberto Fontova notes in The Longest Romance, Castro’s rule is as bad as it gets, comparable to Stalin’s. But Hillary offers no detail about the regime’s political prisoners and persecution of homosexuals. Chile, on the other hand suffered the “brutal military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.” And the coup that brought Pinochet to power, says Hillary, is “a dark chapter in our involvement in the region.”</p>
<p style="color: #1a1a1a;">The author provides no details about the coup and fails to note that the brutal Pinochet, unlike the non-brutal Castro, stepped aside to allow free elections. But readers will observe the first response to blame the United States. Hillary Clinton describes none of the episodes on her watch as Secretary of State, including the Benghazi attack, as a dark chapter in American diplomacy.</p>
<p style="color: #1a1a1a;">It took a village of handlers to produce Hard Choices, dumbed down to the point of explaining that winter in the southern hemisphere occurs at a different time of year. The book is highly autohagiographical, bulked with gossipy filler such as half a page on Benazir Bhutto’s shalwar kameez, “a long flowing tunic over loose pants that was both practical and attractive. . . We wore it for a formal dinner. I wore red silk and Chelsea chose turquoise green.”</p>
<p style="color: #1a1a1a;">On page 595 Hillary says she has yet to make the decision to run for President of the United States. If Hard Choices unsettles readers about her suitability for that office, they might also read Hell to Pay: The Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton, the 1999 book by the late Barbara Olson, a victim of the Islamist terrorist attack on September 11, 2001.</p>
<p style="color: #1a1a1a;">Readers might also consult Peter Collier’s Political Woman: The Big Little Life of Jeane Kirkpatrick. Hillary Clinton nowhere mentions Ambassador Kirkpatrick but deciding which woman is the tougher, more intelligent and more successful diplomat should not be a hard choice.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>North Korea&#8217;s Meth Sales to US Shows Why Sanctions are Worthless</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/north-koreas-meth-sales-to-us-shows-why-sanctions-are-worthless/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=north-koreas-meth-sales-to-us-shows-why-sanctions-are-worthless</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/north-koreas-meth-sales-to-us-shows-why-sanctions-are-worthless/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 08 May 2014 16:56:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[North Korea]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=224225</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[40 per cent of North Korea’s foreign earnings come from illegal activities.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/meth-in-ruili-yunnan.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-224226" alt="meth-in-ruili-yunnan" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/meth-in-ruili-yunnan-450x339.jpg" width="450" height="339" /></a></p>
<p>Sanctions don&#8217;t work. They hurt ordinary people, but they do nothing to the regime. They didn&#8217;t work in Iraq. They don&#8217;t work in Iran. And they&#8217;re not just useless in<a href="http://blazingcatfur.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/brea-kim-bad-99-pure-crystal-meth-made.html"> North Korea, they make the problem worse</a>.</p>
<p>When a president doesn&#8217;t want to do anything about a problem, he imposes sanctions. See Crimea, Russian Invasion of.</p>
<blockquote><p>Crystal meth made in laboratories in North Korea is flooding the world&#8217;s drugs market, with shipments ferried through China to distribute across the globe.</p>
<p>In the U.S. police officers have intercepted batches of the highly addictive drug, that were bound for New York after being produced in Kim Jong-un&#8217;s Communist state.</p>
<p>In some parts of North Korea up to 50 per cent of the population are reported to be hooked. Parents even offer it to children to help them concentrate on their studies.</p>
<p>As one of the few commodities easily available, it is used for everything from treating colds to curbing hunger pangs during times of food shortages.</p>
<p>Experts say the North Korean government reportedly began producing meth in the 1990s to provide desperately-needed hard currency for the ruling elite.</p>
<p>Then it was exported, mostly to China, with reports of North Korean diplomats being sent abroad with their bags stuffed full with meth.</p>
<p>Experts estimate up to 40 per cent of North Korea’s foreign earnings now come from illegal activities.</p></blockquote>
<p>Which is what happens when you impose sanctions. The black market takes off and causes worse problems for everyone. North Korea isn&#8217;t just a nuclear hub. It&#8217;s a meth hub.</p>
<p>An intelligent rule of thumb is that you either do something about a country. Or you don&#8217;t. Imposing sanctions accomplishes little except to give the regime new ways to make money.</p>
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		<title>Rep. Ed Royce: Iran Is Following North Korea&#8217;s Playbook</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/rep-ed-royce-iran-is-following-north-koreas-playbook/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=rep-ed-royce-iran-is-following-north-koreas-playbook</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 07 Apr 2014 04:20:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ed Royce]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[foreign policy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Lebanon]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[North Korea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sanctions]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Syria]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=222842</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The congressman explains the urgent need to restore sanctions on the Islamic Republic at the West Coast Retreat. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong>Editor’s note: Below are the video and transcript of Congressman Ed Royce&#8217;s speech at the Freedom Center’s West Coast Retreat, held at the Terranea Resort in Palos Verdes, California from March 21-23, 2014:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/90390381" height="281" width="500" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Ed Royce: </strong>The advantage of having some seniority on the Foreign Affairs Committee is you get an opportunity to see the same mistakes made over and over again, and there&#8217;s a certain advantage to that.  With North Korea I used to wonder: am I the only guy in this meeting who thinks it&#8217;s odd that we want to lift sanctions on North Korea?  I mean, we&#8217;ve got them by the throat.  The Treasury Secretary, Steward Levy, was finally able, after we caught them counterfeiting $100.00 bills, finally able to use his authority, since nobody else in the government would do it, to say, well, there&#8217;s only 11 banks they use.  We just freeze the accounts.  They&#8217;ve got a decision to make in China whether they&#8217;re going to do business with the United States or business with North Korea.  What do you think they&#8217;re going to do?  Of course, the North Koreans couldn&#8217;t move a dime.</p>
<p>Now, I had the unique experience of actually interviewing the fellow who was in charge of propaganda for three of these Kims in the dynasty, for the father, the grandfather, the grandson, right?  So he tells me that it shut that economy down like a drum.  I mean, it just absolutely capped all economic activity.  There was nothing they could do.  The fellow who defected out of the missile program told me for eight months everything was closed down on the missile line.  He said, you know we used to buy these clandestine black market gyroscopes that we needed for our missile programs out of Japan.  It costs more on the black market to buy what you need for an underground nuclear program and missile program.  But he said we couldn&#8217;t buy a thing.  Well, the whole thing was collapsing.  He made one astute observation, which I have tried to remember.  You know, if you&#8217;re the dictator and you can&#8217;t pay the generals, that&#8217;s not a good position to be in, and he said that was the position that Kim Jong-Il was in.  And yet somehow, out of the State Department, comes the idea that if we only lift $25,000,000.00 in sanctions at least it might get them back to the bargaining table.  Why?  I mean, we were in the position.  I mean, I was arguing at the time, it&#8217;s collapsing.  Bring it on.  Let&#8217;s see what we get.  No, no, no, no, no, says the State Department.  We have to lift those sanctions, it&#8217;s just $25,000,000.00 and of course once we lifted the $25,000,000.00 what was the result?  Everybody had their confidence to go back in and do business again in North Korea.  All right.  There&#8217;s the sign.  They&#8217;re lifting the sanctions.  Let&#8217;s get back in and do some business and they were out from underneath the pressure.</p>
<p>Now apparently, since we know the Iranians were always over there assisting them, that&#8217;s what Intel says, apparently somebody was taking notes.  Apparently Iran decided, well if that&#8217;s the way the State Department likes to play this game &#8212; and believe me I have debated the individual right now who&#8217;s in charge of these negotiations years and years ago in a 50 minute debate over this same issue with respect to North Korea.  But now you hear the same arguments.  Well, if we just lift the sanctions a little bit we&#8217;ll get a little bit more serious.  Now, if we can just extend an olive branch, to quote one administration official fairly high up, since it was the Secretary of State, if we just extend an olive branch we will get their attention.  And the consequences are that while we sanction the United States right here and refuse to export our natural gas &#8212; by the way, at a time when our natural gas would be worth something since we&#8217;re capping wells here because of the glut, we&#8217;re flaring natural gas, it could really turn out to be handy in Eastern Europe at the moment if we were exporting, but no, no, no, we&#8217;re sanctioning our own because of our fossil fuel concerns; we&#8217;re sanctioning the export of our natural gas into Eastern Europe, but we&#8217;re willing to lift those sanctions.  For three months in a row now we&#8217;ve had an increase in petroleum exports out of Iran.  Well, maybe this has changed Iran&#8217;s behavior.  Maybe this is worth it.  Let&#8217;s think that through.  Let&#8217;s see, what did we have in March?  We had Iran getting caught in the Red Sea with a scheme to first purchase out of Syria M302 missiles with a much longer range than anything that they&#8217;ve been buying lately, 100 miles, and then transfer those into Iran.  And then find a ship, hide it under, I think it was cement, ship that to Iraq again in order to keep it from being discovered, transfer it into Sudan, and unfortunately for Iran, the IDF were monitoring all of this.  This elaborate ruse, in order to disguise the magnitude of a transfer so big, in terms of heavy mortars, in terms of the longest ranged rockets ever to be introduced into a mosque. How long was the range?  Well, enough to hit the Mangurian Airport, enough to hit Tel Aviv, enough to hit Jerusalem.  I mean, these are serious payload, long-range, rockets and fortunately the IDF managed to seize the cargo ship.</p>
<p>So what was interesting to me was the reaction by the reporters.  Reading the story, and the reporter asks by what right does Israel board a cargo ship on the high seas.  Well, that&#8217;s a penetrating question.  How about the question by what audacity in the middle of these negotiations does Iran transfer this new capability to Hamas and why is it that everybody standing there smiling in the pictures shaking hands with the foreign minister or Rouhani instead of asking the question, what the hell is going on and how can it be that this is not the question that all of us are wrestling with right now?  How is it humanly possible in the middle of this for Iran to be showing its true intentions, its true character, the fact that the regime cheats, and that isn&#8217;t the storyline?  That isn&#8217;t the introductory paragraph?</p>
<p>I am reminded of when I was in Haifa, went over during the second Lebanon war.  Somebody&#8217;s got to talk to the marketing department over in Tel Aviv, that has got to be called the Hezbollah War but for some reason we call it the Second Lebanon War.  The war with Hezbollah and those rockets were coming in every day slamming into Haifa.  We were in Haifa.  I went down to the trauma hospital and there were 600 victims in there.  Now that is what Syrian and Iranian rockets were able to do with their limited range in shutting down one city, Haifa.  Imagine with these longer-range rockets now what it would mean in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Now, fortunately along the way Israel had the prescience to develop the Iron Dome.  And that is an Israeli development, something that after the fact we looked at and said, wow they did that for a dime on the dollar for what we could of, if we could have thought of it.  And so now it&#8217;s important, like the Arrow Program where we&#8217;re cooperating with Israel, now it&#8217;s very important to us and to our allies.</p>
<p>For those who ask about our foreign aid support to Israel, you should ask them, where do you think these ideas come from and where are they trained on the battlefield, and how much would it cost to replace Israel if it was not in the Middle East as the bulwark against what is developing as a result of the chaos throughout the region.  But I just bring it up as an example because the press at the time had those same attitudes.  When I was talking to the reporters in Haifa trying to get them to focus on Israel, no, no, no, the focus was on Israel&#8217;s defense of itself.  The question was, well yeah but look at this counter-battery fire into Lebanon.  And I would say, well, yeah but to put this into context, I&#8217;ve been watching it on CNN, I&#8217;ve been seeing this on the BBC, but why don&#8217;t you reporters come down to the trauma hospital and do a story about why it&#8217;s happening?  It&#8217;s happening because Haifa is under siege and has been under siege for weeks.  But we have got to carry that narrative, my friends, because it is not going to happen in the major media, because I was told by the reporters even if we wanted to do that our editors tell us that would not be balanced.  Okay, so, by the way at that time my wife was in Jerusalem and I called her and I was venting, as I am right now, and she said, well, why don&#8217;t you take some of the barbarians and just put them &#8211; take the shrapnel, pick it up, put it in a bag, start going on the shows showing it, because they can&#8217;t resist that, they can&#8217;t resist a demonstration of the shrapnel.  And she was right and then we got that out on CNN and so forth.</p>
<p>But, fortunately for Israel, Israel developed the Iron Dome.  So now Israel has the capacity to knock out a lot of these incoming rockets.  But the fact that we are looking the other way while Iran is doing this in the middle of negotiations is so similar to exactly what the way in which North Korea was emboldened during the negotiations there.  What were they doing?  They were transferring their nuclear weapons capability to Syria, and on the banks of the Euphrates they were building a weapons program for the Syrians this time.  That&#8217;s what North Korea was doing in the middle of these negotiations.  So we have to learn from history and for that reason, the legislation, which I authored, which was this Iran&#8217;s Sanction Bill, took Stewart Levy&#8217;s ideas. I had asked him, if you wanted to just shut an economy down and collapse a government how would you do it?  And his response was well you just block the repatriation of earnings, this whole swift system, the whole system that is used to cash checks and so forth.  It&#8217;s simple.  It&#8217;s just that we lack the will to do it.  So we laid out in the legislation how to do that and what to do on petroleum, etc., and the impact of that would have been to simply implode the regime.  And I think it was Stewart that first said it, give the Ayatollah a choice between regime survival or compromise on his weapons.  So I wrote the Act, sat down with Eliot Engle from New York, from the Bronx. Eliot said this is exactly what we need. He&#8217;s the ranking member, I chair foreign affairs, and he&#8217;s the ranking member, and Eliot said let&#8217;s try to get everybody on board.  We presented it to our committee, despite the administration&#8217;s opposition, we had a unanimous vote in the foreign affairs committee.  We got it out onto the floor, and boy then the administration was working full throttle.  We can&#8217;t have this pass, no, we&#8217;ve got to extend an olive branch, we can&#8217;t do this.  And working time and a half, they were able to have it pass 400 to 20.  They got 20 votes, the progressive caucus got 20 votes.</p>
<p>So, now we&#8217;re in the Senate and we&#8217;re working towards two-thirds support, but of course the administration found a strategy here.  They went to Harry Reid who was willing to do their bidding, and despite the overwhelming support in the Senate for the bill, they bottled it up.  What I notice are more and more people saying, what is going on?  As you know, I do a lot of work out in the communities, in Los Angeles, Orange County, San Bernardino. I have parts of all of those counties, and my district is very ethnic, and so I&#8217;ve taken on the responsibility of going out into all these communities in LA and in Southern California and carrying our message because I&#8217;ve come to the conclusion that David&#8217;s come to, waiting for other people to do it, it&#8217;s just not going to happen.  So, as I&#8217;m out there what I notice is community after community have connected the dots.  We have got to get out friends out there talking to more people in more communities because everybody is waking up and saying, wait a minute, this was not the way it was supposed to turn out.  When we pushed the reset button with Russia wasn&#8217;t the strategy that we would kick the Poles and the Czechs in the teeth, but pull out the interceptors, we wouldn&#8217;t do the program to defend Europe against any launch out of Iran, and defend ourselves out of any launch from Iran, and in exchange we would get respect from Russia.  Russians would work with us because after all we pushed the restart button by doing something Russians wanted us to do.</p>
<p>And when we extended the olive branch to the Ayatollah wasn&#8217;t the result supposed to be that they would stop the centrifuges from spinning, not that we would find out that the Ayatollah himself was the biggest investor in the chemical operation in Iran and that we were now lifting sanctions and exporting petro chemicals and making the Ayatollah rich. That wasn&#8217;t supposed to be the outcome.  The outcome was not supposed to be that Iran in the middle of this negotiation was going to continue to be the No. 1 export power for terror around the globe.  He can get caught doing it again.  And wasn&#8217;t it supposed to be that the centrifuges would stop spinning and the work on the Iraq plutonium reactor would stop, and then you see the foreign minister being quoted, no we&#8217;re not stopping construction on the plutonium reactor.  Well you&#8217;ve got a bomb-making factory there, it seems pretty clear cut.  I mean, well, in the six-month agreement you just saw Catherine Ashton, you had the foreign minister for the EU say in all probability it&#8217;s going to go beyond six months.  Oh, they&#8217;re going to continue to run the clock like North Korea?  I mean, how many similarities are there in this playbook?  Well, my friends, this foreign policy is bankrupt.  This strategy is doomed to fail.  And the reality is that across the United States, and frankly in Europe, people are beginning to realize the cost.</p>
<p>Now you, in this room, have been the most dedicated to this cause because you understand the power of ideas, the power of getting those ideas out to the public.  So I actually shouldn&#8217;t be up here venting with you because frankly you are the ones that have helped support David through all of these efforts, and the reason that we are in the position we are in is because of the intellectual ammunition that comes out of his shop and others allied with his cause.  If we were solely dependent on getting our ideas out of the State Department you know exactly where we would be.  And frankly, because of his ideas, the Republican Party has another chance.  We have another chance.  And we as a country have another chance to set this right, and that chance is coming up in November.  And if we keep our wits and we don&#8217;t embarrass ourselves and we stay focused on the goal and we tell those who want to have these internecine battles within the party right now, look, the fate of the country is at stake, and I will tell you, there are a lot of Democrats with second thoughts who share those thoughts with me, right?  And in terms of taking on the administration on these issues, I mean, I still think about when you put these ideas front and center, the fact that we ended up with a unanimous vote in the foreign affairs committee, because looking at the hard reality of it people went along.</p>
<p>Now I want to just share with you when we talk about the State Department and the mindset one rather recent experience of mine.  I was over in Israel and met with the Prime Minister.  We were going through some legislation that I advanced through the committee for Israel&#8217;s qualitative military edge and some other issues, and the State Department said well you have a delegation of seven members here.  Could you go meet with President Abbas?  I said certainly.  And so I started reading his recent communications to the Palestinian people.  Now, for many years I&#8217;ve tried to get through legislation in the Congress that gave us leverage, and we give Israel leverage on this question of Palestinian incitement, and every year the State Department had been able to block it.  But here was something new.  I had the remarks of Abbas himself, President Abbas himself, Dr. Abbas.  So I thought, well, here&#8217;s an opportunity to talk with him.  And so in that exchange with our delegation I asked him about his broadcast on Iranian-owned radio in which he denied the existence of the Holocaust and I told him I brought with me the photographs my father took when Dachau was liberated.  And, as my father says, this was one camp, on one day, and there were camps all over Europe.  How can anyone deny, I know I&#8217;m supposed to call you Dr. Abbas because you have your doctorate in Holocaust Denial from the University of Moscow.</p>
<p>Now, by the way, you and I all know that the Russians knew better because they liberated camps in the east.  They knew exactly what they were doing when they stamped his doctorate in the University of Moscow and made him a doctor of Holocaust Denial.  They knew they were using a pawn there in the Palestinian authority.  That&#8217;s all they were doing.  But he proudly is Dr. Abbas and everyone refers to him as such.  So I simply asked him, how could you do that?  And he said well it&#8217;s been a long time and there are arguments about this or that, but regardless, he started back up, regardless of that the Palestinians shouldn&#8217;t suffer today because of what happened then.  I said, no, the incitement language, my question goes to the incitement language you used, because the incitement language you used is the same language used in the 1930s to demonize a race of people, to marginalize a race of people, and the consequences of that we know what that was.  So you, knowing that, why would you use this language of incitement yourself?  Now we&#8217;re no longer talking, my friends, about the fact that it&#8217;s in the school books.  This is the president of the Palestinian&#8217;s authority.  And he tried to change the topic.  And I said, and on your map, where is Israel on your map?  He said let&#8217;s see your map, let&#8217;s see your map.  Well, at about that point in time he remembered something and he started yelling at me, and you, Ted, you, you called my son a crook.  And I was trying to figure out what he was talking about.  And then I saw Ted Deutch from Florida sort of raise his hand.  He said, I&#8217;m sorry Mr. President, it was me.  It was Ted.  I called your son a crook.  Well anyway the conversation sort of went downhill from them, but we did later meet with some other Palestinian former representatives who did say the boss&#8217;s son is a crook.  I said tell Ted, tell Ted Deutch.</p>
<p>The bottom line is this.  Afterwards, the State Department said we&#8217;ve never had a conversation go quite like that before.  I said well isn&#8217;t it about time somebody talked about the messaging that&#8217;s going on, because if you&#8217;re not, what I had told President Abbas was, if you&#8217;re not preparing the next generation for peace, if you&#8217;re not educating them, if instead you&#8217;re just inciting them to hate, if you&#8217;re just poisoning the minds of the next generation, is the point I&#8217;m making to you, then how is there going to be peace?  And if the State Department keeps arguing against putting into the inclusion of the bill &#8212; this year I got that included in legislation and we passed it out.  But I will tell you unless we continue to point out the obvious to the American public, and to our colleagues, frankly it&#8217;s not going to help pointing it out to the State Department, I&#8217;ve come to that conclusion, but pointing it out to the world, that we&#8217;re going to continue to find ourselves in the position we&#8217;re in and our allies are going to continue to be in that position.  If, on the other hand, we find the voice to get out there and speak about the world as it really is and speak about our enemies as they are and call upon Americans to assist us, and of course correction, in November then I think we&#8217;re going to see some very real changes.  Thank you all very much for the opportunity to talk with you here.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member:</strong> Congressman, it&#8217;s my understanding that during the Clinton administration, Clinton approved trade with North Korea without any verification to see that they were living up to their promises.  Can you elaborate on that?</p>
<p><strong>Ed Royce: </strong>Well we had conflict divisions, shall we say, between the Clinton administration and some of us in Congress, including Mark Kirk and myself.  Kirk was then a staff member on our committee on this whole issue and as you know, my policy is Stewart Levy&#8217;s policy and then you have on the other end the engagement theory, and I think it&#8217;s been proven out that engagement is simply a life line manipulated by regimes like that to keep themselves in power at the expense of their own people.  And I think the humane thing to do is to bring that government down, exert enough pressure that people want to get rid of the head of state.  If you don&#8217;t pay the generals, let them turn up the heat, do Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty-style broadcasting into the country, create dissent.  We&#8217;ve got the wrong format in terms of dealing with regimes like that.  I asked the Gallup pollster what percentage of people in Iran want change.  Two-thirds of the country want what they call a western-style democracy and the end of theocracy in Iran.  Well, you&#8217;ve got two choices there.  You can increase the unemployment.  You can increase the inflation.  You can increase the angst and the opposition to the regime or you can make the portfolio for Rouhani and for the Ayatollah grow in value.  You can, as I made my point, while we&#8217;re sanctioning ourselves on exports of gas, either way, we&#8217;ve been asked, they&#8217;re not writing to the president on this anymore, the heads of state of Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic for Poland have all written the speaker to say please start a crash program to send gas east.  The cost is four times the price because he has a monopoly.<br />
President Putin has 52 percent of his income for his military coming from oil and gas.  All we have to do is break the monopoly.  All we have to do is use competition.  That&#8217;s something we&#8217;re supposed to be for, competition.  You want to give him second thoughts about where he goes with policy?  How about competition?  You want to make Eastern Europe more independent?  How about giving them the gas that we&#8217;re flaring and the wells that we&#8217;re capping, right?  Why don&#8217;t we engage with that kind of a strategy?  We had an Apollo program.  Why don&#8217;t we have a crash course to do this?  So this is the request, as well as from the Ukraine.  That&#8217;s how Ukraine got into this mess, because Russia had them by the throat over this issue and they were able to manipulate it, right?<br />
Why not do the easy thing, but suffice it to say that we are not using that strategy and instead we are allowing the economy in Iran to recover.  I held up the Wall Street Journal when we had the Secretary of State testify during one of our hearings and the headline was Businesses Beat a Path to Iran for Opportunities, words to that effect.  Bill, you had a question.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>Yeah. Congressman, you made some kind of statement to the effect that you&#8217;ve given up on trying to convince the State Department or something like that.</p>
<p><strong>Ed Royce: </strong>Right.  Right.  I may have been overly tough on that.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>But why are they like that?  Are they anti-American citizens?</p>
<p><strong>Ed Royce: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Listen.  Some people, Billy, Billy, some people just come to a different conclusion.  If we sit down and reason together, Billy, we ought to be able to come to a conclusion.  And that&#8217;s the way a lot of educated people that have doctorates, if we can just sit at the table and talk back and forth.  But, Billy, that presupposes the person on the other side of the table is using reason and logic.  What if our Western constructs for that is not what&#8217;s motivating them?  What if they&#8217;re willing to lie and cheat and steal to get to their goal?  And what if their goal is not world peace as you and I assume everybody in this room&#8217;s goal is.  What if their goal is to destabilize an entire region?  This is what was interesting about a conversation I had with a Middle Eastern ambassador, one of the Sunni ambassadors.  Myself and Eliot Engle, we were both at the table with him.  He said, now, I know that your government thinks one thing about how they&#8217;re going to handle Iran, but let me tell you what I and other ambassadors believe will happen.</span></p>
<p>He said, I think that when they get this relief from sanctions, far from putting that money into assisting anybody in Iran, that money is going to go to destabilizing regimes all over the region.  He said, what do I mean?  There&#8217;s a low-level insurgency going on in Saudi Arabia among the Shiite population because Iran is funding it.  Azerbaijan, they&#8217;re sending imams into Azerbaijan, and they&#8217;re saying, why are you supporting the secular government here?  Your Shia.  The Islamic Republic is Shia.  You&#8217;re part culturally and historically of, you should be joining the Islamic Republic of Iran.  You should be part of us.  You should overthrow this government.  He said &#8212; this is as close as I can remember to his examples &#8212; they are that close to toppling the government in Yemen, the Iranian forces, their intelligence forces.  And he said, and I need not tell you the history they played in Sudan, and then he went down a long laundry list in terms of North Africa and everything else that you &#8212; so let&#8217;s just say for a minute there is a conflict division between the world that you and I want to see versus the objective of the Iatola in terms of sowing that instability.  I readily understand how people at the State Department can come to a different conclusion.  But the conclusion I have come to is more like Ronald Reagan&#8217;s short retort about well, how does this end between the Soviet Union and the United States.  We win.  They lose.  I think the shorter answer is better because I think as Reagan understood that his adversaries didn&#8217;t have the same goal and therefore it was necessary to spread a different ideal for human progress.  I think it&#8217;s that kind of a situation.  Was there one more question?</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>Audience Member: </strong>Congressman, please give us what you think or how the confrontation with Russia will play out over the Ukraine and Eastern Europe in view of what you&#8217;ve said about the State Department and as you perceive the administration&#8217;s mindset.  Is this mindset going to change?</span></p>
<p><strong>Ed Royce: </strong>I think we are going to get more and more support for the legislation which we passed out of committee that calls for a massive targeted export of our L and G reserves into Ukraine and Eastern Europe, as well as support for shell gas exploration in Western Ukraine and a whole host of initiatives that will help make Eastern Europe independent of Russian pressure.  I think the consequences on that are far more important than the calculus on any sanctions on an individual business tycoon or whatever.  I think the only thing that matters is that 70 percent of Russia&#8217;s exports are gas and oil.  And the profit, where they make the most profit is in that Eastern Europe and Central Europe market, and I believe that if that is threatened, the whole calculus in the Kremlin changes and they begin to say, okay, how do we wind this thing down, how do we take this down a notch?  And that&#8217;s how you get their attention and that&#8217;s the way forward, and, as I said, that&#8217;s the way you give Europe some breathing room to be more independent and not to feel that any decision they might make counter to Moscow would risk turning off the valves again, which is exactly what the Russians have done in the winter.  So if we put up an alternative and if we also begin to develop pipelines from Central Asia into the region, that all will come with time.  But what&#8217;s most important is that markets react very quickly, so if the administration were to announce a crash course and announce that the L and G facilities in Texas right now are shipping to that market, instantaneously the future&#8217;s market would react.  The stock market in Moscow would react and certainly the currency would react and that is the clarifying moment for those in charge of policy in Russia.  And you&#8217;re doing it through competition which is the capitalist way.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>Hi.  I&#8217;m just wondering if there&#8217;s any move in Congress to get arms to the Ukrainians.</p>
<p><strong>Ed Royce: </strong>Well, there is, Jack.  There were efforts to assist the Ukraine in that way but I can tell you in order to have a credible threat that would impact Russia&#8217;s calculus economically, the most overt and quickest thing we could do is gas because that&#8217;s what would change the balance.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>And if we don&#8217;t do these things and Putin continues his march and NATO does nothing, will NATO collapse?</p>
<p><strong>Ed Royce: </strong>I think Russia is a dying power.  I think if we look ahead, well, it&#8217;s not a dying power, but you&#8217;ve seen the demographics of the birth rates in Russia and you know what&#8217;s happening with radical Islam.  You all saw the footage from Beslan the school.  I know several, in Dagestan several moderate, actually Muslim representatives there.  They&#8217;re scared to death of what&#8217;s happening with radical Islam.  I think Putin is very much locked in the past.  I&#8217;ll tell you a quick story, doctor.  The first time I met him, he was a councilman from Saint Petersburg.  There were two of them and two members of Congress were asked to stay over and meet with them and I had a friend there and Jack was &#8212; some of you know Jack Wheeler &#8212; Jack was arm wrestling Putin.  Putin, we&#8217;d had a few drinks and Putin&#8217;s very competitive, and in the middle of this effort, well, actually Jack won the first round because he&#8217;s very muscular.  He works out a lot but he had a hard time.  I mean this was really, Putin&#8217;s a strong guy.  So Jack wins and Putin says, I think he says, I&#8217;m left handed.  Now the other arm.  And so in the middle of that second match, Putin looks at Jack and jumps up, Jack jumps up and Putin pokes him in the chest.  Jack had done some work in Central Asia and he yells, CIA.  And Jack goes, KGB.  Then Putin lets out this big laugh, and my take away is that Putin is very much in the past, a KGB guy that remembers the high point of the empire or what-have-you, but at the same time what he has to contend with is a declining birth rate, an ever-encroaching radicalization of a part of the population and ten years from now we&#8217;re going to be dealing with somebody else in Russia.  And Russia&#8217;s big problem is going to be what&#8217;s happening in Southern Russia with respect to radical Islam.</p>
<p>Al-Qaida affiliates are operating all through that region and they&#8217;re growing explanentially.  And so I think Russia&#8217;s real, long-term &#8212; I mean we&#8217;ve screwed this up in all the ways that I&#8217;ve explained to you.  But we can get it back in terms of a situation that can be managed because the real challenge for the West is going to be the Al-Qaida affiliated organizations, they&#8217;re going to continue to grow and let&#8217;s keep our eye on that ball.  Let&#8217;s solve this problem. To solve this problem, let&#8217;s show the world what we can do.  We produce far more gas than Russia.  It&#8217;s just Russia exports more into that one little market where they&#8217;ve got a monopoly.  Let&#8217;s knock them off their game there.</p>
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		<title>Council on Foreign Relations Caught Lying about Cuba-North Korea Arms Smuggling</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/humberto-fontova/council-on-foreign-relations-caught-lying-about-cuba-north-korea-arms-smuggling/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=council-on-foreign-relations-caught-lying-about-cuba-north-korea-arms-smuggling</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 28 Mar 2014 04:04:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Humberto Fontova]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Julia Sweig's disturbing ties to known Castro spies. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/seeig-speaking-540p.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-222117" alt="KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/seeig-speaking-540p-450x344.jpg" width="315" height="241" /></a>Back in July a North Korean ship trying to sneak military contraband through the Panama Canal after leaving Havana was stopped by Panamanian authorities on a tip it was carrying illegal drugs.</p>
<p>Instead the ship, named the Chon-Chon Gang, was found to be crammed with missiles, MIGS  and <i>mucho </i>military contraband from terror-sponsoring Cuba <i>en route </i>to North Korea. Nuke-rattling North Korea, by the way, has been under a UN arms embargo since 2006.</p>
<p>At first, Cuban terror-sponsoring dictator Raul Castro tried threatening the Panamanian authorities behind the scenes to keep the issue mum, or at least parrot their version of the scam. But Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli scoffed at the blatant blackmail and made the truth known.</p>
<p>The Council on Foreign Relations, on the other hand, parroted the Castroite version of events almost instantly and almost word for word. Here’s Castro’s version of events:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;The 508-foot Chong Chon Gang carried 240 tons of obsolete defensive weapons  were to have been repaired in North Korea and returned to Cuba as part of a commercial deal.” (July 17, 2013)</p></blockquote>
<p>Now here’s the Council on Foreign Relations Latin American “expert” Julia Sweig’s version of events:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;It&#8217;s not about Havana trying to circumvent an arms embargo. It&#8217;s about: how about we refurbish our old weapons&#8221; (Julia Sweig (7/28/2013.)</p></blockquote>
<p>Admittedly, the issue was in doubt at the time. No investigation had been conducted. So who knew the truth?</p>
<p>Fine. So why did an outfit like the Council on Foreign Relations, which bills itself as: “an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank,” not wait for an independent non-partisan investigation to determine the truth?  Why did the Council on Foreign Relations instantly<i> </i>start parroting the version of this issue as concocted by the propaganda ministry of a regime modeled on Stalin’s?</p>
<p>A United Nations panel recently completed its investigation into the Chon-Chon Gang issue, among its findings:  “The incident involving the Chong Chon Gang revealed a comprehensive, <a href="http://www.capitolhillcubans.com/2014/03/must-read-un-releases-concerning-report.html">planned strategy to conceal the existence and nature of the cargo.</a>&#8221; The weapons, needless to add, were not “obsolete” or meant to be “refurbished.”</p>
<p>When the CFR’s Julia Sweig visited Cuba in 2010, accompanied by <i>The Atlantic’s </i>Jeffrey Goldberg, something caught Goldberg’s eye:</p>
<p>“We shook hands,” Goldberg writes about the meeting with Fidel Castro. “Then he [Castro] greeted Julia warmly. They [Castro and Sweig] have known each other for more than <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Longest-Romance-Mainstream-Media-Castro/dp/1594036675/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1376276049&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=the+longest+romance+humberto+fontova">twenty years.”</a></p>
<p>Julia Sweig’s promotional services for the Castro regime reached a level where the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency top Cuba spycatcher, Chris Simmons (now retired), named her a Cuban “Agent of Influence.”  Some background:</p>
<p>In 25 years as a U.S. Military Counterintelligence officer, Lieut. Col. Simmons helped end the operations of 80 enemy agents, some are today behind bars. One of these had managed the deepest penetration of the U.S. Department of Defense in U.S. history. The spy’s name is Ana Montes, known as “Castro’s Queen Jewel” in the intelligence community. “Montes passed some of our most sensitive information about Cuba back to Havana,” revealed then-Undersecretary for International Security John Bolton.</p>
<p>Today she serves a 25-year sentence in federal prison. She was convicted of “Conspiracy to Commit Espionage,” the same charge against Ethel and Julius Rosenberg carrying the same potential death sentence, for what is widely considered the most damaging espionage case since the “end” of the Cold War. Two years later, in 2003, Chris Simmons helped root out 14 Cuban spies who were promptly booted from the U.S.</p>
<p>In brief, retired Lieut. Col. Chris Simmons <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Longest-Romance-Mainstream-Media-Castro/dp/1594036675/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1376276049&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=the+longest+romance+humberto+fontova">knows what he’s talking about.</a></p>
<p>The Council on Foreign Relations’ Julia Sweig holds preeminence in one field. No “scholar” in modern American history thanks the “warm friendship” and “support” of six different communist spies and terrorists in the acknowledgments of their book, three of whom were expelled from the U.S. for terrorism and/or espionage, two for a bombing plot whose death toll would have dwarfed 9/11. Some background:</p>
<p>On Nov. 17, 1962, the FBI cracked a plot by Cuban agents that targeted Macy’s, Gimbel’s, Bloomingdale’s and Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal with a dozen incendiary devices and 500 kilos of TNT. The massive attack was set for the following week, the day after Thanksgiving. Macy’s get’s 50,000 shoppers that one day. Had those detonators gone off, 9/11’s death toll would have almost certainly taken second.</p>
<p>Here are pictures of some of the Cuban terrorists upon arrest. <a href="http://babalublog.com/2013/08/10/the-council-on-foreign-relations-julia-sweig-pushes-for-stronger-sanctions-against-american-deer-hunters-but-lifted-from-terror-sponsoring-regimes/">Note the names<i>: Elsa Montero</i> and <i>Jose Gomez Abad.</i></a></p>
<p>Now here’s an excerpt from the acknowledgements in Julia Sweig’s book <i>Inside the Cuban Revolution</i>, written in collaboration with the Castro-regime:</p>
<blockquote><p>“In Cuba many people spent long hours with me, helped open doors I could not have pushed through myself, and offered friendship and warmth to myself during research trips to the island…Elsa Montero and Jose Gomez Abad championed this project.”</p></blockquote>
<p>In addition to these two KGB-trained terrorists, the CFR’s Julia Sweig thanks the “warm friendship and championship of” of Ramon Sanchez Parodi, Jose Antonio Arbesu, Fernando Miguel Garcia, Hugo Ernesto Yedra and Josefina Vidal for their “warmth, their friendship and their kindness in opening Cuban doors.”</p>
<p>All the above have been identified by Lieut. Col Chris Simmons as veteran officers <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1594036675/">in Castro’s KGB-trained intelligence services. </a></p>
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		<title>And When He Cried the Little Children Died in the Streets</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/benjamin-jefferies/and-when-he-cried-the-little-children-died-in-the-streets/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=and-when-he-cried-the-little-children-died-in-the-streets</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 21 Mar 2014 04:10:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Benjamin Jefferies]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[british]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[North Korea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[UK]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[The British Left's obsessive hatred of Israel -- and complacency toward genuine evil. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p itemprop="articleBody"><strong><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/20118182852498580_20.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-221532" alt="Pro-Palestinian demonstration to boycott Israel" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/20118182852498580_20-450x321.jpg" width="315" height="225" /></a>Reprinted from <a href="blogs.timesofisrael.com">TimesofIsrael.com</a>.</strong></p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">I was brought up in a secular, democratic socialist family and the values of freedom, equality and solidarity were engrained into me from an early age.</p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">My parents, British Labour Party stalwarts, looked to Israel in the 1960s as exemplar of the democratic and socialist ideals they maintained. Both were on the centre left of the Labour Party, and <em>as a result</em>, they and their many friends were deeply committed supporters of Israel and the Zionist cause. The commitment of those British socialists of half a century ago to the cause of the national self-determination of the Jewish people was exemplary and widely shared on the British left, Jewish and Gentile alike.</p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">Things are very different now. The left of centre is, at least in Britain, the domain of the new antisemites of the anti-Zionist movement. BDS stalks the land, not the Spectre of Communism. The left is delivered to a lethal compromise that gets into bed with clerical fascists who demand women and gays and Jews be thrown off mountains.</p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">This modern red-brown Strasserite left spits on the socialists of yore that actually believed in such values as freedom, equality and solidarity — and does it in the name of a fictional “anti-imperialism” that is nothing but the cheer-leading of the evil and murderous. The great British writer and journalist Julie Burchill <a title="Don’t you dare tell me to check my privilege" href="http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9141292/dont-you-dare-tell-me-to-check-my-privilege/" target="_blank">has recently written</a> of her own similar upbringing and the sad, sad demise of that left of the past, that left of another country:</p>
<blockquote>
<p itemprop="articleBody">It’s easy for me to sentimentalise those days when the trade unions held sway, chiming as they did with the calf country of my communism, but whatever their beery and sandwichy limits, they were far better than what replaced them; the politics of diversity. While working-class left-wing political activism was always about fighting the powerful, treating people how you would wish to be treated and believing that we’re all basically the same, modern, non-working-class left-wing politics is about… other stuff. Class guilt, sexual kinks, personal prejudice and repressed lust for power.</p>
</blockquote>
<p itemprop="articleBody">And blatant, overt hypocrisy.</p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">On March 17th, the <em>Times of Israel</em> carried <a title="UN probe likens North Korea to Nazis" href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/un-probe-likens-north-korea-to-nazis/">an article</a> about the recently published report of the UN Commission of Inquiry on human rights in DPRK (North Korea). The report is some 400 pages long and makes for harrowing reading. In its <a title="North Korea: UN Commission documents wide-ranging and ongoing crimes against humanity, urges referral to ICC" href="http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=14255&amp;LangID=E" target="_blank">press release</a>, the Commission asserts that</p>
<blockquote>
<p itemprop="articleBody">The gravity, scale and nature of these violations reveal a State that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world [...] These crimes against humanity entail extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation. Crimes against humanity are ongoing in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea because the policies, institutions and patterns of impunity that lie at their heart remain in place.</p>
</blockquote>
<p itemprop="articleBody">What has been the reaction of the British left to news of this thumping great big report that overtly compares the North Korean neo-monarchy with Hitler’s Germany? In short, the reaction has ranged from utter indifference to insane support for the North Korean regime. The report certainly makes uncomfortable reading for the comrades who head up Britain’s fractious and minute communist movement, for example — especially as many of them spend an awful lot of time inviting members of the North Korean embassy in London to shindigs. Hardly a surprise then that the comrades have either ignored the report, or denied its findings (for a deranged and mendacious example of the latter, see <a title="Enquiry on Human Rights in the DPRK? " href="http://www.lalkar.org/issues/contents/mar2014/dprk.html">here</a>).</p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">Much the same weary cynicism greets news that the situation in Darfur is continuing on its genocidal way. The indefatigable Eric Reeves, who has spent decades exposing the murderous ways of the Khartoum regime is certainly correct to condemn the inaction of the international community. In one of <a title="Khartoum: A criminal regime in its death throes lashes out with more violence" href="http://www.sudantribune.com/spip.php?article50293" target="_blank">his most recent articles</a>, Reeves highlights the escalation in mayhem in that benighted place and the utterly abysmal lack of concrete response from the world community. Writing of the thoroughly useless and widely ignored 2011 Doha “agreement” between the Darfuri rebels and the Khartoum regime, Reeves writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p itemprop="articleBody">The international community—especially the UN and African Union—have been flogging this dead horse of a “peace agreement” since it was signed by factitious, unrepresentative “rebel groups” in July 2011, failing to acknowledge how very little support it has among Darfuri civil society and the major rebel groups (who must answer for their own severe abuses of the civilian population). This “support for the Doha process” has persisted long after all observers not part of the AU or the UN clearly have come to see that it is a failure. It was left for expedient international actors to pretend that “progress” was being made in negotiating an end to the Darfur catastrophe, thus giving the Doha process a credibility that could hardly be provided by its Qatari auspices. The U.S. has been front and center in this pretense, shamelessly asserting the potential success of the DDPD. Both previous U.S. special envoys for Sudan—Scott Gration and Princeton Lyman—were complicit in this diplomatic travesty.</p>
</blockquote>
<p itemprop="articleBody">Reading Reeves’ cataloguing of the crimes of the Khartoum regime’s <em>janjawid</em> mercenaries in Darfur, the trail of murder, rape, looting, arson, sickens one’s heart. It is truly appalling what is happening in Darfur. It is equally as unacceptable that, despite it being widely known that the Khartoum regime is committing genocide there (and elsewhere), absolutely nothing is being done to stop that vile and barbarous dictatorship of military men and religious fanatics in their tracks. Nothing. This absolute condemnation of the moral hypocrisy of the global movers and shakers is embellished by the discovery that the very “great and good” sent in to Darfur by organisations as allegedly august as the African Union to oversee resolutions to such intractable conflicts have spent much of their time fighting turf wars with each other whilst women and children die in the villages and desert fastnesses of Darfur. Thambo Mbeki, former President of South Africa, take a bow.</p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">This should make the British left choke with frustrated anger. Yet fear that it might interfere with the comrades’ digestion might well also mean that they defer reading on until they have finished debating the intricacies of transgender intersectionality. Let’s be honest with ourselves, many times even if the left collectively shakes its head in despair at the evil that walks on every side and the vilest men that are exulted… they will  move to propose some daft resolution demanding immediate socialist revolution in the Sahel based on the sterling work of local jihadi and condemning Zionism for the ills of the world.</p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">So if genocidal regimes are either to be supported, or simply ignored by those who call themselves left-wing in the UK, if the mass murder of women and children in Darfur, or the terrifying, Orwellian dystopia of North Korea does not move the brothers and sisters, what exactly does get the comrades all frothy at the chops and out on the front line where they are meant to be? — Israel and Jews. That’s what.</p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">Sometimes I think the entire British left has dropped acid. There can be surely no other explanation for its addiction to insane, inverted political visions of a surreal quality that might suggest the left was readier for the madhouse than any sort of political power. Really though, it is not funny ha-ha. There is nothing amusing about the treachery of the modern British left, its abandonment of the values of freedom, equality and solidarity. Julie Burchill rightly rages against the modern British left’s obsessions with the hang-ups of the chattering classes; but if ever there was a collective criminal act by which the British left has betrayed its own foundational values, it is its iniquitous and venomous loathing of Israel and its denial of the Jewish people’s inalienable right to national self-determination in that land.</p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">It is more than a delusion to condemn the only democratic and liberal state in the entire Middle and Near East as an “apartheid state”, to vilify its supporters as “Zionazis” — it is an outright slander, a defamation of the rights of an entire people. It is despicable to knowingly and falsely assert that Israel is a land without freedom and equality, when it is the only state in the entire meta-region where religious, sexual and personal liberties are not only maintained but upheld. It is an utter disgrace that the British left, almost invariably, takes the side of mass murderers of Jews, terrorists and violent antisemitic clerical fascist thugs rather than show solidarity with the Jewish State and its people. It is a betrayal of those that die in the villages of Darfur, of those that languish in the prison-state of North Korea, about whom these so-called British socialists could clearly not give a fig.</p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">Nick Cohen, one of Britain’s most wonderful political journalists and writers, summed it up nicely: What’s left? The answer is sad, so sad: not much – a red flag stained not with the blood of our martyrs, so much as dripping with the blood of the victims of the British left’s indifference or even naked, open support for the real sources of evil and wrong in this world. The poet W. H. Auden wrote bitterly in his poem <em>Epitaph on a Tyrant</em> of a dictator that “When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter”. When Comrade Kim laughs, the comrades in Britain stand up and deliver him a round of applause, it would seem — lackeys all of a red-handed murderer. When al-Qaradawi demands the extermination of Jews, Red Ken Livingstone invites him to a nice slap-up meal in London and calls him a “moderate”. When Hamas and Islamic Jihad slam indiscriminately missiles into Jewish towns, the British left rambles on about a fictional “siege” of Gaza. When clerical fascist murderers saw off the heads of their victims, the British left rave about the ultimate responsibility of Zionism. And woe betide the uppity Jews of Israel should they respond to suicide bombers and Khaibar missiles and snipers – because, you see, the victims of terror had it coming – just in case they are Jewish.</p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">I have spent plenty of time trying to get to the bottom of this evil malaise that grips the British left. I can rationalise it away as an addiction to a basically failed ideological obsession with a faulty notion of anti-imperialism, one in which the tactic of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” holds sway. Yet even accepting this, it does not explain away the sheer poisonousness and simultaneous stupidity of the British left’s hatred of Israel that seems to cut across every single value to which it claims it holds dear.</p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">Auden’s poem ends with a line that confronts the sheer hypocrisy of his dictator, “And when he cried the little children died in the streets”. The British left is today that dictator crying its crocodile and lethal tears. What it does shout about is the absolute inverse of what it should be screaming about. What the left does rail about is completely the opposite of what should be motivating it. It defends the evil and defies the righteous. As the Psalmist had it: evil walks on every side when the wicked are exalted. The British left have become part of the problem and not its solution.</p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">I despair.</p>
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		<title>The Right Fights Evil &#8212;- The Left Fights the &#8216;Redskins&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dennis-prager/the-right-fights-evil-the-left-fights-the-redskins/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-right-fights-evil-the-left-fights-the-redskins</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 29 Jan 2014 05:20:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dennis Prager]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[What the U.N. focused on last week while it was ignoring the atrocities of North Korean and Iran.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/1383873869000-AP-Redskins-Protest.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-217496" alt="1383873869000-AP-Redskins-Protest" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/1383873869000-AP-Redskins-Protest-450x337.jpg" width="315" height="236" /></a>A news item this past week made this point with glaring clarity. It reported a meeting that the United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights had on Friday.</p>
<p>Before revealing the subject of that meeting, let&#8217;s review for a moment what is happening in the world regarding human rights.</p>
<p>North Korea continues to be an affront to the human species. That North Korea, whether or not it had nuclear weapons, is not a central concern is an indictment of humanity.</p>
<p>That the West, with the noble exception of Canada under Stephen Harper, is appeasing the dictators of Iran, is an indictment of the West.</p>
<p>Add to this list the U.N.&#8217;s and the world&#8217;s ignoring of the Chinese government&#8217;s continuing suppression of all dissent and its decades-long violent eradication of Tibet&#8217;s unique and ancient culture.</p>
<p>Then add the slaughter of millions in Congo over the last decade, the 100,000-plus killed in Syria just last year, most of them civilians killed by their own government, and the blowing up, burning alive, and throat-cutting of untold numbers of innocent people by violent Islamists on a daily basis.</p>
<p>In other words, if what bothers you most is evil — the deliberate infliction of cruelty on people by people — North Korea, Congo, China, Syria and radical Islam will bother you more than anything else on the world scene.</p>
<p>So, then, what was the subject of the meeting convened Friday by the United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights?</p>
<p>The alleged racism of the name of the National Football League&#8217;s Washington team, the Redskins.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s right. All these horrific evils are happening as you read this, and the second-ranking official in charge of human rights at the United Nations had a meeting about the name Washington Redskins.</p>
<p>The U.N. is not alone in paying undue attention to the Redskins&#8217; name.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">This left-wing obsession with a non-evil exemplifies the left&#8217;s moral universe. That universe is preoccupied with lesser evils while nearly always ignoring the greatest evils. </span>The left in the United States is nearly obsessed with it. President Barack Obama has spoken out against it. The Washington Post editorial board has demanded that the team drop the name. In the herd-like way that governs media, innumerable columnists and sports writers have written passionate columns against the name, and increasing numbers of sports writers have vowed to never again write or speak the name.</p>
<p>Preoccupation with real evil is the greatest difference between right and left. The right was preoccupied with fighting Communism while the left (not liberals such as JFK, but the left) was preoccupied with fighting anti-Communists.</p>
<p>The right today is preoccupied with fighting Islamism; the left is preoccupied with fighting &#8220;Islamophobia.&#8221;</p>
<p>One way of putting it is that the right is preoccupied with fighting evil and the left is preoccupied with fighting those who fight evil.</p>
<p>The right is preoccupied with defending Israel against those who wish to annihilate it. The left is preoccupied with Israeli apartments on the West Bank.</p>
<p>This difference was made manifest last week in the address given by the one world leader to exemplify the right&#8217;s preoccupation with evil, Canada&#8217;s prime minister, Stephen Harper. Talking about all the condemnations of Israel, Harper said:</p>
<p>&#8220;Think about the twisted logic and outright malice behind that: a state, based on freedom, democracy and the rule of law, that was founded so Jews can flourish as Jews, and seek shelter from the shadow of the worst racist experiment in history, that is condemned, and that condemnation is masked in the language of anti-racism. It is nothing short of sickening.&#8221;</p>
<p>Only a conservative leader would have the moral courage to say that. Because while the right fights evil, the left fights the Redskins.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Dennis Rodman and Other Stalinist Fellow Travelers</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lloyd-billingsley/dennis-rodman-and-other-stalinist-fellow-travelers/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=dennis-rodman-and-other-stalinist-fellow-travelers</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 10 Jan 2014 05:12:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Lloyd Billingsley]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Dennis Rodman]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kim Jung Un]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[North Korea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stalin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[trip]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=215025</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[An ugly American tradition. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/140108080325-01-rodman-0108-horizontal-gallery.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-215026" alt="140108080325-01-rodman-0108-horizontal-gallery" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/140108080325-01-rodman-0108-horizontal-gallery-446x350.jpg" width="268" height="210" /></a>The antics of former NBA player Dennis Rodman in North Korea have puzzled many observers but should come as no surprise. Rodman is actually part of a longstanding American tradition of propping up Stalinist regimes at the nadir of their brutality. It all started with Stalin himself.</p>
<p>“One must not make a god of Stalin. He was too important for that.” That is the sort of thing one cannot make up. It comes from <i>I Change Worlds</i> (1935) by Anna Louise Strong, an American journalist who helped found the <i>Moscow News</i>, an English-language Soviet publication staffed by American Communist women “of quite exceptional horror,” as the <i>Manchester Guardian’s</i> Moscow correspondent Malcolm Muggeridge put it. He wrote that Strong bore an expression of such overwhelming stupidity it actually gave her a rare kind of beauty.</p>
<p>Strong also wrote for such prestigious publications as the <i>Atlantic</i>, and remained a faithful member of Stalin’s alibi armory, denying or defending every atrocity. That got her no seniority with the boss and in 1949 Stalin had Strong arrested and charged her with espionage. She duly transferred her allegiance to Mao Tse-Tung and lived in Communist China until her death in 1970.</p>
<p>While Strong was defending Stalin, Muggeridge broke the story of Stalin’s <a href="http://www.ibiblio.org/expo/soviet.exhibit/famine.html">forced famine in the Ukraine</a>, which claimed millions of lives. But according to Walter Duranty of the <i>New York Times</i> the Ukraine at the time was a veritable cornucopia, flowing with milk and honey. In Duranty’s narrative famine was impossible under the scientific, planned economy of the USSR and the wise leadership of Stalin. Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize and later admitted he knew the full horror of the famine all along. His favorite expressions included: “I put my money on Stalin,” and “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”</p>
<p>For more American adulation of the USSR see Paul Hollander’s <i>Political Pilgrims</i>, which includes the Soviet colony of Cuba. Americans lining up to pay homage to Fidel Castro included New Left stalwart Abbie Hoffman, who said of Fidel: “He is like a mighty penis coming to life, and when he is tall and straight, the crowd immediately is transformed.”</p>
<p>Castro tortured poets, persecuted homosexuals and ran a regime so repressive that people flee at the first opportunity on anything that floats. That repression proved no object to American celebrity adulators such as Robert Redford and Oliver Stone. The same crew, with celebrities like Martin Sheen, were big fans of the Sandinista junta in Nicaragua as it attacked the press and imprisoned dissidents. But Castro and the Sandinistas are no match for the fathomless depravity of North Korea.</p>
<p>As former <i>Washington Post</i> East Asia bureau chief Blaine Harden noted in <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/lloyd-billingsley/north-korea-campout/"><i>Escape From Camp 14</i></a>, North Korea’s forced labor camps “have now existed twice as long as the Soviet Gulag and about twelve times longer than the Nazi concentration camps.” Since the regime works prisoners into their graves, death camps would be an accurate description. The regime also eliminates “enemies of class” through three generations, as Kim Il-Sung proclaimed. With Stalin’s encouragement, he invaded South Korea in 1950. But as American leftist icon I.F. Stone explained in <i>Hidden History of the Korean War</i>, South Korea invaded the North.</p>
<p>North Korea’s current Stalinist-in-chief is Kim Jong-un. According to reports in a Chinese state-backed newspaper, Kim Jong-un recently had his uncle and five of his aides stripped naked and <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/kim-jonguns-executed-uncle-jang-song-thaek-stripped-naked-fed-to-120-dogs-as-officials-watched-9037109.html">fed to a pack of hungry dogs</a>. According to other reports the aides were executed with anti-aircraft machine guns.</p>
<p>The North Korean regime also threatens the United States and its allies with nuclear weapons and aids terrorist groups. None of that matters to Dennis Rodman, who bows to Kim Jong-un, croons “Happy Birthday” to the dictator, and charges that one of his victims, American Kenneth Bae, actually deserves his 15-year sentence.</p>
<p>Whether he knows it or not, Dennis Rodman follows the American tradition of abetting Stalinist regimes at the very depths of their depravity. The worst regime gets probably the most buffoonish apologist. They didn’t call him “The Worm” for nothing.</p>
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		<title>Empire of Madness: Caligula in Pyongyang</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/empire-of-madness-caligula-in-pyongyang/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=empire-of-madness-caligula-in-pyongyang</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 17 Dec 2013 05:48:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jang Song-thaek]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kim Jong-Un]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[North Korea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[purge]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stalin]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=213341</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The North Korean nomenklatura braces itself; no one is safe.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/lp.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-213351" alt="lp" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/lp-450x281.jpg" width="315" height="197" /></a>North Korea is Stalin&#8217;s ultimate dream come true. It is a most dangerous actor in world politics and a despicable tyranny where reason and moderation are treated as mortal enemies. Blind obedience is mandatory and so is infinite subservience to the Supreme Leader, the administrator of truth, memory, and universal poverty. It is the most hermetic regime in the world, an armed-to-the-teeth totalitarian despotism whose possession of  nuclear weapons  gives nightmares to all those who know how the Kim dynasty and its sycophants operate. It is, in fact, as the recent bloody purges made clearer than ever, a huge concentration camp run by a lunatic commander.</p>
<p>The mysterious, baby-faced monster Kim Jong-un has unleashed a Stalin-style onslaught on his own acolytes. It is like a re-enactment of the Soviet Great Purge when Stalin got rid of the whole Bolshevik Old Guard. It is not an exaggeration to predict more bloodshed to follow. No doubt the North Korean nomenklatura is now frightened and  humiliated. No one is safe in this universe of paranoid delusions and rampant suspicions.</p>
<p>The propaganda machine indulges in hysterical harangues against the alleged traitors, despicable vermin, &#8220;repugnant human scum,&#8221; &#8220;nauseating reptiles&#8221; and other surreal zoological metaphors. Until recently the regime&#8217;s number two, lionized as a wise advisor to the satrap, Kim Jong-un&#8217;s uncle, Jang Song-thaek, was killed after having been swamped into an ocean of  morbid accusations. Is this the abysmal end or the frightening beginning of young Kim&#8217;s absolute rule?</p>
<p>As Nicholas Eberstadt has pointed out, Kim Jong-un&#8217;s grandfather and father avoided dealing mortal blows to the members of the highest communist aristocracy. They practiced a dynastic communism that blended nationalist mysticism with ferocious Stalinism. The Juche doctrine means the right of the communist Lidero Maximo to act as arbitrarily and erratically as he wishes. Initially, the enigmatic &#8220;Dear Leader,&#8221; a latter-day Caligula with a Swiss high-school background and the face of a hieratic, opaque deity, seemed to be just a puppet manipulated by his ostensibly omnipotent aunt and uncle. He has finally escaped their suffocating grip, or at least this seems to be his conviction. He acts ruthlessly and in perfect cold blood. Will he continue the carnage or will he be himself liquidated by an equally brutal backlash from those whom he wants to eliminate? Will this grotesque farce culminate in a settling of accounts that could somehow restore a minimal rationality in this empire of madness? What card will China play?</p>
<p>When Kim Jong-un was ritualistically anointed his father&#8217;s successor two years ago, and the world media were disseminating those mind-boggling images with teenagers hitting their heads and old ladies screaming as loud as possible their desperation, I predicted that the struggle for power would exacerbate to the point of assassinations and show trials. What is at stake is absolute power within an absolutist regime, a red monarchy if ever one was. For the time being, the &#8220;beloved aunt&#8221; and estranged wife of the executed &#8220;traitor,&#8221; has managed to survive. It is not sure at all that the vindictive Kim Jong-un will spare her. The logic of  unbound Stalinism is an ever-growing, endless purge. Still, it is hard to know whether in the dark corridors of the North Korean pyramid of power some of the alleged loyalists are not sharpening their daggers. This is not Hamlet in Pyongyang, but rather Richard III or Caligula.</p>
<p>I have written a lot on national Stalinism and dynastic communism in Romania, North Korea, and Cuba. There are striking similarities between Nicolae Ceausescu&#8217;s and Kim Il-sung&#8217;s experiments. In 1986 I published in the journal &#8220;Orbis&#8221; a study titled “Byzantine Rites, Stalinist Follies: The Twilight of  Dynastic Socialism in Romania.”  I explored the wedding between unbound Stalinism and nationalist delirium, the mixing of autarchic narcissism and ideological paranoia, the relations between party elite, secret police and army within a decrepit dictatorship.  I am tempted to write now an article titled  “Confucian Rites, Stalinist Follies: The Twilight of  Dynastic Communism in North Korea.” Ideological dictatorships, also known as ideocracies or logocracies, cultivate miracle, myth, and mystery (a point made by historian Fritz Stern).</p>
<p>In the case of North Korea, the miracle and the myth are totally exhausted. The mystery remains and this is most alarming.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>Obama’s China Bluff</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obamas-china-bluff/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-china-bluff</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 16 Dec 2013 05:52:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[China]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Eastern Europe]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[North Korea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=213269</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The last drop of American influence is on the line.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/obrt.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-213272" alt="obrt" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/obrt-450x281.jpg" width="315" height="197" /></a>North Korea’s dictator is executing family members and ex-girlfriends at a speed that would give even Stalin pause. Meanwhile the People’s Republic of China has decided to follow in the footsteps of the Empire of Japan while the pacifistic modern Japan and an uncertain South Korea look to America for aid.</p>
<p>Obama’s amazing Asian pivot has now run smack dab into China’s infinitely expanding territorial claims. And it’s hard to think of a worse totem animal for defying the dragon than the yellow-bellied jackass.</p>
<p>China is out to kick foreign powers out of Asia and lay claim to any nautical territory that it wants; especially if its waters are enriched by oil. Like the Empire of Japan, the People’s Republic is hungry for oil and obsessed with the strategic weaknesses of building an empire while beset by resource problems.</p>
<p>The PRC’s oil tends to be coastal which makes it too easy for a foreign power to break its economy. And like a great city, it has no hope of being self-sufficient when too many of its vital resources have to be imported from across the water. The only way to protect its economic lifeblood is with naval power.</p>
<p>The next stage of China becoming a great power depends on it pushing the United States out of Asia and forcing Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, not to mention other American allies, to make their peace with its new empire. It can’t allow former Communist allies like Vietnam to balance out its power by allying with the United States which is why given a choice between the homicidal lunacy of Kim Jong-un and the double-dealing Vietnamese eager to bring back the Yanks, the People’s Republic will go on supporting North Korea. North Korea may be run by mad dogs, but it won’t be seduced by the West.</p>
<p>North Korea is to Japan what Iran is to Israel. Quite a few Japanese have moved to the United States because they expected that, long before Fukushima, the pint-sized dictator would turn their country into a radioactive wasteland.</p>
<p>Bill Clinton sold out Japan by letting North Korea go nuclear. If the Israelis had been paying more attention, they would have realized the implications of that move. If the United States could screw allies like Japan and South Korea, who don’t have entire Muslim lobbies grinding away at them in the United Nations and the State Department, it was obviously going to screw Israel on Iran’s nuclear capabilities.</p>
<p>South Korea and Japan are still hoping that Uncle Sam will do his job by showing the flag. And that’s what the Asia pivot really amounts to. Obama is hoping to play a cut-rate JFK with one General Secretary of the Communist Party, Xi Jinping, standing in for another General Secretary of the Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev.</p>
<p>But China isn’t the USSR. It’s not struggling to consolidate its gains; it needs to seize them first. The PRC isn’t Khrushchev’s USSR, trying to figure out how to build houses that won’t fall down. It’s Stalin’s USSR dreaming of an empire that will stretch from the Bering Sea to the English Channel with the appropriate regional territorial substitutions.</p>
<p>Xi Jinping isn’t Khrushchev; a blustering coward who was better at shooting starving peasants and fooling Western leaders than at standing his ground. And China has less to worry about than he did. Unlike Khrushchev it doesn’t have to worry about a nuclear war or fear that American tank divisions will plow through its conquered territories and smash the rotten mass of military forces protecting them.</p>
<p>Finally, Obama is no JFK. Obama isn’t even Carter. And after having gotten through being humiliated by everyone from Iran to Russia while selling out every ally in Europe and the Middle East who was at all vulnerable to his brand of progressive political treachery, his backbone, which bends unnaturally when in the vicinity of an enemy of the United States, has less credibility than his health care plan promises.</p>
<p>The only way for Obama to salvage even a modicum of success from his pivot to an Asian bluff is by convincing the People’s Republic of China that he is unpredictable and dangerous and that provoking him might have unintended consequences. But that will be a hard sell in Beijing since the only nations he is a proven danger to are the allies depending on him and he is as predictably wobbly as his red lines are.</p>
<p>China’s recent crackdown on its Uyghur Muslim population may have angered Obama enough so that the next time he bows to the General Secretary of the Communist Party his nose will pause short of a 45° degree angle to the floor. But that won’t help Japan, South Korea or the American sailors playing chicken with Chinese warships in the expectation that the men in Washington who ordered them to stand firm, will stand behind them if anything goes wrong; instead of washing their hands of the crisis.</p>
<p>The People’s Republic of China knows that it faces America at its weakest. If it can force a crisis that will lead to an American withdrawal from Asia and the recognition of its unilateral authority, it stops being a world power in name only and that dismal honor instead passes to the United States of America.</p>
<p>The Asia pivot is becoming a very dangerous game. That’s how war games are. But it’s a game that we are going to have to play sooner or later or allow Asia to go the way of Eastern Europe in the forties.</p>
<p>China is Communist in name only. But that doesn’t mean that we can ignore it. Obama has ceded American influence everywhere else while clinging to the Asia pivot. He has let Russia push its influence deeper into its old Warsaw Pact territories and let Iran have a blank check on terrorizing the Middle East. The tyrannies of the left have been given a free hand in South America as Obama has pressed the flesh with Raul Castro and Hugo Chavez and taken Argentina’s side against the United Kingdom.</p>
<p>Asia is the last card in the deck of American influence. South America, Eastern Europe and the Middle East are gone. With the dealer glowering at him, Obama is bluffing China with his Asia pivot, but if China calls his bluff, then the last card will have been played. And it will be up to the weakest man to ever sit in the Concorde Presidential Office Chair to decide whether to go all-in on Asia… or once again to fold.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>A New Reign of Terror in North Korea</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ryan-mauro/a-new-reign-of-terror-in-north-korea/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-new-reign-of-terror-in-north-korea</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 13 Dec 2013 05:44:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ryan Mauro]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[collapse]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[executed]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kim Jong-Un]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[North Korea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Uncle]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=213128</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the regime may be on the verge of collapse -- and how global terrorists may benefit. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/south_korea_koreas_kim_s_uncle1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-213129" alt="south_korea_koreas_kim_s_uncle1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/south_korea_koreas_kim_s_uncle1-450x337.jpg" width="315" height="236" /></a>The North Korean regime <a title="" href="http://www.politico.com/story/2013/12/north-korea-kim-jong-un-uncle-executed-101104.html?hp=r6" target="_blank">announced</a> the execution of its second-in-command yesterday; the latest casualty in a far-reaching purge by Kim Jong-Un. The rift may increase the chances that the world’s largest exporter of WMDs and persecutor of Christians will collapse, but that scenario opens up dangers of its own.</p>
<p>The excellent <a title="" href="http://freekorea.us/" target="_blank">One Free Korea blog</a> says that the execution of Jang Song-Thaek is “immensely important” as he was widely seen as the man pulling the strings from behind the curtain. He was Vice Chairman of the National Defense Commission and had long personal relationships throughout the regime’s pillars of power. He was also Kim Jong-Un’s uncle and husband of the late Kim Jong-Il’s sister.</p>
<p>The regime’s announcement accused Jang of “attempting to overthrow the state by all sorts of intrigues and despicable methods with a wild ambition to grab the supreme power of our party and state.” The intelligence analysis firm <a title="" href="http://www.stratfor.com/sample/analysis/policy-impact-north-koreas-latest-purge-and-execution" target="_blank">Stratfor</a> assessed that “there was a slow coup forming in North Korea.”</p>
<p>His death comes shortly after his public arrest and dismissal from all positions. He was charged with various offenses, including betraying the country and selling resources at unapproved low prices. This was a reference to trade with China. Shortly after Kim Jong-Un took over, he upped the cost of iron ore and minerals being sold to China.</p>
<p>The One Free Korea blog <a title="" href="http://freekorea.us/2013/12/09/china-not-sounding-so-happy-about-n-korean-purge/" target="_blank">observed</a> that China was enraged by the dismissal of Jang. It demanded that Kim Jong-Un immediately travel to Beijing and the Chinese military even conducted a simulation of a night landing on the Yellow Sea Coast with 5,000 troops.</p>
<p>Kim Jong-Un apparently felt there was a threat from a pro-Jang faction, though the killing of him can either be seen as a sign of confidence or of fear. Jong-Un’s older brother <a title="" href="http://abcnews.go.com/International/kim-jong-uns-aunt-helped-purge-husband-north/story?id=21189463" target="_blank">oversaw</a> the arrest of Jang’s two closest aides last month.</p>
<p>Jang’s money manager defected shortly before or after Jang’s dismissal. It is the highest level defection in 15 years. It is unclear if the defection caused Jang’s arrest or vice versa. He is <a title="" href="http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=21189463" target="_blank">believed</a> to have taken Jang’s assets and confidential information about the nuclear program to China, another indication that China favored Jang’s wing of the regime.</p>
<p>“Jang worked with the Chinese even before Kim Jong Il&#8217;s death to solidify his own power and effectively be China&#8217;s regent for running North Korea,” <a title="" href="http://www.stratfor.com/sample/analysis/policy-impact-north-koreas-latest-purge-and-execution" target="_blank">says</a> Stratfor.</p>
<p>The crackdown goes beyond Jang and his associates. The South Korean President <a title="" href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-25312983" target="_blank">says</a> a “reign of terror” is underway and experts <a title="" href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303932504579253721867878680" target="_blank">see it</a> as the biggest political purge in North Korea in 40 years.</p>
<p>Jong-Un sacked his father’s top financial advisor who had a close relationship with Jang. Even the elites that secured his own ascent weren’t spared, leaving behind only one senior official, the chief of the Politburo. About 44% of military commanders have been <a title="" href="http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2013/12/04/2013120401535.html" target="_blank">dismissed</a>, as have 97 of 218 of the party heads, government ministers and senior military officers.</p>
<p>In one case, the regime made a dramatic public display with one official. The Assistant Chief of Staff for the Ministry of the Peoples’ Armed Forces was <a title="" href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/leave-no-trace-of-him-behind-down-to-the-hair-north-korean-official-executed-with-mortar-round-after-drinking-during-mourning-period-for-dear-leader-kim-jongil-8226398.html" target="_blank">blown apart</a> with a mortar round so, in the regime’s words, it’d “leave no trace of him behind, down to his hair.”</p>
<p>There is also a crackdown on outside culture to slow down the <a title="" href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/southkorea/8165274/North-Koreas-undercover-journalists-reveal-misery-of-life-in-dictatorship.html" target="_blank">crumbling</a> of the information blockade that has sustained the regime so long. He executed 80 people for allegedly possessing Bibles, having pornography and watching South Korean videos. In August, the regime <a title="" href="http://www.latimes.com/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-north-korea-executes-80-20131111,0,2954869.story" target="_blank">killed</a> a dozen entertainers by firing squad, <a title="" href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/10272953/Kim-Jong-uns-ex-lover-executed-by-firing-squad.html" target="_blank">including</a> his ex-girlfriend. They were accused of being involved with pornography distribution.</p>
<p>Some experts interpret North Korea’s selling of its gold reserves as an indication of increasing economic troubles. It sold two tons to China last year to make $100 million. Other experts feel this is routinely done and is not an indication of anything abnormal.</p>
<p>These developments come shortly after the RAND Corporation concluded in a <a title="" href="http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR300/RR331/RAND_RR331.pdf" target="_blank">study</a> that there is a “reasonable probability” that the regime will collapse in the foreseeable future. It predicts a massive humanitarian crisis requiring a major international intervention. The top national security advisor to the President of South Korea <a title="" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/249870" target="_blank">predicted</a> the regime will collapse within 2 to 3 years after Kim Jong-Un’s takeover.</p>
<p>There are three ways that this regime change can happen and they are not mutually exclusive.</p>
<p>The most stable transition would be a coup, perhaps with covert Chinese assistance. However, even under this scenario, it is hard to believe that the bloodthirsty regime will non-violently step down. It could easily become a civil war or an insurgency.</p>
<p>The second scenario is a civil war. There is no viable armed opposition group, but that could change as Kim Jong-Un alienates large parts of the military. In 2010, about 200 former North Korean soldiers <a title="" href="http://www.defensenews.com/article/20100909/DEFSECT02/9090302/Ex-N-Korea-Soldiers-Start-Group-To-Topple-Regime" target="_blank">announced</a> an armed campaign to overthrow the regime but it fizzled.</p>
<p>The third scenario is a popular uprising. In November 2009, plans to reform the currency sparked an unprecedented public <a title="" href="http://articles.latimes.com/2010/mar/25/world/la-fg-korea-famine25-2010mar25" target="_blank">expression</a> of opposition. The frightened regime apologized and Kim Jong-Il executed the advisor responsible for the policy.</p>
<p>In February 2011, protests were again <a title="" href="http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2011/02/24/2011022400582.html" target="_blank">sparked</a> in a market when promised goods didn’t arrive. Security forces intervened, beating one man unconscious and escalating the situation.</p>
<p>It is easy to hope for the commencement of regime change when you look at North Korea’s record on human rights abuses and WMD trafficking.</p>
<p>There are around <a title="" href="http://www.persecution.org/2013/12/11/north-korea-satellite-images-expose-vast-prison-camps/" target="_blank">200,000</a> political prisoners. <a title="" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/feb/01/northkorea" target="_blank">Testimony</a> from escapees will one day be the basis of movies that will shock the world. There are <a title="" href="http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/world/2011/October/Witness-to-Evil-Mothers-Kill-Children-to-Survive/" target="_blank">countless</a> <a title="" href="http://www.theatlanticright.com/2009/07/24/north-korea-tests-chemical-and-biological-weapons-on-children-prisoners/" target="_blank">stories</a> of concentration camp-like persecution, <a title="" href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/1432366/Famine-struck-N-Koreans-eating-children.html" target="_blank">cannibalism</a>, torture, starvation and widespread <a title="" href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/asia-pacific/2009/07/20097165415127287.html" target="_blank">human experimentation</a>, including on children.</p>
<p>North Korea is the <a title="" href="http://www.opendoorsuk.org/resources/worldwatch/north_korea.php" target="_blank">number one</a> oppressor of Christians. If you are caught practicing the faith, you and three generations of your family are sent to a lifetime of labor. An estimated 400,000 of the 20-million population is Christian. One prison alone is thought to house 6,000 Christians.</p>
<p>If and when the regime starts falling, North Korea will be seen as a gold mine for criminals, terrorists and rogue states around the world. Huge stockpiles of unconventional and conventional weapons will be up for grabs. Between 2,500 and 5,000 tons of chemical weapons and 5,000 tons of biological weapons are there. Cyber warfare experts, special forces operatives, weapons scientists, and average soldiers will be looking for jobs.</p>
<p>In addition, there is a consistent pattern where North Korea engages in provocations during times of internal transition. Every major step in the succession process that brought Kim Jong-Un into power coincided with an outburst to draw international attention.</p>
<p>British intelligence <a title="" href="http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/178005/North-Korean-leader-s-son-ordered-ship-attack" target="_blank">believes</a> Jong-Un has an “explosive temper” and suffers from severe hypertension. North Korea has carried out three nuclear tests. Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, one of the nation’s top experts, recently gave a <a title="" href="http://www.clarionproject.org/news/have-concessions-iran-made-emp-attack-more-likely" target="_blank">bone-chilling webinar</a> on the Electromagnetic-Pulse (EMP) threat, and included a frightening examination of North Korea’s capabilities in this area.</p>
<p>For things to get better in North Korea, things will have to first become far worse.</p>
<p><em>The <a title="" href="http://www.theird.org/" target="_blank">Institute on Religion and Democracy</a> contributed to this article.</em></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>North Korean Dictator Arrests Uncle for &#8220;Dreaming Different Dreams&#8221;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/north-korean-dictator-arrests-uncle-for-dreaming-different-dreams/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=north-korean-dictator-arrests-uncle-for-dreaming-different-dreams</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 10 Dec 2013 01:32:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kim Jong-Un]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[North Korea]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=212808</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Jang was removed from the number two position in the leadership]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/article-0-19F9CC0200000578-937_634x399.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-212815" alt="article-0-19F9CC0200000578-937_634x399" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/article-0-19F9CC0200000578-937_634x399-450x283.jpg" width="450" height="283" /></a></p>
<p>In true Communist Party fashion, the arrest appears to have been made at a Party meeting and filmed on television. Saddam Hussein liked to do the same thing. As did Stalin.</p>
<blockquote><p>Jang was said by South Korea&#8217;s intelligence agency last week to have been removed from the number two position in the leadership, but there was no official confirmation of this from the North at the time.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2520616/Kim-Jong-Uns-uncle-sacked-committed-criminal-acts-baffling-imagination-lived-depraved-life.html">A terror state has nothing to run on but terror</a>. And tyrannies begin new purges with each generation to stay in power.</p>
<blockquote><p>North Korea has released images of the moment Kim Jong Un&#8217;s uncle was dragged from a meeting by police following his dismissal from government for &#8216;criminal acts that baffle imagination&#8217;.</p>
<p>The hermit state has reportedly &#8216;thrown the book&#8217; at Kim&#8217;s former second-in-command, Jang Song Thaek, accusing him today of a string of crimes including womanising, alcohol abuse and &#8216;living a depraved life.&#8217;</p></blockquote>
<p>Basically being a typical member of the North Korean elite which enjoys the good life but knows that it can be arrested for it at any moment. No parallels please, we&#8217;re liberals here.</p>
<blockquote><p>Insisting Jang had failed to toe the Party line, the government, in an astonishingly frank and poetic revelation, said he had &#8216;dreamed different dreams&#8217;.</p></blockquote>
<p>In North Korea, government decides what you can dream. Over here, if you like your dreams, you can keep your dreams.</p>
<blockquote><p>And within days of his dismissal, Jang was already beginning to be erased from the country&#8217;s history as a previously recorded documentary about Kim was released with the disgraced statesman airbrushed out of every scene.</p></blockquote>
<p>Photoshop makes things sort of easier.</p>
<blockquote><p>And to cap his public humiliation, state television reportedly aired footage of Jang being arrested by uniformed police officers during a high-profile meeting in Pyongyang in front of hundreds of stony-faced colleagues.</p></blockquote>
<p>I imagine he knew it was coming.</p>
<blockquote><p>One of Jang&#8217;s aides, holding many of his secrets, recently defected to South Korean agents in China.</p></blockquote>
<p>Yup.</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8216;Jang and his followers committed criminal acts baffling imagination and they did tremendous harm to our Party and revolution,&#8217; said the official KCNA news agency.</p>
<p>&#8216;Jang pretended to uphold the party and leader, but was engrossed in such factional acts such as dreaming different dreams and involving himself in double dealing behind the scene,&#8217; said KCNA.</p>
<p>&#8216;Affected by the capitalist way of living, Jang committed irregularities and corruption and led a dissolute and depraved life.&#8217;</p></blockquote>
<p>So again, typical members of the North Korean elite.</p>
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		<title>Syria, Iran and the North Korean Model</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/caroline-glick/syria-iran-and-the-north-korean-model/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=syria-iran-and-the-north-korean-model</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 20 Sep 2013 04:39:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Inspections]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Nuclear Weapons]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Syria]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Why the Islamic Republic is looking forward to new rounds in the nuclear negotiations game.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><i><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/north-korean-nuclear-weapons-thumb-470x328-3134.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-204870" alt="north-korean-nuclear-weapons-thumb-470x328-3134" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/north-korean-nuclear-weapons-thumb-470x328-3134-450x314.jpg" width="270" height="188" /></a>Originally </i><a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Column-one-Syria-Iran-and-the-North-Korean-model-326571"><i>published </i></a><i>in The Jerusalem Post. </i></p>
<p>Did US President Barack Obama score a great victory for the United States by concluding a deal with Russia on Syria&#8217;s chemical weapons or has he caused irreparable harm to the US&#8217;s reputation and international position? By what standard can we judge his actions when the results will only be known next year? To summarize where things now stand, last Saturday US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov concluded an agreement regarding Syria&#8217;s chemical weapons arsenal. The agreement requires Syria to provide full details on the size and locations of all of its chemical weapons by this Saturday. It requires international inspectors to go to Syria beginning in November, and to destroy or remove Syria&#8217;s chemical weapons from the country by June 2014.</p>
<p>Obama and Kerry have trumpeted the agreement as a great accomplishment. They say it could never have been concluded had the US not threatened to carry out &#8220;unbelievably small&#8221; punitive military strikes against the Syrian regime in response to its use of Sarin gas to massacre 1,400 civilians in the suburbs of Damascus on August 21.</p>
<p>And then there is the perception of an &#8220;Iran dividend&#8221; from the US-Russian deal. Just two days after last Saturday&#8217;s agreement, speculation mounted about a possible breakthrough in the six party negotiations with Iran regarding its illicit nuclear weapons program.</p>
<p>According to Der Spiegel, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani may consider closing down Iran&#8217;s illicit uranium enrichment facility at Fordo under IAEA supervision in exchange for the removal or weakening of economic sanctions against Iran&#8217;s oil exports and its central bank.</p>
<p>The White House has not ruled out the possibility that Obama and Rouhani may meet at the UN General Assembly meeting later this month. These moves could pave the way for a reinstatement of full diplomatic relations between the US and Iran. Those relations were cut off after the regime-supported takeover of the US embassy in Teheran in 1979.</p>
<p>Obama&#8217;s supporters in the US media and Congress have hailed these developments as foreign policy victories for the United States. Thanks to Obama&#8217;s brilliant maneuvering, Syria has agreed to disarm from its chemical weapons without the US having had to fire a shot. The Iranians&#8217; increased willingness to be forthcoming on their nuclear program is similarly a consequence of Obama&#8217;s tough and smart diplomacy regarding Syria, and his clever utilization of Russia as a long arm of US foreign policy.</p>
<p>For their part, critics have lined up to condemn Obama&#8217;s decision to cut a deal with Russia regarding Syria.</p>
<p>They warn that his actions in that regard have destroyed the credibility of his threat to use force to prevent Iran from developing or deploying nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>To determine which side is right in this debate, we need to look no further than North Korea.</p>
<p>In April 1992 the IAEA concluded that North Korea was hiding information on its nuclear program from the UN and declared it in breach of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty it signed in 1985. In March 1993 North Korea announced its intention to vacate its signature from the NPT. Later that year, it later offered to begin negotiations related to its illicit nuclear program with the US.</p>
<p>Those negotiations began in early 1994, after the US canceled planned joint military exercises with South Korea as a goodwill gesture to the North. The talks led to the Agreed-Framework Agreement concluded later that year under which North Korea agreed to shutter its nuclear installation at Yongbyon where it was suspected of developing plutonium based nuclear weapons. In exchange the US and its allies agreed to build light water nuclear reactors in North Korea, and to provide North Korea with oil for energy production until the reactors were up and running.</p>
<p>In November 2002 the North Koreans acknowledged that they were engaging in illicit uranium enrichment activities. In January 2003 Pyongyang announced it was withdrawing from the NPT.</p>
<p>In February 2005 it announced it possessed a nuclear arsenal. And on October 9, 2006, North Korea launched its first test of a nuclear bomb.</p>
<p>The US suspended its talks with North Korea in 2003. It responded to the nuclear test by renewing those negotiations just weeks after it took place. And in February 2007 the US and North Korea reached an agreement under which Pyongyang agreed to close down Yongbyon in exchange for a resumption of shipments of free oil.</p>
<p>In September 2007, against the strenuous opposition of then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, who was the architect of the US&#8217;s renewed push to cut a deal with North Korea, Israel destroyed a North Korean built nuclear reactor almost identical to the Yongbyon nuclear reactor in the Syrian desert. Had it become operational, Syria would likely have developed a nuclear arsenal by now.</p>
<p>In June 2008, the North Koreans demolished Yongbyon&#8217;s cooling tower.</p>
<p>Amidst fears that North Korea had reopened the reactor in the fall of 2008, the US removed North Korea from the State Department&#8217;s list of state sponsors of terrorism.</p>
<p>Six months later, in April 2009, Pyongyang resumed its reprocessing of spent fuel rods for the production of plutonium. And the next month it conducted another nuclear test.</p>
<p>In 2010, North Korean scientists at Yongbyon told Siegfried Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory that the plutonium reactor had been shuttered.</p>
<p>Later in 2010, the North Koreans began open enrichment of uranium at Yongbyon.</p>
<p>Enrichment activities have doubled in scale since 2010. US experts now assess that with 4,000 centrifuges operating, North Korea produces enough enriched uranium to build three uranium based nuclear bombs every year. On February 12, 2013 North Korea conducted a third nuclear test. Experts were unclear whether the tested bomb a plutoniumbased or uranium-based nuclear weapon.</p>
<p>On September 11, the media reported that the latest satellite imagery indicates the North Koreans have resumed their plutonium production activities at Yongbyon.</p>
<p>Although the media claim that this represents an abrogation of the 2007 deal, it is unclear why that deal was considered in place given that North Korea began its reprocessing activities in April 2009 and tested another nuclear weapon the next month.</p>
<p>Although it issued a strong statement condemning the reopening of the plutonium operation at Yongbyon, the Obama administration remains committed to the sixparty talks with North Korea.</p>
<p>When viewed as a model for general US-non-proliferation policy, rather than one specific to North Korea, the North Korean model involves a rogue state using the Chinese and Russians to block effective UN Security Council action against its illicit development and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.</p>
<p>Faced with a dead end at the UN, the US is forced to decide between acting on its own to compel a cessation of the illicit behavior, or to try to cut a deal with the regime, either through bilateral or multilateral negotiations.</p>
<p>Not wishing to enter into an unwanted confrontation or suffer domestic and international condemnations of American unilateralism, the US opts for diplomacy. The decision is controversial in Washington. And to justify their decision, the champions of negotiating deals with rogue proliferators stake their personal reputations on the success of that policy.</p>
<p>In the case of Rice, her decision to open negotiations with North Korea following its nuclear test was staunchly opposed by vice president Dick Cheney. And once the policy was exposed as a failure first by the intelligence reports proving that North Korea was proliferating its nuclear technologies and know-how to Syria, and then with its early suspension of its agreement to the 2007 agreement, rather than acknowledge her mistake, she doubled down. And as a consequence, under the nose of the US, and with Washington pledged to a framework deal to which North Korea stood in continuous breach, North Korea carried out two more nuclear tests, massively expanded its uranium enrichment activities, and reinstated its plutonium production activities.</p>
<p>Just as importantly, once the US accepted the notion of talks with North Korea, it necessarily accepted the regime&#8217;s legitimacy. And as a consequence, both the Clinton and Bush administrations abandoned any thought of toppling the regime. Once Washington ensnared itself in negotiations that strengthened its enemy at America&#8217;s expense, it became the effective guarantor of the regime&#8217;s survival. After all, if the regime is credible enough to be trusted to keep its word, then it is legitimate no matter how many innocents it has enslaved and slaughtered.</p>
<p>With the US&#8217;s experience with North Korea clearly in mind, it is possible to assess US actions with regards to Syria and Iran. The first thing that becomes clear is that the Obama administration is implementing the North Korean model in its dealings with Syria and Iran.</p>
<p>With regards to Syria, there is no conceivable way to peacefully enforce the US Russian agreement on the ground. Technically it is almost impossible to safely dispose of chemical weapons under the best of circumstances.</p>
<p>Given that Syria is in the midst of a brutal civil war, the notion that it is possible for UN inspectors to remove or destroy the regime&#8217;s chemical weapons is patently absurd.</p>
<p>Moreover, since the agreement itself requires non-compliance complaints to be discussed first at the UN Security Council, and it is clear that Russia is willing to do anything to protect the Syrian regime, no action will be taken to punish non-compliance.</p>
<p>Finally, like his predecessors with regard to Pyongyang, Obama has effectively accepted the continued legitimacy of the regime of Bashar Assad, despite the fact that he is an acknowledged war criminal.</p>
<p>As was the case with Pyongyang and its nuclear brinkmanship and weapons tests, Assad won his legitimacy and removed the US threat to remove him from power by using weapons of mass destruction.</p>
<p>As for Iran, Rouhani&#8217;s talk of closing Fordo needs to be viewed against the precedents set at Yongbyon by the North Koreans. In other words, even if the installation is shuttered, there is every reason to believe that the shutdown will be temporary. On the other hand, just as North Korea remains off the State Department&#8217;s list of state sponsors of terrorism despite the fact that since its removal it carried out two more nuclear tests, it is hard to imagine that sanctions on Iran&#8217;s oil exports and central bank removed in exchange for an Iranian pledge to close Fordo, would be restored after Fordo is reopened.</p>
<p>Like North Korea, Iran will negotiate until it is ready to vacate its signature on the NPT and test its first nuclear weapon.</p>
<p>The critics are correct. And the danger posed by Obama&#8217;s decision to seek a false compromise rather than accept an unwanted confrontation following Syria&#8217;s use of chemical weapons will only be removed when the US recognizes the folly of seeking to wish away the dangers of weapons of mass destruction through negotiations. Those talks lead only to the diminishment of US power and the endangerment of US national security as more US enemies develop and deploy weapons of mass destruction with the sure knowledge that the US would rather negotiate fecklessly than contend responsibly with the dangers they pose.</p>
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