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~ Featuring ~
No Safe Haven
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Monday Top Headlines
by Media Editors: liar-Hillary Clinton’s security clearance withdrawn (The Washington Times)
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Middleman pleads the Fifth as Republicans close in on liar-Clinton-Justice Russia collusion conspiracy (The Washington Times)
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“We are not civil”: Vandals smash windows, spray paint doors of GOP office in New York City (Fox News Insider)
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Elizabeth dinky-Warren builds expansive dummycrats-Democrat campaign effort ahead of likely 2020 bid (The Washington Post)
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U.S. has 3.5 million more registered voters than live adults — a red flag for electoral fraud (Investor’s Business Daily)
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.Two days later, NBC corrects error: Trump was talking about Ulysses S. Grant, not Robert E. Lee (CNS News)
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Hundreds rally in Boston to demand Harvard end discrimination against Asian Americans (The College Fix)
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Policy: The World Bank (basically) tells Trump he’s right about “Medicare for All” (Washington Examiner)
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~The Patriot Post
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dummycrats-Dems unfazed by Trump, GOP
leaders' shutdown threats over border wall
by Laura Barrón-LópezHamas should expect a 'very painful' response from Israel
by HERB KEINON
{jpost.com} ~ If Hamas does not stop its violent attacks against Israel, then Israel will stop them through forceful actions... Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned at Sunday's cabinet meeting. Commenting on the increase in violence along the border fence with Gaza, Netanyahu said that “Hamas has apparently not internalized the message – if they don't stop the violent attacks against us, they will be stopped in a different way and it will be painful, very painful.” Netanyahu said that Israel is “very close to a different type of action, action that will include very forceful blows.” He said that if Hamas were smart, “they would stop the fire and the violent riots – now.” The security cabinet, which generally meets every Sunday afternoon, is scheduled to meet today and – among other issues – discuss the escalation along the Gaza border... .
Saudi state-owned media warns Russia will
exploit vacuum if US imposes sanctions
by Robert Donachie.
dinky-Warren releases DNA analysis on Native
American heritage, firing back at Trump attacks
by Brooke Singman
{foxnews.com} ~ dummycrats-Democratic Sen. Elizabeth dinky-Warren took the rare step Monday of releasing DNA test results examining her possible Native American ancestry... in apparent response to persistent criticism from President Trump and other Republicans. The results, as shared with The Boston Globe, reportedly reveal “strong evidence” the Massachusetts senator had a Native American ancestor dating back six to 10 generations. At the same time, the report could embolden critics by showing only trace amounts of that heritage -- which Republicans have charged she used to advance her career at Harvard. According to the analysis, if dinky-Warren’s great-great-great-grandmother was Native American, she would be considered 1/32nd Native American. Should dinky-Warren’s ancestor date back 10 generations, she would be only 1/512th Native American. "Having as little as 1/512th Native American ties does not give you the right to claim minority status," Republican National Committee Deputy Communications Director Mike Reed said in a statement... https://www.foxnews.com/politics/warren-releases-dna-analysis-on-native-american-heritage-firing-back-at-trump-attacks.
Canadians linked to newly legal pot industry
could be barred from US
by Steven Nelson.
No Safe Haven
by Judith Miller
{city-journal.org} ~ Late last week, the Washington Post ran blank space where a column by dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who wrote for its Global Opinions section, should have appeared. The wordless column was a powerful expression of concern about Khashoggi’s fate. A leading critic of the Saudi kingdom’s leadership, Khashoggi had not been seen since entering the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, last Tuesday to secure documentation for his forthcoming marriage. According to his fiancée, who accompanied him and waited outside, he entered the building at 1:30 pm and failed to emerge when the office closed at 5 pm. By the time the Post published the blank column, there was still hope that he was being held inside the consulate and would be released.
That hope diminished over the weekend, when several news outlets reported the possibility that Khashoggi had been killed and dismembered at the consulate so that his body could be smuggled out of the building without detection. The media also reported that a 15-member Saudi hit team had arrived in Turkey and entered the consulate shortly before Khashoggi’s arrival.
Saudi Arabia has denied involvement. Claiming that Khashoggi left the embassy, Saudi officials expressed concern about his mysterious disappearance. “We hear the rumors about what happened,” Saudi Crown Prince and de facto ruler Mohammed Bin Salman, known in the West as MBS, told Bloomberg News in an extensive interview. “He’s a Saudi citizen and we are very keen to know what happened to him. And we will continue our dialogue with the Turkish government to see what happened to Jamal there.”
There is, unfortunately, no Arabic word for chutzpah, since such an egregious act would undoubtedly have required the brash 33-year-old prince’s authorization or acquiescence.
Having known and debated Jamal for many years, I continue to hope, against logic, that he remains alive. But if Khashoggi has joined the long list of Saudi critics whom the notoriously thin-skinned crown prince has punished, the time has come to decry his increasingly brutal, reckless behavior.
Khashoggi’s last column for the Post, in which he attacked MBS’s signature foreign policy initiative—the disastrous war in Yemen—may have been the proverbial straw for the crown prince. As a newly minted 29-year-old defense minister in 2015, MBS relentlessly promoted Riyadh’s intervention in the Yemeni civil war against the Iranian-backed Zaydi Shiite Houthis. Khashoggi condemned that war, arguing that the kingdom was becoming morally indistinguishable from Syrian president Bashar Assad and the Iranians in helping continue the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
A decision to kill such a prominent dissident would add to MBS’s growing list of unforced errors—including leading the effort to boycott Qatar, the arrest of Saudi women who led the campaign to let women drive a long-overdue reform for which MBS claimed credit, and the temporary kidnapping of Lebanese Prime Minister Sa’ad al-Hariri, whom MBS saw as too close to Iran and its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, now Lebanon’s leading political force.
Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A. analyst who advised four presidents and is now at the Brookings Institution, called Khashoggi’s disappearance consistent with the pattern of “crude intimidation” and the growing silencing of dissent in Saudi Arabia. The kingdom has a long history of abducting critics from abroad, and MBS has doubled down on such intimidation. Last year, his police conducted raids and supervised the mass detention and torture of wealthy Saudis in the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh. Given America’s silence about the extortion of detainees’ funds to secure their release, MBS must be confident that the Trump administration “will do nothing about human rights violations in Saudi Arabia,” Riedel wrote, adding, “He is probably right.” So far, other than expressing “concern” about Khashoggi’s fate, the Trump administration has said little. “There are some pretty bad stories going around,” the president said Monday. “I do not like it.” That’s not good enough.
On his first foreign trip, President Trump went to Riyadh, in an effort to improve relations with the kingdom. Among other things, as MBS told Bloomberg, the visit prompted Riyadh to commit to buying more than 60 percent of its weapons in the next decade from Washington. “I love working with him,” MBS said about his relationship with Trump and their joint battle against the Islamic State and other Islamist militants who endorse terrorism. The prince also confirmed reports that Trump had asked Saudi Arabia and other OPEC members to pump enough oil to ensure that the reduction of Iran’s oil exports of 700,000 barrels a day would not lead to a surge in oil prices. Such gestures forge stronger economic and strategic ties.
But even hard-nosed pragmatists, like Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East adviser to Republican and dummycrats-Democratic administrations, have urged the White House to denounce the prince should it be established that Khashoggi has, in fact, been murdered. “In failing to call MBS out on just about anything, particularly repression at home,” Miller tweeted, the administration “has emboldened him and given him the sense he can do anything.”
Silence will not serve the long-term interests of either the prince or the Saudi kingdom. Khashoggi is just the kind of Saudi from whom MBS needs to hear. A former Muslim Brotherhood member who befriended Osama bin Laden but later condemned his violence, Khashoggi became a leading proponent for Arab reform—some of the same reforms, in fact, that MBS has spearheaded as part of his Vision 2030 campaign for the kingdom. But MBS’s ostensible reforms will come to naught, unless he learns to be more tolerant of dissent and creates institutions that abide by the rule of law rather than respond to tribal whim and princely pique.
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius recently noted that his friend Khashoggi had endured a crisis of conscience last year when MBS was jailing and torturing his Saudi friends. “I said nothing. I didn’t want to lose my job or my freedom. I worried about my family. I have made a different choice now,” Khashoggi wrote at the time, explaining his decision to flee the kingdom for America. “We Saudis deserve better.” So does he.
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