Community Organizing, Back to the Future

The White House just wrapped up a 3 day summit on violent extremism. The platform of the summit was ending the cycle of hate, in other words, it was a collaboration of anger management classes. Barack Obama told his audience that scaling back on the tensions was not meant for Islamists, but rather to every common citizen worldwide to be gentle going forward with Muslims.

The invitees were hand chosen and those not in attendance were also notable. Were leaders in the fields of intelligence, counter-terrorism, Christians or Jews invited? Well now so much. Imagine the Director of the FBI, James Comey who has open cases in 49 American states not attending.

When it comes to those that did attend standing for ‘human rights’, those representatives come from countries whose own human rights come into question.  “There is a very profound conceptual disagreement about whether the best way to counter violent extremism is through human rights and civil society or through an iron fist,” said Marc Lynch, director of the Institute for Middle East Studies at George Washington University. The Obama administration wants “to project the human rights side, but you look at the people they’re working with and fighting alongside, and there’s a lot more to it than that.”

Elisa Massimino, president of the advocacy group Human Rights First, attended Thursday’s meeting and was struck by the juxtaposition of rhetoric and reality: “We’re sitting in that room with representatives of governments that are part of the problem,” she said. “If the president believes what he’s saying, then the actions that these governments are taking are undermining our supposedly shared agenda.”

From the outside, however, the summit appears hastily organized and fraught with gaps. As of Friday, neither the White House nor the State Department had announced the names of any attendees, an agenda or what specifically the summit is designed to achieve. The summit is scheduled to take place on Wednesday, Feb. 18, and Thursday, Feb. 19.

“It’s bizarre,” says Naureen Shah, a former legislative counsel with the ACLU who recently became the security and human rights director at Amnesty International. “On the one hand they’ve been touting this summit and trying to showcase the U.S. and global efforts to combat violent extremism. But on the other hand, they’re not providing any information about what’s going to happen.”

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki declined to comment last week on whether Russia would be participating in the summit, saying she did not currently have the list of invitees. She anticipated that, in the days before the summit, “we’ll do a briefing on the plans for the summit, what we hope to accomplish, et cetera.”

The takeaway was Barack Obama’s edit to reach out to governance in Muslim countries and require them to be more sensitive to the plight of those in poverty that would build programs generating educational access and later jobs. This is where the ‘community organizing’ comes into play.

Michelle Malkin says it best, laying it out for required reading.

Instead of killing jihadists, keeping them off our soil, locking up their poisonous spiritual agitators, and shutting off their terror-funding pipelines, President Obama called on America and the world to “invest” in unnamed immigrant “communities” vulnerable to unnamed extremism. Some of the most generous welfare states on the planet have suffered horrific jihad attacks this year. Liberal Denmark’s soft-on-jihad rehab program has been a disaster. But that hasn’t stopped State Department spokes-babbler Marie Harf from mewling incessantly about “combating poverty” to combat ISIS. Vice President Joe Biden opened the convention of jihad-coddlers on Tuesday by emphasizing the need for “respect” (cha-ching) and “a sense of community.” White House senior aides spoke generically about terrorists of “all shapes and sizes,” as they studiously avoided the precise nature and identity of the perpetrators of evil that precipitated the meeting. Screw that. Muslim jihadists chopped off the heads of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians in Libya last weekend. Muslim jihadists launched deadly shooting sprees in Copenhagen at a cartoonists’ free-speech event and a synagogue. Muslim jihadists murdered Jews at a kosher deli in Paris and slaughtered the entire staff of Charlie Hebdo over their drawings. Muslim jihadists caged and burned alive Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasasbeh. Muslim jihadists threw gays off buildings in Iraq. Muslim jihadists beheaded journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, humanitarian workers Alan Henning and Peter Kassig, and Japanese nationals Haruna Yukawa and Kenji Goto Jogo. Muslim jihadists have kidnapped and slaughtered thousands of innocent men, women, and children in Nigeria. The solution, the Obama administration wants the 60 nations that sent representatives to D.C. to learn, is a super-sized community-organizing campaign. It’s Jobs for Jihad Delinquents! No, this is not a Saturday Night Live anniversary skit. Politically correct public officials from L.A., Boston, and Minnesota are holding seminars on their “outreach” efforts to disaffected yoots as shining counterterrorism models. In Minneapolis, where al-Shabaab recruiters have metastasized, the U.S. attorney has bought into Muslim grievance-mongers’ complaints that “immigrant youngsters remain marginalized, without access to adequate education, employment, and other opportunities.” Social-justice warriors are united: Less “marginalization.” More midnight basketball. What a bloody crock. States like Minnesota and Maine have bent over backward to resettle thousands upon thousands of Somali refugees — putting their demands for halal-food freebies, taxpayer-funded foot baths, and “cultural sensitivity” over the safety and well-being of native-born citizens and taxpayers struggling to make ends meet. While grandmothers and disabled soldiers and breastfeeding moms must submit to invasive TSA screening, Muslim leaders in Minneapolis have the feds groveling in apology over increased scrutiny of some Somalis. I mean, it’s not like dozens of young male members of their “community” are flying off to the Horn of Africa and the Middle East to take up arms for jihad after benefiting from America’s blind generosity. Oh, wait. They are. The persistent left-wing myth of the poor, oppressed jihadist is absolute madness. How many times do we have to remind the clueless kumbaya crowd that al-Qaida mastermind Ayman al-Zawahiri had a medical degree, as did Hamas bigwig Abdel al-Rantisi and the seven upper-crust doctors who helped plan the 2007 London/Glasgow bombings? Or that al-Qaida scientist Aafia Siddiqui studied microbiology at MIT and did graduate work in neurology at Brandeis. Terror architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed earned a mechanical-engineering degree at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. 9/11 lead hijacker Mohamed Atta majored in urban planning at a German technical university. Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh attended the London School of Economics before abducting and murdering American journalist Daniel Pearl. And Osama bin Laden and Sayyid Qutb (Colorado State Teachers College) had plenty of exposure to wealth and Western studies. The “root cause” of their evildoing is not a lack of employment, education, community centers, iftar dinners at the White House, or publicly funded “opportunities.” When will these fools in high office learn that you can’t bribe these adherents of Stone Age ideology to behave? They don’t want jobs. They want blood. Revenge. Islamist dominance. Ruthless extermination of Jews, gays, Coptic Christians, Christian aid workers, cartoonists, journalists, apostates, and infidels of all shapes and sizes. The M****m j*******s are not victims of Islamophobic intolerance and Western callousness. We are the victims of our own leaders’ bleeding-heart overindulgence and reckless refusal to deal with reality.

Winning the hearts and minds of jihad….riiiiight….. maybe including Obamacare, Obama phones, the SNAP cards and Section 8 housing will work too.

Ask the Clinton’s About These Foreigners Please

How about the HSBC bank that is embroiled in a major scandal? How long have the Clinton’s known the Brit Richard Caring? Have Hillary and Bill describe their relationship with Frank Giustra, a Canadian mining magnet. Then of course there is Huma Abedin, the Dubai Foundation, Friends of Saudi Arabia, Hani Masri, Oman, Saban Family Foundation and the Soros Foundation, just handful of the Clinton’s foreign friendly network.

So, where does all this lead? Foreign friends, NGO’s, foundations and powerbrokers buy presidential candidates and Hillary is no exception. She using the same page out of the money playbook that Barack Obama used.

Foreign Government Gifts to Clinton Foundation on the Rise

Donations raise ethical questions as Hillary Clinton ramps up expected 2016 bid

The Clinton Foundation has dropped its self-imposed ban on collecting funds from foreign governments and is winning contributions at an accelerating rate, raising ethical questions as Hillary Clinton ramps up her expected bid for the presidency.

Recent donors include the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Australia, Germany and a Canadian government agency promoting the Keystone XL pipeline.

In 2009, the Clinton Foundation stopped raising money from foreign governments after Mrs. Clinton became secretary of state. Former President Bill Clinton, who ran the foundation while his wife was at the State Department, agreed to the gift ban at the behest of the Obama administration, which worried about a secretary of state’s husband raising millions while she represented U.S. interests abroad.

The ban wasn’t absolute; some foreign government donations were permitted for ongoing programs approved by State Department ethics officials.

The donations come as Mrs. Clinton prepares for an expected run for the Democratic nomination for president, and they raise many of the same ethical quandaries. Since leaving the State Department in early 2013, Mrs. Clinton officially joined the foundation, which changed its name to the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, and has become a prodigious fundraiser as the foundation launched a $250 million endowment campaign, officials said.

A representative for Hillary Clinton referred all questions to the Clinton Foundation.

A spokesman for the Clinton Foundation said the charity has a need to raise money for its many projects, which aim to do such things as improve education, health care and the environment around the world. He also said that donors go through a vigorous vetting process.

One of the 2014 donations comes from a Canadian agency promoting the proposed Keystone pipeline, which is favored by Republicans and under review by the Obama administration. The Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development agency of Canada, a first-time donor, gave between $250,000 and $500,000. The donations, which are disclosed voluntarily by the foundation, are given only in ranges.

One of the agency’s priorities for 2014-2015 was to promote Keystone XL “as a stable and secure source of energy and energy technology,” according to the agency’s website. Mrs. Clinton’s State Department was involved in approving the U.S. government’s initial environmental-impact statement. Since leaving State, Mrs. Clinton has repeatedly declined to comment on Keystone.

The Canadian donation originated from an agency office separate from the one that advocates for Keystone XL, a Foundation spokesman said.

While the Canadian donation didn’t appear in a Clinton Foundation online database of donors until recently, the donation of about $480,000 was announced in June in Cartagena, Colombia, where the program provides job training for youths.

Kirk Hanson, director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University in California, said the Clintons should immediately reimpose the ban, for the same reasons it was in place while Mrs. Clinton led U.S. foreign policy.

“Now that she is gearing up to run for president, the same potential exists for foreign governments to curry favor with her as a potential president of the United States,” he said.

If she becomes president and deals with these nations, “she can’t recuse herself,” added James Thurber, director of American University’s Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies. “Whether it influences her decision making is questionable, but it is a legitimate thing to focus on by her political opposition.”

The donations weren’t announced by the foundation and were discovered by The Wall Street Journal during a search of donations of more than $50,000 posted on the foundation’s online database. Exactly when the website was updated isn’t clear. The foundation typically updates its website with the previous year’s donations near the beginning of the year. All 2014 donations were noted with asterisks.

At least four foreign countries gave to the foundation in 2013—Norway, Italy, Australia and the Netherlands—a fact that has garnered little attention. The number of governments contributing in 2014 appears to have doubled from the previous year. Since its founding, the foundation has raised at least $48 million from overseas governments, according to a Journal tally.

United Arab Emirates, a first-time donor, gave between $1 million and $5 million in 2014, and the German government—which also hadn’t previously given—contributed between $100,000 and $250,000.

A previous donor, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, has given between $10 million and $25 million since the foundation was created in 1999. Part of that came in 2014, although the database doesn’t specify how much.

The Australian government has given between $5 million and $10 million, at least part of which came in 2014. It also gave in 2013, when its donations fell in the same range.

Qatar’s government committee preparing for the 2022 soccer World Cup gave between $250,000 and $500,000 in 2014. Qatar’s government had previously donated between $1 million and $5 million.

Oman, which had made a donation previously, gave an undisclosed amount in 2014. Over time, Oman has given the foundation between $1 million and $5 million. Prior to last year, its donations fell in the same range.

The Clinton Foundation has set a goal of creating a $250 million endowment, an official said. One purpose was secure the future of the foundation’s programs without having to rely so much on the former president’s personal fundraising efforts, the official said.

The Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Oman donations went to the endowment drive.

Obama Approves Minsk Agreement, Great for Putin

The new Minsk ceasefire agreement empowers Russia-backed separatists with a number of leverages over Ukraine. If implemented, the agreement could provide a functioning framework for a mutually acceptable political settlement. In the event of non-implementation, a re-eruption of hostilities is highly likely.

                          

In Minsk on 12th February, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, Russian President Vladimir Putin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande managed to reach an agreement on the ceasefire in Eastern Ukraine, and the outlines of a conflict settlement.

Formally, the document was signed not by the heads of state, but by the Trilateral Contact Group (composed of representatives of Ukraine, Russia and the OSCE) as well as the leaders of the Donetsk and Luhansk separatists. This indirect scheme allowed Kyiv to reach an agreement with the separatists without formally recognizing them as legitimate partners.

The document, composed of thirteen points, refers to the separatist entities as “particular districts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts”, using the same wording as the September 2014 Minsk agreement. Hence, neither their self-proclaimed names, Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, nor the Russian term Novorossiya are used, which is a strong signal that none of the parties questions that these regions belong to Ukraine.

                       

*** So what else needs to be known? Who is still supporting Putin and why….

The segments of the Russian population that, arguably, have the best chance to dissuade President Vladimir Putin from his actions in Ukraine are business leaders and the rich. But despite having lost millions of dollars because of sanctions against Russia , the falling ruble and low oil prices, they still rally behind their leader-both privately and publicly.

Despite a cease-fire announced Thursday , Western sanctions on Russia over its support of insurgents in neighboring Ukraine have already pushed Russia’s borrowing costs higher and crushed its currency (Exchange: RUBUSD=). The problems have been made worse by the price of oil, whose fall since September has further undercut the petro-state’s ability to fund itself. Yet Putin still enjoys broad domestic support, and experts tell CNBC that the country’s monied class is no exception. Timothy Ash, who heads emerging markets research at Standard Bank (Johannesburg Stock Exchange: SBK-ZA), summarizes the phenomenon in a few words: “Nationalism plays very well with many people,” he told CNBC

Alexander Kliment, director of Russia research at Eurasia Group, said the sanctions have actually strengthened elite support for Putin because they have bolstered the government’s position as a last-resort lender for them. “Also, sanctions have inflamed patriotic sentiment and been a convenient scapegoat for economic woes,” Kilment told CNBC.

“If you are an oligarch, it’s bad to suffer sanctions from the West,” he said, “but you’re still pretty well-off as part of the Russian system. It’s an awfully big leap to turn your back on that, which would risk literally everything you have.” Read More Total CEO: US will not become energy independent Edward Mermelstein, a New York-based attorney who works with Russian business clients, told CNBC that Putin’s popularity is no longer dependent on finance as much as the might of Russia.

“As long as the country is perceived as strong, he will continue to dominate domestically. The Russian citizen can withstand famine, but they cannot withstand the appearance of weakness,” he said.

While some companies are getting hit hard by what Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov has acknowledged is an economy in “dire straits,” others are finding ways to benefit.

*** Now comes the alternate banking system. Almost 91 domestic credit institutions have been incorporated into the new Russian financial system, the analogous of SWIFT, an international banking network.The new service, will allow Russian banks to communicate seamlessly through the Central Bank of Russia. It should be noted that Russia’s Central Bank initiated the development of the country’s own messaging system in response to repeated threats voiced by Moscow’s Western partners to disconnect Russia from SWIFT.

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev meeting with miniters

SWIFT (The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) is a Belgium-based international organization that provides services and a standardized environment for global banking communicating that allows financial institutions to send and receive messages about their transactions. Earlier this month Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov expressed confidence that Russia would not be disconnected from SWIFT. In her turn, Russian Central Bank First Deputy Chair Ksenia Yudaeva called upon Russian civilians and financial institutions not to dramatize the current situation.Russian experts point to the fact that Western businesses would face severe losses if they expelled Russia from the international SWIFT system. On the other hand, the alternative system launched by Russia might reduce the negative impacts caused by measures imposed by the West, including possible disconnection from SWIFT, and diminish Western financial dominance over Russia.

 

Ukraine has a Deadly History

A cease fire was signed this week known as the Minsk Agreement. The ink was not dry and the hostilities continued. So looking back on Ukraine’s history is a look at today and tomorrow.

After hours of beatings, the men in black took Lutsenko into the woods, put a bag over his head, made him kneel in the snow and told him to say his prayers. Then they walked away.

Not long after Lutsenko emerged, Verbytsky was found in the same woods, bound in duct tape, his ribs broken, internal organs smashed. An autopsy showed he froze to death. What is a cause of Putin’s military aggression over Ukraine?

Oil.

Ukraine’s state gas and oil company Naftohaz has reported discovering a sizeable oil field on the country’s territory.

Nafothaz said late July 11 that the discovery was one of the largest oil fields found in Ukraine in some 15 years.

Naftohaz believes the Budishchansko-Chutovskoyefield in eastern Ukraine’s Poltava region, contains some 12.8 million tons of oil.

Naftohaz has been working the site since 2011 and the company’s public relations department said it was the first oil field owned solely by the Ukrainian company.

Ukraine’s government is attempting to wean the country off its dependence on Russian energy supplies. Kyiv has placed a priority on developing the country’s own energy resources and diversifying sources for importing energy supplies.

*** Yet Ukraine’s history is a look back at what is underway today.

Ukraine was formally incorporated into the USSR as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UkSSR) in 1922.
The Communists were aware that resistance to their regime was deep and widespread. To pacify the Ukrainian  people and to gain control, Moscow initially permitted a great deal of local autonomy to exist in the UkSSR. The
newly established Ukrainian Autocephalous (self-ruling) Orthodox Church and the new All-Ukrainian Academy of  Sciences, non-Communist national institutions of great importance, were both permitted to continue their work
until the end of the 1920’s.

All of this changed once Joseph Stalin came to power. Stalin wanted to consolidate the new Communist empire  and to strengthen its industrial base. Ukrainian national aspirations were a barrier to those ends because even
Ukrainian Communists opposed exploitation by Moscow. In Stalin’s eyes, Ukraine, the largest of the  non-Russian republics, would have to be subdued. Thus, the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church was
placed under the jurisdiction of the Communist-controlled Russian Orthodox Church. Ukrainian bishops, priests  and thousands of Christian lay leaders were sent to Siberian labor camps, the so-called “Gulag.” Hundreds of
thousands, possibly over a million, of Ukraine’s intellectual leaders – writers, university professors, scientists,  and journalists – were liquidated in purges ordered by Stalin. Not even loyal Ukrainian Communists were exempt
from Stalin’s terror. By 1939, practically the entire (98%) of Ukraine’s Communist leadership had been  liquidated.

Hardest hit by Stalin’s policies were Ukraine’s independent landowners, the so-called “kulaks” (kurkuly in  Ukrainian). Never precisely defined, a kulak was a member of the alleged “upper stratum” of landowners but in
reality anyone who owned a little land, even as little as 25 acres, came to be labeled as a kulak. Stalin ordered  that all private farms would have to be collectivized. During the process, according to Soviet sources, which are
no doubt on the conservative side, some 200,000 Ukrainian families were “de-kulakized” or dispossessed of all  land. By the summer of 1932, 69.5% of all Ukrainian farm families and 80% of all farm land had been forcibly
collectivized.

Stalin decided to eliminate Ukraine’s independent farmers for three reasons:
(1) they represented the last bulwark of resistance to totalitarian Russian control;
(2) the USSR was in desperate need of foreign capital to build more factories and the best way to obtain
that capital was to increase agricultural exports from Ukraine once known as “the breadbasket of
Europe”;
(3) the fastest way to increase agricultural exports was to expropriate land through a process of farm
collectivization and to assign procurement quotas to each Soviet republic.
During the collectivization process, Ukrainian farmers resisted vigorously, often violently, especially when the  GPU (Soviet secret police) and militia forced them to turn their land over to the government. Thousands of
farmers were killed and millions more were deported to Siberia to be replaced by more trustworthy workers.

*** Fast forward to the 1980’s, were marked by increasing political impotence of Soviet leadership. The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant accident of April 26,1986, brings back painful memories for all Ukrainians. This disaster caused tens of thousands of deaths and health related problems, and inflicted enormous ecological and economic damage. Chernobyl served to rock the Communist Party establishment with political fallout as the facts behind bureaucratic ineptitude, negligence, disregard for the ordinary citizens, and cover-up emerged and began to stir the minds of the people.

On July 6, 1990, the legislature proclaimed Ukraine’s sovereignty. In August 1991, a failed three-day military coup of the Kremlin’s would-be dictators led to the Declaration of Independence by the Verhovna Rada (Parliament) on August 24. On December 1, in a nationwide referendum, 93% of Ukraine’s citizens voted for an independent Ukraine and chose Leonid Krawchuk, former communist ideologist, as their first democratically elected President. On July 10, 1994, Leonid Kuchma, former director of the world’s biggest rocket plant, defeated Leonid Krawchuk to become the second President of independent Ukraine.

Following the Orange Revolution, on December 26, 2004, after two rounds of falsified elections, Viktor Yushchenko beat the Kremlin-backed candidate in the third round. Under Yushchenko, Ukraine finally became free from Moscow’s 300-year domination. *** Can Ukraine survive the current Soviet loyalists aggression? Not without assistance from the West, but will that assistance come?

White House Invited Muslim Brotherhood Policy



A ROUND TABLE DISCUSSION WITH “THE STOP QATAR NOW COALITION”

Who Are the Muslim Brotherhood-Linked Leaders Obama Met?


The Stop Qatar Now Coalition of good Patriots have spent weeks gathering evidence, documents and performed interviews to bring to publication the facts on the Muslim Brotherhood penetration into the American culture against the will and knowledge of Americans and the U.S. Constitution…

BROADTCAST LIVE WORLDWIDE:  THURSDAYS – 9:00PM (eastern) / 6:00pm (pacific) on WDFP – Restoring America Radio , Red State Talk Radio, American Agenda, Nightside Radio Studios, and on Freedom In America Radio