Contact Form

Name

Email *

Message *

Showing posts with label Arafat. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Arafat. Show all posts

Thursday, March 29, 2018

Mis-Use, Fraud Of Palestinian Funds Hurts The Very People They Were Meant For

The Secret World of the Palestinian Authority

by 
  • The failure of the donors -- mainly the US and the EU -- to demand accountability and transparency from the Palestinian Authority has deprived Palestinians of a significant part of the funds.
  • It has also encouraged Palestinian leaders to continue pocketing millions of dollars, enriching their private and hidden bank accounts.
  • The Palestinians, of course, are the primary victims in this story.
A report published this week offers a rare glance into the secret world of the Palestinian Authority (PA), which was established in 1994 in accordance with the Oslo Accords signed between Israel and the PLO.
Headed by Mahmoud Abbas, the PA has since received billions of dollars in aid from the US, EU and several other donor countries.
However, the failure of the donors to demand accountability and transparency from the Palestinian Authority has deprived Palestinians of a significant part of the funds. It has also encouraged Palestinian leaders to continue pocketing millions of dollars, enriching their private and hidden bank accounts.
One would have expected the Western donors to have woken up and noticed that Palestinian leaders are misusing the taxpayer money they send.
One would have expected the Americans and Europeans to come to Abbas and his cronies, bang on the table, and demand that they start using and investing money for the welfare of their people, and not for their friends and family members.
The report, published by the Coalition For Accountability And Integrity (AMAN), established in 2000 by a number of civil society organizations working in the field of democracy, human rights, and good governance, shows that the Western donors have learned nothing from their past mistakes.
The report also shows that the Palestinian Authority remains the same corrupt body it has been since its inception more than twenty years ago.
Under Yasser Arafat, the PA was plagued with widespread corruption and mismanagement. His successor, Mahmoud Abbas, has followed in this tradition and, despite his repeated promises, the Palestinian Authority remains as corrupt as ever.
Why should Abbas and his associates work to improve the living conditions of their people if those who are pouring billions of dollars on them continue to turn a blind eye to financial and administrative corruption in the PA they are funding?
Entitled "Integrity and Combating Corruption: Palestine 2017," the AMAN report reviews the status of corruption and lack of transparency and accountability in the Palestinian Authority during 2017.
It is one of the most comprehensive reports looking into the widespread corruption and squandering of public funds by the Palestinian Authority leadership.
The report found, for example, that the Palestinian Authority had invested $17.5 million in building a "presidential palace" for Abbas. The palace is built on an area of 4,700 square meters.
After facing criticism over the project, Abbas decided to convert the palace into a huge national library.
Here is what the report had to say about the grandiose project:
"Honorable as it may sound to convert the presidential palace into a public library, it remains to be the epitome of misuse of public funds as well as a bad example of lack of prioritization. And although the idea of building a hospitality palace for official foreign delegations is not evil in itself, it is not and never was a priority for Palestinians, given the urgent need to finance vital services such as health and education. This is apart from the chronic financial crisis plaguing the Palestinian Authority. And while recognizing the importance of a national library, the idea of converting the palace to one is detrimental, since it would cost more than building a new library from the start due to the construction and re-construction details it involves."
The 83-year-old Abbas could have invested the $17.5 million in building a new hospital or creating new jobs for his people, but he chose to build a palace for his cohorts and himself on a hilltop on the outskirts of Ramallah.
Was the palace part of Abbas's plan for a quiet, comfortable and luxurious retirement? The idea of converting the palace into a national library is equally ridiculous. For the Palestinians, a new school or hospital is more urgently needed than a library. Besides, at this point, the Palestinians hardly need a library that looks like a royal palace.

Pictured: Mahmoud Abbas' $17.5 million "presidential palace" near Ramallah. After facing criticism over the project, Abbas decided to convert the palace into a huge national library. (Image source: Palestinian Economic Council for Development and Reconstruction)

Here is another example provided by the report concerning the Palestinian Authority's practice of squandering public money: paying the salaries and expenses of a non-existent airline called "Palestine Airlines."
It said that "hundreds of employees of this company continue to receive salaries and allowances from the Palestinian Authority, although the company is not registered as a company in accordance with Palestinian law."
The budget for this company, the report found, is included in the budget of the Palestinian Ministry of Transportation, but with no specific details of how the money is spent.
The "Palestine Airlines" employees are not the only civil servants who are paid despite not working and their being employed by a company that does not really exist. According to the report, members of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), the Palestinians' parliament, have also been benefiting from monthly salaries, despite the parliament having been paralyzed for more than a decade as a result of the dispute between Abbas's ruling Fatah faction and Hamas.
"The continuation of the dysfunction of the PLC, in 2107, posed the biggest challenge to formal accountability and oversight of the government's performance in terms of management of public funds and public affairs in general," the report stated. In 2017, the report revealed, the Palestinian Authority spent more than 39 million shekels (about $11 million) on the PLC. Half of the money went to salaries for the Palestinian lawmakers even though they have not been working for more than a decade. The report continued:
"It is the right of citizens to inquire about the feasibility of these expenses without tangible results of the role of the PLC, and its failure to hold sessions that include members of Parliament in the West Bank and Gaza, in accordance with the law... Results of the government's plans did not show restraint in the continuing financial crisis of the PA, nor rationalization of public expenditures, or control over procurement and administrative and operational expenditures. In addition, talk of austerity continued without carrying out any serious implementation steps."
The report also found continued flaws in the structure of the Palestinian Authority security apparatus. The increase in the number of high-ranking officers had a negative impact on the performance of the security forces. In addition, this increase in the numbers placed an added burden on the public budget. The percentage of officers in three security apparatuses accounted for 50% of all officers in the Palestinian Authority's eight security forces.
The report found that corruption has also extended to the purchase of vehicles for Palestinian officials and their family members and friends. "Influential persons in senior positions were granted tax exemptions with legal basis for approval," the report found. "The amount of wasted funds is enormous." Here, it is worth noting that the Palestinian Authority law allows Palestinian terrorists who spent more than 20 years in Israeli prison to receive, one time only, a free car. This, of course, is in addition to the Palestinian Authority's policy of paying salaries to families of Palestinian prisoners and "martyrs."
According to the report, "political corruption has deepened in the Palestinian case due to the presence of two authorities, one in the West Bank and the other in the Gaza Strip." This division, which is the result of the Hamas-Fatah power struggle, has harmed Palestinian lives on many levels and negatively affected public funds, human rights and freedoms, and development as the two governments took decisions and measures to weaken each other.
In 2017, the Palestinian Authority's Anti-Corruption Commission received 430 complaints, but only 21 were referred to the prosecution's office, the report noted. "This indicates that the commission, its staff and follow-up mechanisms are slow," it added. "As for the nature of the cases, they ranged from embezzlement to abuse of power to fraud to breach of trust and bribery." The largest proportion of those accused of corruption crimes were employees in the governmental public sector.
The report also took to task the Palestinian Authority for the way it approved its 2017 budget. The full version of the budget was not made public; only revenues and expenditures were presented with no details as to allocations for each ministry. Nor did the budget law include a table illustrating the Palestinian Authority's debts and loans or propose a plan for the collection of payments of these debts and loans. In addition, contributions and investments of the Palestinian Authority in local and non-local companies were also not clarified.
The Western media completely ignores such reports. By doing so, Western journalists are betraying their own people by failing to inform them how their foreign-aid money is being embezzled and squandered by corrupt Palestinian leaders. The Palestinians, of course, are the primary victims in this story. They live in poverty as their leaders scrabble to misappropriate public funds. The lives of the Palestinians could have been much better had their leaders been held accountable for their actions.
For Palestinians, to confront the dictators in Ramallah and the Gaza Strip means nothing short of putting one's life on the line. Yet the same is not true for the international community, including Western mainstream media.
Why, then, do they continue to look the other way as Abbas constructs gilded mansions for himself and his buddies? Perhaps because they are too busy digging up dirt about Israel. But when journalists close their eyes and ears, enabling the theft of American and European taxpayer money by despotic Palestinian leaders who continue to injure their own people, the tinsel begins to tarnish on the golden world of the Palestinian Authority.
Bassam Tawil is a Muslim based in the Middle East.
© 2018 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute.

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Monday, April 24, 2017

Our Goofy Foreign Policy



Why Is the US Still Funding Palestinian Terrorism?

(At Least Close the PLO Office in Washington)

by 
  • Jamil Tamimi, 57, knew that if he committed an act of terror, he would be lionized by the Palestinian Authority (PA) and -- perhaps more importantly -- that, if he were killed or sent to prison, his family would be taken care of financially.
  • "The PLO Commission was new only in name. The PLO body would have the ‎same responsibilities and pay the exact same amounts of salaries to prisoners... PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas retained overall supervision of ‎the PLO Commission." — Palestinian Media Watch.
  • In 2016 Bashar Masalha, who murdered U.S. Army veteran Taylor Force and wounded several others, was hailed on official PA media outlets as a "martyr." A few months later, Abbas said on PA TV, "We welcome every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem.... With the help of Allah, every martyr will be in heaven, and every wounded will get his reward."
  • The U.S. government should let the PLO and PA know that we are onto their game. Disincentivizing terrorism by closing the PLO office in Washington would be a good first step.
British exchange student Hannah Bladon was stabbed to death on a Jerusalem light rail train last Friday. Her murderer was identified as an East Jerusalem resident who had previously been convicted of molesting his daughter and had tried to commit suicide. Failing at that, he apparently opted for terrorism, on the assumption that the police would kill him. They didn't. "This," the Shin Bet said in a statement, "is another case, out of many, where a Palestinian who is suffering from personal, mental or moral issues chooses to carry out a terror attack in order to find a way out of their problems." 

"Suicide by cop" is not unheard of, but the real incentives need to be spelled out.
Jamil Tamimi, 57, knew that if he committed an act of terror, he would be lionized by the Palestinian Authority (PA) and -- perhaps more importantly -- that, if he were killed or sent to prison, his family would be taken care of financially.
To take the PA leader, Mahmoud Abbas, at his word, the PA itself does not pay salaries or pensions to terrorists in Israeli jails or to their families; the money -- instead! -- comes from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). That sleight-of-hand would make this a perfect time for the United States, an ally of the UK and properly appalled by terrorism, to take a step it has been avoiding for more than 25 years: to close the PLO office in Washington -- preferably before the planned visit by Abbas in May.
The PLO was once understood to be a terrorist organization and a terror umbrella. It hijacked airplanes and threw an elderly disabled man in a wheelchair overboard from a cruise ship. Black September, an arm of the PLO, murdered 11 Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich. The PLO has committed acts of horrific terror in Israel -- including massacring bus drivers and their families on holiday. Twenty-five adults and 13 children were killed and 71 others wounded. The PLO has also committed acts of war against the United States by killing American diplomats in Sudan.
In the 1970s and 80s, the U.S. generally knew what it was looking at.
During the Reagan-to-Bush "41"-transition, however, the U.S. dropped its ban on officially talking to then-PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat. (Full disclosure: Colin Powell, then national security advisor, gave this author a "heads up": "Everyone has something to say," he said. "The U.S. government already knows what Arafat has to say," I said, and it is unacceptable." He was not interested.)
Talking was not the same as opening an office; that move was still prohibited by the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1987. However, in the post-Oslo Accords euphoria, Senate legislation permitted the PLO an official mission in Washington "to implement the accords," and it allowed President Clinton to waive the law barring U.S. funds to international organizations that gave money to the PLO. The House passed similar legislation. Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-CA) said at the time:
"This legislation provides a limited, temporary and conditional waiver of restrictions in United States law that would seriously impede the ability of Israel and the PLO to proceed with negotiating and implementing their landmark peace agreement."
It was "conditional" on the PLO meeting its Oslo Accords obligations, including refraining from terrorism and renouncing international moves that would impede bilateral agreement on final status issues. While the legislation was, as Berman said, "temporary," it came with the usual waiver provision, ultimately allowing Presidents to do as they wished.
Presidents, therefore, beginning with President Clinton, did exactly that, even as the Palestinian Authority supplanted the PLO as the "peace partner" and ignored the Oslo Accords at will.
In 2003, the height of the so-called "second intifada," the Palestinian terror war against Israel, Colin Powell, by then Secretary of State, waffled through a statement suggesting that the Palestinians kindly refrain from not killing so many Jews. "We need to see a more concerted effort against the capacity for terrorist activity on the Palestinian side... It's not enough just to have a cease-fire." He then noted "progress in reducing attacks against Israelis" -- but without mentioning that the IDF and Shin Bet had reduced them; not the PA. Nevertheless, President Bush exercised the waiver.
A 2011, a Palestinian bid for recognition as a full member of the UN failed, but the waiver remained. Over U.S. objections, "Palestine" joined the International Criminal Court in 2015. President Barack Obama waived the sanctions every six months -- right through two Hamas wars against Israel.
Largely through the work of Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), the question of payments to terrorists and their families has come to the fore. Worried about foreign aid payments from the U.S. and the EU, in 2014 the Palestinian Authority claimed it stopped paying salaries and that future money would come from a new PLO Commission of Prisoner Affairs. However, PMW reported from Palestinian sources:
The PLO Commission was new only in name. The PLO body would have the ‎same responsibilities and pay the exact same amounts of salaries to prisoners; the ‎former PA Minister of Prisoners' Affairs, Issa Karake, became the Director of the new ‎PLO Commission and PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas retained overall supervision of ‎the PLO Commission.
Tower Magazine reported that in 2015, a year after the PA "officially" transferred authority over Palestinian prisoners to the PLO, it also transferred an extra 444 million shekels (more than $116 million) to the PLO -- nearly the same amount that the PA had allocated in the previous years to its now-defunct Ministry of Prisoners' Affairs.
Citing PMW, Tower wrote that the transfer to the PLO was meant to evade pressure from Western governments that demanded an end to terrorist salaries -- specifically the United States and the UK, which froze payments to the PA in 2016 over the problem.
In the end, perhaps, it does not matter whose bank account transfers the money to whose bank account:
In 2016 Bashar Masalha, who murdered U.S. Army veteran Taylor Force and wounded several others, was hailed on official PA media outlets as a "martyr." A few months later, Abbas said on PA TV, "We welcome every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem. This is pure blood, clean blood, blood on its way to Allah. With the help of Allah, every martyr will be in heaven, and every wounded will get his reward."


Abbas has not said much about Jamil Tamimi, last Friday's murderer, and it is time to stop encouraging, threatening or demanding that he do so. Rather, the U.S. government should let the PLO and PA know that we are onto their game. Disincentivizing terrorism by closing the PLO office in Washington would be a good first step.
Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of the Jewish Policy Center.

© 2017 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute.
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Trump And Netanyahu Have A Lot In Common


Trump Welcomes Netanyahu

By Alan Dershowitz 

Israel’s long time Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will soon be welcomed to the White House by newly elected President Donald Trump. What can we expect from this initial meeting between two strong willed national leaders?
I know them both– Netanyahu better than Trump– and I believe they will get along well.  They are both no nonsense pragmatists who understand the relationship between economic development and political progress. We all know of Trump’s business background and focus on jobs and trade. Less well known is Netanyahu’s business background. Like Trump, Netanyahu went to business school and began his career as a business man, working for Boston Consulting Group.  When he entered politics, he helped transform Israel from an agrarian based economy into “start-up nation,” which has become a technological superpower with a strong economy.  He is the Alexander Hamilton of Israel, to David Ben Gurion’s Jefferson. Trump has to admire that.
Trump will also admire Netanyahu’s strong nationalism and love of country.  He has made Israel great, militarily, technologically and economically.  He may soon become Israel’s longest serving Prime Minister, surpassing the legendary Ben Gurion.


Each leader would like to be the one who succeeds in bringing a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  So many others – people of good will and considerable effort – have been unable to achieve this goal. There is no certainty that Trump and Netanyahu can succeed when so many others have come close but have never been able to close the deal.  Both are respected for their deal-making capabilities – Trump in business, Netanyahu in domestic politics.
But there are considerable barriers to achieving a peaceful resolution.  Netanyahu and his Palestinian counterpart, Mahmoud Abbas, each have domestic constituencies that would oppose the compromise necessary to achieve a two state solution.  Some of Netanyahu’s right wing coalition partners oppose a two state solution in which Israel would turn over most of the West Bank to establish a Palestinian state.  And many West Bank Palestinians – not to mention Hamas in Gaza – oppose recognizing the legitimacy of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.  They also demand the “return” of four million Palestinian refugees to Israel, despite the reality that there are probably only a hundred thousand or so actual refugees who themselves left Israel in 1948, many voluntarily.
It must be remembered that Israel has twice in recent times offered the Palestinians a State on 95 percent of the West Bank.  In 2000-2001 then Prime Minister Ehud Barak and then President Bill Clinton made a generous offer. Yasser Arafat, who was being advised by Jimmy Carter, rejected it and started a violent Intifada in which more than 4000 people were killed.  Then in 2008, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made an even more generous offer, to which Mahmoud Abbas did not respond.  And in 2005, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon unilaterally ended the military occupation and settlements in the Gaza strip only to be greeted with thousands of rocket attacks and terror tunnels from Hamas.
Much has changed since these Israeli offers and actions.  The current Israel government is not likely to offer more than what was rejected by the Palestinians. So the pressure must now be placed on the Palestinian leadership to make good faith counter offers.  That pressure can only come from the United States.  This is so because the rest of the International community – the United Nations, the European Union, the Courts in the Hague, the BDS Movement – all disincentivise the Palestinians from making compromises by falsely telling them they can get a state without negotiating with Israel.
President Trump must make it crystal clear that unless the Palestinians negotiate a reasonable solution with Israel, they will never have a state. President Obama did not send that message with clarity, especially when he ordered his United Nations Representative to allow a one-sided anti-Israel Resolution to be passed by the Security Council.
President Trump must reassure Prime Minister Netanyahu that he will apply pressure – perhaps through our Sunni allies – on the Palestinian authority, and not only on Israel, as the Obama Administration did.  History shows that American administrations that really have Israel’s back – not to stab, but to support – are more likely to persuade Israel to offer compromises.
So I hope that Benjamin Netanyahu will emerge from the White House meeting with the confidence in American support to stand up to those in his cabinet who oppose the two state solution and who want to expand settlement activity.  And I hope the Palestinian leadership will understand that they have no option other than to accept the Netanyahu offer to negotiate anywhere, anytime, and with no preconditions.  Perhaps then we will finally see a reasonable resolution to the age-old conflict.
Reprinted with author’s permission from The Jerusalem Post

Read more at https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Dershowitzs-recipe-for-a-successful-Netanyahu-Trump-meeting-481523#tSOr3Ez7ixoaWClR.99
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Monday, January 23, 2017

John Kerry Is A Traitor To Everything He Touches

Share This Post
 0
January 12, 2017
By Joan Swirsky
Nothing could have surprised the national and international public more than learning through a Boston Globe article by Jennifer Anne Perez on February 2, 2003, that U.S. Senator John Kerry – who presented himself as a born-to-the-purple “Boston Brahmin” of Irish-Catholic ancestry – was in fact the grandson of Czech Jews.
Like another Democrat (piece of dreck) former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Kerry pretended to be shocked! shocked! to learn of his Jewish heritage.
Only when he was outed did this poseur – more known for marrying heiresses then for any legislative accomplishments in his over 30 years as a U.S. senator – admit that, yes, his Eastern European ancestors, surnamed Kohn (a variation of Cohen) were Jews.
But why, after he knew the truth, would he be one of the major architects of a policy to destroy the Jewish state of Israel, as he did with his genocidal speech in the State Department at the end of December?
Of course, the same can be asked of Jews like George Soros, Peter Beinart, and dozens of other Jewish Jew haters who lie awake nights roiling and ruminating over Israel’s success – indeed, its very existence – and feel so distressed by their own Jewishness that they spend their entire lives plotting and planning and spending millions of words and dollars to obliterate Israel, which they no doubt fantasize will kill the Jew inside themselves.
Here’s an ironic twist: Kerry’s younger brother Cameron, an attorney, converted to Judaism in 1983.
Getting back to John Kerry, however, we now know that from the very beginning of his public life, he knew he had Jewish roots but lied about them. I think this is called being a liar.
Once a liar…
No one has said it better than the founder and editor of the New York Sun, Seth Lipsky: “It looks like Secretary of State Kerry is determined to go out the way he came in – wrapping himself in the flag while betraying the causes of both America and its allies. He came in by doing that to Vietnam and is going out by turning on Israel. “
To be sure, if there’s one thing most Americans are certain about it’s that Kerry lied through his teeth when he defamed the heroic soldiers he fought with in Vietnam, accusing them – falsely – of hideous war crimes.
Lipsky explains that, “Kerry’s tirade against Jewish settlements and liberated Judea and Samaria was breathtaking in its mendacity.” And what is the definition of mendacity? Lying!
It’s that very fatal character flaw in Kerry that led the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth to destroy his campaign for president in 2004 when the soldiers who were fighting alongside him convinced the public that he had lied about his record and accumulated medals he didn’t deserve...medals he subsequently threw over a fence in front of Congress in utter contempt of his fellow warriors.
Worse were the accusations of treason that were mounting against Kerry as his accusers cited the 1970 meeting he conducted with North Vietnamese Communists in absolute violation of U.S. law, and other meetings with enemy parties in Paris. According to best-selling author Jerome Corsi, Kerry violated the U.S. code that forbade a U.S. citizen from negotiating with a foreign power. “Kerry was openly advocating that the Communist position was correct and that we were wrong. He had become a spokesman for the Communist Party.”
Corsi noted that Kerry’s presidential campaign was “trying to fudge on the issue of meeting with enemy agents….” And what is the definition of fudging? Lying!
And here is Mr. Kerry again, over 45 years later, still on the wrong side. In Vietnam, a noble war fought for the cause of stemming the rising tide of worldwide Communism, he slandered both his fellow soldiers and America itself, while today he slanders – and lies about – Israel, our most trusted and stable ally in the tumultuous Middle East.
As Mr. Lipsky says, “Mr. Kerry’s speech [against Israel] is just a transparent attempt at shifting onto Israel blame for his own failures in peace negotiations he should never have entered.”
As Wesley Pruden has written, Mr. Kerry “doesn’t come late to the betrayal of friends. He has had considerable practice.” Explaining his betrayal of Israel, Pruden says that, like “diplomats before him…he has no permanent friends, only his own permanent interests…. [L]like the president, [Kerry] seems to have been waiting for this moment in time, to stick it to the pesky and resolute Jews who have no taste for the second Holocaust when, as promised by the Iranians, Israel is ‘wiped off the map.'”
Here’s the amazing Brittany Hughes telling John Kerry the difference between right and wrong, a lesson he clearly never learned. And here’s another brief video telling the whole world what this preposterous and anti-Semitic territory dispute is all about.
Once a traitor…
To shed light on Kerry’s strange attraction to leaders around the globe who have nothing but detestation and loathing for America, it is significant that his 2004 presidential campaign promises were aired on Al Jazeera and he received – and never rejected – the endorsements of the arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat, the murderous Communist leader of North Korea Kim Jong II  the virulent anti- Semitic and American-hating prime minister of Malaysia Mahathir Mohamad, and the terrorist-appeasing president of Spain Jose Luis Zapatero.
But that is not where Kerry’s craven nature ends. In 2004, I wrote an article for Newsmax.com, “Kerry & Company’s Homeland Insecurity,” in which I detailed how Sen. Kerry – who sat on both the Foreign Affairs and Select Intelligence committees – was warned for four months before September 11th of a possible terrorist attack at Logan Airport in Boston (from which one of the planes took off that fateful day). The information was given to him by a recently retired special agent with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) who had spent over 10 years as a risk-management specialist charged with the security of air traffic control facilities throughout New England.
For three months, Kerry did nothing, finally passing the information to the one agency the FAA agent had warned him was the most remiss in addressing terrorist threats: the Department of Transportation.
Kerry was never called before the self-described “non-partisan” 9/11 Commission, a commission composed of many members with a deep interest – like Kerry’s – in not turning the spotlight on the real suspects in the Clinton administration who for nearly a decade systematically facilitated the encroaching terrorist threat to our nation. In fact, it was Clinton’s FAA that allowed knives with blades less than four inches long to be taken aboard commercial airliners!
This was a very bad thing for America, so it is easy to see why John Kerry said and did nothing to make it less bad.
As in the Obama years, the Clinton administration loathed the military and tried its best to diminish our military strength. Clinton’s cuts included 709,000 active-duty personnel, 293,000 reserve troops, eight standing army divisions, 20 Air Force and Navy air wings with 2000 combat aircraft, 232 strategic bombers, 19 strategic ballistic missile submarines with 3,114 nuclear warheads on 232 missiles, 500 ICBMs with 1,950 warheads, four aircraft carriers and 121 surface combat ships and submarines, plus the support bases, shipyards, and logistical assets needed to sustain such a naval force.

Americans looking forward to a huge economic recovery, a reconstituted military, protected borders, and a robust foreign policy can thank President-elect Donald J. Trump for decimating the Democrat Party, the far-left media, and the credibility of most pollsters, as well as sending both Clintons and creepy flunkies like Kerry into the political wilderness forever.
I suppose that someday someone will have the stomach to analyze John Kerry – a soldier who turned on his fellow soldiers, an American attracted to all things anti-American, a man with Jewish blood who turned on the Jewish homeland.
In his absence, America will be stronger than ever and Israel will survive and continue to flourish. Translated: Mr. Kerry, with all your pretensions and posturing, your thinly-disguised anger and hostility, your attempts to excise from yourself the things you hated most – your military status, your American identity, your Jewish blood – you failed!

Joan Swirsky (www.joanswirsky.com) is a New York-based journalist and author who can be reached at joanswirsky@gmail.com.
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)