Men har længe kunnet læse om hvorledes dyrene sulter i de zoologiske haver indtil de bliver spist af lige så sultende borgere, folk, som Enhedslisten ’stærkt fordømmer’ og kalder “[T]he right wing opposition in Venezuela (…) dominated by extreme, fascist-like, tendencies” i dødelige kampe med sikkerhedsstyrker, der ikke går af vejen for at køre sine egne borgere over med pansrede køretøjer, drastiske stigninger i børnedødelighed og kvinder der dør i barselsengen, som sundhedsvæsenet bukker under, under manglen på alt, forretninger der plyndres for resterne, børn der dør af sult - hvilket er bagernes skyld, fiskere der bliver pirater, hyperinflation.  Alt dette er “systematic distortions of the events in the international press” - ifølge Enhedslisten.

Daniel Pipes skriver i Wall Street Journal at især politikere (og akademikere generelt må jeg tilføje) er til fals for fikse ideer

As John Maynard Keynes put it, “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. . . . It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.”

The story of Venezuela makes this point with singular clarity. In 1914 the discovery of oil brought the country vast revenues and produced a relatively free economy. By 1950 Venezuela enjoyed the fourth-highest per capita income in the world, behind only the U.S., Switzerland and New Zealand. As late as 1980, it boasted the world’s fastest-growingeconomy in the 20th century. In 2001 Venezuela still ranked as Latin America’s wealthiest country.

Venezuela’s troubles, however, had begun long before. Starting around 1958, government interference in the economy, including price and exchange controls, higher taxes, and restrictions on property rights, led to decades of stagnation, with per capita real income declining 0.13% from 1960-97. Still, it remained a normal, functioning country.

“The problem of Venezuela is no longer one of internal politics. It is a threat to the harmony of the whole continent” siger Brasiliens præsident Michel Temer, som begrundelse for, at Brasilien nu har sat deres væbnede styrker ind mod grænsen til det socialistiske eksperiment. Og det er noget af et eksperiment, med historien og bagklogskabens klare lys at opløse en førende oliestats økonomi på et par årtier. Fra Chaves tog magten i 1998 begyndte hans regime af ligesindede at plyndre landet sideløbende med ødelæggende socialistiske programmer. En failed state indrømmede selv The New Yorker.

En journalist og en fotograf fra Reuters tog sidste år på en bustur gennem landet for at bese elendighederne, der nu kun er blevet værre. Og Amy Horowitz leverede en stemningsbeskrivelse som modpol til socialistisk drømmende amerikanske vælgere

Det meste er bag en betalingsmur, inklusiv deres leder(?), så jeg vil ikke forholde mig til indholdet af Politikens fremlægning af alting Trump, der sikkert er i tråd med Jyllands-Postens, andet end at lade det illustrere via omfanget af omtale og skæbnesymfoniske overskrifter. En anden artikel på Politiken om “Trumps Inderkreds: De sigtede, de mistænkte og de forsvundne” indledes med sætningen “Den særlige anklager i Trump-Rusland sagen står stærkt efter dom over Trumps kampagneboss”. Den er også bag betalingsvæg, hvorfor man ikke kan hvorfor en dom over Manafort, der var kampagnechef i to måneder og som blev fyret efter det kom frem at han tidligere havde havde lavet lobby arbejde for ukrainske interesser uden at oplyse det til de relevante myndigheder og er blevet dømt for banksvindel og skattesnyd begået for ti år siden, skulle være knyttet til Trump, Rusland eller Trump-Rusland sagen.

Cohen, der tidligere har fastslået at betalingen af tidligere påståede elskerinder af Trump for deres tavshed, ikke var kampagnebidrag, har nu, hvor han har indgået et forlig, plea-bargain, om anklagerne imod ham for banksvindel og skattefusk, med ‘Muellers 17 vrede Demokrater’, hvis egentlige mål er Trump, erklæret sig skyldig i alligevel at have givet et kampagnebidrag af en ulovlig størrelse på vegne af en velvidende Trump. Cohens advokat, Lanny Davies, er en del af Clinton og Demokraternes kreds

SÅ lidt ekspertise er er vel på plads. Andrew C McCarthy sætter lidt perspektiv på forbrydelsens omfang, skulle Trump have begået en sådan

The Justice Department has a history of treating serious campaign-finance transgressions as administrative violations, not felonies. A prominent example: The 2008 Obama campaign accepted nearly $2 million in illegal campaign contributions, but was permitted to settle the matter with a $375,000 fine. Of course, the force of that argument is undermined considerably by the fact that Cohen’s infraction has been treated as a felony (as was Dinesh D’Souza’s comparatively tiny one, also prosecuted by the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York).

Still, as we’ve repeatedly pointed out, Justice Department guidance does not permit the indictment of a sitting president. (A president may be prosecuted once he leaves office.) The issue for President Trump is not whether he has committed a crime but whether he has committed a high crime and misdemeanor. On that score, I will repeat what I said about mitigation in the aforementioned column, drawing on the lessons of the Clinton impeachment misadventure in the late Nineties:

The further removed misconduct is from the core responsibilities of the presidency, the less political support there will be for the president’s removal from office. This is critical because impeachment is a political remedy, not a legal one. The way the Framers designed the process — which requires just a simple House majority to file articles of impeachment, but a two-thirds Senate super-majority for removal — no president will ever be removed from office absent misconduct egregious enough to spur a consensus for removal that cuts across partisan lines. Such misconduct would surely have to involve either (a) an abuse of power involving core presidential powers; or (b) an extremely serious crime (if unrelated, or only tangentially related, to presidential power).

The conduct here is not of the egregious nature that rises to high crimes and misdemeanors — it is an infraction committed by many political candidates and often not even prosecuted. More to the point, it is remote from the core responsibilities of the presidency, implicating pre-election actions to conceal alleged indiscretions that occurred a decade earlier. And while the president has denied the indiscretions, it is not like the allegations come as any surprise to the public, who, while well aware of his flaws, elected Donald Trump nonetheless.

(Mere om det udramatiske i Obamas 2008 kampagnerod kan man læse hos Politico, for fuld nørderi). Og Andrew C McCarthy, Alan Dershowitz, Mark Levin og herunder Derek Hunter i Town Hall, har svært ved at se, der overhovedet skulle være tale om en lovovertrædelse for Trumps vedkommende

But in the guilty plea Cohen claims he committed campaign finance law violations to “influence the election.” This is where the wheels come off.

It doesn’t matter what Cohen thought he was doing, or why he thought he was doing it, what matters is the law. If Donald Trump had Cohen pay off these women then paid him back, that’s not illegal. Anyone, even a politician, can pay off anyone they want to keep quiet. Cohen’s plea says he did it to influence the election, but his motivation is irrelevant. What matters is the money.

If Trump paid to have his lawyer keep these women quiet, he was allowed to. Theoretically he wouldn’t have wanted this public because he’s married with children, and he was running for president and didn’t want it to be an issue. Whether he did it or not doesn’t matter, what matters is if he used campaign funds to pay Cohen or he paid out of his own pocket.

He’s allowed to pay people to sign non-disclosure agreements on any topic as long as the money comes out of his bank accounts or that of his business, no matter the motivation (though he’d have several unrelated to the campaign). He can’t use campaign funds to pay Cohen or pay himself back, and there’s no indication that he did.

Og Mark Penn fra The Hill, der ikke tilhører nyhedsorganisationer, der normalt indeholder et forsvar for Trump, spekulerer videre

The plot to get President Trump out of office thickens, as Cohen obviously was his own mini crime syndicate and decided that his betrayals meant he would be better served turning on his old boss to cut the best deal with prosecutors he could rather than holding out and getting the full Manafort treatment. That was clear the minute he hired attorney Lanny Davis, who does not try cases and did past work for Hillary Clinton. Cohen had recorded his client, trying to entrap him, sold information about Trump to corporations for millions of dollars while acting as his lawyer, and did not pay taxes on millions.

The sweetener for the prosecutors, of course, was getting Cohen to plead guilty to campaign violations that were not campaign violations. Money paid to people who come out of the woodwork and shake down people under threat of revealing bad sexual stories are not legitimate campaign expenditures. They are personal expenditures. That is true for both candidates we like and candidates we do not. Just imagine if candidates used campaign funds instead of their own money to pay folks like Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about affairs. They would get indicted for misuse of campaign funds for personal purposes and for tax evasion.

There appear to be two payments involved in this unusual agreement. Cohen pleaded guilty to a campaign violation for having “coordinated” the American Media payment to Karen McDougal for her story, not for actually making the payment. He is pleading guilty over a corporate contribution he did not make. Think about this for a minute. Suppose ABC paid Stormy Daniels for her story in coordination with Michael Avenatti or maybe even the law firm of the Democratic National Committee on the eve of the election.

By this reasoning, if the purpose of this money paid, just before the election, would be to hurt Trump and help Clinton win, this payment would be a corporate political contribution. If using it not to get Trump would be a corporate contribution, then using it to get Trump also has to be a corporate contribution. That is why neither are corporate contributions and this is a bogus approach to federal election law. Note that none of the donors in the 2012 John Edwards case faced any legal issues and the Federal Election Commission ruled their payments were not campaign contributions that had to be reported, both facts that prosecutors tried to suppress at trial.

Argumentet om at pengene var et de facto kampagne bidrag fordi det ville gavne Trumps kampagne rammer ind i en myriade af spørgsmål, thi man kan tænke sig allehånde eksempler på forbrug af penge, der kunne gavne en valgkamp fra nye tænder til kandidaten. Og, påpeger Dershowitz, “You don’t charge people with a crime when the law is vague”. Og Penn spekulerer videre

Contrast what is going on here with the treatment of the millions of dollars paid to a Democratic law firm which, in turn, paid out money to political research firm Fusion GPS and British spy Christopher Steele without listing them on any campaign expenditure form, despite crystal clear laws and regulations that the ultimate beneficiaries of the funds must be listed. This rule was even tightened recently. There is no question that hiring spies to do opposition research in Russia is a campaign expenditure, yet no prosecutorial raids have been sprung on the law firm, Fusion GPS or Steele. The reason? It does not “get” Trump.

So, Trump spends $130,000 to keep the lid on a personal story and the full weight of state prosecutors comes down on his lawyer, tossing attorney-client privilege to the wind. Democrats spend potentially millions on secret opposition research and no serious criminal investigation occurs. Remember that the feds tried a similar strategy against Democratic candidate Edwards six years ago and it failed. As Gregory Craig, a lawyer who worked both for President Clinton and Edwards, said, “The government theory is wrong on the facts and wrong on the law. It is novel and untested. There is no civil or criminal precedent for such a prosecution.” Tried it there anyway and it failed.

For noget andet seriøst nørderi kan jeg anbefale dette indlæg af Andrew C McCarthy, hvor bl.a kernen i ovennævnte John Edwards eksempel forklares.

Et billede på danske mediers dækning af USA og Trump, her ved Jyllands-Posten, den borgerlige avis

Det tåbeligste af vejen først, artiklen om advokaten, der påstår at Cohen har oplysninger af interesser for efterforsker. Det er Cohens advokat, der er sat til at varetage sin kriminelle klients interesser, som antyder at Cohen kan sandsynliggøre at Trump vidste at ‘russerne’ ville hacke Demokraternes servere (ingen ved om serverne er blevet hacket eller om at der er lækket fra dem - det sidste er det mest sandsynlige). Den historie forudsætter at ‘russerne’ har henvendt sig til Trump og afsløret deres planer om “at ødelægge det amerikanske demokrati” i sikker forvisning om, at Trump ikke ville gå til myndighederne med denne eksplosive viden, hvis ikke fordi han var et lovlydigt menneske eller en patriot, så for at score nogle gode politiske point midt i den amerikanske valgkamp. Stor tillid en af verdens dygtigste efterretningsvæsener viser en storskrydende forretningsmand og TV stjerne - og svindler, som vi skal kigge nærmere på.

Søren Espersen fra Dansk Folkeparti, indrømmer ikke at vide “meget om” “amerikansk statsjura”, men “forstår på dem, der har forstand på det, at dette er en meget alvorlig situation for præsidenten”. Han lytter til de forkerte. Artiklen indledes med dramatisk at slå fast at “Der er uhørt stærkt pres på USA’s præsident, Donald Trump, som undersøges for ulovlige forbindelser til Rusland i valgkampen i 2016″. Og så opklares følgende rod

Trumps tidligere kampagnechef Paul Manafort blev kendt skyldig i svindel med skat og banker og for ikke at oplyse om sin udenlandske bankkonto.

Kendelsen ses som den hidtil største sejr for specialanklager Robert Mueller. Han undersøger, om der var forbindelse mellem Trumps kampagnestab og Rusland.

Tirsdag erklærede Donald Trumps tidligere advokat Michael Cohen, som i mange år var hans nærmeste rådgiver, sig skyldig i skattesvindel og ulovlige bidrag i valgkampen.

Michael Cohen forklarede under ed, at Trump beordrede ham til at begå en forbrydelse, da Cohen i 2016 betalte to kvinder for at tie om deres seksuelle forhold til Trump. Præsidenten afviser, at han havde et forhold til kvinderne.

Så Trumps tidligere kampagnechef og hans tidligere advokat er i fedtefadet for intet at have med Rusland at gøre, intet at vide om Rusland, men derimod for noget de har gjort førend Rusland overhovedet kom ind i billedet. Men godt at få nævnt Rusland, nu historien er gået fra at undersøge alting russisk med det perspektiv at Kreml har begået amerikansk statskup - en decideret krigshandling - og de facto regerer USA gennem deres marionet Trump, til et pinligt torskegilde for en tidligere ansat.

Tidligere kampagnechef for Trump, Paul Manafort blev arresteret ‘at gun point’ midt om natten i sit eget hjem, hvor hans kone blev visiteret i sin egen seng, for eventuelle skydevåben gemt i hendes nattøj, da FBI åbenbart ikke mente at kunne udelukke at hun ville skyde sig selv og familien fri af anklagerne om ’svindel med skat og banker’ og for at hendes mand ikke havde oplyst om sine udenlandske konti. Men intet Rusland. Intet vedrørende Trump eller valgkampen. Dette er den største sejr ifølge artiklen, der ikke kan se at det er et de facto nederlag. Manaforts skattearrangementer ligger et ti-år tilbage og er helt og holdent hans egen og hans lurvede partners affære.

Anderledes er det med Trumps tidligere advokat Cohen. Heller ikke her er der skyggen af russere, hvis man ignorerer hans advokats mediestrategiske udgydelser, men der er skyggen af valgkamp og Trump. To kvinder, hvoraf den ene er en tidligere voksenfilm-skuespillerinde, påstår at have kendt Trump intimt, back in the days, hvilket Trump skulle have (og grangiveligt har) bedt Cohen om af ‘fixe’ ved at betale de to kvinde nogle hundrede tusinde dollar hver, for ikke at blabre ud om disse, for den amerikanske nation så trivielle forhold, midt i en valgkamp. Dette er, i modsætning til hvad mange i pressen tror for tiden, helt lovligt.

Men, hvis man tolker betalingerne som et indirekte kampagnebidrag, så overstiger beløbet så langt, hvad der er tilladt førend man skal underrette myndighederne. Og dette er ikke gjort. Hvis vi holder os til tolkningen om, at der reelt var tale om et kampagnebiddrag, i og med at man forsøger at holde saftige oplysninger om Trumps væsen ud af den politiske debat og ikke at Trump blot ville sikre sit ægteskab mod sladder - hvad der jo er en realistisk mulighed - så er det stadig ikke Trumps problem. Trump bad sin advokat om at ordne et par kedelige forhold, advokaten har ansvaret for om løsningen holdt juridisk.

Så tilbage til Trump som svindler, som en ekspert Jyllands-Posten har talt med kalder ham. Hun mener at vide “at Trump lige nu er ualmindeligt nervøs” fordi Cohen tilhører “hans absolutte inderkreds”. Eksperten Mette Claushøj er dog ikke juridisk ekspert, hvilket måske forklarer udsagn som

»Hvis Cohen bliver kendt skyldig, så bliver han kendt skyldig i noget, som præsidenten er medskyldig i, og det er meget skadeligt for Trumps ry både politisk og blandt befolkningen,« siger eksperten, som vurderer at »man skal være mere end almindelig konspirationsteoretiker, hvis man skal forestille sig, at Michael Cohen skulle sige det her, hvis det ikke passer«.

Det sidste først. Cohen har indgået en ‘plea-bargain’, en aftale med anklageren, hvor han tilstår nogle af anklagerne mod at andre droppes, hvilket sparer alle for besværet og usikkerheden med en retssag. Så, ja, hvad kan Cohen dog have af interesser i at sige noget, som måske ikke er helt sandt, til de af hans anklagere, hvis egentlige mål er på den ene eller anden måde at inkriminere Trump i et eller andet, russisk eller ej? Og igen, klienten er ikke i udgangspunktet medskyldig i advokatens håndtering af hans opgaver, hvorfor eksperten Claushøj ikke kan konkludere, at “hvis Cohen bliver dømt, så har Trump løjet.”

“Nu er det slut med at lade, som om at præsidenten er en stor uskyldighed, når han selv har bedt ham om at bryde kampagnefinanieringsloven” forsætter eksperten håbefuldt - og afslørende. Hvem har ladet som om Trump er en stor uskyldighed? End ikke Trump selv, der på forhånd advarede sine vælgere om, at de jo vidste hvad han var for een. Hvilket selvfølgelig også var et smart træk af ham fordi det samtidig var et gulvtæppe til at feje allehånde lurvede transgressioner ind under.

Spørgsmålet er jo derfor ikke om han er en stor uskyldighed, men om han er skyldig i hvad han bliver anklaget for, nemlig i samarbejde med den russiske regering “at ødelægge det amerikanske demokrati” og/eller “bryde kampagnefinanieringsloven”. To anklager det er svært at have med i samme sætning uden at fnise. Det sidste antager den forudsætning af Trump ikke kan være den politiske analfabet som han også er blevet beskyldt for at være. Men hvad, han er alting dårligt.

Det afslørende for Claushøj er den stråmand, der lufter sin frustration over at ingen af de anklager, som har været luftet i medierne, har haft fugls føde på sig. Skuffet gang på gang over at Trump ikke har ødelagt de amerikanske demokrati på hverken den ene eller anden måde, er der nu endelig et håb om at han på en eller anden måde må være skyldig i et eller andet. Han er måske i det mindste ikke en stor uskyldighed længere, hurrah - man må tage hvad man kan få.

Faktisk, forsætter hun optimistisk “begynder [Trump] at ligne den svindlertype, som han hele tiden er blevet anklaget for at være” - hvis vi ser bort fra ødelægger af det amerikanske demokrati. Og som Claushøj og Jyllands-Posten og det meste af MSM hele tiden antager, at han er, hvorfor de ikke reflekterer over, hvorledes to års spekulationer om russisk sponseret statskup er endt i torskegilder og pornostjerner. Ekkokammeret er selvforstærkende og en journalists formulering om at Trump “har betalt penge til to kvinder for deres tavshed i forsøget på at påvirke det amerikanske valg” (gennem at holde tand for tunge med forhold fra før Trump meldte sit kandidatur) fører direkte til socialdemokraten Nick Hækkerups spekulation i det “dybt bekymrende, hvis vi har en amerikansk præsident, som i et eller andet omfang har snydt sig til sin valgsejr”.

En kæde af crazy, der bliver forstørret i hvert led.

Der er et par kulturpersoner der er døde inden for de seneste dage. Soulsangerinden Aretha Franklin døde i går. Da hun var på toppen, spændte hendes stemme over 4 oktaver (Julia Andrews klasse) og hun var en rigtig kvinde, der forstod at man godt kunne ønske sig en mand, der kunne sætte hende på plads som en boss så hun vidste, han kerede sig for hende, uden dog at miste Respekt. Nu har musikken mistet hende, som vi danskere har mistet Benny Andersen.

Ja, Andersen var ikke så plat med sine små tø-høer, som jeg og hvor fuglene fløj i flok når de var mange nok, udnyttede han sprogets nuancer og dobbelttydigheder til det gode. Derfor er det også en stadig kilde til undren, når sådanne mennesker med raffinerede sind, bliver så platte som mine Franklin referencer, når de skråsikkert tramper sig ind i den politiske debat.

I Danmarks Radios lille artikel træder Andersens kunstneriske virke i baggrunden for hans meninger i islamdebatten. Så her mindes Andersens ven Mustafa Gezen, “vicerektor og formand for organisationen Dialog Forum, der vil bygge bro mellem folk fra forskellige kulturelle baggrunde”, hvorledes den ‘folkekære’ digter i 2008 var “rejst fra Lyngby til Aarhus for at deltage i ramadanmiddagen, fordi han var nysgerrig”. Som en 3 timers køretur i bil eller tog bliver beskrevet som ‘en rejse’, således opfattes en Ramadan middag også som et kulturmøde, der skulle tjene til inspiration for danskerne. Middagen, uden den månedslange faste, var rigeligt til at inspirere Andersen til at gøre op med danskernes ‘fremmedfrygt’ og fordomme om islam og i 2015 skrev han bogen ‘Sådan kan islam også være‘ i et forsøg på at “nuancere og korrigere en række af de usandheder, der florerer om islam og integration”. Det belønnede Dialog Forum med en dialogpris og i samme år. Også i 2015 var Mustafa Gezen fortaler for en “rummelig og brobyggende stormoske” i København - da som talsperson for Muslimernes Fællesråd.

At tale muslimernes interesser er en god dialog. Plads til mangfoldighed er for muslimer også kun plads til muslimernes propaganda i bybilledet såsom burkaer - det er ikke plads til bøsserne.

Det hører Andersen ikke. Ja, han “kunne beskrive danskerne med humor og ironi” fordi han var god til at lytte til de mindste nuancer i det danske sprog. Han var virkeligt meget, meget dansk. Men han var tonedøv i mødet med det fremmede, der vedblev at være en abstraktion og ikke noget konkret. Det fremmede var blot en spejling af dig selv, det samme, bare anderledes.

Nej, det fremmede er virkeligt fremmed og ikke et spejlbillede af ønsketænkning. Vidia ‘V. S.’ Naipaul havde rejst meget i de muslimske lande, observeret, talt og lyttet og havde så skrevet Blandt De Troende - det var forlægget for Martin Krasniks ‘De retfærdige - en islamisk stafet’. David Pryce-Jones mines Naipaul i National Review

In March 1979 I interviewed him for the BBC. He said to me, “I know that Trinidad, like India, the other ancestral strand, is a place without any possibility. If a place has some positive element you like to feel for it, it gives you a little hope. There is intellectual nullity there nowadays. No mind at all.” That last sentence is key. Mind is a universal value; everybody can acquire it just the way he did, and then they are civilized.

Those, and only those, who use their mind are able to escape from injustice and cruelty. Among the Believers and Beyond Belief are books of reportage on the horrors that he encountered in Muslim countries where mindlessness has taken control.

Liberals were slow to realize the extraordinary damage Vidia was doing to their aspiration that the world be what they would wish it to be. Some Indians have described him as a traitor to his race, and I once heard a Jamaican professor criticize him as “too brown.” The West Indian poet Derek Walcott accused him of fouling the nest and caricatured him in print as V. S. Nightfall (though he later apologized for this). In Marxist clichés, the academic H. B. Synge called him “a despicable lackey of neo-colonialism and imperialism.” But even those who disliked what he stood for acknowledged his mastery of the English language.

Vidia the writer had complete inner certainty. Inevitably he generated controversy, but he hardly bothered to read what was written about him or to respond to it. Nadira, whom he married after the death from cancer of Pat, filled his final years with grace. On the morning when the Swedish Academy announced his Nobel award, I rang to congratulate him. “Oh, you’ve heard of my little spot of luck, have you.” Nadira and he invited me to accompany them to Stockholm. The moment we reached the hotel, Vidia was swept off to a television studio. On the program with him were two previous Nobel winners, Nadine Gordimer and Günter Grass. They were agreeing that poverty is the whole motivation of Islamist terror. Vidia shot back that like millions of others he came from a poor family and did not commit terror. Infuriated by the liberal twaddle, he went to his room without dinner. About 2,000 people attended the ceremony, and Vidia was instructed to speak to them for not more than three or four minutes. On a podium, he then held up his watch, whose strap had just broken, and said that Julius Caesar invading Egypt had slipped on the sandy beach. An omen! Getting up, Caesar rallied his officers, “What I have, I hold.”

Vidia was a free spirit.

Ja, en køretur kan ses som en rejse og islam som værende mange ting. Men mange af de ting, er der grund til at frygte. Islam kræver magten og i så tilfælde må du sluge hele pakken. Og det er ikke blot den månedslang faste, der skal overholdes, hvis man ikke vil ‘mærke at man lever’ på sine rygstykker.

Palæstinenserne er i krig med Israel og har derfor en krigsøkonomi, hvor ressourcerne ledes hen mod terrorsektoren, skriver The Tower

A Palestinian terrorist, who murdered a 31-year-old Israeli man in the West Bank community of Adam on Thursday, has been declared a “martyr” by the Palestinian Authority and is entitled to a one-time payment of $1,600, as well as monthly salaries starting at $380, under the PA’s “Pay to Slay Program.”

The 17-year-old Palestinian terrorist Muhammad Tareq Dar Yusuf fatally stabbed Yotam Ovadia, a father of two young children, and wounded two other Israelis, in a frenzied attack in Adam last week.

A day after the murder took place, Yusuf was hailed a “martyr” in an article published in the official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Shiri Moshe reported in The Algemeiner on Monday. According to a translation by Palestinian Media Watch, an Israeli research and advocacy organization, the same description was used in a Facebook post published the same day by the Bethlehem branch of Fatah, the party of PA President Mahmoud Abbas.

Men palæstinenserne er, som muslimer flest ikke kun prosaiske og der er masser af åndelige værdier der motiverer jødedrab, fortæller de gladeligt herunder. Det er ligemeget om det er civile eller endda børn, fortæller en palæstinenser om sine terrordrømme. En anden har ambitionen om at blive martyr, for alle elsker sådan en. Min mor ville blive kisteglad fortæller en tredie. Allehånde forskellige drømme der motiver disse unge mennesker om de foretrækker kniv, pistol eller bombe, alle har deres egen stil. Men det grundlæggende er, at tro på Allah får vi fortalt, og de døde lever i Paradis, hvor de får 72 jomfruer - og den kvindelige martyr er den smukkeste af jomfruerne, så der er noget til alle. Det er ikke bare noget de selv finder på, det står skrevet

PALESTINIAN JIHAD from Pierre Rehov on Vimeo.

Det er svært, at diskutere sameksistens på de præmisser.

“[W]hen do we see almost a shadow government come out and say, ‘We cannot side with the government, whether it’s the cabinet or the Senate” spurgte den tidligere terrorekspert for både CIA og FBI Philip Mudd retorisk CNNs Anderson Cooper. Og guderne skal vide, at det ikke er manglende vilje blandt efterretningsvæsenets top. Foragten for folkets mand Trump og frygten for, hvad han kan gøre mod ’sumpen’ er tydelig, som Victor Davis Hanson gør opmærksom på

No federal official, in the manner of Andrew McCabe, should be in charge of investigating a suspect whose campaign affiliates have recently donated huge amounts of money to the investigator’s wife’s prior political campaign. And a DOJ official is required to state whether he has conflict of interests that affect his performance in the manner in which Bruce Ohr allegedly did not cite his own spouse’s employment for the Clinton-funded Fusion GPS Steele project, or his own contacts with those concerned.

No doubt the idea of impeaching Rod Rosenstein may be misplaced. But Rosenstein himself must know that in such politically charged times he has by needs played some sort of prior role in the Uranium One investigations, the Clinton email investigations, the FISA court warrants, and the collusion investigations, and that these issues swirl around both his current prosecutorial choices and may at some future date put himself in legal limbo. Clearly, if there exists such a doctrine of recusal, he should have long ago recused himself in the fashion of Jeff Sessions, who may have had far less exposure to charges of conflicts of interest.

It wins the Mueller investigation no favors that its origins, by the admission of former FBI director James Comey, were instigated by the leaks of confidential presidential memos by Comey himself — and then coincidentally led to the selection of Mueller, a friend of Comey and for a moment, before his special-counsel appointment, an apparent willing aspirant to be Comey’s replacement as FBI director.

A second worry, of course, is the necessary appearance of political neutrality, crucial for public support for any high-profile federal special inquiry. Robert Mueller needlessly incurred criticism by his own appearance of conflicts of interests, when, for example, he did not disclose promptly the reasons for the departures of Lisa Page and Peter Strzok from his investigative team, and delayed notice until much later after their severances, and seemingly staggered their reassignments to cloud any inference that they were related and prompted by their shared incriminating texts.

Mueller did not need to include counsels on his team, again in such a politically charged atmosphere, who had earlier represented either the Clinton Foundation or contractors for Hillary Clinton under suspicion for the destruction of key evidence.

It would have also been wiser to have gone beyond the law and either have insisted that his legal team’s members had not been donors to either presidential candidate, or, barring that, to have included roughly equal numbers of 2016 partisans. No doubt there are individual complexities and extenuating circumstances surrounding the retirements, resignations, firings, or forced reassignments of a spate of FBI and DOJ officials. But it is not conspiratorial or improper to suggest that something is wrong in Washington when the public was never really told the initial circumstances surrounding the fates of James Baker, Peter Kadzik, Michael Kortan, David Laufman, Andrew McCabe, Bruce Ohr, Lisa Page, James Rybicki, and Peter Strzok.

Baseret på en rapport, Steele rapporten, udarbejdet på uverificerbare kilder fra Rusland, af alle steder, på vegne af Trumps direkte modstander til præsidentposten Hillary Clinton, gik FBI til domstolen for udenlandsk spionage (FISA court) og opnåede tilladelse til at aflytte og spionere mod Trumps valgkampsmaskine. Dommeren fik ikke at vide at FBIs viden ikke var viden og interesserede sig heller ikke for at få det afklaret, så spioneret blev der.

Det kom frem da Justitsministeriet offentliggjorde en bunke dokumenter, der kastede lidt lys over baggrunden for efterretningsvæsenets grundlæggende interesse for alting Trump. Men det meste i disse dokumenter var censureret (redacted) af hensyn til… Statens ansattes gode navn og rygte. Men hvad der gemte sig i mørket, mente republikanernes formand for sikkerhedsudvalget Devin Nunes, var endnu værre

“If people think using the Clinton dirt to get a FISA was bad, what else that’s in that application is even worse,” Nunes recently told the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel.

“There’s a stall game going on at DOJ and FBI – they’re trying to stall as much as they can, hoping and betting that Republicans would lose the House in the fall,” Nunes said. “And if that happens … it essentially shuts down everything. Rod Rosenstein will not be held in contempt, FBI will not be held accountable, all these investigations will shut down, everything will be buried…. That’s why the sooner the president declassifies this, the better.”

Det er noget af en rådden gestalt, efterretningsvæsenet der holder sig. Et giftigt meningsfællesskab har set sig selv, som på en særlig mission, hvor overordnede hensyn tilsidesatte de regler, der definerede selvsamme hensyn. Drengepolitik, med andre ord og denne opfattelse af at være en del af de få udvalgte med en højere mission rykker grænserne for almindelig moral umærkbart for den enkelte. Jeg tror Bombards Body Languages analyse, skønt dansende med selvbekræftende observationer, af Peter Strzok er rigtig. Strzok blev fyret fra Muellers hold, for at have udtrykt sin foragt og had til Trump i en masse korrespondancer han havde med sin ligesinde elskerinde i FBI Lisa Page