One of the central lessons from the run-up to WWII is that you cannot make peace treaties with countries hell-bent on war. The UK tried this under Neville Chamberlain at Munich. For a treaty to have any practical value, there must also be conditions set to prevent war, and you either have to take the time to achieve them, or prepare for war yourself and don’t agree to signing worthless treaties.

In terms of Israel the deal that Barack Obama handed to Iran was no different in character than what the allies gave to Nazi Germany.

Iran was already involved in two wars, Syria and Yemen, in which the number of victims in both will or had run to over six figures. You can debate whether Obama could have, should have done more about those bloodbaths, but he certainly had an opportunity to achieve a great deal in preventing another looming war, where Israel can potentially become the third country in the region to suffer losses running into six figures.

The Revolutionary Guard has repeatedly boasted that it possesses tens of thousands of ballistic missiles in different countries which it will launch en masse in a war of extermination of Israel. Obama’s deal did not even touch upon the issue of imposing restrictions on the use of their ballistics. What Obama did instead was hand Iran $150 billion to add more and deadlier ballistics to fire at Israel in the promised war of extermination.

That’s only for starters.

To end the Second Lebanon War in 2006 between Israel and Iran’s proxy Hezbollah the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1701. The main points were that those maniacs were not to restock their missiles and they were not to send armed fighters south of the Litani River, the area abutting Israel. European peacekeeping troops (UNIFIL) were posted there.

No sooner had Obama come into office than the missiles starting flowing in from Iran and Hezbollah fighters began crossing the Litani River, armed to the teeth. Any UN resolution is only as good as the backing the US gives it. Obama acted as if Resolution 1701 did not exist and did nothing.

The UNIFIL troops engaged in a few firefights with Hezbollah intruders, lost a number of soldiers, and then threw in the towel. You can’t blame them. With no else seeming to care, why should anyone die in a lost cause?

When Obama came in, Hezbollah had maybe 7,000 missiles. Today they have upwards of 100,000 and with greater range than in the 2006 war. Their fighters are now ensconced all over the place south of the Litani, much thicker than before. You can sustain a great many armed fighters at the ready for a very long time with $150 billion.

That 100,000 figure far exceeds what any NATO country in Europe possesses with the possible exception of the UK and France. It’s not as if the UN was not aware precisely what was happening. Ban ki-Moon, then secretary-general, did do his duty, travelled to Lebanon and told Nasrallah, the boss of Hezbollah, what you are doing is wrong and you must stop. Nasrallah laughed in his face.

What could be heading our way from Lebanon is upwards of 1,500 missiles per day as compared to 180 per day in the 2006 war. Their Zelal-2 missile reaches 250 km and Scud D missile reaches up to 700 km. Israel’s length is 424 km, and at its widest, just 114 km. Everything in Israel is exposed to attack from ports to oil refineries.

The entire area north of Israel has been turned into one big booby-trap. Israel has to decide what do with that venue at the same time the missiles are flying overhead. They’ve got military vehicles parked in civilian garages and weapons stored in rooms in houses. There are tunnels as we know, barrel bombs, rockets, mortars, and weapons everywhere.

American military experts say that the best way to deal with a situation as in south Lebanon is fuel-air explosives (FAEs). These are bombs that disperse an aerosol cloud of fuel which is ignited by a detonator, producing massive explosions. The resulting rapidly expanding wave flattens all buildings within a considerable range. The sky turns into an inferno. Whatever Israel does, they can’t diddle around like last time.

There is also a possibility that once this war begins, the Revolutionary Guard will make good threats that Hossein Salami, their deputy commander, has been voicing like a broken record about launching wave of ballistics at Israel. Here’s an example.

Hossein Salami: “Today, more than ever, there is fertile ground … for the annihilation, the wiping out, and the collapse of the Zionist regime. In Lebanon alone, over 100,000 missiles are ready to be launched.”

“If it serves Iran’s interests and if the Zionist regime repeats its past mistakes due to its miscalculations, these missiles will ‘pierce through space, and will strike at the heart of the Zionist regime, preparing the ground for its great collapse in the new era.

“Tens of thousands of other high-precision, long-range missiles … have been placed in various places throughout the Islamic world. They are just waiting for the command, so that when the trigger is pulled, the accursed black dot will be wiped off the geopolitical map of the world, once and for all.”

It would only take a few Iranian ballistics being fired and you’ve got a much bigger war. This will not be a repeat of 1991 where Israel could let a large coalition do its fighting for it against Iraq. The coalition is us.

Obama’s record everywhere in foreign affairs was catastrophic. Throughout the Middle East people began slaughtering each other wholesale in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Libya and millions of refugees fled into Europe. The only reason things didn’t get much worse in the region was because the army took back control of Egypt from the Muslim Brotherhood, another organization of maniacs. Much of the slaughter in Syria and Iraq was due to the emergence of the Islamic State terrorist organization, numbering in the tens of thousands. They have now spread round the world into dozens of countries and may have $400 million in their coffers. Islamic State started as a knot of perhaps 300 in Iraq. The Americans knew about them and Obama could have wiped them out in a day. He looked the other way. In the rest of the world Russia went to war with the Ukraine supposedly under US protection, established a presence in the Middle East for the first time in 40 years, China spread out across the Pacific staking out natural resources that belonged to others, and North Korea headed towards H-bombs. At home Obama permitted the state of readiness of the US military to crumble into decrepitude.

In the first few years that Obama was in power Syria was not in chaos, UNIFIL was not demoralized, and there is no explanation why he froze at the stick when Iranian missiles began flowing into Lebanon.

Before others got involved, the Syria Civil War was rather a simple proposition. Assad, the brutal dictator, was being opposed by rebels who sought to establish human rights in that country. The American response was theoretically regime change, and they were working with the rebels. These made one overriding request to the Americans, declare a no-fly zone to make this a level playing field.

What killed that effort was Hillary Clinton’s big mouth. One day she declared that a no-fly zone over Syria was being considered. There was jubilation throughout the land. But she was just talking to hear herself talk. Weeks passed and nothing. The rebels felt betrayed, the nexus with the Americans was broken, and the rest is history.

Douglas Laux was a main CIA operative on the scene and published a book on what happened.

Maureen Callahan: “It’s the top-secret mission that never was: the US plan to oust Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in 2012.

“A former CIA agent named Douglas Laux reveals the Obama administration’s paralysis — and that of our Europe-an allies — in his heavily redacted new memoir, ‘Left of Boom.’”

“On Aug. 10, 2012, then-secretary of state Hillary Clin-ton travelled to Turkey and publicly announced that the US was seriously considering a no-fly zone over Syria.

“Laux was stunned — the CIA had given him no heads-up, and he had no idea if they even knew about this announcement. He immediately met with Syrian rebel leaders who, he writes, ‘were elated by Clinton’s statement.’

“Once suspicious of US motives in the region, they now ‘happily shared everything with me — the state of their forces, where they were deployed, the names of important leaders, etc. It yielded an intel bonanza.’

“A week went by with no US air power over Syria. Two weeks, and the rebels were angry and suspicious.”

“After three weeks, the rebels felt so betrayed that they stopped meeting entirely with Laux, who realized Clinton’s statement had been a bluff — a clumsy attempt to flush Assad out diplomatically.

“‘What (the consideration of a no-fly zone over Syria) accomplished was to flush the slim credibility we had in Syria down the drain,’ wrote Laux.”

It was around this same time that Obama got it into his head that he wanted a “peace deal” with Iran. Obama’s military experience was zero, which meant that he should have bent over backwards to hear out the professionals, his defence secretaries. He went through three of them, one after the other, Robert Gates, Leon Panetta, and Chuck Hagel in his first six years. Their common complaint after they left: Obama did not listen to any of their advice. Hagel added, he threatened “to destroy” me, whatever that means.

Matt Margolis: “Obama’s former defence secretaries were revealing the incompetence, mismanagement, and politicization of the military by Barack Obama … Remember, Obama’s military failures were front and centre … our dwindling military readiness, the lack of strategy, etc. … Gates, Panetta, and Hagel (all) were sounding the alarm over Obama’s inexperience and leadership failures.”

For good measure Obama also fired James Mattis, whom Trump would hire as his first defence secretary.

From that you can conclude without any evidence to the contrary that Obama dreamed up the deal with Iran on his own, some kind of impetuous ego trip. Everything was hush, hush, so much so that Jen Psaki, then state department spokeswoman, lied to a question in 2013 by James Rosen of Fox News of whether secret talks were under way. Then eight minutes of the video recording suddenly vanished. This is public business; videos are not supposed to vanish. Peace treaties are the best things in the world; you proclaim working on them from the rooftops, not skulk around like a thief in the night as Obama did. But as it turned out this was not going to be a peace treaty at all, but a mortifying capitulation to a terrorist regime.

By 2015 Obama had erased Iran and Hezbollah from the terrorist threat list while the missiles kept flowing into Lebanon. Trump is pilloried and perhaps with some justification for apparently intending to turn over the mop-up of Islamic State to Erdogen of Turkey, the pre-eminent nutjob of all the nutjobs in the Middle East, but that was the very alibi that was trotted out for the sudden whitewashing of Iran and Hezbollah and you didn’t hear a murmur of protest.

You could offer any human being on earth $150 billion on condition that they vow not to manufacture, use, or supply IEDs to harm Americans at any time in the future and everyone would grab it with both hands. Obama handed over $150 billion to the Iranians without extracting even that minimal commitment. Iranian-supplied IEDs had killed 1,000 Americans in Iraq.

That $150 billion came from money seized by Jimmy Carter in his day. There is a question, which historians will have to decide, of whether Obama took money of which $53 billion legally belonged to American victims of Iranian terrorist attacks. Morally it did. There have been several court awards made to victims or their families of various and sundry Iranian terrorist attacks over the years. The latest one was $10.5 billion awarded to victims’ families of the 9/11 attack. Courts found that Iran played a role in that atrocity and also the supreme leader Ayatollah Khameni personally. They were able to sue Iran immediately because Iran was on the list of state sponsors of terrorism. Victims’ families seeking to sue Saudi Arabia for their complicity had to wait until 2016 after an exhaustive campaign when Congress granted them the right. (Pakistan was also involved. When a prisoner in American hands fingered the air force chief as the guy who handled it from their end, his plane crashed one week later.) One group, victims’ families of a Hezbollah attack in 1983 in Beirut in which 241 US servicemen were blown up have now taken their case to the Supreme Court. The victims’ families won $2.3 billion along the way. Apparently there is $1.6 billion of Iranian money frozen in a Swiss bank account which Obama failed to swipe and if they win their case, they may get that. Orde Kittrie, a law professor, testified about these cases at a Senate subcommittee hearing in 2015 entitled “Justice Forsaken: How the Federal Government Fails American Victims of Iranian and Palestinian Terrorism.”

(https://s3.useast2.amazonaws.com/defenddemocracy/uploads/documents/Kittrie_How_the_Federal_Government_Fails_American_Victims.pdf)

The one “achievement” Obama claimed was getting Iran to agree to suspend developing nukes for a limited period. But as long as Obama or his successors did nothing to reign in North Korea, Iran could have ordered nukes ready-made at any time, delivered by Fedex, and launched a sneak attack on one of its two main enemies, Israel and Saudi Arabia. And they would not be in violation of the agreement.

I’m not suggesting that Obama is an anti-Semite although he will go down in history as the only US president to take up the cause of a Nazi war criminal. His protagonist had recruited Waffen SS units responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Jews in the Holocaust in the Balkans. This was Obama’s opening act when he became president. He began campaigning for a property in Jerusalem confiscated by the British from the Mufti Hajj Amin and awarded by Israeli courts to a Jew to be handed over to the family of Amin as if Israel was America’s banana republic and its courts didn’t count. I suppose on the positive side he did draw attention to the fact that Israel does grow bananas. Meanwhile, Obama made no effort to enforce Resolution 1701 at any time nor oblige Iran to remove the missiles they sent to Hezbollah and their armed fighters from south of the Litani River before signing his agreement with Iran. But here is where the US mass media (MSM) is complicit in this happening in two ways.

The US MSM is so lopsided in favor of the Democrats you’d think that in order to get a job there all the journalists (q.v.) are obligated first to take this famous oath in Japanese: Mizaru, Kikazaru, Iwazaru. The major exception is Fox News and even there Shep Smith is rumored to have taken the oath secretly. The phrase means “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” It cuts two ways. With Obama you only saw and heard paeans of praise and never a critical comment from the MSM. With Trump, everything is either bad, worse, or the world is ending in five minutes.

To meet the quota of bad news for the day, the MSM relies on fake news, stuff that never happened or is grossly distorted. Here’s a story that the New York Times published on its front page which no self-respecting editor of a village weekly would have touched. Trump, subject to the draft during the Vietnam War, got a doctor to falsely write that he had bone spurs in his heels, which justified a medical exemption. The sources are his daughters, admittedly hostile to Trump, who were aged 3 and 6 at the time. There is no corroboration from any source. The doctor died 10 years ago. We are supposed to believe that the doctor talked to his daughters about his patients of yore when they grew up, violating confidentiality, that he admitted committing a breach of ethics, and because the patient was a rich man’s son, decided to curry favor with the father, his landlord, in violation of his oath as a doctor. In other words he was confessing to his children that he had been a quack. Ten years ago Trump was only a minor celebrity, a borderline public figure, and the Vietnam War was ancient history. Who cared about him or that war? Besides that the army did its own examinations so either Trump did have bone spurs and he could have been in a heap of trouble.

Here’s what happened in 2008 when Obama, the unknown, was running and there was a real news story out there, which would have given some insight how he felt about Israel and Jews. If published in full, it may have not have cost him the election but it would have set off alarms of what could be expected from him.

In 2003 in Chicago there was a gathering of anti-Semites in honor of the worst of the lot, Rashid Khalidi. Obama gave the toast in honor of Khalidi. At the time Khalidi had made comments in which he appeared to justify suicide bombers killing Jews in Israel. In 2007 Khalidi was at Columbia University in NY and brought in Ahmadinejad, the Iranian leader, after he had hosted a Holocaust deniers conference and vowed to destroy Israel.

The LA Times had a video of the 2003 gathering. If they had released it, it would have shown who was there, what they said, and what Obama’s reaction was. From there you could do up a follow-up and pin him down on a whole host of pertinent questions. The LA Times refused to release the video on some lame excuse. This was not a one-timer for them. Previously when Obama had run for the Senate in a tight race, they released details of the divorce proceedings of his opponent, which both he and his ex-wife had agreed to keep under wraps, and which gave sensitive information concerning a child. That destroyed his opponent.

In all things big and small it works the same way with the MSM. And that’s why no one asked Obama why he was (a) not enforcing Resolution 1701 along the way and (b) then not taking remedial action before giving Iran the keys to the kingdom.

The hypocrisy knows no bounds. Today Trump is being accused of setting up the Kurds in Syria for another Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks by extracting a corporal’s guard of Americans from there. But when Obama abandoned the Kurds in Iraq into what would become a much deadlier situation, there was not a peep of concern expressed for their fate.

Whether Iran existed or didn’t, Syria has always been an existential threat to Israel. In 2007 they were building nukes with the help of North Koreans, which Israel discovered and destroyed. All those chemical weapons Assad used repeatedly on insurgents and civilians, they had accumulated with an eye on Israel going back decades. Russia and Turkey, now meddling in Syria, are both lawless actors currently occupying parts of countries they invaded — Russia in Georgia and the Ukraine and Turkey in Cyprus — but in the scheme of things, they are no more than background noise. The bottom line is that Syria is a sovereign nation and if they start a war with or without Iranians, there’s no choice but to bomb them back to the Stone Age, as has always been the case. As for Russia, the last time they sent up its planes against Israel in 1970 at the Suez Canal they were blown out of the sky.

Who was missing in action here while Resolution 1701 was being violated? Obama’s two secretaries of state, Hillary and John Kerry. If one of those had pounded on a table occasionally à la Nikki Haley, it may have slowed down the process of resupply. Those two never lifted one finger, let alone make a fist out of five, in reference to Resolution 1701. They were both too busy enriching themselves. Hillary probably stole more, running into the hundreds of millions, but Kerry had the global network of companies of his billionaire wife Teresa Heinz at his disposal, and did his plundering in a much more surreptitious manner. And in his case it was a family affair. The MSM looked the other way the whole time.

The Clintons had a racket going called the “Clinton Foundation.” It was called a “charity” but only 8 per cent went to the needy, the rest flowed into their pockets. As secretary of state, everything Hillary did was “pay to play” and that set up an unending river of kickbacks.

Charles Krauthammer: “The foundation is a massive family enterprise disguised as a charity, an opaque and elaborate mechanism for sucking money from the rich and the tyrannous to be channelled to Clinton Inc.”

The best book out on this was written by Peter Schweizer, ”Clinton Cash.”

Here are some of Hillary’s biggest scores.

Haitian earthquake: Haiti had been hit by a major earthquake. The Haiti government says 220,000 died. This figure is disputed, but there was a great many along with vast property damage. The survivors were in dire straits.

Here was the political situation. Haiti had run the first leg of its election for new president. Leading was Mirlande Minagot, poised to become the first woman president. She was a former first lady, held a Ph.D from the Sorbonne, and she promised to bring in universal public education. She criticized the aid groups that were flocking in, saying they operated without accountability. She said that her government would insist on knowing where every dollar was being spent.

The guy who ran second to Minagot was Jude Célestin, who was a close ally of the sitting president René Préval. He had finished just ahead of Sweet Micky Martelly, a singer supported by the machine of the disgraced dictator Duvalier.

In order for the Hillary to get her mitts on much of the dough flowing into Haiti she had to get rid of Minagot, because this woman had done the unthinkable, promised to run an honest administration. Hillary needed a crook to work with, and there he was, Sweet Micky.

Hillary called the president Préval and told him to tell his man Célestin to step aside and let Sweet Micky run. If Préval didn’t play ball, she would cut off US aid to Haiti.

Sweet Micky won the election and the pillaging by Hillary and her friends began.

Didn’t someone once say that black lives matter? No one informed Hillary. The Haitians themselves throw around the figure “billions” stolen. This may be an exaggeration, but no one really knows. The Haitian currency lost 30 per cent of its value under Hillary’s straw man.

Marguerite Laurent is a poet and human rights lawyer.

Marguerite Laurent: “Hillary Clinton preyed on Haiti.”

“The earthquake (that hit Haiti on Jan. 12, 2010) weakened the victims and she used her power to crush them some more. Dressed as ‘savior’ at the Obama state department, Hillary Clinton betrayed innocent Americans who desired to help with recovery. If we are scientifically and objectively balancing facts, then Donald Trump, arguably a bigot and perhaps a sexist, still clearly has less of a record of lies, looting, lawlessness, and implementing systemic governmental/institutional racism than Hillary Clinton.”

She was backed up by Bernard Sansaricq, former president of the Haitian senate.

Bernard Sansaricq: “Sadly, when an earthquake rocked the nation of Haiti in 2010, corruption moved in faster than the help so desperately needed.

“Today, the people of Haiti are still suffering despite the billions of dollars that have flowed into the Clinton Foundation. The Clintons exploited this terrible disaster to steal billions of dollars from the sick and starving people of Haiti. The world trusted the Clintons to help the Haitian people during their most desperate time of need and they were deceived. The Clintons and their friends are richer today while millions still live in tents.”

Arms sales: Hillary once in office began selling weapons like they were going out of style at twice the pace of the Bush II administration, no questions asked, come one, come all — don’t forget to leave your donation to the Clinton Foundation at the door. She raked in $140 million. There is a strong suspicion that Qatar, the terrorists’ friend, supplied some of her weapons to Islamic State. Those who know aren’t talking. But v-p Joe Biden did say this in a speech at Harvard in 2014 referring to Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the Gulf States. “(They) were so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war. What did they do? They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad. Except that the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra and al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world”

Uranium One: These were highly complex transactions in which Hillary as secretary of state enabled Russia’s Vladimir Putin to gain control of 20 per cent of US uranium resources while raking in $145 million in kickbacks from companies involved. But the worst of it is seldom talked about. Putin did not care about the US uranium resources — he really can’t do much with them — he was after Kazakhstan’s uranium, with which he can make nukes. CFIUS is the US entity that approves foreign investment.

Andrew C. McCarthy: “What Putin really wanted were Uranium One’s Kazakh uranium holdings, which dwarfed its American holdings. The complication was that, because Uranium One held the US assets, Rosatom (the Russian energy conglomerate) could not acquire it without CFIUS approval. But the US assets were of secondary importance; Russia’s main objective was Kazakhstan’s uranium.

“The scandalous aspects of the Uranium One transaction involve Clinton family self-dealing. In 2005, Bill personally intervened with the despicable Kazakh dictator, Nursultan Nazarbayev, to grant uranium mining rights to Clinton’s major Canadian benefactor, Frank Giustra. This led to tens of millions of dollars pouring into the Clinton Foundation, and to Giustra’s merging his company (Ur-Asia Energy) into Uranium One — a deal valued at $3.5 billion. Later, when Putin leaned on Nazarbayev putting Uranium One’s holdings in jeopardy of seizure, with downward pressure on its stock value, Hillary’s state department immediately mobilized, mediating a deal that gave Rosatom a minority stake in Uranium One. Then, when the Kremlin wanted Rosatom to have a controlling interest in Uranium One, CFIUS signed off on the deal.

“We now know that, around the time that sign-off was under consideration, millions more in related donations were made to the Clinton Foundation and Bill was given $500,000 for a single speech by a Kremlin-tied financial institution. In addition, the justice department had a prosecutable racketeering/extortion/money-laundering case against Rosatom’s US subsidiary. Bringing the case at that point would have made the transfer of uranium assets to Rosatom politically impossible. Instead, the justice department sat on the investigation for four years even as Rosatom’s US subsidiary continued actively corrupting the US energy sector.”

This deal was done even though an FBI informant William Campbell exposed a Russian plot to corner the American uranium market a year before Hillary acted on the sale. What Obama did to Campbell was slap on him an “iron clad” gag order so that he could not even tell Congress what he knew. Trump finally lifted that gag order.

John Solomon: “An FBI informant (William Campbell) gathered extensive evidence during his six years undercover about a Russian plot to corner the American uranium market, ranging from corruption inside a US nuclear transport company to Obama administration approvals that let Moscow buy and sell more atomic fuels, according to more than 5,000 pages of documents from the counterintelligence investigation.

“Campbell documented for his FBI handlers the first illegal activity by Russians’ nuclear industry officials in fall 2009, nearly an entire year before the Russian state-owned Rosatom nuclear firm won Obama administration approval for the Uranium One deal, the memos show.”

In all the negotiations with Hillary’s state department, Uranium One was represented by the Podestas, Tony and John, close friends of the Clintons. How close? John Podesta would become Hillary’s campaign manager in the 2016 election.

In any event, getting his hands on the Kazakhstan uranium must have restored Putin’s faith in Communism. It was Lenin who said, “The capitalist will sell you the rope with which he is to be hanged.”

The oft repeated claim that Bill Clinton shook down Putin for $500,000 in cash for a speech before permitting the deal to go through is probably true. The claim is based on the suspicious timing of the speech.

Hillary had another initiative going in Russia, which appears to be worthy of praise, except that she made a bundle off that as well. She wanted to help Russia develop its own Silicon Valley by having American high-tech companies locate there. Called Skolkovo Innovation Center, it was founded by then president Dmitry Medevev in 2009 just as Hillary was coming in. Of the 28 US companies accepted into Skolkovo, 17 made “donations” to the Clinton Foundation.

Viktor Vekselberg, a Russian billionaire in Putin’s inner circle, is in charge of Skolkovo. It was Vekselberg who invited Clinton to make the $500,000 speech, staged at a obscure bank no one had ever heard of.

In passing it should be noted that Israel has taken full advantage of the existence of Skolkovo.

Wikipedia: “In 2011 Israel’s Ariel University Center, jointly with Martal Consulting Group, signed a co-operation agreement with the Skolkovo Innovation Center known as “Silicon Valley” in Russia. Following this agreement, an Israel-Skolkovo Gateway/Center (IsraelSK) was formed. IsraelSK model for innovative technologies commercialization involves raising private capital and government grants leveraging for Israeli and Russian start-up companies. In 2016, Igor Drozdev, chairman of the board of the Skolkovo Foundation, signed a co-operation agreement with the mayor of Yokneam.” (That’s where I live.) “Beginning in 2018, Israel’s Hadassah Medical Center, in agreement with the mayor of Moscow, is opening a branch in Skolkovo, becoming the first foreign hospital to open in Russia.” That’s a four-storey building and is now open.

The Saudis. In 2016 the Saudis were very agitated that families of victims of 9/11 were going to be permitted to sue them for their role in 9/11. Bush II and Obama had been united in keeping the lid on that can of worms hermetically sealed. The Saudi response was to buy the likely next president, Hillary. Tony Podesta, brother of her campaign manager, was hired at $140,000 per month to be the Saudis’ lobbyist. But that wasn’t enough. Mohammad Ben Salman, the guy who runs that country and is best known today for ordering a state enemy Jamal Kashoggi to be hacked to death in Turkey, made this comment in an interview in March 2016 with Jordanian media.

Bin Salman: “In the American current election we provide with full enthusiasm 20 per cent of the cost of Hillary Clinton’s election, even though some elements in the country don’t have a positive look at the king’s supporting a woman for the presidency.”

Up to that point he said that they had already forked over $24 million to Hillary.

No one in the US MSM was paying attention to what Kerry was doing on the job, but a few things leaked out here and there. He was using his position as state secretary to promote his private businesses or those of his wife, who is worth $1.2 billion, however they arrange things among themselves.

Israel gas: During Kerry’s time there was a major controversy over what to do over a possible monopoly of the companies operating in the offshore natural gas fields. Kerry called Netanyahu and urged him to follow through on a plan to retroactively “forgive” the monopoly, telling Netanyahu it was important for Israel to have a “consistent regulatory environment.”

Kerry happened to have a $1 million investment in one of the companies, reported first by the whistleblower site OpenSecrets.org.

His conflict of interest was widely reported in the Israeli press although it did not seem to be picked up in the US MSM.

Tibet water: Tibet was overrun and occupied by the Chinese Communists in the 1950s. Ever since reliable information on anything, even the population size is almost impossible to obtain. The government-in-exile, as it were, under the Dalai Lama says the population is 6 million while others publicize 3 million. An organization in Canada took considerable time studying the issue and concluded in 2015 that 6 million is probably right.

There was major bloodshed in 1959 and then again in the late 80s when the Iron Curtain was falling elsewhere, but it never happened in Tibet or China generally for that matter. There was further violence circa 2007. Those who were not killed in any of these were probably hauled off to forced labor camps, a death sentence in itself for many.

Self-immolations began in 2009. Buddhists had resorted to this elsewhere (if you are old to recall Vietnam, you know that) but this was new to Tibet. What happened was that in 2008 Chinese troops gunned down 20 16-year-old girls in a school. Exactly a year later authorities cancelled a religious mourning ceremony in memory of the girls. A young Buddhist monk named Tapey ran into the street with his robes enflamed holding up a Tibetan flag in one hand and a picture of the Dalai Lama in the other. Troops shot him before the flames consumed him.

Altogether there were 145 self-immolations during Obama’s term. The last two in 2016 were a 20-year-old female student named Tsering Kyi and a former monk named Rabten.

Richard Pollock: “Rabten was seen running down a roadway, his body engulfed in flames as a passerby chanted prayers. He collapsed on a sidewalk as his skin burned away, revealing charred skeletal remains. Rabten left behind a statement, saying: ‘We Tibetans are not scared of death, but in order to solve the issue peacefully, I was left with the only choice of self-immolating to warn people. What is necessary for Tibetan people is other people’s blessing and show of concern. We should be able to live like genuine people on our own land. Long live Tibetans!’”

During Kerry’s term what the Tibetans got from the Americans was a curse, not a blessing.

The Tibetans realize that only a miracle will restore to them their country’s independence but what they ask from foreigners is not to join the Chinese in exploiting their natural resources. In three cases when foreigners went into Tibet, the protests in their own countries caused them to beat a retreat. These were: Holiday Inn from the US. The Free Tibet movement launched an international boycott of the chain and they finally pulled out after a six-year campaign; Sino Gold Mining of Australia which capitulated after a one-year campaign and this persuaded the global giant Rio Tinto to scrap plans to enter Tibet.

The state department’s policy has always been not to encourage American firms to invest in Tibet. They issue reports regularly on “severe repression” of Tibetan human rights in the areas of “speech, religion, association, assembly, and movement.”

Kerry arrives and the Free Tibet movement was shocked to discover that his wife, in her complex of trusts and companies, had investments from two different sources in Tibet Water Ltd. that bottles pure glacial water for sale to Chinese elites and upscale Europeans. By 2025 the company is projected to sell 10 million tons of Tibetan bottled water.

One was a rather small investment of $15,000 which Heinz made in 2014. It takes time to discover these things but in 2016 the head of the Free Tibet movement wrote to Kerry personally.

Richard Pollock: “Free Tibet director Eleanor Byrne-Rosengren sent a letter in March 2016 to Kerry imploring him and his wife to divest themselves of their ‘inappropriate’ stock in the Chinese company.

“‘’On behalf of Free Tibet and our supporters, I urge you to ensure that the Heinz Family Trust divests its shares in Tibet Water Resources Ltd,’ Byrne-Rosengren told Kerry.”

Kerry never answered her and never divested in violation of the very policy he was supposed to be implementing. But that was only the tip of the iceberg.

Richard Pollock: “Kerry and his wife also have more than $1 million invested in Blackstone Capital Partners, a private equity arm of the Blackstone Group. Blackstone Fund Advisors, a part of the same company is one of the largest single institutional investors in Tibet Water. The investment firm reportedly invested $11.2 million in Tibet Water, according to the Financial Times.”

In this case the Free Tibet movement generated 1,300 letters of protest to the Blackstone Group and they never replied to any of them.

Fewer and fewer governments are prepared to criticize China over its actions in Tibet because it is throwing vast sums at countries all over the globe in order to gain influence. For example China helped Greece with its debt problems. In the EU they needed unanimous consent of all 28 members to condemn China for its human rights record. Greece voted nay. It’s coming down to the fact that if America doesn’t speak up for the Tibetans, no one else will. If you put a grifter like Kerry in charge of US foreign policy, they are entirely isolated.

News does not travel easily out of Tibet but the 145 self-immolations of mostly young people in the space of seven years was a unique occurrence in the world which the Americans could have drawn attention to. That water exploitation is also one that environmentalists are watching closely so global publicity could have helped the Tibetans in their cause. But the publicity would have embarrassed Kerry, so he locked hands with the Chinese government in keeping the self-immolations as quiet as possible. The only interest Kerry ever showed in Tibet was how much money it was putting in his wallet.

The plot thickens. Stephen Schwarzman is one of the richest men in the US, worth $12.4 billion. He’s done $32 billion worth of deals in China alone in the last five years. He has a sterling reputation and is renown as a philanthropist. He is the owner of Blackstone.

Schwarzman ignored the 1,300 letters from the Free Tibet movement protesting his collusion with the Chinese in exploiting Tibetan resources. As a private citizen he was not like Kerry but entitled to do business wherever he wants. But as a Jew he should be ashamed of himself. If Israel had lost the 1948 war we would in the same shape as the Tibetans are today, those who had not been thrown into the sea. You could write a million letters around the world and no one would answer. Those people live on hope. When that goes that nation will die. Neither Schwarzman nor anyone else has any right to do anything to kill their hope, which is what he was and is doing. Someone has to say it.

Now for the upside. Schwarzman is a Republican but did not support Trump in the election or contribute to his campaign although he did make a loan of $312 million to the son-in-law Jared Kushner for a real estate transaction during the campaign but that was business.

Since the election he’s become close again to his neighbor and long-time friend Trump. They got off to a rocky start. Trump appointed him head of a corporate policy advisors forum which ended when the cry went up that Trump is a “white supremacist” after Charlottesville.

But Schwartzman happens to be an American that the Chinese leader Xi Jinping holds in high esteem immediately after Henry Kissinger, who is now 95. When Trump launched his trade war with China, Schwartzman became a very important intermediator. Trump, the nationalist, was not going to listen to anything that Schwartzman, the globalist, recommended but Schwartzman was able to convey precisely what the issues were directly to Xi and that led to the truce at the G20 meeting and a positive outlook that a new deal can be achieved.

On Tibet Trump signed a new law with bipartisan support that exerts leverage on China to let Americans visit that land. Today they have to go through hoops and the majority are rejected. Those that do enter are shadowed so that they cannot mix freely with the people. This law is a tit-for-tat enraging the Chinese but it does send a message to the Tibetans that Kerry and his ilk are rogue elements. America has not forgotten Tibet.

Peace Corps: This slice of Kerry family chicanery became known because the Peace Corps referred one of its former directors, a guy by the name of Buck Buckingham, for prosecution for conflict of interest. He was fined $10,000.

Kerry set up a foundation called Seed, headed by his daughter Vanessa (by his first wife.)

In 2012 when Kerry was chairman of the Senate committee on foreign relations, which oversaw Peace Corps spending along with that of the state department, Seed formed a partnership with the Peace Corps to provide AIDS relief in parts of Africa. A year before the $2 million contract was awarded, Buckingham finagled it so that it would be written in the books as a grant without Seed having to go to tenders.

Then Buckingham went to work for Seed when Kerry was foreign secretary immediately after Seed got a $6.4 million four-year extension in 2015 again without going to tenders.

Kid Stuff. Peter Schweizer has a new book out entitled, “Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends.”

The families are from both sides of the aisle. And like cancer, they’ve probably always been around and no one has any idea of a cure. The French thought they had rid themselves of families like these with the guillotine, but they just morph into new forms.

Naturally the Kerrys would be found among the worst of the current lot. When the Democrats won in 2008 his step-son Christopher Heinz and Biden’s son Hunter rapidly formed a private equity firm to take advantage of the situation. The firm, Rosemount, grew by leaps and bounds to a reported value of $2.4 billion. The two followed their powerful fathers around and when the US did things favorable to places, the boys entered and got favorable financial deals in those places. I’ll give you one example. Joe Biden flew to China on official business with Hunter on the plane. Within 10 days Rosemount had inked a billion dollar deal with a subsidiary of the Bank of China.

Hunter Biden is a piece of works. It’s a wonder anyone would invest a dollar with him. He got kicked out of the navy reserve in 2014 after less than a year for using cocaine. He dumped his wife Kathleen of 23 years (three children) who then accused him of squandering hundreds of thousands of dollars on “drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, strip clubs, and gifts for women with whom he has sexual relations, while leaving the family with no funds to pay … bills.” When his brother Beau died he took up with his widow Hallie. Very biblical of him. The divorce now finalized showed that Kathleen was not exaggerating about his squandering money: they owed $300,000 in taxes and had a double mortgage. If Joe Biden wins the presidency Rosemount will probably grow to be as rich as Microsoft.

I’ve run through all this to show why Hillary and Kerry did nothing to enforce Resolution 1701. They were too busy taking care of business. There was no time to waste on anything else.

So what was Obama’s problem in not enforcing Resolution 1701? He is not a crook at the level of the Clintons and the Kerrys. He dipped into crime once while a senator. He was in tight in Chicago with the gangster Tony Rezko. One day Rezko made him an offer he could not refuse: an expensive property at a ridiculous price. Obama took it. Jerusalem lawyer Ron Festinger, an expert in these matters, wrote that if Obama had committed that deal here under Israeli law, he would have been sent to prison for five years.

Obama is purely and simply a total incompetent. You can compare his performance with having a hypothetical horse instead of him in the White House at the time of Resolution 1701 and the Iran deal. The two would come out even regarding non-enforcement of Resolution 1701 but the horse would win in the Iran deal because he would not have given the Iranians $150 billion.

We have another such case. When Obama came into office robbers had just committed perhaps the greatest robbery in world history causing a near collapse of the economy. He knew their names, home addresses, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses. Compare his performance here with having a vicious dog in the White House. Again Obama loses. He let all the robbers walk away. The dog would have bitten at least one of them.

Anyone else would have sent a swat team to surround Wall Street and collar enough felons there to fill a prison for 20 years.

It had always been the rule in the US that no one was above the law. Bill Clinton for example gained convictions of 1,000 high finance big-fish felons; Bush II, 1,300; Obama, zero attempts.

Obama had changed the rule. The new rule became, if you stole a loaf of bread you went to jail; if you stole the bakery, you got invited to the White House. Human nature is such that in their deep gratitude for not being made to answer for their crimes, big-fish malefactors would contribute massively to the campaigns of Obama and any Democrat, such as Hillary.

Where was the MSM all the time while no action was being taken to prosecute the Wall Street felons? Good question. Certainly there were no public histrionics of the Jim Acosta sort valiantly defending his microphone against a female intern come to take it away, that might have drawn the public’s attention to Obama’s paralysis. Nor were there any first-rank Democrats who raised a voice of protest except for one, Bernie Sanders. He never stopped screaming about this, even after the statue of limitations meant that the felons were home free.

Bernie Sanders: “It is an outrage that not one major Wall Street executive has gone to jail for causing the near collapse of the economy. The failure to prosecute the crooks on Wall Street for their illegal and reckless behavior is a clear indictment of our broken criminal justice system.”

“Millions of Americans lost their jobs, homes, life savings and ability to send their kids to college because of the greed on Wall Street. We can no longer tolerate a criminal justice system that treats Wall Street executives as too big for jail when their actions have ruined the lives of so many Americans.”

The party would strike back at Bernie for embarrassing the others by rigging the primaries.

Death To America!: Kerry never seems to do anything in the public interest unless he can line his pockets in the process. So when he went madly off to Iran to whimper on the shoulders of the foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, after Trump cancelled the Iran deal, we can surmise Kerry made the trip because he was about to lose a bundle of money. You know Zarif; everyone does. He’s the guy always leading the chant, “Death To America! Death To Israel!” And since when do ex-foreign secretaries side publicly with America’s enemies in opposition to US policy? We can also surmise that the message that Kerry delivered to Zarif was, not to worry, not to do anything rash, Trump will be a one-term president, the sanctions will be lifted, and then it will all be business as usual. Trust me.

Will Trump be a one-term president? Unless the unemployment rate takes a big hike, highly unlikely.

I’ll spell it out in a nutshell. There are more people who work with their hands than sit on their rears. That’s the working class. If they are with you, it doesn’t matter what the elites do and say, if yours is a centre-right party, you’ve got the advantage. Menachem Begin, the Likud founder, invented this formula, a centre-right party aligned with the working class. Previously because of the history of organized labor, the working class normally went with centre-left parties. But if their leaders merge into the elites and forget about them as happened in Israel and then under Obama in America, it leaves the working class with no one looking out for them. (In Israel the last chance that the misnamed Labor had to replenish their ranks was when the Russians came in and very many were unemployed. Ehud Barak in 1999 promised the Russians tens of thousands of jobs and delivered none. They have not won since.) In the US it’s a different system and a much bigger country, but Trump has the working class with him. After years of making his living on construction sites he speaks their language, takes no guff, and they feel one of them is in the White House. They don’t show their true strength in polls just at the ballot box, both men and women. As a Tennessee congressman described the scene in the last election: “They were coming down from hills and up from the valleys, people I never knew existed, and they were all voting for Trump.” That’s how Trump beat Hillary among white women 53-43, a rout, even though he got only lukewarm support in the traditional affluent Republican suburbs and trailed by a country mile in all the polls from start to finish. “Deplorables” they may be in the eyes of the elites, as Hillary dubbed them, but it was to give a voice to the common people that democracy was invented. If you are familiar with the song from the 80s by Paul Young “Living In The Love Of The Common People” that tells you everything you need to know about the Trump base and they are not going away any time soon.