Its All About Our #Choice

#MEGA. #Trump #StandsWithIsrael.

This is from a Joint Statement from Jason Dov Greenblatt and David Friedman, Co-Chairmen of the Israel Advisory Committee to Donald J. Trump

It has been an exhilarating election cycle. Approximately seven months ago, we were blessed to have been tapped by Donald J. Trump to be his top advisors with respect to the State of Israel. We have been fortunate to work with a talented team of people and have put together the below positions. Each of these positions have been discussed with Mr. Trump and the Trump campaign, and most have been stated, in one form or another, by Mr. Trump in various interviews or speeches given by him or on his social media accounts. For those of you who are true friends of the State of Israel, and for those of you who believe that the State of Israel and the United States of America have an unbreakable friendship, we urge you to read the below. We would like to express our gratitude to those individuals who have helped us over the past few months - we truly appreciate your efforts, friendship and guidance. We would also like to express our gratitude to our friend, a great friend of the State of Israel, Donald J. Trump, who gave us the tremendous opportunity to serve in this capacity. May God bless the United States of America and the State of Israel.

• The unbreakable bond between the United States and Israel is based upon shared values of democracy, freedom of speech, respect for minorities, cherishing life, and the opportunity for all citizens to pursue their dreams.
• Israel is the state of the Jewish people, who have lived in that land for 3,500 years. The State of Israel was founded with courage and determination by great men and women against enormous odds and is an inspiration to people everywhere who value freedom and human dignity.
• Israel is a staunch ally of the U.S. and a key partner in the global war against Islamic jihadism. Military cooperation and coordination between Israel and the U.S. must continue to grow.
• The American people value our close friendship and alliance with Israel -- culturally, religiously, and politically. While other nations have required U.S. troops to defend them, Israelis have always defended their own country by themselves and only ask for military equipment assistance and diplomatic support to do so. The U.S. does not need to nation-build in Israel or send troops to defend Israel.
• The Memorandum of Understanding signed by the American and Israeli Governments is a good first step, but there is much more to be done. A Trump Administration will ensure that Israel receives maximum military, strategic and tactical cooperation from the United States, and the MOU will not limit the support that we give. Further, Congress will not be limited to give support greater than that provided by the MOU if it chooses to do so. Israel and the United States benefit tremendously from what each country brings to the table - the relationship is a two way street.
• The U.S. should veto any United Nations votes that unfairly single out Israel and will work in international institutions and forums, including in our relations with the European Union, to oppose efforts to delegitimize Israel, impose discriminatory double standards against Israel, or to impose special labeling requirements on Israeli products or boycotts on Israeli goods.
• The U.S. should cut off funds for the UN Human Rights Council, a body dominated by countries presently run by dictatorships that seems solely devoted to slandering the Jewish State. UNESCO's attempt to disconnect the State of Israel from Jerusalem is a one-sided attempt to ignore Israel's 3,000-year bond to its capital city, and is further evidence of the enormous anti-Israel bias of the United Nations.
• The U.S. should view the effort to boycott, divest from, and sanction (BDS) Israel as inherently anti-Semitic and take strong measures, both diplomatic and legislative, to thwart actions that are intended to limit commercial relations with Israel, or persons or entities doing business in Israeli areas, in a discriminatory manner. The BDS movement is just another attempt by the Palestinians to avoid having to commit to a peaceful co-existence with Israel. The false notion that Israel is an occupier should be rejected.
• The Trump administration will ask the Justice Department to investigate coordinated attempts on college campuses to intimidate students who support Israel.
• A two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians appears impossible as long as the Palestinians are unwilling to renounce violence against Israel or recognize Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. Additionally, the Palestinians are divided between PA rule in the West Bank and Hamas rule in Gaza so there is not a united Palestinian people who could control a second state. Hamas is a US-designated terrorist organization that actively seeks Israel's destruction. We will seek to assist the Israelis and the Palestinians in reaching a comprehensive and lasting peace, to be freely and fairly negotiated between those living in the region.
• The Palestinian leadership, including the PA, has undermined any chance for peace with Israel by raising generations of Palestinian children on an educational program of hatred of Israel and Jews. The larger Palestinian society is regularly taught such hatred on Palestinian television, in the Palestinian press, in entertainment media, and in political and religious communications. The two major Palestinian political parties - Hamas and Fatah - regularly promote anti-Semitism and jihad.
• The U.S. cannot support the creation of a new state where terrorism is financially incentivized, terrorists are celebrated by political parties and government institutions, and the corrupt diversion of foreign aid is rampant. 
• The U.S. should not support the creation of a state that forbids the presence of Christian or Jewish citizens, or that discriminates against people on the basis of religion.
• The U.S. should support direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians without preconditions, and will oppose all Palestinian, European and other efforts to bypass direct negotiations between parties in favor of an imposed settlement. Any solutions imposed on Israel by outside parties including by the United Nations Security Council, should be opposed. We support Israel's right and obligation to defend itself against terror attacks upon its people and against alternative forms of warfare being waged upon it legally, economically, culturally, and otherwise.
• Israel's maintenance of defensible borders that preserve peace and promote stability in the region is a necessity. Pressure should not be put on Israel to withdraw to borders that make attacks and conflict more likely.
• The U.S. will recognize Jerusalem as the eternal and indivisible capital of the Jewish state and Mr. Trump's Administration will move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.
• Despite the Iran Nuclear deal in 2015, the U.S. State Department recently designated Iran, yet again, as the leading state sponsor of terrorism - putting the Middle East particularly, but the whole world at risk by financing, arming, and training terrorist groups operating around the world including Hamas, Hezbollah, and forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The U.S. must counteract Iran's ongoing violations of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action regarding Iran's quest for nuclear weapons and their noncompliance with past and present sanctions, as well as the agreements they signed, and implement tough, new sanctions when needed to protect the world and Iran's neighbors from its continuing nuclear and non-nuclear threats.

#DailyComic

Fox Ratings Drop as Megan Kelly Takes Lead

Poor Megan Kelly, as she turns out to not be the golden goose she was promised to be....

But perhaps she is worse, as reported by MATTHEW BOYLE of Breitbart, the October ratings just came in and according to The Hill newspaper, CNN beat Fox News for the first time in 15 years.

According to the Hill:

“CNN enjoyed its strongest ratings month in years in October, beating rival Fox News in the key 25-54 demographic for a full month for the first time since 2001,” The Hill’s Joe Concha wrote. “CNN averaged 704,000 prime time viewers overall in October from the ages 25-54 demographic — the most coveted group by advertisers. Fox came in second with an average of 663,000 viewers, while MSNBC averaged 432,000 viewers — an all-time high for the Comcast-owned network.”

Cracks in the International Criminal Court

Wall Street Journal

Tuesday, November 1, 2016

Guest post by John Bolton

The International Criminal Court—established by an international treaty and operating since 2002 in The Hague—is under assault from within. South Africa, Burundi and Gambia have announced their intent to withdraw from the ICC (the first members to do so), and other African states, such as Kenya, are also on the brink.

When “nonaligned” nations begin deserting any international organization, it surely is in real trouble. But for reasons that have been clear since the Statute of Rome creating the ICC was negotiated, it has never been in America’s interest to see the court succeed. We should hope the African exodus continues.

The ostensible trigger for the withdrawal is that many African nations are unwilling to arrest and remand to the ICC Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir, accused of genocide and war crimes, when he enters their sovereign territory. There is hardly a less sympathetic figure on the planet, outside of Islamic State and al Qaeda. However, the issue is emphatically not whether one favors “justice” for international wrongdoers, but whether the ICC—with its inherent illegitimacy—could ever be the right vehicle for the job.

Within the African Union (open to all countries on the continent) the issue is also made more complex by a rising feeling that the ICC is the latest European neocolonial pretext to interfere in their internal affairs. Since the court’s founding, all 39 public ICC indictments have been of Africans.

Given the European Union’s deepening travails, Europe hardly has the time, will or resources to dabble much in neocolonialism. Yet it is also true that the ICC has been the Western human-rights community’s dearest project, pursued with near-religious devotion in much of Europe and the U.S., and much less enthusiastically elsewhere.

Europeans happily embraced this additional effort to reduce their own sovereignty by joining an institution that could severely compromise their own justice systems. Yet only 124 of 193 U.N. members have joined. The U.S. removed its signature from the Rome Statute in 2002, and even Barack Obama never re-signed, knowing that Senate ratification was impossible—Americans up to the president himself remain at risk of ICC prosecution if U.S. personnel are alleged to commit offenses on a member state’s territory.

Russia, China and India are the most prominent among nearly 70 other nations that have not become members, although something called “Palestine” has joined. This is hardly the trajectory of a viable international institution.

What Africa’s simmering discontent really exposes are the fundamental fallacies underlying the ICC project itself. The world is not one civil society, like a real country, within which disputes are resolved peacefully under the rule of law. Pretending that the globe is a nation under construction, and establishing institutions that pretend to perform like national legislatures, courts and executives, won’t make the world a country.

Even characterizing the ICC primarily as a court ignores the real problem. The Rome Statute’s actual danger is less the court than its prosecutor, which, as Americans understand the separation of powers, is not a judicial function but an executive one. Next to the power to wage war, prosecutorial authority is the most-potent, most-feared responsibility in any executive’s arsenal.

In the case of the ICC, its ability to prosecute democratically elected officials and their military commanders for allegations of war crimes or crimes against humanity could undercut the most fundamental responsibility of any government, the power of self-defense. This power, lodged in the ICC’s prosecutor, is what Africans are really protesting, and also why the U.S. will not join the ICC in the imaginable future.

The prosecutor is much like the “independent counsels” created in America by post-Watergate legislation. These prosecutors performed so irresponsibly and oppressively that a bipartisan congressional majority quietly allowed the statute to lapse. Americans now understand that political accountability—in the broad constitutional sense that federal prosecutorial legitimacy stems from the president’s election—is absolutely critical to responsible law-enforcement.

ICC advocates contend that the prosecutor is supervised by the court itself. Yet in the U.S., for instance, our separation of governmental powers specifically rejects judicial supervision of prosecutors—precisely because elected, and therefore politically accountable, officials must be vested with responsibility for prosecutorial decisions. ICC advocates also argue that the prosecutor is supervised by the Rome Statute’s 124 state parties.

This is purest fantasy. Anything supervised by 124 governments isn’t supervised by anyone, as the sprawling U.N. system demonstrates on virtually a daily basis. Particularly from an American perspective, the ICC’s lack of political accountability and dangerous potential to impede resolution of global conflicts proves it is not fit for purpose.

No wonder the ICC is well on the way to becoming yet another embarrassment like the International Court of Justice or the U.N. Human Rights Council.

Mr. Bolton is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of “Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad” (Simon & Schuster, 2007). 

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