"Trump is Making U.S. a Laughingstock"

The outgoing director of the Office of Government Ethics has accused President Donald Trump of "profiting from the presidency," saying the United States is "pretty close to a laughingstock."

In an interview with The New York Times published on Monday, Walter Shaub lamented that Trump has had a damaging attitude toward ethics, undermining the US position abroad.

“It’s hard for the United States to pursue international anticorruption and ethics initiatives when we’re not even keeping our own side of the street clean. It affects our credibility,” he told the newspaper over the weekend. “I think we are pretty close to a laughingstock at this point.”

Shaub, who will leave office nearly six months before the end of his term, said the president’s frequent trips to his own business properties have raised ethics concerns.

“Misuse of position is really the heart of the ethics program, and the internationally accepted definition of corruption is abuse of entrusted power," he added.

“It undermines the government ethics program by casting doubt on the integrity of government decision making.”

Shaub announced earlier this month that he would resign after challenging the White House on ethics issues for six months, saying he felt he could not accomplish much in the Trump administration.

Shaub, who started his tenure during the George W. Bush administration, will officially step down from the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) on July 19, according to a letter to Trump that Shaub posted on Twitter.

Before Trump was inaugurated, his lawyer unveiled how Trump would structure his businesses after taking office. Rather than completely divesting, Trump would maintain limited connections to his business empire.

Shaub denounced the arrangement, calling it “wholly inadequate” in resolving any potential conflicts of interest.

Jimmy Carter, Antisemite

William Bradford Smith, Chair of the Division of History, Politics & International Studies at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, once sent a letter to the Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia, which said in part:
When I taught at Emory University, I used to see former President Jimmy Carter on a fairly regular basis, and it was all I could do at times to stop myself from spitting at him.

Carter’s hatred of Israel and, by extension, of all Jews (and make no mistake, if you spend any time in the man’s presence, his discomfort at being in the same room with someone who merely appears to be Jewish is palpable), is rooted in the man’s megalomania, and his unflinching belief in his own rectitude.
In an interview
Carter once  said, “When you single out any particular group of people for secondary citizenship status, that’s a violation of basic human rights.” But, if the former president really believes that, he should look at his own life, since he has displayed anti-Semitism during much of his presidential and post presidential career.

According to many observers Carters anti-Jewish bigotry stems from his feeling that he lost reelection campaign because he became the first Democrat since 1920 not to receive a majority of the Jewish vote. Carter got 45%, Reagan received 39%, and 3rd party candidate John Anderson got 14%. It is also that perceived abandonment behind Carter’s disdain of Israel.

Ambassador Marc Ginsburg was Jimmy Carter’s deputy senior adviser on the Middle East, and from 1977 through 1980 was White House liaison to the State Department. He has a unique perspective of Jimmy Carter’s Middle East dealings. According to the Ambassador, the reason Carter goes out of his way to bash Israel is that he feels American Jews did not fawn over him enough for all that he did for Israel.

…When former President Jimmy Carter revealed that Israel has more than 150 nuclear weapons, he clearly had a motive, according to his administration’s deputy senior adviser, Marc Ginsberg: “I think there’s no doubt — particularly given the vantage point I had in the White House at the end of his administration — that he resents the way in which Israel and the American-Jewish community have failed to express sufficient gratitude for his efforts on behalf of peace in the Middle East.
“In my judgment, there’s no other explanation,” Ginsberg says.
(…) “There’s no doubt he knows exactly what he is doing when he’s making these statements, or making misrepresentations that Hamas has agreed to recognize Israel if certain conditions occur, or to the book he wrote [‘Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid’] referring to Israel.”
Believe it or not, when he was in the Oval Office, President Carter rejected someone for a position on the board of the Holocaust Memorial Council because the guy’s name was too Jewish. That’s right the Holocaust Memorial Council. Monroe Freedman, who was executive director of the council during Carter’s presidency, told a reporter that Aaron Klein, that a noted Holocaust scholar who was a Presbyterian Christian, was rejected from the council’s board by Carter’s office because the scholar’s name “sounded too Jewish.”
Freedman said he sent a memo to Carter’s office containing recommendations for council board members. The memo was returned with a note on the upper right hand corner that stated, “Too many Jews.” The note, Freedman said, was written in Carter’s handwriting and was initialed by Carter.
Ultra-liberal famous law professor Alan Dershowitz also feels that Carter is a Jew-hater. In an essay talking about Carter’s anti-Semitic claims that the Jews control foreign policy and the media, he wrote:

The entire premise of his criticism of Jewish influence on American foreign policy is that money talks. It is Carter, not me, who has made the point that if politicians receive money from Jewish sources, then they are not free to decide issues regarding the Middle East for themselves. It is Carter, not me, who has argued that distinguished reporters cannot honestly report on the Middle East because they are being paid by Jewish money. So, by Carter’s own standards, it would be almost economically “suicidal” for Carter “to espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine.”

(…) If money determines political and public views as Carter insists “Jewish money” does, Carter’s views on the Middle East must be deemed to have been influenced by the vast sums of Arab money he has received. If he who pays the piper calls the tune, then Carter’s off-key tunes have been called by his Saudi Arabian paymasters. It pains me to say this, but I now believe that there is no person in American public life today who has a lower ratio of real to apparent integrity than Jimmy Carter.
Ken Stein was director of the Carter Center and even collaborated with Jimmy Carter on the book, “The Blood of Abraham,” resigned in protest from the center after Carter published his biased tome “Palestine Peace Not Apartheid.”
Jimmy Carter should examine his own life before makes false charges of bigotry against others. Thankfully the drug he is taking that was tested in Israel seems to have eradicated the cancer in his brain (yes the nation and people he abhors may have saved his life). I only wish him a long life to examine the hatred in his own heart.

By Jeff Dunetz

In a Time of holocaust Deniers, Nanette Konig Talks about Her Friend, Anne Frank.

Looking through the barbed wire of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, 14-year-old Nanette Konig could barely recognize her friend and classmate from Amsterdam, Anne Frank.

Both girls had been caught by the Nazis in the Dutch capital and were sent to starve to death in a place Konig describes today as “hell on Earth.” Both were emaciated when they saw each other again in different sections of the same German camp in 1944.

“She looked like a walking skeleton, just like me,” Konig, one of the few living friends of the teenage diarist, told JTA in a video interview from her home in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on April 6, which was her 88th birthday.

As more and more Holocaust survivors die each year, Konig was compelled a decade ago to break her long silence and join a diminishing group of witnesses who now tell their story in the media and at schools. Her lectures, which Konig says she has delivered to thousands of students on three continents, are something that “survivors owe to the victims.”

But it’s also her way of repaying Anne Frank’s father, Otto, who comforted Konig in the aftermath of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, even as he was grieving for his own two daughters and wife.

Otto Frank, who edited the diaries his daughter wrote while the family was in hiding into the best-selling “The Diary of a Young Girl,” met Konig in 1945 at a rehabilitation center in eastern Holland. Konig, who was 16 and weighed only 60 pounds, was brought there following the Allies’ liberation of Bergen-Belsen — “a hell where people were not exterminated immediately, but died from hunger, dysentery, typhus, cold, exhaustion, beatings, torture and exposure,” she says.

Yet Konig was one of the lucky ones to survive. Anne Frank and her older sister, Margot, were among the estimated 50,000 who perished at Bergen-Belsen in 1945 after arriving there from Auschwitz. Their mother, Edith, died at Auschwitz a month before her daughters, just three weeks before the Red Army liberated the death camp.

Otto Frank, the sole survivor from his family, already knew his daughters and wife were dead when he came to the rehabilitation center to visit Konig, who is also the only survivor from her family. Konig said he wanted to know as much as possible about his family’s last weeks.

Listening to her stories and seeing her emaciated physique “visibly caused Otto Frank a lot of pain,” Konig recalled.

But despite his grief Frank, who died in 1980, “gave me support, encouraged me at a point in my life when I had no one,” she said. “He was a very special man and I will always be grateful for the consolation he offered me.”

Like many of Anne Frank’s schoolmates and friends, Konig recalled the diarist as a “sunny, smiley child.”

But unlike most of them, Konig also witnessed Anne “change into an adult” in a matter of weeks at Bergen-Belsen, she said.

“We had a childhood and then we had no adolescence,” she said. “We simply became grown-ups overnight. It was the only way to survive.”

During their meeting, Otto Frank told Konig that he intended to edit his daughter’s diaries — there were three of them — into a book. During their conversation, he said he was still thinking of omitting some of the personal details that Anne included in the diaries, including her tense relationship with her mother and her account of getting her first period.

Ultimately, though, he included these details — countless readers of Anne Frank’s book regard them as crucial to achieving the personal connection many of them feel to her.

“The Diary of a Young Girl” is perhaps the world’s most-read manuscript about the Holocaust; it has been translated into 70 languages in dozens of countries.

After the war, Konig worked as a bilingual (English-Dutch) secretary in England. She married a British man and moved to Brazil in the 1950s. She and her husband have three children and five grandchildren, as well as several great-grandchildren.

But it wasn’t until a decade ago that Konig felt the drive to bear testimony — similar to what Otto Frank felt when he published Anne’s diary and set up the educational Anne Frank Foundation in Basel, Switzerland.

“I saw he was the exception,” Konig said of Otto Frank. “Most Holocaust survivors decided not to talk about it, maybe it was too painful. Maybe it was too complicated. In the Netherlands there was a sense that Jews shouldn’t make too much of a fuss about their own tragedy when everyone suffered.”

Gradually, Konig began speaking at schools – first the ones her grandchildren attended. Then she was invited to speak about the Holocaust on Brazilian television and other media. She went on to speak at schools in the United States and Europe, and give interviews to leading media in her native Netherlands.

In 2015, Konig published a book in Brazil titled “I Survived the Holocaust.”  It has since been published in Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish. She said she is looking to have it published in English as well.

“It became clear to me that we, the survivors, have a duty to the victims, even when it’s an unpleasant one,” Konig said.

The Jews, she said, “are not so vulnerable anymore in a world that has a strong Israel and its robust voice.”

But other minorities, she adds, “are as vulnerable as we were.”

In her talks at high schools, Konig tries to impress upon her listeners how the Holocaust was the result of a democratic transition of power.

“Two weeks after he took office,” she said of Adolf Hitler, “he revoked the constitution, closed parliament and declared himself a dictator. When your time comes to vote, be sure to exercise it wisely.”

When she speaks in  the Netherlands, Konig said part of what she regards as her duty is to talk about the checkered history of the population of that country, where both Nazi collaboration and heroism were prevalent.

The Netherlands has an outsize number of Righteous among the Nations — non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. More than a fifth of all the 26,513 Righteous recognized by Israel are from the Netherlands, a nation of 17 million people. Its tally of 5,595 Righteous is the second-largest in the world after Poland’s 6,706.

But the Netherlands also has the highest death rate of Jews in Nazi-occupied Western Europe. The genocide, which resulted in the murder of 75 percent of the country’s pre-Holocaust Jewish population of 140,000, was facilitated by Dutch police, collaborators, and headhunters, and was followed by callous treatment of those who survived. Thousands were required to pay taxes on properties while they were in camps or in hiding, and fined for missing payments because of this reason.

Konig herself had to pay the equivalent of thousands of dollars in medical bills for her own rehabilitation after returning from Bergen-Belsen, she said.

This appears to have left her bitter toward the Dutch state.

“I never went back and I never considered going back to that country, where most of the Jews were killed,” she said. “In fact, I left as soon as I could.”

Yet Konig draws a distinction between the country and its people.

“I don’t think the Dutch wanted to kill us. They were acting out of fear,” she said. “And people will do most everything when they are afraid.”

http://www.jta.org/2017/04/13/news-opinion/world/anne-franks-final-days-as-told-by-her-former-classmate

The Real Story Behind The Syria Strikes

 I detest empty conspiracy theories. If the most straightforward logical explanation for something is well supported by the facts, then it’s probably true most of the time. But here’s the trouble with the events of the past forty-eight hours: none of it makes sense on its face. Not the gas attack in Syria. And certainly not Donald Trump’s response. I hate to say it, but these events only logically make sense if they’ve all been arranged by Vladimir Putin.
 Let’s start with the gas attack in Syria. In my view, the rebels lack the motivation and the organization to have been behind it. And ISIS was so weakened during the Obama administration that it now lacks the muscle to have pulled this off (and ISIS would be loudly taking credit if it did). And yet Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, genocidal as he may be, would not have done something like this without the approval of the Kremlin, because he is a longtime Russian puppet in both an economic and military sense.
 But Vladimir Putin knows full well that a gas attack like this was likely to prompt at least some kind U.S. military response against Assad. So Putin wouldn’t have been behind this unless he wanted the U.S. to take military action in Syria. And the only logical reason for Putin to want that is if he was trying to set up a win for Donald Trump, which could boost his historically low approval rating. It would also allow Trump to paint himself as being willing to go against Russian interests, as an argument against the most serious charges in the worsening Trump-Russia scandal.
 Moreover, the U.S. Tomahawk missiles used in the attack could have been struck down by the S-400 weaponry which Russia already had in place in Syria (source: Washington Post) – but Russia chose not to do so. Additionally, NBC News is reporting on-air that the U.S. strike only took out planes and fueling stations, while leaving the two airstrips intact. The airstrips would have required significant reconstruction, but the equipment can theoretically be replaced tomorrow.
 The U.S. attack seemed tailor made to look fierce to casual viewers at home, while inflicting as little real damage to Assad’s air force capability as possible. Trump went out of his way not to substantially impair Assad, and in return Russia went out of its way to allow the U.S. attack to happen. For that matter, Russia seemed to have already known what the U.S. would hit when it made the decision not to take out the incoming missiles. Regardless of any public jawing between the U.S. and Russia tonight, this reeks of carefully crafted military theater.
 Combine that with the reports this week from Rachel Maddow on her MSNBC show that the U.S. military had already been building up troops in Syria before the gas attack, and it strongly suggests Donald Trump knew he would soon be taking military action there. Further, Trump tried to keep the troop buildup a secret, suggesting he didn’t want anyone to figure out that he already knew the gas attack was coming.
 This is a hell of an accusation to make on my part. I’m suggesting that Vladimir Putin orchestrated a gas attack in Syria so Donald Trump could strike back in minimal and symbolic fashion, and that Putin told Trump ahead of time to go ahead and begin building up troops in advance, and that Trump went along with the horrifying stunt. And yet this is – incredibly – the least convoluted explanation that makes any logical sense.
 Whatever the real story behind the surreal events of the past forty-eight hours, which has cost the lives of Syrian children and has put U.S. troops in harm’s way, Donald Trump’s role in it must be investigated to the fullest. Because if my logical theory is even half right, then Trump just became a genocidal war criminal.