Timetable of Trump's pullout from Syria being questioned

.apnews

Amid questions about the pace of his exit from Syria, President Donald Trump complained Monday that he’s getting “bad press” for his decision to pull American troops out of the country and insisted he was simply making good on his campaign promise against U.S. involvement in “never ending wars.”

Trump abruptly announced in mid-December that he was withdrawing 2,000 U.S. troops from Syria. The decision was roundly criticized by his national security advisers and Democratic and Republican lawmakers, several of whom asked him to reconsider. It prompted Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to step down, and the U.S. envoy to the coalition fighting Islamic State militants resigned in protest.

Trump fought back against the criticism.

“I am the only person in America who could say that, ‘I’m bringing our great troops back home, with victory,’ and get BAD press,” Trump tweeted Monday. “It is Fake News and Pundits who have FAILED for years that are doing the complaining. If I stayed in Endless Wars forever, they would still be unhappy!”

Critics not only warn of a resurgence of IS, but worry that the American exit is a betrayal of U.S.-backed Kurdish forces in Syria and leaves them vulnerable to an attack from Turkish forces. Turkey considers the U.S.-backed Kurdish People’s Protection Units, which now controls nearly 30 percent of Syria, a terrorist group linked to an insurgency within its own borders.

Critics also contend that the U.S. withdrawal would embolden Iran and Russia, which have supported the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, will be traveling to Israel and Turkey in early January to discuss what the White House says is the “deliberate and coordinated” withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria. Bolton also will be discussing increased cooperation with the Turkish military and other partners.

Bolton’s spokesman, Garrett Marquis, said in a statement Monday that Bolton will be joined in Turkey by Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and James Jeffrey, the secretary of state’s special representative for Syria engagement. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is expected to speak with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on New Year’s Day at the inauguration of Brazil’s new president in Brasilia.

Some critics also have expressed fear of a rapid withdrawal of U.S. troops.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a Trump backer and leading voice on national security and foreign affairs on Capitol Hill, had lunch with the president Sunday and emerged from the White House saying that Trump was slowing down the withdrawal from Syria.

“I think we’re in a pause situation where we’re re-evaluating what’s the best way to achieve the president’s objective of having people pay more and do more,” Graham said. “The pause is to assess the effects of the conditions on the ground.”

“I think we’re slowing things down in a smart way,” Graham said, adding that Trump was very aware of the plight of the Kurds.

Graham said his meeting with Trump was reassuring. “The president will make sure any withdrawal from Syria will be done in a fashion to ensure 1) ISIS is permanently destroyed, 2) Iran doesn’t fill in the back end, and 3) our Kurdish allies are protected,” Graham tweeted.

The National Security Council at the White House declined to answer questions about whether the president was re-evaluating or whether he was slowing his timetable for pulling troops out. The White House referred questions to the Pentagon.

When he announced he was pulling troops from Syria, Trump said the withdrawal would be rapid. On Monday, he said he was “slowly” pulling troops out. Initially, Trump said IS had been destroyed in Syria. Now he said the militant group is “mostly done,” although the network, with its hard-line extremist ideology, continues to inspire sympathizers and has affiliated groups in other parts of the world.

“If anybody but Donald Trump did what I did in Syria, which was an ISIS loaded mess when I became President, they would be a national hero. ISIS is mostly gone, we’re slowly sending our troops back home to be with their families, while at the same time fighting ISIS remnants,” Trump tweeted.

“I campaigned on getting out of Syria and other places. Now when I start getting out the Fake News Media, or some failed Generals who were unable to do the job before I arrived, like to complain about me & my tactics, which are working. Just doing what I said I was going to do!”

High school teacher suspected of molesting his students

times of Israel

Three girls aged 14-15 say educator at prestigious institution touched them inappropriately; suspect denies allegations, is sent to house arrest

A teacher in a prestigious high school in central Israel has been arrested on suspicion of molesting at least three of his female students, authorities announced on Tuesday.

The teacher, who hasn’t been named, was arrested last week and was released Tuesday to house arrest for seven days.

He teaches at a top school in the city of Rehovot, and all his alleged victims were 14-15 years old, reports said.

yeschurin aguna fixes

Can It Happen Here? Madeleine Albright Examines Fascism Then and Now

nytimes

George H. W. Bush declared that “the end of the Cold War has been a victory for all humanity,” and Vaclav Havel predicted Europe would create “a new kind of order” where the powerful would no longer suppress the less powerful and disputes would no longer be settled by force.

How far away those days seem. What happened to this optimism? Why has the momentum toward democracy and international comity slowed? Why, as Madeleine Albright asks early in her new book, “are we once again talking about fascism?”

Who better to address these questions than Albright, whose life was shaped by fascism and whose contribution to the cultivation of democracy as a stateswoman and private citizen is unparalleled? In “Fascism: A Warning” Albright (with Bill Woodward) draws on her personal history, government experience and conversations with Georgetown students to assess current dangers and how to deal with them.

LEADER OF ULTRA-ORTHODOX JEWISH SECT AND THREE FOLLOWERS ACCUSED OF CHILD KIDNAPPING

newsweek

Four members of the “extremist” Jewish sect Lev Tahor were arrested on Friday and accused of the "terrifying" kidnapping of two children, said the Justice Department. 

According to a news release by the Justice Department, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York charged Nachman Helbrans, Mayer Rosner, Aron Rosner, and Jacob Rosner with kidnapping two children in Woodridge, New York, and unlawfully transporting them to Mexico.

U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman said: “As alleged in the Complaint, the defendants engaged in a terrifying kidnapping of two children in the middle of the night, taking the children across the border to Mexico.  

“Thankfully, the kidnappers were no match for the perseverance of the FBI, the New York State Police, and Mexican authorities, and the children were recovered this morning after a nearly three-week search,” he said. 

The children, aged 12 and 14, were staying with their mother when they were seized. She had fled the sect’s base in Guatemala six weeks before the kidnapping fearing for their safety, according to the release. 

She had been granted temporary sole custody of the children and well as a protective order against their father, who is not named. 

Lev Tahor, which means “pure heart,” is an ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect. In 2014 most members fled from their community in Ontario, Canada, to Guatemala, after being investigated for child abuse by Canadian authorities. The sect claims it has suffered religious persecution at the hands of authorities. 

Shemos; Silence Brings Destruction byRabbi Shloime Pollak

The obvious question is: what should איוב have done? Protest the Gezeirah? Cry sympathetically for the Yidden (אז סטוט וויי שרייט מען)?? Well, יתרו didn't cry or protest and nothing happened to him... Apparently, it was clear that they can not do anything to change the decree... So what is wrong with being quiet??...

time for President Trump the great Disruptor to declare victory and retire

Opinion

Friedman: Time for GOP to threaten to fire Trump

palmbeach post.

Up to now I have not favored removing President Trump from office. I felt strongly that it would be best for the country that he leave the way he came in, through the ballot box. But last week was a watershed moment for me, and I think for many Americans, including some Republicans.

It was the moment when you had to ask whether we really can survive two more years of Trump as president, whether this man and his demented behavior — which will get only worse as the Mueller investigation concludes — are going to destabilize our country, our markets, our key institutions and, by extension, the world. And therefore his removal from office now has to be on the table.

I believe that the only responsible choice for the Republican Party today is an intervention with the president that makes clear that if there is not a radical change in how he conducts himself — and I think that is unlikely — the party’s leadership will have no choice but to press for his resignation or join calls for his impeachment.

It has to start with Republicans, given both the numbers needed in the Senate and political reality. Removing this president has to be an act of national unity as much as possible — otherwise it will tear the country apart even more. I know that such an action is very difficult for today’s G.O.P., but the time is long past for it to rise to confront this crisis of American leadership.

Trump’s behavior has become so erratic, his lying so persistent, his willingness to fulfill the basic functions of the presidency — like reading briefing books, consulting government experts before making major changes and appointing a competent staff — so absent, his readiness to accommodate Russia and spurn allies so disturbing and his obsession with himself and his ego over all other considerations so consistent, two more years of him in office could pose a real threat to our nation. Vice President Mike Pence could not possibly be worse.

The damage an out-of-control Trump can do goes well beyond our borders. America is the keystone of global stability. Our world is the way it is today — a place that, despite all its problems, still enjoys more peace and prosperity than at any time in history — because America is the way it is (or at least was). And that is a nation that at its best has always stood up for the universal values of freedom and human rights, has always paid extra to stabilize the global system from which we were the biggest beneficiary and has always nurtured and protected alliances with like-minded nations.

Donald Trump has proved time and again that he knows nothing of the history or importance of this America. That was made starkly clear in Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis’s resignation letter.

Trump is in the grip of a mad notion that the entire web of global institutions and alliances built after World War II — which, with all their imperfections, have provided the connective tissues that have created this unprecedented era of peace and prosperity — threatens American sovereignty and prosperity and that we are better off without them.

So Trump gloats at the troubles facing the European Union, urges Britain to exit and leaks that he’d consider quitting NATO. These are institutions that all need to be improved, but not scrapped. If America becomes a predator on all the treaties, multilateral institutions and alliances holding the world together; if America goes from being the world’s anchor of stability to an engine of instability; if America goes from a democracy built on the twin pillars of truth and trust to a country where it is acceptable for the president to attack truth and trust on a daily basis, watch out: Your kids won’t just grow up in a different America. They will grow up in a different world.

The last time America disengaged from the world remotely in this manner was in the 1930s, and you remember what followed: World War II.

You have no idea how quickly institutions like NATO and the E.U. and the World Trade Organization and just basic global norms — like thou shalt not kill and dismember a journalist in your own consulate — can unravel when America goes AWOL or haywire under a shameless isolated president.

But this is not just about the world, it’s about the minimum decorum and stability we expect from our president. If the C.E.O. of any public company in America behaved like Trump has over the past two years — constantly lying, tossing out aides like they were Kleenex, tweeting endlessly like a teenager, ignoring the advice of experts — he or she would have been fired by the board of directors long ago. Should we expect less for our president?

That’s what the financial markets are now asking. For the first two years of the Trump presidency the markets treated his dishonesty and craziness as background noise to all the soaring corporate profits and stocks. But that is no longer the case. Trump has markets worried.

The instability Trump is generating — including his attacks on the chairman of the Federal Reserve — is causing investors to wonder where the economic and geopolitical management will come from as the economy slows down. What if we’re plunged into an economic crisis and we have a president whose first instinct is always to blame others and who’s already purged from his side the most sober adults willing to tell him that his vaunted “gut instincts” have no grounding in economics or in law or in common sense. Mattis was the last one.

We are now left with the B team — all the people who were ready to take the jobs that Trump’s first team either resigned from — because they could not countenance his lying, chaos and ignorance — or were fired from for the same reasons.

I seriously doubt that any of these B-players would have been hired by any other administration. Not only do they not inspire confidence in a crisis, but they are all walking around knowing that Trump would stab every one of them in the back with his Twitter knife, at any moment, if it served him. This makes them even less effective.

Ah, we are told, but Trump is a different kind of president. “He’s a disrupter.” Well, I respect those who voted for Trump because they thought the system needed “a disrupter.” It did in some areas. I agree with Trump on the need to disrupt the status quo in U.S.-China trade relations, to rethink our presence in places like Syria and Afghanistan and to eliminate some choking regulations on business.

But too often Trump has given us disruption without any plan for what comes next. He has worked to destroy Obamacare with no plan for the morning after. He announced a pullout from Syria and Afghanistan without even consulting the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or the State Department’s top expert, let alone our allies.

People wanted disruption, but too often Trump has given us destruction, distraction, debasement and sheer ignorance.

And while, yes, we need disruption in some areas, we also desperately need innovation in others. How do we manage these giant social networks? How do we integrate artificial intelligence into every aspect of our society, as China is doing? How do we make lifelong learning available to every American? At a time when we need to be building bridges to the 21st century, all Trump can talk about is building a wall with Mexico — a political stunt to energize his base rather than the comprehensive immigration reform that we really need.

Indeed, Trump’s biggest disruption has been to undermine the norms and values we associate with a U.S. president and U.S. leadership. And now that Trump has freed himself of all restraints from within his White House staff, his cabinet and his party — so that “Trump can be Trump,” we are told — he is freer than ever to remake America in his image.

Trump misleads about military pay raises again

cnn

President Donald Trump incorrectly told troops in Iraq on Wednesday that he gave them their first pay raise in more than 10 years -- a falsehood he has repeatedly told.

Speaking to troops at Al Asad Air Base during his surprise visit to Iraq, Trump told troops: "You protect us. We are always going to protect you. And you just saw that, 'cause you just got one of the biggest pay raises you've ever received. ... You haven't gotten one in more than 10 years. More than 10 years. And we got you a big one. I got you a big one. I got you a big one."

In fact, military pay has increased every year for more than three decades. It was raised 2.4% in 2018 and then 2.6% in the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act. The 2.6% pay raise is the largest in the past 9 years.

Trump decision to pull troops from Syria puts pro-Israel groups in a bind

https://www.thedailybeast.com/israels-government-collapses-amid-corruption-charges-and-trumps-mideast-chaos?ref=scroll

 US President Donald Trump’s decision to pull American troops out of Syria has created a serious policy dispute with Israel, potentially complicating his relationship with the mainstream US pro-Israel community for the first time since he took office.

The withdrawal of some 2,000 soldiers from Syria will likely make it more difficult for Israel to fight Iranian efforts to entrench itself in the war-torn country and expand its influence in the region.

Much like Israel’s government, which is faced with trying to preserve its tight bond with the Trump administration despite reports of Jerusalem feeling “betrayed,” the pro-Israel community in the US is also having to find a way to navigate between backing Trump and backing Israel.

FOX NEWS HOSTS GRILLS TRUMP AIDE: 'NAME AN ADVISER' WHO RECOMMENDED SYRIA TROOP WITHDRAWAL

Newsweek

Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade grilled a White House spokesperson on Monday morning over President Donald Trump’s controversial move to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria.

Mercedes Schlapp, who works as the White House’s director of strategic communications, appeared on the morning program to discuss Trump's recent decisions. When the subject of the president’s sudden move to pull American forces from Syria and Afghanistan came up, Kilmeade pushed back hard.

“Can you name an adviser the president has that recommended he pull out 2,000 troops?” Kilmeade asked Schlapp.

Declining to answer the question directly, Schlapp said she was “not going to get into the internal discussions of how the decision was made.” Trump reportedly made the call against the wishes of many top advisers, leading to the resignation of Secretary of Defense General Jim Mattis andBrett McGurk, the U.S. envoy to the coalition fighting the Islamic State militant group, or ISIS.

Rep.-elect Green Wrong About Vaccines, CDC Fraud

fact check

At a town hall event on Dec. 11, Rep.-elect Mark Green of Tennessee inaccurately claimed that vaccine preservatives might cause autism. He also repeated an unsubstantiated claim that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “fraudulently managed” data that showed a link between vaccinations and autism.

Both of these statements are bogus:

• Multiple large studies already have investigated whether any aspect of vaccination — including preservatives — can cause autism and found no evidence they do. The CDC alone has conducted nine investigations into the preservative thimerosal, finding no link to the disease.
• There is no evidence that the CDC “fraudulently managed” vaccine data. Green said he was referring to an allegation of a CDC cover-up that was brought to the House floor in 2015. Those claims, however, are unsupported.

According to the Tennessean, which first reported the story, Green’s vaccine claims came in response to a question from a woman asking about possible cuts in Medicaid funding. She said she was the parent of a young adult with autism.

Here is more of Green’s reply.

Green, Dec. 11: Let me say this about autism. I have committed to people in my community, up in Montgomery County, to stand on the CDC’s desk and get the real data on vaccines. Because there is some concern that the rise in autism is the result of the preservatives that are in our vaccines.

So, as a physician, I can make that argument and I can look at it academically and make the argument against CDC, if they really want to engage me on it. But it appears some of that data has been — it appears some of that data has been, honestly, maybe fraudulently managed. So we’ve got to go up there and stand against that and make sure we get that fixed, that issue addressed.

Green is a former Army special operations flight surgeon and a 1999 graduate of Wright State University’s Boonshoft School of Medicine in Dayton, Ohio. Green, who is a Republican, previously served as a state senator and was elected this fall to represent Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District.