https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/is-it-time-for-the-jews-to-leave-europe/386279/
For half a century, memories of the Holocaust limited anti-Semitism on the Continent. That period has ended—the recent fatal attacks in Paris and Copenhagen are merely the latest examples of rising violence against Jews. Renewed vitriol among right-wing fascists and new threats from radicalized Islamists have created a crisis, confronting Jews with an agonizing choice.
Four deadly terrorist attacks launched specifically against Jewish targets have taken place during the 2012 to 2019 time period in Europe.j Each was launched by an individual or individuals with either an aspirational or actual association with a jihadi terrorist group. Underpinning the motivation for these different attacks has been a mix of al-Qa`ida/Islamic State ideological doctrines, ancient Islamic anti-Semitic tropes, and current Palestinian-Israeli political tensions.
The past seven months have seen the death of 12 Jews in the United States by the way of two politically motivated attacks against non-combatants, or terrorism.74 Accounted for by the October 27, 2018, attack in Pittsburgh in which 11 congregants of the Tree of Life Synagogue were killed and the April 27, 2019, Chabad of Poway, California, synagogue shooting in which one parishioner died,75 these attacks as well as the deadly 2014 attack at the Kansas City Jewish Community Center were carried out by white supremacist, neo-Nazi-affiliated individuals.
Every single fatal extreme right-wing terrorist attack on Jews in the West between 2012 and 2019 took place in the United States, suggesting the country is a new, emerging focal point of the extreme right-wing threat against Jews. The three deadly terrorist attacks (and at least four thwarted plots) against Jews in the United States in this period were carried out by individuals motivated to attack explicitly Jewish targets by violent extreme right-wing ideology. There were no deadly terror attacks on Jews in the United States that were perpetrated by jihadi extremists in this period.
Belgian authorities may consider the terrorist threat diminished enough to end the patrols.
The Department of Justice filed a motion notifying a New York State court Tuesday that it intends to replace President Trump's private lawyers to defend him in a defamation lawsuit brought by writer E. Jean Carroll.
Why it matters: It's highly unusual for the DOJ to intervene in such cases. The department said in its notice that it intervened because Trump was "acting within the scope of his office as President of the United States" when he said last year that Carroll was "totally lying" about claims that he raped her in the mid-1990s.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/7204036-Carroll-2.html
https://nationalsecurityaction.org/newsroom/trump-military-industrial-complex
There’s only one problem with Trump’s latest defense: It’s pure fantasy. Trump has consistently prioritized the financial interests of America’s defense contractors -- and, in doing so, turned our values and long-term interests into collateral damage.
But CNN national security reporter Ryan Brown called Mr Trump’s comments an “unprecedented public attack by a sitting US president on the leadership of the US military”, and said comparisons to Mr Eisenhower’s address were off the mark.
“Some folks really ought to read what President Eisenhower actually said,” he tweeted. “While they are both critical of the military industrial complex, nowhere does Eisenhower actually accuse military leaders of engaging in shooting wars to boost profits for firms
Speaking on CNN, retired army lieutenant general Mark Hertling said it was interesting that Mr Trump had attempted to deny accusations he had insulted the military “by insulting the military”.
“It was insulting to me as a former general,” he said. “As a former soldier, going into combat the military-industrial complex was not even a portion of my thought process. All I wanted was the equipment and the resources to fight the battles.”
Mr Hertling also pushed back on Mr Trump’s “endless wars” jab, which he took as a criticism of how US conflicts in the Middle East had been run by military leadership.
“We are told what to do by our elected officials, so if there’s bad strategy, bad involvement in foreign wars, it’s because the political masters have sent us there to do their bidding,” he said. “We attempt in every way possible to conduct the operations.”
Mr Hertling said Mr Trump was attempting to sow division. “This is kind of like fighting an insurgency – President Trump has already gone after the intelligence community by separating their leaders from those who are in the trenches,” he said.
“He has separated the FBI, claiming the leaders are terrible but everybody in the FBI is good, now he’s attempting to do the same thing with the military. ‘The generals are all bad, they’re all working for the military industrial complex, but all you soldiers still love me, right?’”
In short order, Mollie Hemingway, Glenn Greenwald (who was retweeted by Trump himself), and Russia Today — the holy trinity of pro-Trump trolling — scrambled to cast Trump’s remarks as merely echoing Dwight Eisenhower’s famous warning about the military-industrial complex.
One of the favorite gambits of Trump’s defenders is to insist that national security professionals only oppose him because he stands athwart the American empire. And it is certainly true that military leaders disagree with some of Trump’s policies: his opposition to NATO, his betrayal of the Kurds, admiration of Russia, and (in some cases) desire to accelerate removal of troops from Afghanistan. Some of the most intense military opposition has come from the conviction by military leaders that he threatens its culture by encouraging war crimes and using troops as a domestic propaganda weapon, including to attack peaceful protesters. (By the way, it’s not true that “the soldiers” are “in love” with Trump — a Military Times poll shows his approval rating underwater and him narrowly trailing Joe Biden among active-duty service members.)
Trump is not a threat to the Pentagon budget. He has lavished as much money on defense as he can get from Congress, and boasts constantly that he “rebuilt” it after Barack Obama supposedly exhausted its entire supply of ammunition. If Trump is concerned about the influence of defense lobbyists on the Pentagon’s decision-making, it’s odd that he picked a top corporate lobbyist for Raytheon to serve as his current Defense secretary.
Trump has frequently cited the profits from arms sales as the main reason for the United States to continue supporting Saudi Arabia. Asked in 2018 about cutting off sales to the kingdom after its brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi, he replied, “Well, I think that would be hurting us. We have jobs, we have a lot of things happening in this country. We have a country that’s doing probably better economically than it’s ever done before. Part of that is what we’re doing with our defense systems, and everybody’s wanting ’em, and frankly I think that that would be a very, very tough pill to swallow for our country.”
Later that day he reiterated, “I don’t like stopping massive amounts of money that’s being poured into our country … they are spending $110 billion on military equipment and on things that create jobs for this country.”
Trump probably assumed that having bought off the military brass with lavish spending, he could count on them to stay discreet about his occasional sociopathic remark. It is very believable that he would be unable to imagine a motive for their unease with his leadership other than venality. But nobody else needs to cooperate with the preposterous ruse that Trump poses a threat to the income stream of American military leaders.
