It happened many times in the history of Europe that a state drove out the Jews, then regretted doing so when it found itself the poorer, and so invited them back again. Now voices are raised about the sad plight of Berlin since its Jews were ‘driven out’, never to return.

We may hear the sound of bitter laughter from the ghosts of European Jewry (though not apparently from stupider Jews living in Germany now) as we read this, by Paul Belien of the Hudson Institute:

Thilo Sarrazin, a Bundesbank director who criticized Turkish and Arab immigrants in a recent interview, has been punished by his employer and may lose his job. Apart from receiving threats by Islamist extremists, he may also be taken to court by the German authorities on charges of “incitement to racial hatred.” For many Germans, however, Mr. Sarrazin, who until last May was Finance Minister in the regional government of the state of Berlin for the Social-Democrat SPD, is a hero.

Last week Axel Weber, the president of the Bundesbank, Germany’s equivalent of the FED, needed body guards on an official visit to Istanbul. Normally, the head of the German central bank never travels with body guards, but life at the Bundesbank has changed since two weeks ago. Lettre International, a German cultural magazine based in Berlin, published an interview with Thilo Sarrazin, in which the Bundesbank director criticized the unwillingness of Turkish and Arab immigrants to assimilate into German society. The interview provoked the anger of these very immigrants. Immigrant groups accuse Mr. Sarrazin of espousing the “racist views of the far right.”

His boss, Mr. Weber, however, does not want to become the target of angry Muslims. He has apologized to everyone who might feel offended by the “discriminatory comments” of the Bundesbank official. In fact, the Bundesbank issued a statement, distancing itself in the strongest terms from the interview. It also demoted Sarrazin; he may even be fired altogether.

In the Lettre International interview, Sarrazin talked about the economic and cultural situation in his hometown of Berlin. He argued that Berlin has been unable to recover the cultural and economic status and prestige it had before the Second World War. Even its contemporary population figure of 3.2 million is lower than the pre-war 4 million. Sarrazin says that Berlin’s dynamics were broken when the city lost its Jews: the Jewish elite were driven out and instead the city acquired a Turkish and Arab underclass.

“The large scale disappearance of the Jews could never be compensated,” Sarrazin said. “Thirty percent of physicians and lawyers, eighty percent of all theatre directors in Berlin in 1933 were of Jewish origin. Commerce and banking were also largely Jewish. All this has vanished; it was also a considerable intellectual loss. Sixty to seventy percent of the extermination and expulsion of the Jews in the German speaking countries affected Berlin and Vienna.”

Sarrazin argued that during the Cold War, ambitious and dynamic people moved away from the highly-subsidized West Berlin while left-wing activists and drop-outs took their place. Meanwhile a Turkish and Arab underclass was imported, which also lives mostly off government subsidies without making economic contributions to the city.

“Berlin has a bigger problem than elsewhere of an underclass that does not take part in the normal economic cycle. Many Arabs and Turks in this city, whose numbers have grown as a result of wrong policies, have no productive function except selling fruit and vegetables,” Sarrazin said. The plight of his home town makes him very bitter. He lashed out at what he called policies that were “too plebeian” instead of elitist. “Anyone who can do something and strives for something with us is welcome. The rest should go elsewhere,” Sarrazin told Lettre International. The Turks, however, “are conquering Germany in the same way that the Kosovars conquered Kosovo: through their high birthrate. […] I do not need to acknowledge anyone who lives off the state, rejects this country, does not take proper care of the education of his children and keeps producing little girls in headscarves.”

Since the publication of the interview, Sarrazin has received threats from Islamists. The Social-Democratic SPD Party has started a procedure to oust him from its ranks. He has also been criticized by the Central Council of German Jews, whose General-Secretary Stephan Kramer compared his comments about Turkish and Arab immigrants to the “opinions of Göring, Goebbels and Hitler.” The Berlin prosecutor is currently examining whether Mr. Sarrazin can be prosecuted for the crime of “racial incitement.”

An opinion poll indicated, however, that 51 percent of the Germans agree with what Mr. Sarrazin said. Conservative newspapers, such as Die Welt, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and the mass circulation Bild have come to his defense, arguing that he has merely stated uncomfortable facts. Prominent Germans, such as former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and the writers Henryk Broder and Ralph Giordano, have also spoken out in support of the Bundesbank official.

Helmut Schmidt, the nonagenarian former leader of the Social-Democrat SPD, said that the presence of seven million immigrants in Germany are proof “of a wrong development for which the political class [of the past 15 years] is responsible.” It would have been better, Mr. Schmidt told the weekly magazine Focus, that those who refuse to integrate into German society “had been left outside.” He added that “The further inflow of people from Eastern Anatolia or Black Africa will not solve the problem [of Germany’s ageing population], but will only create an enormous new problem.”

Ralph Giordano said that Sarrazin’s analysis was “right on the mark.” Henryk Broder stated that he “does not even go far enough.” Since both Messrs. Giordano and Broder are Jewish, their support for Mr. Sarrazin has earned them severe criticism from the Central Council of German Jews, whose Mr. Kramer derisively called both men “Jewish intellectuals.”

On October 14th, Jasper von Altenbockum, an editorialist of the influential Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, wrote in his paper that Mr. Sarrazin’s frank remarks were proof of his great “civil courage.” “Civil courage is more than just courage. It is also a service to the state, whose legal constitutions and social achievements are worth defending.” Mr. Altenbockum criticized those who accuse Sarrazin of acting irresponsibly and foolishly. “In a civil society it is not considered foolish to risk one’s own existence when one defends the civil society and its freedoms and security. What is foolish is for the civil society to punish those who act this way.”

In contemporary Europe, leading a life surrounded by body guards has become normal for people such as Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician who criticizes the Islamization of his native land, and Kurt Westergaard, a Danish cartoonist who made a drawing depicting the Muslim Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban. Thilo Sarrazin has now joined their ranks.

Christian missionaries have exerted themselves zealously to spread their faith in Africa. Christianity, they most sincerely and passionately believe, will improve the miserable life most people lead on that benighted continent. Let’s look at the improvement it has wrought.

From the Los Angeles Times:

The nine-year-old boy lay on a bloodstained hospital sheet crawling with ants, staring blindly at the wall. His family pastor had accused him of being a witch, and his father then tried to force acid down his throat as an exorcism. It spilled as he struggled, burning away his face and eyes. The emaciated boy barely had strength left to whisper the name of the church that had denounced him — Mount Zion Lighthouse. A month later, he died.

Nwanaokwo Edet was one of an increasing number of children in Africa accused of witchcraft by pastors and then tortured or killed, often by family members. Pastors were involved in half of 200 cases of “witch children” reviewed by the AP, and 13 churches were named in the case files. Some of the churches involved are renegade local branches of international franchises. Their parishioners take literally the Biblical exhortation, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

Other Christians protest:

“It is an outrage what they are allowing to take place in the name of Christianity,” said Gary Foxcroft, head of nonprofit Stepping Stones Nigeria.

The bleeding-hearts brigade make excuses:

For their part, the families are often extremely poor, and sometimes even relieved to have one less mouth to feed. Poverty, conflict and poor education lay the foundation for accusations, which are then triggered by the death of a relative, the loss of a job or the denunciation of a pastor on the make, said Martin Dawes, a spokesman for the United Nations Children’s Fund. When communities come under pressure, they look for scapegoats,” he said. “It plays into traditional beliefs that someone is responsible for a negative change … and children are defenseless.”

The idea of witchcraft is hardly new, but it has taken on new life recently partly because of a rapid growth in evangelical Christianity. Campaigners against the practice say around 15,000 children have been accused in two of Nigeria’s 36 states over the past decade and around 1,000 have been murdered. In the past month alone, three Nigerian children accused of witchcraft were killed and another three were set on fire.

The United Nations is being as useful as ever – making not the slightest difference:

Nigeria is one of the heartlands of abuse, but hardly the only one: the United Nations Children’s Fund says tens of thousands of children have been targeted throughout Africa….

American members of the same church plead ignorance …

The Nigerian church is a branch of a Californian church by the same name [Mount Zion Lighthouse]. But the California church says it lost touch with its Nigerian offshoots several years ago.

“I had no idea,” said church elder Carrie King by phone from Tracy, Calif. “I knew people believed in witchcraft over there but we believe in the power of prayer, not physically harming people.”

… while Church authorities say they’re too big to do anything about it:

The Mount Zion Lighthouse — also named by three other families as the accuser of their children — is part of the powerful Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria. The Fellowship’s president, Ayo Oritsejafor, said the Fellowship was the fastest-growing religious group in Nigeria, with more than 30 million members.

“We have grown so much in the past few years we cannot keep an eye on everybody,” he explained.

Read the rest of the LA Times article if you can stand the sickening details of the torture inflicted on children by their parents and pastors.

Here is part of a story from the Washington Post. (Note the PC use of ‘paramilitary’ instead of ‘terrorist’. By the up-side down values of the left, terrorists must be treated with respect.)

U.S. and European counterterrorism officials say a rising number of Western recruits — including Americans — are traveling to Afghanistan and Pakistan to attend paramilitary training camps. The flow of recruits has continued unabated, officials said, in spite of an intensified campaign over the past year by the CIA to eliminate al-Qaeda and Taliban commanders in drone missile attacks.

Since January, at least 30 recruits from Germany have traveled to Pakistan for training, according to German security sources. About 10 people — not necessarily the same individuals — have returned to Germany this year, fueling concerns that fresh plots are in the works against European targets.

“We think this is sufficient to show how serious the threat is,” said a senior German counterterrorism official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

German security services have been on high alert since last month, when groups affiliated with the Taliban and al-Qaeda issued several videos warning that an attack on German targets was imminent if the government did not bring home its forces from Afghanistan.

There are about 3,800 German troops in the country, the third-largest NATO contingent after those of the United States and Britain. German officials say Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders are trying to exploit domestic opposition in Germany to the war; surveys show that a majority of German voters favor a withdrawal of their soldiers.

The videos all featured German speakers who urged Muslims to travel to Afghanistan and Pakistan to join their cause.

“They’re doing such good business that they are dropping a new video every week or so,” said Ronald Sandee, a former Dutch military intelligence officer who serves as research director of the NEFA Foundation, a U.S. group that monitors terrorist networks. “If I were a young Muslim, I’d find them very convincing.”

Last week, German officials disclosed that a 10-member cell from Hamburg had left for Pakistan earlier this year. The cell is allegedly led by a German of Syrian descent but also includes ethnic Turks, German converts to Islam and one member with Afghan roots.

Other European countries are also struggling to keep their citizens from going to Pakistan for paramilitary training.

In August, Pakistani officials arrested a group of 12 foreigners headed to North Waziristan, a tribal region near the Afghan border where many of the camps are located. Among those arrested were four Swedes, including Mehdi Ghezali, a former inmate of the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay …

They shouldn’t have been let into Europe, they shouldn’t have been given citizenship. European states should be glad to let them all go, including the converts who are of European descent. They should never be let back in again. It’s when they return that they are most dangerous, not when they stay in North Waziristan. The treacherous immigrants who seek terrorist training out there should have their families sent after them.

From Islam Watch:

Obama will soon sign a document in Copenhagen that will subordinate the United States to a global authority.  At Bethel University in St. Paul, Lord Monckton, former science adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, ‘gave a scathing and lengthy presentation, complete with detailed charts, graphs, facts, and figures which culminated in the utter decimation of both the pop culture concept of global warming and the credible threat of any significant anthropomorphic climate change’, according to this report, which goes on to say that Monckton raised ‘the single most important issue facing the American nation, bigger than health care, bigger than cap and trade, and worth every citizen’s focused attention’.

That issue is nothing less than the establishment of world government.

Quotations from Lord Monckton’s address:

At [the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in] Copenhagen, this December, weeks away, a treaty will be signed. Your president will sign it. Most of the third world countries will sign it, because they think they’re going to get money out of it. Most of the left-wing regime from the European Union will rubber stamp it. Virtually nobody won’t sign it.

I read that treaty. And what it says is this, that a world government is going to be created. The word “government” actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to third world countries, in satisfication of what is called, coyly, “climate debt” – because we’ve been burning CO2 and they haven’t. We’ve been screwing up the climate and they haven’t. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement. …

So, at last, the communists … are about to impose a communist world government on the world. You have a president who has very strong sympathies with that point of view. He’s going to sign it….

And the trouble is this; if that treaty is signed … and you can’t resign from that treaty unless you get agreement from all the other state parties – And because you’ll be the biggest paying country, they’re not going to let you out of it.

So, thank you, America. You were the beacon of freedom to the world. It is a privilege merely to stand on this soil of freedom while it is still free. But, in the next few weeks, unless you stop it, your president will sign your freedom, your democracy, and your humanity away forever. And neither you nor any subsequent government you may elect will have any power whatsoever to take it back. That is how serious it is. …

But I think it is here, here in your great nation, which I so love and I so admire – it is here that perhaps, at this eleventh hour, at the fifty-ninth minute and fifty-ninth second, you will rise up and you will stop your president from signing that dreadful treaty …

Certain countries contributing soldiers to the coalition forces in Afghanistan are buying their troops protection by paying the enemy tribute, according to some reports. The allegations seem all too probable. The aim would be not to defeat the Taliban but just to keep them temporarily at bay. It is not a tactic for conquest and victory. If true, it is yet another sign that NATO is in disarray and the Taliban are winning.

From The Australian:

The Times [London] newspaper  said 10 French troops killed in Sarobi, near Kabul, last year had not properly assessed the risks, because their Italian predecessors failed to inform them they had paid the Taliban not to attack them.

The Italian government described the British newspaper’s report as “totally baseless” and said it had “never authorised any kind of money payment to members of the Taliban insurrection in Afghanistan”.

But a senior Afghan official suggested otherwise. “I certainly can confirm that we were aware that the Italian forces were paying the opposition in Sarobi not to attack them,” he said.

“We have reports of similar deals in (western) Herat province by Italian troops based there under NATO’s umbrella.

“It’s a deal: you don’t attack me, I don’t attack you,” he said, adding the practice was passed on between foreign forces and it was likely that senior commanders were either involved or turned a blind eye to it. It is simply a matter of buying time and surviving.”

A French army spokesman in Kabul, Lieutenant Colonel Jackie Fouquereau, said: “The French do not give money to insurgents.”

NATO spokesman in Afghanistan, General Eric Tremblay, said he was “not aware” of such practices and had no information about the Italian case. …

But according to a number of Western and Afghan officers, the politically sensitive practice is fairly widespread among NATO forces in Afghanistan.

One Western military source told of payments made by Canadian soldiers stationed in the violent southern province of Kandahar, while another officer spoke of similar practices by the German army in northern Kunduz.

“I can tell you that lots of countries under the NATO umbrella operating out in rural parts of Afghanistan do pay the militants for not attacking them,” the senior Afghan official said. …

He said he did not want to say precisely how many but one Western officer said: “As it’s not very positive and not officially recognised, it’s never spoken about openly. It’s a bit shameful. Consequently, it’s sometimes not communicated properly between the old unit and the new unit that comes in to relieve them,”  which may have happened between the Italians and the French. According to The Times, the Italian secret service gave tens of thousands of dollars to Taliban commanders and local warlords to keep the peace in the Sarobi region. …

This is from an article by Sarah Palin in the National Review (read it all here):

In addition to drilling, we need to build new refineries. America currently has roughly 150 refineries, down from over 300 in the 1970s. Due mainly to environmental regulations, we haven’t built a major new refinery since 1976, though our oil consumption has increased significantly since then. That’s no way to secure our energy supply. The post-Katrina jump in gas prices proved that we can’t leave ourselves at the mercy of a hurricane that knocks a few refineries out of commission.

Building an energy-independent Amer ica will mean a real economic stimulus. It will mean American jobs that can never be shipped overseas. Think about how much of our trade deficit is fueled by the oil we import — sometimes as much as half of the total. Through this massive transfer of wealth, we lose hundreds of billions of dollars a year that could be invested in our economy. Instead it goes to foreign countries, including some repressive regimes that use it to fund activities that threaten our security.

Reliance on foreign sources of energy weakens America. When a riot breaks out in an OPEC nation, or a developing country talks about nationalizing its oil industry, or a petro-dictator threatens to cut off exports, the probability is great that the price of oil will shoot up. Even in friendly nations, business and financial decisions made for local reasons can de stabilize Amer i­ca’s energy market, since the price we pay for foreign oil is subject to rising and falling exchange rates. Decreasing our dependence on foreign sources of energy will reduce the impact of world events on our economy.

In the end, energy independence is not just about the environment or the economy. It’s about freedom and confidence. It’s about building a more secure and peaceful America, an America in which our energy needs will not be subject to the whims of nature, currency speculators, or madmen in possession of vast oil reserves. …

To Sarah Palin freedom is a high ideal, perhaps the highest. To Obama it is not. On the contrary, he is a collectivist. No argument for freedom will move him.

Here’s how Charles Krauthammer ends his delectable must-read article on the continuing failure of Obama and his Secretary of State to achieve anything good for America with their ‘smart power’:

Didn’t Obama say in July that Iran had to show compliance by the G-20 summit in late September? And when that deadline passed, did he not then warn Iran that it would face “sanctions that have bite” and that it would have to take “a new course or face consequences”?

Gone with the wind. It’s the U.S. that’s now retreating from its already flimsy position of just three weeks ago. We’re not doing sanctions now, you see. We’re back to engagement. Just as the Russians suggest.

Henry Kissinger once said that the main job of Anatoly Dobrynin, the perennial Soviet ambassador to Washington, was to tell the Kremlin leadership that whenever they received a proposal from the United States that appeared disadvantageous to the United States, not to assume it was a trick.

No need for a Dobrynin today. The Russian leadership, hardly believing its luck, needs no interpreter to understand that when the Obama team clownishly rushes in bearing gifts and “reset” buttons, there is nothing ulterior, diabolical, clever or even serious behind it. It is amateurishness, wrapped in naivete, inside credulity. In short, the very stuff of Nobels.

Yesterday the Fox News star Glenn Beck, in the course of a gripping solo performance, showed a video clip of Anita Dunn, the White House Communications Director, telling school children that one of her favorite philosophers, one whom she ‘turns to most’, was Mao Tse Tung, and recommending that they take his advice.

She joins a long line of Western admirers of Mao and Maoism: the sort of people Lenin called ‘useful idiots’.

What sort of man was Mao Tse Tung? What did he think, say, and do? What was the ‘philosophy’ of the man Anita Dunn admires? What made Mao so heroic a figure to her, whose opinions are valued by the president of the United States, that she commends him as a mentor to American school children?

Here are passages – some quoted, some summarized – from the biography Mao, by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, published in 2005:

During ‘the Great Leap Forward’, Mao enslaved the ‘entire rural population’, took away from them everything they possessed, and demanded ‘a feverpitch’ of work. He organized them into ‘People’s Communes’, to make slave-driving more efficient. He ‘even toyed with getting rid of people’s names and replacing them with numbers’. His aim was to ‘dehumanize China’s 550 million peasants and turn them into the human equivalent of draft animals.’ … ‘Total control over food gave the state a terrifying weapon. … Undernourishment and overwork quickly reduced tens of millions of peasants to a state where they were simply too enfeebled to work. When he found out that one county was doling out food to those too ill to work, Mao’s response was: “This won’t do. Give them this amount and they don’t work. Best halve the basic ration, so if they’re hungry they have to try harder.”’

Hungry peasants would ‘steal’ their own harvest, and for doing so –

Horrific punishments were widespread: some people [including children] were buried alive, others strangled with ropes, others had their noses cut off. … A child had four fingers chopped off … Two children had wires run through their ears and were then hung up by the wire….

People starved in the cities too … Most urban dwellers could barely survive on the rations they got … People were told to eat ‘food substitutes’. One was a green roe-like substance called chlorella, which grew in urine and contained some protein. After Chou En-lai tasted and approved this disgusting stuff, it soon provided a high proportion of the urban population’s protein.

Nationwide famine started in 1958, peaked in 1960, and lasted until 1961.

People were just driven crazy by hunger. … Some resorted to cannibalism. … One couple strangled and ate their eight-year-old son …

While all this was happening, there was plenty of food in state granaries, which were guarded by the army. Some food was simply allowed to rot. A Polish student saw fruit ‘rotting by the ton’ in southeast China in summer-autumn 1959. But the order from above was: ‘Absolutely no opening the granary door even if people are dying of starvation’.

Close to 38 million people died of starvation and overwork in the Great Leap Forward and the famine, which lasted four years. Mao knowingly starved and worked these tens of millions of people to death. … To the May 1958 congress that kicked off the Leap, he told his audience they should … actively welcome dying as a result of their Party’s policy. … ‘Death,’ said Mao, ’is indeed to be rejoiced over. … We believe in dialectics, and so we can’t not be in favor of death.’

When Mao was in Moscow in 1957, he had said: ‘We are prepared to sacrifice 300 million Chinese for the victory of the world revolution.’

In the single year of 1960, ‘22 million people died of hunger. This was the largest number in any one year in any country in the history of the world.’

In that year Mao told his inner circle:

The goal for now was ‘to propagate Mao Tse-tung Thought’ round the world. … The resulting propaganda campaign brought the world ‘Maoism’. The idea of promoting China’s experience as a model when the Chinese were dying of starvation in their millions might seem a tall order, but Mao was not perturbed: he had watertight filters on what foreigners could see and hear. … Mao could easily pull the wool over most visitors’ eyes. … [When he] told barefaced lies to France’s Socialist leader (and future president) François Mitterrand during the famine in 1961 (‘I repeat it, in order to be heard: there is no famine in China’), he was widely believed. The future Canadian prime minister, Pierre Trudeau came in 1960 and co-wrote a starry-eyed book, Two Innocents in Red China, which did not say a word about famine. Even the former chief of the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, Lord Boyd-Orr, was duped. In May 1959, after a trip to China, he opined that food production had risen 50-100 per cent over 1955-8 and that China ‘seems capable of feeding its population well’. Britain’s Field Marshal Montgomery, a much more gullible figure, asserted after visits in 1960 and 1961 that here had been ‘no large-scale famine, only shortages in certain areas’, and he certainly did not regard the ‘shortages’ as Mao’s fault, as he urged Mao to hang on to power: ‘China … needs the chairman. You mustn’t abandon this ship.’

Mao had no problem covering up the famine, and was confident he could promote himself as a credible international leader. For this job he brought in … dependable writer-journalists. …

*

One of these dependable types was Felix Greene (cousin of the novelist Graham Greene), who made documentary films about China for the BBC in the 1950s. Their message was that ‘nobody starves in Communist China’. These words were repeated like a mantra by Western intellectuals of the left to rebuke all criticism of Mao, and to excuse whatever he ‘had to do’ – the torture, the mass murder, the enslavement of the peasants, rumor of which reached the ears of the West even though hands were clasped over them – as if merely to be kept alive was a favor for which the Chinese should be grateful to their master. But even if it could be counted an achievement so great that it would justify everything, it wasn’t true.

Does Anita Dunn know the truth about Mao?

Which would be worse: that she does not know it and commends him, or that she does know it and commends him?

If the first, should she be speaking to American school children?

If the second, should she be speaking for the president?

We are not persuaded that any Iranian faction we know of promises much good, though none could be much worse than the present regime.

So we post the following extract not primarily in support of the resistance, nor even out of sympathy (which we have) with the regime’s victims, but as an illustration of how Obama’s policy towards Iran goes beyond appeasement to base, humiliating, toadying submission.

Kenneth R. Timmerman writes:

The Obama administration has cut funding for pro-democracy and human rights programs in Iran, reversing years of efforts during the Bush administration to help develop a civil society …

The move is apparently intended to please Iran’s rulers after they criticized President Obama and the State Department for allegedly seeking to fund a “velvet revolution” during the June presidential elections in Iran. …

Word that the administration was planning to cut the pro-democracy programs leaked out in June, when the draft budget for the State Department sent to Congress zeroed out the funds.

The aid cut-back became public last week, when the executive director of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, which is affiliated with Yale University campus in New Haven, Conn., disclosed that her center’s request for a grant of $2.7 million had been denied.

“If there is one time that I expected to get funding, this was it,’’ Renee Redman told the Boston Globe last week. “I was surprised, because the world was watching human rights violations right there on television.” …

“The State Department cut in pro-democracy funding for Iran is part and parcel of a very deliberate policy by President Obama to diminish the role of human rights and democracy as goals of U.S. foreign policy,” said Joshua Muravchik, a scholar focusing on democracy promotion with the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. …