We guess there are millions of people, tens of millions, who – like ourselves – long for justice to be done to Crooked Hillary and her aides and enablers.

Oh, to see them in prison! The hunger for vengeance upon them is intense, but only very slowly and teasingly is the Department of Justice  – not yet fully recovered from its 8 year performance as the Department of Social Justice – working towards the indictment, trial, and sentencing of those arch villains.

At least a start has been made. The Attorney General has ordered investigation into the sale by Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of Sate of some 20% of US uranium ore to the Russians.

And her lying cheating aides may now, by suggestion and perhaps order of the President, be forced to disclose the hideous truths they have so willingly – for Crooked Hillary’s sake –  concealed. Willingly yes, but incompetently. They are being found out.   

Mark Moore at the New York Post reports:

President Trump [today, January 2 2018] suggested the Department of Justice “must finally act” to investigate longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin after the State Department last week released emails belonging to her, including some marked classified that were found on her husband’s laptop.

Will the DOJ take the President’s suggestion as an order?

The President wrote on Twitter:

“Crooked Hillary Clinton’s top aide, Huma Abedin, has been accused of disregarding basic security protocols. She put Classified Passwords into the hands of foreign agents. Remember sailors pictures on submarine? Jail! Deep State Justice Dept must finally act? Also on Comey & others.”

The State Department last Friday released parts of 2,800 emails that belonged to Abedin but were recovered by the FBI on the laptop of her husband, former Rep. Anthony Weiner, during an investigation into his sexting with a female high school student.

He is now in prison. One down and innumerable others still to go.

​The discovery of the emails, ​some marked as classified, prompted former FBI Director James Comey to announce in October 2016, just weeks before the presidential election, that he would reopen the probe into Clinton’s use of a private email server.

He reversed himself two days before the vote, saying nothing of significance had been found in her emails.

Trump fired Comey, who had been heading the FBI’s investigation into Russian meddling in the election, in May.

The president was also referring to a report on the Daily Caller website on Sunday that said Abedin forwarded sensitive work emails to her private Yahoo account – and some of the messages contained passwords for her government laptop.

The report noted that 500 million Yahoo accounts had been hacked in 2014.

Among those indicted by the Department of Justice in March 2017 for the hack was Igor Suschin, a former Russian intelligence agent.

So it may reasonably be assumed that the Russians have those passwords and that classified information. As well as 20% of US uranium.

And she and her accomplices continue to accuse President Trump of “collusion” with the Russians!

An obvious synonym for a “lie” is  a “hillary”.

Examples of use:

“The accusation that presidential candidate Donald Trump colluded with the Russians is a huge and wicked hillary.”

“How many hillaries has Huma told about those emails?”

“How many hillaries does it take to cover up years of criminal activity?”

We’ll never know the number, but that there were many will be revealed. Eventually. To be archived for posterity among the obscene selfies of a registered sex-offender.

In an individual, generosity may be considered a virtue; but a state holds its tax-payers’ money in trust, and has a duty to be thrifty with it.

Why does the US give money to other countries? We can think of no good reason.

If the giving had secured the supporting votes of the recipients in that abominable institution, the United Nations, through the last seventy years, there would have been at least a small reason, but that did not happen.

The streams of monetary foreign aid must dry up. The Trump administration may be starting to stem the flow. A cause for celebration if it does.

There was global outcry after President Trump announced his intention to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, but that might actually turn out to be a good thing for America’s economy if the White House makes good on the threat made to the countries opposing the move. …

The bold move by the Trump administration sparked international backlash, so much so that a referendum condemning the move was put forward at the United Nations.

Nikki Haley said that the United States would be “taking note” of the countries that “disrespected” America by voting in favor of the resolution, and President Trump said bluntly that the countries who don’t vote with the U.S. will have their funding cut.

We quote the Daily Caller’s report.

Here are the countries that voted against the U.S., listed alphabetically, along with America’s 2016 financial “obligation” to each country:

Afghanistan — $5,060,306,050

Albania — $27,479,989

Algeria — $17,807,222

Andorra — $0

Angola — $64,489,547

Armenia — $22,239,896

Austria — $310,536

Azerbaijan — $15,312,389

Bahrain — $6,573,352

Bangladesh — $263,396,621

Barbados — $5,442,370

Belarus — $11,166,107

Belgium — $3,101,636    ???

Belize — $8,613,838

Bolivia — $1,378,654

Botswana — $57,252,922

Brazil — $14,899,949

Brunei — $354,829

Bulgaria — $20,066,715

Burkina Faso — $74,469,144

Burundi — $70,507,528

Cabo Verde — $5,044,716

Cambodia — $103,194,295

Chad — $117,425,683

Chile — $2,266,071

China — $42,263,025      !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Comoros — $1,057,063

Congo — $8,439,457

Costa Rica — $14,650,552

Cote d’Ivoire — $161,860,737

Cuba — $15,776,924      !!!

Cyprus — $0

Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) — $2,142,161    !!!!!!!!!!

Denmark — $3,455     ???

Djibouti — $24,299,878

Dominica — $616,000

Ecuador — $26,014,579

Egypt — $1,239,291,240

Eritrea — $119,364

Estonia — $15,937,295

Ethiopia — $1,111,152,703

Finland — $33,492

France — $4,660,356         ??????

Gabon — $31,442,404

Gambia — $3,197,858

Germany — $5,484,317     ????????????

Ghana — $724,133,065

Greece — $8,508,639

Grenada — $690,300

Guinea — $87,630,410

Guyana — $9,691,030

Iceland — $0

India — $179,688,851

Indonesia — $222,431,738

Iran — $3,350,327              !!!!!!!!!!

Iraq — $5,280,379,380

Ireland — $0

Italy — $454,613

Japan — $20,804,795

Jordan — $1,214,093,785

Kazakhstan — $80,418,203

Kuwait — $112,000

Kyrgyzstan — $41,262,984

Laos — $57,174,076

Lebanon — $416,553,311

Liberia — $473,677,614

Libya — $26,612,087

Liechtenstein — $0

Lithuania — $15,709,304

Luxembourg — $0

Madagascar — $102,823,791

Malaysia — $10,439,368

Maldives — $1,511,931

Mali — $257,152,020

Malta — $137,945

Mauritania — $12,743,363

Mauritius — $791,133

Monaco — $0

Montenegro — $2,118,108

Morocco — $82,023,514

Mozambique — $514,007,619

Namibia — $53,691,093

Nepal — $194,286,218

Netherlands — $0

New Zealand — $0

Nicaragua — $31,318,397

Niger — $144,122,239

Nigeria — $718,236,917

Norway — $100,000

Oman — $5,753,829

Pakistan — $777,504,870    !!!

Papua New Guinea — $14,836,598

Peru — $95,803,112

Portugal — $207,600

Qatar — $95,097

Republic of Korea (South Korea) — $3,032,086

Russia — $17,195,004      ??????

Saint Vincent and the Grenadines — $612,000

Saudi Arabia — $732,875      !!!!!!

Senegal — $99,599,642

Serbia — $33,062,589

Seychelles — $223,002

Singapore — $468,118

Slovakia — $2,585,685

Slovenia — $715,716

Somalia — $274,784,535

South Africa — $597,218,298

Spain — $81,231

Sri Lanka — $27,192,841

Sudan — $137,878,835

Suriname — $232,672

Sweden — $1,269      !

Switzerland — $1,168,960      ??????

Syria — $916,426,147

Tajikistan — $47,789,686

Thailand — $68,182,970

The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia — $31,755,240

Tunisia — $117,490,639

Turkey — $154,594,512

United Arab Emirates — $1,140,659

United Kingdom — $3,877,820         ??????????

United Republic of Tanzania — $628,785,614

Uruguay — $836,850

Uzbekistan — $20,067,933

Venezuela — $9,178,148         !!!!!!

Vietnam — $157,611,276

Yemen — $305,054,784

Zimbabwe — $261,181,770

TOTAL — $24,485,383,599

If any country wants aid from the United States, it needs to have a mighty good reason to ask for it. Then let it beg for its aid, and in return promise loyalty to its benefactor. If it breaks the promise, no more aid.

President Trump is making a good start with Pakistan. Daniel Greenfield writes at Front Page:

Pakistan is an Islamic terror state.

That point can’t objectively be disputed. Pakistan’s political and religious elites promote terrorism. Its government funds and directs terrorists. It even hid Osama bin Laden. …

President Trump opened 2018 with a social media salvo against Pakistan, accusing the Muslim-majority nation of harboring terrorists while expressing frustration that the United States has “foolishly” sent billions in aid to the country.

“The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools,” Trump tweeted Monday morning. “They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help. No more!”

“No more!”

May every regime throughout the hellish Third World hear those words.

And may they be true.

(Hat-tip Cogito for the list)

On December 31, 2014, in the midst of the second lurch of the terrible reign of the Community Organizer, we made some New Year wishes.

Have any of them come true? Have some of them begun to come true?

1.May Obama be hindered, hampered, frustrated and blocked in every political action he takes

He has gone. His horrible legacy is being undone. Obamacare has been semi-repealed. Taxes are down. Americans are becoming prosperous again. Illegal immigration is down.   

2.May the decline of America, that Obama has deliberately worked, be reversed. May the Republicans use their congressional majorities and all their positions of authority to effect that reversal.

American leadership in international affairs has been restored.The Iranian people are in uproar and riot against the ayatollahs’ dictatorship that Obama fawned over.

3.May religious belief start withering away, irreversibly, from the human psyche.

Religious belief is diminishing in the West at least.

4.May Islam be soundly defeated everywhere on earth and set on the road to rapid and total extinction.

The ISIS caliphate has been defeated, to a large extent by US military action in accordance with President Trump’s policy.

5.May the welfare state start being phased out, and genuine market economies be allowed to function in every nation-state.

Not started yet.

6.May the man-made global warming lobby give up.

It’s dying. The fatal blow was administered by President Trump when he withdrew the US from the absurd and ruinous Paris Agreement. Also, the US Environmenal Protection Agency (EPA) is being castrated and having all its teeth pulled at the same time. That’s worth a cup of cheer all on its own.

7.May the United Nations and all its agencies be destroyed.

The US has begun defunding the evil UN. It’s total demise begins to look like a real possibility.

*

On  the last day of 2014 we commented: “Okay – we’re being unrealistic. But while we’re wishing, we may as well wish big.”

As it transpires, we were not being unrealistic.

May 2018 bring further fulfillment of those same wishes – and the full granting of all the wishes of our readers, commenters, encouragers, and contributors.

A Happy New Year to all who see this page!

Republicans in Congress are fed up with being played for irrelevant fools by the little dictators of the DOJ and FBI.

The stench of corruption from both those federal agencies grows stronger by the day.

The guilty men and women need to be cleaned out, and all the facts of their perfidy revealed.

Is it beginning to happen at last?

If the Clintons and their multitudinous gang in the “deep state”  are guilty of the dark crimes it seems they are, what would be the just punishment for them?

There is no precedent in American history for such crimes; none for so wide and deep and conscienceless a conspiracy to undermine the constitutional processes of the Republic.

They amount to treason, but not treason as defined by US law. (Article III of the Constitution defines treason as levying war against the United States, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid or comfort.) For clear cases of treason, even if they do not come within the legal definition of the crime, capital punishment alone may be  the right retribution. The Rosenbergs, who gave US nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union, were found guilty of committing espionage, and were electrocuted to death. For the deep corruption of the intelligence services of the United States – for that alone – such a punishment would not be too extreme.

Failing the death penalty, how long would prison sentences have to be? How many “life” terms, served sequentially?

Or will they all get away completely with their crimes, every last one of the guilty men and women?

If they do, what will the rule of law mean in the USA? Nothing. Because it will have turned out that some people are above the law.

John Hinderaker writes at PowerLine:

It may be that Russians penetrated the DNC/Podesta email accounts, but the reports don’t prove that fact. More important, they contain nothing beyond bare assertion to support the implausible claim that Putin wanted Trump, rather than Hillary “Reset Button” Clinton, to win the election. Washington insiders say that the intelligence agencies have provided some evidence that Russia was behind the spearfishing of both the DNC and RNC accounts, but no evidence that Russia’s goal was to try to secure the election for Trump. On the contrary, there is little doubt that Russia’s agents in the U.S., relying on the Washington Post, the New York Times, etc., were reporting that Clinton had the election in the bag.

The FBI/CIA/NSA reports supplied an important link in the Democrats’ anti-Trump strategy. They implied that Trump’s alleged collusion with the Putin regime bore fruit: the Russians wanted Trump to win, they “meddled” in the election to achieve that purpose, and sure enough, he won the election. The intelligence community’s reports went a long way toward delegitimizing the Trump administration before it even came into being.

It now appears clear that this entire story was a fraud. There was no collusion; not by Trump, anyway. The collusion was all on the other side, and it looks to me as though the CIA’s and NSA’s politicized leaders were part of it. Who was the Director of the CIA when these reports were prepared and handed to the press? John Brennan …

Who was the Director of National Intelligence? The clueless and virulently anti-Trump James Clapper, who just a few days ago called President Trump an “asset” of Russia …

You could say these people are crazy, but a few short months ago they were in charge of the U.S. intelligence community. It seems clear that by the end of 2016 they were collaborating in the DNC/Clinton campaign/Steele/Fusion GPS/FBI/Russia effort to undermine the incoming Trump administration. An obvious question is, how far back did cooperation by CIA and NSA go? Did those agencies corruptly collaborate with Obama’s DOJ in spying on Trump and his associates during the campaign?

Based on what we already know, the DNC/Clinton campaign/Steele/Fusion GPS/Russia/FBI collusion looks like the biggest scandal in American political history. To the extent that the CIA and NSA were also involved, it can only get worse.

Yet another badly needed change has been accomplished byPresident Trump, one that will change political alignments and actions all over the world – for the better. 

DebkaFile reports:

The White House has decided to quietly withdraw from all its ties with the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority and Mahmoud Abbas.
DEBKAfile’s exclusive sources report that the Trump administration has resolved to scrap all ties with the Palestinian leadership in retaliation for its campaign against US President Donald Trump and his Jerusalem policy. Several warnings to Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) of what was in store if he did not desist from castigating the US president fell on death ears.
Last week, two Arab crown princes, Saudi [Crown Prince] Muhammed bin Salman and UAE Sheikh Muhammed bin Zayed, summoned Abbas to their capitals and urged him strongly to back away from his attacks on President Trump. He got the same advice from the ruler of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim Al Thani, who conferred with Washington on the subject – all to no avail. The Trump administration has therefore set out an eight-point program of sanctions, which is first revealed here:

• The Israeli-Palestinian peace plan under preparation in Washington will not be submitted to Ramallah – only to Israel and the relevant Arab governments.
• US-Palestinian interaction is to be suspended – not just at the senior levels but in day-to-day interchanges. The administration has notified Palestinian and other Arab parties to stop addressing queries on political and economic matters to the US consulate in Jerusalem, because they will not receive answers. The status of the PLO office in Washington will be reevaluated with a view to shutting it down.
• Palestinian officials will no longer be invited to Washington by the US government, including the State Department and Department of Treasury.
• Above all, they will not be welcome at the White House or the National Security Council where US Middle East policy is designed. Senior US officials congratulated the senior Palestinian negotiator Saab Erekat, who also holds the PA’s American portfolio, on his recovery from illness, at the same time warning him that he would no longer be received at the White House. [That’s witty – ed.] 
• The Trump administration will not make any public announcement of the cutoff of financial aid to the Palestinians. Since the funds are mostly earmarked for specific economic projects, each allocation will simply be held back on the pretext of the need for a “reappraisal”.
• The US will halt its contributions to the UN Work and Relief Organization, an estimated one billion dollars per annum.
• The US administration moreover intervened with the governments of Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi and Qatar with a request that they freeze or slow their economic aid to the Palestinian Authority.
• According DEBKAfile’s sources, Palestinian officials in Ramallah were devastated by news of the sudden cutoff of the main sources of the PA’s revenue. Even the Qatar ruler, whom Abbas visited last week as a last resort to save the PA from economic meltdown, refused to release any more funding.

(Hat-tip Cogito)

Taxation is theft.

The government has a monopoly of force, and uses it to extort money from the people.

We complain about it, but we are not anarchists. We know there must be a government, and that it needs money to do its job.

If it only did what only government can do, protect our liberty and property essential to our liberty from domestic crime and foreign invasion, and nothing more, we would not grudge parting with some of our money to pay for that necessary service.

But even the best governments use the people’s money for superfluous ends. They give it to foreign countries! They squander it on art and sport and … The list of unnecessary, and even  positively wicked, recipients of government largesse is very long.

Plainly, the less government does, the better. The less tax it extorts from the people, the better.

So it is very good that a tax-reducing bill has been passed in both the House and the Senate.

President Trump – who promised tax cuts – will sign it, and the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act will be law. (Here are its details and professional analysis of it.)

It is also an achievement of the Republican Party – not easily won, but finally won.

No Democrat voted for it. Theirs is the party of high taxation for big government, low growth, high unemployment, more dependence on government, less self-determination.

But we doubt if there is one of them (except the extremely rich among them because they aren’t getting a reduction, such as House minority leader Nancy Pelosi) who is not secretly glad he’ll be paying less tax.

They are also, as we often repeat, the Hypocrite Party.

Condoning and aiding crime. Committing a form of treason. Then admitting it. A swamp creature losing his mind?

From Infowars

An ex-spy chief who spoke out publicly against Trump while inspiring other career intelligence figures to follow suit has admitted his leading role in the intelligence community waging political war against the president, describing his actions as something he didn’t “fully think through”.

In a surprisingly frank interview, the CIA’s Michael Morell – who was longtime Deputy Director and former Acting Director of the nation’s most powerful intelligence agency – said that it wasn’t a great idea to leak against and bash a new president.

Morell had the dubious distinction of being George W. Bush’s personal daily briefer for the agency before and after 9/11, and also served under Obama until his retirement. In the summer of 2016 he took the unusual step (for a former intelligence chief) of openly endorsing Hillary Clinton in a New York Times op-ed entitled, I Ran the C.I.A. Now I’m Endorsing Hillary Clinton, after which he continued to be both an outspoken critic of Trump and an early CIA voice promoting the Russian collusion and election meddling narrative.

As Politico’s Susan Glasser put in a newly published interview, Morell “has emerged out of the shadows of the deep state” to become one of Trump’s foremost critics speaking within the intel community. …

Morell acknowledges that he and other spy-world critics of the president failed to fully “think through” the negative backlash generated by their going political. “There was a significant downside,” Morell said in the interview.

Not only had Morell during his previous NYT op-ed stated that he was committed to doing “everything I can to ensure that she is elected as our 45th president” but he went so far as to call then candidate Trump “a threat to our national security” – while making the extraordinary claim that “in the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation”.

Curiously, Morell in his latest Politico interview indicates when asked about his “public profile” and activism so soon after leaving the agency (something that was relatively unusual prior to Trump taking office) that his post-retirement media appearances have been approved and/or received some level of oversight by the CIA. In the interview Morell states, “I did a 60 Minutes interview about my life inside CIA, and it’s something the agency thought that was a good thing to do, and I taped most of it before I left the agency.”

While such CIA review of former employees’ publications and media interaction is nothing new, in Morell’s case was an unprecedented example of a very high profile intelligence figure explicitly campaigning for a presidential candidate and against another while specifically invoking his role at the CIA (he began his NYT column with, “During a 33-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, I served presidents of both parties — three Republicans and three Democrats…” followed by a litany of key national security events he was central to).

The other important confirmation to come out of the discussion is the clear guiding assumption of the interview – that the intelligence “deep state” did in fact go to war with Trump – which has now been confirmed by Morell himself, which is essentially to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. …

Morrell said:

[Donald Trump is elected] president, and he’s supposed to be getting a daily brief from the moment he becomes the president-elect. Right? And he doesn’t. And within a few days, there’s leaks about how he’s not taking his briefing. So, he must have thought — right? — that, “Who are these guys? Are these guys out to get me? Is this a political organization? Can I think about them as a political organization when I become president?

So, I think there was a significant downside to those of us who became political in that moment. So, if I could have thought of that, would I have ended up in a different place? I don’t know. But it’s something I didn’t think about. …

For every other part of the intelligence community except CIA, you’re working for a cabinet member. At CIA, you are working for the president of the United States. That is your customer. Right? 00:08:03 So, when you see your customer questioning what it is that you are providing to him or her, and that person seems to be cherry-picking what they accept and what they don’t accept, it’s demoralizing. …

Yet Morell … admitted that he is personally one of the chief authors of precisely this “demoralizing” scenario in which the president doesn’t fully trust his intelligence briefers. …

We should all remember that this is a man who on the one hand described “Russia’s hacking is the political equivalent of 9/11” and constantly hyped “Russian propaganda”, while on the other he went on a lengthy RT [Russia Today] News segment in order to promote his newly published book.

Why were such men made heads of important government agencies? Other Intelligence chiefs, James Clapper, James Comey, and John Brennan have also revealed themselves to be dishonest and disloyal.

Examples of their deceptions:-

On Clapper, from Breitbart:

When James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, was asked under oath at a Senate Intelligence Committee meeting in March of this year: “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?, he answered “No, sir.”  … Yet documents recently leaked by former NSA analyst and America’s number one fugitive, Edward Snowden, demonstrate Clapper likely gave false testimony to Congress. Clapper has since admitted he testified in the “least untruthful manner” he could think of and he was “too cute by half”. But there is little chance he will be prosecuted.

On Comey, from the Washington Times:

President Trump accused former FBI Director James B. Comey of lying to protect Hillary Clinton in a series of tweets on Wednesday after the agency released new documents on the investigation. … [He was]  commenting on an FBI document release on Monday that showed Mr. Comey began drafting a letter exonerating Mrs. Clinton prior to the conclusion of the investigation, and before even speaking to her about the matter. “As it has turned out, James Comey lied and leaked and totally protected Hillary Clinton. He was the best thing that ever happened to her!” the president tweeted.

On John Brennan, from Gateway Pundit:

Seeking to retain his position as CIA director under Hillary, Brennan teamed up with British spies and Estonian spies to cripple Trump’s candidacy. He used their phony intelligence as a pretext for a multi-agency investigation into Trump, which led the FBI to probe a computer server connected to Trump Tower and gave cover to Susan Rice, among other Hillary supporters, to spy on Trump and his people. … A supporter of the American Communist Party at the height of the Cold War, Brennan brought into the CIA a raft of subversives and gave them plum positions from which to gather and leak political espionage on Trump. He bastardized standards so that these left-wing activists could burrow in and take career positions. Under the patina of that phony professionalism, they could then present their politicized judgments as “non-partisan”.

The presidents who appointed these men are as much to blame as the perfidious operators themselves.

Those we trusted with the power to enforce the law and defend our liberty, let us down.

In America we have President Trump to restore moral decency to government – as well as restoring the economy and the standing of the United States in the world, after the massive damage that Barack Obama did to the country he led and despised.

But in the rest of the so-called free world, most of the political leaders in power are continuing the betrayal. How long will it take for the peoples of the West to get rid of their rotten rulers and find others with the courage and resolve to restore their heritage, their national identity and law-protected liberty?

Today President Trump made a speech of historic significance.

Here’s the text:

When I came into office, I promised to look at the world’s challenges with open eyes and very fresh thinking.

We cannot solve our problems by making the same failed assumptions and repeating the same failed strategies of the past. All challenges demand new approaches.

My announcement today marks the beginning of a new approach to conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

In 1995, Congress adopted the Jerusalem Embassy Act urging the federal government to relocate the American Embassy to Jerusalem and to recognize that that city, and so importantly, is Israel’s capital. This act passed congress by an overwhelming bipartisan majority. And was reaffirmed by unanimous vote of the Senate only six months ago.

Yet, for over 20 years, every previous American president has exercised the law’s waiver, refusing to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem or to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital city. Presidents issued these waivers under the belief that delaying the recognition of Jerusalem would advance the cause of peace. Some say they lacked courage but they made their best judgments based on facts as they understood them at the time. Nevertheless, the record is in.

After more than two decades of waivers, we are no closer to a lasting peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.

It would be folly to assume that repeating the exact same formula would now produce a different or better result.

Therefore, I have determined that it is time to officially recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

While previous presidents have made this a major campaign promise, they failed to deliver.

Today, I am delivering. I’ve judged this course of action to be in the best interests of the United States of America and the pursuit of peace between Israel and the Palestinians. This is a long overdue step to advance the peace process. And to work towards a lasting agreement.

Israel is a sovereign nation with the right, like every other sovereign nation, to determine its own capital. Acknowledging this is a fact is a necessary condition for achieving peace. It was 70 years ago that the United States under President Truman recognized the state of Israel.

Ever since then, Israel has made its capital in the city of Jerusalem, the capital the Jewish people established in ancient times.

Today, Jerusalem is the seat of the modern Israeli government. It is the home of the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, as well as the Israeli Supreme Court. It is the location of the official residence of the prime minister and the president. It is the headquarters of many government ministries.

For decades, visiting American presidents, secretaries of State and military leaders have met their Israeli counterparts in Jerusalem, as I did on my trip to Israel earlier this year.

Jerusalem is not just the heart of three great religions, but it is now also the heart of one of the most successful democracies in the world. Over the past seven decades, the Israeli people have built a country where Jews, Muslims and Christians and people of all faiths are free to live and worship according to their conscience and according to their beliefs.

Jerusalem is today and must remain a place where Jews pray at the Western Wall, where Christians walk the stations of the cross, and where Muslims worship at Al Aqsa Mosque. However, through all of these years, presidents representing the United States have declined to officially recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. In fact, we have declined to acknowledge any Israeli capital at all.

But today we finally acknowledge the obvious. That Jerusalem is Israel’s capital. This is nothing more or less than a recognition of reality. It is also the right thing to do. It’s something that has to be done.

That is why consistent with the Jerusalem embassy act, I am also directing the State Department to begin preparation to move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. This will immediately begin the process of hiring architects, engineers and planners so that a new embassy, when completed, will be a magnificent tribute to peace.

In making these announcements, I also want to make one point very clear. This decision is not intended in any way to reflect a departure from our strong commitment to facilitate a lasting peace agreement.

We want an agreement that is a great deal for the Israelis and a great deal for the Palestinians. We are not taking a position of any final status issues including the specific boundaries of the Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem or the resolution of contested borders. Those questions are up to the parties involved.

The United States remains deeply committed to helping facilitate a peace agreement that is acceptable to both sides. I intend to do everything in my power to help forge such an agreement.

Without question, Jerusalem is one of the most sensitive issues in those talks. The United States would support a two-state solution if agreed to by both sides. In the meantime, I call on all parties to maintain the status quo at Jerusalem’s holy sites including the Temple Mount, also known as Haram al-Sharif. Above all, our greatest hope is for peace. The universal yearning in every human soul.

With today’s action, I reaffirm my administration’s longstanding commitment to a future of peace and security for the region. There will, of course, be disagreement and dissent regarding this announcement. But we are confident that ultimately, as we work through these disagreements, we will arrive at a peace and a place far greater in understanding and cooperation. This sacred city should call forth the best in humanity.

Lifting our sights to what is possible, not pulling us back and down to the old fights that have become so totally predictable.

Peace is never beyond the grasp of those willing to reach it.

So today we call for calm, for moderation, and for the voices of tolerance to prevail over the purveyors of hate. Our children should inherit our love, not our conflicts. I repeat the message I delivered at the historic and extraordinary summit in Saudi Arabia earlier this year: The Middle East is a region rich with culture, spirit, and history. Its people are brilliant, proud and diverse. Vibrant and strong.

But the incredible future awaiting this region is held at bay by bloodshed, ignorance and terror.

Vice President Pence will travel to the region in the coming days to reaffirm our commitment to work with partners throughout the Middle East to defeat radicalism that threatens the hopes and dreams of future generations.

It is time for the many who desire peace to expel the extremists from their midsts. It is time for all civilized nations and people to respond to disagreement with reasoned debate, not violence. And it is time for young and moderate voices all across the Middle East to claim for themselves a bright and beautiful future.

So today, let us rededicate ourselves to a path of mutual understanding and respect. Let us rethink old assumptions and open our hearts and minds to possible and possibilities.

And finally, I ask the leaders of the region political and religious, Israeli and Palestinian, Jewish and Christian and Muslim to join us in the noble quest for lasting peace.

Thank you.

We applaud and celebrate the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and the starting of the building of a new US embassy in Jerusalem.

And we wait for the first rockets and acts of terrorism that will show how keenly Muslims are joining in the noble quest for peace.

President Trump has – we’re glad to say – offended the British political and media establishment, including the Prime Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury. They all deserve to be offended.

They took offense at his retweeting certain videos – put out with pride by Muslims – showing Muslims carrying out violent acts. One of them was of a Muslim mob pushing a teenage boy off a roof and then, finding him still alive, beating him to death. Yes, of this they are proud!

It so happened that the videos had first been tweeted about by a British organization called Britain First – a name inspired by Donald Trump’s “America First ” slogan. In Britain it is de rigueur to revile Britain First, because, the revilers say, it is an offshoot from the British National Party (BNP) which was neo-Nazi; therefore, the reasoning goes, Britain First is “far right”. (Never mind that Nazism was a socialist movement, correctly describable as deriving from the Left – the Left long ago won that deception of nomenclature.) Actually, Britain First thinks of itself as being primarily Christian, and its opposition to Islam is at least partly on religious grounds.

But aside from all that, President Trump condemned the videos because of what they were, not because of who else condemned them.

He reacted to Theresa May’s indignant fury by tweeting: “Don’t focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom. We are doing just fine!”

James Delingpole comments at Breitbart:

Now let me explain why, far from being a stupid, irresponsible, unpresidential move – as Britain’s chattering classes would have us believe – Trump’s tweets were in fact tactically astute. …

First, let’s just establish what he was NOT doing:

Winning the hearts and minds of radical Muslims; making liberals love and respect him more; getting nice coverage in the Guardian and the New York Times; persuading Never Trumpers that they might have misjudged him; winning over Theresa May and the rest of the faux-Conservative political class.

No. Trump doesn’t give a damn for any of these people. (And who can blame him?)

Instead he was sending a message to the people he cares about: all those ordinary people out there, not just in the U.S. but in Europe and beyond, who are shocked, appalled, scared by the way their countries are slowly (or quite quickly in the case of some countries, Sweden, for example) surrendering to Islam; who feel betrayed by the pusillanimity of their political leaders and let down by the failure of most of their media to report on the rapes and the sexual grooming and the violence being committed disproportionately by Muslims, both immigrants and home-grown radicals; who feel unable to speak – except in embarrassed whispers – about their fears about being stabbed or machine-gunned or blown up or mown down by yet another jihadist simply for the crime of going about their daily, Western life; who bitterly resent being tarred as Islamophobic or xenophobic or uncaring when all they want is to be allowed to live their life in peace in a country whose traditions, laws and cultural values remain the ones they grew up with and which make their homeland worth living in.

These are the people Trump was reaching out to with those tweets.

As for the rest – all those politicians and media types and cry bully activist groups – they just fell into Trump’s trap.

Trump wanted them to react in the way they did. ..

That boy on the roof – Hamada Badr, his name was, and he was 19 years old – really was pushed off and beaten to death by an Islamist mob, one carrying the black Al Qaeda flag …

So what, exactly, was Trump doing wrong by tweeting videos drawing attention to these issues?

None of his detractors has successfully answered this question.

That is because they do not have an answer.

Some of us here in Britain – many if not most of us, I suspect – are continually pinching ourselves in disbelief at what our country has become in so short a space. It seems only yesterday that we used to be able to walk over Westminster Bridge or go shopping round Borough Market or go to a pop concert without for one second having to worry about the possibility of being murdered by Islamic terrorists; that boys and girls in headscarves were never segregated in inner city schools and taught to despise Jews and other kuffar; that the correct response to mass rape was mass arrest not mass cover ups; that Britain believed in equality before the law not in separate Sharia courts for certain communities; that a supermarket worker who told his boss “I can’t serve alcohol to customers” would be told in no uncertain terms either to do his job or move on elsewhere …

The story is the same across continental Europe, from Austria to Sweden to Germany to France and the beaches of Greece, Italy and southern Spain.

But has our political class responded to our concerns about this menace to our values, our cultural cohesion and our safety?

On the contrary. It has either ignored the problem altogether. Or doubled down on it, as Angela Merkel did in 2015 when she decided to enrich her country, whether it liked it or not, with another million or so Muslim “refugees”. Or – as in the case of all this confected outrage about Britain First (a tiny organization about which few people either know or care) – they go: “Look, a squirrel!”, in the hope that people will politely join them in pretending that there isn’t a problem, thus relieving themselves of the burden of having to deal with it.

The U.S. was nearly as bad, of course, till Trump came along and said: “Enough is enough.” Which, of course, is one of the main reasons he is now president. He understood, as so many of our chatterati still do not, that there is a yawning gulf between where our political class are on the subject of immigration and Islam, and where the man and woman in the street are.

Trump sticks out like a sore thumb at the moment … because he is the only truth teller in a world of lies.

As a result of these events, the Special Relationship is under strain, and President Trump has cancelled a planned working visit to the United Kingdom to open the new US embassy in London.

Good decision, Mr. President!

It is foolish of Theresa May to pick a quarrel with President Trump, when Brexit Britain badly needs the best trade deals  it can get with the United States.

But what else should be expected of her? She is plainly a foolish woman when she constantly says that that the Muslim terrorist attacks plaguing her country “have nothing to do with Islam”, and at the same time has the forces of law and order hunt down and punish those who denounce the horrors on the grounds that any such criticism is offensive to Muslims.