NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) —Thousands of demonstrators gathered in Times Square Wednesday evening in protest over the recent landmark nuclear deal with Iran.
As CBS2’s Jessica Schneider reported, some 10 thousand are rallying in solidarity with signs and voices raised against the nuclear deal.
Protest organizers proclaim: “Washington is prepared to give Iran virtually all that it needs to get to the bomb. To release $150 billion to Iran will result in the expansion of worldwide terror.”
Former New York Governor, and Presidential contender, George Pataki joined the chorus of voices urging lawmakers to block the deal.
“Reject this deal. Protect America. Protect Israel and protect the world from freedom,” Pataki said.
The Stop Iran Rally Coalition — which claims to be a bi-partisan group — is also calling out Sen. Charles Schumer, saying he “has the votes as presumptive leader to override this deal….If this deal is not stopped, New York voters will know whom to blame.”
Sen. Schumer said in a statement Wednesday that he wasn’t ready to make a decision on the deal yet.
“I’ve read the agreement and I’m seeking answers to the many questions I have. Before I make a decision, I’m going to speak at length with experts on both sides,” the lawmaker said.
In Washington, Secretary of State John Kerry led back-to-back, closed-door briefings, trying to sway lawmakers to approve the deal to curb Iran’s nuclear program.
“We are convinced that the agreement that we have arrived at with world powers is an agreement that will prevent Iran from the potential of securing a nuclear weapon. It will make the region, our friends and allies safer, it will make the world safer,” Kerry said. “And we are convinced that the absence of any viable alternative absolutely underscores that fact.”
Meanwhile, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. is fiercely lobbying lawmakers to reject the deal. And Republicans are pledging to do just that.
“Because a bad deal threatens the security of the American people, and we’re going to do everything possible to stop it,” said Speaker of the House Rep. John Boehner.
And many at the rally said more people in the country need to start listening and speaking out as well.
“I’m very concerned about what our situation is here. Nobody wants this deal to go through and we’re hoping that Obama will hear the voice of the American people and we’re hoping that Congress will listen to what we have say. And hopefully we can do something about that,” said one protester.
“I feel people really don’t understand the main issue. To me the main issue is not what happens 10 years from now, but what happens as soon as the sanctions are removed from Iran,” another protester told Schneider. “Which is the main terrorist regime in the world, which spreads terrorism all around the world, which is responsible for the deaths of Americans as well as Israelis.”
Several academic, military, and political leaders will speak to the crowd Wednesday night. All of them urge that this is an issue that transcends politics and they’re urging Congress to keep sanctions against Iran, even if it means overriding President Barack Obama’s likely veto on any legislation against the deal, Schneider reported.
Congress has 60 days to approve or reject the deal. The Senate will hold a hearing on the deal Thursday.
Frank Gaffney among many other leaders called Obama a traitor. Obama struck secret side deals on the monstrous Iran deal. There were many, many calls for impeachment. Trevor Loudon was at the event along with many of my friends. God bless America! Let the fight begin. Allen West gives one of the most impassioned, best speeches I have ever heard here. 10,000 people showed up in Times Square. The biggest protest ever there. More to come on the rally. Stop Iran Now!
President Obama was on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Tuesday night, pitching the Iran deal as the best way to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, and claiming once again that it came down to this deal, or war. This week he did an end-run around Congress by going to the United Nations, where the UN Security Council unanimously adopted the agreement between the P5+1 (U.S., England, France, Germany, Russia and China) and Iran. As we have pointed out, this agreement virtually guarantees Iran a path to having nuclear weapons, if they don’t already. Plus, it will release them from tough sanctions (no “snap-back” sanctions are feasible), and will soon provide them with approximately $150 billion of their frozen oil revenues to continue to expand their state sponsored terrorism and hegemonic ambitions. The U.S. held all the cards when the negotiations began, yet made concession after concession, completely abandoning numerous red lines that were previously insisted upon.
Today, Wednesday July 22nd, an important demonstration and rally will be taking place in Times Square, in the heart of New York City, to call attention to the multitude of problems with this so called agreement, and to try to prevent it from going into effect. It is called the Stop Iran Rally, and features an outstanding lineup of speakers. Six of them are members of our Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi, including Adm. James “Ace” Lyons (Ret.), former CIA Officer Clare Lopez, Gen. Paul Vallely (Ret.), Lt. Col. Allen West (Ret.), Steven Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, former Rep. Pete Hoekstra (former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee). In addition, the list includes former CIA Director James Woolsey, Alan Dershowitz, Robert Morgenthau, Caroline Glick, Frank Gaffney, Mort Zuckerman and George Pataki. Too many to name them all. To see the full list, take a look at the poster.
The event is scheduled to begin at 5:30 p.m., and will last at least two hours. You can watch it live by clicking here. I will be in attendance, and will be reporting on the event.
Friday, July 17th, marked the 19th anniversary of the deaths of 230 people on TWA Flight 800. There remain unaddressed questions about how this jet mysteriously exploded off the coast of Long Island. But the mainstream media aren’t interested in providing the public with much needed answers, pursuing this scandal, or even, really, marking the anniversary of the victims. Instead, recent coverage of this anniversary has been confined to some local news reports. I’m sure there will be much more coverage next year, for the 20th anniversary.
But the media continue to do a disservice to America and the memories of those lost, by ignoring this enduring scandal and its many victims. They are not interested in re-litigating the facts because the facts overwhelmingly point to an administration cover-up, and to expose this scandal would implicate the Clintons in yet another scandal.
Andrew Danziger, a 28-year airline veteran, spoke out this past April about the transparent government cover-up that took place nearly two decades ago.
“This investigation smelled like bull all those years back, and time has done nothing to soften that stench,” wrote Danziger for the New York Daily News. “I don’t believe the findings, and neither do hundreds of other pilots that I know.”
That might be because the FBI, he says, took the “lead” in the investigation, an “unprecedented” step. In particular, Danziger wrote, one of the lead investigators representing the interests of the TWA pilots at the time told him that “the mechanics and their representatives were denied access, in the early going, to the hangar where all of the recovered material was stored and being re-assembled.”
His colleague also told him that “During the investigation, the FBI periodically required everyone to leave the hangar due to ‘national security issues.’”
“Only after they ‘sterilized the area’ were folks allowed back in to continue where they left off (that is, if what they were examining was still there),” writes Danziger. In addition, eyewitnesses were not allowed to testify, and their words were only summarized in FBI reports which they could not personally review.
“Lots can go wrong with an airplane,” he wrote. “But jets do not explode in midair.”
“…Hank Hughes, an [National Transportation Safety Board] NTSB investigator who headed up the reassembly of the wreckage in a hangar in Calverton, New York, had been telling what he knew since early in the investigation,” I recalled for Accuracy in Media two years ago. “He told a Senate committee in 1997 that he witnessed evidence being tampered with, and some being destroyed.”
I still believe that “the evidence remains overwhelming that the plane was brought down by a missile or missiles.”
AIM conducted a detailed investigation of the downing of Flight TWA 800 to attempt to expose the truth. We examined the evidence supporting each of the three leading theories of what caused the plane to explode, and then crash into the Atlantic, 19 years ago this week. Our award-winning documentary, “TWA 800: The Search for the Truth,” can be viewed here.
In a Sunday column in The Washington Post, “Stop laughing at Donald Trump,” a liberal analyst from the Brookings Institution tries to warn the Washington, D.C. beltway elites that they should take the businessman seriously because he has figured out how to win a national election—by taking the white vote. This is the “silent majority.”
While it is true that minorities and other groups helped elect President Obama twice, “the white portion of the electorate, which votes strongly Republican, underperformed in support of John McCain in 2008, and white turnout was down in 2012,” when Mitt Romney was the Republican presidential nominee, notes William H. Frey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a population studies professor at the University of Michigan.
In other words, if McCain and Romney had only come across in a more conservative and assertive manner, and had appealed to more white voters, they probably would have won.
Frey comments that Trump “appeals to a vein of the U.S. electorate that will remain a significant voting bloc for several election cycles to come: older whites.”
Yet, GOP politicians and Fox News commentators such as George Will and Charles Krauthammer have been attacking Trump and his policy positions. McCain went further, smearing Trump supporters as “crazies,” before Trump fired back, in comments on McCain’s war record. Veteran reporter Sharyl Attkisson said Trump’s comments were taken out of context and distorted by The Washington Post.
It appears that the “crazies” include a lot of ordinary Americans who are sick and tired of politics as usual. Trump, in contrast to McCain and Romney, has figured out a way to fire them up and tap their anger and frustration.
A 2014 study by Professor Marisa Abrajano on the coming backlash to immigration policy not only explains the Donald Trump phenomenon, but also why the liberal media are so determined to destroy him. The media know that Trump’s appeal threatens the ability of the Democratic Party to continue to fool white voters into embracing liberal policies that destroy their own communities.
Her academic paper, published by the Brookings Institution, was clearly designed to warn liberals about how a “broad backlash” to immigration could damage the Democratic Party. She said a backlash could not only “shift the balance of power between Democrats and Republicans” but benefit “rightward leaning candidates throughout the country” who want to do something about it.
“Immigrants may be arriving in historically high numbers,” she noted, “but they account for only a relatively small fraction of the nation’s population. Native-born whites still represent 63 percent of the population and, perhaps more importantly, some 75 percent of its voters.”
Hence, the key to Democratic Party success lies in manipulating the minority groups and immigrants into voting for Democrats in overwhelming numbers, as they currently do, while also conning a significant number of whites into voting Democrat. This is a con because the Democratic Party has no interest in protecting the interests of white people as a political or special interest group.
The Abrajano report has some interesting comments about media coverage of the issue that may help explain the reaction to Donald Trump. It says, “At the aggregate level, we find that when media coverage of immigration uses the Latino threat narrative, the likelihood of whites identifying with the Democratic Party decreases, and the probability of favoring Republicans increases.”
Of course, the liberal media never use the “Latino threat narrative,” and the phrase is meant to suggest that concerns about immigration are somehow racist or improper. Our media have done their best to play down the problem, through such maneuvers as banning the term “illegal alien” and substituting “undocumented worker.”
What Trump has done is bring the issue to the fore, making it out to be the threat that it is. The Trump surge, plus the murder of a young American in San Francisco by a Mexican illegal alien and the prison escape in Mexico of a drug cartel leader, have put the dangers on the front pages of our newspapers in a manner that has garnered the attention of the nation. Our media have been forced to cover the issue in a way that captures the peril our nation currently faces. As a result, the Democrats and their liberal media allies fear that white voters have now been dramatically educated about the political stakes and may vote accordingly in favor of their own interests.
The media have no problem with blacks and Hispanics voting for Democrats in large numbers and affirming and protecting their own racial identities. But when whites do it, it suddenly becomes racism. That charge has carried a lot of sting in the past, but with illegals streaming across the border and Middle Eastern Muslims creating enclaves in places like Tennessee, it looks more and more like members of the “silent majority” are deciding to be silent no more. They are realizing that the lives of their family members and the cultural identity of their nation are at risk.
“Immigration and other factors appear increasingly to be pitting the declining white majority against the growing non-white minority,” she wrote. That majority may have found its voice in Trump, a man unafraid of the liberal media and the GOP establishment, which wants to continue the losing strategy of pandering to the minorities who overwhelmingly vote Democrat.
Abrajano also wrote, “The conventional view of pundits and prognosticators and maybe even most social scientists is that the dramatic growth of the minority population and its strong ties to the Democratic Party portend the demise of the Republican Party.” She adds, “That may be true in the long term. But that prediction ignores the white population and the possibility of a widespread white backlash in the short term.”
It appears that “short term” has now arrived. His name is Donald Trump.
Abrajano’s co-author, Hajnal, a professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, recently wrote that Republicans’ “opposition to immigration reform actually represents a winning strategy, not a losing one.”
Of course, the term “immigration reform” is code for amnesty for illegals.
That aside, he acknowledges that “Republicans win or lose largely depending on white voters. Whites still make up the vast majority of voters—some 75 percent in 2014—and whites tend to favor the Republican Party by large margins. Republican congressional candidates garnered 60 percent of the white vote in 2014. All told, 89 percent of all Republican votes in 2014 came from white voters. Put simply, the Republican Party doesn’t really need the minority vote.”
Since the Republicans have a winning strategy, what holds them back from using it? It’s called political correctness, which holds that appealing to people based on their fears of immigration destroying their country is racist and wrong. Trump didn’t care what the media thought and decided to address the issue anyway. The response speaks for itself.
It’s not surprising that GOP presidential candidates like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio would go after Trump. For whatever reason, perhaps because they want to appear “inclusive,” they are desperate to appeal to Hispanics, a voting bloc that is essentially owned by the Democrats.
This is not to say that some Hispanics do not agree with Trump.
Maria Espinoza launched the group America First Latinos, in order to “prove, once and for all, that the majority of Latino citizens are solidly behind the U.S. Constitution and a secured national border.” Espinoza also launched the Stolen Lives Quilt project, whose members appeared with Trump at his July 10 news conference. The group remembers the victims of illegal alien crimes in the U.S. and is coming to Washington, D.C. this week to press their case against criminal aliens coming across America’s open borders.
as presumptive leader to override this deal….If this deal is not stopped, New York voters will know whom to blame.”
