Speaking Thursday evening at a farewell party in central London for Israel's outgoing Ambassador Daniel Taub, Shalom praised the Ambassador for his "incredible work" facing down a "relentless" torrent of anti-Israel sentiment and criticism in the UK. At the event, hosted by the Jewish National Fund and Zionist Federation, Shalom recounted a frank conversation he had had with a senior British minister earlier in the day, which he said illustrated the European "obsession" with criticizing Israel - even among many self-described "friends."

"Right at the start of the meeting she told me: 'I am a friend of Israel, but as a friend…' and then she started criticizing us for 'settlement building'," he recounted. "I told her, 'You ignore our concerns about Iran, you ignore all the Palestinian terrorist attacks, you ignore the fact that the Palestinians are breaching every treaty they signed with us by taking unilateral steps - at the ICC, at the Security Council, in FIFA - and you don't say a word.

"'But when someone extends their balcony, or when we announce 300 new homes in Bet El - homes which were actually approved during the last government, and it was just voted to honor that approval - you criticize. If you are such a good friend why do you only criticize?' It is as if there is no Iran, there is no Al Qaeda, no ISIS, no Hamas, no Hezbollah, no Islamic Jihad - only Israel is responsible for all the problems in the Middle East!"

"There is a crazy attempt here to shut the mouth of whoever thinks otherwise, of whoever opposes the [gay] community and same-sex marriage,” Smotrich told Arutz Sheva. “I suggest that you go into my Facebook page and see the curses and the namecalling and the mudslinging against me… there is crazy violence against me. If people claim that they are against violence, well – the violent side in this story is their side.”

"Most of all,” he said, “I regret that the police are cooperating with this thing, and anyone who dares publish anything against the LGBTs is immediately considered to be an inciter and is immediately arrested. I call upon the police and the Minister for Internal Security to take a deep breath, drink some water, cool down and take care of matters in a professional manner, instead of joining the crazed herd mentality.”

Asked why everyone seems to fear the LGBTs, Smotrich said that they are “a violent community that tramples everything standing in its way. I have been experiencing this on my flesh since I entered the Knesset. The style of discourse there is all aggressive and uses ugly words that I cannot repeat. The lowest rung. You can't go any lower than the disgusting gutter talk that this group hurls at me.”

"We must not bend in the face of this phenomenon,” he said. “We have confidence and full belief in the rightness of our path. Truth will emerge victorious. Most of the nation is closer to us than to them, even if the Evil Side is currently celebrating.”

But the Obama administration, which boasts of its actions and has called for even deeper military ties with Beijing, shows no signs of backing down from the highly controversial and potentially dangerous programs. In 2013, the Obama administration shocked the world by inviting Communist Chinese troops to the United States to train with American forces for the first time in history. Ostensibly aimed at practicing “disaster management,” the US-Communist China military exercises raised widespread alarm among national security experts.

And while the Pentagon downplayed the risk and denied in comments to The New American that any weapons were involved, Chinese officials were boasting of “weapon demonstration, technique exchange, and cooperative action.” Earlier in 2013, a senior Chinese general, who in 2005 threatened to destroy hundreds of US cities with nuclear weapons, led a “military exchange program” delegation to Washington DC from Beijing.

The next year, again for the first time in history, Obama offered further opportunities for Chinese forces to gather sensitive intelligence on how the US military works — this time by inviting Beijing’s Navy to participate in the “RIMPAC war games.” Hosted off the American coast by the US Pacific Command, RIMPAC is the largest multinational maritime exercise in the world. And by allowing the Chinese regime’s ships to participate, Beijing was able to gather important insight into the US military’s “tactics, techniques and procedures” (TTPs), according to analysts. Beijing was invited again this year, even as it steps up its aggressive actions against US Navy ships in international waters.

Since Obama took office, US forces have been training Chinese troops and sailors in “counter-piracy operations” in the Indian Ocean, too. The Obama administration also waived the ban on Chinese parts in US weapons systems, with potentially catastrophic implications for national security.

Creating the illusion of democratic decisions within the EU, even when there is no clear will among the member states, has returned like a boomerang with the recent Greek vote – the Greek people voted overwhelmingly against more austerity, but their European neighbours forced it on them anyway. This is especially relevant for a group of states with a single currency, a single financial pillar that supports not only a vast economic-monetary-regulatory platform, but the destiny of multiple countries and millions of human lives.

Thomas Jefferson was right when he claimed that “banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties then standing armies”. With the Greek government’s reluctant decision to accept a proposed bailout plan in which nobody believes, Greeks are heading toward death by instalment.

The Greek lesson is not new. A number of multinational states have fallen apart due to irreconcilable differences – between national sovereignty and the democratic principle of majority rule – that have enabled big nations to impose their will on the small ones. The Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and even Czechoslovakia fell apart after democratic elections simply because every nation wants to decide its own destiny. Therefore democracy is beautiful and efficient as long as it acts within national boundaries. But in a union of states like the EU, the issue of decision-making among nations presents a big problem.

Eugenics was the racist pseudoscience determined to wipe away all human beings deemed "unfit," preserving only those who conformed to a Nordic stereotype. Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions, enacted in twenty-seven states. In 1909, California became the third state to adopt such laws.

Ultimately, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in "colonies," and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning. Before World War II, nearly half of coercive sterilizations were done in California, and even after the war, the state accounted for a third of all such surgeries.

California was considered an epicenter of the American eugenics movement. During the Twentieth Century's first decades, California's eugenicists included potent but little known race scientists, such as Army venereal disease specialist Dr Paul Popenoe, citrus magnate and Polytechnic benefactor Paul Gosney, Sacramento banker Charles M Goethe, as well as members of the California State Board of Charities and Corrections and the University of California Board of Regents.

Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been for extensive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. They were all in league with some of America's most respected scientists hailing from such prestigious universities as Stamford, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton.

These academicians espoused race theory and race science, and then faked and twisted data to serve eugenics' racist aims. Stanford president David Starr Jordan originated the notion of "race and blood" in his 1902 racial epistle "Blood of a Nation," in which the university scholar declared that human qualities and conditions such as talent and poverty were passed through the blood. In 1904, the Carnegie Institution established a laboratory complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island that stockpiled millions of index cards on ordinary Americans, as researchers carefully plotted the removal of families, bloodlines and whole peoples. From Cold Spring Harbor, eugenics advocates agitated in the legislatures of America, as well as the nation's social service agencies and associations.

The Harriman railroad fortune paid local charities, such as the New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration, to seek out Jewish, Italian and other immigrants in New York and other crowded cities and subject them to deportation, trumped up confinement or forced sterilization. The Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German eugenics program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.

The pair, both in their 70s, have been together for 50 years and registered in New York City as domestic partners in 1994. But when they moved to Pennsylvania, they discovered their domestic partnership wasn’t recognized, and legalized same-sex marriage was nowhere on the horizon. Needing to take care of estate-planning issues, the pair pursued a novel legal approach. Novak adopted MacArthur in 2000. The fact their parents were deceased removed any legal objection.

“It was the only legal method we could use in Pennsylvania to give underpinning to our relationship,” MacArthur said. When the United States District Court declared unconstitutional Pennsylvania’s marriage laws prohibiting same-sex marriage unconstitutional in 2014, Novak and MacArthur wanted to tie the knot in marriage, but their earlier legal gambit now became an obstacle. Pennsylvania law doesn’t permit marriage between parents and children.

So, a week ago, the father and son’s Petition to Vacate Adoption Decree was approved, and the pair simply became two single men now allowed to marry. The pair has been given a marriage license and is planning a summer wedding.

And you know what? When Vladimir Putin called us “godless” he was 100 percent correct. Someday when history judges us, we will fully deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China and Hitler’s Germany. Our consciences have been so seared that we have absolutely no sense of perspective anymore. We get all bent out of shape over the killing of Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe, but the trafficking of the body parts and internal organs of millions of our own babies hardly elicits any reaction at all.

Yes, the killing of that lion in Zimbabwe was a horrible crime, and I hope that dentist is held accountable for it. But how can that possibly compare to the absolutely sickening crimes against humanity that are being committed by Planned Parenthood every single day? But what about the Nazi-like atrocities that are being carried out day after day with the full endorsement of the Obama administration? I don’t know how anyone can read those articles without being absolutely sickened and horrified.

The Obama administration is staunchly defending Planned Parenthood and has chosen to attack those that made the undercover videos instead… “The White House expressed its firm belief Thursday that recently-released videos attacking Planned Parenthood are ‘fraudulent’.” Their source: Planned Parenthood. Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, was speaking with reporters when they raised the matter of the videos released by the Center for Medical Progress which appear to show Planned Parenthood officials discussing the sale of fetal organs for profit, a violation of federal law. He claimed the videos were released in a “fraudulent way” with “not a lot of evidence” behind them.

“There is ample reason to think that this is merely the tried and true tactic that we’ve seen from extremists on the right to edit this video and selectively release this edited version of the video that grossly distorts the position of the person that’s actually speaking,” Earnest said. This is a level of evil that is almost unspeakable. Sadly, the truth is that our politicians are a reflection of who we have become as a nation. The reason why we have evil leaders is because we have become evil.

Back in World War II, we fought to rid the world of the Nazis, but now we are becoming the Nazis. Very shortly, we are going to be moving into a time when lots of really bad things are going to start happening to this nation. And you know what? We are going to deserve all of it. I believe that right now we are being given an opportunity to see just how wicked we have become. But there is no sign that we are turning away from that evil. Instead, we just keep racing into even more depravity. Killing babies and selling their body parts is wicked. There is no middle ground. And since this is the path that our nation has willingly chosen, we will receive the appropriate judgment for this great evil from the God who created all things.

To set the stage, following the release of the first two shocking videos showing top Planned Parenthood doctors discussing and arranging the sale of aborted babies with actors posing as biotech firm officials, the biotech company StemExpress, which purchases aborted babies from Planned Parenthood to sell to research universities and other places, got a judge to issue a restraining order preventing the release of any more videos related to StemExpress.

Why?

Center for Medical Progress president David Daleiden, who coordinated the shocking undercover videos, explained to CNN this morning that StemExpress has something to hide — a secret that has significant bearing on Planned Parenthood: “In a meeting with their top leadership where their leadership admitted that they sometimes get fully intact fetuses shipped to their laboratory from the abortion clinics they work with, and that could be prima facie evidence of born alive infants. And so that’s why they’re trying to suppress that videotape and they’re very scared of it,” Daleiden said.

What does that mean?

If true, that means Planned Parenthood could be breaking the federal law known as the Born Alive Infants Protection Act that requires abortion clinics, hospitals and other places that do abortions to provide appropriate medical care for a baby born alive after a failed abortion or purposefully birthed to “let die.” That would be one of the potential ways Planned Parenthood could produce a “fully intact” baby to sell to StemExpress for research. Most “crunchy” abortion methods would do damage to the baby’s body.

Astonishingly, Kerry himself said Wednesday that he has not read the agreements but has been “briefed” on their contents. Senator Tom Cotton, Republican for Arkansas, wanted to know why these deals can’t be made public. “Why can’t we confirm or deny the content of these agreements in public?” Cotton asked in a Senate hearing. “Why is this classified? It’s not a sensitive US government document. The Ayatollahs know what they agreed to.” “Because we respect the process of the IAEA and we don’t have their authorization to reveal what is a confidential agreement between them and another country,” said Kerry.

Cotton said, “So the ayatollahs will know what they agreed to but not the American people?” Kerry said members of Congress would be able to learn about it in a classified briefing. Kerry said he believes one staffer in his department may have read the agreement "at their facility" but didn't possess a copy of it. "The IAEA is an independent entity under the United Nations, Senator, which I know you know." "I have received several classified briefings on the deal, and look forward to another one, but what Congress would like is the text of the deal," Cotton said.

Cotton said reports by media, including the latest by the Associated Press, indicate that Iran will be allowed to collect its own samples and submit those samples to the IAEA, "much like an NFL player taking his own urine sample and sending it to Roger Goodell for a drug test. Can you confirm or deny that that is the content of those side deals?" "I can't here in this session," Kerry responded. Today's testy exchanges in the Senate hearing come a day after similarly heated exchanges between Kerry and Representative Scott Perry in the House.

Perry gave Kerry a public dress-down on the Iran deal, suggesting the secretary of state could have forged a better deal if he had only kept America's interests as the top priority. Perry said: "There is a history for … getting a better deal and if the ayatollah doesn't like it and doesn't want to negotiate it, oh boo hoo, we're here for America, we stand for America. You represent America," according to news video of the Capitol Hill committee meeting.

Kerry replied a bit tersely: "Congressman, I don't need any lessons from you about who I represent. I represent and fought for our country since I was out of college."

What is different this year is the political storm from which she has emerged in Berlin and the speculation still rife in Germany about her future. It has been a bruising few months. Largely due to the drama of the Greek debt crisis, whose twists and turns could have come straight from one of the operas Mrs Merkel so enjoys.

There was open rebellion from 60 of her own conservative MPs, who refused to back a third bailout for Greece. But she was also criticised by those who felt, conversely, her stance on Greece had been too harsh. She has been chancellor for 10 years and must choose whether to lead her conservatives into the next general election in 2017.

Commentators wonder whether Mrs Merkel's moment has passed. There are few obvious challengers.

Tonnes of comments have been written in the last weeks about how Germany has put its narrow national interests above the European interest. By turning Grexit into a real policy option, the narrative goes, Schäuble has further damaged Greece and weakened the eurozone.

The only problem with that story is that Schäuble doesn’t fit into the role of the villain. Schäuble is the last political survivor of the Helmut Kohl era. As a German interior minister, he managed the internal aspects of German reunification in 1990. And since his youth, Schäuble, born in 1942 in southwestern Germany close to the French border and the son of a tax adviser, is a firm believer in European integration.

He was the co-author of a legendary paper in 1994 (Schäuble-Lamers Paper), according to which Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxemburg — so-called core Europe — would integrate much faster and more deeply than the rest. Schäuble wants to move ahead now because he feels that the eurozone is fragile and that time is running out. His ambition is to become the architect of a eurozone that is viable in the long term, with members that sign up to the same policies and with capable and competent institutions.

The future of the eurozone and of the EU will be decided in many European capitals. Paris and Brussels will be first among them, but Berlin will also be key. Germany has become the EU’s centre of gravity in the last years, because of its own weight and the relative success of its economy, but also because of the country’s deep commitment to the EU. Unlike in most other EU countries, all major parties in Germany are enthusiastically pro-EU, and the political class still signs up to federalism as the ultimate vision for Europe’s future.

Like spraying lighter fluid on a roaring barbecue, the neocons also want a military escalation in Ukraine to burn the ethnic Russians out of the east, and the neocons dream of spreading the blaze to Moscow with the goal of forcing Russian President Vladimir Putin from the Kremlin. In other words, more and more fires of Imperial “regime change” abroad even as the last embers of the American Republic die at home.

Much of this “strategy” is personified by a single Washington power couple: arch-neocon Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century and an early advocate of the Iraq War, and his wife, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who engineered last year’s coup in Ukraine that started a nasty civil war and created a confrontation between nuclear-armed United States and Russia.

There’s also a family-business aspect to these wars and confrontations, since the Kagans collectively serve not just to start conflicts but to profit from grateful military contractors who kick back a share of the money to the think tanks that employ the Kagans. For instance, Robert’s brother Frederick works at the American Enterprise Institute, which has long benefited from the largesse of the Military-Industrial Complex, and his wife Kimberly runs her own think tank called the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).

So, to understand the enduring influence of the neocons – and the Kagan clan, in particular – you have to appreciate the money connections between the business of war and the business of selling war. When the military contractors do well, the think tanks that advocate for heightened global tensions do well, too. And, it doesn’t hurt to have friends and family inside the government making sure that policymakers do their part to give war a chance — and to give peace the old heave-ho.