http://sarahhonig.com/2012/01/26/another-tack-the-perry-mason-school-of-life/
“Obama might kid himself that he’s playing for time till after November’s Election Day. Only by then, all bets will likely be off. Obama’s inaction inexorably pushes Israel to the desperate unilateral action it itself is leery of. We cannot remain pawns in Obama’s gamble that Ahmadinejad can be converted to Harvard niceties. Or as Perry Mason reiterated: “You can’t sit back and wait for things to happen to you.”
Back in 1940, as whodunit author Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Case of the Baited Hook got typically tangled, fictional legal wizard Perry Mason opined to his trusty secretary Della Street that “Every time you stop to figure what the other fellow’s going to do, you unconsciously figure what you’d do in his place.
http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2016/Beastweek-vs-Wilders-No-Contest.aspx
Beastweek decided to take a swipe at Geert Wilders this month — no particular reason, just because he’s still there. It’s a singularly empty piece, a selection of complaints by Christopher Dickey rattling around, anchored by an almost comically validating chorus.
Example:
There’s no such thing as moderate Islam, Wilders insists, and he’s tired of hearing that radical Islam is something different from the mainstream faith.
BTW, Beastweek, Turkey’s Erdogun goes ballistic at the very notion of “moderate Islam.” The Turkish PM doesn’t like assimilation, either — calling it “a crime against humanity.” But never mind. You’re perfect the way you are. Don’t ever change.
Beastweek:
It means nothing to him that among Muslim believers there are many different sects and currents.
Chorus:
“He makes no distinctions whatsoever,” says Robert Leiken, author of the just-published study Europe’s Angry Muslims. “He wants to throw out the whole Quran because of some things that are objectionable—but you could say the same thing about the Book of Joshua.”
Robert Leiken, an old friend of mine, is the man who brought us all “The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood,” which is kind of like the Edsel, or even the Titanic, for intellectuals. “Abrogation” doesn’t seem to have entered the syllabus yet.
It will not be easy, but we will persevere
David Wilder
January 26, 2012
A few days ago, January 20, was the fifteenth anniversary of the implementation of the Hebron Accords, which divided our holy city into two unequal zones. Jews today have access to 3% of Hebron, while Arabs access some 97% of the city.
Yesterday we posted an interesting, important and timely article by Noam Arnon (in Hebrew) marking this ill-fated act, which led to so much violence and tragedy. I decided to also write about this, not with a ‘new article,’ rather using words of the past, clips from articles I authored fifteen plus years ago. They speak for themselves.
Clearly, should Israel continue on the same path in the future, the results won’t be any different. It is essential to learn from the errors of the past, in the hope that they will not be repeated in the future. History’s virtue lies not in names, dates and places. Rather it should be a tool, with which we can examine what occurred, why it occurred, and its implications for the future.
http://times247.com/ Bernanke: Fed to keep rates near zero through 2014 Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernank… Read more… Florida dead heat: Poll has Newt, Mitt in statistical tie Six days out from Election Day, a Qu… Read more… Daily Mail ousts NYT as biggest online newspaper The Daily Mail, an omnivorous middle… Read more… Psych! Pelosi’s […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/289271/ballot-box-zombies-deroy-murdock Liberals love to laugh off voter fraud. It’s “a made-up problem invented by GOP operatives,” Robert Koehler snickered in the Huffington Post on January 5. Regarding ballot hijinks, Democratic national chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz chuckled: “There is almost none.” But the recent news is not so funny. One probe recorded on tape how easily anybody […]
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
We know that the state of the union is good no matter how many Americans are out of work, how many families are counting every penny, how many industries are falling off a cliff and how high the national debt gets. We know it’s good so long as another politician takes a victory lap up to the podium and tells us that it’s all good because he’s here.
Iraq? Nothing to worry about. We just brought all the troops home. Sure it’s breaking up into a civil war, but you won’t hear about it on the news. Osama bin Laden is no longer a threat, but his allies have taken over Egypt and Tunisia, and are moving on Libya. The Taliban’s momentum has been broken and they are on the verge of taking over the government which means they will finally have been defeated. These achievements are a testament to a military which is facing the biggest budget cuts in decades.
The American soldier is a role model to us. I take away his weapons, fire him, put him on trial and force him to marry his bunkmate to show his tolerance, and he never complains because he’s not allowed to. The rest of you need to take a lesson from him. Stop complaining or I’ll send you to a military tribunal.
Fighting Back Against Lawfare Posted By Jacob Laksin
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/26/fighting-back-against-lawfare/print/
FrontPage Interview’s guest today is Brooke Goldstein, a New York City-based human rights attorney, author and award-winning filmmaker. She serves as director of The Lawfare Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to raising awareness about and facilitating a response to the abuse of Western legal systems and human rights law. Her award-winning documentary film, The Making of a Martyr, uncovers the illegal, state-sponsored indoctrination and recruitment of Palestinian children for suicide-homicide attacks. To view the trailer, click here. Goldstein is the co-author, with Aaron Eitan Meyer, of the recently published Lawfare: The War Against Free Speech: A First Amendment Guide for Reporting in an Age of Islamist Lawfare.
Goldstein will be speaking at the Philadelphia Chapter of the David Horowitz Freedom Center at The Office of Duane Morris, LLP. 30 South 17th Street, 12th Floor, Philadelphia, PA 19103, on February 2nd from 5:00 to 6:30pm. To register for that event, click here.
FP: You run an organization that focuses on it and you’ve recently written a book about it, but for the benefit of the uninitiated reader, what is “lawfare” and what is it designed to accomplish?
BG: Lawfare is the use of the law as a weapon of war. More specifically, it is the manipulation of international human-rights law, the laws of armed conflict and legal terminology leading to their misapplication. Lawfare has basically three strategic goals. First, to frustrate and hinder the ability of democracies fight terrorism. Second, to undermine the rights of sovereign nations, including the rights to defend their citizens against imminent threats and exert sovereign control over their territory. And third, to punish and silence free speech about real national-security threats such as militant Islam, Islamist terrorism and terror financing.
FP: How does lawfare help to stifle free speech about the threats we face? And how did you become engaged in this subject?
BG: I’m a Canadian by birth but I moved to this country because I wanted to practice law and have a tremendous respect for the American Constitution. In the United States people enjoy more rights then ever recognized by a governing authority in the history of civilization. Yet there are many Americans who do not know what their rights are under the First Amendment and who don’t understand the implications of its guarantor of free speech. For instance, I get calls and emails from people who don’t know that blasphemy is not a crime in this country, or that free speech encompasses the right to speak and write truthfully about religion. I’ve gotten into discussions with bloggers who thought that hate speech was a crime in this country, which it’s not. American citizens have a right to speak freely and critically about their government and about religion. That principle is the cornerstone of liberal democracy and what the founding fathers based the First Amendment on.
Obama’s Bankrupt Vision Posted By Jacob Laksin URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/25/obamas-bankrupt-vision/ Coming during an election year, President Obama’s State of the Union address was supposed to be a kinetic affair, the opening salvo in Obama’s battle to retain the White House. While making the case for his reelection, the president was expected to offer a […]
Weaponizing the Passenger Plane Posted By Daniel Greenfield
URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/26/weaponizing-the-passenger-plane/
On September 11 the passenger jet as a weapon came crashing into the consciousness of the citizens of the country which had made international air travel viable. Muslim terrorists had viewed planes in terms of the passengers and hijacked planes to take people hostage. But at the beginning of the millennium it was no longer the people that mattered, only the use of the plane as a makeshift missile aimed at the institutions and infrastructure of the free world.
This change of tactics was a game changer because it meant the potential casualties of airplane hijackings were no longer limited to the passengers in the air who were now flying around in ICBMs with much less explosive payload, but enough to take down skyscrapers and kill thousands of people. Every passenger was no longer just a risk to other passengers, but a risk to everyone in the Empire State Building, the Sears Tower or any other clumping of people in target areas that could be
Obama in Foreign Policy Hell Posted By David P. Goldman
URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2012/01/25/obama-in-foreign-policy-hell/
It won’t decide the 2012 election, but the meltdown of Barack Obama’s Islamophile foreign policy has to hurt. Iran’s imminent acquisition of nuclear weapons humiliates a president so committed to dialogue with the evil lunatics in Tehran that he refused to support a mass outpouring of democracy demonstrators during the summer of 2009. Obama’s closest foreign policy friendship is with the Islamist president of Turkey, who has jailed more journalists than China and steered his country towards imminent economic disaster. Tayyip Erdogan may not be a terrorist, as Rick Perry said in last week’s debate, but he backs them, including Hamas.
Product Details
How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too) by David P. Goldman (Hardcover – Sep 19, 2011)
And then there is Egypt: Even the New York Times has noticed that Egypt’s economy is collapsing, and that the country faces disaster as it runs out of money.
The reasons for his plight have been piling up all year: a virtual cutoff of foreign investment, a 30 percent decline in tourist visits and the stagnation of economic growth. The official unemployment rate is 12 percent, but among young people the real rate of unemployment is at least double that figure.
The military rulers have also presided over a period of financial turmoil. Inflation has surged into double digits, and the exchange rate for the currency, the Egyptian pound, is under heavy pressure. Foreign exchange reserves have plunged, as the government is spending about $2 billion a month in a losing battle to prop up the pound. Foreign currency reserves have fallen to about $10 billion, after certain obligations, from about $36 billion before the revolt.
Readers of this blog are familiar with the story. The only piece of news in the Times’ very belated offering is the estimate that Egypt’s foreign exchange reserves are down to just $10 billion (rather than the reported $18 billion), or import coverage of a month and a half, preparing an “all but inevitable further devaluation of Egypt’s currency that could send the prices of food and other goods soaring.” In an Asia Times essay last Monday, I observed that the Egyptian government no longer could borrow from its own capital markets, suggesting that reserve figures were much lower than reported; the Times does not say where it got the $10 billion number, but it sounds reasonable.
