http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/personal-reflections-on-yom-hazikaron-for-israels-fallen-soldiers-victims-of-terror/ As we approach the double days of Israel’s Yom HaZikaron and Yom HaAtzma’ut this week, I once again reflected on the meaning of this juxtaposition of official holidays – one representing the ultimate sadness of a people, the second, the ultimate national joy. Last year, we read the weekly Torah portion – Parshat Emor […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/04/most_easter_lamb_this_year_was_halal.html Americans have a long history of rejecting coerced religion. From the Pilgrims who came for freedom of conscience to the colonists who decided that the free exercise of religion would be featured first in the Bill of Rights, the American claim to liberty has had religious freedom at its core. That was then. Now, […]
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ Everyone deals with trauma in different ways. Getting violently attacked on a street late at night. Watching a loved one murdered in front of your eyes. Feeling the fire on your skin as your home burns. It’s not just the pain of the experience, it’s realizing afterward how your world has changed and that […]
http://main.acsevents.org/site/TR?team_id=1127826&pg=team&fr_id=40248&fl=en_US&et=siU42lF19E4_6Jqp-pVt3g&s_tafId=862772 http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ To be genuinely outraged about something, you need to actually believe in something. Without principles, outrage is just tactical anger, or bullying in plainer language. Principles, values and codes are universal. That is if you are angry about a dog being mistreated by riding on top of a car, then you should at […]
http://www.jewishledger.com/
FROM THE CONNECTICUT JEWISH LEDGER….BEST JEWISH INTEREST PAPER IN THE COUNTRY….RSK
Lee Whitnum has not attributed responsibility for the October snowstorm that left Connecticut and much of the northeast powerless to Israel. Not yet anyway. Other than that, Whitnum, a candidate for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senator from Connecticut, has been using her spot on the debate stage these past few weeks to blame Israel for just about every other ill around the world and otherwise. The Iraq war, 911, the uprising in Egypt and Syria, Connecticut’s financial woes, etc. … all Israel’s fault. Whitnum reiterated her viewpoints in a recent interview on “The Stark Truth,” an online program whose guests have included David Duke, former grand wizard of the Klu Klux Klan. Here are a few excerpts of what she had to say:
* “In every culture in the world except Israel, if you take something that doesn’t belong to you it’s stealing. In every culture in the world except Israel if you kill someone it’s murder.”
* “I personally don’t have a problem with [Syrian president Bashar] al-Assad. I do have a problem with Netanyahu controlling the Middle East. … It’s all about Iran, and taking down Syria is part of it. Israel is all about taking down the entire region. All about control. I think the Arab world should be left to the Arabs.”
* “Everything went a little crazy in 1998 when Ariel Sharon said ‘grab the hilltops,’ and since then Jews from all over the world have immigrated to Israel in order to grab the land, to the tune of 500,000 of them and many of them are Americans, In the process of forcibly taking people’s homes … in the middle of the night they’ll put a Christian family or a Muslim family out of their house and put a Brooklyn family in there.”
* “The Israeli government lets the (U.S.) Secretary of State know if Egypt has been a good neighbor and the Secretary of State releases money to Egypt. So, it’s all about Israel.”
* “AIPAC is more powerful than Republicans or Democrats. It’s the most powerful force in Washington. ….They literally own our Congress. If you own 435 Representatives and Senators you rule the world.”
* On why Governor Malloy, then mayor of Stamford, called her an antisemite: “The governor is not capable of reading – he has dyslexia. He doesn’t understand my stand, at least he didn’t back then. The rabbis put him up to it.”
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=1759
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a YouTube clip is valued at millions. This is why, in a split second, Lt. Col. Shalom Eisner – deputy commander of the Jordan Valley Brigade – turned into a world-renowned anti-hero this week.
Eisner, leading an operation to curb the activities of the “peace activists” who made up last Sunday’s “flytilla,” unwittingly became the latest casualty in the propaganda war against Israel. Caught on camera smashing the butt of his M-16 into the face of a young Danish activist, the IDF officer instantly lost the career he loved, along with the former admiration and respect he had earned as an upstanding commander. Everyone at the top, from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Defense Minister Ehud Barak to IDF Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, rushed to distance himself from Eisner, without so much as a “by your leave.”
The investigation into the 60-second incident, the lead-up to which lasted a full two hours, will take place. But whatever its result, Eisner’s reputation has already been broken, like his spirit and one of his fingers.
I am not going to provide a defense of Eisner here, as the facts of the case have yet to emerge in full. But his version of events is utterly plausible, given the history of behavior on the part of “peace activists” toward the IDF, sent in by the government to prevent large-scale violence. This always puts the soldiers in a terrible position, because no matter what they do, they are in jeopardy. Since the goal of such activists is to provoke the military into doing its job, so that it will look bad on film, our Israeli boys in uniform either get clobbered physically (as happened during the flotilla to Gaza in 2010) or get accused of using excessive force. The activists who planned the flights to Israel on Sunday were not going to waste the opportunity to stir up trouble, one way or another. This is why the government did everything in its power to keep them out. But it doesn’t take more than one bop with the butt of one rifle to cause an international scandal focusing on Israeli “atrocities.”
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=266797
As with Peter Beinart, so it is with Friedman. It seems no anti-Israeli accusation is too egregious for them to stoop to.After so many years of being wrong about the Palestinians being ready to make peace with Israel, it is difficult to take New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s Middle East advice columns seriously. But his latest effort in this genre contains some whoppers that got our attention even if they only provide more proof the veteran writer is still hopelessly out of touch with reality. – Jonathan Tobin, Commentary magazine, April 4, 2012
Beinart’s total disregard for reality, his sanctimonious obsession with moral abstractions, is a great obstacle to real reconciliation because it protects the enemies of peace while making impossible demands on those who really want it. – Daniel Doron, The Jerusalem Post, April 15, 2012
Hast thou betrayed my credulous innocence; With vizor’d falsehood and base forgery? – John Milton, Comus, 1634
The latest offerings of ignorance and arrogance from Peter Beinart and Tom Friedman triggered a deluge of well-deserved outrage and an array of caustic critiques of the dubious duo’s duplicitous drivel.
Betrayal of professional integrity
While several commendable ripostes were posted, the first two excerpts above caught my eye as being particularly apt in the way they conveyed the essence of Beinart’s and Friedman’s portrayals of reality – as hopelessly detached from the truth and devoid of context.
Indeed, both men have betrayed their professional integrity by conveying to their readers a picture which is not only wildly distorted and deceptive, but apparently deliberately so.
Both make the dismayed question of the “Lady” in Milton’s 17th-century masque regarding the exploitation of innocent credulity through falsehood and forgery distinctly apposite today.
In last week’s column I pointed out how much of Beinat’s condemnation of Israeli actions was founded on evidence that ranged from the flimsy to the false, and how his inflammatory accusations were based on a selective and slanted presentation of events. This week I will focus on the New York Times’ Friedman.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/04/20/Dershowitz-prosecution-immoral With ABC News’ release of the George Zimmerman photo showing blood flowing freely from his head, the question becomes whether Angela Corey, the prosecutor in the case, had access to the photo before charging Zimmerman with second-degree murder. The arrest affidavit did not mention the photograph, or the bleeding, gashes, and bruises on Zimmermans’ […]
http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2099/Disowning-Birth-Certificates-Disowning-Truth.aspx
Below is this week’s syndicated column: “Is Obama Disowning His Online Birth Certificate?” It takes in the shifting strategy of the Obama defense team in fending off challenges to Obama’s eligibility to appear on presidential primary ballots. Obama’s eligibility is a signal concern for the nation which should be the subject of informed, serious debate on the front pages, on news shows, and also, most important, in the Congress. Such debate is non-existent. Such concern is non-existent, too. It doesn’t seem to matter to the citizenry that a fraudster may be completing one term in the White House while seeking another.
I recently had the occasion to discuss the matter with a very famous American conversative.
Famouse Conservative said to me: Tell me what columns of yours are getting a big response lately.
I had earlier written this column about the Georgia ballot challenge hearing in which President Obama ignored a subpoena for the certified copy of his birth certificate (among other documents). This column elicited a great response from readers, many of whom asked me the same question: why this important story wasn’t being covered in the media.
They’re really interested in this whole eligibility story, I said.
Famous Conservative: I’ll bet they are.
Me: Aren’t you?
FC: No.
Me: No? Why aren’t you?
FC: If this were happening back at the time of the election, maybe.
I told FC this is an election (ding-dong).
FC: Exactly. But this will alienate the people we need to defeat him at the polls.
I made some naive-sounding comment (which I thoroughly subscribe to) about the seeking the truth regardless of the outcome, adding that the truth would likely alienate plenty of people from Obama, too.
Impasse.
http://www.mythsandfacts.org/Conflict/16/EU.htm Europe seeks to play the role of neutral mediator in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Yet for a host of reasons – most of them self-serving – Europe has demonstrated a clear pro-Arab bias, including insensitivity to Israel ‘s security needs. And it excuses Arab terrorism that no civilized nation would ever tolerate if faced with […]
