DANIEL GREENFIELD: THE WEEK THAT WAS …READ IT ALL
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HISTORY IN THE UNMAKING
• First President to Preside Over a Cut to the Credit Rating of the United States Government• First President to Violate the War Powers Act • First President to Orchestrate the Sale of Murder Weapons to Mexican Drug Cartels• First President to issue an unlawful “recess-appointment” while the U.S. Senate remained in session (against the advice of his own Justice Department).• First President to be Held in Contempt of Court for Illegally Obstructing Oil Drilling in the Gulf of Mexico • First president to intentionally disable credit card security measures in order to allow over-the-limit donations, foreign contributions and other illegal fundraising measures.
…and there’s lots more “History” where that came from. Just imagine all the “History” he can make in another four years”
PROFILES IN COURAGE
So after four years, Obama finally got around to openly stating a position that everyone knew he always held, but that he sorta denied he held until the fundraising needs were bad enough to bring it to the table. And it’s a position devoid of specific commitments too.
If that’s not courage, I don’t know what is.
Four years from now maybe he’ll finally admit that he intended to badly damage American business and have the Muslim Brotherhood take over the Middle East.
Meanwhile, the media is chewing over what Romney did in high school, described under the trendy label of “Bullying”. Isn’t it wonderful how we can’t nail down what Obama was doing far more recently than that, but our dedicated media corps is busy investing what Romney was doing as in high school.
Any day now we can expect a hard hitting piece on Romney’s war on women in first grade. The current news lineup includes a congratulatory piece on Obama’s fundraising, an attack on Romney via his High School years and another attack on Romney from Obama over the auto bailout.
We may not quite be living under communism, but we are certainly living under its media apparatus.
OBAMA WHITEWASHES GENOCIDE IN SUDAN
This is a point that flew most people’s radar when commenting on Obama’s big Holocaust speech.
While Obama mentioned ‘atrocities’ twelve times in his speech, he only mentioned ‘genocide’ three times and one of those times he was quoting from the mission statement of the Holocaust Museum. The list of examples from his own policies contained only one example of genocide, the mass murder program carried out by the Sudanese government.
Tellingly Obama described this actual genocide as a ‘conflict’ rather than an atrocity and urged both sides to negotiate, a sharp contrast with his next three examples, in Cote D’Ivorie, in Libya and in Uganda, where he clearly placed the blame on three leaders and described military and pseudo-military actions that he had taken to end the violence.
President Omar al-Bashir, whom he urged in his speech to have the “courage” to negotiate and make peace, is wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. There is no comparison between the actions of Gaddafi or Gbago and those of Bashir. Yet Obama ignored actual genocide, and defiled the Holocaust Memorial Museum by using it as a stage for whitewashing one of the world’s worst ruling mass murderers.
That’s an excerpt from my article on The Genocide that Obama Refuses to Prevent. The piece focuses primarily on Iran’s genocidal intentions toward the Jewish people, but I thought this point was worthy of further attention. It’s outrageous and downright criminal.
AAAAAGH REPUBLICAN JEWS
Asking a New York Times reporter to investigate the phenomenon of Republican Jews is like asking a moralist to go to Studio 54. There’s always this baffled tone of faint disapproval and mostly confusion.
While the overall Jewish vote skews statistically liberal, the Jewish community is a complex place, and there are communities within it that skews well to the right. Russian Jews are one of them.
Since then, Russian speakers have helped the Republican candidates in three recent local elections: those involving Representatives Bob Turner and Michael G. Grimm, both of whom won, and David Storobin, a State Senate candidate who held a slim lead initially in a special election in March but has not been declared the winner because some ballots are still being challenged in court.
Some scholars likened the attitudes of Soviet immigrants to those of the Vietnamese boat people who fled their homeland’s Communist government and of the Cuban refugees who fled the government of Fidel Castro, both of whom took a more conservative tack in the United States than the members of most immigrant groups.
“Having been seared by statism, they see Democrats as drifting toward statism and see that as dangerous for themselves and for the country,” said Fred Siegel, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute’s Center for State and Local Leadership.
The Storobin election is one of those cases when if the election is close, the Dems will keep counting and counting ballots until they win. That looks like it’s going to happen there.
Now that the Times has covered the right-wing leanings of Russian Jews, it might do the same for Orthodox Jews in general and Syrian Jews specifically. I did a more intensive piece on the Jewish vote last year, but suffice it to say that long run demographics will shift the Jewish vote slowly to the right, but it won’t be for another few decades.
How significant is this? In a 2011 survey, 67 percent of Orthodox Jews found the Tea Party “refreshing” . Some exit polls placed the Jewish vote for Obama at 78 percent. But Orthodox polling showed that the 78 percent went the other way, with McCain polling at 78 to Obama’s 13.
What are the results on the ground? Take a look at Florida’s Precinct 4145. Gore took 68 percent of that district. Kerry took 42 percent. Obama didn’t even manage 40. In Lakewood, New Jersey, Gore took 51 percent. Kerry took 33 percent. Obama took 31. What is significant about those numbers is that they are not a hasty reaction to Obama’s candidacy, but part of an ongoing trend. The long term results of that trend will be significant. The short term results however will not arrive that quickly.
A good example is France, where Sarkozy scored the Jewish vote. Anyone expecting a rapid turnaround over Obama will be disappointed. Obama will score a lower total of the Jewish vote, but the markup is not going to change significantly until the demographics of the American Jewish community do.
DEFENSE SHOWDOWN
Obama has not exactly been known as a budget cutter. The national debt is horrifying, and the policies of the administration even more so. But the one place that he’s willing to cut the budget to the bone is on national defense, with a major purge of the military.
Now that is leading to a showdown in Congress over technology and personnel cuts. The media has naturally rediscovered its love for budget cutting and is calling Obama’s disastrous cuts a “finely balanced budget” and accusing Republicans of ignoring “budget discipline”.
The Obama allied think-tanks are already spewing claims that the deficit would balloon under Romney and that the Republican Party is engaged in a “War on Children”.
The Nation, which does not actually turn a profit, has a better plan.
However, the crucial question is not how many jobs are created by spending, for example, $1 billion on the military. Rather, it is whether spending that $1 billion creates more or fewer jobs when compared with spending $1 billion on alternative public purposes, such as education, healthcare and the green economy
Anyone who doubts how effective dropping another billion on teacher’s unions, health care consultants and wind farms is, can look at the massive amount of jobs that Obama created with his 16 trillion dollar deficit.
FREEDUMB, FREEDUMB
The left is deeply confused over this whole “Freedom” thing. Because they’re also confused by this whole “Individual Freedom” thing.
As an example the New York Times offer us the usual ObamaCare vs Freedom of Religion talking points
Are institutional church hierarchies like the U.S. Conference of Bishops the arbiters of religious freedom? Why does their freedom matter more than that of the majority of American Catholics, who, according to every public opinion poll, disagree overwhelmingly with their church’s prohibitions of contraception, in vitro fertilization, abortion for rape and incest victims, and voluntary sterilization?
But of course that’s the whole point. The Church isn’t the arbiter of religious freedom, except for those Catholics who follow its doctrines. A business owner should be able to choose to exercise his religious freedom, based on whatever beliefs he has. The Church isn’t compelling Catholic business owners to deny abortion funding. The Obama Administration is compelling the Church to offer it.
The Obama Administration has set itself up as the arbiter of religious freedom. That is the whole problem here.
ANTI-SEMITISM AND RACISM
Israel stands at the critical intersection of this debate. The Jewish claim to the land is based on the history of its people while the Muslim claim to the land is entirely ahistorical. Islam is a religion, not a people, and its claim to the territory rests on religious supremacy through a trip taken by Mohammed on a flying horse. The fiction of an ancient “Palestinian people” was a temporary convenience that is being set aside by Hamas leaders looking to join Gaza together with a Muslim Brotherhood run Egypt.
The struggle between Israel and the Muslim world is a struggle between a people and an ideology, just as the struggle between Israel and the left is a struggle between a people and an ideology. Islam and the left both represent transnational ideologies and as an ethno-religious group, the Jews remain an obstacle for the transnationalists of Islam and the left.
Like Hitler, Islam and the left have made it their goal to destroy Jewish ideas, but have found themselves unable to do so without also physically destroying the Jewish people. The Nazis, the Communists and the Muslims all came to the conclusion that there is no way to destroy the Jewish idea without also destroying the Jewish body. For all three the war of ideas sooner or later comes down to genocide.
That’s an excerpt from my other article this week, “Anti-Semitism is Racism” which deals with how the left prioritizes protecting Islamic ideology along with its Anti-Semitism over the Jewish people.
VIVA PUTIN
In what is being described as a snub to Obama, Putin will be skipping the Group of Eight summit in the United States. Putin’s first state visit as old/new tyrant of Russia will be to Mexico, and he will meet with Obama at the Los Cabos G20 summit.
Why Mexico? For one thing it’s in America’s backyard, which is Putin’s way of kicking sand in Uncle Sam’s face. Russia has been pushing into Latin America back in the Cold War era, but it’s amping up the push, especially with the prospect of Cuba and Venezuela sliding out of its grip. Most of it is business. Russia’s Foreign Minister has talked about Russia joining the Inter-American Development Bank. China has already plowed in a billion in investment capital. But mostly the message is that under Obama, America doesn’t matter anymore.
RISE OF THE ‘H’S
France’s new Socialist leader already has an invite from Hamas. Not that I imagine he’ll take it, but some members of his coalition are another story.
THE USUAL SUSPECTS
In Nigeria, Muslims are pursuing a genocidal war against Christians, specifically targeting churches and Christian institutions, while the State Department pretends nothing is wrong. But how high up does Muslim support for terror go?
A prominent member of Nigeria’s Supreme Council for Sharia (SCS) has dismissed as wrongly misplaced accusations that some elders in the north have been protecting Muslim terrorists.
Clearly of course he has nothing to do with the terror. He probably couldn’t even point you to where Boko Haram is. Oh wait…
He said the Supreme Council for Sharia was the first group to initiate dialogue between the government and Boko Haram to find ways of ending the security crisis. “Throughout the situation, it was the only genuine dialogue when we started intervening through our [leadership]…in fact we instantly witnessed [the] lack of sincerity from the federal government,” said Pantami.
Notice he doesn’t say anything about Boko Haram being ungenuine or insincere.
Sheikh Isa Ali Pantami, the SCS deputy Secretary General, said his group has suggested to President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration several ways to resolve the country’s security crisis.
“Wherever you do injustice, that injustice could definitely invite atrocity to your community. So if we want to tackle that problem, let us not just criticize northern Muslims or northern elders. Let us look critically, [at] what the federal government has done and at the same time what some state governments have done.”
Nice country, you have here. Shame if a bunch of your churches would get blown up.
Of course Muslim terrorists aren’t to blame for their terror. The Christians are for not giving in to them. This is Muslim logic, where there is a permanent cry for the “justice” of Islamic supremacism.
HISTORY IN THE UNMAKING
• First President to Preside Over a Cut to the Credit Rating of the United States Government
• First President to Violate the War Powers Act
• First President to Orchestrate the Sale of Murder Weapons to Mexican Drug Cartels
• First President to issue an unlawful “recess-appointment” while the U.S. Senate remained in session (against the advice of his own Justice Department).
• First President to be Held in Contempt of Court for Illegally Obstructing Oil Drilling in the Gulf of Mexico
• First president to intentionally disable credit card security measures in order to allow over-the-limit donations, foreign contributions and other illegal fundraising measures.
…and there’s lots more “History” where that came from. Just imagine all the “History” he can make in another four years.
WITH STRIP SEARCHES FOR ALL AND MALICE TOWARDS NONE
Even when customs officials have been tipped off about a black drugs mule arriving on a plane from the Caribbean, they deliberately intercept a number of innocent white passengers so they can’t be accused of discrimination.
John Vine, chief inspector of the UK Border Agency, says staff try to ensure the right racial ‘mix’ even though they have no legal right to detain people on such grounds. This is because they are petrified about being hammered with allegations of racism every time they stop and search someone from an ethnic minority background.
Tell us something we don’t know. Airport security operates on the same senseless basis.
We’ve all watched elderly white passengers being put through the third degree, while young Asian men wearing backpacks waft past unchallenged. I’ve seen distressed grey-haired pensioners being patted down intimately and forced to empty all their belongings out of their hand luggage. Meanwhile, women in full burkas are waved through with a cheery: ‘Have a nice flight.’
Remember quotas work both ways. Next time you’re getting pulled over it’s because airline security has to make its ‘non-racism’ quota too.
URI L’TZEDEK AT IT AGAIN
The Anti-Orthodox Uri L’Tzedek hate group is at it again, boasting that it intimidated a Jewish company to pay out money to an Anti-Israel Marxist union. Now it’s moving out into more open pro-terrorist activism with an op-ed by Shmuly Yanklowitz, who wrongly claims to be an Orthodox Rabbi.
Yanklowitz is not a Rabbi. He’s a graduate of YCT, an institution funded by left-wing donors for the purpose of creating left-wing activists like him. His reasoning is also blatantly laughable.
The use of torture is against Jewish law and Jewish values. To be sure, according to Jewish law, one is permitted to defend oneself by killing an attacker if one’s life is threatened (Mishneh Torah, Rotzeach 1:6). Judaism does not oppose self-defense. But a captured prisoner is no longer in the category of attacker (rodef), and therefore, extreme measures of what would otherwise be called self-defense may not be inflicted upon a captured individual.
Yanklowitz makes this claim without providing any Halachic reasoning for it aside from generic misused references from the Torah. I suppose then we have to choose between the Jewish values of King David in his treatment of Moab and the “Jewish values” of Barack Hussein Obama. He quotes Rabbi Aryeh Klapper, whose editorial does not even try to assert a halachic basis for his argument.
The subject has not been widely explored, but the biblical approach provides parameters for treatment of enemy civilians, it provides none for the treatment of enemy combatants. That does not negate the modern approach to the treatment of prisoners of war, if we place that treatment in its proper framework.
When there is a mutual pact on the treatment of prisoners of war, that is honored by both sides, then prisoners should be treated according to that pact. However when the other side does not observe any such pact and tortures or kills prisoners, then there is no unilateral obligation to observe such a pact.
A biblical example of this attitude can be found at the very beginning of Judges.
But Adoni-bezek fled; and they pursued after him, and caught him, and cut off his thumbs and his great toes.
And Adoni-bezek said: ‘Threescore and ten kings,whose thumbs and great toes I have cut off, gathered food under my table; as I have done, so God hath requited me.’ And they brought him to Jerusalem, and he died there.
Not too pretty by modern standards, but it makes the point adequately enough that an enemy leader or warrior cannot expect a higher standard of treatment than the one he is willing to dispense himself.
This is a fundamentally moral approach because it compels the other side to either adopt pacts on the treatment of prisoners or be treated as they treat others. Failing to hold enemies to such a standard and unilaterally providing them with good treatment rewards them for their atrocities.
A SENATE MAJORITY LEADER FOR ALL SEASONS
For 200 years we’ve had the right to extended debate. It’s not some procedural gimmick. It’s within the vision of the founding fathers of our country… Some in this chamber want to throw out 214 years of Senate history in the quest for absolute power. They want to do away with Mr. Smith, as depicted in that great movie, being able to come to Washington. They want to do away with the filibuster.
…Harry Reid then
“If there were anything that ever needed changing in this body, it’s the filibuster rules, because it’s been abused, abused, abused.”
But wait. If the Senate switches, then Senator Harold Mason Reid will discover the genius of our Founding Fathers and 200 some years of Senate history to take the floor and denounce Republicans for doing away with a fictional movie senator going to Washington.
RONALD REAGAN BULLIES BLIND BLACK MAN
… Washington Post cover story coming via time machine. Following the incident the black man’s health declined until he died of liver disease some years later.
ROUNDUP
The Jewish Press blog roundup can be found here
LET’S TALK ABOUT THE IMPORTANT STUFF…
Elizabeth Warren waved off reports yesterday that an ancestor helped round up Cherokees in the infamous “Trail of Tears,” as well as demands from U.S. Sen. Scott Brown to prove she never claimed her Native American heritage to further her career — dismissing the developments as “politics as usual.”
“I think what this is about is Scott Brown trying to change the subject,” said Warren at a Brighton event last night. “He just wants to find a way to talk about something else, and I think it’s wrong. I think this is why people are turned off on Washington politics.”
We really do need to start talking about the important stuff. Like what Romney did in High School. Or the time that Warren decided to mock Brown for his modeling days and then began whining about his response. Or filing suit over that basketball shot.
So what serious important stuff is Warren doing?
Ben Affleck, Matt Damon to host Warren fundraiser
Thank goodness there’s someone to champion the needs of the little people.
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