http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3246/turkey-trade-deficit-reveal-an-economy-in-deep I’ve been hammering away at Turkey’s credit bubble problem for the past eight months: consumer lending is still growing at a nearly 30% annual rate, after dipping into the teens earlier this year (I am annualizing the 3-month growth rate). But the trade data just released for June show a slowing domestic economy. With […]
http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/korol/120803
American children are already being taught from textbooks that contain revised Islamic history, hatred for Jews and Christians, and respect for Shari’a law over our Constitution. The jihad (war) strategy of falsehoods, taqiyyah, hides Islam’s violent history and distorts the truth for stealth conquest and for the future jihadist generation — our children and grandchildren.
Act! for America created a full report revealing the historical revisionism, omissions, and bias in teaching Islamic doctrine in our schools, the religion, dogmas, their supercessionist role in the world, innate anti-Semitism, and unending war to conquer Western civilization. Islamic instruction is on the increase in accredited schools, teaching hate, diminishing the values of Christianity and Judaism, and are beginning to raise some parental claims of proselytization and indoctrination. The following samples were taken from hundreds of treacherous textbooks, authorized for all grades in American classrooms nationwide.
History of Early Islam, Muhammad and Jerusalem
The Qur’an tells the story of the Night Journey in which a winged horse took Muhammad to Jerusalem. Teachers Curriculum Institute, History Alive! The Medieval World and Beyond, 2005, p. 87.
Jerusalem, the holiest city to Judaism since the 10th century BCE, is mentioned 823 times in the Hebrew Bible (including 154 times as Zion); and 161 times (including 7 times as Zion) in the Christian Bible; and never mentioned in the Qur’an. By contrast, Jerusalem had no connection to Islamic prayers, Muhammad, or to being a cultural or political center. It wasn’t until 715 AD, when the Umayyad sect built a second mosque on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and called it the Furthest Mosque (Al-Aqsa) that a strategic connection was given to Muhammad, a century after his death and the Qur’an.
Muhammad and Medina’s Jews
In Medina, Muhammad displayed impressive leadership skills. He fashioned an agreement that joined his own people with the Arabs and Jews of Medina as a single community. These groups accepted Muhammad as a political leader. As a religious leader, he drew many more converts, who found his message appealing. McDougal Little/Houghton Mifflin, World History — Patterns of Interaction, 2007, p. 265.
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=279930
FRIEDMAN IS A “CALUMNIST” WHO WOULD BLAME EVEN THE FLU ON ISRAEL IF HE COULD….POMPOUS CUR…..RSK
Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided
– Sen. Barack Obama (D-Illinois) at the annual AIPAC conference, June 4, 2008
Congress maintains its commitment to relocating the United States Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and urges the President, pursuant to the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995… to immediately begin the process of relocating the United States Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem…. None of the funds authorized to be appropriated by this Act may be available for the publication of any official government document which lists countries and their capital cities unless the publication identifies Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
– Section. 212 of the “Foreign Relations Authorization Act, Fiscal Years 2002 and 2003,” relating to “United States policy with respect to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel,” sponsored by Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Delaware), cosponsor of the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act.
Whereas in 1990, the US Senate and House of Representatives overwhelmingly declared that Jerusalem, the capital of Israel, “must remain an undivided city”… therefore, be it – Resolved by the Senate (the House of Representatives concurring) That the Congress… strongly believes that Jerusalem must remain an undivided city in which the religious rights of every ethnic and religious group are protected as they have been by Israel during the past twenty-five years; and calls upon the President and the Secretary of State to issue an unequivocal statement in support of these principles.
– Resolution S.CON.RES.113 (June 18, 1992) co-sponsored by Sen. Joseph R Biden Jr. (D-Delaware)
Keep these excerpts in mind – their relevance will soon become evident.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443866404577563151864043044.html?mod=googlenews_wsj When terrorists struck in Bulgaria last month, killing five Israeli tourists and a Bulgarian bus driver, Jerusalem immediately accused Hezbollah and its Iranian paymasters of the crime. Tehran and Hezbollah, as always, denied it. But no matter who carried out this atrocity on European Union territory, the EU’s continued refusal to put Hezbollah on […]
http://dailycaller.com/2012/07/31/house-to-consider-eliminating-senate-confirmation-for-presidential-appointees/
UPDATE: The House passed the legislation Tuesday night by a vote of 261-116. The bill now goes to President Obama’s desk for his signature.
“The legislation, sponsored by New York Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer, passed the Senate in June 2011, with 20 Republicans voting against it. The Senate bill has 17 co-sponsors, including both Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.McClusky of FRC Action estimated in his memo that “thousands of positions would be filled by the President without any Senate vetting.”The legislation would affect appointments across the executive branch, including to the Defense, Homeland Security and Justice departments.”
The House of Representatives is set to consider legislation Tuesday that would exempt certain presidential appointees from having to be confirmed by the Senate.
But a number of conservative groups are arguing that the “Presidential Efficiency and Streamlining Act” amounts to Congress neutering itself and giving the executive branch unprecedented power.
Presidential appointees that would no longer require Senate confirmation under the legislation include the treasurer of the United States and the deputy administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration.
“The United States Constitution does not bestow kingly powers on the President to appoint the senior officers of the government with no process,” wrote Thomas McClusky, the senior vice president for the Family Research Council’s legislative arm, in a Monday memo to lawmakers.
http://townhall.com/columnists/dianawest/2012/08/03/why_are_we_handing_muslim_extremists_the_house_keys
Two weeks ago, I wrote about the handful of House Republicans, led by Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, who sent letters in June to inspectors general at five government departments, asking them to investigate evidence of Muslim Brotherhood influence on U.S. government policymaking. The Muslim Brotherhood is a global Islamic movement engaged, according to the group’s own internal document, on a “grand jihad” in North America to destroy “Western civilization from within.” To date, the inspectors general haven’t responded.
Nonetheless, Bachmann and her colleagues — Trent Franks of Arizona, Louie Gohmert of Texas, Tom Rooney of Florida and Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia — have focused attention on the disastrous policy of bringing members of known Muslim Brotherhood fronts and their associates into Uncle Sam’s policymaking chain. The representatives’ letters went to inspectors general at State, Justice, Defense, Homeland Security and the Office of the National Intelligence Director. These government nerve centers are increasingly advancing policies American leaders once would have excoriated for supporting the enemies of this country.
Is it by chance, for example, that director of national intelligence James Clapper, reading from prepared notes, absurdly described the Muslim Brotherhood to the House Intelligence Committee last year as a “largely secular” organization? Is it an accident that in June the State Department issued a visa to Hani Nour Eldin of Egypt to meet with senior White House officials? Eldin is a member of Gama’a al-Islamiyya, a terrorist organization once led by Omar Abdel Rahman, “the blind sheikh” convicted of the first attack on the World Trade Center. In the person of Rahman’s successor, Refai Ahmed Taha, the group is one of the five signatories of Osama bin Laden’s February 1998 “World Islamic Front Statement Urging Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders.” Isn’t it imperative to review the policy mechanism that permitted a member of bin Laden’s jihad front into the White House?
http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2012/08/israel—-obamas-wedge-issue.php?utm_source=MadMimi&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Israel+-+Obama%27s+wedge+issue&utm_campaign=20120803_m113208775_Israel+-+Obama%27s+wedge+issue&utm_term=Continue+Reading___
Less than 100 days before the US presidential elections, the Obama administration is openly denying Israel’s sovereignty over Jerusalem. Can this be a vote-getter?
Last week, the Emergency Committee for Israel released an ad titled, “O, Jerusalem.” The commercial showed administration officials squirming when asked to name the capital of Israel, and highlighted the recent refusals of White House and State Department spokespeople to acknowledge that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital city. The underlying message of the ad was that the administration’s policy is out of step with the views of the majority of Americans.
Barack Obama’s position is certainly a political outlier. The 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act, passed nearly unanimously by both houses of Congress, explicitly stated that it is the policy of the United States that Jerusalem should be recognized as the capital of Israel. The law granted the president a right to postpone the transfer of the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on national security grounds. But the law’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital was unconditional.
During his visit to Israel earlier this week, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney highlighted the fact that he holds the consensus view of the American public on Jerusalem.
In his speech in Jerusalem on Sunday afternoon, Romney said simply, “It is a deeply moving experience to be in Jerusalem, the capital of Israel.”
The Palestinians were predictably enraged.
Also predictably, the Palestinians chastised Romney for another statement he made that was equally rooted in America’s bipartisan consensus.
Romney noted that other things being equal, cultures that uphold and protect political and economic freedoms are more prosperous than cultures that don’t.
In a breakfast meeting with American supporters in Jerusalem on Monday, Romney noted that Israel’s per capita income is significantly higher than the per capital income of Palestinians in areas governed by the Palestinian Authority, just as per capita income in the US is higher than per capita income in Mexico, and per capita income in Chile is higher than per capita income in Ecuador.
It is hard to think of a milder criticism of Palestinian society than Romney’s comparison of the Palestinian economy to the economies of Mexico and Ecuador. Romney could easily have gone much further without ever leaving the confines of received wisdom. For instance, he could have mentioned – as Obama did in his speech in Cairo in June 2009 – that Muslim societies under-invest in education relative to non-Muslim societies.
Or he could have highlighted – as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton often did during her tenure in the US Senate – that official Palestinian institutions indoctrinate Palestinian children in a culture of death, teach them to hate Jews and aspire to become suicide bombers in a jihad aimed at Israel’s physical eradication.
It was predictable that the Palestinians would condemn Romney for his run of the mill support for Israel and his milquetoast criticism of the Palestinians, because they reject every criticism of their behavior and take umbrage at every step anyone takes that suggests acceptance of the Jewish state or recognition of Jewish history.
This behavior is common to all groups in Palestinian society, from Hamas to Fatah to the so-called liberal reformers. In line with this, while Hamas condemned visits to Auschwitz as helping “Israel to spread the lie of the Holocaust… and garner international sympathy… at the expense of the Palestinians,” the supposedly moderate, liberal Palestinian for Dignity organization condemned the EU for upgrading its trade ties with Israel.
The EU is the largest financial backer of the PA. Its policies towards Israel are in complete alignment with what the purportedly moderate Palestinians claim they want in a peace deal with Israel, including the partition of Jerusalem, and the expulsion of 600,000 Jews from Judea and Samaria and the neighborhoods built outside of the 1949 armistice lines in Jerusalem. And yet, as Shoshana Bryen from the Jewish Policy Center reported, for simply upgrading EU trade ties with Israel, Palestinian for Dignity announced its members “will organize to protest the latest manifestation of EU complicity and to challenge its presence and operations in Palestine.”
Given the routine nature of Palestinian hysteria at Romney, and the bipartisan consensus upon which Romney’s remarks were based, there was no reason either his remarks or the Palestinians’ response to his remarks would spark any controversy in the US. Indeed, given the fact that both US law and the majority of Americans respect Israel’s determination that Jerusalem is its capital city, it could have been taken for granted that Obama would keep his head down and hope to avoid further discussion of the issue.
Certainly, given that he had made statements similar to – indeed stronger than – Romney’s statements about cultural causes for economic prosperity, it could have been assumed that Obama and his surrogates would have disregarded PA spokesman Saeb Erekat’s ridiculous characterization of Romney’s statement as “racist.”
Given that it is election season, and then-candidate Obama’s stated support for Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in 2008, the Obama administration could reasonably have made its own endorsement of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital city.
But amazingly, the Obama administration has taken the opposite tack. Obama and his media surrogates seized on the Palestinians’ criticism of Romney as proof that by embracing the American consensus on Israel, Romney had committed an unforgivable diplomatic faux pas.
First there was the White House’s statement Monday on Jerusalem. Rather than keeping quiet, Obama doubled down. In a press briefing, White House deputy spokesman Josh Earnest not only refused to acknowledge that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. He drew attention to the difference between Romney’s position and the administration’s and denied that Israel has a capital.
In Earnest’s words, “Our view is that [Romney’s position that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital] is a different position than this administration holds. It’s the view of this administration that the capital should be determined in final-status negotiations between parties.”
At the same time, Obama’s media surrogates have focused their wrath on Romney’s statement about the cultural sources of economic prosperity.
Foreign Policy’s David Rothkopf condemned Romney’s statement as racist.
The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman accused Romney of “not knowing what he was talking about.”
Both Rothkopf and Friedman – and a chorus of their colleagues on the even more hysterical Left – laced their broadsides against Romney with frontal assaults against top Republican donor Sheldon Adelson and other Jewish American supporters of Romney. These denunciations were – at a minimum – infused with anti-Semitic innuendo.
Israel Affairs Volume 18, Issue 3, 2012
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13537121.2012.689517
Attacking Israel with genocidal intentions
DOI:10.1080/13537121.2012.689517Nidra Poller*pages 363-371
De-legitimization of the State of Israel is the current episode in a persistent genocidal project aimed at the Jews and, more profoundly, at the values inherent in Judaism and shared by civilized societies. Skirting the shame attached to anti-Semitism after the horrors of the Holocaust, contemporary advocates of the genocidal plot are given free rein to attack Jews by a combination of severe criticism of the State of Israel and well-meaning plans for its geopolitical future, i.e. the peace process. Ugly lies – the Jews stole the land from the Palestinians, Israel is an apartheid state – function like the age-old charges that justified persecution of the Jews as Christ killers. Beautiful lies – the two state solution that everyone knows – echo the proto-legalistic measures that gradually deprived European Jews of their rights, their strength, their resources and capacity to resist deportation and extermination. Americans, misinterpreting as a repetition of the 1930s the rise of violent anti-Semitism in Europe at the dawn of the twenty-first century, are unprepared to deal with a parallel rise in Muslim Brotherhood forces within the US. As brutal Islamic Jew hatred boils in an Arab-Muslim world revolting, reforming, and submitting to sharia law, the Obama administration conducts a policy of the outstretched hand and blindfolded eyes that leaves Iran free to develop the ultimate genocidal weapon. Israel is the bulwark, not only for Jews but for the free world. Clear thinking, uncompromising discourse, and resolute action – at the risk of being labelled extremist – can stop the genocidal project and, working backward, disarm the lies.
Keywords Israel, Jews, anti-Semitism, Holocaust, de-legitimization, apartheid, genocide
From the first stirrings of Judaism to the present day the war against the Jews has been pursued with variations in methods, scope, and intensity. It would be foolish to sum up in a few sentences the brilliant work of a host of thinkers who have analysed this process and examined its underlying causes. We can no more ignore their thought than rest on their conclusions. We have to integrate their wisdom into fresh thinking based on the contemporary situation. What stands in the way of an early twenty-first century genocide of the Jews? Compared to the previous genocide, Jews today are healthier, wealthier, and wiser. Honest human beings the world over are sincerely horrified by the Shoah and more or less aware of the dangers of a repetition. The democratic nations in which the Diaspora lives in relative peace and prosperity are well-armed to defend themselves against attack and the Jews against potential exterminators. But all of these safeguards would crumble if not for the State of Israel.
Therefore, one could say with near scientific precision that the State of Israel stands between the Jews and a twenty-first century genocidal plot. How clever, then, to labour away at destroying Israel while denying the slightest anti-Semitic intentions. The range of weapons is limitless. The combinations are devilish. A peace process seasoned with Intifadas, martyrdom operations coupled with invocations of international law, humanitarian flotillas armed to the teeth, rocket attacks in tandem with UN recognition bids, and of course the construction of a tight-knit international network of sympathizers extending from the grassroots to the halls of power. While Israel’s neighbours pound away at its existence, Muslims in Europe and the Americas blithely attack Jews to ‘avenge’ their Palestinian ‘brothers’. Again, freedom to harm Jews has been granted along with immunity from the anti-Semite label. Domestic and foreign enemies of the Jews collaborate to conduct attacks that terrorize large populations into granting whatever is demanded in the name of Islam, Palestine, peace, and adulterated civil rights. The leavening agent of this recipe is a compound of the good obtained by a reverse chemistry that transforms the moral lessons of the Holocaust into the amoral values by which Jews can once more be pursued and exterminated.
In the name of the good, Jews can be harassed on university campuses, elbowed out of professional and commercial activities, vilified in lowbrow and highbrow media, abandoned to thugs and murderers and, conversely, glorified if they outspokenly reject Israel. Cartoonists win prizes with Nazi style caricatures where Jews are recycled as Israelis. Arab-Muslim intellectuals are invited to speak in high places and given tenure in prestigious universities for justifying the persecution of Jews identified as Israelis. Outreach operations promote the narrative that Jews, Christians, and Muslims are mutually guilty of/victims of prejudice. Idealists wave the co-exist banner.1 People of all colours and creeds can live together harmoniously as long as the Jews turn their backs on the outlaw state of Israel – under its present government, of course. The genocidal plot aims to divide and conquer: divide Diaspora Jews from Israel, Israeli Jews from their government, Israelis living inside the green line from ‘colonists’, and so on.
Here and there, the ‘evils of Zionism’ give permission to break the post-Auschwitz taboo and stir up old-fashioned anti-Semitic stereotypes. The hue and cry against Wall Street speculators and billionaires are emblematic targets of Jew hatred that would be unleashed if the bulwark of Israel were ever to collapse.
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=2342
Here’s a factoid about the Middle East that may have slipped by you while focusing on Iran’s nuclear program, Syria’s massacres, Egypt’s Islamization and Israel’s response to Mitt Romney’s recent visit: The highest consumption of beauty products and cosmetic surgery in the world today exists in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
This is surprising on many levels, and I admit to having been puzzled when I heard about it — since the only benefit I see in veils is the freedom not to wear make-up. This is particularly true these days, as was pointed out brilliantly by the late, great Nora Ephron, who bemoaned the endless time a woman has to spend on hair, nails and skin so as not to feel ungroomed. Personally, I can’t think of anything better than a burka for solving that particular problem. Apparently, however, rich Saudi ladies view it differently.
To add giggle to guffaw, the country in the region with the biggest booming cosmetic surgery tourism industry is Lebanon. This necessitates travel from Riyadh to Beirut to have “work done.” And since a Saudi woman needs her husband’s permission to get a passport, it makes sense that she would want to look her best for him when she removes all her coverings. One false move, or new wrinkle, and such a privilege might be revoked without as much as a by-your-leave.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/obamas-assault-on-us-energy?f=puball For the second time in two days, hundreds of millions of people across India have been plunged into darkness when its electrical grids collapsed. This is a warning of what could occur here in America. “So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them because […]
