http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/331566/us-should-withdraw-unesco-brett-d-schaefer Last fall, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) granted membership to the Palestinian Authority. President Obama then stopped all U.S. financial contributions to UNESCO, as required by U.S. law. This didn’t sit well with UNESCO director general Irina Bokova. Earlier this month, she ramped up her campaign to get the U.S. […]
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/10/24/secretary-of-state-clinton-grins-laughs-while-answering-question-about-benghazi-white-house-downplays-emails/
Minutes ago, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton answered a singular question about the new emails showing that the Obama administration knew that the Benghazi assault was a terrorist attack two hours after it began. Clinton once again said that “No one wants to get to the bottom of what happened more than I do,” before touting her “independent review board” and its progress in investigating the attack. That board will not report any of its findings prior to the election, and it is operating under the secretary’s control. The State Department has not even released the names of the board members. As Clinton described the board’s work, she said that it is reviewing every piece of evidence, and not “cherry picking” pieces here and there. As she said the words “cherry picking,” Clinton nervously grinned and chuckled.
The White House, meanwhile, is downplaying the import of the emails that Reuters and other media outlets obtained late Tuesday. Despite the fact that the emails show clearly that knowledge of Ansar al-Sharia’s claim to have launched the attack reached the highest levels of the government, the White House is insisting that that was but one piece of information obtained that night.
http://pjmedia.com/blog/obamacore-radical-education-bill-set-to-take-effect-after-election/ Barack Obama, having little else in his arsenal, began his first debate by touting his signature education program [1] “Race to the Top.” Joe Biden also cited “education” in his debate with Paul Ryan. Last Tuesday, Obama even turned a question about gun control into an opportunity to boast about [2] his education policies. […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/treating-islam-with-special-reverence-is-cultural-suicide-and-just-plain-wrong?f=puball
My brilliant niece Freya was talking to my brother the other day about the religious education curriculum at her predominately white, middle-class state school in a pretty English cathedral city. She happened to mention ‘Mohammed, Peace Be Upon Him.’ ‘Eh?’ said my brother. ‘It’s what we’re taught at school. After we mention “Mohammed” we have to say “Peace be upon him”.’
Now I know what you’re thinking: that Freya must surely have got the wrong end of the stick. ‘If this were a madrassa in Bradford, well maybe,’ you’ll be thinking. ‘But at a white, middle-class state school in a pretty English cathedral city? No way. Things aren’t that bad. At least not yet, anyway…’
But Freya is not stupid. That’s why, at the beginning, I referred to her as my ‘brilliant’ niece as opposed to my ‘incredibly thick’ one. Apparently, she assures me, they’ve been taught to use the ‘peace be upon him’ formula since Year 7 and though they’re allowed to shorten it to PBUH, they’re definitely not supposed to call him just Mohammed. ‘There’s sometimes the odd snigger when the phrase comes up but we’ve been conditioned pretty much to accept it as normal,’ says Freya. ‘It’s a bit weird, given that there’s only two Muslim kids in my year of 100.’
I find this scary for at least two reasons. The first is what it says about the death of our national identity. When Freya’s father and I were at school, we had to go to ‘chapel’ once a day, and twice on Sundays. In our scripture classes we were taught all the key bible stories, even to the point of having to learn the names of all the apostles. It didn’t turn us into religious freaks – anything but. What it did instil in us, however, was a sense of history and tradition. Like generations before us we were members of the Anglican Church, familiar with the same tales, the same liturgy, the same hymns and psalms, the same rituals, the same boredom.
Before the 1980s, I suspect, this was the experience of most British children, regardless of their race or religious background. It wasn’t a question of forcing Christianity down anyone’s throat – merely an accepted part of the fabric of British life. You went to church (at least occasionally – Christmas at any rate) in the same way you watched Top of the Pops and Morecambe and Wise, or you had roast beef and Yorkshire pud for Sunday lunch. It just was what you did.
Not any more. Sure, the old religion is still covered in RE classes, but at state schools like Freya’s only as an equally valid and certainly by no means preferable alternative to Judaism, Sikhism, Islam and the rest. ‘Jesus was the son of God! Do you agree?’ asks a sample Key Stage 3 question from Freya’s school website. Well, what a bloody stupid question to ask an 11-year-old. How are they possibly going to be intellectually equipped to produce any kind of meaningful answer?
A teacher at my old school, Malvern, told me that when new kids arrive he can no longer rely on their being familiar with even the most basic prayers and bible stories. No doubt the progressives who devised the new God-free curriculum will congratulate themselves on having finally freed young minds from the shackles of organised religion. (Probably they read somewhere that religion has caused more wars than, like, anything, man). But what they’ve really done is impoverished and deracinated and dumbed down a generation. They’ve denied Freya and her contemporaries the key that might one day have helped them unlock everything from ‘The Dream of the Rood’ to ‘The Whitsun Weddings’. They’ve vandalised 1,400 years of the history, literature and traditions which bound us as a nation.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-balkanization-of-america-part-iii-alone-together-the-failure-of-assimilation
Part I can be found here.
Part II can be found here.
As discussed in previous installments, the process of Balkanization is the breaking-down or disintegration of the bonds that constitute a united nation and people, such that a formerly unified whole fragments into parts. Just as shared experiences, aspirations, historical memory, traditions and customs can foster trust and unite a people – the absence of these things can disunite them. What we call civil society is built upon an intricate network of reciprocal relationships and social norms. It is also built upon shared culture and language. Although the rule of law is a critical part of civil society, the law alone is insufficient to create a functioning civic order.
Trust is the real coin of the realm. It is difficult to maintain a free and open civil society in the absence of trust, and it is difficult to establish trust among people who do not know one another. A genuine sense of community is probably impossible among people who are disinclined to know one another and who are unwilling to do the work of building relationships with their neighbors. Conversely, people who know one another and share at least some values, expectations, and experiences in common are more likely to trust one another and form a viable community.
Not so many decades ago, Americans possessed a strong sense of shared identity. The typical man or woman on the street knew – and could explain in simple terms – what it meant to be a citizen of the United States. He or she could summarize the rights common to all Americans, and also the responsibilities and duties of citizenship. Thanks to widespread primary and secondary-school instruction in civics and American history, most adults had at least a fundamental knowledge of our founding documents and traditions. The well-informed citizen knew important passages from the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and from famous speeches and orations. That citizen was also well-versed in U.S. history, and knew the structure and function of the various branches of government.
Although a given American may have been born in another country, or raised in a home where English was not spoken, he was expected to learn the language of his country – and usually did so without complaint. Likewise, his teachers expected him to work hard to master English as soon as possible. Knowing the language was rightly seen as a gateway to economic opportunity and upward social mobility.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/guest-voices/post/a-holocaust-film-that-must-be-seen/2012/10/19/2fc3bc20-196f-11e2-aa6f-3b636fecb829_blog.html Countries, like individuals, have sinister histories from which they cannot escape. At best, they may be able to come to terms with the past, to integrate it into a public consciousness. But committed indignities, perversions of justice, persecutions and atrocities are every bit as much a part of a national identity as the intellectually […]
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/12341#.UIfqh5G9KK0
Obama told America that Romney was wrong in calling his 2008 visit to Israel an “apology tour”. The facts are below.In the final Romney-Obama foreign policy debate, Obama claimed the Romney allegation of the “Apology Tour” never happened, which is clearly a whopper-in-chief.
Here are President Obama’s verbatim excerpts, taken from Obama’s speeches in Ankara, Turkey April 2009 and Cairo, Egypt June 2009, where President Obama directly apologized for the US Guantanamo Base jails for Islamic terrorist murderers, and for waterboarding Islamic terrorist murderers who had vital information – so as to avoid ticking time bomb terrorists blowing other Americans up.
I report, you decide!!
In Ankara, on April 6, 2009, President Obama stated to the Turkish Parliament:
“I say this as the President of a country that not very long ago made it hard for somebody who looks like me to vote, much less be President of the United States. But it is precisely that capacity to change that enriches our countries. Every challenge that we face is more easily met if we tend to our own democratic foundation. This work is never over. That’s why, in the United States, we recently ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed. That’s why we prohibited — without exception or equivocation — the use of torture. All of us have to change. And sometimes change is hard.”
http://politicalmavens.com/
A much heralded documentary, The Flat concerns the death of the Israeli filmmaker’s 98 year old grandmother in Tel-Aviv and the revelations unveiled by this event post-mortem. Gerda Tuchler was an elegant German-Jew, married to a judge and comfortable with their long-standing friendship with a prominent Nazi propaganda minister and his wife. The Tuchlers accompanied the von Mildensteins who traveled to Palestine in the thirties where the Baron hoped to find a suitable place to dump the Jews of Germany and Europe before the more cost-effective Final Solution was found. Arnon Goldfinger, the grandson and filmmaker, is entrusted with going through the old woman’s collection of German books and memorabilia, finding photographs of Gerda and her husband vacationing with the von Mildensteins before and after the holocaust and a particularly salient newspaper article titled “A Nazi in Palestine,” recording the aforementioned trip. Complicating this already sordid picture is the disclosure that Gerda’s mother, Susi, a German Jew who visited her family in Palestine but declined to relocate from her native home, was transported to the ghetto of Riga and eventually murdered in Theresinstadt.
http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2012/10/24/benghazi-from-see-no-sharia-to-ansar-al-sharia/
Followers of Ansar al-Sharia and other militias protest on September 21, 2012 in Benghazi
The Obama administration’s wall of mendacity surrounding the murderous 9/11/12 jihadist attack on our Benghazi, Libya diplomatic compound has collapsed under an avalanche of released State Department internal [2] emails [3].
Even the reliable mainstream media Obama sycophants may be compelled to report the story broken by Reuters [2] (Tuesday evening, 10/23/12). Within two hours of the attack, the State Department was aware that the jihadist group Ansar al-Sharia—declared [3] by the State Department itself to be an al Qaeda affiliate—had claimed responsibility for the raid (or more appropriately, “razzia”). These emails were disseminated [3] by the State Department to sundry “redacted national security platforms,” such as the White House Situation room, the Pentagon, the FBI, the Director of National Intelligence and the State Department. An estimated 300-400 national security figures obtained [3] these emails—including persons working directly below the administration’s leading national security, military and diplomatic officials—“in real time almost as the raid was playing out and concluding.”
Who are Ansar al-Sharia? “AL-QAEDA IN LIBYA: A PROFILE [4]” was an August, 2012 report prepared by the Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office [5], a Pentagon program office under the aegis of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict. The report emphasized how Al Qaeda Senior Leadership (AQSL), working via a large, powerful, and well-established jihadist infrastructure in Libya—including, prominently, Ansar al-Sharia—sought to capitalize on the US and NATO-supported insurrection which toppled the Libyan despot Qaddafi, and fulfill its goal of making Libya part of an eventual transnational caliphate [6].
A sizable, ominous Ansar al-Sharia public rally during June, 2012 was highlighted in the August, 2012 Pentagon report [4], which also noted the unwillingness of Libya’s Sharia-supporting [7] central government to contend with these ostensibly “more radical” avatars of Sharia [8] supremacism:
In June 2012, Ansar al-Sharia staged a large-scale rally and military show of force involving dozens of military vehicles, with Islamists wearing the Afghan mujahidin’s traditional outfit. Some leaders described themselves as Islamists and called for implementation of sharia similar to that which the Taliban had implemented in Afghanistan or al-Qaeda in Somalia and Yemen. The military show of force consisted of a parade in which some 30 battalions from Benghazi, Darnah, Misrata, Al-Nufilyah, Ajdabiyah, and other Libyan towns took part in the first meeting in support of sharia in Benghazi. Islamist leaders pointed out that the aim of the military parade was to terrorize (Arabic: irhab) those who do not want to be judged by God’s law. Islamist leaders urged the Transitional National Council to clarify the identity of the state as Islamic or secular. Such a system of local affiliates might use neighborhood mosques as a support infrastructure for a religious and popular movement that could frighten politicians attempting to run on a moderate Islamic platform. …A weak Islamist-dominated central government is unlikely to confront such a radical movement, at least in the short term. The minister of religious affairs expressed his government’s weakness when he lamented the “hijacking” of mosques by extremist imams imposed by militiamen. Two of these local Islamist-oriented militias—Ansar al-Sharia and al-A’hrar Libya—are the tip of the iceberg. They broadcast typical al-Qaeda–type propaganda on the Internet, and they have adopted the black flag, which symbolizes commitment to violent jihad promoted by AQSL.
http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/225910
Barack Obama does not want to talk about Columbia. Not even to his good friends at the New York Times, who’ve so reliably helped him bleach away his past — a past neck-deep in the hard Left radicalism he has gussied up but never abandoned.
Why? I suspect it is because Columbia would shred his thin post-partisan camouflage.
You might think the Times would be more curious. After all, the Democrats’ presidential nominee has already lied to the Gray Lady about the origins of his relationship with Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. Back in May, in a cheery profile of Obama’s early Chicago days, the Times claimed (emphasis is mine):
Mr. Obama also fit in at Hyde Park’s fringes, among university faculty members like Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, unrepentant members of the radical Weather Underground that bombed the United States Capitol and the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War. Mr. Obama was introduced to the couple in 1995 at a meet-and-greet they held for him at their home, aides said.
Now look, anyone who gave five seconds of thought to that passage smelled a rat. Ayers and Dohrn are passionate radical activists who lived as fugitives for a decade. There’s no way they held a political coming-out party for someone who was unknown to them. Obviously, they already knew him well enough by then to feel very comfortable. They might have been sympathetic to a relative stranger, but sponsoring such a gathering in one’s living room is a strong endorsement.
And now, even the Times now knows it’s been had. In this past weekend’s transparent whitewashing of the Obama/Ayers tie, the paper claimed that the pair first met earlier in 1995, “at a lunchtime meeting about school reform in a Chicago skyscraper[.]” That storyline is preposterous too, but it is also a marked revision of the paper’s prior account (which, naturally, reporter Scott Shane fails to mention).
Why the change? The tacit concession was forced by Stanley Kurtz and Steve Diamond — whom the Times chooses not to acknowledge but who hover over Shane’s sunny narrative like a dark cloud.
Despite all manner of stonewalling by Obama, Ayers and their allies, these commentators have doggedly pursued information about the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. That’s the $150+ million “education reform” piggy bank substantially controlled in the nineties by Ayers and Obama, who doled out tens of millions of dollars to Leftist radicals — radicals who, like their patrons, understood that control over our institutions, and especially our schools, was a surer and less risky way to spread their revolution than blowing up buildings and mass-murdering American soldiers. As Diamond observes, in a 2006 speech in Venezuela, with Leftist strongman Hugo Chavez looking on, Ayers exhorted: “Teaching invites transformations, it urges revolutions small and large. La educacion es revolucion!”
Be clear on that much: Whether clothed as a terrorist or an academic, Ayers has made abundantly clear in his public statements, both before and after he established a working relationship and mutual admiration society with Obama, that he remains a revolutionary fueled by hatred of the United States. And while Obama now ludicrously pleads ignorance about Ayers’s terrorism — the terrorism that made the unabashed Ayers an icon of the Left — understand that this rabid anti-Americanism is the common denominator running through Obama’s orbit of influences.
