http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3562/global-zero-nuclear-weapons Senator Hagel, while signing up to the timetable for the elimination of all nuclear weapons, also said in the 2009 Al Jazeera interview, that nuclear weapons can be abolished because they no longer need to play a traditional deterrent role. As part of this strategy, Hagel proposes to “de-alert” our weapons, making them unusable […]
http://www.kirkcenter.org/index.php/bookman/article/hope-or-despair/ ROGER KIMBALL’S BOOK THE FORTUNES OF PERMANENCE-CULTURE AND ANARCHY IN AN AGE OF AMNESIA IS ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS I READ IN 2012. PLEASE ALSO READ: http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-fortunes-of-permanence-culture-and-anarchy-in-an-age-of-amnesia For those who cherish the life of the mind, one of the saddest events of 2012 was the death of the great historian Jacques Barzun. If […]
http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/p19188.xml
“How about a Secretary Hagel on what Hillary Clinton astonishingly described in her otherwise appallingly uninformative swan-song appearance on Capitol Hill last week: the menace posed to us and our allies by “the global jihadist threat.” Never mind that Mrs. Clinton has done little, if anything, to evince such concernover the past four years – or, for that matter, during the preceding decade-plus she spent in the Senate and White House. In fact, along with President Obama’s pick for the next CIA Director, John Brennan, and his new White House Chief of Staff, Dennis McDonough, she has been one of the prime-movers behind the administration’s efforts to deny jihad’s plain meaning, namely holy war, and to submit to at least its stealthy, subversive and pre-violent version as practiced by the Muslim Brotherhood.”
In the run-up to the Senate Armed Services Committee’s hearing this Thursday on Chuck Hagel’s fitness to become the next Secretary of Defense, its members have been treated to the spectacle of the nominee spinning at the RPM of a prima ballerina.
Evidently, the former Nebraska senator has very low regard for those now serving in the Senate. He seems confident that they will either not see through – or at least not object to – his concerted efforts to: disavow his well-documented public record; obscure his serial, faulty judgments; and ignore the harm both suggest he is prepared to do, if confirmed, to the national security.
The question is: Will Mr. Hagel’s cynical and contemptuous gambit be rewarded by the Senate? Or will it be properly repudiated?
For example, will the Armed Services Committee membership really accept Mr. Hagel’s current insistence that he is a strong supporter of Israel when the evidence to the contrary is manifest from his plethora of votes, resolutions, letters, and public statements? Will Senators on and off that committee trust him to execute Obama administration policy towards Iran’s nuclear threat – which their colleague, Sen. John Kerry, last week insisted was “prevention, not containment” – given his longstanding opposition to both meaningful economic sanctions and military action?
Can legislators who are alarmed at the hollowing-out of the U.S. military now becoming ever more palpable really take at face value Sen. Hagel’s current assurances about his commitment to a strong U.S. military? After all, prior to his nomination by President Obama and his attendant “confirmation conversions,” Mr. Hagel insisted that the Pentagon budget is bloated and can safely be “pared.”
Now, Hillary Clinton might ask, “What’s the difference?” Unfortunately, the difference could be a Secretary of Defense who will actively encourage, rather than steadfastly oppose, the devastation arising from: the elimination, or dramatic slowing, of virtually all Pentagon modernization programs; the reduction in maintenance of worn-out weapon systems and other equipment; the dissipation of much of what is left of the defense industrial base; the evisceration of training and other benefits, etc.
Then there is Senator Hagel’s stance on nuclear disarmament. Last May, the would-be Defense Secretary affirmed his sympathy for arms control schemes that amount to prescriptions for unilateral reductions in our deterrent forces by co-authoring a plan for achieving them sponsored by the Global Zero initiative. In so doing, as Heritage Foundation fellow Rebecca Heinrich’s has noted in the Daily Caller, he signed onto the fatuous idea that “security is mainly a state of mind, not a physical condition.” He recommended that the United States eliminate two out of three “legs” of its strategic Triad. And he called for steep cuts in the short-range nuclear weapons that are the backbone of the “nuclear umbrella” our allies have long relied upon for extended deterrence. The effect would be to undermine global stability and exacerbate proliferation.
http://EconWarfare. News reports on the surge of violence in countries afflicted by the Arab Spring are bewildering, averting the Western readers’ attention from the economic hardship it has generated. While the U.S. and its Western allies were mostly cheering on the sidelines and their media supported the revolution, little, if any attention was paid to […]
Antisemitism: A Specific Phenomenon, by Clemens Heni (Berlin: Edition Critic, 2013). A publication of the Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemitism.
http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/01/22/antisemitism-a-specific-phenomenon-review/
“As time went on … the Nazis not only became the source of power and wealth and the seekers after Germany’s greatness, but also learned how to handle footnotes and quotations…Hitler was aware of the necessity of presenting anti-Jewish ideology in a scholarly coating.…By 1935 he had succeeded. Within a few years, the fight against the Jews was no more confined to shabby tracts by unknown authors; it had made its entrance into the respectable academic world of Germany.”
– Max Weinreich, Hitler’s Professors (YIVO/Yiddish Scientific Institute, 1946).
Clemens Heni is a young German scholar who has undertaken the Herculean task of throwing back the assault on Holocaust memory that is currently carried on “mostly in the ivory towers of esoteric academia” by activist professors (who demonstrate the explosive power of boredom). Himself a PhD in political science from Innsbruck and currently Director of the Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, Heni pays particular attention to the ignorance as well as tendentiousness of the learned. “We are currently facing a …movement around the globe to distort the history of the Second World War and to deny the uniqueness and unprecedented character of the Holocaust…. Many scholars…seem to have a clear mission: universalizing the Holocaust and denying its specific anti-Jewish character.” Heni shows, in this vast and discriminating critical survey of the campaign to make murdered European Jews into metaphors for both humanity in
general and Palestinian Arabs in particular, that it would be dangerous to think of academics as harmless drudges who know so much about so little that they cannot be contradicted, nor are worth contradicting. Drudges they may be; harmless they are not. Their aims are not scholarly, but political—and often murderous.
http://EconWarfare.org The U.S. appears to acknowledge the economic and political mess that the last two years have brought to the Arab world and Africa generally in high-flown rhetoric devoid of reference to American interests. But things appear to be getting much worse quickly. We have been watching it accelerating in Libya and Syria, the Maghreb […]
Don Irvine — January 28, 2013 Accuracy in Media, AIM, In a wide ranging interview with The New Republic, President Obama turned media critic when he blamed Fox News and Rush Limbaugh for what he called the “nasty atmosphere” in Washington. Obama was responding to a question about whether or not there were Republicans that […]
http://myrightword.blogspot.co.il/2013/01/even-stones-laugh-at-amos-oz.html The New York Times’ favorite Israeli author, Amos Oz (or is he David Grossman? or, perhaps, AB Yehoshua? no difference, actually, as they are all Leftist and belong to the exclusive “Admor Clique” of Israel ‘peace camp’, a religiously messianic sect), sat down with Roger Cohen, another type of “favorite” of the NYTimes). From […]
