Anschluss legacy Forty-two percent of Austrians believe that “not everything was bad under Hitler,” according to a poll conducted by the Viennese newspaper Der Standard. That’s very telling, especially this week when Austria marks the 75th anniversary of the Anschluss – its merger with Nazi Germany. In the postwar years, Vienna sought to shirk all […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-wonderful-wizard-of-ozeroland Hollywood is so bankrupt of ideas that it seems all it can do is: “Remake” films from the past, altering and adapting them for dumbed-down audiences or what filmmakers assume are dumbed-down audiences, and make them politically correct (e.g., The Four Feathers, Clueless, the latter based on Jane Austen’s Emma, Cape Fear); Produce “prequels” […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/jack-kerwick/why-americans-should-know-and-care-about-south-africa/ Front Page Magazine recently published a particularly important article, Arnold Ahlert’s, “The Gruesome Reality of Racist South Africa.” In painstaking detail, Ahlert goes where angels fear to tread in exposing the murderous, borderline genocidal, conditions under which white South Africans are systematically forced to labor. The very same Western media that campaigned tirelessly against […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/davidhornik/palestinians-well-protest-obamas-visit/
President Obama’s visit to Israel and the Palestinian Authority, scheduled for Wednesday to Friday next week, may spark violent Palestinian protests. In fact, it’s already doing so.
On Wednesday Israel Hayom reported that the previous day Israeli troops had entered a “refugee camp” near Hebron in the West Bank to detain Palestinians caught throwing Molotov cocktails at Israeli vehicles. (Almost two decades after the creation of the Palestinian Authority, these “camps”—neighborhoods—are yet to be dismantled because the Palestinian leadership sees their residents eventually moving en masse to Israel itself.)
The Israeli troops found themselves under a life-endangering hail of rocks; returning fire, they killed a Palestinian named Mahmoud Titi and wounded two others.
Titi’s funeral on Wednesday set off further riots.
The above Israel Hayom report notes that Israeli “defense officials…are concerned that the latest incident could incite a spate of violent disturbances in Judea and Samaria,” and that they “believe…certain Palestinian elements are planning to use U.S. President Barack Obama’s momentous trip to Israel next week as the impetus to stoke disquiet.”
There are also tidings of Palestinian intentions not only to direct protests at Israel but also at Obama himself.
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/why-obama-needs-another-dictator-to-replace-chavez-on-the-glazov-gang/
This week’s Glazov Gang had the honor of being joined by Bob Zeidman, award-winning novelist, Larry Greenfield, Senior Fellow at the American Freedom Alliance and Howard Hyde, author of the new pamphlet, Pull the Plug on Obamacare. The Gang members discussed Why Obama Prefers to Deal With Dictators. The dialogue occurred in Part I and focused on the post-Chavez era. Part II dealt with Hyde’s pamphlet and whether it is too late to resist Obama’s health care plan. The segment also included an analysis of Obama’s Billion-Dollar Giveaway to the Muslim Brotherhood. To watch both parts of the two part series, see below:
Part I:
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/ben-shapiro/michelle-antoinettes-big-b-day-bash/
This week the Obama administration announced that due to the awful, terrible, nasty, horrible sequestration, they would have to shut down the White House tours for the public. The same week, a White House source told the Daily Mail that Michelle Obama was planning a birthday blowout for her 50th. In attendance: Adele and Beyonce.
The White House did say that the Obamas would pay for the party. But that’s highly unlikely – it’s supposed to take place at the White House, which requires Secret Service protection, high-class dining, and all the fringe benefits.
The White House website currently carries a populist quote from Michelle Obama: “It’s the ‘People’s House.’ It’s a place that is steeped in history, but it’s also a place where everyone should feel welcome. And that’s why my husband and I have made it our mission to open up the house to as many people as we can.”
Unless those people don’t earn several million dollars per year for singing. Then they can stick it.
Interview: What Went Wrong With Bernard Lewis?
http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2013/03/12/interview-what-went-wrong-with-bernard-lewis/
I spent an hour with my colleague, the prolific author [1] Robert Spencer, discussing Bernard Lewis [2], nonagenarian doyen of Islamic Studies. The entire interview, conducted as a segment for Robert’s outstanding weekly series of Jihad Watch programs on the Aramaic Broadcasting Network, is embedded above. Please read the summary assessment of my concerns before watching the interview. A more detailed analysis of Lewis’s analytic pitfalls can be read here [4].
Accrued over a distinguished career of more than six decades of serious scholarship, Bernard Lewis [2] clearly possesses an enormous fund of knowledge regarding certain aspects of classical Islamic civilization, as well as valuable insights on the early evolution of modern Turkey [5] from the dismantled Ottoman Empire. A gifted [2] linguist, non-fiction prose writer, and teacher, Lewis shares his understanding of Muslim societies in both written and oral presentations, with singular economy, eloquence, and wit. Now 96 years old and still active, these are extraordinary attributes for which Lewis richly deserves the accolades [6] lavished upon him.
I began expressing my concerns with the less salutary aspects of Lewis’ scholarship in a lengthy [7] review [8]-essay [9] (for Frontpage) on Bat Ye’or’s seminal book Eurabia—The Euro-Arab Axis [10], published December 31, 2004. Over the intervening years—in the wake of profound US policy failures vis a vis Islamdom at that time, and subsequently, till now—this disquietude has increased considerably. As I demonstrate in my recent book, Sharia Versus Freedom [11], Lewis’s legacy of intellectual and moral confusion has greatly hindered the ability of sincere American policymakers to think clearly about Islam’s living imperial legacy, driven by unreformed and unrepentant mainstream Islamic doctrine. Ongoing highly selective and celebratory presentations of Lewis’s understandings—(see this [12] for example) —are pathognomonic of the dangerous influence Lewis continues to wield over his uncritical acolytes and supporters.
In Sharia Versus Freedom [11], I review Lewis’s troubling intellectual legacy regarding four critical subject areas: the institution of jihad, the chronic impact of the Sharia on non-Muslims vanquished by jihad, sacralized Islamic Jew-hatred, and perhaps most importantly, his inexplicable 180-degree reversal on the notion of “Islamic democracy.” Lewis’ rather bowdlerized analyses are compared to the actual doctrinal formulations of Muslim legists, triumphal Muslim chroniclers celebrating the implementation of these doctrines, and independent Western assessments by Islamologists (several of whom worked with Lewis, directly, as academic colleagues; discussed at length here [4]) which refute his sanitized claims.
Journalist David Warren, writing [13] in March 2006, questioned the advice given President Bush “on the nature of Islam” at that crucial time by not only “the paid operatives of Washington’s Council on American-Islamic Relations, and the happyface pseudo-scholar Karen Armstrong,” but most significantly, one eminence grise, in particular: “the profoundly learned” Bernard Lewis. All these advisers, despite their otherwise divergent viewpoints, as Warren noted [13], “assured him (President Bush) that Islam and modernity were potentially compatible.” None more vehemently—or with such authority—than the so-called “Last Orientalist [14],” nonagenarian professor Bernard Lewis. Arguably the most striking example of Lewis’s fervor was a lecture [15] he delivered July 16, 2006 (on board the ship Crystal Serenity during a Hillsdale College cruise in the British Isles) about the transferability of Western democracy to despotic Muslim societies, such as Iraq. He concluded with the statement, “Either we bring them freedom, or they destroy us.” This stunning claim was published [15] with that concluding remark as the title, “Bring Them Freedom Or They Destroy Us,” and disseminated widely.
http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/342913
Sometime in the first years of the new millennium, “global warming” evolved into “climate change.” Amid growing controversies over the planet’s past temperatures, Al Gore and other activists understood that human-induced “climate change” could explain almost any weather extremity — droughts or floods, temperatures too hot or too cold, hurricanes and tornadoes — better than “global warming” could.
Similar verbal gymnastics have gradually turned “affirmative action” into “diversity” — a word ambiguous enough to avoid the innate contradictions of a liberal society affirming the illiberal granting of racial preferences.
In an increasingly multiracial society, it has grown hard to determine the racial ancestry of millions of Americans. Is someone who is ostensibly one-half Native American or African-American classified as a minority eligible for special consideration in hiring or college admissions, while someone one-quarter or one-eighth is not? How exactly does affirmative action adjudicate our precise ethnic identities these days? These are not illiberal questions — given, for example, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren’s past claims of being Native American to gain advantage in her academic career.
Aside from the increasing difficulty of determining the ancestry of multiracial, multiethnic, and intermarried Americans, what exactly is the justification for affirmative action’s ethnic preferences in hiring or admissions — historical grievance, current underrepresentation due to discrimination, or both?
Are the children of President Barack Obama or Attorney General Eric Holder more in need of help than the offspring of immigrants from the Punjab or Cambodia? If non-white ancestry is no longer an accurate indicator of ongoing discrimination, can affirmative action be justified by a legacy of historical bias or current ethnic underrepresentation?
http://blogs.jpost.com/content/jewish-state-makes-perfect-sense
The Jewish State makes Perfect Sense
The images that the international media portrays of Israel are so distorted that it seems that the reporters and editors must have closed their eyes, ears and minds to common sense. Well welcome to the blog that blows away those false smokescreens and gives a true sense of what this amazing country is achieving.
The brain controls our senses and the nerve center of Israeli research is Neuroscience. A groundbreaking ceremony took place at the site of the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences (ELSC) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The new building will be home to the largest neuroscience center in Israel and one of the most ambitious in the world. One Hebrew University Professor, Hagai Berman, is to receive he Rappaport Prize for Excellence in Biomedical Research as overdue recognition for his work on Deep Brain Stimulation. Over 100,000 Parkinson’s sufferers have been treated with DBS, one of the most effective treatments for the ailment.
Researchers over at Israel’s Technion are working at the forefront of a new Neuroscience category called Optogenetics where they have discovered a substitute for damaged retinas. A light-sensitive protein can turn the ganglion cells in the eye into photoreceptors. Visual images projected onto these cells stimulate neurons and recreate the image in the brain. Watch this space! Meanwhile Bloomberg TV highlighted Israel’s huge advances in brain science. The reporter even put on an Israeli Brain Machine Interface. But it took common sense to recognize that Alzheimer’s sufferers would benefit simply from wearing “MediTags” – bracelets that contain medical and contact details in Hebrew and English in case they get lost.
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
Every day another one of the stories comes in. A teacher panicked by a plastic gun, an army man on a cupcake, a t-shirt, a pop tart chewed into the shape of a gun or a finger gun hits the panic button. Supensions and lectures quickly follow as the latest threat to the gun-free zone, usually in the form of a little boy, is tackled to the ground and lectured to within an inch of his life.
Tellingly these incidents rarely take place in the inner city schools where teenage gang members walk through metal detectors at the start of the day. The safety officers in those schools, big weary men with eyes that look everywhere at once, don’t waste their time on toys. Not unless those toys are full-size, painted black and filed down to look like real guns.
It’s usually the schools where a shooting is wholly unlikely; where gun violence is not a daily reality, but an unlikely convergence of horror, that institutional vigilance hits an irrational peak as every school imagines that it could be the next Columbine or the next Sandy Hook.
The NRA’s initial proposal of armed school guards was met with an irrational chorus of protests. More guns aren’t the answer, was the cry. And the leading crier was the White House’s expert skeet shooter. In a country where law enforcement is heavily armed and gunmen are stopped by gunmen in uniforms, a strange Swedenization had set in. The problem was not the man, it was the gun. Get rid of the guns and you stop the killing. Schools across the country are banning not the gun, but the idea of the gun. It is a conceptual prohibition that is meant to push away the threat of gun violence by eliminating any mention of the G word. Gun-free zones mean places where guns cannot be mentioned, depicted or even symbolized as if the refusal to concede the existence of a firearm will eliminate the threat of it being used on the premises.
