http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=3727 Ahead of his visit to the Holy Land next week, U.S. President Barack Obama decided to grant an exclusive interview to leading Israeli anchorwoman Yoni Levi. The 25-minute one-on-one was taped on Wednesday at the White House and broadcast Thursday night, with Hebrew subtitles, on Channel 2. A few days ago, when Channel 10 […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/03/israel_has_a_government_mr_president.html
That’s something to remember when you arrive there next week.
Israel has a government, elected by its people in a free, fair, open and democratic election. Multiple parties representing widely divergent points of view met a wildly diverse electorate through free media and open debate. This is no stultified two-party affair with a libertarian insurgency.
Israel will be the only country you visit in the region, this time or any other, that has a fully democratic system. Do not be swayed by the “apartheid” slander. Citizens of Israel are Jews, Moslems, Christians, and Druze, each with religious and non-religious elements. Their background is Ethiopian, Russian, North and South American, European, and derived from every country of the Arab world plus Persia; watch Rita before you go. There are left and right-wingers, socialists and capitalists. (Surprise: some of the socialists are right wing and some of the capitalists are left wing, since left and right in Israel are not only economic values, but relate to land and security. Some of the security hawks are economic leftists.) Every single one of them has a vote — and they use it.
Remember, the Palestinians could have had that, too. Or could they? Abbas’s single elected term ran out in January 2009; people who stay after that are dictators, not “elected leaders.” Journalists and protests against PA corruption are stifled with an increasingly heavy hand. Hamas is overtly intolerant of the Christian minority in Gaza, and the West Bank’s Christians are leaving as well; the brave ones talk about why. A key Palestinian demand is that territory they may one day have for a state must be Judenrein. Why would they think you would find that acceptable?
THIS BOOK OFFERS AN ASTOUNDING LACK OF HISTORICITY: FOR EXAMPLE “Among other things, he reminds us of an oft-forgotten truth: the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict pre-date the ascendancy of radical Islam.” REALLY? IT IS THE OTHER WAY AROUND…THE ENTIRE CONFLICT IS A RESULT OF CENTURIES OF ISLAMIC ANTI-SEMITISM AND JIHAD….READ ANDREW BOSTOM’S “THE LEGACY OF ISLAMIC ANTI SEMITISM-FROM SACRED TEXTS TO SOLEMN HISTORY.”
SECOND HE OFFERS THE FOLLOWING BLATHER:”….Unfortunately, after having set the stage at great length and very informatively for a discussion of the Jewish future, Eizenstat seems to run out of steam. In “Final Thoughts,” his peroration to the reader, he advocates nothing more original than a “two-state solution,” increased tolerance in Israel for internal dissent, new approaches toward dealing with Israel’s Arab minority…”
THE GUY DID WORK FOR JIMMY CARTER SO SKIP THIS BOOK…..RSK
http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/6140/features/eizenstat-on-the-jewish-future/
Stuart E. Eizenstat is, for many in the Jewish community, a household name—and deservedly so. Since his appearance on the national scene in 1976 as Jimmy Carter’s chief domestic policy adviser, Eizenstat has been U.S. Ambassador to the European Union, an Under Secretary of State, and a Deputy Secretary of the Treasury. When Bill Clinton was president, Eizenstat led negotiations with Switzerland, Germany, and Austria for the return of Jewish property to descendants of Holocaust victims; he is currently co-chair of the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute. Eizenstat’s experience as a participant in many of the international dramas of the past four decades and his intimate familiarity with Jewish affairs have left him well prepared to write a big book with the title The Future of the Jews: How Global Forces are Impacting the Jewish People, Israel, and Its Relationship with the United States.
The strongest chapter of this volume—the opening chapter, “A New Multipolar World”—consists of a country-by-country survey of changing economic, social, political, and military conditions in seven countries and regions (including China, of which he offers a superb analysis) that are increasingly important to both the United States and Israel. Eizenstat clearly intends to underscore, from the very beginning, the fact that Israel must pay heed to its major ally’s foreign policy goals as it seeks to cultivate better relationships with these emerging powers.
The plot of The Future of the Jews thickens when, in subsequent chapters, Eizenstat evokes the dangers posed to Israel (and to Jews generally) by a radicalized Islam, globalization, anti-Semitism, and the continued campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state. Eizenstat brings an insider’s perspective to his analysis. Among other things, he reminds us of an oft-forgotten truth: the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict pre-date the ascendancy of radical Islam.
The Jewish Egyptian Revival Passover marks the day on which God liberated the people of Israel from Pharaoh’s rule. So there is no small irony in noting that three millennia after the Exodus, emancipated Jews in Western countries expressed their unique national identity by building synagogues in the Pharaonic style. The first Egyptian-style building of […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/03/ten_key_points_on_islamic_blasphemy_law.html
There is an intensifying, global campaign to impose Islamic blasphemy law on non-Muslims, including those living outside Islamdom, in non-Muslim societies.
What follows are ten key points on the doctrinal origins and practical implications of this global campaign:
1) According to the Sunna (the traditions of Muhammad and the early Muslim community), by using foul language against the Muslim prophet Muhammad, Allah, or Islam, the non-Muslim transgressors put themselves on a war footing against Muslims, and their lives became licit (such as the poet Kaab b. al-Ashraf, who composed poems denigrating Muhammad, and was assassinated). [see 1.1, 1.2, 1.3]
2) This “offense” was then constructed and legitimated by Muslim jurists when Islam was politically, militarily and economically dominant, so that it was expected that the non-Muslims under Islamic rule would not denigrate the religion of Islam, nor cast aspersions on its major figures or institutions. [see 2.1, 2.2,2.3]
3) The jurists saw any such denigration as an unacceptable hostile act, punishable by death, automatically, as per three of the main Sunni schools of Islamic Law (Maliki, Shafii, Hanbali), and the major Shiite schools. According to the fourth major school of Sunni Islamic law, the Hanafi, the punishment of a non-Muslim guilty of blasphemy is left to the discretion of a Muslim judge. The death penalty was in fact most often applied by the Hanafis. (see 3.1, 3.2) Qadi Iyad (d. 1149), the great Almoravid jurist, captured the doctrine’s animating Muslim supremacism in his seminal Ash-Shifa, which includes one of the most authoritative analyses of Islamic blasphemy law’s treatment of non-Muslims, ever written: “Once Islam was firmly established and Allah had given it victory over all other religions, any such detractor that the Muslims had power over and whose affair is well-known, was put to death.”
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2935/debunking_the_hugo_ch_vez_re_election_myth Hugo Chávez may be dead, but the myth of his four consecutive re-election victories is still very much alive Hugo Chávez may be dead, but the myth of his four consecutive re-election victories is still very much alive. With recent news that Chavez’s remains will no longer be embalmed, it’s time to bury that […]
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3625/germany-radical-islamists More recently, Salafists have issued death threats against German politicians, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel. “The groups aim to change our society in an aggressive belligerent way so that democracy would be replaced by a Salafist system, and the rule of law replaced by Sharia law.” — Hans-Peter Friedrich, Ministry of the Interior, Germany […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/jamie-glazov/remembering-a-dissident-3-1-1/
Editors’ note: Yuri Glazov, Russian dissident and the father of Frontpage’s editor Jamie Glazov, died 15 years ago today on March 15, 1998. The editors felt it would be appropriate to mark this occasion by reprinting Jamie’s dedication to his father from our March 11, 2012 issue. We also hope readers will consider contributing to the Yuri Glazov Memorial Award to keep the memory of Yuri and his fight for freedom alive. [See info at bottom of article for U.S. and international donations.] Frontpage’s editors would also like to stress that in the last year the situation in Russia has become far worse — with Putin’s increasing state repression, ruthless crack-down on human rights and the implementation of the re-Stalinization campaign.
One day, when I was nine years old, my father and I were on our way to Church. As we neared the entrance, I spat on the ground. Reflexively, my dad’s arm shot out across my chest like a railway barrier, blocking my motion forward. We stood there, frozen in time, for some three seconds until my father uttered, in a very serious but patient way: “It is ok to spit outside of KGB headquarters, but never in front of a place such as this.” I registered the message and indicated my understanding — and we proceeded on our way.
That was my dad’s moral clarity and sharp, quick-witted way with words; and the sacred values that spawned those words made a profound impression on me from the moment of my birth. I was born into a family of Russian dissidents — a father and a mother, Yuri and Marina Glazov, who put their clenched fists up and went toe-to-toe with the Evil Empire.
Throughout my youth, my dad shared many stories with me, which included how he had always been aware, even in his youth, that he existed in a slave camp masquerading as a country and that he perpetually dreamed of escaping it. He spent his young years studying maps, trying to decipher which body of water he could swim across to escape the communist paradise he languished in. But his life ended up going a different way: he confronted the slave masters, rather than escaping the prison they had built.
My father was a scholar at the Soviet Academy of Sciences and a professor at Moscow State University. His main field of study concerned Oriental languages and cultures, with a specialty in the Chinese, Sanskrit and Tamil areas. Despite his rewarding career, my dad put everything on the line and began to attend human rights demonstrations in Moscow on behalf of political prisoners. He also started to sign letters of protest against the political repressions that were heightening in the country in the 1960s, connected as they were to the re-Stalinization of the Soviet Union after the Khrushchev thaw. The activities my dad engaged in could land a Soviet citizen in the gulag or a psychiatric hospital for decades.
On February 24, 1968, my father signed the Letter of Twelve, a letter written and signed by twelve Soviet dissidents to the Supreme Congress of Communist Parties in Budapest denouncing Soviet human rights abuses. He was immediately fired from his work for being “unprofessional” in his scholarly studies (even though he previously had received high praise for his academic studies).
http://www.prudenpolitics.com/newsletter?utm_source=P&P%20Auto%201&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=6540 Two cats fighting on the back fence can ruin a man’s sleep, but in the cat world, the noisy arguments between Tom and his feline lady friends rarely settle anything. All they accomplish is more cats. The Democrats have used this formula to great advantage over the years, squabbling like cats and moving on […]
http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/03/14/bon-voyage-president-obama-in-israel/
In anticipation of President Obama’s forthcoming visit to Israel The New York Times published three “Op-Ed” columns in a single day (March 13) assessing the dim prospects for Middle East peace – and, to be sure – holding Israel responsible. Even if “Op-Ed” refers only to location (adjacent to the editorial page) rather than to policy (deviating from the editorial position), this was an unusual, but hardly random, concentration of journalistic firepower.
With his characteristic airy detachment, columnist Thomas Friedman seemed to applaud Obama’s belated realization that given current realities on the ground, “benign neglect” toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is preferable to active intervention. After all, as Friedman correctly notes, “the most destabilizing conflict in the region is the civil war between Shiites and Sunnis,” not the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Furthermore, the obstacles to an Israeli-Palestinian peace are, at least at the moment, insurmountable. Why? Because Israeli settlers and Hamas rockets make it so. Note the moral equivalence.
Nonetheless, Friedman prepared questions for the President to ask Israeli officials – but not Palestinian officials in Ramallah: How can “your relentless settlement drive” fail to undermine Israel as “a Jewish democracy” and further “delegitimize” Israel worldwide? Shouldn’t Israel “be constantly testing and testing whether there is a Palestinian partner for a secure peace” – as though Israel had not repeatedly done that ever since the Oslo Accords were drafted. “As a friend,” Friedman also wants to know whether Israel even has a long-term strategy for peace.
