http://www.newenglishreview.org/blog_direct_link.cfm/blog_id/47992 A new report by Reza Kahlili at WorldNetDaily (WND) raises the speculative possibility of whether Stuxnet might have triggered the alleged explosion at the Iranian underground enrichment facility at Fordow that allegedly occurred on January 21st, “Iran nuke-site blasts confirmed, sabotage suspected”. If that was possible was it the older version, Stuxnet 0.5 rather […]
http://www.juliagorin.com/wordpress/?p=3012 Here I was wondering how we’d made it so far into March without an Albanian killing someone somewhere — which lately is how the new year is rung in — and it turns out I missed a recent item: Three dead in Swiss factory shooting (BBC.com, Feb. 27) Imogen Foulkes reports on the shooting […]
http://www.prudenpolitics.com/newsletter?utm_source=P&P%20Auto%201&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=6496
“Mr. Obama, pressing for the elusive diplomatic solution to the Iranian threat to build the Islamic bomb, quotes the ancient Chinese military philosopher Sun Tzu: “Build a golden bridge for your opponent to retreat upon.” Nice work, if you could get the opponent to use such a bridge. The evil-doers in the Middle East would blow it up and pocket the gold.”
Barack Obama, who stiffed the Israelis throughout his first term, is finally packing his bags for a visit to what we once called the Holy Land, before the world became an unholy mess. The Israelis have even put up an “app” on the Internet to enable everyone with a laptop to keep track of the trip in Hebrew, English and Arabic.
The app, the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promises, will feature “real-time updates, video, photographs and behind-the-scene glimpses of the visit,” with Web links to the prime minster’s office, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Now if only Mssrs Obama and Netanyahu actually do something worth talking about.
“Another day,” observes the Jerusalem Post, “another gimmick.” There’s lots to talk about, and both the president and the prime minister are practicing to give the other man an earful. Mr. Obama offered a hint or two last week when he called two dozen leaders of Jewish organizations in the United States to the White House for a briefing of sorts about what to expect.
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3618/comic-relief-charity-extremists Every year, the charity Comic Relief organizes the leading fundraising event in Britain. Some of the vast sums it raises, however, end up in the bank accounts of politicized groups with extremist agendas. Every year since 1985, the British charity Comic Relief has held a high-profile fundraising telethon called Red Nose Day. Since its […]
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3619/euro-islam Yet the book also contains troubling passages revealing cracks in Idriz’s façade. “Idriz plays two different pianos.” — Gunther Beckstein, President, Bavarian Interior Ministry Benjamin Idriz, an imam who leads the Islamic Community Penzberg (Islamische Gemeinde Penzberg or IGP) in a town south of Munich, has achieved prominence in Germany as an exponent of […]
Kerry, Obama, and the Turkish Prime Minister John Kerry’s recent rebuke of Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan for “inflammatory verbal attacks on Israel” stands in sharp contrast to Barack Obama’s long-established indifference to them. In the three months prior to Obama’s speeches in Turkey in early April (6-7) of 2009, Jewish life had been […]
Can you just imagine that the Normandy Invasion had been hinted at, and bruited about in the news by pundits, legislators and military men who all hinted that a strike was coming but, then backed off because “sanctions” needed time to work?
Or, if the nation most immediately threatened kept moving the “red line” and the goal post assisted by a seditious media and the Don Quixotes of Israeli politics?
To every hawkish thrust there is a pacifist parry…..yup thrust with a sword and deflect with a carrot—-namely, more threats that there will be even more and greater threats.
What a spectacle.
And, by the way, that Son of a Ron is now a hero? Puleez! Read Daniel Greenfield’s notes today.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/342522/while-you-werent-looking-obama-kills-military-commissions-andrew-c-mccarthy In the blink of an eye, the second Obama term has turned the clock back to the pre-9/11 days, when al-Qaeda was a law-enforcement problem, not a national-security challenge. Remember the great ruckus over the administration’s attempt to give Khalid Sheik Mohammed & Co. a civilian trial in lower Manhattan? In what would, in […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/342568 It was Wednesday, shortly before Senator Rand Paul’s bravura 13-hour filibuster, the Jimmy Stewart star turn in Paul’s crusade to have the Constitution ban a bogeyman of his own making: the killing of American citizens on American soil by America’s armed forces — a scandal that clearly cries out for action, having occurred exactly […]
WHERE THE GOVERNMENT SEES, IT CAN SEND A DRONE…
http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/342564
I shall leave it to others to argue the legal and constitutional questions surrounding drones, but they are not without practical application. For the last couple of years, Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, has had Predator drones patrolling the U.S. border. No, silly, not the southern border. The northern one. You gotta be able to prioritize, right? At Derby Line, Vt., the international frontier runs through the middle of the town library and its second-floor opera house. If memory serves, the stage and the best seats are in Canada, but the concession stand and the cheap seats are in America. Despite the zealots of Homeland Security’s best efforts at afflicting residents of this cross-border community with ever more obstacles to daily life, I don’t recall seeing any Predator drones hovering over Non-Fiction E–L. But, if there are, I’m sure they’re entirely capable of identifying which delinquent borrower is a Quebecer and which a Vermonter before dispatching a Hellfire missile to vaporize him in front of the Large Print Romance shelves.
I’m a long, long way from Rand Paul’s view of the world (I’m basically a 19th-century imperialist a hundred years past sell-by date), but I’m far from sanguine about America’s drone fever. For all its advantages to this administration — no awkward prisoners to be housed at Gitmo, no military casualties for the evening news — the unheard, unseen, unmanned drone raining down death from the skies confirms for those on the receiving end al-Qaeda’s critique of its enemies: As they see it, we have the best technology and the worst will; we choose aerial assassination and its attendant collateral damage because we are risk-averse, and so remote, antiseptic, long-distance, computer-programmed warfare is all that we can bear. Our technological strength betrays our psychological weakness.
And in a certain sense they’re right: Afghanistan is winding down, at best, to join the long list of America’s unwon wars, in which, 48 hours after departure, there will be no trace that we were ever there. The guys with drones are losing to the guys with fertilizer — because they mean it, and we don’t. The drone thus has come to symbolize the central defect of America’s “war on terror,” which is that it’s all means and no end: We’re fighting the symptoms rather than the cause.
