http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3693/saudi-arabia-tribal-justice By playing the clerics and institutions against the people, the House of Saud rises above the power struggle and justice itself, and continues further to consolidate its power. A Saudi court ordered Ali al-Khawahir, a 24-year-old Saudi citizen, to be surgically paralyzed as punishment for a crime he committed as a 14-year-old, that […]
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3692/belgium-erasing-christianity Under the guise of letting go of the Christian holidays, this text provides Muslims with a waiver to add Islamic holidays…. Six Belgian senators introduced a draft resolution in the Belgian Parliament that would make “Islamophobia” a crime punishable by fines and imprisonment. A person would be guilty if he “considers Islam to be […]
http://www.meforum.org/3494/india-israel-ties
Since their establishment in January 1992, Israeli-Indian relations have improved dramatically. Israel has emerged as a major Indian trading partner in the Middle East with bilateral trade rising from a meager US$100 million to over $6.6 billion.[1] Cooperation in the military-security arena has similarly grown,[2] and there are widespread popular exchanges between the people of the two countries. The Israeli ambassador is the most sought after diplomat in New Delhi after his U.S. counterpart, and Indo-Israeli ties seem extraordinarily robust. Yet failure to acknowledge the limitations of this relationship would be costly.
India’s Israel policy falls into three broad phases. Beginning in the early 1920s, the nationalist leadership adopted a pro-Arab position, which largely continued until January 1992. Its recognition of the Jewish state in September 1950 did not materially alter this stand. The adoption of a pro-Arab stand was seen as critical for its interests in the Middle East and was pursued through a pro-Palestinian foreign policy. While it did not identify with the Arab extremism of that period, recognition without relations was the hallmark of Indian policy until January 1992. The end of the Cold War and the transformation of the global order brought an end to this zero-sum approach as New Delhi concluded that, in order to make a difference in this new era, it was both possible and necessary to maintain normal relations with the Israelis and the Palestinians, who seemed to be moving toward a historic reconciliation. Shortly after the decision to normalize relations with Israel was announced on January 29, 1992, the two countries opened diplomatic missions and paved the way for increased political, economic, cultural, and security cooperation.
After the Congress party returned to power in 2004, bilateral relations moved to a third and more complex phase. In a radical departure from its pre-1992 position, New Delhi began to delink bilateral relations from the vagaries of the peace process. While disagreements with Israel over the peace process had earlier prevented full normalization of relations, New Delhi quietly began to pursue the peace process as if there were no bilateral relations with Israel and to pursue bilateral relations as if there were no differences with Israel over the peace process. This move was not only inevitable but has also been critical for the consolidation of the bilateral relations.
However, New Delhi continues to maintain some of its core pre-1992 positions vis-à-vis the Palestinians. Most importantly, it continues to support the pursuit of Palestinian political rights that will result in the formation of a sovereign and independent state coexisting with Israel. Ever since its decision to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the “sole and legitimate” representative of the Palestinians, political ties and interactions have improved and strengthened between the two parties with the PLO mission in New Delhi granted embassy status in early 1980. At that time, the Israeli representation was still confined to a consulate in Mumbai, which was often described as India’s diplomatic Siberia. In November 1988, India was among the first countries to recognize the “state of Palestine,” proclaimed by the PLO in Algiers, and began receiving PLO chairman Yasser Arafat and his successor, Mahmoud Abbas, as heads of state. In the wake of the Oslo agreement, in 1993, India opened a separate mission in the Gaza Strip. As has been the practice in the West, the Gaza mission reported directly to the Foreign Office in New Delhi and not to the Indian embassy in Tel Aviv. When the situation in Gaza became more difficult, the mission was moved to Ramallah in the West Bank in 2004.
http://www.prudenpolitics.com/newsletter?utm_source=P&P%20Auto%201&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=7071
Political correctness is always petty, often infuriating, and sometimes does no permanent harm. But occasionally it’s a threat to the nation’s security. When a paperclip general at the Pentagon surrenders to the enemy at the first sound of the popguns, the harm can be permanent.
Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stood up to the enemy in Iraq, where he made an enviable combat record. But at the Pentagon, he appears to have fallen, not on his sword, but on a paperclip, attached to a point of religious doctrine.When, 18 months ago, apologists for Islamic radicals complained that an instructor at the National Defense University, the military war college, was guilty of the sin of showing insufficient deference to radical Islam, the general first humiliated him, then cashiered him, to appease Muslim critics, some of them radical and no friends of the United States. Now the instructor has been rejected for battalion command and his promising Army career is effectively over.
Army Lt. Col. Matthew Dooley (a good Irish Catholic name), decorated for valor in Iraq, was an instruction leader at the Joint Forces Staff College in Washington, lecturing on the dangers of radical Islam, when he invited an authority on Islamic extremists to talk to his students about how the extremists operate. You might think that “knowing the enemy” is a good thing in senior Army officers. One passage in the materials used by a guest lecturer, former FBI agent John Guandolo, particularly enraged the critics:
“If Islam is so violent, why are there so many peaceful Muslims? This is similar to asking why there are so many Christians who are arrogant, angry and vindictive, if Christian doctrine requires humility, tolerance and forgiveness.” There were no protests from Christians, or Christian organizations. But one participant in the course complained to the Pentagon, and the witch hunt, led by the thoroughly frightened Gen. Dempsey, began.
http://www.yourjewishnews.com/2013/04/26908.html
SCHOOL SUPERINTENDENT NAMED MIKE LOONEY (WELL NAMED) DEFENDS TEXT….RSK
(Scroll down for video) Tennessee parents are fuming after learning that school textbooks justify Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel.
Some parents in Williamson County, Tennessee, are calling for the removal of the high school textbook, believing that it is biased against Israel.
The textbook is taught on a college level elective course called Human Geography, and is available to students in public schools in Williamson County, which also offer an elective course on the Bible.
Parents are against the kind of questions that the book is encouraging teens to ask. One of the book’s questions is: “If a Palestinian suicide bomber kills dozens of Israeli teenagers in a restaurant in Jerusalem, is it an act of terrorism or a war against the policies of the Israeli government?”
Julie West, a mother of a 15-year-old student at Franklin High School in Franklin, Tennessee, said the question is pro-Palestinian.
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/davidhornik/escalation-iranian-drones-over-israel/print/
On Thursday an Israeli warplane shot a drone into the Mediterranean just west of the Haifa shoreline. The drone came from Lebanon, and Israeli media immediately reported that it was sent by Hizballah—even though the prime minister and the IDF spokesman, in their public statements on the incident, made no such claim.
Amos Harel, military analyst for Haaretz, reports that the reason for that omission is probably that it wasn’t Hizballah that sent the plane but, rather, Iran—specifically its Revolutionary Guards contingent in Lebanon.
The UK’s Telegraph reports that “according to Syrian rebels and Israeli intelligence, Tehran has poured Revolutionary Guard soldiers into Syria and Lebanon to support its Shiite allies.” The Revolutionary Guards are also believed to have been behind another drone sent from Lebanon in October. That one entered Israeli airspace and was shot down not far from Israel’s nuclear plant in the Negev.
The Telegraph quotes a “Western diplomat” saying: “The Israeli military command doesn’t treat drones launched from Lebanon lightly, since their goal may be not only taking pictures, but also an assassination of senior officials, military or political.” In fact, at the time Thursday’s drone was spotted, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was flying across northern Israel, and his helicopter had to be grounded until the drone was downed.
What was the drone’s mission? Probably not to hit Netanyahu, since that would be an open act of war and Iran, with its elections upcoming in June and its nuclear program probably not quite yet at the finish line, wouldn’t seek that outcome at this point. Harel speculates that “Iran wished to openly demonstrate its potential ability to damage essential facilities in Israel.”
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/the-virtue-of-lucidity-yuri-glazov-and-the-fate-of-communism/
please also read: http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2013/04/16/jamie-glazov-the-devil-in-history/
To order Yuri Glazov’s The Russian Mind Since Stalin’s Death, click here.
In 1985, the USSR seemed immortal. Most of the observers of Soviet affairs were aware of the insuperable systemic tensions (in Hegelian-Marxist parlance, “contradictions”), but very few anticipated the regime’s imminent end. In fact, such insights existed especially among the small and beleaguered dissident enclaves in the Soviet Union itself and in East-Central Europe. Most Western academics, however, were too busy to scrutinize the arcane workings of the Politburo and regarded the dissident activities as marred by romantic daydreaming. Dissidents could be admired, but not taken too seriously. There were exceptions, to be sure, among them Zbigniew Brzezinski, Robert Conquest, Leo Labedz, Martin Malia, Peter Reddaway, Richard Pipes, Robert C. Tucker and Adam Ulam.
A specialist in Oriental cultures and a professor at Moscow State University, Yuri Glazov (1929-1998) was a noble humanist and a committed democrat. He joined this quasi-subterranean dissident counter-culture. Because of his heretical views, he was denied the right to teach. Eventually, he left the Soviet Union together with his family and settled in Canada where he taught Russian studies for many years at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. His main interests were linked to the role of the Russian intelligentsia in articulating oppositional discourses and strategies, the dynamics of Stalinism and post-Stalinism, and the soul-searching tribulations among those who refused to live within the Big Lie.
Yuri Glazov was among the first scholars to insist on the importance of scrutinizing the psychology of Soviet leaders as a way to fathom how the decision-making process in the Kremlin operates. Many Western scholars, especially in the 1970s, during the detente era, treated Soviet institutions as similar to those in the West and tried to disregard the pre-eminence of ideology. Like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Yuri Glazov saw ideology as the main underpinning of the communist dictatorship. Ideology sanctified the absolute falsification of reality, constructed a ritualized super-reality and a pseudo-scientific, in fact mystical vision of history.
He published a truly outstanding book, The Russian Mind since Stalin’s Death, in 1985, with D. Reidel Company, a respected academic press. I read it recently and was struck by his extraordinary prescience and intellectual acumen. Before Glasnost became the ubiquitous buzzword, Glazov identified the search for truth as a subversive method to oppose the system and recover civic dignity. For him the most important psychological feature of Sovietism was the universal sentiment of fear:
There is one feeling that people living in non-totalitarian countries are unable adequately to understand: a feeling of fear in a country without law and without justice. This feeling of fear could be read in the eyes and faces; it could be heard in voices and speeches. The feeling of fear destroys the process of communication between people. They say what they do not mean. They hear in other people’s words what is not meant. Who creates this atmosphere of fear? Who requires it? Can it be kept under control? To what extent does this feeling of fear alter the whole nature of a person?
These are disturbingly vital (or, under Soviet conditions, mortal) questions to which Glazov offered remarkably persuasive answers. Fear and mendacity were intertwined in the genesis of what the system aimed at, the New Man, Homo Sovieticus. Communism was not only a political and social revolution, but even more important, it championed an anthropological mutation.
http://www.newenglishreview.org/blog_direct_link.cfm/blog_id/48834
Sunday in Manhattan there was a Jerusalem Post Policy conference. There was a panel debating the topic of Two States for Two People. Harvard Law Professor was in top form demonstrating why he has about reached his limit. Read the Jerusalem Post report ,”Dershowitz presents plan to restart peace talks”, about a truculent audience rejecting his views and according to fellow panelist and senior JP columnist Caroline Glick saying:
Following laughter from the audience, Dershowitz lashed out, saying that “It’s so easy to laugh but I have to tell you the audience today is not helpful in resolving complex and serious issues,” which lead to loud jeers and boos.
The bestselling author was booed loudly after telling audience members that they are “part of the problem” for laughing at his new framework for negotiations.
“You’re proving my point,? Dershowitz hit back, adding, “You are part of the problem, not the solution.”
The Post’s Senior Contributing Editor Caroline Glick, who was also on the panel, told the audience that she “Need[ed] to catch my breath for a second,” after Dershowitz’s comments. “It’s very nice to come in here and smack down your audience,” she intoned.
Dershowitz, she told the audience, is “nasty to those who disagree” with him.
“If you want to say that people who devote their lives to defending the Jewish state are illegitimate voices then why should I care what you have to say,” she asked Dershowitz.
Towards the end of the debate, Dershowitz alleged that those who booed him and former prime minister Ehud Olmert were not representative of American or Israeli Jewry and are “foolish.” He said he would defend his “right to tell you what I think of you and it’s not much.”
My boyfriend the bomber
Fanatic’s ex: He said I was ‘pure’ and he took my virginity. I loved him but he slapped me and tried to brainwash me to hate US like he did
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4906994/my-boyfriend-the-bomber.html
AN ex-girlfriend of dead Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev has told how he tried to brainwash her into becoming a Muslim fanatic who hated America.
Nadine Ascencao, 24, said Tamerlan made her wear an Islamic hijab and pray to Allah and slapped her when she wore Western clothes.
But she was so blindly in love with the handsome boxer who had taken her virginity, she did her utmost to make him happy.
Nadine said: “I went to his mosque a couple of times and even looked into converting to make him happy. I thought, ‘This is crazy’ — but I still did it for him.
“Tamerlan had taken my virginity and said he loved me because I was pure and hadn’t been with any other guys. I was in love and scared he’d leave me if I didn’t do what he said. Looking back I had a lucky escape.”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2316360/Misha-speaks-DENIES-radicalizing-Boston-bomber-Tamerlan-Tsarnaev.html ‘Misha’ speaks out: Friend accused of radicalizing Boston bomber is revealed as 39-year-old Islam convert with an U.S. girlfriend as he DENIES teaching Tamerlan Tsarnaev Identity of mysterious ‘Misha’ revealed to be Rhode Island resident Mikhail Allakhverdov He is an Islamic convert who knew Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2009 when he lived in Boston He […]
