The Politics of Yiddish “One cannot fully know the process of the Jewish transition into modernity without knowing what Yiddish holds,” wrote Ruth Wisse in 1985. Since then, the scholar who is now the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature at Harvard University has done as much as anyone else on earth to let people […]
http://peaceandtolerance.org/index.php/2012-07-26-13-33-42/islamic-extremism-at-northeastern/boston-marathon-bombing-update/139-did-radical-islamic-leadership-in-boston-influence-marathon-bombers For ten years we have been warning Boston politicians, media, civic and religious leaders in Boston about the radical nature of the Islamic Society of Boston at whose Cambridge mosque the two terrorist brothers sometimes attended. What will it take to end this dangerous silence? What is it going to take to end the […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/signposts-on-the-road-to-decline/print/
In late 1930 the Tory leadership in Britain’s governing coalition decided to back independence for India despite the increasing, vicious sectarian violence that graphically showed India was not yet ready for the British to leave. Later, historian A.L. Rowse would link partisan self-interest to the failure of nerve and collapse of morale that lay behind the policies of the ruling caste. It was in 1931, Rowse wrote, that “the caste lost confidence in itself and, undermined by fear, it lost not only confidence but conscience. Confused in mind about everything, except the main chance––its own preservation, it survived from year to year, from month to month, from day to day, by blurring the clarity of all issues, even the most dangerous––that of the nation’s safety; it maintained its enormous majority by electoral trickery, it spoke and perhaps thought in the language of humbug, it hoped to stave off conflict . . . by offering appeasement.”
These comments can serve as a commentary on the Obama administration’s failed foreign policy. There has seldom been a coherent, sound principle behind that policy other than partisan electoral “preservation” no matter the danger to the nation’s security and interests. Consider this by no means exhaustive catalogue:
• His opposition to the war in Iraq, predicated in the main on the ideological prejudices of his progressive base and validated by war-fatigue among many Americans, lead to a failure to achieve a status-of-forces agreement that would have left enough troops to prevent the current descent into sectarian violence and nascent civil war now rending that country.
• His campaign-sloganeering that Afghanistan was the “good war” compared to Bush’s “bad war” in Iraq compelled him to send more troops into that country, but then to undermine them by announcing a date-certain for American withdrawal, thus ensuring a Taliban resurgence, even now accelerating, after we leave.
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/ryan-mauro/new-york-times-whitewashes-islamist-zaytuna-college/print/ Zaytuna College was founded by three Islamists with a history of anti-American rhetoric, but you wouldn’t know that if you read the New York Times puff piece about the California school. Readers are left to believe this is a moderate Muslim institution that will “foster an American Islam” to lead the Muslim world into […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/jamie-glazov/muslim-mommy-dearest/
You have probably already had the privilege of watching the heart-warming video clip of Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, the mother of the Boston jihadi bombers, in which she is screaming hysterically at a CNN reporter about her indifference to her sons’ fates. She ends her tirade with a well-know jihadist expression — that informs its non-Muslim victims why they must die. Here’s the key quote, which may give you a fuzzy feeling inside:
“I don’t care if my youngest son is going to be killed today. I want the world to hear this. And, I don’t care if I am going to get killed too. And I will say Allahu Akbar!”
To get the real “Islamic feel” of this maternal-jihadi disposition held by Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, watch the video clip below:
As you have also probably noticed, Muslims shout “Allahu Akbar!” in the process of killing or raping kafirs (dirty non-Muslims) – like the Muslims who recently raped two Christian women in broad daylight in Egypt. Our media, of course, always rushes to inform us that this Islamic-Arabic expression is translated as “God is Great,” so that we can all be rest assured that Islam means us no harm — and that the particular Muslims screaming it while slicing our throats have somehow misunderstood their peaceful religion somewhere along the way. The tiny problem, of course, is that, as Daniel Greenfield shrewdly crystallizes:
Allahu Akbar doesn’t mean Allah is Great, in a “Isn’t ‘Allah and the Virgins of Paradise’ a great band.” It’s more like Allah is Greatest or Superior. And if you’re on the right side of the cockpit door, the one doing the shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ means that Allah is superior to your country and to you. And one of his followers is about to do his best to show you why.
“Allahu Akbar,” in other words, is an expression of Muslim hate and superiority — which means, of course, Allah’s hate and superiority. Allah hates and is superior to all the lesser (and non-existent) gods that the kafir so insolently and ignorantly worships. And that’s why, as 67% of the Meccan Koran and 51% of the Medinan Koran mandate, the kafir needs to be reviled, subjugated and killed. The Muslim, meanwhile, who is a slave to Allah, must also not stick around too long; indeed, he needs to end his own life, sooner rather than later, for Allah – as long as it’s done in the process of killing some kafirs. The Muslim’s life on earth is, after all, by Allah’s decree, pointless, since he is completely worthless as an individual. (The very opposite of the Judeo-Christian tradition’s view of the individual.) And the only way he can get into Islamic paradise and get access to the 72 virgins is through Jihad.
This is the lovely context in which we come to understand the exhilarating life of Zubeidat Tsarnaeva. She is our Muslim Mommy Dearest. And who better for her to take after than the Palestinian Muslim Mommy Dearest: Umm Nidal (Mariam Farhat), who was known in certain circles as the Mother of Martyrs or, depending on what your milieu is, the Mother From Hell. Umm Nidal, you see, liked to engage in infanticide, particularly when it came to her own kids. She passed away this past March, but the legacy she left behind still brings tears to the eyes of Muslims around the world who loved her, and who were touched by what she did for Allah.
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
The left has a clearly defined set of responses to a terrorist attack. After all the hopes for a properly right wing terrorist have come to naught, it begins the long slow process of rolling back the laws and emotional attitudes stemming from the attack.
For it, terrorism, like anything else, either fits into its narrative or conflict with it. The narrative
defines the world, past, present and future, in terms of the political agenda of the left. An event that clashes with the agenda must have its meaning changed so that the power of the narrative is restored.
Most violent attacks, from a street mugging to September 11, cause people to seek out security by combating the attackers. The left’s task is to shift the narrative so that people see it in an entirely different way. The perpetrators become the victims by the trick of transforming the real victims into the real perpetrators. The lesson shifts from going on the offense to learning not to give offense.
The process is gradual and the playbook is infinite. Weapons of mass distraction are brought out. New villains are introduced and the emotional resonance of the events is drowned in ridicule. The tones are also many, from urging everyone to let love defeat hate to displays of virulent hate against the people “truly” stirring up trouble, but they all share a common agenda. Only the tactics vary.
Unlike the right, the left is systematic. It studies structures and people and plots its lines of attack accordingly. It pits emotion against emotion and law against law. It waits for the initial shock to fade before launching its first wave of attacks over process.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/chechnya-headscarves-not-babushkas?f=puball This is not your grandmother’s Russia. Islamist Chechen soldiers are joining with Al Qaeda all over the Middle East and can be found across vast areas; from civil wars in Northern African to rebel camps in Syria, and now Boston, Massachusetts. A slender bronze statue of Medea, the Greek goddess of rage, holding up […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/what-the-boston-bombers-tell-us-about-radicalization Whenever an act of terrorism is committed in the United States often the initial assessment of it or the perpetrators is inaccurate or wrong. This is becoming clear in the investigation into the recent bombing of the Boston Marathon by the Tsarnaev brothers. As we search to find the motive behind the attack, we […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/346815/print
‘What difference, at this point, does it make?”
That was then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s angry response to a question about the State Department’s account of the attack on the Benghazi consulate in which Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were murdered on September 11, 2012.
Her response was cheered by leftist commentators on MSNBC. Righteous indignation is so attractive.
But of course it makes a difference. Hillary Clinton is leading in polls for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination and general election. It’s always legitimate to examine the performance of a front-runner for the presidency. And of the president himself.
You can find such an examination in the Interim Progress Report that five House Republican committee chairmen released last Wednesday.
Democrats complain that this is a partisan effort. Sure, but Democrats are free to present their own view of the facts. My sense is that they would rather squelch critical examination of Benghazi and the Obama administration’s response — as they did, with the help of most of the press, during the 2012 presidential campaign.
The Interim Report sets out copious evidence of the rash of security threats in Libya during 2012. There were more than 200 “security incidents” between June 2011 and July 2012 in Libya, it states, and 50 of them were in Benghazi.
Britain, the U.N., and the Red Cross withdrew their personnel from Benghazi that spring. The United States, meanwhile, reduced security forces despite a plea for increases from then-Ambassador Gene Cretz in March 2012.
“In a cable signed by Secretary Clinton in April 2012,” the Interim Report says, “the State Department settled on a plan to scale back security assets for the U.S. Mission in Libya, including Benghazi.”
Later requests from Stevens after he replaced Cretz in June were also denied.
That contradicts Clinton’s testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in January 2013. She said the cable traffic never made its way to her.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/346810/pigford-forever
At the time of his premature death, the great provocateur Andrew Breitbart was more than a year into a grinding crusade to bring attention to a little-known class-action settlement called Pigford, which had begun with plausible accusations that the U.S. Department of Agriculture had discriminated against a small number of black farmers, but which had spiraled into a billion-dollar, open-ended government kickback machine for untold thousands that showed no signs of letting up. The Pigford case represented everything Breitbart raged against in the American political order — large-scale cronyism, corrosive and cynical identity politics, unrepentant hypocrisy, and the predictable indifference of the mainstream media. A handful of conservative outlets reported on the story at the time — including NR — and a handful of liberal outlets dedicated only as much ink to these stories as it took to dismiss them. But in Breitbart’s lifetime, Pigford never cracked into “the conversation”; it never came to be seen as emblematic of a deeper corruption endemic in Big Government.
Perhaps that will now change with the publication, by no less an arbiter of “the conversation” than the New York Times, of a deeply reported 5,000-word piece on Pigford and its descendants that, if anything, reveals the truth to be worse than was previously thought.
Due to the pliability of the Clinton Justice Department and the dogged efforts of a few highly incentivized trial lawyers, the original Pigford settlement made $50,000 payments available to any African American who could merely claim to have been discriminated against by the federally deputized administrators of USDA bridge loans (loans designed to get farmers from the planting season to the harvesting season). And “claim” might even be too strong a word; since administrative records for the loan program were poor, the courts set the bar laughably low. To establish oneself as a farmer for the purposes of Pigford, it would all but do to establish that you had once bought a seed and passed within a country mile of a USDA office. And to establish that you were discriminated against there, it would all but do to affirm on a form that you found that experience less than satisfactory — and to have your second cousin affirm that you told him as much at the time.
