Obama’s scrub of Muslim terms under question; common links in attacks http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/apr/25/obamas-cleansing-of-islamic-terms-suppresses-commo/?page=all#pagebreak Before the Boston Marathon bombings, the Obama administration argued for years that there is a big difference between terrorists and the tenets of Islam. A senior White House aide in 2009 publicly urged Washington to cease using the term “jihadist” — asserting that […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bosch-fawstin/calling-islam-islam/ I wrote this a few years ago, and I think it’s worth posting again, particularly after the latest jihadist attack in Boston. I noticed, after the attack this week, that a number of people are using more proper terminology to identify this enemy, which is very important in taking on the enemy. I recall […]
http://www.climatedepot.com/2013/04/25/obamas-democrats-mangle-climate-science-
Obama’s smear misfires at GOP ‘deniers’: ‘The inconvenient truth is Obama & the Democrats have made many utterly ignorant & often times comical climate science claims’ — A Climate Depot Rebuttal
Climate Depot Responds to Obama campaign’s climate smear of skeptics — Morano: ‘Bluntly stated, a man — President Obama — who declared his presidency would result in ‘the rise of the oceans beginning to slow’, has no business whatsoever claiming he understands, let alone champions science in any way’ — ‘A president who claims Americans can ‘do something’ about floods, hurricanes, droughts tornadoes is not pro-science’
By Marc Morano – Climate DepotApril 25, 2013 11:55 PM
Climate Depot Editorial
President Barack Obama’s campaign to smear and intimidate global warming skeptics in Congress is now in full swing. See: Obama campaign launches plan to shame climate skeptics in Congress: ‘It is time to call out U.S. politicians who deny the science behind climate change’ & Obama Tweets about global warming: ‘Climate deniers in Congress refuse to even debate the issue. Make sure they don’t get away with it’
Obama’s new campaign hopes to silence skepticism, despite the fact that the GOP is the party taking a pro-science stand when it comes to man-made global warming fears. See: Lord Christopher Monckton defends GOP from Obama campaign attack: ‘Obama climate video stars GOP truthsayers’ — Monckton says GOP ‘talking common sense about climate’
The inconvenient truth for Obama is that he and his fellow Democrats have made many utterly ignorant and often times comical climate science claims. Bluntly stated, a man — President Obama — who declared his presidency would result in ‘the rise of the oceans beginning to slow’, has no business whatsoever claiming he understands, let alone champions science in any way.
http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2488/The-Fox-Effect-Pt-5.aspx
Earlier this year, I wrote a series of posts on “The Fox Effect,” which analyzed Fox coverage of Islamic stories through the Saudi scrim — in other words, keeping in mind the part-ownership (7 percent) of News Corp. by ranking Saudi scion Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, and the part-ownership (nearly 20 percent) of Rotana (Alwaleed’s media company) by Rupert Murdoch. (More coverage here.) The series culminated with a lengthy Q & A with Ryan Lauro here.
In this week’s syndicated column, I note that Fox — where Steve Emerson first broke the news that Saudi 3B-terrorist and ex-“person of interest” in the Boston bombing, Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi, was slated for deportation on “national security grounds” — appears to have “dropped” the story. That is too tepid a term. While Glenn Beck appeared on O’Reilly last night to present his team’s ground-breaking work on the MSM-ignored story, Fox hasn’t just dropped the story. The network is censoring it.
A search of the Fox News website reveals zero entries on Alharbi. To date, the Emerson video discussing Alharbi’s scheduled deportation remains available; so does Beck’s O’Reilly video. There are no news stories, however, on the Saudi national who was detained, becoming a “person of interest,” a 3-B terrorism-designee, a “witness,” and then a bone of contention between House members and DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano. The whole event is non-news.
More aggressively sinister, a report by Todd Starnes, radio host of “Fox News and Commentary” and a regular on “Fox & Friends,” was taken down from the site — even after it was a Drudge selection (i.e., widely publicized), twice!
Dated April 22, the Starnes story broke news. It was headlined: “Saudi National Was on Terror Watch List” — a claim that Janet Napolitano would confirm before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Starnes’ tweet on the topic remains in place.
Richard Falk and radical Islam
U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories Richard Falk caused a major brouhaha over a piece he published in Foreign Policy Journal last week.
“A Commentary on the Marathon Murders,” which appeared on April 19, suggested that the Boston bombings were linked to America’s Middle East policy, particularly as it relates to Israel.
“… [A]s long as Tel Aviv has the compliant ear of the American political establishment, those who wish for peace and justice in the world should not rest easy,” he wrote, adding, “Some of us naively hoped that Obama’s Cairo speech of 2009 was to be the beginning of … a process of renewal… acknowledg[ing] that relations with the Islamic world needed fundamental moves by the U.S. government for the sake of reconciliation, including the adoption of a far more balanced approach to the Palestine/Israel impasse. But as the months passed, what became evident, especially given the strong pushback by Israel and its belligerent leader, Bibi Netanyahu, were a series of disappointing reactions by Obama … Now at the start of his second presidential term, it seems that Obama has given up altogether, succumbing to the Beltway ethos of Israel First.”
Yes, asserted Falk, the United States needs to engage in “self-scrutiny,” because until “this process of reassessment occurs … America’s military prowess and the abiding confidence of its leaders in hard power diplomacy makes the United States a menace to the world and to itself.”
This is merely a morsel from the radical feast laid out by Falk in his piece, which is why it elicited so much criticism, both in the Jewish community and in the Obama administration. Even U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice on Tuesday tweeted her outrage: “Someone who spews such vitriol has no place at the U.N. Past time for him to go.”
Falk’s response to the outcry was to publish a “Clarifying Boston Marathon Post” on his blog.
“… I had no intention whatsoever to connect any dots as to whether there was a causal linkage between what the U.S. or Israel have done in the world and what happened in Boston,” he wrote on Thursday. “My only effort was to suggest that in addition to grieving and bringing the perpetrators to justice, this could also become an occasion for collective self-scrutiny as a nation and as a people.”
This is not a retraction. Nor does it suffice to let its author off the hook.
But let’s not kid ourselves: Falk’s positions, and his anti-American and pro-radical Islam activism, have been an open book throughout his career.
In various official capacities, he has called Israel an “apartheid state;” compared Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to Nazism; accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing;” and justified Islamic suicide bombings as a legitimate method of resistance.
These constitute but a tiny fraction of the egregious misrepresentations, outright lies and extremist views that Falk has disseminated over the past several decades. That the United Nations Human Rights Council appointed him in 2008 to a six-year term as a “special rapporteur” on behalf of the Palestinians is therefore as fitting as it is no surprise.
What bears reminding anyone who has forgotten, however, is Falk’s track record on the Islamic Republic.
In January 1979, Falk — a professor of international law at Princeton — accompanied former Attorney-General Ramsey Clark and Don Luce, a prominent member of “Clergy and Laity Concerned” (established in 1965 by the National Council of Churches to “struggle against American imperialism and exploitation in just about every corner of the world”) on a private, eight-day fact-finding mission to Iran. At the end of the trip, the trio stopped over in France to meet Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who had been living in exile for 14 years.
Right around this time, the ousted, cancer-ridden Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, fled the country. Two weeks later, Khomeini returned to take over the country. When asked by reporters on his flight how he felt about coming home to his native land, Khomeini said that he “felt nothing,” indicating that the spread of Islam was what mattered to him, not the borders of his birthplace.
That was on February 1.
On February 16, Falk published an op-ed in The New York Times called “Trusting Khomeini.” In the piece, Falk waxed poetic about the Muslim cleric, disabusing readers of the notion that the oft-regarded “mystery man” was someone to be feared either by Iranians or by the West. “The depiction of him as fanatical, reactionary, and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false.”
Falk went on to laud the progressive and benevolent nature of Shiite Islam. “What is distinctive, perhaps, about this religious orientation,” he wrote, “is its concern with resisting oppression and promoting social justice.”
He concluded that, “Having created a new model of popular revolution based, for the most part, on non-violent tactics, Iran may provide us with a desperately needed model of humane governance for a third world country.”
Well, we saw what the Islamic Republic of Iran’s “humane governance” looked like. We watched as Khomeini backed the “students” — among them Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — who took over the U.S. Embassy and held dozens of its staff hostage for 444 days. And we witnessed President Carter trying to negotiate their release by “understanding the grievances” of the Iranian regime.
Sound familiar?
Indeed, no matter what the circumstances, some things, as some people, never change. Falk is one such person. That neither he nor his false prophecies have been totally discredited by any and all American and international bodies connected with education or human rights is what beggars belief — not Falk’s predictable blog posts.
Ruthie Blum is the author of “To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the ‘Arab Spring.’”
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http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/feds-further-investigating-role-bombers-wife_719130.html
Feds Further Investigating Role of Bomber’s Wife
Katherine Russell Tsarnaeva notified husband that the FBI had released his picture.
Stephen F. Hayes
Law enforcement officials are carefully reexamining any possible role that Katherine Russell Tsarnaeva, the wife of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, played in the Boston Marathon bombings on April 15, according to three federal officials with knowledge of the investigation. The intense scrutiny comes as a result of information provided by Dzokhar Tsarnaev in his on-again, off-again interrogation by FBI officials before he was read his rights by a federal magistrate.
According to those officials, Dzokhar Tsarnaev told interrogators that the information that set in motion the series of events leading to Tamerlan’s death and Dzokhar’s apprehension came in a phone call from Katherine Russell Tsarnaeva to her husband. “She notified him and there certainly didn’t seem to be any notion of surprise – just a report that ‘you’re being watched,’” said one official with knowledge of the investigation. Tsarnaev had seen the photographs and videos distributed by the FBI on television and called her husband to give him a heads up.
After receiving that phone call, authorities believe, Tamerlan decided he could not continue to hide from law enforcement and triggered the brothers’ bizarre flight from authorities – a wild chase that included the murder of an MIT police officer, a convenience-store robbery, a carjacking, shootouts with police officers, the death of Tamerlan and the capture of Dzokhar.
An attorney for Katherine Russell Tsarnaeva said earlier this week that her client knew nothing about her husband’s plans and wanted to help authorities conducting the investigation. “She is doing everything she can to assist with the investigation,” said Amato DeLuca, her attorney, in a statement. “The report of involvement by her husband and brother-in-law came as an absolute shock to them all.”
Tsarnaeva, 24, grew up in Rhode Island and converted to Islam after meeting Tamerlan Tsarnaev. She has been staying with her parents in Rhode Island.
http://sarahhonig.com/2013/04/26/another-tack-the-lesson-of-april-26/
It didn’t seem that way, but this day – April 26 – exactly 65 years ago was pivotal in yet-to-be-born Israel’s history. Its little-celebrated and hardly remembered events remain central for debunking the lies about the circumstances of the Jewish state’s inception. Its trials and tribulations tell a unique story of individual courage and defiant daring quite literally against all odds.
Yet shamefully too few – even among us – are at all aware of it. As time goes by, the numbers only dwindle.
April 26, 1948 was shaping up to be quite a dismal day. The single exception was the fact that on that day the IZL (Irgun Zvai Leumi) and the large Labor-led Hagana signed a cooperation agreement whereby the Irgun undertook to carry out only missions beforehand authorized by the Hagana, as well as to assume whatever operational roles the Hagana would assign it.
The evening of April 26 was particularly wretched for Menachem Begin. In his role as IZL commander he had decided to halt the Irgun’s attack on Jaffa’s Manshiyeh quarter, then already in its second ill-fated day.
Mounting casualties and bleak assessments had outweighed the Hagana’s green light to continue the offensive. A grim Begin explained to his men:
“Were it not for the British tanks and armored vehicles, we could have achieved our objectives. But the tanks are there, and we cannot ignore their presence… We will hold on to the line we had reached and leave a strong advance guard there for days to come. The other units will be withdrawn… This is no failure. The combined power of the enemy is many times greater than ours… I don’t think we should continue bashing our heads against strongholds reinforced by British tanks.”
http://www.jewishpress.com/news/is-fear-of-blaming-islam-greater-than-a-need-to-fight-terrorism/2013/04/25/0/ “The lights are going out in the enlightenment” Professor Barry Rubin told The Jewish Press in an interview this week. “Reporters have no interest in reporting accurately, professors have no interest in speaking accurately, and the policy makers have no interest in promulgating responsible policy.” Rubin was talking about the reluctance to name Islam […]
http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/phillips/130426 Abe Foxman, the ADL’s longtime National Director, seemed to want to do everything possible to direct attention away from the possibility that the Boston Marathon attack was the work of Islamic terrorists when he issued his April 15 statement on the attacks. Foxman stated: “This apparent terrorist attack comes during a week when […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/if-only-the-boston-bomber-had-been-a-white-american?f=puball One of the most unpleasant things, in the aftermath of terrorist attack, is the way commentators want the perpetrator to fit a particular profile. The title of this piece tells you pretty much all you need to know: ‘Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American‘. It’s a silly article, whose author probably now […]
