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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324348504578607680825610270.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond

If this were a TV drama, it would be ‘The X-Files’ in its 46th season.

Sufian Abu Zaida is a well-known Palestinian nationalist who worked closely with Yasser Arafat and sits on the Fatah Revolutionary Council, the ostensible legislative branch of the Palestinian Authority’s ostensible ruling party. Though he spent years in Israeli prison on terrorism charges, he has long been considered a relative moderate for his participation in various peace initiatives.

These days Mr. Abu Zaida is an unhappy camper, but not because of the Israelis.

“Honestly, no one ever dreamt we would reach this situation of concentration of authorities and senior positions in the hands of one person,” he wrote about Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in a recent op-ed published on several Palestinian websites.

“The President today is the President of everything that has to do with the Palestinian people and the Palestinian cause. He is the president of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the State of Palestine and the Palestinian Authority. He is the president of the Fatah movement and general leader of the [security] Forces. And as the legislative council is now suspended, he issues laws and has practically replaced the council.”

Mr. Abu Zaida goes on to complain of the pervasive toadyism among Palestinian ministers and officials, their “impotence and fear” in the face of Mr. Abbas’s every decision and appointment. “One of the main reasons that made President Abbas a natural candidate after President Arafat passed away is that many had thought Abbas’s management would be different than Arafat’s,” he notes. Yet now the president “holds authorities that Arafat in all his greatness and symbolic importance didn’t hold.”

Oh, well: Just another aging strongman in another squalid

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323740804578601472261953366.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

More people have left the workforce than got a new job during the recovery—by a factor of nearly three.

recent months, Americans have heard reports out of Washington and in the media that the economy is looking up—that recovery from the Great Recession is gathering steam. If only it were true. The longest and worst recession since the end of World War II has been marked by the weakest recovery from any U.S. recession in that same period.

The jobless nature of the recovery is particularly unsettling. In June, the government’s Household Survey reported that since the start of the year, the number of people with jobs increased by 753,000—but there are jobs and then there are “jobs.” No fewer than 557,000 of these positions were only part-time. The survey also reported that in June full-time jobs declined by 240,000, while part-time jobs soared by 360,000 and have now reached an all-time high of 28,059,000—three million more part-time positions than when the recession began at the end of 2007.

That’s just for starters. The survey includes part-time workers who want full-time work but can’t get it, as well as those who want to work but have stopped looking. That puts the real unemployment rate for June at 14.3%, up from 13.8% in May.

The 7.6% unemployment figure so common in headlines these days is utterly misleading. An estimated 22 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed; they are virtually invisible and mostly excluded from unemployment calculations that garner headlines.

http://www.newmediajournal.us/ As illustrated by today’s mainstream media, there is a very fine line between news reporting and the act of propagandizing. The aware understand that news reporting consists of the sometimes painful process of conveying the “who, what, where, when, why and how” of a story, while at the very same time expunging the reporter’s […]

NYC’s De Blasio Threatens to Pull JFK Airport Slot From Saudi Arabian Airlines for Blocking Israelis From Flights NYC’s De Blasio Threatens to Pull JFK Airport Slot From Saudi Arabian Airlines for Blocking Israelis From Flights Saudi Arabian Airlines discriminates against Israeli nationals attempting to fly the airline out of New York’s John F. Kennedy […]

http://www.thejerusalemconnection.us/blog/2013/07/15/obamas-kindness-to-the-cruel.html There is an ancient Talmudic saying best summarized as: “Those who are kind to the cruel in the end will be cruel to the kind.” We first saw this warning vividly and sorrowfully cast aside at the Summit of All Americas as President Obama, during his first term in office, smiled and warmly embraced […]

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The prosecutors of George Zimmerman need a refresher course in criminal law. If you’re a prosecutor and you believe you are putting an evil-doer away, first you have to convict him. This means proving he’s an evil-doer by proving who did the evil act.

That’s not always easy, as we saw last week in Florida. Even an assistant professor of criminal law at the Bald Knob University of Law, Floral Arranging and Mortuary Science could have told the Zimmerman prosecutors there are no slam dunks in murder trials. Once a case goes to a jury of independent minds with nothing on those minds but the evidence before them, all bets are off. Juries duly instructed can do anything they please with the evidence, and the wonder and beauty of the system is that jurors with so much license invariably take their responsibilities very, very seriously. They’re determined to do the right thing by the law.

Jude M. Faccidomo, a former president of the Florida Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, tells the Miami Herald that he thinks the Zimmerman jury clearly believed the right to self-defense applied in this case. “Especially when cases are so gray, like this one was, self-defense really resonates because people can associate with being afraid.” This is what laymen have concluded, too.
O.J. Simpson (shown in 1990)

Lawyers across the land, with a criminal practice or not, will study this one for a long time. Why was the six-person jury – its members’ identities still kept secret – not more racially diverse? Florida is a surviving melting pot, with newly minted citizens from dozens of nations to choose juries from, and an all-white, all-black or all-Hispanic jury is an anomaly in the counties of central and south Florida. Would one or two black jurors have made a difference in the Zimmerman verdict? Why did the state accept a jury that was all white save one, thought to be Hispanic? Why the all-female panel? Would defense lawyers think one or two men on the jury might make them more confident of a favorable verdict?

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The US is Iran’s top target. Economic sanctions are not an effective sanction. A military preemption with no boots on the ground is the solution.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3850/america-joins-jihad Instead of presenting a firm defense of American principles based on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the entire U.S. national security leadership simply caved in to this attempt to suborn the government. The FBI submissively complied with these jihadist demands, purging its anti-terrorist curriculum of hundreds of pages that an undisclosed group […]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3848/individual-rights-vs-gun When, as Arabs, we see how Western society agonizes over everything concerning the legal system and the rights of the individual, we can only conclude that democracy is a recipe for self-destruction, and that the last thing we should do is adopt it. It seems obvious that we should use the West’s lack of […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/steven-plaut/giving-up-the-temple-mount/ The Temple Mount in Jerusalem is the holiest place on earth according to Judaism.  It is where both Biblical Temples stood, whose destruction is commemorated this week with fasting and mourning on the Ninth day of the month of Av according to the religious calendar.  The Western Wall is considered holy only because of […]