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August 2013

Guest Column: Bombing Into Unintended Consequences in Syria by Abigail R. Esman

http://www.investigativeproject.org/4145/guest-column-bombing-into-unintended-consequences In the Netherlands these days, politicians discuss revoking the passports of citizens who join the opposition to Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria. In Belgium, the government threatens to revoke benefits for Belgian nationals who do the same. And in America, the New York Times reported only a month ago on the growing threat to […]

DIANA WEST RESPONDS: “WHEN SHOULD A BOOK NOT BE WRITTEN”

http://gatesofvienna.net/2013/08/when-should-a-book-not-be-written/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyiHvAO4I_s

“A perversion of logic as much as a loss of courage”

Diana West spoke last night as a guest of Ahavath Torah Congregation in Stoughton, Massachusetts. Her topic was the continuing controversy over her book, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character.

In the following clip you’ll hear Ms. West point out the manifest falsehoods that have been circulated about American Betrayal. They seem to represent an attempted “takedown” of her book, a deliberate assault intended to destroy her professional standing as a writer.

The author also explains how she fell into the research that eventually resulted in the book. She began by investigating an entirely different topic, the penetration of the United States government by agents of the Muslim Brotherhood, and followed the trail of evidence back to Communist penetration in the 1930s and 1940s. The parallels between the two cases are striking — each involves the subversion of our government by a totalitarian ideology that seeks the overthrow of our constitutional republic.

Many thanks to The United West for recording the event, and to Vlad Tepes for editing this excerpt:

THE STUNNING MYOPIA OF DAVID HARRIS: MARTIN SHERMAN ****

It is becoming increasingly difficult to respond with any degree of courteous civility to the advocates of the so-called “two-state-solution” (TSS).

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Into-The-Fray-David-Harriss-stunning-shortsightedness-324726

Minister Naftali Bennett’s remarks, rejecting outright the vision of two states for two peoples, are stunningly shortsighted

– David Harris, American Jewish Committee executive director, June 17, 2013

Since we cannot defeat Israel in war, we do this in stages. We take any and every territory that we can of Palestine, and establish a sovereignty there, and we use it as a springboard to take more. When the time comes, we can get the Arab nations to join us for the final blow against Israel

– Yasser Arafat, Jordanian TV, September 13, 1993 (the day he signed the Oslo Accords on the White House Lawn)

The idea of a two-state solution should be dead, today, because unfortunately a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria would bring about Israel’s demise

– Yuval Steinitz, The Jerusalem Post, September 14, 2008

It is becoming increasingly difficult to respond with any degree of courteous civility to the advocates of the socalled “two-state-solution” (TSS). Maintaining the shabby pretense is simply proving too perilous. The time has come to dispense with the false façade of social decorum and to call a spade, a spade, to deem the moronic, “moronic” and the myopic, “myopic.”

Dangerous, delusional dogma

This applies equally to longstanding supporters of this dangerous delusion, who resolutely refuse to acknowledge error – despite the manifest misery and mayhem its misguided pursuit has wrought; and to recent neophytes, who have inexplicably, and inexcusably, embraced this patently preposterous policy proposal – despite their past opposition to it being unequivocally vindicated.

Likewise, it applies to senior Israeli policy-makers, who have shown neither the necessary intellectual depth nor daring to formulate a cogent counterparadigm, and thus have been coerced into endorsing this disproven dogma; and to leaders of allegedly pro-Zionist organizations in the Diaspora – principally the US – who, whether for reasons of political naiveté, or social nicety, have perversely embraced the establishment of an illiberal Muslim tyranny as the litmus test of refined liberalism.

MY SAY: MUSIC TO DEFY THE SAVAGE BEAST….SEE THIS MOVIE

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/orchestra-of-exiles/
Orchestra of Exiles is the suspenseful chronicle of how one man helped save Europe’s premier Jewish musicians from obliteration by the Nazis during World War II. In three years, Bronislaw Huberman transformed from a world renowned violinist to a humanitarian racing against time. With commentary by Itzhak Perlman, Zubin Mehta, Pinchas Zukerman, Joshua Bell and others.

But it is so much more. It chronicles Huberman’s dream of creating the Palestine National Orchestra with Jewish musicians from the best orchestras of Europe- Germany, Poland, Hungary- who came to Israel when Ben Yehuda Street in Tel Aviv was not even paved. Toscanini, the most famous conductor in the world snubbed the Nazis and conducted the first performance in 1936. William Steinberg who became one of America’s top conductors had rehearsed the audience in makeshift conditions. Leonard Bernstein played the piano and conducted after the 1948 War when David Ben Gurion renamed it the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra- today one of the leading orchestras in the world.

This is a wonderful movie presented by PBS in April 2013 during their fund raising season (natch!)…..

MARK STEYN: Perfunctory And Ineffectual War-Making in Syria is Worse Than Nothing.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/357287/accidental-war-mark-steyn

I see the Obama “reset” is going so swimmingly that the president is now threatening to go to war against a dictator who gassed his own people. Don’t worry, this isn’t anything like the dictator who gassed his own people that the discredited warmonger Bush spent 2002 and early 2003 staggering ever more punchily around the country inveighing against. The 2003 dictator who gassed his own people was the leader of the Baath Party of Iraq. The 2013 dictator who gassed his own people is the leader of the Baath Party of Syria. Whole other ball of wax. The administration’s ingenious plan is to lose this war in far less time than we usually take. In the unimprovable formulation of an unnamed official speaking to the Los Angeles Times, the White House is carefully calibrating a military action “just muscular enough not to get mocked.”

That would make a great caption for a Vanity Fair photo shoot of Obama gamboling in the surf at Martha’s Vineyard, but as a military strategy it’s not exactly Alexander the Great or the Duke of Wellington. And it’s trickier than it sounds: I’m sure Miley’s choreographer assured her she was “just muscular enough not to get mocked,” and one wouldn’t want to see the United States reduced to twerking arrhythmically to no avail in front of an unimpressed Bashar Assad’s Robin Thicke. Okay, okay, that metaphor’s as thinly stretched as Miley’s talent, so what does unmockable musculature boil down to? From the New York Times: “A wide range of officials characterize the action under consideration as ‘limited,’ perhaps lasting no more than a day or two.”

Yeah, I know, that’s what Edward III said about the Hundred Years’ War. But Obama seems to mean it:

CLAUDIA ROSETT: SO MUCH FOR THE UN CHARADE IN SYRIA

http://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/so-much-for-the-un-charade-in-syria/ If there’s one favor Russia and China have done for us all lately, it’s been to reduce the United Nations to glaring irrelevance in the Syria conflict. Due to these two, there has been no Security Council resolution proposing to deal with Syria, and it looks like there won’t be. Repeated emergency meetings and […]

DANIEL GREENFIELD: THE WEEK THAT WAS

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ FOR IT AND AGAINST IT Ten years ago, James Clapper, now the Director of National Intelligence, said he was “unquestionably sure” that Saddam’s WMDs had been moved out of Iraq. Top Iraqi generals stated that the WMDs had gone to Syria. But all that fell on deaf ears. John Kerry’s senate career began with […]

DIANA WEST: FREE THE LEAVENWORTH TEN PLUS

“The question remains: What kind of government punishes men who step up to fight in the hellholes of the world where our leaders believe, at least until they don’t, that they see America’s “vital interests”? In the blink of a president’s eye, armies are redirected, men are redeployed, but our prisoners of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars remain behind bars. In the blink of an eye, these soldiers made the life-or-death determination that may have saved their lives, but also lost them their liberty.”

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2640/Free-the-Leavenworth-Ten-Plus.aspx

Does any American believe that Army 1st Lt. Clint Lorance (above), 28, should remain in a military prison for the next 20 years for “murder” after giving a legitimate order to his soldiers to fire at three Afghan men on motorcycles, killing two in the process?

What circumstances in those few seconds of on-the-ground command decision-making – during Lorance’s second patrol in Afghanistan – could possibly compel the Army to rob Lorance of his freedom until he is 48 years old?

I have been reading up on Lorance’s case, and I find none. I am not a military prosecutor (thank goodness), but I see nothing in accounts of the incident to warrant a sentence of two decades – unless, that is, Lorance’s lawyer, retired Lt. Col. Guy Womack, is correct. Following Lorance’s sentencing at Ft. Bragg, N.C., on Aug. 1, Womack said: “The Army is using him as a scapegoat so they can tell the Afghan government the person who killed the civilians is being punished.”

Read it and weep – and get sick.

Then, I hope, get angry – and let your congressman know it.

NEUROTROPE: EXCEPTIONAL PROMISE IN THE DIAGNOSIS AND TREATMENT OF EARLY STAGE ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE ****

MY DEAR FRIEND AND E-PAL DR. JOHN ABELES IS FOUNDER AND CHAIRMAN OF NEUROTROPE, INC. RSK

www.neurotropebioscience.com

Neurotrope BioScience is collaborating with the Blanchette Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute (BRNI) to advance novel diagnostic and therapeutic technologies developed at BRNI that have shown exceptional promise in both preclinical and clinical models of Alzheimer’s Disease. The commercial introduction of a new, non-invasive diagnostic test for early stage Alzheimer’s Disease is the first milestone this collaboration seeks to achieve. Following this, the BRNI-Neurotrope BioScience team plans on initiating several Phase 2 clinical trials in this disease with novel drug prototypes discovered at BRNI.

The research team at BRNI has pioneered a new approach to treat neurodegenerative disease through the activation of protein kinase C-epsilon (PKCε). While the inhibition of PKC has previously been explored in clinical studies for the treatment of cancer, BRNI has discovered the selective activation of this enzyme is effective in treating memory and cognition disorders stemming from neurodegenerative disease. This approach exploits a complex pathway of biochemical events in the neuron that seem to be centrally orchestrated by PKCε. The changes mediated by PKCε effectively converge in reversing the neuronal damage and loss central to the pathogenic process in Alzheimer’s Disease.

NORTH KOREA’S CLOSE MILITARY TIES TO SYRIA INCLUDE WEAPONS TRANSFERS

http://www.east-asia-intel.com/eai/2013/08_28/2.asp North Korea’s failed attempt to export gas masks and weapons to Syria presumably for use in the Middle East nation’s chemical weapons program highlights ongoing close military ties between the two nations despite U.N. sanctions. Pyongyang tried to export gas masks and other weapons to Syria, but the shipment was intercepted by Turkey, according […]