Displaying posts published in

September 2013

ROGER KIMBALL: THE SINGLE BEST ARTICLE ON SYRIA

http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2013/09/07/the-single-best-article-i-have-read-on-syria/?print=1

Where by “Syria” I mean our response to the civil war in Syria, i.e., efforts by terrorist thugs (the “rebels,” freedom fighters, etc.) to topple an establishment thug (the rogue ophthalmologist, B. al-Assad). That article is Andy McCarthy’s “Drawing an Al-Qaeda Red Line” [1] over at NRO. What’s so good about it? Several things.

Item: Andy calls attention to the enormous hypocrisy on the part of the Obama administration about Assad.

Or maybe it’s not “hypocrisy,” but bumbling inconsistently, which when translated to the stage of world diplomacy equals stunning incompetence. Remember, this is an administration that just a few short years ago

– reopened diplomatic ties with Syria.

– Hillary Clinton called Assad a “reformer” (no where near as dangerous as that hapless chap who made the anti-Muslim internet video and who was sent to federal prison for . . . for what? Jay-walking? Failing to abate a smoking chimney? Violating the terms of his parole? Something that for people who do not attract the ire of the president merits a stern talking-to?)

– John “reporting for duty” Kerry and his wife were photographed having an intimate dinner with Dr. & Mrs. Assad, the “wildly democratic” couple Vogue celebrated in a puff piece just a couple of years ago.

It was all part of Obama’s love-thy-Muslim-brother initiative. Bang! Burka Burka Mohammed Jihad blows up another church, mows down 13 fellow soldiers, wounding another 30, at a Texas army base, detonates homemade IEDs at a road race in Boston, murders a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans at a U.S. diplomatic mission in some African hellhole, etcetera, very much etcetera. Who’s to blame? “Violent extremists,” the president’s favorite bad guys. Not “Muslim violent extremists,” just your ordinary, run-of-the-mill extremist — please let it be a white, male, Christian, gun-toting, tea-party extremist.

Bottom line: what’s happening in Syria is the latest assault — the salt in the fields, as it were — on the establishment narrative about the Muslim world.

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL: MICHAEL ORDMAN

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com
http://blogs.jpost.com/users/just-look-us-now

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

The first robotic brain surgery. Dr. Nizam Razack successfully performed the world’s first deep brain stimulation (DBS) using Renaissance robotic guidance system from Israel’s Mazor Robotics, at Celebration Health Hospital in Orlando, Florida.
http://www.globes.co.il/serveen/globes/docview.asp?did=1000877241&fid=1725

Israeli doctors use robots to treat children. For the first time in Israel, doctors at Rambam hospital used surgical robots to perform advanced pediatric surgery. Using the Rambam’s da Vinci robot they corrected congenital defects on three Israeli children. Surgeons from Boston Medical Center trained the Israeli doctors.
http://www.rambam.org.il/Home+Page/About+Us/News+and+Events/News+2013/Israeli+First+Pediatric+Robotic+Surgery.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-6vi3PgbfI

Multiple studies produces research breakthrough. Dr. Ayelet Erez studied at the Technion, Sheba Medical Center, Tel Aviv University, Baylor College Texas and now Weizmann. Her wide experience led her to discover the link between the enzyme ASL and Nitrous Oxide, which is essential for regulating blood pressure.
http://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/where-lab-and-clinic-meet#.UiTek3-868A

Skin defect can trigger allergies. Scientists at Tel Aviv and Northwestern Universities have discovered that mutations in the molecule desmoglein 1 in skin cells can disrupt the immune response and lead to allergic reactions.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-08/nu-scd082613.php

Exciting new cancer research. Ariel Munitz of Tel Aviv University is researching a type of white blood cell called macrophages. Exposed to a certain stimulus and they’ll promote healing of cancer and fibrosis. But exposed to a different stimulus and they actually make the condition worse. You can see where this is heading.
http://israel21c.org/health/new-pathway-to-treat-colorectal-cancer-pulmonary-fibrosis/

AMB. (RET.) YORAM ETTINGER: ISRAEL’S HIGH TECH: A UNIQUE CONTRIBUTION TO THE U.S. ECONOMY

http://send.hadavars.com/index.php?action=message&l=2096&c=21241&m=19723&s=a317a26441993bdd8f740ee9a6c71bce 1. The San Francisco and NY-based FTV Capital invested $40MN in Israel’s Credorax, joining prior investors such as Blumberg Capital and Japan’s Mobile Internet Capital.  Blumberg Capital invested $3MN in Israel’s FeeX (Globes, August 29, 2013). 2.  According to Israel’s Technion Ne’eman Institute, IBM’s research and development centers in Israel registered 463 patents between […]

MORE LUNACY: TO ENSURE THAT EVERY CHILD WINS ONTARIO ATHLETIC ASSOCIATION REMOVES BALL FROM SOCCER

http://www.cbc.ca/thisisthat/blog/2013/09/03/to-ensure-every-child-wins-ontario-athletic-association-removes-ball-from-soccer/index.html

With the growing concern over the effects of competition in youth sports programs this summer, many Canadian soccer associations eliminated the concept of keeping score. The Soccer Association of Midlake, Ontario, however, has taken this idea one step further, and have completely removed the ball from all youth soccer games and practices.

According to Association spokesperson, Helen Dabney-Coyle, “By removing the ball, it’s absolutely impossible to say ‘this team won’ and ‘this team lost’ or ‘this child is better at soccer than that child.'”

“We want our children to grow up learning that sport is not about competition, rather it’s about using your imagination. If you imagine you’re good at soccer, then, you are.”

This summer Peter Oldring spent time with the Midlake Thundercats, an under 11 boys and girls team, and put together this radio documentary.

Little Rock School District Will Now Make Teachers Wear Underwear : Eric Owens (Education Editor)

MY E-PAL FRIEND PETER K…FOUND THIS DOOZIE….

http://dailycaller.com/2013/09/06/little-rock-school-district-will-now-make-teachers-wear-underwear/

The school district in Little Rock, Ark. has announced plans for a dress code that will require teachers to wear underwear. Every single day. Female teachers will have to wear bras, too.

An Aug. 29 letter from the Little Rock School District’s Office of the Superintendent to all employees explains that the dress code will officially go into effect in the fall of 2014.

“Foundational garments shall be worn and not visible with respect to color, style, and/or fabric,” the letter reads. “No see-through or sheer clothing shall be allowed, and no skin shall be visible between pants/trousers, skirts, and shirts/blouses at any time.”

T-shirts, patches and other clothing containing slogans for beer, alcohol, drugs, gangs or sex will also be prohibited. Other verboten garments will include cut-off jeans with ragged edges, cut-out dresses and spaghetti-straps if teachers aren’t wearing at least two layers.

Flip-flops will be banned. “Tattoos must be covered if at all possible.” No jogging suits, either (though gym and dance teachers do get a pass on this one).

TONY ABBOT, CONSERVATIVE,FORMER CATHOLIC SEMINARIAN AND RHODES SCHOLAR WINS ELECTION IN AUSTRALIA

“There’s been a bit of wobbling under the current government but I would expect our standard rock-solid friendship with Israel to resume should the coalition win the election,” he said. ”I’m a friend of Israel — always have been, always will be.”

http://www.timesofisrael.com/conservative-pro-israel-candidate-wins-aussie-election/

CANBERRA, Australia — Australia’s conservative opposition swept to power Saturday, ending six years of Labor Party rule and winning over a disenchanted public by promising to end a hated tax on carbon emissions, boost a flagging economy and bring about political stability after years of Labor infighting.

“I know that Labor hearts are heavy across the nation tonight, and as your prime minister and as your parliamentary leader of the great Australian Labor Party, I accept responsibility,” Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said in a speech to supporters, after calling opposition leader Tony Abbott to concede defeat. “I gave it my all, but it was not enough for us to win.”

A victory for the conservative Liberal Party-led coalition comes despite the relative unpopularity of Abbott, a 55-year-old former Roman Catholic seminarian and Rhodes scholar who has struggled to connect with women voters and was once dubbed “unelectable” by opponents and even some supporters.

The Liberal Party’s election victory may signal a strengthening of ties between Canberra and Jerusalem. Abbot told reporters last month that the last two Labor governments had not maintained Australia’s strong relationship with the Jewish state, something he said he aimed to fix, according to the Australian Associated Press.

“There’s been a bit of wobbling under the current government but I would expect our standard rock-solid friendship with Israel to resume should the coalition win the election,” he said. ”I’m a friend of Israel — always have been, always will be.”

But voters were largely fed up with Labor and Rudd, after a years-long power struggle between him and his former deputy, Julia Gillard. Gillard, who became the nation’s first female prime minister after ousting Rudd in a party vote in 2010, ended up losing her job to Rudd three years later in a similar internal party coup.

The drama, combined with Labor reneging on an election promise by imposing a deeply unpopular tax on the nation’s biggest carbon polluters, proved deadly for Labor’s re-election chances.

Public Opinion and the Syria Strike By Stanley Kurtz

http://nationalreview.com/node/357887/print Congressional phone lines are melting from calls opposing a Syrian intervention, with margins running well over 10 to 1 against. Yet for all the polling and headcounts, we still haven’t truly admitted American public opinion into our strategic calculations on Syria. That is a serious mistake. Instead of simply considering how a yes or […]

Life and Death Memories By Jerold S. Auerbach ****

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2013/09/life_and_death_memories.html There is irrefutable evidence that the government of Syria has used chemical weapons to murder its own citizens. The wrapped corpses of children provide grisly testimony that President Bashar al-Assad, following the horrific precedent set by his father, will rank high among the most odious political murderers of the past century. Such photographs trigger […]

GERMANY’S “GREEN ENERGY” DISASTER: DANIEL MITCHELL

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4116/must_read_article_about_germany_s_green_energy_disaster Even though green-energy programmes are a disgusting boondoggle, American taxpayers and consumers should be thankful they’re not in Germany I’ve written before that Obama’s Solyndra-style handouts have been a grotesque waste of tax dollars. I’ve argued that they destroy jobs rather than create jobs. I’ve gone on TV to explain why government intervention in energy creates a cesspool […]

DIANA WEST: THE REBUTTAL- PART ONE *****

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/09/05/The-Rebuttal-Part-One

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Calumnious charges against my new book, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character (St. Martin’s Press), originated in a review that appeared at FrontPage Magazine on August 7, 2013. The 7,000-word review by Ronald Radosh was titled “McCarthy on Steroids” (FrontPage editor David Horowitz wrote the title). The Radosh review is referenced as source material for a series of attack-pieces that followed at FrontPage Magazine, Pajamas Media, The American Thinker, National Review, and elsewhere.

In one of three follow-up pieces Radosh published, he described the original review as a “take-down.” David Horowitz, in one of two pieces written about American Betrayal, wrote, “She should not have written this book.”

Who says that and why?

I have since come to understand the “take-down” of my book and the ad hominem attacks on my person in terms of a scorched earth policy to preserve and protect the conventional narrative as promulgated by mainstream academia.

“But FrontPage is a conservative site,” I can hear people say.

This stopped me, too, at first. Then I realized that the books Radosh cites in his “take-down”–not to debate my ideas, but to impugn them–are written by academics from Yale, Harvard, and Stanford. That’s liberal academia. Another source Radosh draws heavily from is a British historian and BBC documentary-maker whose works appear on PBS. More conventional (read: liberal) consensus.

My book threatens that consensus with arguments that are densely and meticulously documented. My sources are listed in 944 endnotes that draw from a bibliography that conventional historians consistently ignore. Specifically, I draw from the vast bibliography of Soviet espionage and infiltration that conventional historians ignore when writing World War II and even Cold War history. Indeed, the books Radosh cites omit or barely reference the same bibliography American Betrayal draws upon.

The Radosh review, then, is a defense of a conventional, tightly blinkered historiography – “the court histories that continue to obscure key facts about our backstage war with Moscow,” as M. Stanton Evans wrote in his endorsement of American Betrayal. But Radosh’s is in no way not a fair defense. It is not a fair debate. Instead, the Radosh review misrepresents my work by continually attacking my credibility.

For example, Radosh calls American Betrayal “yellow journalism conspiracy theories,” all the while failing to inform readers about my book’s copious source material, which in itself is a rebuke to such charges. Such is the Radosh modus operandi, however, in defense of the conventional narrative. Indeed, a reader of the Radosh “take-down” is led to believe I made the whole thing up due to my “conspiratorial mindset.” This is a gross and destructive calumny.

But it is only the first. That makes what follows anything but a rejoinder in a traditional battle of ideas. It is instead a detailed defense set forth to disprove the smears and expose the fabrications and distortions that went into the 7,000-word “take-down” of American Betrayal.

The rebuttal begins.

PREFACE

I will open with an email from FrontPage Magazine editor David Horowitz. I received this message after I declined FrontPage’s invitation to reply at FrontPage to the August 7 Radosh review of American Betrayal. Most readers don’t realize that the Radosh review is FrontPage’s second review of my book. The first, a positive review by FrontPage writer Mark Tapson, was removed from the website by Horowitz on July 8. I declined FrontPage’s invitation to reply to the Radosh review on the principle that eliminating one opinion, as Horowitz did, and replacing it with a more “correct” opinion is no way to conduct a debate. I had and have no intention of legitimizing such an uncivil action, which, among other things, makes a mockery of FrontPage’s commitment to free speech.

David Horowitz has, to date, written two pieces attacking me and American Betrayal. In the first, he cited the first reviewer’s alleged lack of expertise as the reason for his decision to take down the positive review. In the second, Horowitz wrote: “She should not have written this book.” As an example of the first reviewer’s inexpertise, Horowitz wrote the reviewer “readily conceded he was not familiar with the sources and could not properly assess such crucial matters as her claim that Soviet agents had gotten the United States to ship fissionable uranium to Stalin via Lend-Lease.”

As an aside, the word “fissionable” doesn’t appear in American Betrayal’s discussions of uranium. I mention this to flag a consistent pattern of misrepresentation or distortion that is evident in the Radosh review and follow-up pieces in which critics overstate a fact as stated in American Betrayal and criticize their own exaggeration.

That said, uranium shipments did indeed go to Stalin during World War II under the Roosevelt administration’s Lend-Lease program. Among my sources for this shocking fact is one source “familiar” to all: the United States Congress. I cite “Hearings on the Transfer of Atomic Material to the Soviet Union During World War II.” As such, this is quite easy to “properly assess” – if one has read my book.

This is just one of dozens of false claims about American Betrayal that Radosh, Horowitz, and the echo chamber they triggered have made, some even written by people who admitted they haven’t read it. The baseless sloganeering against me now includes such falsehoods as: I called Eisenhower a Communist (false); I claimed the FDR administration was “run” by Soviet agents (false); I portrayed Churchill as a Soviet dupe (false); I argued for an “entente with Hitler’s army against Stalin” (false).

If there is a beginning to the lies, gross distortions, and outright fabrications that I now must sort through, it is the editors’ note posted (in full knowledge of its gross distortion of the facts) over the Radosh review at FrontPage:

Editors’ note: FrontPage offered Diana West equal space to reply to Professor Radosh’s points below. She refused.

I refused to reply only at FrontPage–and the editors know that I refused to reply only at FrontPage. In other words, they decided to publish a gross distortion of the truth to encourage readers of the Radosh review to believe I am either incapable or uninterested in responding to the charges therein.

Not true.

Here is the Horowitz email.

Dear Diana,

Our decision to remove the review of American Betrayal was not because it offered an incorrect opinion that we wanted to suppress. The review was removed because the reviewer was as incompetent to provide an informed assessment of your book as you were to write it.

David

My task is to disprove this intemperate and, worse, baseless charge against my competence in handling evidence and evaluating it. This is the basis of the Radosh-Horowitz critique and, therefore, the basis of the multiple copy-cat critiques that have been written since, even by people who openly admitted they had not read my book. (I repeat this fact because it is incredible to me.) This competence issue makes my rebuttal about more than score-keeping, or tit-for-tat. These widely repeated attacks on me and my book undermine my integrity as a writer, and thus my livelihood.

My challenge to readers: Determine for yourselves who is “incompetent.”