http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/sep/30/pruden-a-president-as-clueless-as-ever/ Barack Obama is no Bill Clinton in the pantheon of romancers and boudoir bandits, but he is the president, after all, and his vain search for love in all the wrong places is enough to break a heart of stone. He just can’t believe that Hasan Rouhani, the new president of Iran, is just […]
Steven Emerson on The Sordid World of CAIR — on The Glazov Gang
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/steven-emerson-on-his-face-off-with-jihad-on-the-glazov-gang/print/
This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Steven Emerson, the Executive Director of The Investigative Project on Terrorism.
In this blockbuster episode, he unveiled The Sordid World of CAIR:
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/edward-alexander/anti-zionism-arrives-in-disguise-at-indiana-u/print/
Competition for the most licentious definition of the term “criticism of Israel” conceived by the mind of man has for many years been intense. Given the number of academic scribblers with febrile imaginations who are profoundly troubled by having to share the globe with the state of Israel, this should come as no surprise.
Intifada II, during which Palestinian Arab suicide bombers, pogromists, and lynch mobs slaughtered over a thousand people (most of them Israeli Jews) and wounded thousands more, was euphemistically described (in Judaism Magazine, no less) by a Vassar professor of Jewish Studies as “a critique of Zionism.”
A Panglossian sociologist writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education assured readers that “calls to destroy Israel, or to throw it into the Mediterranean Sea…are not evidence of hatred of Jews,” but merely “reflect a quarrel with the State of Israel.”
When questions were raised in November 2003 about the indecency of Harvard and Columbia honoring and playing host to Oxford poetaster Tom Paulin after he had urged that Jews living in Judea/Samaria “should be shot dead” and announced that he “never believed that Israel had the right to exist at all,” his apologists in Cambridge and Morningside Heights defended his right “to criticize Israeli policy.”
The learned Swedish Chancellor of Justice (Goran Lambertz) in 2006 ruled that repeated calls from the Grand Mosque of Stockholm to “kill the Jews” by dispatching suicide bombers to Israel were not unlawful racial incitement to murder. Rather, ruled this Swedish Solomon, they
should be judged differently and therefore be regarded as permissible because, although highly critical of the Jews, they were used by one side in an ongoing…conflict where calls to arms and insults are part of the everyday climate in the rhetoric that surrounds it.
But Shaul Magid of Indiana University has beaten all these redefiners of “criticism” to mean the advocacy of politicide (for Israel): he is ahead of the pack, and has no second in this race for obfuscation. Here is the official description of a course that this “chaired” professor of Jewish Studies and Religion is at the moment planning to offer in Bloomington. In happier times this great university was called “the Athens of Monroe County”; if Magid, a tribune of “post-Judaism,” makes further headway there, it may be renamed New Chelm:
Jewish Critics of Zionism (3 cr.)
Shaul Magid
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/rich-arrogant-and-stupid/print/
The modern West demonstrates a phenomenon unknown in history––unprecedented wealth, technology, and access to information combined with abject stupidity. Wisdom once known by every village explainer and cracker-barrel crank has been discarded and replaced with phony “sciences” making claims about human nature and behavior that are based on nothing other than false assumptions, political ideology, and wishful thinking. Whether it’s foreign policy, managing the economy, or teaching the young, our leaders institute policies that violate the traditional wisdom accumulated by generations of human experience.
The debacle unfolding in Syria is not a consequence of a failure of complex knowledge known by “experts,” or of mismanagement of abstruse technical diplomatic procedures. It’s a failure to understand human nature as well as illiterates did in the past. Common sense tells us that any negotiation with an adversary depends on a credible threat of serious force. Sometimes violence must be used just to demonstrate a willingness to back up words with deeds and convince skeptics you mean what you say. Likewise a treaty is only as good as the commitment to enforce its provisions with violence. A serial failure to do so, particularly when those failures are accompanied by empty bluster or passive-aggressive diplo-speak, invites more aggression and violations. History is full of examples of this simple truth. The 20’s and 30’s of the last century illustrate aggressor after aggressor brushing aside treaty obligations and the bluster of the League of Nations while pursuing their aggression––Japan in China, Italy in Ethiopia, and of course Germany in the Rhineland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia.
More recently, North Korea, a failed thugocracy surviving only by dint of Chinese life-support, brilliantly exploited the unwillingness of the West to back up its threats with force. Just peruse the timeline of the West’s attempts to stop North Korea’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, and the serial failure of diplomacy unsupported by credible force becomes obvious. Yet despite that glaring example of the wages of ignoring common sense, Obama––hard on his humiliating appeasement of Syria camouflaged by U.N. “inspections”––is now playing diplomatic footsie with Iran’s alleged “moderate” President Hassan Rouhani. This would be the same Rouhani who a few years ago publicly bragged about using diplomatic gabfests to buy time for advancing Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Obama and other foreign policy naïfs think that his threat of an “unbelievably small” cruise-missile fireworks show frightened the Iranian regime––the same terrorist gang with American blood up to its elbows––into this charm offensive. The truth is Obama’s patent willingness to perfume his failure of nerve with “negotiations” convinced the Iranians that he will not use force to stop their nuclear program, and that throwing him a few diplomatic bones might win them a relaxation of sanctions for very little cost.
Why do we do ignore traditional wisdom the way we do? Because we can afford to indulge the internationalist fantasy that war is an anomaly from our uncivilized past, and that all peoples want what we want––peace, leisure, and prosperity––and are eager to avoid conflict with diplomatic words in order to avoid military deeds. Common sense and a knowledge of history show that in reality, many peoples want something else––honor, fidelity to their gods, domination of others––and are willing, if not eager to use violence to achieve these goals.
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/why-terrorists-kill/
Guns don’t kill people. Ideas do. Islam, like Nazism or Communism, is a set of weaponized ideas.
The Westgate attack in Kenya with its accompanying butchery of every man, woman and child in a shopping mall who couldn’t name Mohammed’s mother is being met with baffled mutterings about “senseless violence.”
But there’s nothing senseless about the violence that took place.
Terrorists kill because it’s what they do. Plumbers unclog toilets. Computer companies sell you software. Terrorist organizations kill people.
Al-Shabaab’s real audience wasn’t the Americans watching CNN and trying to make sense of the violence. It was the millionaires and billionaires in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar who can turn any terrorist group from wannabes into RPG toting superstars racing through the desert on last year’s model Toyota pickup trucks with crates full of night vision equipment.
You may think of the news as a collection of tragedies. To the dozens of Al-Qaeda franchises and assorted Islamist terrorist groups; it’s American Idol. The CNN coverage of their attack is their audition on a worldwide reality show that shows off their skills and makes them famous.
Not every terrorist group is lucky enough to have its own Bin Laden; its Saudi sugar daddy with the cash and the cachet to get them the money they need in exchange for being the one to appear on camera and proclaim “Death to America”. And the Jihadists in Afghanistan fighting over Osama at times nearly killed each other over access to their effete money man.
Terrorists kill people “senselessly” because a spectacular terrorist attack gets them noticed. It sets them apart from every other Islamist terrorist group that throws together a name and waves a flag with a bunch of swords on it while vowing to drive out all the infidels. The 12 PM CNN audience may not applaud, but the Al Jazeera audience does. And it’s the one that matters.
Muslim terrorist organizations fight to impose Islamic law. But what does that really mean, aside from the little girls wearing Burkas and the demolished churches?
http://spectator.org/archives/2013/09/30/win-or-go-home Three cheers for the crazies. You know who they are. They’re Republicans in Congress who understand what Brent Bozell said about Obamacare: if you fund it, you own it. These are the same people who led Washington Post columnist David Ignatius to cry crocodile tears for John Boehner because he’s unable to lead them […]
http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/09/30/is-a-house-a-home-in-hebron/
Amid a week of Middle East turbulence, with the roller coaster ride of Syrian disintegration momentarily offset by a telephone conversation between the Iranian and American presidents, the fate of a house in Hebron may seem inconsequential.
But Hebron is no ordinary place. Abraham’s purchase of the Machpelah cave as the burial site for Sarah was the first parcel of land owned by the Jewish people in their promised homeland. The most ancient Jewish city in the world, long antedating Jerusalem as a sacred site for Jews and preceding it as the capital of David’s kingdom, Hebron has a unique place in Jewish history. It has remained a revered holy site, and a place of Jewish habitation, ever since.
One week ago the murder of IDF Sgt. Gal Kobi, shot in the neck by a suspected Palestinian sniper at an army checkpoint near the Machpelah cave, thrust Hebron back into the news. To be sure, the murder of Jews there is hardly novel. In 1929 a wave of Arab rioting, when sixty-seven Jews were brutally slaughtered, decimated the centuries-old Jewish community.
Restored to Jewish habitation by religious Zionist settlers after the Six-Day War, the Hebron community now numbers some seven hundred residents and two hundred yeshiva students. They inhabit the restored Jewish neighborhood adjacent to the Machpelah holy site, which Muslims enclosed inside a mosque and prohibited Jews from entering for seven centuries until 1967.
The murder of Sgt. Kobi revived sorrowful memories of the sniper killing of seven-month-old Shalhevet Pas in the Avraham Avinu quarter of Hebron in 2001. Responding to that tragedy, Hebron Jews reclaimed and inhabited abandoned property purchased for the Jewish community a century earlier – but eventually they were forced out by their own government.
http://www.humanrightsvoices.org/
Poisonous Durban Declaration Gets New Life
The UN “Human Rights” Council has breathed new life into the poisonous anti-Israel Durban Declaration that emanated from the racist ‘ant-racism’ Durban conference back in 2001. Among other things, the resolution just adopted in Geneva:
1. renews the “intergovernmental working group on the effective implementation of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action”
2. pushes the wide dissemination of the 2011 General Assembly resolution reaffirming the Durban Declaration
3. demands the “resuscitation” of the “five independent eminent experts” charged back in 2003 with “follow-up on the implementation of the provisions of the Durban Declaration”
4. directs those experts “to convene a special meeting before 31 December 2013 to…present an update report by the 25th session [March 2013]”
The point of all this? Manufacture ever more meetings to press the implementation of the Durban Declaration. Keep the momentum going until a Durban IV conference can one day be convened. Ensure that the UN pathology connecting Zionism with racism continues to infect the organization and its human rights system.
Obama Hails Security Council Syria Resolution That Rejects His Many Demands
On September 27, 2013 the UN Security Council adopted a resolution on Syria. President Obama hailed the agreement as “a major diplomatic breakthrough.” Here’s what he didn’t tell the American people.
• The resolution does not blame Syria for the August chemical weapons attack – ignoring the repeated impassioned pleas of the President and Secretary Kerry on this very subject. On the contrary, the resolution suggests chemical weapons use is equally a problem of the government and the opposition – referring to “any use of chemical weapons by anyone in the Syrian Arab Republic.”
• The resolution does not sanction the use of force for any Syrian non-compliance. On the contrary, any proposed use of force in the future requires a return to the UN Security Council – meaning Obama and any erstwhile allies have tied their hands to Russian-approved enforcement in the future.
• The deal seriously undercuts the Syrian opposition, by stating that the “only solution to the current crisis” is an “inclusive Syrian-led process” and referring to an international conference which is “fully representative of the Syrian people” – that is, inclusive of the regime of President Assad.
• Contrary to President Obama’s previous insistence that “Assad must go,” the resolution ensures that Assad will stay. It depends on Assad to implement it. In its words “…recognizing the primary responsibility of Syrian government to…”
• The deal uses the catchword of “accountability” for the chemical attack while providing no means of getting there. Suggestions to refer the matter to the International Criminal Court were rejected by Russia.
http://humanrightsvoices.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=779a7657507fa1127185b036a&id=247de2f3ae&e=1b65c1689e
Family members identify dead.
Nigeria Extremists Slaughter College Students Pursuing “Western” Education
“Islamic extremists attacked an agricultural college in the dead of night, gunning down dozens of students as they slept in dormitories and torching classrooms in an ongoing Islamic uprising in northeast Nigeria, the school’s provost said… Molima Idi Mato, provost of the Yobe State College of Agriculture told The Associated Press that as many as 50 students may have been killed in the attack that began at about 1 a.m….Northeastern Nigeria is in a military state of emergency against an Islamic uprising prosecuted by Boko Haram militants who have killed more than 1,700 people since 2010 in their quest for an Islamic state. Boko Haram means Western education is forbidden.”
http://humanrightsvoices.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=779a7657507fa1127185b036a&id=1b022dad00&e=1b65c1689e
Bashar Assad
USA Fails to Get UN Human Rights Council to Name Syria as Guilty of Chemical Weapons Attack
Despite the fact that President Obama continues to champion the UN “Human Rights” Council, on the final day of its recent session, administration diplomats failed to get agreement on blaming Syria for August’s chemical weapons attack. On Friday, September 27, 2013, the Council adopted a resolution on Syria that omitted any finding that Assad was responsible for the attack which left 1,400 civilians dead. A single Palestinian civilian wouldn’t have been a problem.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/10/obamarouhani_peace_in_our_time.html Poor President Obama and the beleaguered nation he leads. Benghazi, Fast and Furious, Obama care, the IRS and his most recent diplomatic fiasco, Syria. Can it get any worse? Well you may wish to hold onto your hats, this 5 year roller coaster took another deep drop this Thursday when yet another smooth […]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304373104579107011205240106.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond
I have only one cavil…the statement :”Here’s a line I never thought I’d write: I wish Ehud Olmert were Israel’s prime minister. Mr. Olmert has many flaws, some of them well known. But he also had a demonstrated capacity to act.” Huh? Olmert does have a capacity to act disreputably and irresponsibly and possibly against the law…. rsk
So Israel’s prime minister is now left to play the part of querulous Uncle Ben, who arrives the day after the funeral convinced his scheming siblings have already absconded with mother’s finest jewelry.
Uncle Ben’s suspicions may well be right. But he largely has himself to blame for not acting in time.
Benjamin Netanyahu visited the White House on Monday and on Tuesday addresses the United Nations. It’s a predictable routine. First he obtains the stylized assurances from President Obama—still exulting from his 15 minute phone call Friday with Iran’s Hasan Rouhani—that Iran will not be allowed to get a bomb and that “all options are on the table.” Then Mr. Netanyahu denounces Iran at the U.N. and issues unspecified, and increasingly noncredible, warnings that Israel may act on its own.
All hat and no cattle, as they say.
