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THANKS TO MY BRILLIANT E-PAL JOAN SWIRSKY …AMERICAN MINUTE WITH BILL FEDERER…..RSK
On November 29, 1948, Democrat President Harry S Truman wrote to Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the first President of Israel:

“I remember well our conversations about the Negeb… I agree fully with your estimate of the importance of the area to Israel, and I deplore any attempt to take it away from Israel.

I had thought that my position would have been clear to all the world, particularly in the light of the specific wording of the Democratic Party platform.”

http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001LmBdV0nqSrcbhx0jM_tRTKLmV1Cv1PxED6KTbYOEqymW7eHv7hle68FlenKroQbmnKQfYQZrC6ThyBkWCzXPHqmZ6T7ZH5mWGgcgUcnNpqWDMbsCa66fTpzerD2AAs3C479gQxRuSBKpwWJ3Va9Kby_xND40eEcH52glzfbwdrw1d8HHraN_OvqdabwVdpL7Bg_SgawA-Fs=
The 1948 Democrat Party Platform stated:

“President Truman, by granting immediate recognition to Israel, led the world in extending friendship and welcome to a people who have long sought and justly deserve freedom and independence.

We pledge full recognition to the State of Israel. We affirm our pride that the United States under the leadership of President Truman played a leading role in the adoption of the resolution of November 29, 1947, by the United Nations General Assembly for the creation of a Jewish State.

We approve the claims of the State of Israel to the boundaries set forth in the United Nations resolution of November 29th and consider that modifications thereof should be made only if fully acceptable to the State of Israel.

We look forward to the admission of the State of Israel to the United Nations and its full participation in the international community of nations.

We pledge appropriate aid to the State of Israel in developing its economy and resources. We favor the revision of the arms embargo to accord to the State of Israel the right of self-defense.”

President Truman concluded his letter to Israel’s President Dr. Chaim Weizmann, November 29, 1948:

“I have interpreted my re-election as a mandate…to carry out…the plank on Israel… In closing, I want to tell you how happy and impressed I have been at the remarkable progress made by the new State of Israel.”

http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/2013/11/28/comparative-health-dangers-in-the-new-york-times/

The NYTimes of Nov 27th devoted one and a quarter pages of text and an oversized, inflammatory front page picture of an Israeli’s woman’s breast revealing a scar and the top of her nipple under a tattooed Star of David. The shorthand association reads: Israel, Jews, cancer. Is this another disease caused by the same people who brought on the black plague in the middle ages? Has Bibi spurred the spread of breast cancer? Is this a further extension of Israeli occupation? By contrast, there is no photograph of a partially exposed penis accompanying the story on page 4 of the NYT of Nov 28th concerning the rapid rise of unprotected sex among gay American men. The Times tiptoes through the statistics saying only that the rate of unprotected sex had risen 20% from 2005 – 2011 and that infection rates are highest among young black gay men. Here are some of the statistics that the Times didn’t include in this delicate treatment of a disturbing subject.

Though blacks represent only 13% of the U.S. population, they account for more than 50% of new cases of HIV – 8 times the rate of whites. Black women are 19 times more likely to have HIV than white women. According to the CDC (Center for Disease Control & Prevention), as of 2009, more than a million people in the US were infected with HIV out of which half had AIDS. Genital herpes increases the susceptibility to HIV – as of 2009, 48% of black women and 39% of black men were infected with genital herpes. AIDS infection is 5 times more prevalent inside prison than outside and black men represent 40% of all inmates in America. THE SINGLE LEADING CAUSE OF CONTRACTING HIV IS UNPROTECTED SEX WITH A MAN. These statistics suggest than HIV/AIDS pose an enormous problem for the black community and the entire country yet the Times devoted only four skimpy columns on page 4 to the alarming news that the rate of the leading cause of HIV has risen 20% in only six years.

Readers should be concerned about the disparity in the Times coverage of serious health issues. Only between 5 – 10% of breast cancers are linked to genetic causes, a tiny fraction of the problem faced by American women, particularly tiny since the BRCA genes covered in the article on 11/27 affect mainly Ashkenazi Jews, an even tinier population within our country. Of interest, in its editorial today, the Times called for more money to be spent on world-wide AIDS – it endorses the figure of 15 billion dollars which the Global Fund to Fight AIDS hopes to raise, largely from the U.S. One would have thought that the most significant factor contributing to the spread of a disease that costs us many billions of dollars home and abroad would have warranted a front page story, illustrated with a large picture of one of its victims. But given the choice between that and any story with Israel in the title, the Times chose predictably. The old grey lady got its nickname for having a higher ratio of copy to graphics. With the publication of that partially bared Jewish breast, we learned that the Times is resolved to live down that old reputation and aim for something cheaper and lower. It succeeded.

Modern “Palestinians” have been manipulated by two generations of corrupt and cold-hearted leaders into an identity they did not have just 65 years ago. Try telling that to the BBC or the United Nations

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4399/hold_the_phone_who_are_you_calling_a_palestinian

The word “Palestinian” has always been difficult to define. For a start, there has never been a state called “Palestine”, so how can you define Palestinians? There has never been a Palestinian currency, monarch, capital city or defined international border.

In fact, at the end of the Ottoman empire in 1918, Arabs living in the area now covered by Israel and Jordan preferred to be known as Syrian. It was the incoming Jews who were calling themselves “Palestinian”, following the name of the area under British mandate control.

When Britain, to satisfy promises made to Arab leaders during World War 1, set aside part of her Palestinian mandate for Arab rule, it was this area (Trans-Jordan, now Jordan) which was known as a Palestinian state — something it still is in cultural terms.

When Jordan illegally invaded and seized part of the mandate territory allocated for Jewish settlement in 1948 and called it “The West Bank” there was no talk of creating a second Palestinian state on that land and there was no localised national movement to do so. Arab nationalism, up to then, had focussed on being part of a wider Muslim “Umma” covering the whole region.

http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&doc_id=10194
“No force in the world
can remove the weapon from my hand”

At an event marking the ninth anniversary of the death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, the Popular Arts and Military Music group performed the song “My weapon has emerged,” wearing military uniforms and keffiyehs (Arab headdresses).

The lyrics of the song encourage and glorify violence and Martyrdom death for Allah:
“From my wounds, my weapon has emerged…
There is no force in the world
that can remove the weapon from my hand.
My weapon has emerged…
He who offers his blood doesn’t care
if his blood flows upon the ground.
As the weapon of the revolution is in my hand,
so my presence will be forced [upon Israel].”

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4393/the_settlements_fallacy

Israeli settlements do not make peace less likely, nor is there any logical reason why they should. In many cases, the very opposite is true

At the beginning of last week the French President Francois Hollande was in Ramallah and, as is customary, he was calling on Israel to halt settlement building, “for the sake of peace and to reach a deal”. In doing so the French President was giving voice to the Settlements Fallacy.

Of course, it would be unfair to single out the French government as being uniquely misguided on this subject; which Western country doesn’t essentially take this line?

That, however, doesn’t change the fact that it is quite mistaken to assert causality between an increase in settlements and a decline in the prospects for peace.

Experience thus far certainly suggests that settlements do not make peace less likely, nor is there any logical reason why they should. In actual fact, those places that Israel has removed its civilians from, are today some of the most lawless, radicalised and dangerous areas in the region.

Presently within the West Bank, while Jewish communities sit on less than two percent of the territory, Jews constitute around twenty percent of the population there. Many of these people were born and raised in the communities they live in, they are second and third generation West Bank Jews.

In other words, this group, the so called settlers, are a well-established ethnic community, a reality that is not going anywhere, much like the Arab-Israeli citizens living within the rest of Israel.

http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2013/11/when-is-a-deal-not-a-deal/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=4ea98c6350-Mosaic_2013_11_29&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-4ea98c6350-41165129

There are many arguments today about the substance of the agreement between Iran and the P5+1. But there is a prior question: is there really an agreement at all?

Looking at the text of the “agreement,” the most striking thing is the conditional or aspirational language:

The goal for these negotiations is to reach a mutually-agreed long-term comprehensive solution that would ensure Iranˈs nuclear program will be exclusively peaceful….This comprehensive solution would build on these initial measures….There would be additional steps in between the initial measures and the final step….This comprehensive solution would involve a reciprocal, step-by step process….

Would, would, would. Not “shall.”

The White House fact sheet on the “agreement” says that

Today, the P5+1 and Iran reached a set of initial understandings….

http://sarahhonig.com/2013/11/29/another-tack-bloodlust-and-lies/

A lot of astonishment mingled with shock was expressed in our midst when it emerged that it was a 16-year-old, from an Arab village near Jenin, who slit the throat of Eden Attias earlier this month. Eden was a rookie soldier, just a couple of years older than the teen who slew him while he napped on the bus that took him back from sick leave to boot camp.

The beautiful people just couldn’t get their sensitive heads around it. The cold-blooded knifer was just a boy, whose soul is assumed to be pure.

While most liberal sorts remained atypically tongue-tied, the few who at all regarded the slaughter as worthy of their didactic attention implied that our sins were what drove a mere youth to such hopeless desperation. There had to be a reason (one that clearly conformed to their logical constructs). Violence doesn’t spring from a psychosocial vacuum, they tell us.

The cover-story wasn’t late in coming. The underage butcher was merely avenging the incarceration of his cousins in Israel. The abiding impression is that the two are victims of the ruthless repression of Israeli occupation – prisoners of conscience, persecuted altruists and political-philosophers unjustly put behind bars.

This indeed was the theme replayed unremittingly in the Palestinian Authority’s controlled official propaganda organs – the press, the schools and the mosques. A new overnight icon and adulated role model was born.

So what if one terrorist cousin was duly convicted of a double-homicide and the other of multiple homicide attempts? Sooner or later they’ll be released – either as part of a lopsided swap or in the framework of goodwill gestures to entice implacable enemies to pose as indignant peace-makers in made-up negotiations. Indeed the16-year-old isn’t likely to grow old in durance vile.

Odds are that, after doing too little time, he too will be liberated to be triumphantly feted in Ramallah and jubilantly accorded a hero’s homecoming in Jenin.

Massacring Jews has long been glorified in Mahmoud Abbas’s fiefdom and no one – least of all Barack Obama, John Kerry and the screeching chorus of sanctimonious EU notables – have mumbled the slighted murmur of objection to the ongoing incitement and indoctrination.

But what resonates in every ear throughout the PA and the entire Arab/Muslim realm beyond is of paramount significance. Foremost it marks the core difference between us and them. It shows how malicious it is to judge Israel and its neighbors by inherently hypocritical double standards.

What tells us apart is our underlying culture of pluralism and tolerance versus their underlying culture of bloodlust and lies. To deny this is to willfully distort history and, no less willfully, to misrepresent the present.

Is it really only in the Israeli context that Arabs spill blood?

To confer credence on the false narrative that this region’s ills all began with Israel’s birth in 1948 or with its so-called occupation in 1967 is to recycle deceit – whether knowingly or stupidly.

Here a gruesome yet grossly underreported story from Syria becomes crucially relevant. A video posted on the Internet on the very day that young Eden was stabbed in his sleep, featured two members of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) holding up a bearded man’s head before a cheering ecstatic throng in the Syrian city of Aleppo. It was yet another among numerous beheadings by the purported rebels, whom much of the free world celebrates as defenders of the “Arab Spring.”

Since international opinion has learned to live quite calmly with the Arab/Muslim penchant for decapitation, there was no cause for this clip to kick up undue commotion.

What would eventually be revealed as a case of macabre mistaken identity began at an Aleppo hospital, where a wounded man lay rambling incoherently. Somebody claimed he blurted out the names of Shiite holy men. Since Shiites constitute the military mainstay of despot Bashar Assad and his Alawite loyalists, nothing further was required to seal the fate of the semi-conscious patient.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4064/free-pressA free press is messy — and when wrong, culpable — but it is also our best protection against despotism and one of the only tools we have in the West to root out corruption. Every other arm of state or civil society had failed to expose the problem, and it was down to the […]

Back in October 2001 then prime minister, Ariel Sharon, raised the hackles of the White House when he warned the United States, “Do not try to appease the Arabs at our expense. We cannot accept this.” Sharon then invoked the 1938 Munich Pact. As he put it, “Don’t repeat the terrible mistakes of 1938, when the enlightened democracies in Europe decided to sacrifice Czechoslovakia for a comfortable, temporary solution.”

Israel, he said, “will not be Czechoslovakia.”

Sharon was sharply rebuked not only by the White House, but by leading American supporters of Israel. They attacked him for daring to make the comparison. In time, with the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, Sharon’s warning was largely forgotten.

The question of whether George W. Bush sought to appease the Arabs and Iran at Israel’s expense is an open one. Strong arguments can be made on both sides of the issue. On the one hand, Bush took the fight to terror supporting regimes.

On the other hand, Bush refused to face the threat of Iran. And he forced Israel to remain trapped in the two-state paradigm which requires it to make unreciprocated concessions to Palestinian terrorists working towards its destruction.