http://www.nationalreview.com/node/367085/print If advocates admitted that it increases Washington’s power, we could have a better, more honest debate. Since the effectively national Common Core education standards were unveiled in 2010, advocates have insisted that they’re a “state-led” effort. President Obama declared in the 2011 State of the Union address that “these standards were developed . . . not by Washington, […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2013/12/jewish_rights_in_the_land_of_israel.html
Diplomatic negotiations are invariably accompanied by rumors fueled by a combination of inside knowledge, leaks, and vivid imaginings that anticipate their outcome. So it is with current Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, which seem to limp along in limbo, periodically interrupted by Secretary of State Kerry’s frenetic visits and palpable arm-twisting of Israel. But a report in Arutz-7 (December 23), Israel’s right-wing news service, suggests that behind the public screen of negotiating paralysis Israel is preparing to make sweeping and, to say the least, alarming concessions.
Palestinian sources have apparently disclosed that in stages over the next decade Israel is prepared to withdraw its soldiers and civilians from the strategically crucial Jordan valley, and the biblical homeland of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank). In Jerusalem, the capital of Israel, the historic Old City and the Temple Mount, the holiest Jewish site, would form an autonomous region under international supervision.
This “disclosure” may only represent scare tactics designed to stiffen the backs of the Netanyahu government and its negotiators. But it nonetheless raises the perennial question about the legality of Israeli “occupation” of “Palestinian” land since its 1967 victory in the Six-Day War and the subsequent proliferation of Jewish settlements (now numbering more than 120, with 350,000 residents).
Israel’s critics incessantly claim that it is illegally “occupying” Palestinian land, and that Jewish settlements violate Article 49 of the Geneva Convention (1949), which stipulates that an “Occupying Power” may not “deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” But Article 49, as a bevy of international law experts have pointed out, applies to the invasion of sovereign states and is inapplicable to Israel because Jordan never held legal sovereignty over the West Bank. Furthermore, Jewish settlers hardly were deported or transferred, as were the citizens of European countries by Nazi Germany during World War II; they relocated entirely of their own volition.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/12/do_democrats_really_need_to_promote_religious_persecution.html Democrat politicians do not want respectful disagreement between Evangelicals and gays. War between homosexuals and evangelicals is important for them. The Democratic Party, in order to raise money from gays and lock in millennial votes, is attacking freedom of thought, speech and religion. This is a basic community organizing tactic: encourage grievance, divide the […]
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304866904579265932490593594?mod=Opinion_newsreel_1 Health insurance should be individual, portable across jobs, states and providers, and lifelong and renewable. The unraveling of the Affordable Care Act presents a historic opportunity for change. Its proponents call it “settled law,” but as Prohibition taught us, not even a constitutional amendment is settled law—if it is dysfunctional enough, and if Americans […]
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304367204579267030770210744?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop A year has passed since the Newtown massacre, and Americans this month marked the somber moment. The most fitting tribute Congress could pay the 26 victims would be to return in January to take up Pennsylvania Representative Tim Murphy’s thoughtful overhaul of federal mental-health policies. Severe mental illness is the common link among the […]
