http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/07/al_dura_show_trials_end_badly.html An apparent victory for France Télévisions and Jerusalem correspondent Charles Enderlin in the long legal battle they initiated against French citizen Philippe Karsenty may turn out to be the last stage in a cascade of strategic errors… by the broadcaster. On June 26th the 11th Chamber of the Appellate Court convicted citizen Karsenty of […]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324436104578581663230962692.html?mod=WSJ_article_MoreIn_Opinion
News that U.S. intelligence agencies routinely monitor European phone and digital traffic and may even have spied on the institutions of the European Union is causing a political furor in Paris, Brussels, Berlin and other Continental capitals.
“Unacceptable, it can’t be tolerated,” warns Angela Merkel, Germany’s Chancellor. “Abhorrent” inveighs Jean Asselborn, the foreign minister of Luxembourg. “George Orwell is nothing by comparison,” thunders Elmar Brok, chairman of the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee. French President Francois Hollande has even suggested delaying talks on a trans-Atlantic trade agreement until the issue is resolved.
This is one of the better recent Claude Rains’s routines, with politicians shocked to find spying going on between allies. Europe’s governments have robust spy agencies of their own, and those agencies spy on friends and foes alike. So it has always been. The U.S. has ample reason for spying on Germany, for example, since we know it was the al Qaeda cell in Hamburg that executed the 9/11 attacks.
The real mystery (assuming the allegations are true) is what sort of intel did America’s spies think they could glean from snooping on the European Union?
Could it have been the early word on the European Commission’s directive this May (soon rescinded) mandating that olive oil be served only in nonrefillable bottles with tamper-proof caps and labels written in “clear and indelible lettering”? Or maybe it was the research notes of the three-year investigation leading to Brussels’s 2011 decision to forbid bottled-water producers from claiming that water prevents dehydration—on the basis that the claim lacked scientific evidence?
Far more interesting is the growing dismay at President Obama among his former idolators in Europe. The folks who gave him the Nobel Peace Prize before he’d brokered any peace are now disillusioned that he uses drones against terrorists, hasn’t closed Guantanamo, and hasn’t repudiated every Bush-Cheney security policy. And Europeans keep saying Americans are naive about the world.
A version of this article appeared July 3, 2013, on page A14 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Spy Who Bored Me.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323936404578579962612795172.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop
The glamour seems to be wearing off for Edward Snowden. The self-admitted leaker of America’s national-security secrets and hero of the world’s anti-American left now finds himself at the mercy of Vladimir Putin, the old KGB man and one of the world’s leading authoritarians.
Since fleeing Hong Kong with his WikiLeaks entourage, Mr. Snowden has been stuck for more than a week in transit purgatory at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport. On Sunday night he formally requested Russian political asylum, but on Monday President Putin played coy. Russia won’t extradite Mr. Snowden to the U.S. but may not let the American stay in Russia either, he said.
Perhaps Mr. Snowden should have had someone other than Julian Assange as a travel agent. A better guide might have told him that Freedom House ranks Russia as “not free” and on par with Algeria in respect for political rights and civil liberties. Seventy-nine journalists have been killed in Russia since 1992, more than in any other country, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. The Russian activist Alexei Navalny, who publishes his investigations of official corruption on his Web blog, faces a lengthy jail term on politically trumped-up charges. These things are good to know if you’re a self-styled crusader for “transparency” looking for a refuge.
Amid Obama Administration pleas not to shelter the American, Mr. Putin said Mr. Snowden should seek refuge elsewhere. And he offered “one condition” for him to stay: “He must cease his work aimed at inflicting damage to our American partners, as strange as it may sound from my lips.” But the Russian also cracked that Mr. Snowden “sees himself as a human rights activist and a freedom fighter for people’s rights” and doesn’t intend to “cease his work,” so Moscow may not be right for him.
http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2013/07/zombies-in-the-mineshaft/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=8f82571312-Mosaic_2013_7_3&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-8f82571312-41165129
So I saw World War Z, the new Brad Pitt movie about a worldwide zombie outbreak, and here’s the surprising thing: I can’t decide whether it’s the most anti-Semitic movie ever made, or the most Zionist movie ever made.
I know what you’re thinking: Isn’t that the way with a deeply profound work of art—that it makes you question your assumptions and goes beyond narrow ideological categories? Well, yes. It is the way of a deeply profound work of art. But World War Z isn’t a deeply profound work of art. It’s not deep, it’s not profound, and it’s not art. It’s actually pretty dumb, as you can tell when you learn that the people who made it think the United Nations possesses its own deepwater navy and aircraft carrier. (If that were actually the case, I would probably support a zombie takeover of the earth.)
World War Z is a combination horror movie, disaster movie, war movie, and spy movie. It’s both very scary and very boring, though, I must confess, not at the same time. Which is to say, when it’s not frightening it’s incredibly dull, and when it’s not tedious it makes you gnaw on your fingernails and cover your eyes in horrified anticipation. It’s probably more boring than scary; but if you like scary, you’ll love it.
Okay—enough with the consumer guidance, and back to the anti-Semitism/Zionism question. About an hour into the movie, Brad Pitt is told by a CIA agent that the only place on earth where the zombies have been stymied is Israel. This led my friend Kyle Smith in the New York Post to say that the movie “takes a pernicious turn when Israel, alone, is said to have known about the zombie apocalypse in advance. In a world where perhaps hundreds of millions believe Israel knew about 9/11 beforehand, this shows poor judgment, to put it mildly.” So that’s the anti-Semitic part.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/352591/inhospitable-earth-jonah-goldberg You just can’t out-gloom an environmentalist. The Atlantic invited some luminaries to answer the question “How and when will the world end?” Some contributions were funny. Others were simply plausible — a volcanic eruption from underneath Yellowstone National Park is frightfully overdue. But only an environmentalist like Bill McKibben could be a killjoy about […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/352590/will-egyptian-military-scrap-sharia-constitution-andrew-c-mccarthy If you read Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, you’re not surprised by anything that’s happening in Egypt. At the moment, the situation is fluid, so take reports with due caution. That said, “sources” inside the Egyptian military tell Reuters that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) has drafted a “political roadmap” which it […]
http://www.rollcall.com/news/north_korea_is_no_paper_tiger_commentary-226001-1.html?pos=oopih North Korea fell off the front pages when the media decided Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un is a fat paper tiger. But North Korea is resolutely sending military advisors to help Syria, an embattled ally and an excellent customer for chemical weapons. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights notes that North Korean officers are […]
http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/novelists-view-world/2013/jul/2/engelhard-hemingway-and-generation-lost/ In the end, the will to die was stronger than the will to live. On the morning of July 2, 1961, Ernest Hemingway aimed a double-barreled, 12-guage shotgun at his head, pulled the trigger and thus ended the short happy life of America’s most famous writer. He was 61 and we do not know […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-common-core-straight-jacket?f=puball American education was based on some very fundamental principles and, from the 1640s until the 1840s, they were, in the words of Joseph Bast, the president of The Heartland Institute, “real civics, real economics, and real virtues.” Bast is the co-author of “Education and Capitalism” and in a recent speech at the Eighth annual […]
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=4843 There is nothing to suggest that the mass demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square against Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi are any more indicative of hunger for democracy than the 2011 protests that led to the ouster of former President Hosni Mubarak. This is not to say that the Egyptian people aren’t hungry. On the contrary, […]
