http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323419604578573531565348760.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond Not surprisingly, President Obama and Speaker John Boehner have different views on energy policy, differences brought into stark contrast by their recent statements. The president sees our nation’s energy policy primarily in terms of the environment, with the economy a secondary concern. His policy is grounded in a view that government regulation and subsidies […]
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3806/hassan-rouhani-nuclear-negotiations Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi announced on Wednesday that newly elected Iranian President Hassan Rouhani will once again head up Iran’s nuclear negotiation team. The next negotiation round of the P5+1 group [the five permanent members of UN Security Council plus Germany] will also be overseen by an investigative body, all of whom […]
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3772/arab-spring-europe It is not difficult to portray Western women as licentious whores. For Muslim men, the West has no honor whatsoever. Even if immigrants try to adopt the culture of their new countries, the cultural and religious indoctrination breeds only the rejection of all the values of the host countries. What we are witnessing is […]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323873904578571390930041734.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop Lincoln, describing the fight of July 1-3, 1863, showed the world what was at stake in a Pennsylvania crossroads town. Among my great-grandfather’s papers, carefully set down in his small, gnarled handwriting, is a copy of the Gettysburg Address. When Lincoln delivered the speech, my great-grandfather was 10 years old and living in Sweden, […]
Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller Banned from the U.K. — on The Glazov Gang
by Frontpagemag.com
Why Jihad supporters are welcome — and why freedom fighters and truth-tellers are not.
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/robert-spencer-and-pamela-geller-banned-from-the-u-k-on-the-glazov-gang/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/10150635/Patients-facing-eight-hour-waits-in-ambulances-outside-AandE-departments.html Patients facing eight-hour waits in ambulances outside A&E departments Sick patients have been forced to wait up to eight hours in ambulances queuing outside Accident & Emergency units amid a crisis in the system. An investigation by The Sunday Telegraph shows that the number of patients forced to wait at least two hours parked […]
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=10309
‘Even if you give up all the land, it won’t solve the problems in the Mideast’
An interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, author of “Infidel” • “From the perspective of the Arab leaders, reaching a two-state solution is to betray God. If you want peace and not merely a process, you must make peace with the people. The negotiators themselves are of no importance.”
There is something dignified in the quiet, determined manner of Ayaan Hirsi Ali as she rises from the audience and walks towards the podium to deliver her lecture. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s intricate history starts in Somalia, where she was born to a Muslim family. At the age of five she underwent female genital mutilation. By her teens she was a devout Muslim. In her early twenties, upon learning of plans for an undesirable arranged marriage, she made her way to Holland, where she applied for asylum. Hirsi Ali studied at Leiden University and began publishing critical articles about Islam, the condition of the Muslim woman, and so forth.
She wrote the script for the Dutch movie “Submission” for director Theo van Gogh, who was subsequently murdered by a Muslim assassin. Hirsi Ali joined the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy and in 2003 was elected to the Dutch parliament. A few years later she moved to the United States, where she became a researcher at the American Enterprise Institute. She published some books; notably, an autobiography titled “Infidel” that became an international bestseller. Already in 2005, Time magazine named Hirsi Ali among the 100 most influential people in the world. The internet abounds with information about her, with articles and videos of her lectures.
She is doubly courageous: in her stand against Islam, leading to threats on her life, and vis a vis the Western liberal elite, which disapproves of criticism of multiculturalism and the blindness afflicting Western society in grasping the strategic threat to its existence as a free societ
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/maureen-mullarkey/
Among liturgically concerned responses to the previous post, one of them gave me a start:
On Corpus Christi, at a Manhattan parish, we had to sing an entrance song which begins, “We are here to tell our story, We are here to break the bread, we are here to know our rising from the dead … ”
Here to tell our story. The Gospel of Me. The all-encompassing Cosmic Me. The lyrics lend new meaning to the adjective catholic, do they not? The respondent rightly makes fun of it: ”It was like the B-side of a Debby Boone album, except Debby Boone’s lyrics are more coherent.” Yet the lyrics are more ominous than that. Any global extension of the self into the very object of liturgical devotion is deadly. Ovid knew just how lethal self-worship was: Narcissus wasted unto death mooning over his own reflection.
No one needs to have read Keith Campbell and Jean Twenge’s psychological study The Narcissism Epidemic (1999) to know that narcissism spreads like fungus. It advances through the social order, blighting the wits not only of individuals but of populations. Even liturgical culture decomposes under its assault. External realities disintegrate in the drive to construct and celebrate a winsome, elevated self-image.
• • • • •This occurs to me every time I walk past the lawn of the local Episcopal church. Staked in the ground close to the sidewalk is an eight foot banner erected in the wake of the Newtown school shooting. Great block letters trumpet: THEY ARE ALL OUR CHILDREN. Beneath the slogan is a list of endorsing religious groups: the town’s four Christian denominations, the local temple, the Quakers, regional Baháis, and the county Muslim association.
My gorge rises at the sight of it. This is grandstanding clothed as compassion. Counterfeit condolence, the banner comforts no one. Words are not directed to the suffering parents of those murdered school children. They are addressed to our town, not Newtown. An outsized bumper sticker, the banner advertises its own self-admiring stance. That it is still on show six months after the shootings insinuates a political agenda—gun control—for which the deaths of children were expedient. The disguise of fellow-feeling gets thinner each day that the banner stands.
You have to have a taste for tartuffery to greet this display of higher sanctimony as anything but cant. The falsity of it is plain: The children of Sandy Hook Elementary School are not our children. Their deaths have not withered our hopes, crushed our spirits, caused us unimaginable agony. That pain belongs exclusively to the parents who gave those little ones life and love. The solemnity of parental grief is mocked by unctuous affectation in service to an unspoken platform that circumvents informed, serious discussion.
To broadcast one’s own empathy—made without risk or cost—is pharisaical vanity. Signatories to this vulgar pennon offer nothing but cheap grace, bestowed on themselves. My town’s children remain snug in their beds, ATM cards under their pillows. Ivy League visions still dance in their heads. Their birthdays continue.
http://unitedpatriotsworldwide.com/vinienco/ Boston Bomber Indicted, Holder has Final Say on Execution Boston Bomber Indicted, Holder has Final Say on Execution: Accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of killing four people in the largest mass-casualty attack on US soil since September 11, 2001. The 30-count indictment filed in […]
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Controls/SendFriend.ashx?print=1&type=1&item=13492 Facing a Nuclear Iran: Israel’s Remaining Options Nuclear strategy is a “game” that sane and rational decision-makers must play. From Prof. Louis René Beres In the best of all possible worlds, Iran could still be kept distant from nuclear weapons. In the real world, however, any such operational success is increasingly unlikely. More precisely, […]
