http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3687/china-militant-nationalism As we kept providing incentives for unacceptable behavior, Beijing predictably became less cooperative and more assertive. Worse, the less and less the Chinese felt the desire to engage us, the more and more we felt the need to engage them. If we do not change our policies, our indulgence may end up creating the […]
The State Dept Got Syrian MB Right….in 1947! http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2013/04/28/nowhere-in-rebel-controlled-syria-is-there-a-secular-fighting-force-to-speak-of/ “Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of.” Just before Christmas, 2012 (12/24/12) , I wrote an extensive critique [1] of US policy in Syria (with the eponymous title, “Why Is America Midwiving a Muslim Brotherhood-Ruled Syria?”). My analysis highlighted […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/346689/diagnosing-dr-biden
The second lady exemplifies a bloated class of people with irrelevant, unimpressive titles.
Doctor Biden has joined Twitter as @DrBiden. The account is “run by Dr. Jill Biden’s Office,” and it tells us absorbing things about Dr. Biden — things such as “Yesterday, Dr. Biden hosted an education roundtable” and “Yesterday, Dr. Biden honored the nation’s top teachers.” It retweets praise, too: “Thank you Dr. Biden for your work as an educator and as a voice for all educators in our nation,” reads one tribute. If a tweet is signed “Jill,” the doctoral bio informs us, this indicates that it is a “tweet from Dr. Biden.” “Jill,” if you’re wondering, is Dr. Biden’s nickname. Her formal name is “Dr.”
Wherever she goes and whatever she does, Dr. Biden is always referred to as “Dr. Biden.” “Is Joe Biden married to a physician?” wondered the Los Angeles Times in January. “You might have gotten that impression while watching television coverage of the inauguration.” Yes, you might have indeed.
Dr. Biden isn’t a physician, of course. She has a doctorate – in “educational leadership,” whatever the hell that is. This Ed.D gives her the right to call herself “Dr.” in much the same way as my Master’s degree gives me the right to put MA after my name. Perhaps my Twitter handle should be @MA(Oxon)Charles?
Or . . . perhaps not. It’s not @MA(Oxon)Charles because I’m keenly aware that my non-vocational education really isn’t that important to anybody other than me. (And, perhaps, my mother.) Dr. Biden has made a different judgment about the value of hers, and in doing so she has become another symptom of our Potemkin aristocracy, to which only those who have letters after their name may belong.
Titles of nobility be damned; as a means of signaling that one is a person of general acceptability, an advanced degree now works wonders. No doubt many will look at the second lady’s splendid moniker and think, “Gosh, Dr. Biden must be smart! She is definitely not a mechanic.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/anti-judaism-the-western-tradition-by-david-nirenberg/2013/04/26/1088809a-8d94-11e2-9f54-f3fdd70acad2_story.html
Michael S. Roth is the president of Wesleyan University and the author of “Memory, Trauma, and History: Essays on Living With the Past.”
Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics,And the Catholics hate the Protestants,And the Hindus hate the Muslims,And everybody hates the Jews.
So sang Tom Lehrer in his satirical song “National Brotherhood Week.” It’s no news that even those who preach “love they neighbor” have often combined their striving for community with the hatred of a scapegoat, the Jews. David Nirenberg’s “Anti-Judaism” is a thorough, scholarly account of why, in the history of the West, Jews have been so easy to hate. And this story goes back a very long way.
Nirenberg returns to ancient Egypt to examine traditions that portray Jews as “enemies of Egyptian piety, sovereignty, and prosperity.”This was already old in the 7th century BCE! Ancient Greeks and Romans would have their Jews, too; they found use for an “anomalous” people who stuck together and followed their own rules, who were “neither disenfranchised nor citizen, neither conquered nor conquering, neither powerless nor free.” Over the centuries, when there was trouble in the kingdom, be it corruption or military threat, famine or political chaos, pagan ideologues developed a handy solution: Attack the Jews.
Jews were useful for those who were contending for power in the ancient world, and the Egyptian model of scapegoating was often repeated. But it was the Christians who refined anti-Judaism into a core theological and political ideology. Christianity had a particular problem: to show that it had overcome Judaism — overcome its adherence to the laws of the “old” testament, overcome its tribal particularity with evangelical universalism. The idea of Judaism — together with the fact that there were still people in the world who chose to remain Jews — was an affront to that universalism. “To the extent that Jews refused to surrender their ancestors, their lineage, and their scripture, they could become emblematic of the particular, of stubborn adherence to the conditions of the flesh, enemies of the spirit, and of God.”
Throughout the centuries theologians returned to this theme when they wanted either to stimulate religious enthusiasm or quash some perceived heretical movement. Not that you needed any real Jews around to do this. You simply had to label your enemies as “Jews” or “Judaizing” to advance the purity of your cause. In the first through fourth centuries, Christians fighting Christians often labeled each other Jews as they struggled for supremacy. And proclaiming your hatred of the Jews became a tried and true way of showing how truly Christian you were. Centuries later, even Luther and Erasmus agreed that “if hatred of Jews makes the Christian, then we are all plenty Christian.”
http://spectator.org/archives/2013/04/23/jihad-blows-up-the-liberal-uto/print Jihad has blown up The Liberal Utopia. The visionary liberal land of political and social perfection. President Obama is not happy — and he isn’t alone. You know the place. ▪ The Liberal Utopia is a land where gun background checks prevent mass murder. ▪ The Liberal Utopia is a land where Islamic fundamentalists […]
http://dailycaller.com/ Despite the heated rhetoric from the Obama administration and environmental groups about the urgency of global warming, climate scientists have begun to come to terms with the lack of evidence of catastrophic global warming over the last decade. “While some climate scientists continue to resist the obvious that the climate system is more […]
New Glazov Gang — Why Eric Holder Shut The Mouth of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
by Frontpagemag.com
Nonie Darwish, Dwight Schultz and Ann-Marie Murrell unveil what the Obama administration doesn’t want you to know about the Jihad in Boston.
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/why-eric-holder-shut-the-mouth-of-dzhokhar-tsarnaev-on-the-glazov-gang/
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Hezbollah-and-the-Syrian-Civil-War-311377 The international community can and must take responsibility for removing all WMD from Syria. The reported presence of thousands of Hezbollah fighters and Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Syria to protect President Assad and his regime means Iran has made a strategic commitment not to lose Syria. That in turn means Syria will not follow […]
Libya faces growing Islamist threat Exclusive: Diplomats warn that militants squeezed out of Mali by western intervention are hitting targets in Tripoli http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/28/libya-mali-islamist-violence-tripoli Diplomats are warning of growing Islamist violence against western targets in Libya as blowback from the war in Mali, following last week’s attack on the French embassy in Tripoli. The bomb blast […]
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/world/middleeast/islamist-rebels-gains-in-syria-create-dilemma-for-us.xml;jsessionid=8AF35751CFB10888183E65532767B26A?f=19
Islamist Rebels Create Dilemma on Syria Policy BEN HUBBARD
CAIRO – In Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, rebels aligned with Al Qaeda control the power plant, run the bakeries and head a court that applies Islamic law. Elsewhere, they have seized government oil fields, put employees back to work and now profit from the crude they produce.
Across Syria, rebel-held areas are dotted with Islamic courts staffed by lawyers and clerics, and by fighting brigades led by extremists. Even the Supreme Military Council, the umbrella rebel organization whose formation the West had hoped would sideline radical groups, is stocked with commanders who want to infuse Islamic law into a future Syrian government.
Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of.
This is the landscape President Obama confronts as he considers how to respond to growing evidence that Syrian officials have used chemical weapons, crossing a “red line” he had set. More than two years of violence have radicalized the armed opposition fighting the government of President Bashar al-Assad, leaving few groups that both share the political vision of the United States and have the military might to push it forward.
Among the most extreme groups is the notorious Al Nusra Front, the Qaeda-aligned force declared a terrorist organization by the United States, but other groups share aspects of its Islamist ideology in varying degrees.
“Some of the more extremist opposition is very scary from an American perspective, and that presents us with all sorts of problems,” said Ari Ratner, a fellow at the Truman National Security Project and former Middle East adviser in the Obama State Department. “We have no illusions about the prospect of engaging with the Assad regime – it must still go – but we are also very reticent to support the more hard-line rebels.”
Syrian officials recognize that the United States is worried that it has few natural allies in the armed opposition and have tried to exploit that with a public campaign to convince, or frighten, Washington into staying out of the fight. At every turn they promote the notion that the alternative to Mr. Assad is an extremist Islamic state.
The Islamist character of the opposition reflects the main constituency of the rebellion, which has been led since its start by Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority, mostly in conservative, marginalized areas. The descent into brutal civil war has hardened sectarian differences, and the failure of more mainstream rebel groups to secure regular arms supplies has allowed Islamists to fill the void and win supporters.
