Displaying posts published in

2013

WES PRUDEN: HOMELAND SECURITY? A TITLE RIGHT OUT OF ORWELL

http://www.prudenpolitics.com/newsletter?utm_source=P&P%20Auto%201&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=6965

The sour wind from the left

Bearded terrorists can be terrifying, but there’s nothing more terrifying than a politician, particularly a clean-shaven member of Congress in full hysteria mode. Once a congressional — or gubernatorial — mouth starts flapping, you never know how much wind it can expel.

Rep. Peter King of New York is a Republican member of the House Homeland Security Committee (a title right out of George Orwell’s literary fancy) and the House Intelligence Committee (“intelligence” in the House? Who knew?). He wants everybody put under suspicion, if not arrest. He prescribes more cameras, more dogs, more surveillance, more neighbor-to-neighbor snooping to deal with the terrorists. Even if you don’t see something, say something. Call the cops.

“For instance,” he told MSNBC in the wake of the Boston massacre, “merchants, if they’re selling any components that can be used for a bomb, everywhere from ball bearings to beauty products, they can all make bombs. They should notify police.”

Eyeliner alert!

Merchants and even other shoppers must be on the scout to help police nab anyone buying mascara, lipstick, cold cream, face powder, rouge, body lotion, eau de cologne and perfume. Helena Rubenstein, Max Factor and Cover Girl must be added to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List at once.

Mr. King thinks the Boston massacre should lead to the installation of more and more cameras. “Privacy,” he says, “involves being in a private location. Being out in the street, there’s not an expectation of privacy. Anyone can look at you, can see you, can watch what you’re doing. A camera just makes it more sophisticated.”

Good citizenship requires good citizens to keep their window blinds open, to enable the camera to get a good view. When you get up in the middle of the night to visit the facilities, turn on the lights. The camera must get a good look.

Mr. King wants the cops to have “jammers” to disable cell phones, preventing terrorists from detonating “improvised explosive devices” by remote control: “I feel strongly that local police should have access to jammers. I believe they should have more co-operation with the military –- right now there are legal issues, as far as military being involved in this.” Ah, yes. Those pesky “legal issues” always get in the way of hysteria. But the great thing about hysteria is that it blows away impediments like a Constitution.

SARAH HONIG: COMMUNIST IDEOLOGUES AND ANTI-ZIONISM….

Communist icon Rosa Luxemburg was rifle-butted to death by German nationalists nearly a century ago. Nonetheless, though her legacy has been largely forgotten elsewhere, her spirit is alive and well in 21st century Israel. It thrives among her assorted homegrown doctrinal descendants. Ideologically, Ha’aretz’s Amira Hass is Rosa’s daughter and drinks from her wellspring.

In a recent op-ed, Hass justified – indeed glorified – the targeting of Jews by Arabs who hurl rocks at passing Israeli vehicles. There’s no doubt where her loyalties and sympathies reside. “Throwing stones is the birthright and duty of anyone subject to foreign rule. Throwing stones is an action as well as a metaphor of resistance,” she wrote. Nowhere did Hass mention the historical progression and context that produced what she habitually disparages as Israeli “occupation.”

This is no surprise. Hass, reared in an orthodox communist home, had long ago crossed the lines not only in abstract terms. She resides in Ramallah, having previously made her home in Gaza (but that became uncomfortable and unsafe, given the illiberal nature of Gaza’s Hamas warlords).

For the most part, the usual hodgepodge of Israel-bashers overseas avidly amplifies Hass’s every word. Her diatribes, however, barely resonate inside Israel except among small cliques of local ultra-radicals. But her stirring defense of rock-hurlers did succeed in setting off an uncommon hullabaloo.

For one thing, her piece appeared the day after Waal al-Arjeh, the stone-thrower who hit Asher Palmer’s car in 2011, was convicted of murdering the young father and his one-year-old son, Yonathan. The judges determined that, contrary to forgiving attitudes by predisposed news-slanters, rocks can be lethal weapons. Palmer lost control of his car and was killed in the resultant crash as was the baby – a mere 17 days past his first birthday.

Another toddler, Adelle Biton, is now comatose and in critical condition after a rock struck the car in which she, her two sisters and mother were riding last month. Adelle’s mother, Adva, invited Hass to “come to the Intensive Care Unit, see my Adelle, a three-year-old child, connected to tubes. Come experience with me what I am dealing with. Amira, a rock does not distinguish between different people’s blood, and not between an adult and a three-year-old. A rock kills. A rock is a murder weapon for all intents and purposes.”

But Hass is a seasoned political warrior and in all likelihood impervious to any pain that doesn’t serve the causes she propagandizes. In her universe, the fault for the tragedies of tiny Yonathan and Adelle – and too many others – rests with their parents and official Israel. The tots just shouldn’t have been where they were, Hass would surely aver.

Nor is she likely to be swayed by the fact that the Yesha (Judea and Samaria) Council had demanded that Hass be indicted for incitement. Quite the contrary. She is likely to posture as the Jeanne d’Arc of free speech, despite the fact that Israel’s Left clamors for the prosecution of any oddball who dares opine in the other extreme. Its persistent drive to try Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira for his obscure 2009 Torat Hamelech, a scholarly treatise on the religious rules of warfare, is a prime case in point.

Moreover, Hass didn’t merely extol stone-throwing but took the Palestinian Authority to task for not making practical anti-Israel attrition tactics part of the formal school curriculum.

“It would make sense for Palestinian schools to introduce basic classes in resistance,” Hass advised the PA. In an accusative tone she argued that such instruction isn’t offered “due to inertia, laziness, flawed reasoning, misunderstanding and the personal gains of some parts of society.”

She recommends that “various forms of steadfastness and resisting the foreign regime, as well as its rules and limitations, should be taught and developed.” Thereby, Hass figures, Palestinian youths could be discouraged from aiming at Jewish children – not that anyone has yet come up with a reliable method to rapidly ascertain the age groups among a given moving vehicle’s passengers.

But no such fine points bother Hass or her backers in the increasingly anti-Zionist Ha’aretz. That’s where Hass particularly resembles the Luxemburg prototype.

To inveterate ideologues like Rosa, Zionism was anathema. Although reviled by Germans as a contemptible generic Jew (with her revolutionary doctrines falsely ascribed to all Jews), Rosa’s antipathy to Jewish causes was a near-boastful expression of alienation from her own Jewish roots.

In 1917 she wrote her friend Mathilde Wurm a harsh response to the latter’s concern about pogroms. “I have no room in my heart for Jewish suffering,” Rosa declared outright. “Why do you pester me with Jewish troubles? I feel closer to the wretched victims of the rubber plantations of Putumayo or the Negroes in Africa… I have no separate corner in my heart for the ghetto.”

Rosa’s indifference to her own people arose from the intuition that cutting the cords of disagreeable Jewish affiliations eases acceptance beyond the ghetto. This was Rosa’s ticket to citizen-of-the-world credentials – even if only within the setting of her Marxist milieu, packed paradoxically with her own breed of estranged Jews.

No less paradoxically, her professed lack of solidarity with fellow Jews flourishes remarkably in the Jewish homeland – the creation of the very Zionist movement to which Rosa was the antithesis. Logically, this country ought to be the last place in which to expect Jewish self-loathing. After all, Zionism regarded itself as the remedy to Rosa-syndrome complexes.

But the Zionist cure is perhaps of limited effectiveness against the collective mental aberrations which 2000 years of exile, helplessness and dependence on the whims of diverse potentates and tyrants inculcated in downtrodden Jews. Rosa’s keenness to bask in the warmth of socialist comradeship still abounds among all-too-many Israelis. For them too, distancing themselves from the inherent interests of the Jewish people purchases a voucher for universalist endorsement.

This mindset long predated actual Jewish self-determination. As in the Hass episode, in its more extreme manifestations this inclination didn’t merely involve apathy toward the tribulations of fellow Jews but also meant active collaboration with the enemies of the Jews.

This was already so before the pretext of “resisting occupation” at all came to be. Even Jewish independence hadn’t yet been declared, couldn’t be seized upon as a casus belli and misrepresented as the Palestinian nakba (catastrophe – the loaded Arabic moniker for Israel’s sovereignty).

Then as now, whenever the Left goes on the warpath it’s ostensibly for peace, justice and virtue. Its self-acclaimed high-mindedness inevitably rationalizes any means, as it did immediately following the start in April 1936 of the blood-soaked three-year cycle of Arab-perpetrated pogroms. The more militant Marxists, under the aegis of the Communist Peh-Kah-Peh(PKP, the Yiddish acronym for the Palestinisheh Kommunistisheh Partai) plastered local streets with posters demanding “the repeal of the Balfour Declaration and an end to Jewish immigration.”

The PKP opposed the construction of Tel Aviv Harbor (where immigrant boats docked) and repudiated each batch of new immigration certificates issued. These were entry visas allotted very tight-fistedly by the British mandatory authorities to Jews already then desperately escaping Europe. The PKP, purportedly anti-British and anti-fascist, opposed rescuing these Jews. In that it sided with the infamous Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini who instigated the Nazi-financed carnage that was the 1936-39 “Great Arab Revolt.”

Husseini subsequently, in the role of pan-Arab prime minister, spent the war years in Berlin, where he consorted with Hitler, Himmler, Eichmann, et al. He broadcast virulent Nazi propaganda, recruited Muslims to the SS and actively foiled the rescue of any Jews, even children, during the Holocaust.

Indeed as Arab terror escalated, proof mounted of active PKP collusion with it (in incidents such as the 1936 bombing of Haifa’s Beit Hapoalim and Tel Aviv’s Fair Grounds). When Arab leaders themselves announced a brief truce in the autumn of 1936, the PKP rejected any ceasefire on the grounds that “Zionism drags Jews to hell… Zionists and imperialists alone are to blame for these days of atrocity” – much like settlers are nowadays held liable.

The anti-Zionism of the PKP evolved gradually. The party arose from the fringes of the broad-based Poalei Zion. In 1919 – coincidentally the year in which Rosa was fatally bludgeoned – the embryo faction banded as the Hebrew Socialist Workers Party. But by 1922 its rejection of Zionism became so all-encompassing that it ditched Hebrew – whose revival was core to the Zionist ethos – and reverted to Yiddish (the language which Moscow’s commissars preferred for Jews).

In 1923 the PKP castigated Zionism as “a bourgeois movement serving the interests of British imperialism” (just as the Zionist state today is castigated for purportedly serving the interests of alleged American imperialism). The party cheered the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that facilitated WWII. The PKP vehemently opposed fighting the Third Reich until Hitler betrayed Stalin and attacked the USSR in 1941.

History is an irreverent matchmaker with a quirky sense of irony.

Back in pre-state days, when the PKP assumed it was abetting Marxist goals, it also inter alia furthered the fascist game plan. It’s not much different today.

The anti-Israel and pro-Arab line that Hass promotes appeals equally to anti-Israel forces on the international arena’s left and to rightist neo-Nazi outfits abroad. The rhetoric to which both supposed opposites resort when demonizing Israel is eerily similar. Hass delights them both.

She may pose as the embodiment of humane admonition and hector as the self-appointed voice of Israeli conscience. She may adopt the affectation of doing the moral thing in our name but the end result is immoral and indisputably at our expense.

Hass and her like-minded cronies in our midst aren’t held accountable and most probably never will. They are sure to continue deriding the Israeli mainstream’s disapproval of them. They will keep on deriving clout and celebrity in distant salons, campuses and media.

They’ll keep on molding foreign opinion against their own people. Like Rosa, her heirs too have no room in their hearts for Jewish suffering. Rosa’s ghost walks among them and they bow to its diktats.

CAROLINE GLICK: OBAMA’S VISIT HAD NO IMPACT AT ALL

http://jewishworldreview.com/0413/glick041913.php3

Why Obama’s visit to Israel had no impact on public opinion or government policy

Israel: The happy little country that can

As Yom Haatzmaut (Israel Independence Day) celebrations were winding down Tuesday night, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu made a guest appearance on Channel 2’s left-wing satire show Eretz Nehederet. One of the final questions that the show’s host Eyal Kitzis asked the premier was how he would like to be remembered after he leaves office.

Netanyahu thought a moment and said, “I’d like to be remembered as the leader who preserved Israel’s security.”

On the face of it, Netanyahu’s stated aspiration might seem dull. In a year he’ll be the longest serving prime minister in Israel’s history, and all he wants is to preserve our national security? Why is he aiming so low?

And yet, the studio audience reacted to Netanyahu’s modest goal with a thunderclap of applause.

After pausing to gather his thoughts, a clearly befuddled Kitzis mumbled something along the lines of, “Well, if you manage to make peace as well, we wouldn’t object.”

The audience was silent.

The disparity between the audience’s exultation and Kitzis’s shocked disappointment at Netanyahu’s answer exposed — yet again — the yawning gap between the mainstream Israeli view of the world, and that shared by members of our elite class.

The Israeli public gave our elites the opportunity to try out their peace fantasies in the 1990s. We gave their peace a chance and got repaid with massive terror and international isolation.

We are not interested in repeating the experience.

We will be nice to leftists, if they are polite. We might even watch their shows, if there’s nothing else on or they are mildly entertaining. But we won’t listen to them anymore.

This is why US President Barack Obama’s visit to Israel last month had no impact on public opinion or government policy.

Obama came, hugged Netanyahu and showered us with love just like Bill Clinton did back in the roaring 90s. He praised us to high heaven and told us he has our back. And then he told us we should force our leaders to give Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria to our sworn enemies even as they teach their children to aspire to kill our children.

And we smiled and wished him a pleasant flight home.

Obama had no idea what he was getting into when he came here. Like Kitzis and his colleagues on Channel 2, Obama surrounds himself with people who like him, prefer fantasy to reality. In Obama’s world, Islamic jihad is about the West, not about jihadists. In Obama’s world, the most pressing issue on the international agenda is apartments for Jews in Jerusalem and Efrat. And in Obama’s world, what Israelis need more than anything else is for leftist Europeans to love us.

Belgium vs. Islamic Jihadists by Soeren Kern…..see note

from an e-pal….j.a…..

The rot of extreme Islam in Europe continues — read below — and it is exporting itself to our cities…
Meantime our Islamist-appeasing, even Islam-sympathizing President is far more exercised about the rejection of the gun control motion in the Senate (yes, the Democratic-controlled Senate, not the Republican controlled Congress) than ever about the Boston bombing or the Benghazi tragedy….
Meanwhile the dangerous Muslim Brotherhood and its ilk threatens to overwhelm Syria, as it has in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and elsewhere…The White House has backed the worse of the bad horses in all these circumstances….

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3679/belgium-vs-islamic-jihadists

Some 1,000 Muslims from across Europe are currently active as Islamic jihadists in Syria, which has replaced Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia as the main destination for militant Islamists to obtain immediate combat training with little or no official scrutiny.

Belgian police have carried out dozens of raids and arrested six Islamists — including the pugnacious ringleader of a Belgian Salafist group called Sharia4Belgium — suspected of recruiting foreign fighters for the war in Syria.

The crackdown reflects growing concerns in Belgium and elsewhere about the threat posed by Islamic jihadists, or holy warriors, when they return to Europe after obtaining combat experience in Syria.

Some 1,000 Muslims from across Europe are currently active as Islamic jihadists in Syria, which has replaced Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia as the main destination for militant Islamists seeking to obtain immediate combat training with little or no official scrutiny.

More than 200 Belgian police officers conducted 48 early morning raids on April 16 in the northern port city of Antwerp and in Vilvoorde, which is situated about 20 kilometers north of Brussels, home to most of the 70 young Belgians who are known to have departed for Syria in recent months.

Police seized computers, mobile phones and €30,000 ($40,000), although no weapons or explosives were found. One of those arrested was an unnamed jihadist who was wounded in Syria and just recently returned to Belgium.

According to the public prosecutor’s office, the objective of the police operation was two-fold: to deter other volunteer jihadists from departing for Syria, and also to determine whether a group known as Sharia4Belgium “is a terrorist group,” an offense that carries a 10-year jail term.

In a seven-page statement, the public prosecutor’s office said one of those arrested was Fouad Belkacem (alias Abu Imran), a well-known Antwerp-based Islamist who is the main spokesman for Sharia4Belgium, and who has long called for turning Belgium into an Islamic state.

Although Belkacem had previously been sentenced to two years in prison in February 2012 for incitement to hatred and violence towards non-Muslims, he was released from prison in February 2013 and allowed to serve the rest of his sentence at home, provided he wear an ankle strap and promise not to speak with his followers. His re-arrest implies he violated the terms of his release.

MISINFORMATION AND ANXIETY IN BOSTON TERRORISM INVESTIGATION: ANDREW McCARTHY

http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2013/04/17/misinformation-and-anxiety-in-boston-terrorism-investigation/

Misinformation rather than enlightenment has been the order of the day in the investigation of Monday’s terrorist bombing of the Boston Marathon. The anxiety stemming from the attack and the stream of inaccurate news about it is further freighted, moreover, by the FBI’s confirmation that two letters addressed to top political officials — President Obama and Senator Richard Wicker (R., MS) — tested positive for ricin, a deadly poison. As noted below, a man identified as Kenneth Curtis of Tupelo, Mississippi, has reportedly been arrested in connection with the mailings.

Early this afternoon, massive confusion was generated when mainstream media outlets first reported that an arrest had been made in the bombing case, then retracted that claim. CNN, in particular, kept insisting there had been an arrest even after other press agencies denied it. When all was said and done, though, it appeared that no suspect had even been in police custody, much less been formally charged — and that perhaps no suspect has even been identified yet.

This is a common phenomenon in the high profile investigations that follow terrorist attacks. The investigators actually working the case would rather there were no disclosures made about the status of the investigation. At this point, their work is best done in secret — or, at least, as much secrecy as is possible. Otherwise, any conspirators who may not already have fled will be alerted that it’s time to skip town, destroy evidence, and intimidate witnesses. These investigative agencies actually work for the public, however, and the public has an extraordinarily high level of interest in the progress of the case. Thus the agencies have official press agents whose job it is to keep the public reasonably informed without compromising investigative leads and tactics — not an easy job.

Then there is the most unruly and damaging dynamic in the equation: the media and its anonymous law-enforcement sources. It seems every media outlet is in a rabid competition to be first, rather than most accurate, with every breaking development. This combines toxically with the fact that sources who hide behind anonymity — precisely because they are not supposed to be running off at the mouth — have widely varying levels of knowledge about the actual goings-on in the case.

Couple this with the fact that most journalists and many agents are not well-versed in the esoterica of the justice system — in which, for example, “arrest” is different from “custody”; a “suspect” is different from a “person of interest”; and “detention” is different from “apprehension” — and you have the roadmap to error-ridden reporting. The problem is not that reporters and sources are intentionally misleading the public. It is that their information is both less reliable than they think it is and easily given to miscommunication. A potential witness’s voluntary submission to a law-enforcement interview could be mistaken for a suspect’s surrender to police custody. Solid leads on a potential bomber based on video and forensic evidence could be miscommunicated as a solid identification of a suspect. The issuance of an arrest warrant for a person not in custody could be miscommunicated as an actual arrest.

BRUCE THORNTON: NORTH KOREA’S WINDOW INTO THE FUTURE OF IRAN

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/north-korea-a-window-into-the-future-on-iran/

Rarely do we get to see the dangerous consequences of appeasing one aggressor unfold at the same time we are appeasing another in exactly the same way. But that’s what we are witnessing today, as our leaders respond to Iran’s push for nuclear weapons with the same appeasement playbook that turned a two-bit failed state like North Korea into a nuclear-armed aggressor.

The chronology of the U.S.’s dealings with three psychotic Kim regimes makes for depressing reading. Start in 1991, when President George Bush Sr. withdrew 100 nuclear weapons from South Korea as part of a deal with Mikhail Gorbachev. That same year South Korea formally abjured the production or use of nuclear weapons, a deal the North cheerfully went along with, fully intending to violate it. The next year the North signed the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and allowed in inspectors. A mere two months later the U.S. had to impose sanctions on two companies in the North involved in developing missiles.

In little more than a year, the pattern of North Korea’s defiance and duplicity, and Western appeasement and inaction, had been set. The North would make an announcement promising to let in inspectors in order to head off sanctions, or threaten to withdraw from the NPT to wring concessions from the West, and then would come the revelation that the North had taken yet another step towards creating a nuclear weapon. Then “bilateral talks” would be announced and conducted, “agreed frameworks” and “moratoriums” signed and touted, promises of suspension of forbidden activities made by the North, “appropriate compensation,” i.e. bribes––like food aid, South Korea’s “sunshine policy” of détente and economic cooperation with the North, “economic normalization,” and free light-water nuclear reactors (!)––for such duplicitous concessions delivered by the West, all followed by more sanctions imposed when the North was caught out lying and cheating.

We know the result of this pas de deux of appeasement. North Korea today possesses several atomic weapons, and is preparing to test a missile that can reach America’s bases on Okinawa and Guam. A Defense Intelligence Agency report stated there was “moderate confidence” that North Korea “has nuclear weapons capable of delivery by ballistic missiles.” The next step will be nuclear-armed missiles capable of reaching the west coast of the United States. This was the conclusion of the U.S. intelligence community in a report from 2001, which warned that before 2015 North Korea would have ICBMs that could reach our shores.

In response to this latest iteration of a decades-long pattern of failure, our new Secretary of State John Kerry has gone on a nostalgia tour marked by toothless threats, diplomatic happy-talk, and pathetic begging of China to rein in its pit-bull client. In Beijing, Kerry told the Chinese that the U.S. would pull back deployment of anti-ballistic missile batteries on Guam and on Aegis cruisers in the waters near North Korea if China would restrain Pyongyang. China responded by warning the U.S. against provoking North Korea. Kerry also offered to negotiate directly with Kim Jong Eun over his nuclear arsenal, sanctions on his nation, and food aid. The offer of talks to Kim will likely go nowhere, judging from his rebuff of South Korea’s offer to talk, calling it a “crafty trick.” Like his father, Kim considers such offers as signs of weakness to be met by an escalation of aggression. Last year, after being offered food aid in exchange for international monitoring of his nuclear program, Kim launched a long-range missile in defiance of a U.N. Security Council resolution.

ARI LIEBERMAN: AMERICA MOURNS AND PALARABS CHEER

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/ari-lieberman/palestinians-cheer-while-america-mourns/

“It is time for those in the West who sanctimoniously clamor for the creation of a Palestinian state, to take a closer look at the people they are advocating for. People who cheer when civilians are butchered deserve their own asylum, not statehood.”

On April 16, Palestinians in Gaza cheered. They danced in the streets and handed out candy and sweets to motorists and pedestrians alike. They were not however celebrating the inauguration of a new school or the completion of a hospital. Instead, they were celebrating death. On April 16, Palestinians of Gaza celebrated the Boston marathon atrocity. While our first responders were picking up severed limbs and tending to the wounded, Palestinians reveled in Boston’s misery.

The Palestinian reaction to the horrific events in Boston was unsurprising and was in fact quite predictable. After the 9-11 attacks that killed 3,000 people, the Palestinian response was quite similar. Old women were seen shrieking in jubilation while children passed out sweets and men cheered approvingly.

These are Israel’s so-called “peace partners.” These are the people who are demanding that Israel relinquish all the land liberated during the Six-Day War of 1967. And these are the people who want to establish a twenty-third dysfunctional Arab state called “Palestine” alongside Israel’s most vulnerable and populated areas.

April 17, 2013 marks the seventh anniversary of the Rosh Ha’ir suicide bombing in Tel-Aviv that claimed the lives of 11 civilians including Florida resident, 16-year-old Daniel Wultz. Then as now, civilians were targeted and murdered simply because they believed in freedom. Then as now, those who prepared the bombs made sure to pack them with an assortment of shrapnel to inflict maximum bloodletting. And then as now, Palestinian Arabs cheered as they witnessed mothers looking for their missing children and men unable to get up off the floor because of severed limbs. Their perverted culture – a culture that revels in death and destruction – encourages this type of aberrant reaction to the sufferings of others.

The Boston massacre and Rosh Ha’ir Arab homicide attack underscore the fact that the U.S. and Israel are inexorably bound by shared moral values and principles and it is precisely these principles – those which extol freedom and democracy – that infuriate our enemies. The Arab world, deeply suspicious, distrustful, misogynistic and xenophobic, is mired in medieval backwardness. Their hatred of the West, judging by their deviant reaction to the killing of innocents in Boston, New York and Tel-Aviv, is palpable.

It is time for those in the West who sanctimoniously clamor for the creation of a Palestinian state, to take a closer look at the people they are advocating for. People who cheer when civilians are butchered deserve their own asylum, not statehood.

IGNORING TERRORISM IS NOT THE ANSWER: DANIEL GREENFIELD

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/ignoring-terrorism-is-not-the-answer/ The day before the Marathon Massacre, the New York Times had scored plaudits for running an op-ed by one of Osama bin Laden’s bodyguards complaining about his hard life in Guantanamo Bay. On April 14th, the paper of broken record paid 150 dollars to an Al Qaeda member for the opportunity to complain about […]

The Betrayal of Salonika’s Jews By Andrew Apostolou see note please

http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/6341/features/the-betrayal-of-salonikas-jews/

PRINCE PHILLIP’S MOTHER, WHO MARRIED PRINCE ANDREW OF GREECE IS BURIED IN JERUSALEM, SHE RESOLUTELY REMAINED IN GREECE DURING WORLD WAR 11 DEFIANTLY SHELTERING JEWISH REFUGEES….RSK

http://www.nytimes.com/1988/08/04/world/prince-philip-s-mother-buried-in-jerusalem.html

ALSO PROMINENT GREEK ORTHODOX CLERGY GAVE SHELTER TO JEWS:

On March 23, 1943, Archbiphop Damaskinos of the National Greek OPrthodox Church along with 27 prominent leaders of cultural, academic and professional organizations wrote a document declaring the unbreakable bonds between Christian Orthodox and Jews. That action was unique in the whole of occupied Europe. The 275 Jews of the island of Zakinthos were protected by the mayor and when the Germans ordered a list of the island’s Jews….He gave them 2 names his own and that of Bishop Christomos. RSK

THE COLUMN BY ANDREW APOSTOLOU

THE Nazis’ mass deportations of Jews from Greece in 1943 and 1944 largely ended the life of a thriving community, one responsible for centuries of important contributions to Jewish culture and to the life of the land in which the community lived. Eighty-six percent of Greece’s prewar Jewish population perished. In Salonika, where 70 percent of Greek Jews lived, the death rate exceeded 90 percent. While the German campaign to kill the Jews is no secret, few in Greece acknowledge that the Germans had the support of Greek administrators and police.

Greece’s political leaders have paved the way for this unwillingness to confront Greek collaboration in the Holocaust. Prime Minister Antonis Samaras recently spoke of the Holocaust as if it happened in Greece by chance and as if Greek non-Jews were utterly uninvolved.

Yet the Germans succeeded in their nefarious work precisely because Greek non-Jews were willing to assist. The German occupiers of Salonika implemented their standard battery of anti-Semitic measures with consistent support from Greek Christian administrators, civil servants, and police. The Germans systematically impoverished, isolated, marked, ghettoized, and then deported the Jews. The number of German officials directly involved in deporting tens of thousands of Salonika Jews to Auschwitz in 1943 was relatively small, because the local Greek authorities cooperated and contributed their own manpower.

Salonika is central to the history of the Holocaust in Greece because it had a Jewish identity that many Greeks wanted to erase. Thousands of Jews fleeing from Spain and Portugal (together, Sepharad in Hebrew) had revived the city in the late 15th century. The Sephardim soon became a majority in Salonika, turning the city, then under Ottoman rule, into a major Jewish religious and cultural center. When Greek troops captured Salonika in 1912, they found a city in which the main language was Ladino, not Greek. Although the Jews were anxious about Greek rule, they adjusted, and the younger generations learned the Greek language. By the eve of World War II, the Jews were no longer a majority of the city’s inhabitants, but they had every reason to believe that they were Greeks and that Greece was their country.

The feeling was not reciprocated by many of Salonika’s Christians, and the arrival of the Germans in 1941 provided them with their opportunity. The character of Salonika had changed in the 1920s after a large influx of Greek Christian refugees from Turkey. The Greek government promoted the city’s Greek identity, even discouraging the use of shop signs in Ladino. The Greek press in the city was often viciously anti-Jewish, inciting a 1931 pogrom that claimed two lives. When the Germans entered Salonika on April 6, 1941, they found a willing cadre of collaborators and a broad section of Greek Christian opinion hostile to the Jews.

MARK STEYN: THE NATIONAL PARTY OF SURRENDER

http://www.steynonline.com/5506/the-party-of-surrender From RNC honcho Reince Priebus, from the senator from Swing-State Central Rob Portman, and even from the great Charles Murray, the same mournful dirge echoes through the cavernous emptiness of the Republican big tent: Give it up, losers — give it up on illegal immigration, gay marriage, abortion, and maybe Americans under 30, 50, […]