Displaying posts published in

2013

SARAH HONIG: AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH

http://sarahhonig.com/2013/04/12/another-tack-amusing-ourselves-to-death/

An obscure 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, should be particularly compelling to Israelis. Its author, the late Neil Postman, made a sound case for his contention that Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World accurately predicted our current lifestyle.

Our judgment is crippled by an overpowering addiction to entertainment and news presentation constitutes merely another showbiz feature. Complexities are conveniently diluted and events of the day are offered as a packaged commodity, almost like the drugs with which the denizens of Huxley’s future medicated themselves into bliss. Shallow stimulation and immediate gratification have replaced thought and remembrance.

Cyber-wizardry only exacerbated these already preexisting inclinations. But unlike Postman, who lamented the decline of logic and knowledge, there are those who actually celebrate the loss. Foremost among them is our own president Shimon Peres, always ever-eager to lead the vanguard of what he promotes as progress.

A few years ago, for example, Peres pontificated thus: “Why is it important to know how many people Napoleon killed? …If you want details, go to the Internet.”

It was no slip of the tongue. His previous pearls of wisdom informed all and sundry that Google had “liberated us from the great effort to remember things… Why remember? The past isn’t so great. It’s full of tragedy and war… Look to the future, forget about the past… Personally, I have very little patience for history. I believe that to imagine is more important than to remember.”

DIANA WEST: WEINER’S SEXTING REVELATIONS MISS THE REALLY JUICY STUFF…”HUMA”NITARIAN?

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2467/Weiners-Sexting-Revelations-Miss-the-Real-Juicy-Stuff-Humas-MB-Connections.aspx More than 5,000 words into the New York Times Magazine report on everything ex-Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., and his wife, Huma Abedin, want you to know about Weiner’s “sexting” scandal that led him to resign from Congress in 2011, reporter Jonathan Van Meter pauses the story. Van Meter, a contributing editor at Vogue and […]

DIANA WEST: JOHN KERRY, SYRIA AND THAT OLD FEELING

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2466/John-Kerry-Syria-and-that-Old-Feeling.aspx I read this report and got that old feeling. No, not that one — I got that old, Libya-Redux feeling that the air was going out of the room. That’s what happens whenever I see Uncle Sam stepping in to assist, support or enable the same forces of jihad that hit us right between […]

CAROLINE GLICK: MUST WE CONTINUE TO BE LEADERS IN OUR OWN DESTRUCTION? ****

http://jewishworldreview.com/0413/glick041213.php3

Two events happened on Wednesday which should send a shiver down the spine of everyone concerned about the future of the American Jewish community. But to understand their importance it is important to consider the context in which they occurred.

On January 13, The New York Times reported on a series of virulently anti-Jewish comments Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi made in speeches given in 2010. Among other things, Morsi said, “We must never forget, brothers, to nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred for them: for Zionists, for Jews.”

He said that Egyptian children “must feed on hatred; hatred must continue. The hatred must go on for G0D and as a form of worshiping him.”

In another speech, he called Jews “bloodsuckers,” and “the descendants of apes and pigs.”

Two weeks after the Times ran the story, the Obama administration sent four F-16 fighter jets to Egypt as part of the implementation of a military aid package announced in December 2012 entailing the provision of twenty F-16s and 200 M1-A1 Abrams tanks to Egypt.

The Anti-Defamation League, AIPAC, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and other prominent American Jewish groups did not oppose the weapons transfer.

With the American Jewish leadership silent on the issue, Israel found its national security championed by Senator Rand Paul. Paul attached an amendment to a budget bill that would bar the US from transferring the advanced weapons platforms to Egypt. Paul explained, “Egypt is currently governed by a religious zealot… who said recently that Jews were bloodsuckers and descendants of apes and pigs. This doesn’t sound like the kind of stable personality we [sh]ould be sending our most sophisticated weapons to.” Paul’s amendment was overwhelmingly defeated, due in large part to the silence of the American Jewish leadership.

The Times noted that Morsi’s castigation of Jews as “apes and pigs” was “a slur for Jews that is familiar across the Muslim world.” Significantly the Times failed to note that the reason it is familiar is because it comes from both the Koran and the hadith. The scripturally based denigration of Jews as apes and pigs is legion among leading clerics of both Sunni and Shiite Islam.

It was not a coincidence that the Times failed to mention why Morsi’s castigation of Jews as apes and pigs was so familiar to Muslim audiences. The Islamic sources of Muslim Brotherhood Jew hatred, and indeed, hatred of Jews by Islamic leaders from both the Sunni and Shiite Muslim worlds is largely overlooked by the liberal ideological camp. And the overwhelming majority of the American Jewish leadership is associated with the liberal ideological camp.

If the Times acknowledged that the Jew hatred espoused by Morsi and his colleagues in the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as their Shiite colleagues in the Iranian regime and Hezbollah is based on the Koran, they would have to acknowledge that Islamic Jew hatred and other bigotry is not necessarily antithetical to mainstream Islamic teaching. And that is something that the Times, like its fellow liberal institutions is not capable of acknowledging.

They are incapable of acknowledging this possibility because considering it would implicitly require a critical study of jihadist doctrine. And a critical study of jihadist doctrine would show that the doctrine of jihad, or Islamic holy war subscribed to by the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates, as well as by the Iranian regime and Hezbollah and their affiliates is widely supported, violent, bigoted, evil and dangerous to the free world.

And that isn’t even the biggest problem with studying the doctrine of jihad. The biggest problem is that a critical study of the doctrine of jihad would force liberal institutions like the New York Times, and the institutional leadership of the American Jewish community alike to abandon the reigning dogma of the liberal ideological camp – moral relativism.

Moral relativism is based on a refusal to call evil evil and a concomitant willingness to denigrate truth if truth requires you to notice evil. Since pointing out the reality of the danger the jihadist doctrines propagated by the likes of the Muslim Brotherhood involves the implicit demand that people make distinctions between good and evil and side with good against evil, moral relativists – that is most liberals — cannot contend with jihad.

This is why the American Jewish leadership refused to join Rand Paul and his conservative Republican colleagues in the Senate and demand an immediate cessation of US military aid to the Muslim Brotherhood controlled Egyptian military even after the evidence of the Brotherhood’s genocidal Jew hatred was splashed across the front page of the New York Times.

It is the dominance of moral relativism in liberal institutions like the New York Times that make even the most apologetic expose of the Muslim Brotherhood a major event. And it is the dominance of liberal orthodoxies in the mainstream Jewish community that makes it all but impossible for Jewish leaders to speak up against the Muslim Brotherhood, despite the manifest danger their genocidal hatred of Jews poses not only for Israel, but for Jews everywhere.

MY SAY: APOLOGIES, TURKEY AND ISLAMIC ANTI-SEMITISM

Andrew Bostom has painstakingly laid out the history of Jew hatred in the Koran and Islamic history in his monumental book:
Product Details
The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History by Andrew G. Bostom (May 30, 2008)

It sure punctures the myths about that so called golden age of comity between Muslims and Jews promoted by pseudo Orientalists who paper over the long and unrelenting harassment of Jews in every Muslim/Arab corner of the earth.

Now Israel has apologized to Turkey….is there anyone outside of Mars that is not appalled by this scam? Apologies are indeed due. Read Victor Sharpe, reprinted below:

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2013/04/11/who-truly-deserves-justice-in-the-free-gaza-flotilla-incident-by-victor-sharpe/

And please read this: http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/we-apologize-to-the-turks-gideon-rosenblum.html

WE APOLOGIZE TO THE TURKS:

My 86 year old friend Moshe Klein was 21 years old when he was appointed by one of our defense organizations to take charge in one of the internment camps in which our people, arrested by the British, were held in Cyprus.

He reminded me of a shameful event for which the Turks were responsible which took place during the Second World War. It was so utterly shameful that no one should be allowed to forget it; it needs to be brought up again and again in relation to Holocaust Memorial Day. It is not only the Turks who need to be ashamed; the entire world should be ashamed.

On the 16th of December 1941, a rundown steam ship by the name of Struma left a Black Sea port destined for Israel (then Palestine) by way of the Dardanelles. On board were 103 children, 272 women and 393 men who had escaped the terror of Antonescu’s fascist regime in Romania. Close to the coast of Turkey the engine gave out and the ship was buffeted by the waves. The Turkish authorities dragged the ship into a port nearby. The passengers were left on board and were not offered shelter, this although there was only a single bathroom for the many hundreds on board. The Jews of Istanbul provided food to the immigrants for about two months but the food ran out. Efforts were made to repair the engine but they failed. Jews in other parts of the world tried to find a solution but they did not succeed. (The Jewish Distribution Committee offered to create a camp on land for the Struma’s passengers which it would fully fund, but the Turks refused.)

The Turkish regime instructed the Struma’s crew to take it out of the Turkish port. When this was not done, the boat was tied to a Turkish tugboat and dragged out to beyond Turkish territorial waters in the Black Sea, a distance of about 8 kilometers from the coast. There, on the night of February 23, 1942, the ship was abandoned without food or water for the hundreds of people who crowded its decks. The ship was left, tossed about in the stormy sea, completely helpless.

The next morning a powerful explosion was heard. It was said the ship had come upon a mine (the Turkish suggestion), or maybe by error was hit by the torpedo of a Russian submarine. The ship sank almost immediately. Of the hundreds of people on the ship only two survived, an immigrant by the name of David Stoliar and one of the ship’s officers. The two managed to climb onto a floating wooden beam. The sea was very cold and in the morning David discovered the officer was no longer able to hold on and died. David was pulled on to a fishing boat which came by. David Stoliar thus became the only survivor who was left to tell the world the full story of the shameful behavior of the Turks.

This was the most serious disaster in the history of the efforts to reach Palestine “illegally” following the British White Paper of 1939 which made the Jewish National Home off-limits for Jews. In the enormous Turkish peninsula of Asia Minor, a quasi-continent, the Turks couldn’t find temporary shelter for these desperate people. The Turks chased them away to their death.

We Israelis do not need to apologize. We will not forget and we will not forgive. If one of our readers knows Turkish, he should send this tale to Erdogan so that he too can be ashamed.

Gideon Rosenblum is a retired Israeli lawyer. He describes himself as an amateur scholar focusing especially on the Herodian period.

EDWARD CLINE: THE ASSOCIATE PRESS BLANKING OUT

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-associated-presss-blanking-out?f=puball In Eleanor H. Porter’s 1913 novel, Pollyanna, the title character, a child, adopts an unreserved, delusional perspective of optimism. When given a pair of crutches instead of a doll for Christmas, she proclaims she is happy because she didn’t need them. From that point forward, she turns all bad things into good things. The […]

Who Truly Deserves Justice in the ‘Free Gaza’ Flotilla Incident? by VICTOR SHARPE

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/who-truly-deserves-justice-in-the-free-gaza-flotilla-incident The notorious flotilla that sailed towards the Gaza coast in 2010 with the intention of breaking Israel’s legal blockade of the Hamas occupied Gaza Strip and infiltrating the borders of the Jewish state was headed by a Turkish ship, the Mavi Marmara. On board that vessel was an assortment of Israel haters. They claimed […]

An Immigration Reform No One has Read and No One Understands by BETSY MCCAUGHEY, PHD

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/an-immigration-reform-no-one-has-read-and-no-one-understands The Gang of Eight – four Democratic and four Republican U.S. senators – has been meeting behind closed doors since January to produce “comprehensive immigration reform.” That will mean a multi-thousand-page bill that no one reads. You know the saying “fool me twice.” Americans got bamboozled in 2010 when the 2,572-page Obama health law […]

RYAN MAURO: PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH USES ISLAMISTS FOR”INTERFAITH” STUDY

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/ryan-mauro/presbyterian-church-uses-islamists-for-interfaith-study/print/ The Presbyterian Church (USA) is updating its 2010 study, ““Toward an Understanding of Christian-Muslim Relations,” which was prompted by “alarming anti-Muslim statements and actions.” The 2-million member church partnered with Islamist groups for the project and its website promotes U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entities as interfaith partners. The listed advisors for the study include Naeem […]

BEWARE OF THE REVISIONISTS: ARI LIEBERMAN

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/ari-lieberman/beware-of-the-revisionists/ April 7 marks Yom Ha’shoah, a day marked by solemn remembrances for those who perished in the Holocaust. It is also the 46th anniversary of a more obscure incident that many analysts view as the precursor to one of the most astonishing victories of modern military history. On April 7, 1967 Israeli Mirages and […]