Displaying posts published in

2013

The Orient Express from Mecca to the Vatican Christians in the Cross Hairs by Reuven Berko

  http://www.investigativeproject.org/4209/the-orient-express-from-mecca-to-the-vatican On November 3, 2013, Christian figures from around the Middle East gathered in Beirut to hold an emergency meeting. Most of them came from Syria, Egypt, Lebanon and Iraq, seeking to create a dynamic to improve and reinforce the defenses of Arab Christians, who are currently being persecuted by radical Islamists in their […]

RUTHIE BLUM:BEHIND THE MULTI BILLION DOLLAR MULLAH

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=6313

Move over, Bill Gates. There’s somebody out there stealing your title as the richest man in the world. Unlike you, however, he has been keeping his fortune close to his chest. Or so he thought, until it was revealed by Reuters on Monday.

Yes, your net worth of $76.2 billion pales in comparison to the wealth of your newly discovered competitor, whose assets are estimated at in excess of $95 billion. And this guy didn’t even have to earn it by the sweat of his brow. All he had to do was pray to Allah. Oh, and rob thousands upon thousands of people of their property.

Nor did he get sent to jail, like the folks at Enron or Bernie Madoff, in case you’re wondering. Of course not. But that’s because in his country, the Islamic Republic of Iran, he’s the one who determines all matters of crime and punishment. In fact, he has the last word on just about everything. But then, he’s the turbaned head honcho, the mullah who controls everything in Iran, from women’s fashion to uranium enrichment.

That Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has a stranglehold on the government is not exactly news. Even the ostriches in the United States and Europe have come to acknowledge his immense power. This is why they took heart in the green light he gave to President Hasan Rouhani to engage in negotiations with the West about Iran’s nuclear program. And though it is true that Khamenei and Rouhani are on the same page where these talks are concerned, it is not a page from the book that the fantasists are reading.

What was not known about Khamenei, however, was his grip on more than mere governmental and godly issues. Thanks to an in-depth, six-month investigation by Reuters, we are now aware of the chief mullah’s money-grubbing.

MY SAY: NOVEMBER 19, 2013 MARKS THE 150TH ANNIVERSARY OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S IMMORTAL GETTYSBURG ADDRESS

“On June 1, 1865, Senator Charles Sumner commented on what is now considered the most famous speech by President Abraham Lincoln. In his eulogy on the slain president, he called it a “monumental act.” He said Lincoln was mistaken that “the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here.” Rather, the Bostonian remarked, “The world noted at once what he said, and will never cease to remember it. The battle itself was less important than the speech.”

Alas, Lincoln was right and Sumner was wrong. More young Americans today know the vulgar lyrics of popular rap trash, than the stirring words of the Gettysburg address delivered by Republican President Abraham Lincoln 150 years ago on November 19, 1863.

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

“The Mufti’s Islamic Jew-Hatred” Available as an E-Book….Highly recommended ****

http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2013/11/11/the-muftis-islamic-jew-hatred-available-as-an-e-book/

“The Mufti’s Islamic Jew-Hatred” Available as an E-Book

My e-book, “The Mufti’s Islamic Jew-Hatred” is now available at amazon.com http://amzn.to/HJkOXo [1] , & can be previewed here: http://amzn.to/HQb9PB [2]

The 87 pp. soft covered print edition will also be available very soon via amazon.com
Product Details
The Mufti’s Islamic Jew-Hatred by Andrew Bostom (Nov 9, 2013)

The Tragic Fate of American POWs in Russia — on The Glazov Gang

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/putins-ruthless-power-an-ex-kgb-agent-on-the-glazov-gang/print/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Ex-KGB Agent Konstantin Preobraszhensky who discussed, The Tragic Fate of American POWs in Russia, unveiling a disturbing tale of how Putin blocked the search for U.S. prisoners of war in Russia under the guise of cooperation with the American government. [Starts at the 9:40 mark].

[For more info, see Frontpage’s Symposiums: Why We Left Our POWs Behind and The POWs the Communists Kept.]

Preobraszhensky also shed light on Putin’s Ruthless Power and The Dismal State of Freedom in Russia:

DANIEL GREENFIELD: HOW MUCH HATRED OF ISRAEL IS TOO MUCH?

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/how-much-hatred-of-israel-is-too-much/

The Israelophobic left is a spectrum of hatred that stretches from the commonplace mainstream media basher who pounds out innumerable columns blaming Israel for everything wrong with the Middle East to the Gilad Atzmons and Israel Shamirs who claim that Israel is evil because the Jews are the devil.

Within that spectrum, everyone agrees that Israel is really bad and more responsible for international Muslim terrorism than the Muslim terrorists who are actually carrying it out. But that catechism of Israelophobic progressives is only a surface rationalization for the underlying hatred.

Opposition to Israel has never been rational or objective. It has always been emotional and subjective.

The left’s opposition to Zionism began as a toxic mixture of bigotry and self-hatred; influenced by everything from Karl Marx’s declaration that Jews were the embodiment of capitalism to Lenin’s denunciation of the illegitimacy of Jewish nationhood.

The left’s antipathy to Jews was always entangled with its antipathy to Israel. That is why there is no “New Anti-Semitism”. The virulent hatred of the left for Israel and the Jews is not a new phenomenon. And like all hatred, it has no bottoming out point.

Reasonable opposition has a natural limit. Emotional hatred has none. Opposition to Israel has no end point and few objectives except the ultimate expression of its hatred.

That Fake Term “Islamophobia”. It’s Just Designed to Destroy Free Speech and to Impose Islamic Law on the West: Michael Curtis

West must stop appeasing efforts to ban criticism of Islam

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4345/west_must_stop_appeasing_efforts_to_ban_criticism_of_islam

It is no accident that the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states, “Congress shall make no law …abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” It is also no accident that there is no such absolute provision in the Arab and Islamic world.

On the contrary, for at least fifteen years a concerted effort has been made by Islamic organizations, particularly the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) to prevent or limit criticism of Islam and the Prophet.

This effort of the OIC has led to calls for controls of free speech in democratic countries as well as implementation of repression in its own member states. Although this OIC objective and its consequences have become familiar, it is puzzling that the Obama Administration, and Hillary Clinton, while Secretary of State, did not resist it but rather seemed to compromise with it.

It should have been obvious that major international organs have been manipulated by the OIC to suppress speech. Each year from 1999 until 2010, one of the countries of the 57 member-state OIC, often Pakistan, has proposed resolutions in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) and in the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) outlawing “defamation of religions.”

Rather than protection of religions in general, the intent of all the resolutions that have been passed is to declare criticism of Islam illegal and therefore punishable. More recently, OIC-inspired resolutions have condemned and called for penalization of what they term “Islamophobia.”

However, the number of states approving such resolutions has been declining. The OIC is aware of the fact that democratic countries have become alert to the fact that infringements of free speech result from any implementation of supposed “defamation” resolutions.

ROBIN SHEPHERD: TOTALITARIANISM IS BACK IN FASHION

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4346/totalitarianism_is_back_in_fashion

With the terrifying tenacity of a cancer once thought cured that will never go away, totalitarianism is back in fashion. The “crisis of capitalism”, to use the deluded vocabulary of the latest generation of totalitarians, once again makes Marx “relevant”.

For those influenced by Karl Popper’s magnificent tour de force The Open Society and its Enemies, it will be no suprise that a new wave of people and movements against the free society has emerged, and is fired up with a new confidence. Popper’s argument was that, going back to Plato, we are engaged in a world-historic philosophical struggle between the supporters and the opponents of a freedom oriented political society.

The struggle does not end.

This is but a short missive, which will be followed up later. Consider, for now, an offering from Britain’s leading leftist political magazine, the New Statesman, which (online at least) we regard as now superior in its content and influence to the increasingly life-style oriented Guardian’s Comment is free.

The piece in question is about the “radicalisation” — get the vocab? — of Leftists in the United States. Authored by Max Strasser, here are the central points of the piece, with our queries:

1. (via the summary) “Every time I’ve come home to the US from my home abroad over the past four years, I notice a trend among people of my demographic: they have become increasingly politicised – and increasingly radical.”

S. FRED SINGER: IPCC’S BOGUS EVIDENCE FOR GLOBAL WARMING

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/11/ipcc_s_bogus_evidence_for_global_warming.html

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up by the United Nations in 1988 and has been trying very hard to demonstrate the threat of a dangerous human influence on climate due to the emission of greenhouse gases. This is in line with their Charter, which directs the IPCC to assemble reports in support of the Global Climate Treaty — the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) of Rio de Janeiro.

It is interesting that IPCC “evidence” was based on peer-reviewed publications – but (reluctantly) abandoned only after protracted critiques from outside scientists. E-mails among members of the IPCC team, revealed in the 2009 ‘Climategate’ leak, describe their strenuous efforts to silence such critiques, often using unethical methods.

I will show here that the first three IPCC assessment reports contain erroneous scientific arguments, which have never been retracted or formally corrected, but at least have now been abandoned by the IPCC — while the last two reports, AR4 and AR5, use an argument that seems to be circular and does not support their conclusion. Australian Prof. “Bob” Carter, marine geologist and paleo-climatologist, refers to IPCC as using “hocus-pocus” science. He is a co-author of the latest (2013) NIPCC (Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change) report “Climate Change Reconsidered-II” www.climatechangereconsidereed.org . We also co-authored a critique of the 2013 IPCC-AR5 Summary

RICHARD BAEHR: BACKSTABBED ****

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=6283

Who would have thought it would come to this — the Frenchinterceding to block a giveaway deal to Iran on its nuclear weapons program, a deal advanced enthusiastically by the United States? On the other hand, the Obama administration’s rapture for a deal that would involve empty Iranian promises in exchange for real hard cash to be released to the mullahs with sanctions relief, is not at all surprising.

As Daniel Pipes argued, a second term for U.S. President Barack Obama was bound to lead to this:

“I wrote before the last presidential election that Israel’s troubles will really begin should Obama win a second term. At Obama’s second inauguration, I predicted that he, freed from re-election constraints, can finally express his early anti-Zionist views after a decade of political positioning. Watch for a markedly worse tone from the second Obama administration toward the third Netanyahu government.”

Obama is now finished with elections, unless he seeks the U.N. secretary-general’s post (for which he is eminently qualified with his anti-Zionism). He is done fundraising from his many liberal Jewish “friends” in Hollywood and Wall Street, who always cared a lot more for his policies on abortion, or for business favors he could deliver, or ambassadorships, than they did about Israel, assuming they cared about Israel at all.