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January 2014

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL: MICHAEL ORDMAN

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com  http://blogs.jpost.com/users/just-look-us-now ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS   It’s down to the wire.  (Thanks to Atid-EDI) Trans-Catheter Aortic-Valve Implantation (TAVI) procedures are saving thousands of lives but are extremely difficult to perform.  The Acwire from Israel’s MediValve allows cardiologists to implant these heart valves at exactly the right position.  Acwire has just received European CE mark approval. […]

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: TH ISRAEL DOUBLE STANDARD

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/368563/israel-double-standard-victor-davis-hanson An obscure academic organization called the American Studies Association not long ago voted to endorse a resolution calling for a boycott of Israeli universities. The self-appointed moralists were purportedly outraged over the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians. Given academia’s past obsessions with the Jewish state, the targeting of Israel is not new. Yet why […]

Beyond Bridgegate: Ignoring the Elephant in the Room By Janet Levy

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2014/01/beyond_bridgegate_ignoring_the_elephant_in_the_room.html The political flap over Chris Christie’s role in “Bridgegate” has thrown a spotlight once again on the rough-hewn, plain-speaking New Jersey governor.  But the drama of the current brouhaha has drawn attention away from the governor’s more serious, ongoing missteps — namely, his cultivation of relationships with those associated with known terrorist groups.  Remarkably, New Jersey’s […]

Academics in Wonderland- Daniel Greenfield

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ The study of any philosophy is doomed eventually to the solipsism of the idea as the real world falls away and is replaced by the construct of the world. When Buckley favored being governed by the first 2,000 people in the Manhattan phone book than the faculty at Harvard, he was on solid ground. […]

RAYMOND IBRAHIM: The U.S. and Christian Persecution: Obama Does Nothing to Protect Christians and Other Minorities in the Muslim World.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/368796/print

Prominent indicators confirm that the U.S. is the chief facilitator of the persecution of Christians around the world today.

According to the recently released 2014 World Watch List, which ranks the 50 nations where Christians are most persecuted, Syria is the third worst nation in the world in which to be Christian, Iraq is fourth, Afghanistan fifth, and Libya 13th. All four countries receive the strongest designation, “extreme persecution” (other designations are “severe,” “moderate,” and “sparse” persecution).

Aside from being so closely and harshly ranked, these four nations have something else in common: heavy U.S. involvement. Three — Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya — were “liberated” thanks to U.S. forces, while in the fourth, Syria, the U.S. is actively sponsoring “freedom fighters” against the regime, many of whom would be better labeled “terrorists.”

The Syrian situation alone indicts U.S. foreign policy. According to Reuters:

Open Doors, a non-denominational group supporting persecuted Christians worldwide, said on Wednesday it had documented 2,123 “martyr” killings, compared with 1,201 in 2012. There were 1,213 such deaths in Syria alone last year, it said. “This is a very minimal count based on what has been reported in the media and we can confirm,” said Frans Veerman, head of research for Open Doors. Estimates by other Christian groups put the annual figure as high as 8,000.

ANDREW McCARTHY: OBAMA’S BELATED DEFENSE OF THE NSA

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/368813/print

Why didn’t the president give this speech seven months ago when it would have counted?

It is very hard to take President Obama seriously. At Friday’s big surveillance speech, after five years of Big Government–orchestrated Constitution shredding, he looked the American people in the eye and explained that, as monitoring technology has evolved over the centuries, our nation has always “benefitted from both our Constitution and traditions of limited government.” While your head was still spinning, another whopper: After five years of whimsically “waiving,” ignoring, and unilaterally rewriting congressional statutes, he bleated that “our system of government is built on the premise that our liberty cannot depend on the good intentions of those in power; it depends upon the law to constrain those in power.”

Of course, from the man who repeatedly vowed that you could keep your health-insurance plan, all the while scheming to eliminate your health-insurance plan, we’ve come to expect this disconnect between rhetoric and reality. What makes President Obama so hard to take seriously is not just the lying. It is that he does not take his job seriously. Consider the great “metadata” controversy, the focal point of yesterday’s speech.

It has been seven months since Edward Snowden’s first felonious leaks — seven months of firestorm over the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone-record information on virtually all Americans. During that time the program has been hysterically slandered by critics on the left and right — the libels aided and abetted by legislators who’ve known for years exactly what the NSA was doing and yet feigned shock over Snowden’s “revelations.” (I use the mock quotes in a nod to Representative Jerrold Nadler (D., Upper West Side), who conceded last June that, when it came to the NSA’s data collection, Snowden revealed nothing that hadn’t been well known and hotly debated for seven years.)

Jonah Goldberg: Hillary the Hyped: What Difference the Senate Intelligence Report on Benghazi Makes.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/368805/hillary-hyped-jonah-goldberg

Editor’s Note: The following is Jonah Goldberg’s weekly “news”letter, the G-File. Subscribe here to get the G-File delivered to your inbox on Fridays.

Dear Reader (Including those of you who have merely stumbled onto this “news”letter via the filthy Internet rather than receiving it via the space-age pneumatic technology it was intended for),

Say you work for a company that depends on sales (“Um, are there other kinds of businesses?” — The Couch).

Imagine you have a saleswoman who everyone says is the best — THE BEST!! (ideally said in a Kenny Banya voice). Whenever you point out that her sales numbers stink, everyone calls you “sexist” or insists that you just “don’t get it.”

You respond, “What has she done?”

The universal answer is, “She clocked more miles on sales calls than anybody in company history! She’s driven a million miles! One. Million. Miles!”

You ask: “Yeah, but has she, you know, sold anything?”

“Sexist! You don’t get it!”

If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m talking about Hillary Clinton. When you ask her diehard supporters what she did as secretary of state they start with, “She travelled a million miles! More than any secretary of state.”

Put aside the fact that the “more than any secretary of state” part isn’t actually true — Condi Rice flew more. When you ask, “Okay, what did she get for it?” you get a blank stare or you get some stuff about championing women’s rights. Two people have told me she did good work in Myanmar, but I’ve never really gotten to the bottom of that. I suppose I could look it up, but at the end of the day we’re still talking about Myanmar, which is not the locus of America’s most pressing international problems. (“That’s right, because Hillary prevented the Myanmarese hegemony,” someone at MSNBC just shrieked. “She stopped it cold.”) While the Wikipedia page on her tenure doesn’t even mention Myanmar, it does mention her championing of better cook stoves in the Third World. That’s good. And so is improving the plight of women in various countries where their status ranges between “Slightly More Important than the Village Mule” to “So Incredibly Delicate We Must Keep Them Covered with Burlap Sacks All Day Long Even Though It’s Like 115 Degrees in the Shade Today.”

ANDREW McCARTHY: KSM’s Prison Communiqués: Enemy Combatants Back to Being Criminal Defendants (Part One)

http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2014/01/16/ksms-prison-communiques/ I was invited to provide commentary Tuesday night on Megyn Kelly’s Fox News program (“The Kelly File”) regarding the all too predictable but nevertheless appalling news that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — al Qaeda heavyweight, 9/11 mastermind, decapitator of Daniel Pearl, jihadist warring against America for the better part of two decades, and murderer of […]

ANDREW McCARTHY:KSM’s Prison Communiqués (Part II): Wartime Religion of Peace Propaganda

http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2014/01/17/ksms-prison-communiques-2/ We explained in yesterday’s Ordered Liberty post that the publication of jihad heavyweight Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s communiqués, disseminated from the terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, herald the return of the pre-9/11 paradigm: jihadist terror treated as a mere law-enforcement problem, not a war. Now, we turn to the propaganda aspects of KSM’s published […]

Chuck Brooks, Distinguished Judge, GSN 2013 Homeland Security Awards Program: An Interview

http://www.gsnmagazine.com/2013_digital_yearbook Chuck Brooks is VP for Homeland Security at Xerox and was first Director of Legislative Affairs for the Science and TechnologyDirectorate at DHS. As an Adjunct Faculty Member at Johns Hopkins he taughta graduate course on Congress and Homeland Security, and was a Senior Advisor to the late Senator Arlen Spector. Chuck is leader […]