The Germans are angry with the Greeks for retiring at age 50 and counting on Germans to keep working until they are 65 so as to have enough cash to lend to Greece. The French are angry with the Germans for demanding such harsh and humiliating terms from the Greeks in return for a few billion more euros. The Greeks are angry with the Germans for once again in effect telling them how to levy taxes and to organize their economy. Italy is angry with every other EU country for refusing to relieve it of the flood of refugees fleeing Africa. Britain is angry with the entire EU for denying it the right to control its borders and snatching from it large portions of its sovereignty. Theres more, lots more. But on one thing they all, or almost all, agree: products made in occupied Palestinian land must be labeled as such, rather than as made in Israel. Nothing to do with any anti-Israel attitude, of course. And horrors at the thought that the rule might have anything to do with anti-Semitism. Merely a clarification of existing rules, which are along the lines of those already issued by Denmark, Belgium and Britainyes, Britain, home of the Balfour Declaration, but that was long before the Muslim population soared and academics began their drumbeat of criticism of Israel.
We live in a weary age of fable.
The latest Hollywood mythology is entitled Truth. But the film is actually a fictionalized story about how CBS News super-anchor Dan Rather and his 60 Minutes producer supposedly were railroaded by corporate and right-wing interests into resigning.
In reality, an internal investigation by CBS found that Rather and his 60 Minutes team — just weeks before the 2004 election — had failed to properly vet documents of dubious authenticity asserting that a young George W. Bush had shirked his duty as a Texas Air National Guard pilot.
The fabulist movie comes on the heels of the Benghazi investigations. An e-mail introduced last month at a House Benghazi committee hearing indicated that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — just hours after the attacks on the consulate that left four Americans dead — knew almost immediately that an “al Qaeda-like group” had carried out the killings.
Clinton informed everyone from her own daughter to the Egyptian prime minister that the killings were the work of hard-core terrorists. Yet officially, she knowingly peddled the falsehood that a video maker had caused spontaneous demonstrations that went bad.
It’s official: the European Union will be sending out guidelines [1] to all 28 of its member states on how to label settlement products from Israel.
The move has been in the works for a while. In September the European Parliament voted 525-70 in favor of it. Israeli settlement products have been excluded from EU trade preferences since 2004.
This latest move, though, is something new.
Once it comes into effect, shoppers in any EU supermarket will see certain products labeled “Made in the West Bank” (Israeli settlement) or “Made in the Golan” (Israeli settlement).
They won’t see such labels on products from any other of the world’s 200 territories that are under dispute. Not, for example, Turkish products from Northern Cyprus. Not Chinese products from Tibet.
In some strange way, in a continent that has a long, unlovely history of subjecting Jews to boycotts and badges, it is only products from the Jewish state that are going to be specially marked.
Israel and some American allies have been urging the EU not to go through with the labeling. Their seemingly irrefutable arguments fall on deaf European ears.
A bipartisan letter signed by 36 senators [2], led by Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), stated:
As allies, elected representatives of the American people, and strong supporters of Israel, we urge you not to implement this labeling policy, which appears intended to discourage Europeans from purchasing these products and promote a de facto boycott of Israel, a key ally and the only true democracy in the Middle East.
Very soon, Malcolm Turnbull will jet off to Paris with the taxpayers’ chequebook and a store of telegenic sound bytes hailing Australia’s generosity in ameliorating the injustice of climate change’s impact on the Third World. Thieves, rorters, scam artists and assorted corruptocrats will cheer lustily
Ever used a dodgy builder? Then thank your lucky stars you’re not a granny cyclone victim in Bangladesh, with people from the government arriving to help. The money to build her a new house is provided by a climate-adaptation fund, but all she gets is a roof and floor but no walls. The structure then begins collapsing within two months.
The Paris climate talks next month are partly about creating a $US100b-a-year climate fund to help the Third World adjust to hypothesized global warming. In a bit of political theatre (we taxpayers bought her tickets), Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop last December pledged $200m to this fund, rhapsodizing about “investment, infrastructure, energy, forestry and emissions reductions.” [i] The Climate Fund is now taking heat for corruption and non-transparency. Newsweek, although a fervently warmist journal, ran a piece to that effect a few days ago.
An inkling of how such money actually gets spent comes from our Bangladesh example. Transparency International Bangladesh audited a $A4.5m project financed by a climate-change trust fund administered by the Bangladeshi government. It also tried to audit a sister-fund provided by aid donors, but couldn’t find enough documentation to even start the audit! One of its trenchant recommendations was to “mete out exemplary punishments to corrupt individuals.”
Melbourne teen-turned-suicide bomber Jake Bilardi’s blog did not long survive its author, immediately suppressed and deleted when he atomised himself in Syria. Quadrant Online preserved a copy, however, as both an illustration and indictment of where the left’s anti-West agit-prop can lead
Make no mistake, the much vaunted and extremely expensive ‘deradicalization’ of suspected jihadist converts and sympathisers will fail miserably. This can be guaranteed unless it is complemented by a systematic challenge to the anti-Western ideology that dominates the universities, the education system, much of the media (especially the ABC), and the Internet. It is this radical narrative of Western treachery and wickedness that engulfs the minds of young would-be jihadists and provides the ideological rationale for their self-destructive embrace of terrorism.
Consciously of not, jihadists and their supporters and sympathizers all parrot a modified version of the Marxist-Leninist narrative of Western imperialism, exploitation, oppression, racism, war crimes, murder, rape, and atrocity that was the centrepiece of communist bloc agit-prop campaigns throughout the Cold War and had a particular impact on the Middle-East. As Barry Rubin,editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs observes:
The left is a victimhood cult. It feeds off pain and fetishizes suffering as a moral commodity to be sold and resold in exchange for political power.
The cult’s credo is that its solutions to human suffering take precedence over freedom or democracy. It exploits suffering when it can and creates it where it can’t. Its social media has ushered in the Warholian era of victimhood where everyone can be a famously oversharing victim for 15 trending minutes.
Forget about meritocracy. This is the victimocracy.
The victimocracy’s foot soldier is the crybully. The crybully is the abuser who pretends to be a victim. His arguments are his feelings. He comes armored in identity politics entitlement and is always yelling about social justice or crying social justice tears.
On November 5, 2015 the United States Department of Justice issued a press release, “Four Men Charged with Providing Material Support to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.” The Indictment that charged these individuals with their crimes was filed on September 30, 2015 and unsealed on November 5, 2015.
While most people reading the headline would think of this as purely a disturbing story about terrorism, in reality it is at least as much a story about immigration — not illegal immigration, but the legal side of the immigration system. Serious failures are endemic to the immigration system, but are seldom, if ever, reported on in the media or discussed by our political leaders. They were, however, reported in detail by the 9/11 Commission.
Oops! As a byproduct of an internal dispute at the far left think tank, the Center for American Progress (CAP), it has been revealed that Palestinian advisers were brought into the Ferguson, Missouri demonstrations to advise the rioters. Exactly who paid for them to apparently fly halfway around the world (or otherwise build “strong relationships”) and stick their noses into an American political dispute is unclear, though it has been bandied about that George Soros has played a major role in funding the #BlackLivesMatter movement that is ginning up black anger, and presumably 2016 election turnout for Hillary.
The dispute that led to the shocking disclosure involved the invitation to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak at CAP. The left wing journal, The Nation, chronicled the dispute and let slip the incriminating information. Ali Gharib and Eli Clifton write:
Taqiyya is an Islamic doctrine that allows Muslims to deceive non-Muslims. As in lie to them. Dr. Sami Mukaram, author of Taqiyya in Islam, writes: “Taqiyya is of fundamental importance in Islam. Practically every Islamic sect agrees to it and practices it… Taqiyya is very prevalent in Islamic politics, especially in the modern era.” (Specific references to taqiyya in the Quran, the Hadith, and in Islamic law, can be found here.)
One of the most common and persistent forms of taqiyya we are witnessing today is noted at Islam-Watch:
When placed under scrutiny or criminal investigation, (even when there is overwhelming, irrefutable evidence of guilt or complicity), the taqiyya-tactician will quickly attempt to counter the allegation by resorting to the claim that it is, in fact, the accused who are the ‘the victims’. Victims of Islamophobia, racism, religious discrimination and intolerance. Currently, this is the most commonly encountered form of distraction and ‘outwitting’….
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-duel-of-despots-1447285581 The widening Syria conflict reminds us every day of the dangers of the argument, ironically calling itself “realist,” that a Middle East of dictators is perforce the safest version of that region we may hope for. Like the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the argument refuses to slink off into the historical night. Pierre Razoux’s […]
