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April 2016

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Germany: Humor, Sultan Style by Stefan Frank

By on April 19th, 2016

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has granted Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s demand for the criminal prosecution of comedian Jan Böhmermann, for a poem he wrote insulting Erdogan. Böhmermann is accused of violating a German law forbidding the “slander of institutions and officials of foreign states” — an offense carrying a penalty of up to five years in prison.

Erdogan once acquitted Sudanese President Omar al Bashir of genocide allegations: “Muslims cannot carry out genocide.” Erdogan was expressing an attitude widespread among German politicians and journalists: crimes are not crimes when Muslims commit them. Rarely is a Muslim despot or demagogue criticized in Germany; meanwhile no one has inhibitions about vilifying Christianity.

The signal that the German federal government has repeatedly sent to Turkey: We are totally dependent on and cannot live without Turkey. Is it really a surprise that Erdogan’s megalomania is increasing?

“The ‘cultural sensitivity’ practiced in liberal societies has nothing to do with sensitivity or thoughtfulness. It arises from the fear of violence.” — Henryk M. Broder, journalist and author.

Who would have thought that there is still a law in Germany that makes “lèse majesté” (offending the dignity of a monarch) a punishable crime? And that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is now benefiting from just that — and that it could plunge Germany into a (further) “national crisis.”

The terms “national crisis” and “governmental crisis” have been coming up again and again. In light of all the massive problems Germany has, this one is about a poem in which a cabaret performer and comedian, Jan Böhmermann, recently insulted the Turkish President. Erdogan has called for Böhmermann’s head and, as of last week, has Chancellor Merkel on his side.

The story began in March, when a German regional television station aired a music video during a satirical show, in which repression and human rights violations under Erdogan were pilloried in a humorous way. The Turkish government summoned the German ambassador and demanded that the video be removed from the internet and never be shown again. Germans thereby learned that the German ambassador is regularly summoned to Ankara — three times so far this year. According to reports, the Turkish government once complained about teaching material in Saxony’s schools that dealt with the Armenian genocide.

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Celebrating Terrorism, Palestinian Style by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on April 19th, 2016

The Palestinian jubilation over yesterday’s terror bombing in Jerusalem, the first of its kind since the suicide bombings during the Second Intifada more than a decade ago, is yet another reminder of the growing radicalization among Palestinians.

The major obstacle to peace with Israel remains the absence of education for peace with Israel. In fact, it is safe to say that there never was a real attempt on the part of Palestinian leaders and factions to prepare their people for peace with Israel. On the contrary, the message they send to their people remains extremely anti-Israel.

This casts doubt on the Palestinian leadership’s and people’s willingness to move toward peace and coexistence with Israel.

Shortly after the Jerusalem bus terror explosion attack on April 18, a number of Palestinian factions rushed to issue statements applauding the “heroic operation” and urging Palestinians to pursue the path of armed struggle against Israel.

The Palestinian jubilation over the terror attack, the first of its kind since the suicide bombings during the Second Intifada more than a decade ago, is yet another reminder of the growing radicalization among Palestinians. This radicalization is mostly attributed to the ongoing anti-Israel incitement and indoctrination by various Palestinian factions and leaders.

Not surprisingly, the first Palestinian group to applaud the Jerusalem bus attack was Hamas.

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Sane Jews Do Not Vote for Hillary By Joan Swirsky

By on April 18th, 2016

At the beginning of January 2016, an organization called NORPAC—a lobby whose mission is to support candidates and sitting members of Congress “who demonstrate a genuine commitment to the strength, security, and survival of Israel”—invited its members to “an exclusive and intimate” cocktail reception for Hillary Clinton for people willing to pay $2,700 per individual or $5,400 per couple.

The invitation included a synopsis of Hillary’s credibility vis-a-vis Israel, stating that she had “been a supporter of the US-Israel relationship for many years…and, as Secretary of State, she had stood up against Israel’s enemies….”

Then, NORPAC promptly betrayed its pretense of impartiality by stating: “Please join us in support of Secretary Hillary Clinton for President and share your concerns about the US-Israel relationship with her at this pro-Israel event.”

Of course, all of this hype was pure fiction, but fully embraced by the leftwing Jews who have essentially abandoned genuine Judaism for the Social Justice causes embraced by the Democrat party, causes that make them feel like “good” people—everything from the redistribution of wealth (aka Communism) to saving the environment (from the colossal hoax known as climate change) to equality for women (except when it comes to speaking out against the vile abuses of Sharia law, the mass rapes by Muslims in Europe, and the rapacious behavior of one Bill Clinton) to the Holy Grail of leftism, abortion, which amounts to the de facto approval of the over fifty-eight-million infants murdered by this gruesome procedure since it became the law of the land in 1973.

But the subject here is not the magical thinking of leftists or the suicidal ideation of liberal Jews. Rather, it is to correct the decades-long fantasy that Hillary Clinton is even remotely supportive of Jews, Israel, Zionism, in fact anything to do with Jewish life.
WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE…

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The U.S. – Values & Self Interest by Sydney Williams

By on April 18th, 2016

Nations operate in what they perceive to be their self-interest. It’s not always a good thing. When the Nazis marched into Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1939, it was under the policy of Lebensraum, the claimed need for food that those fertile lands offered. The people of Poland and Czechoslovakia and the Allies disagreed. When nations’ interests clash, differences must be decided diplomatically or war ensues, as happened in Europe in 1939. It has always been that way and, likely, always will.

But sometimes a nation’s interest serves the world’s. In the wake of World War II, America’s self-interest – guided by our values – benefitted not only ourselves and the nations who had allied with us, but the people of those countries we helped defeat. In a recent history, Harry & Arthur, Lawrence Haas, a Senior Fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, tells of the remarkable working relationship between newly sworn-in President Harry Truman and Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg, then the leading Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. According to Mr. Haas, a former member of Al Gore’s staff, the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, NATO and the U.N. Charter would have been impossible without the collaborative efforts of the two men. This was bi-partisanship at its best, relying on fundamental American values – to help those in distress, by serving our own interests. The consequence: the west saw seven decades of economic growth, Germany and Japan became economic powerhouses and the world saw the most rapid eradication of poverty it had ever known.

Things have changed. We have abandoned our magnanimous perch. Our values are on trial. A belief in moral relativism has replaced a sense of national self-confidence that had been driven by moral certitude. Political extremism has meant that our nation’s self-interest has been subsumed within the wants of party hacks; and immediate self-gratification has replaced the values needed for moral leadership. Republicans: consider the effects of the war in Iraq? Democrats: think of the consequences of the attack on Libya, and the rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria? Keep in mind, 9/11was an attack on western civilization by Islamic jihadists – a fact that has all but disappeared from our collective memories. Non-threatening euphemisms used to describe those terrorists (and others since) have undermined a focus on the awfulness of what they did, and what they are still capable of doing.

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Putin’s Playgrounds In the Baltic his planes weren’t armed. In the Middle East, his moves have become deadlier. By Jed Babbin

By on April 18th, 2016

Russia’s military has been much more aggressive and even reckless over the past few weeks, stunting over and around U.S. forces. Those stunts happened, almost simultaneously, with more dangerous Russian moves in supplying Iranian and Hezbollah terrorist forces with enormously capable anti-air and anti-missile systems.

Last Monday and Tuesday, two Russian Su-24 fighter-bombers made mock attacks against the USS Donald Cook, a destroyer in international waters in the Baltic Sea. On neither occasion were the aircraft visibly armed, nor did they answer radio calls from the ship. During the Tuesday incident, one made a pass that took it to within about fifty feet above the ship.

On Thursday, a Russian Su-27 fighter did a barrel roll around an Air Force RC-135 over the Baltic Sea, coming within fifty feet of the aircraft’s wingtip. (To perform a barrel roll the aircraft banks around a single turn of a spiral while rolling once around its longitudinal axis. It takes only a couple of seconds to do, and is a lot of fun if you’re the roller, not the rollee.)

An RC-135 is, to put it bluntly, a spy aircraft that is connected directly into the gizmocracies of the CIA and NSA. It flies seeking to gather whatever intelligence its antennae can scoop up. Flying over the Baltic is a natural place to snoop given the close proximity of both Russia and Kaliningrad which, though not connected by land, is nevertheless part of Russia.

If this were our Air Force or Navy fliers, the fighter jocks would be scolded and probably grounded for a while to sort out what really happened. The Russians are different. As we used to say in the Cold War days, a Russian won’t defecate without orders. In this case, the pilots were clearly acting on the orders of a senior military person and the fact that the incidents were carried out over several days indicates that Russian President Vladimir Putin either ordered the incidents or was at least told of the plans and approved them.

The only reaction to the USS Cook incidents came from Secretary of State John Kerry. On Thursday, Kerry said, “We condemn this kind of behavior. It is reckless. It is provocative. It is dangerous. And under the rules of engagement that could have been a shoot-down.” As we’ve come to expect from Kerry, the harrumphery of condemnation was matched by a comprehensively ignorant statement about the rules of engagement.

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Why Obama is unteachable The president distrusts America’s definition of its interests By Jed Babbin

By on April 18th, 2016

In an April 10 Fox News interview, President Obama identified what he believes is the worst mistake of his presidency. He said, “Probably failing to plan for the day after what I think was the right thing to do in intervening in Libya.”

It’s mighty tempting to deride that statement by going through the long litany of Mr. Obama’s mistakes in national security and foreign policy. But surrendering to that temptation would cause us to miss the important elements in what Mr. Obama said and why he said it. More difficult, and far more important, is an analysis to determine why Mr. Obama is incapable of learning from such mistakes.

Begin with the advice he received from his top defense advisers before going into Libya. According to “Duty,” the memoir of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Mr. Gates had determined that we had no vital national security interest in Libya and so advised the president. Again, according to Mr. Gates’ memoir, the final decision on intervention was made in a meeting between Mr. Gates and his team, including Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, and the State Department and White House teams led by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, National Security Adviser Susan Rice and two of her staffers, Samantha Power (now U.N. ambassador) and Ben Rhodes.

Mr. Obama, saying it was a “close call,” came down on the side of intervention to prevent a humanitarian disaster.

Appearing with Mrs. Clinton on the Sunday talk shows to defend the intervention, Mr. Gates said repeatedly that we didn’t have a vital national interest in Libya, indicating that Mr. Obama’s action was unjustified.

Mr. Gates’ point is so fundamental to American defense and foreign policy that it beggars the imagination that we need to be reminded of it. Like several presidents before him Mr. Obama has misunderstood it, but the principle is precise and clear: the United States should never go to war unless a vital national security interest is at stake.

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UNESCO renames Western Wall “Al-Buraq Plaza” by Robert Spencer

By on April 18th, 2016

On Friday, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) Executive Board in Paris adopted a resolution erasing Israel’s ties to the Temple Mount and the Western Wall.

The UNESCO resolution referred to the Temple Mount area solely as the Al-Aqsa Mosque or Al-Haram Al Sharif, ignoring the Jewish claim to the site.

The resolution called Israel “the occupying power” and the Western Wall as Al-Buraq Plaza. It demanded that Israel not restrict Muslim access to the Temple Mount, condemning Israel for “illegal measures against the freedom of worship” at the “Muslim holy site of worship”. It demanded a return to the “status quo”. The status quo since Israel conquered the Temple Mount in 1967 forbids non-Muslim prayer on the Temple Mount and has remained unchanged.

Blaming “Israel aggression” for the violence at the site, it had no mention of the role of Muslim rioters.

It also condemned the Israel’s plans to establish an egalitarian, non-Orthodox prayer section by Robinson’s Arch.

It accused Israel of “planting Jewish fake graves in other spaces of the Muslim cemeteries” located on Waqf property east and south of the Temple Mount, and of “the continued conversion of many Islamic and Byzantine remains into the so-called Jewish ritual baths or into Jewish prayer places.”.

It referred to Hebron and Bethlehem as solely “Palestinian sites”.

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Robust Foreign Policy Possible, Even in Partisan Times By Lawrence J. Haas

By on April 18th, 2016

Arthur Vandenberg, the former Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman who worked closely with President Truman to architect the free world in the late 1940s, died 65 years ago on Monday. His legacy offers two important lessons for us during our current time of turmoil at home and abroad.

First, we have benefited greatly from the global role that Truman and Vandenberg brought to fruition. We would be wise not to abandon it. Second, we can nourish more bipartisan support for a robust U.S. foreign policy, even when our two parties are fighting fiercely over domestic policy.

Vandenberg worked with Truman in strong bipartisan fashion at a bitterly partisan time, helping to craft a revolutionary new foreign policy through which the United States seized global leadership for the first time on a sustained basis to protect our friends, confront our enemies and promote freedom. Under their leadership from 1945 to 1949, the United States spearheaded the effort to create the United Nations; pledged through the Truman Doctrine to defend freedom, first in Greece and Turkey and then broadly; lifted an economically prostrate Western Europe to its feet through the Marshall Plan; and committed to defend Western Europe through the NATO alliance.

Seven decades later, however, Vandenberg’s legacies – U.S. leadership abroad and bipartisan cooperation at home – are falling victim to a collective crisis of confidence in America, about both what we should do around the world and what our leaders can accomplish in Washington.

On the global front, President Barack Obama has worked to reduce America’s footprint around the world, share burdens with allies and even adversaries and focus on “nation building here at home.” To reduce U.S. burdens in the Middle East, for instance, he welcomed the rise of a hostile Iran, invited Russia’s return to the region and largely let Syria descend into a humanitarian nightmare.

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Bruce Frohnen: Can Civility Be Restored to Our Campuses?

By on April 18th, 2016

Critics have taken to calling the leftist agitators who are running roughshod over university campuses hypocrites. The reasoning is that these self-described social-justice warriors, by shouting down speakers, silencing dissent on social media, and forcing resignations from those they accuse of “injustice,” are betraying the very toleration that allows them to speak freely. Unfortunately, the charge mischaracterizes, not just campus crybullies, but also campuses themselves. Agitators from various radical campus groups, like their predecessors of the 1960s, are not pursuing or even advocating tolerance as a core value (though they may take advantage of those who offer it to them). Rather, they are pursuing power. What is more, those expecting toleration to bring sanity back to campus are placing their faith in the wrong principle. Toleration is a highly useful tool for ordered liberty, but it is far from sufficient for ordered liberty. In practice, toleration is what those in authority give to dissenters; it is not a condition of equal respect for all opinions. Indeed, all societies value some perspectives over others, and to pretend otherwise is to leave the door open for the most radical among us to tear down our society in the name of “progress.”

The progressive myth of an ever-expanding openness to diversity of opinion always has been at best unrealistic and at worst a falsehood uttered in bad faith. The idyll it presents is perfectly suited for the preening of progressive academics, who see their campuses as, properly, neutral spaces within which Truth is pursued by calm, civil, rational individuals concerned only with testing ideas and hypotheses for improving society. The idea is that one can have a community in which there are no orthodoxies, only the free exchange of ideas. Of course, the myth of a neutral square is a particularly false and dangerous orthodoxy, for it puts debate into the straightjacket of scientism (a false sense of what empirical reason, divorced from first principles, can accomplish) and leaves the public square less neutral than open to explosions of emotivism. By pretending that the public square can do without authority, those who actually exercised it for several decades—progressive rationalists—undermined their own already suspect legitimacy, opening the way for the latest round of radicalization.

Our universities abandoned tolerant, civil discourse long ago in favor of a soul-numbing emptiness. The emptiness was sold to us as “free inquiry,” but actually was an attempt to eliminate traditional norms in favor of a caricatured version of the scientific method that purports to value reason above all else. As it has succeeded, this campaign has been replaced by a more vigorous movement to replace supposedly value-neutral faux-scientism with raw emotion and politics. Today’s students and their enablers among professors and administrators seem far more dangerous than their scientistic predecessors. But in truth they are their logical successors and are no more intolerant than those who paved the way for their ascendance.

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A Look Back at this Croatia-News-Heavy Month…in Election Year 2008 Julia Gorin

By on April 18th, 2016

Restaurant honours mass murderer (Herald Sun, April 13, 2008)

An acclaimed Melbourne restaurant has sparked multi-ethnic outrage for paying homage to a fascist warlord and mass murderer.

The plush Katarina Zrinski restaurant attached to Footscray’s Croatian Club has been branded “disgusting” for its celebration of genocidal World War II Croatian leader Ante Pavelic.

Pavelic, who historians say was responsible for the deaths of up to 500,000 Jews, Serbs, Muslims and gypsies, has been described as the Heinrich Himmler of the Croatian nation.

The popular restaurant during the week displayed a big portrait of Pavelic on its wall and T-shirts depicting Pavelic for sale at the bar.

The T-shirts also showed two commanders of the Ustashe’s notorious Black Legion, which murdered thousands of civilians, and Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac, who was jailed for collaborating with the Ustashe.

Drinkers at the bar were also toasting “The Poglavnik” – the name fascists use for their Fuhrer – and on Thursday the restaurant commemorated Hitler’s establishment of the puppet state of Croatia on April 10, 1941.

On Tuesday the restaurant was reviewed in a Melbourne newspaper’s food section, with its “large, airy downstairs dining room perfect for large, extended family groups”.

Dr Bob Miller, a Balkans expert at the Australian National University, has hit out at the club’s feting of Pavelic.

“It’s disgusting. This would be the equivalent to the German community honouring Himmler,” he said.

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