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July 2016

Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the Ethiopian parliament (Thursday, 7 July 2016) From Tom Gross ****

“Salaam. I am so excited to be here. My delegation is excited to be here. My wife is excited to be here. And I want to recognize three outstanding members of our parliament who are also excited to be here, though they’ve been here before: Member of Knesset Avraham Neguise; former Member of Knesset Pnina Tamano-Shata; and our ambassador here in Addis Ababa, Belaynesh Zevadia.

I am absolutely thrilled to be the first prime minister of Israel to visit Ethiopia ever. Well, what took you so long? And the answer is: I don’t know, but I’m already planning the next visit.

Ethiopia is a resplendent land, rich in history, diverse in culture, pregnant with promise. The Prime Minister said today in our meeting, he said something that is so true. He said Israel has a place in the hearts of Ethiopians and Ethiopia has a place in the hearts of Israelis, in the hearts of the Jewish people. I bring you greetings from Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the Jewish people, the place where I grew up and the place where the Queen of Sheba met King Solomon 3,000 years ago.

One of the most beautiful streets in Jerusalem, in the heart of the city, is a street called Ethiopia Street, and in my youth, I would pass, I would walk past the majestic Ethiopian church on it. And I felt always that it was just one expression of the enduring bonds between our peoples – bonds of history, bonds of values, and increasingly bonds of interests.

Our historical bond continued from the Solomonic era through the rise of Christianity to this day. Our values, I think the bonds of history gave rise to the bonds of values. The birth of the Jewish people is interwoven with the birth of our freedom, the story of the exodus. We were brought from slavery to freedom to our land, the land of Israel.

You in Ethiopia, you fought for your freedom. You maintain your freedom throughout the centuries. For millennia, your nation has proudly fought for and maintained its independence. We respect you for it. We admire you for it. You resisted foreign rule and live as a free people in your ancestral homeland. And we too live as a free and independent people in our ancestral homeland. The struggle for freedom unites our two nations, as does the second value we share, which is nation-building.

Our return to the land of Israel was just the beginning. We then needed to build our state, a dynamic state, a powerful state. We recognized early on that the diversity of our citizens would be a source of great bonding. Today we draw upon the skills and wisdom of all our citizens – Arabs, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Druze and Jews from Ethiopia. Thousands of Ethiopian Jews serve in our army, participate in our politics, take part in our economy, in our culture. They help enrich Israeli society every day and in every way. They act as a human bridge between our two peoples.

On the way here, I spoke to two young flight attendants of Ethiopian descent. They are proud to be Israelis and they’re proud of their Ethiopian heritage. And one of them is seeing her family here for the first time in seven years. What excitement! It’s the excitement we all feel in coming here and rekindling our friendship.

EVELYN GORDON: CURBING SETTLEMENTS IS ALL COST NO GAIN

On Monday, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon predictably assailed
Israel’s announced decision to build 800 new apartments in Ma’aleh
Adumim and eastern Jerusalem. He noted that just four days earlier,
the Middle East Quartet (i.e. the U.S., EU, UN and Russia) had issued
a report deeming settlement construction an obstacle to peace. What
Ban didn’t mention is that just a few days before that report came
out, a leading Israeli leftist expert on the settlements published a
comprehensive rebuttal of this claim, providing facts and figures
showing that the settlements effectively aren’t growing at all.

This juxtaposition begs an obvious question: If the world is going to
accuse Israel of “massive settlement construction” that “threatens the
two-state solution” when even leading leftists admit this is a lie,
why should Israel continue to pay the very real price exacted by
freezing settlement construction?

Shaul Arieli, who published the rebuttal in Haaretz last week, is
hardly an apologist for the settlements. Since retiring from the army
as a colonel in 2001, he has become a prominent peace activist. He

helped produce the Geneva Initiative, a nongovernmental template for
an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. He’s on the board of the
Council for Peace and Security, a group of former security officials
that advocates for a peace deal. He has been involved in numerous
legal cases challenging the West Bank security fence. He gives
lectures and tours on the feasibility of a peace agreement, and he’s
considered a leading expert on demarcating a future
Israeli-Palestinian border.

US-Israel ties and the next US president :Yoram Ettinger

The long-term trends of US-Israel relations do not hinge solely/mostly on US presidents, as has been documented since Israel’s establishment in 1948, and especially since the early 1980s, when – in spite of systematic presidential pressure on Israel – bilateral industrial, commercial, scientific, technological, agricultural, homeland security and defense cooperation have surged beyond expectations.

For instance, President Truman pressured Prime Minister Ben Gurion to end the “occupation” of West Jerusalem and parts of the Negev and Galilee; President Johnson pressured Prime Minister Eshkol to refrain from preempting the concerted Arab attack, reuniting Jerusalem and building in “occupied areas”; President Nixon pressured Prime Minister Golda Meir to end “occupation” and refrain from building in East Jerusalem; President Carter pressured Prime Minister Begin to focus on withdrawal from Judea & Samaria, rather than on peace with Egypt; President Reagan pressured Prime Minister Begin to rescind the application of Israeli law to the Golan Heights and end the hot-pursuit of the PLO in Lebanon; President Bush pressured Prime Minister Shamir to recognize the PLO and refrain from construction in Judea & Samaria.

But, notwithstanding presidential pressure – which entailed arms-embargos, suspended deliveries of advanced military systems, denial of loan guarantees and brutal condemnations – Israel’s role as America’s Major Non-NATO Ally and the most effective and unconditional geo-strategic ally has catapulted to unprecedented levels.

The assumption that US-Israel relations are shaped from the top down, and determined by US presidents and “elites,” constitutes a slap in the face of the US democracy, which highlights the American constituent as its chief axis, emitting the thundering battle cry, which no elected official can afford to ignore: “we shall remember in November!” According to the annual February Gallup poll of country-favorability – despite the tension between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu and the ongoing criticism by the Department of State (since 1948!) and the “elite” US media and academia – Israel ranks systematically among the most favorable countries, enjoying the support of 71% of the US constituency, compared with the Palestinian Authority’s 19%.

Data: White unarmed men more likely to be killed by police than blacks BY Martin Barillas

A protest was launched today by Black Lives Matter near the White House, where demonstrators said they were “fed up” with reports over the killings of blacks by police. Members of the black caucus of the House of Representatives are to meet with FBI Director James Comey to discuss the deaths of two black men — Philandro Castile and Alton Sterling — at the hands of police in Minnesota and Louisiana, respectively.

However, the deaths of whites at the hands of police receive much less attention, even in cases where the circumstances of the deaths are controversial. Examples include the death of Gilbert Collar (18), a white student at the University of South Alabama. Collar was naked and under the influence of drugs when he was shot to death by Trevis Austin, a black police officer.

Austin was cleared of the deed in 2012 by a Mobile County grand jury. Little attention was focused on the case outside of Alabama. Collar’s family filed a federal lawsuit against the police that is ongoing.

A study published last week by The Washington Post offers significant details about police shootings:

White officers shooting unarmed black men amounted to less than 4 percent of fatal police shootings.

In about 75 percent of those incidents, police were under defending themselves or civilians.

Most of those killed were wielding weapons, suicidal or mentally disturbed, or ran when ordered to stop.

Nearly a third of police shootings involved car chases that began with a minor traffic stop.

Writing in the New York Post today, Michael Walsh wrote “The Myth of the Killer Cop Epidemic,” and disputed what he called the widespread narrative of “homicidal goon” cops run amok in black neighborhoods. This narrative, Walsh wrote, “ignores the fact that black violent-crime rates are far higher than those of whites. According to the Department of Justice, blacks committed 52.5 percent of the murders in America from 1980 to 2008, when they represented 12.6 percent of the population.”

Regarding a December 2015 study by the Washington Post on police shootings, he noted that of the 965 person killed by police that year, only 90 were unarmed, and the majority of those were white. He also noted the shocking reality of murder in President Barack Obama’s hometown. Walsh wrote: “The worst neighborhoods in Chicago — say, West Garfield Park, where gangs run rampant — have a higher murder rate (116.7 per 100,000) than world murder capitals like Honduras (90.4). But no, best not to mention. That only distracts from the real problem — the cops trying to stop it.”

After Dallas, Leadership The demonization of law enforcement will lead to more violence. Jason Riley

“Instead, what people hear most of the time from groups like Black Lives Matter or Al Sharpton is inflammatory rhetoric that distorts reality and indiscriminately demonizes the police. Showing some awareness Thursday of this lopsided public perception, Mr. Obama said it is possible to express support for the police “while also saying there are problems across our criminal justice system.” Mr. Obama’s attempt at balance might have more resonance if once he said Black Lives Matter’s view of American justice is wrong.”

It was only two years ago, in the summer of 2014, that the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner in New York’s Staten Island made it clear that tensions were rising dangerously between the police and the urban neighborhoods they patrol. It hasn’t stopped.

That December, two policemen were assassinated on a Brooklyn street. The following April brought the Baltimore riot and the Freddie Gray case.

Now Dallas.

Mayor Mike Rawlings said a lone shooter killed five Dallas police officers and wounded seven others in an ambush attack carried out during a march, which was protesting the shootings this week of black men in Louisiana and Missouri by police offers.

Dallas Police Chief David Brown described the words of one suspect, Micah Xavier Johnson, before he was blown up by a police robot bomb: “The suspect said he was upset about Black Lives Matter. He said he was upset about the recent police shootings. The suspect said he was upset at white people. The suspect stated he wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.”
***

America today has the feel of a country flirting dangerously with the 1960s. Back then, disruptions to civic and social order overwhelmed America’s political leadership, which found itself constantly behind the curve of events, on defense. We aren’t there yet, but a familiar deficit of political leadership exists today as social tensions rise.

In the 1960s and ’70s, various individuals and groups said that police brutality against black people justified a violent response. They included Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army. The Black Panthers famously coined the phrase, “off the pigs.”

Violence followed. Some of it consisted of ambush attacks or shootouts between police and group members. One of the most dramatic events, in January 1972, was the late-night gunning down of two New York City cops by three assailants on Manhattan’s lower east side.

Nothing then, however, reached the scale of the sniper attack in Dallas this week. Dallas represents an historically unprecedented escalation of anti-police violence.

President Obama entered office with the belief that significant and persistent racial inequities existed in American life, a matter he has raised frequently in public appearances. He did so again Thursday while in Warsaw, after the shootings in Louisiana and Missouri.

He said the two deaths “are symptomatic of a broader set of racial disparities that exist in our criminal justice system.” He then cited several statistical studies “to try to put in context why emotions are so raw around these issues.” But he added, “To be concerned about these issues is not to be against law enforcement.”

We don’t gainsay Mr. Obama’s sincerity, and racial disparities exist, but one may ask: Why on Friday, after the Dallas murders, did the city’s police chief, who is black, wonder out loud about support for people on law-enforcement’s front line? “We don’t feel much support most days,” Chief Brown said. “Let’s not make today most days.”

If Chief Brown and many like him in American law enforcement don’t think they get much support, it is because they don’t—until after the cops are dead. Then, as always, come the official condolences. CONTINUE AT SITE

James Comey: Lost in The Kultursmog Jeffrey Lord

The FBI and the “Liberal understanding of events ratified as a matter of morals and etiquette.”

So. The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation has now told the American people the following, as reported here at Fox News, bold print supplied:

Comey testifies Clinton email claims ‘not true’ at heated Hill hearing

FBI Director James Comey testified Thursday that Hillary Clinton’s claims — some made under oath — about her use of a private email server were “not true,” fueling Republican questions about whether in doing so she committed a felony.

In a wide-ranging appearance before the House oversight committee, Comey also said Clinton’s email practices put America’s secrets at risk and her actions constituted the “definition of carelessness.”

At the same time, Comey staunchly defended the bureau’s decision not to pursue charges. He also said, “We have no basis to conclude that [Clinton] lied to the FBI.”

Yet he acknowledged that lying under oath is a felony, as some Republicans point to statements she made last October before the House Benghazi committee — and plan to request an investigation. At that hearing, Clinton had claimed that nothing she sent or received was marked classified.

The always perceptive Andrew McCarthy, the Comey friend and former Assistant US Attorney for the Southern District of New York and the man who prosecuted the 1993 World Trade Center mastermind the Blind Sheik — had this to say of Comey’s decision over at the Breitbart News Daily SiriusXM to host Stephen K. Bannon:

“I thought the case [Comey] laid out was as bulletproof as it gets. And it seemed to me when he got all the way down the field, he moved the goalposts. So he added elements that the government doesn’t have to prove under the statute as Congress has written it in order to shrink from recommending that charges be brought. To my mind, that’s difficult to square on a lot of levels.”

DAVID GOLDMAN: A REVIEW OF “HUMAN NATURE &JEWISH THOUGHT: JEWDAISM’S CASE FOR WHY PERSONS MATTER” BY ALAN MITTLEMAN

Help, I’m a Prisoner in a Brain Lab

Alan Mittleman’s new study of Jewish philosophy ‘boils Bible stories and brain science into the message that there’s something holy in everything and everyone’—but can reason and faith coexist?

Most educated people hold radically incompatible views about humankind and nature. They believe that the brain is a mechanism governed by the laws of physics, and that not long from now brain scientists will give a complete account of human consciousness. They also believe that machines will be able to think and that everyone will have meaningful conversations with robots, not just the nerds who ask rude questions of Siri. They believe, in short, that we are the objects of deterministic physical systems akin to machines themselves, but that we can design our identities to suit our whim, down to and including our gender.

The majority of educated people embrace mutually exclusive schools of thought: a vulgar sort of 19th-century determinism on one hand, and the existentialism of Camus and Sartre on the other. It does not occur to them that their views about the mind and the human person are illogical because they do not care about logical consistency, either. Not only do they believe that everyone has their own truth, they believe everyone has a collection of different truths to be applied when convenient.

This state of affairs poses a special sort of problem for the philosopher who wants to present Jewish concepts to a broad audience—which is to say, a mainly secular one. One cannot argue from authority, for the secular audience admits of none, and one cannot argue for logical consistency, because most people do not know what it is, and would abhor it if they did.

Nonetheless, almost everyone has some kind feeling for the sacred, although few associate this feeling to a personal God. That is the soft target at which Alan Mittleman aims in his book Human Nature & Jewish Thought: Judaism’s Case for Why Persons Matter. Mittleman, a professor of philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, boils Bible stories and brain science into the message that there’s something holy in everything and everyone. He writes: “The sacred is not an ontological add-on to the natural world. It is the capacity of that world, as it has emerged in human beings, to turn toward, to attend to, what is highest,” whatever or whomever that might be.

***

The notion that the sacred is immanent is a popular view nowadays, but it is not a particularly Jewish one. To be sure, it was put forward by the 17th-century philosopher Benedict Spinoza, who pops up frequently in Mittleman’s account. Spinoza was expelled by his congregation and severed his ties to the Jewish world; the question of whether he should be regarded as Jewish is poignant and difficult. Mittleman avoids the difficulty altogether. Here and at other key points in his argument Mittleman seems averse to conflict. He presents controversial assertions in sharp conflict with traditional Jewish thinking as if they were self-evident and then changes the subject without bothering to defend it.

A Manufactured Divide Ends In, ‘I Want to Kill White People’ By Frank Salvato

The racial divide in this country, as it exists today, is completely manufactured. It is manufactured by the political and activist class, and for reasons symbiotic to one another.

Politicians need to divide our nation so as to pit demographic against demographic; in order to create political party “battle lines.” This is how they create an “us against them” scenario. True Statesmen and public servants seek to better the nation in ways that are good for all of the population, not just a sympathetic demographic. That does not exist in our country today. True government of and for the people is dead.

Activists – mostly products of the victimhood and grievance class – need to divide to define special interest demographics, again to pit “us against them.” It is how they attain power and influence, as well as wealth for their “movements.” This is serious wealth. One need only look at the personal trappings of Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton to understand this.

Are there bad cops? Yes. Are there good cops that make bad decisions? Yes. But these are anomalies, not the status quote as the fraudulent #BlackLiveMatter movement, race-baiters and the Obama Administration would have you believe.

As a former first-responder I can tell you that even in the most remote locations, each day a man or woman puts on a badge to go to work, they simply want to do their jobs and come home to their families and friends. There is no other agenda than that. It is a goal. And sometimes, as in Dallas, that goal goes unachieved.

The manufactured racial divide now instituted in our nation is starting to take lives; it is fomenting in acts of domestic terrorism. At this point, the militants taking the shots are Black militants. They are targeting law enforcement and the first-responder community. It is perverted.

The fear among the situationally aware is that other intellectually stunted or militantly activist people and/or organizations that are not Black will be moved to retaliate. Many who are of the mind that a “race war” was by design; conceived and facilitated by Progressives attempting to maintain power through the chaos of “national emergency” will assume vindication at this possibility.

But this fear can only become a reality if thinking Americans – which are the overwhelming majority of our people – abandon the color blind society that we created for ourselves through the pain and growth of the 1960s and 1970s. If we do not give into the divisiveness of fear, they cannot achieve their goal of dividing America for purposes of maintaining power and fundamental transformation.

Lenin: Crush, Smash the Police by Diana West

In The State and Revolution, V. I. Lenin elaborates on Marx’s demonic ravings about a violent revolution to create a state of “armed workers” that will itself “begin to wither away.” Madness. Beginning with the first Bolshevik regime in the Soviet Union under Lenin, all such revolutions have only created monstrous dictatorships, which, far from withering away, have slaughtered millions and millions of their own and other peoples all over Planet Earth.

Did five more die in Dallas last night?

Lenin saw police as the front line of the enemy — the enemy, of course, being existing society, which had to be destroyed.

…at a certain stage in the development of democracy, it first welds together the class that wages a revolutionary struggle against capitalism — the proletariat — and enables it to crush, smash to smithereens, wipe off the face of the earth the bourgeois, even the republican-bourgeois, state machine — the standing army, the police and the bureaucracy — and to substitute for it a more democratic state machine, but a state machine nevertheless, in the shape of the armed masses of workers who develop into a militia in which the entire population takes part.

In “What Is To Be Done?” Lenin set forth the strategy:…the Social-Democrat’s [Communist’s] ideal should not be the trade union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects; who is able to generalise all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation; who is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat.

A tribune of the people who is able to generalize all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence …. Sounds like the Black Panthers back in the 1960s, and the Communist Party USA in the Daily Worker, The People’s World, and the like. Today, it sounds like Black Lives Matter. It also sounds like President Obama, who, from the very start of his administration, has reacted and “taken advantage of every event,” as Lenin put it, to “generalize … and produce a single picture of police violence.” This has created revolutionary pressures inside Obama’s Justice Department. Last night, revolutionary violence on the streets of Dallas took the lives of five police officers.