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November 2016

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Leadership and National Unity By Herbert London

By on November 28th, 2016

President, London Center for Policy Research

The recent American election raised a host of hypotheses about how to make America great again, to quote President Elect Trump. What it suggests is what made America great in the first place. Clearly America is based on a Constitution and Bill of Rights that give and constrain simultaneously in a symphony of Judeo Christian beliefs. The free market opened avenues of wealth and opportunity. Most significantly, the nation was blessed with great leaders from Washington to Reagan.

Unfortunately, much of the past is gone and unlikely to be reclaimed. The ruling class is fraught with corruption – the Clinton Foundation a classic example. Leaders like Biden and the Kennedys cheated on tests without remorse. Churches have embraced the Playboy life. Law is relative and administrative rulings rigid. How do you discover a new ruling class when the precedents of the past put the succeeding generations on the pathway to power?

Moreover, how does one govern a nation when half the population is regarded as deplorable and irredeemable and half is comprised of crybabies? Clearly the nation needs leaders of the kind we were blessed to have in the past. There is, of course, the danger of romanticizing a past that didn’t exist. Andrew Jackson might have committed homicide before being elected president. General Omar Bradley called his colleague Douglas Mac Arthur “primitive” for his comments during the Korean War. Richard Nixon was described by his detractors as a “psychopath.” Since George Washington, none of our presidents were universally admired.

Yet there were leaders who transcended the limits of office. George Marshall was more than a Secretary of State and a Secretary of Defense, he was a symbol of American strength and generosity. Wallace Stevens, the poet, worked as an executive for an insurance company, but wrote brilliant poetry in a cocoon of quiet dignity which served as a model of civic conduct. Harry Truman was a flawed personality in many ways including, but not restricted to, his association with the Prendergast machine in Kansas City. He was a conventional New Deal Democrat who hardly stood out as a legislative leader in the Senate. However, when he inherited the presidency, he was obliged to make some of the toughest decisions in the twentieth century. He made them with firmness and confidence. When he retired from office, his wife met him outside the White House, and without fanfare or secret service personnel, they drove off to the family home in Independence Missouri. Not everyone loved Truman, but he was a man who rose above his station.

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NEWS ITEM FROM 1938….PAST AS PROLOGUE?

By on November 28th, 2016

From my friend Andy Bostom…..

New York Timesman Arthur Krock provided the following unusually candid assessment of FDR/Obama statist rule, circa April, 1938 (“Congress Discovers Its Own Backbone,” Arthur Krock, April 10, 1938 The New York Times).

It is, of course, entirely fitting and proper, wholly in keeping with our form of government, that the President [FDR] should regularly discuss with the leaders of the Legislature the affairs of the nation. But the remarkable thing about these meetings is that they were virtually forced upon Mr. Roosevelt. He did not want them. He prefers the system he followed from March, 1933, until last January [1938]. Under its workings, the President decided what he wanted to do administratively, and did it, letting the leaders of Congress read about it in the newspapers. He also decided what he wanted to do legislatively, had a bill prepared to carry out the ideas, and sent it ready-made to Congress to be signed on the dotted line.

Often his leaders introduced the measure without reading it. The late Senator [Joseph Taylor] Robinson “introduced” a copy of the morning paper during the bank crisis of 1933 because the bill it was supposed to be was not fully drafted. Always the rank and file of Congress knew nothing of a bill’s contents until they read them in the newspapers. Sometimes they did not trouble to do that, voting “aye” on faith.

Clearly, now lame duck POTUS Obama repeated FDR’s machinations in forcing passage of the disastrous, liberty-crushing, Orwellian-dubbed “Affordable Care Act.” Good riddance—one fervently wishes—to yet another failed iteration of totalitarian “good governance.” Andrew Bostom

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MY SAY: KRISTALLNACHT- NOVEMBER 9, 1938

By on November 28th, 2016

November 9th, 2016 I was celebrating the election of Donald Trump…and the rejection of Hillary Clinton. While wading through the flood of jubilant national news I overlooked the anniversary of Kristallnacht 1938. As Arab arson ignites in Israel terrorizing civilians and wreaking despair, I think now of Kristallnacht which was the tinder that ignited a war against the Jewish people in which one of every three Jews in the world was killed……rsk
Here is a column from November 9, 2015 published in the Wall Street Journal.
http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2015/11/09/from-kristallnacht-to-the-kindertransport-to-finally-america-a-group-of-berliners-said-a-stain-on-the-street-was-a-jews-blood-even-now-i-can-hear-their-laughter-by-john-h-lang/

From Kristallnacht to the Kindertransport to, Finally, America A group of Berliners said a stain on the street was a Jew’s blood. Even now I can hear their laughter.By John H. Lang

http://www.wsj.com/articles/from-kristallnacht-to-the-kindertransport-to-finally-america-1447019141

Monday, Nov. 9, marks the anniversary of Kristallnacht in 1938, when Nazi hordes ran wild throughout Berlin, as well as in other German cities. Jewish houses of worship were desecrated and then set afire. Thousands of Jews were rounded up, some beaten to death, others sent to concentration camps. Jewish-owned businesses and homes were looted.

I will never forget seeing the unimaginable horror of the night and the following day 77 years ago. By luck, my parents were not in Berlin. I was at my grandmother’s. Through the window I could see my beautiful synagogue engulfed in flames as desperate screams rose from the street below. Each knock on our apartment door brought terror, followed by incredible relief. By some miracle, two of my uncles made it to my grandmother’s seeking safety from the savagery of this night.

The next morning as I wandered through my neighborhood, I saw shards of plate glass everywhere, as every Jewish-owned shop had been looted and painted with vile Jew-hating slogans. Uniformed Nazis and their sympathizers were having fun as they surveyed their brutality. One group looked at a large stain on the street that was said to be the blood of a Jew. Even now I can hear their laughter.

At that moment, I was an 8-year-old who had suddenly turned 18. My every thought turned to survival. When my parents returned, I told my father that I would never live to see my ninth birthday. He took my hand and told me that he would always protect me and that nothing would happen to our family—because he had been a decorated front-line soldier during the 1914-18 World War.

Though reports of Kristallnacht—called the night of broken glass—were circulated world-wide, there was no forceful reaction by the world powers, although the U.S. ambassador to Berlin was recalled to Washington for consultations. In retrospect this became a rehearsal for the Holocaust to come. Although my parents already had applied to immigrate to the United States, they were informed by the U.S. Embassy in Berlin that our quota number would not be reached for several years. There was no escape.

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Dispatches from the Campus War Against Israel & Jews A new book exposes the academic perpetration of an old hatred. Mark Tapson

By on November 28th, 2016

The new book Dispatches from the Campus War Against Israel & Jews by Richard Cravatts, published by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, expertly explores and explains this alarming phenomenon. He covers the ideological roots of academic Jew-hatred, the BDS movement, Students for Justice in Palestine, the demonization of Israel, the “altruistic evil” of social justice, and more.

Dr. Richard Cravatts has written over 400 articles and book chapters on a wide range of topics from campus anti-Semitism and free speech to real estate and social policy in such publications as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, and Chicago Tribune,. He is the author of Genocidal Liberalism: The University’s War Against Israel & Jews. He is a past-president of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and a board member of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under the Law, and the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism.

I reached out to Dr. Cravatts with some questions about his important new book.

Mark Tapson: Can you explain how two influential buzzwords of academia – diversity and multiculturalism – have contributed to the ramping up of anti-Israelism on campus?

Richard Cravatts: Thanks so much for the opportunity to speak with you and your readers.

The desire to achieve diversity on campuses has seen administrations bending over backward to accommodate the sensitivities of minorities and perceived victims of the majority culture—usually at the expense of fairness and rationality. And multiculturalism has brought with it a type of moral relativism in which every country or victim group is equal, regardless of what vagaries, weaknesses, or fundamental evil may underpin its social structure.

Thus, the decades-old emphasis on bringing multiculturalism to campuses has meant that faculty as well as students have been steeped in a worldview that refuses to demarcate any differences between a democratic state struggling to protect itself (such as Israel) and aggressive, genocidal foes who wish to destroy it with their unending assaults (such as the Palestinians, Hamas, and Hezbollah).

Thus, this inclination to worship multiculturalism forces liberals to make excuses for those cultures that have obvious, often irredeemable, moral defects, such as the Islamist foes who currently threaten Israel and the West.

The sensitivity over diversity has regularly led to charge of racism against Israel, and of the many libels from the world community against Israel, perhaps none has gained such traction on campuses as the accusation that the Jewish state now practices apartheid in its treatment of the Palestinian Arabs. The same left-leaning activists from universities who carried the banner against the South African regime have now raised that same banner—with the same accusatory language—and superimposed on Israel that it is yet another apartheid regime oppressing Third World, “colored” victims.

The charge of apartheid is valuable to Israel’s detractors, for it both devalues the nation by accusing it of perpetuating what is to the left the greatest crime—racism—in the form of apartheid, while simultaneously absolving Arabs of responsibility for the onslaught of terror they continue to inflict on Israel, another unfortunate by-product of worshipping diversity and multiculturalism.

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Israel in Flames An arson wave reveals stark truths about a country and its neighbors. P. David Hornik

By on November 28th, 2016

From Tuesday to Sunday in Israel, over 30,000 acres of natural forests and brush were destroyed in wildfires. The fires also spread to, or were ignited in, cities, towns, and villages. About 180 people were injured, some moderately or seriously.

Sixty thousand residents of Haifa, Israel’s third largest city, had to be evacuated on Thursday as about a dozen neighborhoods were threatened by fire. Around 500 homes in the city were reported to be completely destroyed, with over 1700 Haifa residents unable to return to their homes.

There were also raging fires in the coastal town of Zikhron Yaakov, the Jerusalem area, small West Bank communities, and others.

As a rescue official in the West Bank community of Neve Tzuf described it:

When we entered the town, it looked like a bomb had gone off…. A two-storey building was burning and the one behind it caught fire in a domino effect. Gas tanks were blowing up and all you could see everywhere you looked was fire—giant balls of fire skipping from building to building, to the cars, eating up everything and destroying it. I haven’t seen anything like that in a long time….

By the weekend, security forces had reportedly arrested about 40 people suspected of arson or incitement to arson. Most were Israeli Arabs; a smaller number were West Bank Palestinians.

Although Israeli authorities claimed that a sizable proportion of the fires had been caused by weather conditions of dryness and strong winds, the Jerusalem Post noted that “there were few reports of fires in Jordan, the West Bank or the Gaza Strip, which are subject to the same weather conditions.”

The logical inference is that the number of arson cases was higher than the authorities—perhaps because of an inability to catch all the perpetrators—were acknowledging.

Israeli authorities also claimed that the arsonists were mostly “lone wolf” Palestinian youths, similar to those who engaged in a wave of stabbing and car-ramming attacks that began over a year ago.

Veteran Israeli columnist Dan Margalit, however, cast doubt on the lone-wolf assumption. As he pointed out:

organizing arson requires more time and planning than an individual’s spontaneous decision to take a knife from his kitchen and set out to murder; and…more than one terrorist takes part in the act and the materials are not as readily available.

If they managed to get organized so quickly that it was only a matter of hours between incidents, we must suspect, or at least look into, the possibility that this may have been prepared in advance with briefings from a central official….

Although, as of Sunday evening, there were no reports of a “guiding hand” behind the arsons, it was certainly too soon to rule out the possibility.

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Instead of Apologizing (1911) Vladimir Jabotinsky Translated (with explanatory notes in square brackets) by Conor Daly and Brian Horowitz. See note please

By on November 28th, 2016

Please take the time out to learn about the greatest Zionist and scholar Zeev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky….For starters check out David Isaac’s superb series :

www.zionism.org Online now: Jabotinsky Part 3: Revisionism or log in at www.zionism101.org In “Jabotinsky Part 3: Revisionism” Jabotinsky founds the Revisionist party to press the World Zionist Organization to fight harder for Jewish claims in Palestine. After a long, fruitless struggle within the Zionist establishment, Jabotinsky decides to go his own way. He creates the New Zionist Organization.

Taking a long, hard look at the current penchant for accusations of ritual murder, one is left with a most oppressive feeling—a feeling that any impressionable individual will find hard to bear. Just think about it: these things are being said about us—about me, about you, about your mother! So whenever we Jews speak with a Gentile, we must remain aware, every one of us, that our interlocutor may at that very moment be cowering to himself and thinking, “How do I know that you, too, haven’t been tippling from the glass of ritual murder?” Just try and get your head around that! I mean, when it comes down to it, this is even worse than everything else we have to put up with in this prison of a country.

I can imagine that an impressionable person—if he reflects on this accusation and all of its ramifications—may be driven mad with resentment and despair, or at least will need to sob and tear his hair out. A person less fainthearted but still naïve will need to run outside and grab passersby by their coattails and try to prove to them, until his throat is hoarse, that this is slander and that we are not guilty of anything of the sort.

But in the end someone who has been blind from birth (and we have very many people like that) will take a different course of action. He will console himself with the usual soothing phrases: that no one really believes in such absurdities; that even those making the accusations do not themselves believe them; that the blood libel is merely a political tactic; that the entire sensible segment of the Christian community (which naturally constitutes its majority) will never listen to such slander, and is even scandalized by it—in a word, that everything is just fine, and that [in the words of General Fyodor Radetsky after having overcome a Turkish onslaught] “all is calm on Shipka Pass.”

I am not one of those impressionable people who cry out in amazement, nor am I one of those naïve people who make excuses, nor one of those blind-from-birth folks who cannot see what is happening right under their noses. I must dissociate myself most emphatically from the last category. It is all very fine and convenient to imagine that your enemies are mere charlatans and fraudsters, but in the long run this kind of oversimplified explanation of an enemy’s psychology always leads to the severest outcomes. By no means are all of our enemies dimwits, and by no means are all of them liars. I strongly advise my coreligionists not to delude themselves on that score.

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No Apologies: How to Respond to Slander of Israel and Jews Cease assuming the posture of defendants, the great Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky urged his fellow Jews; we have nothing to apologize for.

By on November 28th, 2016

OBSERVATION
VLADIMIR JABOTINSKY, BRIAN HOROWITZ AND CONOR DALY

Introduction

Slanders of Israel and Jews are rife on today’s university campuses, in the media, and from the rostrums of international institutions. How to respond? Many try to reason with their accusers on the grounds of countervailing facts and figures. Facing a similar situation over a century ago, a great Zionist leader cautioned otherwise. Rather than assuming the posture of a defendant trying vainly to win the good will of one’s antagonist, it was far better to carry the battle to the other side.

The occasion was this. On July 21, 1911, police in Kiev arrested Mendel Beilis, a Jewish factory foreman, for the murder of an eleven-year-old Christian boy named Andrei Yushchinsky who had been found dead four months earlier. Beilis was charged with having killed the boy in order to use his blood to bake matzah, a practice allegedly required by Jewish tradition. Such libels, especially common in medieval Europe, had largely gone out of fashion by the 20th century—but not completely so.

The trial lasted nearly two years, with the press playing a major role in turning the “Beilis affair” into a cause célèbre that attracted global attention. The defense, led by a brilliant Jewish lawyer named Osip Gruzenberg, included prominent Russian liberals, both Jewish and Gentile. On the prosecution’s side, the case against Beilis was aided from without by propagandists—some likely hired by the government, others connected with the monarchist, anti-Semitic organization known as the Black Hundreds—who spread anti-Semitic canards among the Russian populace.

In 1913, the trial came to an end as the jury, made up of uneducated Ukrainians, delivered a mixed verdict: Mendel Beilis was not guilty of ritual murder, but a ritual murder had indeed taken place. Beilis immigrated to the United States in 1921.

Historians havepersuasively argued that the accusations against Mendel Beilis were concocted by high-ranking Russian officials at the behest of Tsar Nicholas II, in an effort to divert public anger from the regime’s incompetence and onto a Jewish scapegoat. Indeed, for the tsar, Beilis’s acquittal was a major embarrassment both at home and internationally.

But the Beilis affair had many other repercussions as well, not least among Russian Jewish intellectuals. Vladimir Jabotinsky was one of them. Born in 1880, he had pursued a successful career as a Russian-language journalist, playwright, and literary critic. By 1903, however, the year of an infamous pogrom in Kishinev—itself sparked by similar accusations of child murder and evidently condoned and abetted by local officialdom—he had embraced Zionism and would quickly distinguish himself within the nascent movement as a powerful spokesman and leader.

Jabotinsky’s maturing ideas—especially about the need for Jewish self-defense and national self-respect—is amply evident in the article below, published in Russian in 1911. “Instead of an Apology,” presented below, reflects at once an important trend in Zionist thought and Jabotinsky’s own growing alienation from Russia. Still very much on display in the piece is his effortless command of the Russian language and Russian literary culture. At the same time, the underlying message is one of escape from his birthplace. Ultimately, Jews needed a homeland, and a state, of their own.

—Brian Horowitz

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Good Riddance Fidel The last of the Cold War Soviet stooges goes the way of his masters. Bruce Thornton

By on November 28th, 2016

To paraphrase the old VE jump-rope rhyme, “A-tisket, a-tasket, Castro’s in his casket.” The last of the Cold War Soviet stooges has gone the way of his communist masters.

Encomia from the usual useful idiots are lighting up the internet, but don’t mind them. Like tantrum-throwing college students and George Soros rent-a-protestors, they are a machine for producing Republican voters. The Dem-wits, on the other hand, should pay attention to the Cuban immigrants and expatriates celebrating in Miami. They might find there a clue to how they lost Florida and the whole government. Opening up trade, as their messiah Obama did, with a regime that pockets all the profits while it jails protestors, that gives workers eight cents of every starry-eyed tourist’s dollar, makes for bad optics. Canoodling with a brutal dictator who crushes dissent, persecutes homosexuals, excludes blacks from the government, abuses the church, monopolizes wealth, and tortures dissidents in his gulag is not the way to win American votes.

And discount the extravagant praise for Castro’s political genius. For all his Marxist-Leninist rhetoric and international fan-boys, Castro was a typical, but savvier, Latin American dictator––a cacique, caudillo, jefe, El Señor Presidente, El Gran Chingon, a glorified version of the General Mapache from The Wild Bunch. If not for the Cold War, he would long ago have met the same gruesome fate as those other strutting, bombastic oppressors. Only with billions of dollars in Soviet support and cash for overpriced sugar––and John Kennedy’s foreign policy bungling–– was he able to leverage being 90 miles from the U.S into a geopolitical significance far beyond his deserts, along the way almost igniting a nuclear war. He paid the Soviets back by letting them use his soldiers as imperialist mercenaries in Angola, Ethiopia, and Mozambique. After the USSR vanished like Trotsky from a May Day photo, oil and $18 billion in loans and grants from his fellow dictator Húgo Chavez, along with foreign investment from running-dog capitalists, kept Cuba from collapse. Castro repaid Húgo by skimming thousands of his doctors and other skilled professionals needed at home, and sending them to Venezuela.

More importantly, Castro, like many other Third-World communists or the PLO jihadists, was a genius at exploiting the romance of revolutionary violence and the radical chic endemic among Western bourgeois parlor pinks and caviar communists. For Europeans, Canadians, and a small number of Americans before Obama’s recent softening of travel restrictions, carefully orchestrated and surveilled tours of Cuba were like the hajj to Mecca for Western lefties. Like their political ancestors in the twenties and thirties gaping at the Soviet’s Potemkin economy, these rich, well-fed, politically free beneficiaries of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism ignored or rationalized away the poor, hungry, repressed Cubanos hidden behind the pastel-colored belle époque hotels and the restored ’57 Chevies.

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A Memo for Attorney General Jeff Sessions No vendettas — but Americans need to believe again that laws are not just for the little people. By Robert Delahunty & John Yoo

By on November 28th, 2016

President-elect Donald Trump and his attorney-general designate Jeff Sessions come to office seeking to restore public confidence in the fairness and impartiality of federal law enforcement. After eight years of Attorneys General Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, Americans have lost confidence in the Department of Justice. Recognizing this, Trump declared on November 21 that he had ordered his transition team to prepare executive orders to sign “on Day One to restore our laws and bring back our jobs.”

The most urgent matter that Attorney General Sessions will face is that of deciding the fate of FBI director James Comey. Comey was appointed in 2013 for a statutory term of ten years. In principle, however, he can be removed by the president at any time. President Bill Clinton removed FBI director William Sessions about halfway through his term on charges that Sessions had misused official resources. Although President Clinton discharged Sessions for cause, the statute creating the FBI director does not limit the grounds for termination, and we believe that the president’s constitutional authority of removal would allow him to fire Comey for any reason. Rather than firing the FBI director, however, it is more likely that the president would first request his resignation. We think that Director Comey should leave office for the good of the FBI and the nation.

Last July, on the basis of the information available at the time, we defended Comey’s decision to suspend the investigation of Hillary Clinton. Contrary to his apparent judgment that there was no probable case that crimes were committed, we argued that the country would be better served if the voters, rather than the criminal process, determined Clinton’s fitness to be president. But after Comey’s announcement, disturbing facts emerged that raised doubts about the integrity of his investigation into Clinton. Thereafter came Comey’s sudden changes of heart shortly before the election, first in re-opening, and then in closing, that investigation. Since the election, Clinton has squarely blamed Comey for her defeat.

In these circumstances, we think that Comey is too compromised to remain as FBI director. He may well have acted honestly, impartially, and conscientiously at every phase of the investigation. We do not question his integrity; his true motivations, whatever they may have been, will undoubtedly come to light in time. And he may have found himself in the position of chief prosecutor rather than chief investigator through no fault of his own, but because Bill Clinton’s meeting on the tarmac with Attorney General Loretta Lynch meant that she had to be disqualified from making the final judgment on whetheror not to prosecute Hillary Clinton.

Nonetheless, Comey’s three interventions in the election were, perhaps, key factors in the outcome. His initial choice to prematurely close the investigation — as well as reports that his aides have attempted to shut down inquiries into the Clinton Foundation — squarely thrust the FBI into partisan politics. His decisions have cost him the confidence of the half of the voters who supported Clinton. Many Trump voters have also come to mistrust him.

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DISPATCHES FROM TOM GROSS

By on November 28th, 2016

http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/index.html

HALF A MILLION CHILDREN ARE TRAPPED IN SYRIA, THE UN SAYS

The United Nations said on Saturday that the number of children trapped in besieged areas in Syria had doubled in less than a year to half a million.

The United Nations Children’s Fund, Unicef, said the children were among hundreds of thousands of civilians in 16 areas under siege (manly by the Assad regime and the Iranian-directed Hizbullah militia) across the country that had been “almost completely cut off from sustained humanitarian aid and basic services.”

The Obama administration and other democratic governments continue to do almost nothing to help them, not even to make aerial food and medicine drops.

ABBAS ORDERS PALESTINIAN FLAGS BE FLOWN AT HALF-MAST FOR FIDEL CASTRO

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas ordered all Palestinian flags be flown at half-mast for Fidel Castro, WAFA, the official news agency of the Palestinian Authority, reported.

http://english.wafa.ps/page.aspx?id=c0Le0Ta51734437821ac0Le0T

The Cuban revolutionary leader, Fidel Castro, died on Friday at the age of 90.

Castro enjoyed a close relationship with late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, and was an early supporter of “armed resistance” (i.e. terrorist attacks) against Israeli civilians.

“THE BBC REPORTS CASTRO’S DEATH MORE FAVORABLY THAN THATCHER’S”

See also:

Trudeau attacked worldwide for Castro statement: Politicians, journalists from America, Britain and elsewhere take to Twitter to decry Canadian prime minister’s glowing tribute to Cuban dictator.

Farewell to Cuba’s brutal Big Brother (Washington Post)

The UK’s Guido Fawkes blog also notes:

“The BBC are reporting Castro death more favorably than Thatcher’s. No use of the word ‘controversial’. No mention of the thousands summarily executed after the revolution. No mention that he demanded the USSR nuke the USA. No mention of the decades of impoverishment and human rights abuse. No mention of his secret police rounding up homosexuals and putting them in concentration camps. Castro gets a free pass on democratic norms – ‘his critics accused him of being a dictator’. Does the BBC think that is only an allegation? Particular congratulations to the BBC News Channel, who interviewed ‘Cuba expert’ Richard Gott, without mentioning he was a KGB agent of influence.”

(Tom Gross adds: The BBC have toned down their praise for Castro following widespread criticism.)

ISRAEL KILLS 4 ISIS-LINKED JIHADISTS IN FIRST CLASH WITH GROUP

The IDF killed four gunmen linked to the Islamic State on Sunday after they attacked Israeli forces in the Golan Heights.

The confrontation was the first of its kind between Israel and Islamic State-affiliated forces based in Syria.

The jihadists were riding in a vehicle with a machine gun mounted on its roof, when they attacked an Israeli patrol across the border. Many mortar shells have fallen inside Israel during the Syrian war, some of which may have been fired by these terrorist groups, but it is thought yesterday’s was the first deliberate attack on Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the IDF had “successfully repelled an attempted attack on the triangle of borders,” referring to the point where the borders of Israel, Syria and Jordan meet.

Israel has done its best to keep out of the five-year-old Syrian war, though Israeli doctors have treated over 1000 badly injured Syrians, including many children, who manage to reach the country’s borders and asked for help.

The Israeli government and Jewish charities have paid for the life-saving operations for Syrians in hospitals across northern Israel. Israeli authorities have also sent medical and other humanitarian aid across the border into Syria.

Israeli security experts said it was too early to say whether yesterday’s clash represented a change in strategy by Islamic State-affiliated forces, and that it may have been prompted by the need for a “propaganda victory” among their supporters in the Arab world at a time when Islamic State strongholds in Iraq and Syria were under attack.

DEATH TOLL IN NORTH SINAI ATTACK RISES TO 11

IS affiliate groups continue to be active across Israel’s southern border too, battling Egypt’s Sisi government for its rule over northern Sinai.

The Egypt Independent newspaper reports:

Death toll in North Sinai attack rises to 11
By Aswat Masriya
Egypt Independent
November 26, 2016

http://www.egyptindependent.com//news/death-toll-north-sinai-attack-rises-11

The death toll from an attack on a military checkpoint in North Sinai increased to 11 on Friday, Reuters reported, citing anonymous medical sources.

Three more bodies were found on Friday, bringing the death toll to 11 soldiers out of the checkpoint’s 31-strong force. Twelve soldiers were injured, six unarmed and the rest were missing.

Following the attack, eyewitnesses told Reuters that security forces set up several additional moving and static checkpoints in and around Arish city, where the attack took place, in search for the culprits.

FIRES BROUGHT UNDER CONTROL, BUT ENORMOUS DAMAGE REMAINS

After a five-day campaign in which thousands of Israeli troops aided the country’s firefighters, the wildfires raging across northern and central Israel have finally been brought under control.

While unusually hot, dry conditions and strong winds helped fan the flames, almost half of the fires are suspected of being arson.

Israeli police have so far arrested 18 Israeli Arabs and 6 West Bank Palestinian suspects, and also others who used social media to “incite arson.”

Some arsonists were spotted on security cameras lighting fires. The police say there is no sign of direct coordination between arsonists but they appear to have been inspired by a desire to cause harm to Jews.

However, many Israeli Arabs as well as Israeli Jews have been victims of the fires, seeing their homes and businesses, such as restaurants, burn down.

The Palestinian Authority (along with Jordan and Egypt) also sent firefighters to assist Israel.

Hundreds of Israelis were injured but no deaths were reported.

As I noted in 2012, a new Al Qaeda magazine described in detail how to start huge forest fires across America and other countries.

NETANYAHU THANKS ABBAS FOR SENDING FIREFIGHTERS

This is a press release:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this evening (Saturday, 26 November 2016), contacted Palestinian Authority Chairman Abu Mazen and thanked him for sending firefighters to assist in extinguishing the fires. The Prime Minister also appreciates the fact that Jews and Arabs alike opened their homes to those affected by the fires.

THE FIRES IN ISRAEL – IN PICTURES (THE GUARDIAN)

The Guardian, a newspaper which has been unsympathetic to Israel over many years, and its opposition to Zionism has occasionally spilled over into outright anti-Semitism (its former comment editor is now a chief advisor to the far-left British Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn), has been less hostile to Israel recently, as I noted in previous dispatches.

It published this photo-compilation of the fires Israel has been experiencing, which shows how deadly they have been.

U.S. FIREFIGHTERS FLY TO ISRAEL TO BATTLE BLAZES

Several readers wrote in response to my dispatch last Thursday morning (“Israel on fire: Russia, Greece and Turkey rush firefighting planes to help, as some Arabs celebrate”), to ask if the U.S. government had also offered to help douse Israel’s out-of-control fires.

Since I wrote that dispatch, Britain, France, Spain, Italy and Canada have also sent fire-fighting equipment. The Americans have done so privately after Israel made a commercial order for equipment. And individual American firefighters were quick to help.

Some 40 veteran U.S. firefighters boarded planes from as far away as Los Angeles and Dallas to travel to Israel to help.

The men, ranging in age from 30 to 60, are part of the “Emergency Volunteer Project,” a non-profit organization launched by Israel, the U.S. and others in 2009 to train and work with firefighters and other emergency personnel during extreme circumstances.

A senior American government official who subscribes to this list says he forwarded my previous dispatch (“Israel on fire: Russia, Greece and Turkey rush firefighting planes to help, as some Arabs celebrate”) to some Emirati government officials.

They replied that Dhahi Khalfan Tamim, who had tweeted “Israel banned the muezzin and caught on fire, Blessed be Allah,” is no longer Dubai’s security chief.

CNN APOLOGIZES FOR BANNER READING “IF JEWS ARE PEOPLE”

CNN has apologized following criticism after it ran an on-screen accompanying caption last week which read “If Jews are people.”

The offending phrase appeared during a discussion about America’s alt-right movement on CNN’s “The Lead” show.

CNN said the caption had been clumsily written by a production assistant and was meant to paraphrase the words of American white nationalist leader Richard Spencer who had said of Jews: “One wonders if these people are people at all, or instead soulless golem”.

The regular host of The Lead, Jake Tapper, who was on vacation on the day the caption appeared, also apologized, saying he was “horrified” and “furious” at the caption.

In his apology, the stand-in host of The Lead Jim Sciutto called Spencer’s remarks “hate-filled garbage.”

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