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January 2017

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A testament to Israeli engagement : Ruthie Blum

By on January 7th, 2017

A guilty verdict, coupled with a pardon, would be the perfect end to this horrible story.

On Wednesday, the verdict was issued in the trial of IDF infantry soldier Elor Azaria. The military court ruled that the 19-year-old medic, serving in the Shimshon Battalion of the Kfir Brigade, was guilty of manslaughter and unbecoming conduct, for his part in the March 24 killing of a knife-wielding Palestinian terrorist in the Tel Rumeida neighborhood of Hebron.

Due to the controversial nature of the trial, which from the outset was a political lightning rod, the verdict was not only broadcast live on all Israeli channels, but it was read aloud by the judge in its entirety. The many months’ worth of witness testimony and arguments from the prosecutors and defense attorneys boiled down to two main questions. The first was whether it was Azaria’s bullet that actually killed the subdued terrorist, whom he shot in the head. The second was whether Azaria’s action was warranted, or genuinely perceived as such by the soldier — who said he believed the terrorist was wearing a suicide belt under his jacket — causing him to make the kind of split-second judgment call required when facing a real-time enemy threat.

The reason that this particular case swept the country by storm had to do with the way it was handled from the minute that Azaria’s comrades came under attack at the height of the so-called “lone wolf intifada” — characterized by stabbings, car-rammings and, most recently, arson.

The left-wing foreign-funded NGO B’Tselem, which holds its own government responsible for terrorism against Israelis — on the grounds that Palestinian violence is an expression of justified frustration at their plight as an “occupied” people — was on the scene filming the event.

To counteract the group’s purposeful ambush to highlight IDF wrongdoing, particularly for international consumption — politicians and much of the public promptly came to Azaria’s defense. Many of us railed against the overly stringent rules of engagement that govern the Israeli military. The Hebrew term for the concept — “purity of arms” — says it all in a nutshell.

Meanwhile, members of the IDF top brass and the former defense minister made statements indicating that they had already decided that Azaria deserved to be punished. So, a case that should have been treated to a thorough internal investigation before it came to light was an immediate circus at which everyone had ring-side seats.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Good Morning America By Marilyn Penn

By on January 7th, 2017

Lyrica, Xeljanz, Latuda, Brilinta, Entyvio, Vedolizumab, Toujeo, Prevagen, Xarelto – these are but a sampling of the words I learned while watching television news between 6 and 7:30 a.m. Some, like Lyrica or Brilinta might be new baby names for girls; some might belong to bellicose monsters – Vedolizumab and Xarelto; others have a tentative connotation – prevagen. All carry warnings of severe side effects, some including possible death, for which final effect seems a more fitting adjective. I wondered who names these drugs and whether that is a discrete profession or the product of a staff party with too much alcohol. Are these names with their strange letter combinations the substitute for the unreadable handwriting all doctors previously used to exclude us from their special knowledge? In our digital-happy world where prescriptions must be wired instead of written by the doctor, we may soon no longer need the pharmacists who were trained to decipher those heiroglyphics. One can only wonder at how frequently the wrong medication was previously procured and whether or not that made any difference.

After all, medical protocol tends to reverse itself every decade or so. We now “know” that peanuts should be offered to babies as early in their infancy as six months. Of course you must be certain that your baby won’t go into anaphylactic shock by feeding them – I use that ungrammatical pronoun so as not to offend any infant who might have a gender preference different from their visible nether-parts – an egg and seeing what happens. Babies who die from eggs wil not do well with peanut butter either.

Back to the inscrutable and often unpronounceable names for drugs – my second theory is that their expense necessitates a name that is rare and exotic and never encountered before. None of has ever seen an actual entyvio so we can imagine that its obscurity implies difficulty to harvest or even create in a test tube, making its astronomical price tag more justified. If, for example, you have to send couriers to the steppes of Kalookistan on Mongolian horses to search for entyvio leaves, of course it will cost a lot more than a drug that has only five letters in its mediocre name – advil, for one. While it’s true that the lengthy phenobarbitol is still not overpriced, that illustrates the difference between polysyllabic words and completely unrecognizable ones. We can make out pheno, a common prefix, and there’s that friendly barbi at the end. Try parsing vedolizumab for anything familiar and you’ll get my point.

I am grateful that I don’t need to ask for any of these drugs out loud and in full disclosure, I have to add one more word that did appear in the morning time slot and was not related to big pharma – trivago. Though I would have guessed it was a misspelled acronymic cure for vertigo, it’s actually a website for checking comparative hotel prices. Well, at least you don’t need a prescription for it so it’s safe to just forget it until they come up with a more ingenious name that you might actually remember – like hotelprice.com.

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HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

MICHAEL CUTLER MOMENT: PRESIDENT TRUMP’S IMMIGRATION/JIHAD CHALLENGE

By on January 7th, 2017

This special edition of the Glazov Gang presents The Michael Cutler Moment with Michael Cutler, a former Senior INS Special Agent.

Michael discusses President Trump’s Immigration/Jihad Challenge,as he looks forward to the new president putting security back into the Department of Homeland Security.

Don’t miss it!

And make sure to watch Ingrid Carlqvist focus on How Sweden Became Absurdistan, as she shares her fear that her country could become the first Sharia state in Europe:http://jamieglazov.com/2017/01/06/michael-cutler-moment-president-trumps-immigrationjihad-challenge/

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

ALEC GROBMAN: THE TWO-STATE SOLUTION-WISHFUL THINKING DIVOTCED FROM REALITY

By on January 7th, 2017

From the time of the British Mandate in Palestine (September 29, 1922 to November 29, 1947) to the present, numerous British, American and European government commissions and official emissaries have come to the region to investigate the underlying causes of the Palestinian Arab/Israeli dispute. Academics and journalists have added their own analyses.

In the absence of a solution, a myriad of myths continue to proliferate about the conflict. US Secretary of State John Kerry joins the pantheon of American diplomats, academics and journalists who appear either ignorant of why the dispute remains intractable, or are blinded by their contempt for Israel or their own biases. Many seem psychologically incapable of accepting the reality that Palestinian Arabs refuse to accept Israel’s right to exist, and that until they do so, the war against the Jews will continue.
Two Basic Questions Not Addressed

Some of these “experts” are so “obsessively focused” on the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria as “obstacles to peace,” they fail to ask two fundamental questions: Do the Arabs want a two-state solution? Is establishing a separate Arab state in the best interests of Israel and the West?

For many of Israel’s enemies and detractors, even the suggestion of abandoning this formula is proof that Israel does not want peace. The assertion that once the matter of the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria is resolved, a peaceful resolution of the conflict will be achieved, is fallacious. There is no mention of the homicide bombers; pervasive incitement in the schools, mosques and social media; attempts to deny Jewish connection to the land of Israel; the Jewish refugees expelled from Arab countries; or the deadly rock-throwing and fire-bombing attacks, beatings and stabbings.

Rarely, if ever, is there any recognition that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Yasir Arafat 94 percent of Judea and Samaria, which he refused, and then launched the second Intifada. Ten years later, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas 93.6 percent of Judea and Samaria with a one-to-one land swap. This means that expansion has not significantly reduced the land available for establishing a Palestinian Arab state.

To secure Abbas’s consent, the Jewish communities of Elon Moreh, Ofra, Beit El and Kiryat Arba would be destroyed, Hebron abandoned, and Jerusalem divided. In the process, tens of thousands of Jews would be expelled from their homes. Abbas rejected the offer.
Why Do Arabs Reject the Two-State Solution?

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David Singer: Anti-Israel Security Council Resolution 2334 violates UN Charter

By on January 6th, 2017

Any attempt by the Security Council to enforce Resolution 2334 or to pass any new Resolutions based on Resolution 2334 will also be illegal.

Article 80 preserves the legal rights vested in the Jewish people to reconstitute the Jewish National Home within 22 per cent of the territory comprised in the 1922 Mandate for Palestine (“Mandate”). That territory includes what is known today as Area “C” located in Judea and Samaria (West Bank) and East Jerusalem (“disputed areas”).

Resolution 2334 seeks to erase and annul – not preserve – those vested Jewish legal rights in the disputed areas by:

1. Claiming that Jews now presently living – or seeking in the future to live – in the disputed areas constitutes “a flagrant violation under international law” – when in fact their right to live there is sanctioned by Article 6 of the Mandate and Article 80.

2. Alleging that the right to reconstitute the Jewish National Home in the disputed areas requires the consent of any other party.

3. Calling on all States to discriminate between Jews living in the disputed areas and Jews living in Israel.

4. Discouraging Jews from living in the disputed areas when Article 6 of the Mandate specifically encourages close Jewish settlement in the disputed areas.

The questionable legality of Resolution 2334 needs to be urgently resolved by the Security Council itself seeking an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice (“ICJ”) under Article 96(a) of the United Nations Charter.

The General Assembly so acted when it sought an advisory opinion in 2003 from the ICJ on the legality of the security barrier erected by Israel.

That decision was fundamentally flawed because contrary to Article 65 (2) of the ICJ Statute – two vital documents – the Mandate for Palestine and Article 80 – were not included in the dossier of documents submitted to the ICJ for consideration by then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan – an omission never explained until today.

Give the ICJ half the documents and you will only get half a judgement.

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Agents and Agencies Donald Trump should push for intelligence reform. By Kevin D. Williamson —

By on January 6th, 2017

The Wall Street Journal reports that Donald Trump’s recent public criticism of U.S. intelligence agencies presages an effort to reorganize the nation’s sundry spy bureaucracies. Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, denies that the president has any such plan in mind.

If he doesn’t, he damn well should.

The plan described in the Journal is not unlike the one described in National Review on December 9 by Fred Fleitz of the Center for Security Policy, which would scale back the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), a post-9/11 innovation intended to create a central authority to ensure cooperation and coordination within the herd of cats that is the intelligence community. Fleitz and others have argued that ODNI is just another ladle full of federal alphabet soup — CIA, DIA, NIC, etc. — doing very little more than adding a layer of bureaucracy.

Conservatives have a blind spot for spies, cops, and soldiers. The psychology here is pretty straightforward: A great many conservatives (myself included) who are habitually and instinctively skeptical of grand federal plans were insufficiently beady-eyed when it came to President George W. Bush’s big plans for Iraq, and some of that (again, speaking for myself first and foremost, but not, I think, for myself alone) is purely reactionary. When I see a bunch of dopey white kids with dreadlocks from Haverford College, the Workers World Party, and Chaka Fattah on one side of a barricade, I instinctively want to be on the other side. (This is especially true at the moment for Fattah, the longtime Philadelphia Democrat and Hugo Chávez fanboy who is headed to the penitentiary for corruption.) This is, to be sure, an imperfect heuristic.

There is a question of agents and a separate question of agencies. Many of us, especially conservatives, are inclined to respect and admire those whose profession consists in performing necessary violence: police on the beat in New York City, soldiers patrolling Mosul, and intelligence operatives who, if they are doing their jobs, will never hear the words “Thank you for your service.” But bureaucracies have lives and characters of their own, irrespective of the sort of men they employ. The public schools are made up mostly of good people, but they don’t work very well. One imagines that most IRS agents are scrupulous and dedicated. (The DMV people just hate us.) Out of the field of operations and into the cubicles and corner offices, the NYPD, the FBI, the Department of Defense, and the Central Intelligence Agency are bureaucracies like any others, and suffer from familiar bureaucratic ailments.

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What the ‘Women’s March on Washington’ Is Really About By D. C. McAllister

By on January 6th, 2017

Nearly 200,000 people have signed up to participate in the Women’s March on Washington to protest the inauguration of Donald Trump. The protest, called “The Gathering for Justice,” includes an array of liberal causes, but at the center is the demand for equal rights for women.

The application for the protest states that the purpose is “to come together in solidarity to express to the new administration and congress that women’s rights are human rights and our power cannot be ignored.”

The group’s mission and vision statement says the march is a response to the “rhetoric of the past election cycle,” which they say “has insulted, demonized, and threatened many of us—immigrants of all statuses, Muslims and those of diverse religious faiths, people who identify as LGBTQIA, Native people, Black and Brown people, people with disabilities, survivors of sexual assault—and our communities are hurting and scared.”

Organizers of the event, which are made up of typical liberal community organizers, from pro-abortion activists, to CodePink, to former associates of Al Sharpton, say it’s about more than a protest—it’s a movement and they want it to continue for years to come.

“We plan to make a bold and clear statement to this country on the national and local level that we will not be silent,” said Tamika Mallory, a gun-control activist and one of the main organizers of the march. “And we will not let anyone roll back the rights we have fought and struggled to get.”

But is this march really about the rights of marginalized groups and women, in particular? Exactly what are they protesting? What has happened that is threatening their “human rights”? They can talk about Trump’s rhetoric during the campaign, but does that translate at all into policy? In fact, are any of his policies, when you really examine them, racist, bigoted, sexist, or homophobic in any way? No, they’re not.

There was a time in the past when women actually marched for real rights. From the Suffrage movement to the Equal Rights Amendment marches in the 1970s, women had legitimate complaints and addressed actual issues that concerned them.

But not in 2016. Their rights are not being threatened by the Republican Party’s agenda or Trump. In fact, Trump is more pro-woman, particularly in business with proposals for maternity leave, than most other Republicans. One could argue that he is pro-life, which means he could turn back Roe v. Wade through a Supreme Court nomination, but killing the baby in your womb is not a human right. It’s actually the exact opposite. Getting free birth control is not a human right. Even getting free medical care, paid by the state, is not a human right. Becoming a citizen is not a human right either. Neither is a man using a woman’s bathroom. CONTINUE ON SITE

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Michael Galak: An Outcast at the Table

By on January 6th, 2017

‘This year, 2017, marks the centenary of the Bolsheviks’ takeover in Moscow and the mass loss of human life and dignity that followed. My hope is that this date will be both a milestone and a cue to teach our young that the seemingly lofty ideas so beloved by the Left are nothing but the tools of slavery and oppression. The task, the necessity and, indeed, the destiny of a healthy conservatism is the inoculation of our young against the malignant virus of totalitarianism and its bodyguard of lies, which the Left spreads with every breath. The only way to do it is through active knowledge of true history.”

……No punches were thrown, but festive gatherings with young relatives saw me accused of bigotry, racism, misogyny, homophobia and Islamophobia. How did conservatives allow an entire generations to be brainwashed? We forgot that truth cannot defend itself

­The advent of a new year is a good time to review the one gone by, to sum it up and balance one’s moral and ethical scorecard. Is the ledger mostly in the black or is red ink splashed all over? Was I a reasonably decent human or an idiot? A genius or a schlemiel? Was I treated well by others? Did I treat others the way I would want to be treated? It does feel like a regular corporate performance review, with the difference being that, as long as we are still alive, there’s always the chance to make things right.

This festive season was unusual for many reasons. The closely placed succession of Hanukkah, Christmas and New Year’s Eve parties offered plenty of opportunities for enjoying the unhealthy and sedentary, eating oily or sugary foods (Christmas puddings, stollen, latkes…) and drinking alcohol in amounts considered prejudicial by the moralisers who seem to be popping up at every corner, dubious statistics in hand. (I especially enjoyed having my red wine consumption made the subject of a stern tut-tutting by a chain smoking GP.) Most important, the past weeks offered an opportunity to talk with friends, relatives, children and whoever else came along to celebrate at the festive table. That is where the long-ignored obvious struck and, most importantly, sank in.

Contrary to the long-held convention of not discussing politics, religion and, yes, money, discussions around many a table or a backyard barbeque inevitably turned to Brexit and The Donald’s election victory. In all these exchanges I was a pitiful minority of one, tolerated while treated with the sort of polite and indulgent condescension usually reserved for small children and the mentally unwell or, in my case, a conservative old codger. This patronising came dangerously close to contempt for my presumed moral turpitude: who else but the morally deficient could defend the outrage of those in the UK and America voting other than the way their presumed betters wished and expected? My long-suffering wife succeeded in transmitting the ‘please keep your mouth shut’ signal. All it took for this well-trained husband of 43 years to do as bid was a well-aimed kick under the table. She Who Must Be Obeyed was indeed obeyed, but not before I noticed some peculiarities of the discourse that prompted the thoughts you are reading now.

The Left’s near-total dominance of the political stage in Australia is no news to me, of course. However, the personal experience of being all but openly branded a bigot, a racist and a dangerously unhinged anencephalic, who is also a misogynist, a homophobe and, given a chance, a potential mass-murder of Muslims left me quite shocked. Needless to say – I am none of those things. But perceptions matter and people, like myself, of conservative political leanings are branded morally inadequate precisely on the basis of our convictions, as Quadrant Online contributor Bill Wyndham noted some months ago.

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Shameless!!Obama grotesquely had himself awarded a Defense Dept. medal yesterday By Thomas Lifson

By on January 6th, 2017

President Obama has another ironic award for his trophy shelf, to accompany his Nobel Peace Prize and all those participation trophies he got at Punahou for his basketball skills. His appointee and subordinate Ash Carter yesterday pinned a military medal – the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service – on his boss, as Warner Todd Huston reported for Breitbart.

Defense Secy Carter presents Pres Obama with Dept of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service. pic.twitter.com/a5DihpPRnA
— Mark Knoller (@markknoller) January 4, 2017

The ceremony took place at Joint Base Myers-Henderson, before a crowd that had an awful lot of empty seats, almost as if the military service members who attended were there on orders.

I am sorry, but this stinks of a tin-pot dictatorship.

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The #BlackLivesMatter Torture Film By Matthew Vadum

By on January 6th, 2017

According to our leftist betters, a sickening graphic video showing a white man being brutally tortured in Chicago by four black attackers as they shout, “F— Donald Trump! F— white people!” isn’t evidence of racism or a hate crime.

In the left’s alternate universe, Pepe the Donald Trump-loving cartoon frog is racist. Kidnapping, torturing, and scalping an innocent white man because he is white is not racist. Black-hating mass murderer Dylann Storm Roof speaks for all white people, but the newly arrested black perpetrators in Chicago, Jordan Hill, Tesfaye Cooper, Tanishia Covington, and Brittany Covington, are all rogue actors.

No minorities are responsible for their actions. It’s society’s fault. It’s capitalism’s fault. It’s the fault of white privilege.

To be clear, I am referring to the #BlackLivesMatter kidnapping broadcast live on Facebook (since censored by the fake news commissars at Facebook and at YouTube) that shows a captive, reportedly mentally disabled young white male being physically abused by four young black assailants. Fortunately, Live Leak posted the full video, which runs 27 minutes and 39 seconds.

Black Lives Matter movement hero DeRay Mckesson rushed to Twitter Thursday morning to make excuses for his comrades-in-arms. “It goes without saying that the actions being branded by the far-right as the ‘BLM Kidnapping’ have nothing to do [with] the movement.”

He’s lying.

This is exactly what Black Lives Matter stands for. Its supporters lionize those who murder cops and white people. At their marches, they carry signs reading, “End White Supremacy.” America, they claim, is systemically racist. In other words, white people are racist and evil.

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