A week from Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will address a joint session of Congress. He will find some empty seats as a few dozen Democrats, almost all them either members of the Congressional Black Caucus or the progressive caucus (the most left-wing members of the U.S. House of Representatives), plus a very small number of senators, take the day off. These elected officials will boycott the presentation to express their displeasure with the fact that Netanyahu’s invitation by House Speaker John Boehner was “disrespectful to the president” and violated established protocol. The disrespectful charge came naturally to the members of the Congressional Black Caucus, who have formed a blocking and tackling operation to protect the first elected black president from the time of his inauguration. The protocol issue relates to the timing that the White House was informed, when the invitation was extended, and the timing of a speech by a foreign leader so close to the date of their country’s national election (though the initial date was one three weeks earlier and less in proximity with the Israeli election date, and more in line with other visits by foreign leaders before their nation’s election dates).
▪ Hundreds of Danish Muslims express admiration for, pray at grave of Copenhagen terrorist
▪ By contrast, last night hundreds of Norwegian Muslims form human “peace ring” to protect Oslo synagogue
▪ However, not reported in the BBC, Guardian and other accounts of last night’s Norwegian peace ring: Haaretz: Oslo synagogue ‘peace ring’ organizer blamed Jews for 9/11 (He made the remarks in a speech in Oslo in 2008 titled “I Hate Jews and Gays”.)
HUNDREDS PAY RESPECTS TO COPENHAGEN TERRORIST
Over 500 young Danish Muslims attended the Islamic burial on Friday of the gunman who murdered two people and wounded 5 others in Copenhagen last weekend.
Danish-born Omar El-Hussein, 22, was placed in an unmarked grave in the Muslim cemetery in Broendby, on the outskirts of Copenhagen.
El-Hussein has been identified by police as the gunman who shot dead 55-year-old filmmaker Finn Noergaard and 37-year-old Dan Uzan, an economist and member of Copenhagen’s small Jewish community, who volunteered as a security guard to protect a bat mitzvah party for a 12-year-old-girl. Five Danish police officers were also injured in the attacks.
You can see pictures of the funeral, and admirers posing for photos by El-Hussein’s grave, if you scroll down here.
COPENHAGEN IMAM ON EVE OF TERROR ATTACK: THE PROPHET ENGAGED IN WAR, NOT DIALOGUE, WITH THE JEWS
Video here from February 13, 2015, the day before the murders.
Why isn’t this Imam under arrest?
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There have been several such sermons by Danish Imams in the past. For example, in this one, delivered in Berlin last July, the Danish imam explicitly calls for his congregants to kill Jews “to the very last one”.
Intellectuals in public life stand on unsteady footing. Their employers—all of us—are suspicious, and often rightly so. Knowledge can breed overconfidence, imprudence, aloofness, and moral myopia. Yet there are examples of those possessing wisdom that is both contemplative and practical, who can win political success and become a boon to their country. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was one. Edmund Burke was another.
With this comparison in mind, Greg Weiner set out to write his treatment of Moynihan’s political thought, American Burke: The Uncommon Liberalism of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Weiner, a professor of political theory at Assumption College and a one-time aide to Senator Bob Kerrey, sees Burke less as a direct influence upon Moynihan—Moynihan rarely quoted the great Anglo-Irish politician and writer—and more as a lens through which to examine him. Neither was a systematic thinker, and so an explanation of their mutual principles can never be entirely precise. But however imprecise that exercise must be, the ideas that Burke and Moynihan shared were profound.
The Wall Street Journal reported this past week that the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation has quietly dropped its ban on foreign contributions and is accepting donations from the governments of “the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Australia, Germany, and a Canadian government agency promoting the Keystone XL pipeline.” The Journal’s conclusion: Since 2001 “the foundation has raised at least $48 million from overseas governments.”
Needless to say, the gargantuan troll-like conflict of interest that arises as soon as the foundation of the leading candidate for the presidency of the United States begins accepting money from overseas is apparent to every sentient being on the planet except members of the Clinton family and the growing number of advisers, consultants, strategists, pollsters, groupies, allies, and hangers-on whose livelihood depends on that family’s political success. “These contributions,” the foundation said in a statement to the Journal, “are helping improve the lives of millions of people across the world, for which we are grateful.”
The great humorist, Jerome K. Jerome, suggested many years ago that, “… we all love peace, but not peace at any price.”
Peace is only a reality between states that are rational and can in time become friendly towards each other.
Today, the peaceniks, the liberal groups, the lefties, and all those who shout out the vacuous phrase, “peace and justice,” have turned those once noble words into soiled and tarnished rags.
They have become the very folk who, through one of life’s supreme ironies, shout down dissenting voices and thus become guilty of the very violent behavior they claim to oppose.
The universities and colleges have become hotbeds of radicalized students who chant slogans of peace and justice yet howl down invited speakers with whom they disagree.
Jamie Glazov’s Fight for the Truth About Islam on 3rd St. Promenade.
The Counter Jihad Coalition hits Santa Monica.
http://jamieglazov.com/2015/02/22/jamie-glazovs-fight-for-the-truth-about-islam-on-3rd-st-promenade/
Have you ever asked yourself, ‘would I have helped a Jewish friend or neighbor in Nazi Europe?’ Would I have tried to rouse my fellow citizens in America, when isolationism was the rage? Would I have even noticed there was a call of conscience? Would I have told myself to ignore what was happening around me, until my world was in ruins?
I have no illusions of possessing extraordinary courage. Luckily, as Americans, we do not live under a terror regime. We can inform ourselves easily on the advance of radical Islam. We can speak out. We can exercise our individual conscience. We can listen to the still, small voice that determines our own moral worth.
We are living at what Churchill called “a hinge of fate.” Iran is poised to develop nuclear weapons. The Iranians speak of genocide against the Jews and worldwide conquest as fondly as Hitler did. In America, we are all players in this drama.
The entire lesson from the 20th century is to prevent calamitous developments before it is too late. We have had national unanimity on this point. For thirty-five years there has been bi-partisan recognition that Iran is a terror state, dangerous to Israel, the Saudis, Europe, America. Iran has become more dangerous, not less. Iran has also become weaker economically. The Saudi oil price war gives us a real chance that economic sanctions could bring the mullahs down. Except that Obama lifted the sanctions and no longer wants the regime brought down.
Islamists such as Arfan Bhatti, Mullah Krekar and Ubaydullah Hussain have openly said they want Sharia law introduced in Norway, and placed above Norwegian law.
With such requests for divisiveness at it core, it is hard to see how Islam can not be in constant conflict with its surroundings.
There simply has been no real debate about the ripple effects created from this cultural collision-course between Humanism and Islamism.
It is probably high time to take a long, critical look at the contents of the Qur’an and see what values and spiritual seeds it can plant in people’s minds. Europeans are just starting to face a reality with which Israelis have lived for years.
Here, those who seem “out of line” risk being publicly and privately destroyed by self-appointed “anti-racists,” who do their best to sabotage anyone with the audacity to voice an opinion different from theirs.
Either way, this reaction shows that the openness for discussing sensitive issues is not much better in Norway than in Pakistan.
Politicians need to be especially wary of those they choose as advisors. It is so easy to be an extremist in moderates’ clothing.
Bernie Lewin’s Hubert Lamb and the Transformation of Climate Science is available online from the Global Warming Policy Foundation
They were there at the start, when the study of climate was in its infancy, but today the names of meterologists such as Hubert Lamb are seldom mentioned by those colleagues and their heirs who very quickly grasped that sound science doesn’t pay half as well as a good scare story.
Hubert Lamb the father of modern historical climatology and founder of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, issued this warning to his fellow meteorologists in 1994:
‘A precarious and threatening situation has developed for climatology: a tremendous effort was made to land research funds in all countries, mostly the USA, on the basis of frightening people about the possible drastic effect of Man’s activities, and so much has been said about climate warming that there will be an awkward situation if the warming doesn’t happen or not to the extent predicted.’ (emphasis added)
Two decades later it is widely acknowledged that the slight warming trend of the 1980s slowed and then stalled not many years after Lamb published his warning. Indeed, the frightening predictions of those times have not been realised. But whether this places climatology in ‘an awkward situation’ remains moot across the sceptical divide.
Back in the 1970s Lamb was undoubtedly Britain’s most prominent climatologist. Whenever a climate-related topic required comment, journalists would call him. With radio appearances and the occasional invitation to publish his own plain-language account, this softly spoken scientist had quite the public profile.
Today, it is not widely known that our global warming consensus once faced such a prominent critic. Indeed, Lamb was one of the earliest and most vocal sceptics. Folks are often also surprised to learn that Lamb’s response to the warming scare was far from unusual. Many of the other leaders in the field during the 1970s also grew concerned about its distorting influence. Alas, the more they said so, the more they were marginalised on the wrong side of an increasingly polarised debate.
A few of these former leaders are well known in the current controversy, lampooned as deniers and merchants of doubt. But most are forgotten. Many, like Lamb, are now dead.
Consider Robert White, perhaps the most prominent figure at the World Meteorological Organisation during the 1970s. In 1979 he chaired the first World Climate Conference, which asked all nations ‘to foresee and to prevent potential man made changes in climate that might be adverse to the well-being of humanity’. But a decade later White became concerned that the politics was getting ahead of the science. In 1989 he warned of an ‘inverted pyramid of knowledge’ where ‘a huge and growing mass of proposals for policy action is balanced upon a handful of real facts’.
In that same year White teamed up with others of the old guard in the US raising concerns with their government. These included two former leaders of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography: William Nierenberg (director from 1965 to 1986), and Jerome Namias, the renowned climate forecaster and leader of the Climate Research Group throughout the 1970s.
The USA also had Reid Bryson, the founding director of the world’s first centre dedicated to climatic research at the University of Wisconsin. He was always, and openly, more concerned about an overall cooling trend.
Elsewhere, rumours ran rife of secret doubters unwilling to risk their funding. But still there were surprises, like Brian Tucker in Australia. From the late 1970s he had overseen the research into greenhouse warming as head of the CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Physics. Retiring in 1992, he came out guns blazing.
Others were caught out of step before they were ready to go, including some prominent figures in the European leadership. Hendrik Tennekes was the director of research at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute from 1977 until he was sacked 1990. Afterwards he claimed a link between his ousting and the recent publication of his doubts in the popular press.
More than two centuries in his grave, the philosopher’s warning that politics should and must be more than “an auction of popularity” has never lost its relevance, not least as radicalism and ballot-box venality continue to undermine both moral government and the polities of the West
Does Edmund Burke have anything to say to the modern world? Born in Dublin in 1729, he died at Beaconsfield, his debt-laden property in England, on the July 9, 1797. He was without personal scandal, a devoted family man, and a member of the House of Commons for nearly thirty years. His debts were constant and only relieved by aristocratic patrons whose generosity was not unexpectedly exploited by his enemies. His bequest to prosperity was never to be material. He left behind a voluminous literature in the form of books, pamphlets, speeches and letters. His mind was wide-ranging and his reading voracious. As editor of the Annual Register, he wrote commentaries on the major intellectual works of the period.
Most of his writing, however, concentrated on the political events of the age, in which he took a leading, sometimes determining, role. They included the American and French revolutions. In the debates about those events, he found it necessary to go behind the action to deal with fundamental philosophical questions and propose analyses, most of which remain worthy of study. His insights on politics and the role of politicians are as fresh today as when he put them to paper more than 200 years ago.
He is often acclaimed as the father of modern conservatism. This is largely due to his views on the prescriptive nature of tradition, custom and convention in a healthy, functioning society. It is true that he placed crucial importance on not interfering with social and political arrangements that had passed the test of time. Without further explanation, however, the title of conservative can be misleading. He was not a straightforward traditionalist, one resistant to rational change. Indeed, he said that the ability and willingness to change – change consistent with continuity – ensured a society’s conservation.
