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Understanding Gaza And Beyond… Understanding Gaza and Beyond by Gerald Honigman

Posted By on May 16th, 2018

Renewed tragedy has been occurring in Gaza for weeks now. Before it’s over, there will be much destruction, and many lives will have been lost or seriously impacted in other ways.

The near-sighted blame this on President Trump’s recognition that, since King David purchased it from Jebusites three thousand years ago (with Jerusalem subsequently becoming the heart and soul of Jewish existence), he would heed Congress’s call to acknowledge Zion as Israel’s capital, moving America’s embassy there on the 70th anniversary of Israel’s rebirth, May 14, 2018. Like all other nations on Earth, Israel finally got to choose its own most important city.

Mentioned over 600 times in the Hebrew Bible, the Arabs’ Qur’an does not mention Jerusalem even once. Medieval Arab historians themselves, like Jalaluddin, admitted that Islam’s 7th century C.E. prophet, Muhammad, only paid respect to Jerusalem to gain support from influential tribes of Jews who, fleeing Roman conquest in Judea earlier, founded the date palm oasis of Medina in the Arabian Peninsula. Muhammad fled there to escape fellow pagan enemies in Mecca. After giving him refuge, introducing him to Jewish monotheistic beliefs, important human and non-human luminaries (like Abraham, Moses, the important Angel Gabriel), and such, when the Jews refused his religio-political claims, Islam’s prophet decapitated all their men and enslaved the women and children.

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The US Embassy in Jerusalem enhances US interests Yoram Ettinger

Posted By on May 16th, 2018

1. The recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish State, and the site of the US Embassy, reflects a realistic assessment of Middle East/Arab priorities, notwithstanding official Arab statements. Thus, the Arab walk – unlike the Arab talk – does not consider Jerusalem and the Palestinian issues to be nearly as critical as are the clear, present and lethal threats to all pro-US Arab regimes, which are posed by Iran’s Ayatollahs, ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic terrorists; the regional powder kegs in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya; and the inherent turbulence throughout the tectonic Middle East with many potential eruptions (in Jordan, Egypt, etc.) of devastating, anti-US lava.

2. Recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and relocating the US Embassy to Jerusalem – as prescribed by the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act – represent the resolve to focus on US interests in accordance with Middle East reality, while defying Arab pressure/threats and overruling the conventional “wisdom” of the State Department bureaucracy.

3. Relocating the US Embassy to Jerusalem underscores the reassertion of the US independent and unilateral – rather than multilateral – action. It distinguishes the US President, most members of the House and the Senate and most constituents from the UN state-of-mind, the European vacillation and the worldview of the “elite” media and think tanks.

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Israel Has the Right and Obligation to Defend Its Border with Deadly Force By David French

Posted By on May 16th, 2018

One of the enduring mysteries of modern political discourse is the way in which smart people — who are not remotely anti-Semitic — impose curious, unworkable double standards on the nation of Israel. Let’s take, for example, the response of many on the left to the so-called Great Return March, an effort by thousands of Gazans to storm the Israeli border.

After all, the international legal standards are clear. A nation has the right to protect the integrity of its border, and that right is supplemented by an inherent right of self-defense in the face of a hostile foreign power. Hamas — which rules Gaza — rejects Israel’s right to exist and remains in a state of perpetual, declared war with Israel. Any reasonable person contemplating the consequences of a border-wall breach knows that chaos and bloodshed may result.

Moreover, every reasonably informed person knows that Hamas has a long history of using human shields, including women and children, to drum up international sympathy and deceive gullible foreign critics into believing that Israel is using lethal force against peaceful protestors who merely seek a peaceful resolution to an intractable conflict. Yet still yesterday we saw tweets and articles not just from the single-minded anti-Israel Left but also from far more thoughtful observers:

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A guide for participating in a peacefully violent demonstration with guns, knives and child shields using the complicit media By Ethel C. Fenig

Posted By on May 16th, 2018

In apartheid Gaza, where the remaining less-than-one-percent of the Christian population lives uneasily among the 99%+ Muslim inhabitants with absolutely no Jews allowed, there is a peaceful protest against Israel. How do we know it is peaceful? Because the New York Times, CNN and the usual complicit media say so.

Bringing guns and babies to a conflict and arming children to a declared war to overrun another country and kill all its inhabitants is peaceful because the holy Hamas Covenant, which brutally runs Gaza, clearly states:

‘The Islamic Resistance Movement is a distinguished Palestinian movement, whose allegiance is to Allah, and whose way of life is Islam. It strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine.’ (Article 6)

On the Destruction of Israel:

‘Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.’ (Preamble)

The Exclusive Moslem Nature of the Area:

‘The land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf [Holy Possession] consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgment Day. No one can renounce it or any part, or abandon it or any part of it.’ (Article 11)…

The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them.

Obeying their holy death wish covenant, Hamas operatives posted online instructions for their duped civilian followers promising them a bonus payment of $100 a day for the peaceful privilege of killing Israelis and holy martyrdom for being killed.

But hey, as usual, Trump and the Jooos are to blame.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Why Trump Is a President Like No Other By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on May 16th, 2018

Conrad Black’s erudite biography of Donald J. Trump is different from the usual in mediis rebus accounts of first-year presidents. He avoids the Bob Woodward fly-on-the-wall unattributed anecdote, and “they say” gossip mongering. Nor is the book a rush-to-publish product from former insiders of the Trump campaign or administration. Instead, Black, a prolific and insightful historian, adopts the annalistic method in carefully tracing Trump’s earliest years in business through his various commercial misadventures, financial recoveries, and sometimes wild antics. Black’s aim is to illustrate how much of what Trump has done since announcing his presidential candidacy in summer 2015 is hardly mysterious. Instead, Trump’s methods are fully explicable by what he has always done in the past—in the sometimes troubling, but more often reassuring, sense.

Black is neither a hagiographer nor an ankle-biter. He seeks to understand Trump within the three prominent landscapes in which Americans had come to know their new president: politics, the celebrity world, and the cannibalistic arena of high-stakes Manhattan real estate and finance. Of the three, Black is most jaded about the anti-Trump hysteria within the first two, not because the real estate business is inherently a nobler profession, but because it more often lacks the moral preening and hypocrisies of both the beltway and tabloids. The result is an argument that the first president to have neither prior political nor military service nevertheless has his own demonstrable skill sets that are making his presidency far more dynamic than either his critics or supporters quite imagined. Black’s unspoken assumption is that it is more difficult to build a skyscraper in Manhattan than to be a career politician or an evening news reader.

In Trump’s rise and fall and rise as a billionaire, Black never whitewashes his ruthlessness, his fast and loose relationship with the truth (e.g., “He is not so much a cynic as a methodological agnostic, not a liar as much as a disbeliever in absolute secular truths”), and his occasionally tawdry P. T. Barnum hawking.

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John Kerry: Reporting for Duty… From Vietnam to Iran Paul Kengor

Posted By on May 16th, 2018

He hasn’t changed a lick in 47 years.

I’ve been asked a number of times about John Kerry’s unauthorized actions with Iran compared to Ted Kennedy’s unauthorized actions with the Kremlin. Kerry, this spring 2018, sought to undermine President Trump’s policies, whereas Kennedy, spring 1983, sought to undermine President Reagan’s policies.

Many people — including the president of the United States — want to know if Kerry’s actions constitute a violation of the Logan Act. It’s a question I’m frequently asked about Kennedy. The short answer, in both cases, is that I’m not the source to provide the answer. Congress is. The Democratic Congress in the 1980s didn’t hesitate to launch criminal proceedings against President Ronald Reagan and his staff (many of them fine men of great integrity) in a militant pursuit for impeachment over “Iran-Contra.” Liberal Democrats did so while turning a blind eye as their leader — House Speaker Jim Wright — buddied up to Sandinista dictator Daniel Ortega in his own negotiations.

And Wright wasn’t secretary of state, just as John Kerry wasn’t secretary of state when he conferred with Iranian officials in secret meetings in New York. In what the Boston Globe described as a “rare move” of “unusual shadow diplomacy,” Kerry met with the Iranian foreign minister (among other high-level foreign officials) “to discuss ways of preserving the pact limiting Iran’s nuclear weapons program. It was the second time in about two months that the two had met to strategize over salvaging a deal they spent years negotiating during the Obama administration, according to a person briefed on the meetings.”

That’s the very deal that President Trump was working to cancel just as Kerry was working to save it.

And that’s hardly the only Kerry outrage. No, this is old-hat. I’d like to remind all of Kerry’s affront decades ago. The date was April 22, 1971, 47 years to almost the exact day that Kerry met with the Iranians.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Media goes wild in anti-Trump, anti-Israel fervor By Ben Shapiro,

Posted By on May 16th, 2018

On Tuesday, the New York Daily News ran with another of its desperate appeals for circulation. This time, it blamed Ivanka Trump for Hamas-generated violence in the Gaza Strip.

The cover featured a grinning Ivanka, dressed to the nines, at the inauguration of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem. But instead of her gesturing to the placard featured on the new embassy, the Daily News photoshopped in a photo of a wounded Palestinian on the Gaza border — so now Ivanka was gesturing at Palestinian suffering, a smile spread broadly across her face. The headline: “DADDY’S LITTLE GHOUL.”
This is absolutely abhorrent. It’s also reflective of the media coverage of both the Trump administration and Israel overall. The media have been repeating Hamas propaganda — and, presumably, they know it. They’ve been claiming that Israel is killing “protesters,” even though these are Hamas-led riots. They’ve been claiming that Israel has been targeting civilians, when it is clear this is not the case. And now they’re claiming that the Trump administration is to blame. The Washington Post headlined, “Israelis kill dozens of Palestinians in Gaza protesting U.S. Embassy move to Jerusalem.”

The violence in the Gaza Strip has been ongoing for weeks, and has been entirely orchestrated by Hamas. Palestinians, including Hamas terrorists, have been throwing Molotov cocktails at Israeli troops, as well as explosive devices and stones; they’ve been burning tires and attempting to cut through the border fence with wirecutters. The Israel Defense Forces spokesperson, Ronen Manelis, says Hamas is paying families to protest, and that they have intelligence that Hamas seeks to kidnap an Israeli soldier.

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Tom Wolfe Had the Right Stuff America has lost one of its greatest men of letters—a journalist, novelist and profound cultural observer. Roger Kimball

Posted By on May 16th, 2018

I first became aware of Tom Wolfe, who died Monday at 88, when an English teacher at my Jesuit high school in Maine turned me on to (classical reference in that phrase) his 1975 exercise in New Journalism, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.”

Wow. I mean WOW! South Portland, Maine, had never encountered anything like it. Shakespeare, yes. Dante, but of course. Even a little Virgil and Descartes along the way. But this hypersonic chronicle about the novelist Ken Kesey (“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”) and his Merry Pranksters motoring around California in a school bus decked out in Day-Glo psychedelic paint riding the ineffable wave of 1960s excess? That was something entirely new.

You’ll know one of Kesey’s slogans, which entered the language thanks to Wolfe: “You’re either on the bus or you’re off the bus.” I was decidedly on the Tom Wolfe bus.

Next up was “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” a collection of essays published a decade before “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” Who knew that anyone could write with such serve, with SO MANY CAPITAL LETTERS and EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!? When you’re 16 and have been battened on “The Scarlet Letter” and Kipling’s “If,” it is both a revelation and an emancipation.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Sea Is Rising, but Not Because of Climate Change There is nothing we can do about it, except to build dikes and sea walls a little bit higher. By Fred Singer

Posted By on May 16th, 2018

Of all known and imagined consequences of climate change, many people fear sea-level rise most. But efforts to determine what causes seas to rise are marred by poor data and disagreements about methodology. The noted oceanographer Walter Munk referred to sea-level rise as an “enigma”; it has also been called a riddle and a puzzle.

It is generally thought that sea-level rise accelerates mainly by thermal expansion of sea water, the so-called steric component. But by studying a very short time interval, it is possible to sidestep most of the complications, like “isostatic adjustment” of the shoreline (as continents rise after the overlying ice has melted) and “subsidence” of the shoreline (as ground water and minerals are extracted).

I chose to assess the sea-level trend from 1915-45, when a genuine, independently confirmed warming of approximately 0.5 degree Celsius occurred. I note particularly that sea-level rise is not affected by the warming; it continues at the same rate, 1.8 millimeters a year, according to a 1990 review by Andrew S. Trupin and John Wahr. I therefore conclude—contrary to the general wisdom—that the temperature of sea water has no direct effect on sea-level rise. That means neither does the atmospheric content of carbon dioxide.

This conclusion is worth highlighting: It shows that sea-level rise does not depend on the use of fossil fuels. The evidence should allay fear that the release of additional CO2 will increase sea-level rise.

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Deep-State Standoff The FBI spy in the Trump campaign, and a lot more, must come in from the cold. Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on May 15th, 2018

Gina Haspel’s appearance last week before the Senate Intelligence Committee created a certain buzz but was hardly the biggest spy story in town. That prize belonged to the snoop the FBI had planted in the presidential campaign of Donald Trump. This was not a new story and veteran observers had been keeping close watch.

Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson, Andrew McCarthy wrote in National Review, had been “dead-on accurate” in his testimony that the FBI had a spy inside the Trump campaign for the stretch run of the 2016 race. In his Senate testimony on August 22, 2017, Simpson explained that Steele had met with at least one FBI agent in Rome, and the FBI had intelligence from an internal Trump campaign source, a human source inside the Trump campaign.

This was an explosive revelation and, following the publication of his testimony on January 9, 2018, Simpson did his best to walk it back. The revelations are now the subject of the ongoing battle between the House Intelligence Committee and the DOJ. Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal has been keeping close track on that front.

The DOJ had finally “agreed to brief House Intelligence Committee members about a top-secret intelligence source that was part of the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign. Even without official confirmation of that source’s name, the news so far holds some stunning implications.” The DOJ knew full well it should have turned this material over to congressional investigators last year, “but instead deliberately concealed it.”

As Strassel noted, House investigators even “sniffed out a name,” not a welcome development for Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who like Special Counsel Robert Mueller appears to believe he is a head of state. Rosenstein accused the investigators of “extortion,” as though they were threatening his family for a ransom payment. Rosenstein also said it was a constitutional duty to refuse revelations of FBI files, and the DOJ trotted out what Strassel called the “daddy of all superspook arguments,” that lives were at stake.