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Obama at Peres Funeral: Zionism ‘Best Protected’ When Palestinians Have ‘State of Their Own’ By Bridget Johnson

Posted By on October 1st, 2016

President Obama pressed for a Mideast peace plan today in his address at the Jerusalem funeral of former Israeli President Shimon Peres, saying that because of his “understanding of Israel’s meaning, he believed that the Zionist idea would be best protected when Palestinians, too, had a state of their own.”

The White House guidance for Obama’s visit listed the president’s stops in “Tel Aviv, Israel,” but did not say “Israel” after “Jerusalem.”

Wearing a black yarmulke, Obama joined Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former President Clinton at the Mount Herzl cemetery.

“For a younger generation, Shimon was probably remembered more for a peace process that never reached its endpoint. They would listen to critics on the left who might argue that Shimon did not fully acknowledge the failings of his nation, or perhaps more numerous critics on the right who argued that he refused to see the true wickedness of the world, and called him naive,” Obama said.

“…He understood, in this war-torn region, where too often Arab youth are taught to hate Israel from an early age — he understood just how hard peace would be. I’m sure he was alternatively angry and bemused to hear the same critics, who called him hopelessly naive, depend on the defense architecture that he himself had helped to build,” he added.

Obama stressed that “out of the hardships of the diaspora, he found room in his heart for others who suffered.”

“He came to hate prejudice with the passion of one who knows how it feels to be its target. Even in the face of terrorist attacks, even after repeated disappointments at the negotiation table, he insisted that as human beings, Palestinians must be seen as equal in dignity to Jews, and must therefore be equal in self-determination,” the president continued.

“…Of course, we gather here in the knowledge that Shimon never saw his dream of peace fulfilled. The region is going through a chaotic time. Threats are ever present. And yet, he did not stop dreaming, and he did not stop working… because our founders planted not just flags in the eternal soil, but also planted the seeds of democracy, we have the ability to always pursue a better world. We have the capacity to do what is right.”

HOMELAND SECURITY, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Syrian Refugee U.S. Arrivals in September: 1825 Muslims, 22 Non-Muslims (1.1 Percent) By Patrick Poole

Posted By on October 1st, 2016

The State Department admissions for all of September of non-Muslim Syrian refugees represented only 1.1 percent of the total, with 1,825 Muslim refugees admitted, and only 22 from Yazidi and various Christian sects who are being targeted for genocide by the Islamic State in Syria.

Admissions for the month of August were 3,159 Muslim and 30 non-Muslim refugees—fewer than one percent.

Year-to-date, non-Muslim Syrian refugee admissions account for less than one percent (0.8) overall, with 11,818 Muslims and only 95 non-Muslims of all groups.

Those were the numbers as of today from the State Department’s Refugee Processing Center.

These numbers are highly skewed when compared with Syria’s religious demographics.

According to The Gulf/2000 Project at Columbia University, the religious breakdown of the Syrian population from 2008-2009 shows that 15.98 million are Sunnis (73 percent of the population) while 3.29 million are Shiites (14.7 percent of the population). Christians account for 2.04 million people, or 9.3 percent of the population, while other religions account for 590,000 people, or 2.7 percent of the population.

I noted a few weeks ago that as hundreds of Muslim Syrian refugees were pouring in during early September, only two Christians had been admitted by September 10.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

STEVEN PLAUT FROM ISRAEL: THE BEST COMMENT ON THE DEATH OF SHIMON PERES SEE NOTE PLEASE

Posted By on October 1st, 2016

I would add that Shimon Peres played a significant role in persuading a reluctant Rabin to launch the incredible rescue at Entebbe…..rsk

By concentrating on his role in the Oslo debacle, it is easy to forget the fact that for most of his career, Shimon Peres was a great man. While he was hardly a founding father of the country, as the media are proclaiming in mindless unison, being too young in 1948, Peres played a critical role in Israeli arms procurement, in the creation of the Dimona reactor, in relations with France, even in erection of early settlements in the West Bank. He was Ben Gurion’s sidekick in the rightish breakaway Rafi Party, which split from MAPAI.

Because it lasted so long, the majority of his career days were as a skilled diplomat and leader of the Labor Right, and as Ben Gurion’s Robin. Had he retired 25 years ago, that would have been his legacy.
But he did not. He spent his last 25 years committing Oslo, endangering the very existence of Israel with his delusions. Hectoring the country that if there was no peace it was because Israelis did not want it enough, insisting to the end that almost all Israelis support the “Two-State Solution,” whereas in reality almost none do. Proclaiming that Palestinians seek peace, whereas they seek genocidal jihad.

The obscene reaction to his death among Arabs serves better than anything else to prove how deluded he was.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

An Illegal Bailout for ObamaCare The White House plots a Treasury raid without an appropriation.

Posted By on October 1st, 2016

We keep reading that Donald Trump poses a unique threat to constitutional norms if he’s elected. His liberal critics would have more credibility if they called out the Obama Administration for its current (not potential) abuses of power, and here’s an opportunity: The Administration is crafting an illegal bailout to prop up the President’s health-care law.

News leaked this week that the Obama Administration is moving to pay health insurers billions of dollars through an obscure Treasury Department account known as the Judgment Fund. This would be a cash infusion for an ObamaCare program known as “risk corridors,” an allegedly temporary provision in the 2010 law that enticed insurers to participate in the exchanges.

The program was supposed to hedge against the risk that insurers would suffer large losses from plans that are limited in how they can price premiums for age or illness. Profitable insurers would pay into a fund that would be redistributed to companies that took unforeseen losses. The Administration said that risk corridors would be budget-neutral because more insurers would benefit than buckle, and the fund might even produce a profit.

Meanwhile back on earth, risk corridors resulted in industry-wide adverse selection, in which there are not enough healthy insurers to subsidize the sick ones. In 2014 the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) collected a mere 12% of what insurers requested, and the fund payed out some $360 million of nearly $2.9 billion in claims.

The agency tried to raid other Health and Human Services funds to make up the shortfall, but legislators blocked that run around the law. Congress has twice stipulated that the Affordable Care Act must be enforced as written: No taxpayer money may be appropriated to risk-corridor payments. Yet CMS said in a memo this year that the payments are “an obligation of the United States government,” and the agency is “open to discussing the resolution of those claims.”

The plan now is to sneak around Congress through publicly financed lawsuit settlements. The Justice Department is eager to end a $5 billion class-action suit from Oregon’s now insolvent co-op, Health Republic Insurance, which demanded full payment of risk-corridor claims. So Justice will likely unload cash from the Treasury Department’s Judgment Fund, a 1950s invention that permanently allows for payment of judgments against the U.S.

This is an illegal move to spend money where Congress wouldn’t. A June memo from the Congressional Research Service notes that plaintiffs would have to wait until the government digs up more money or Congress decides to appropriate it. In a 1998 letter the Government Accountability Office pointed out that the Judgment Fund is not a tool to “circumvent congressional restrictions on appropriations,” which is precisely what the White House is doing.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Peres’ funeral, Abbas’ hypocrisy : Ruthie Blum

Posted By on October 1st, 2016

On Thursday, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas requested and was granted permission from the Israeli government to travel to Jerusalem to attend the funeral of elder statesman Shimon Peres, who died on Wednesday at the age of 93.

This gesture on Abbas’ part should make perfect sense to all who knew and loved Peres, much of whose illustrious history was spent singing literal and figurative songs of peace. Indeed, the former president, prime minister and defense minister of the Jewish state, who was honored the world over for his self-proclaimed “dreams” of a new Middle East, has spent decades sympathizing with what he considered to be the plight of the Palestinian people, ostensibly longing for independent statehood.

Peres also shared a Nobel Peace Prize with the late Israeli Premier Yitzhak Rabin and PLO chief Yasser Arafat for the signing of the Oslo Accords. Though these agreements were revealed to be an unmitigated disaster for Israel — leading to heightened waves of Palestinian terrorism — Peres never faltered. If anything, his fantasies of friendly economic and cultural ties between Israel and the Palestinian Authority grew with each passing suicide bombing perpetrated against innocent Jews.

Abbas has always known this about Peres, despite his own and other Palestinian officials’ public pronouncements over the years that the long-time Labor party leader was, like all Jews, a liar and a war criminal.

Abbas is also keenly aware that leaders from countries around the world have begun landing in Israel to pay their last respects to the Israel’s most famous peace-monger. And he doesn’t want to be left out, particularly since he has been trying to persuade all of them, individually and collectively, that all he wants is a state he can call his own. Of course, he always fails to acknowledge that he already possesses sovereignty over most of the West Bank, while Hamas rules supreme in Gaza, and that Israel is not to blame for the ills suffered by his people.

Nor has he budged one iota from his assertion that no Jew would be allowed to live in a future Palestinian state. And why should he? After all, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused him recently of promoting ethnic cleansing, many of the dignitaries who are arriving en masse to say goodbye to Peres responded very harshly. Not to Abbas, mind you, but to Netanyahu.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Shimon Peres, 1923-1016 Essay: With Peres’ death, two very different men died. BY: David Isaac

Posted By on October 1st, 2016

With the passing of Shimon Peres at the age of 93, two very different men died. The first was young, pragmatic and tough-minded, skilled in negotiation and focused on building Israel’s military strength. The second was older, a dreamer, resolutely focused on a vision of peace that proved stubbornly impervious to reality.

The first Peres was tapped by Ben-Gurion to head Israel’s navy at the tender age of 24, and then became director general of the defense ministry at 29. He helped establish Israel’s arms industry and led the negotiations with France that made it Israel’s chief weapons supplier. He was deeply involved in the planning, with England and France, of the 1956 Sinai campaign and is credited with the construction of Israel’s nuclear deterrent at Dimona.

This Peres reacted to events like a security hawk. When in 1976 then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin wavered between sending a rescue mission to Entebbe or giving in to terrorist demands, it was Peres, as defense minister, who pushed hard for the risky and unprecedented rescue effort. And it was Peres, within a divided government, who supported the settlement movement in Judea and Samaria.

But around 25 years ago, Peres was reborn. In 1993, as foreign minister he became the architect of the Oslo Accords. Until then, it had been illegal for an Israeli to speak to PLO representatives. In the blink of an eye, Yasser Arafat went from terror chieftain to world statesman. The new policy led to a Nobel Peace Prize for both Arafat and Peres, along with Prime Minister Rabin, whom Peres carried along with his vision. This is the Peres who promoted the idea of a New Middle East, in which cooperation would replace conflict.

The new Peres would become the most un-Jewish of Israel’s prime ministers. This is not in the sense of religious observance: Peres may have been less alienated from tradition than some of Israel’s other secular leaders. It is in the sense of departing from fundamental Jewish historical values and insights. One of the most central of these is the importance of remembrance. Zakhor—remember, according to former Columbia Professor of Jewish History Yosef Haim Yerushalmi, is invoked 169 times in the Bible. Indeed, Yerushalmi wrote a book entitled Zakhor in which he notes that only in Israel “is the injunction to remember felt as a religious imperative to an entire people.” Yet Peres repeatedly insisted that he had no interest in the past. Noting the contrast between Yerushalmi’s emphasis on memory in Judaism and Peres’s cavalier dismissal of history, the pro-Israel group Americans for a Safe Israel compiled a pamphlet of statements from Peres on subjects like history, Zionism, and Judaism over nearly a decade following the Oslo Accords. Below is a sampling:

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

MY SAY: NO MORE ” YOU ARE ENTITLED TO YOUR OPINION”

Posted By on September 30th, 2016

Apparently it is universal. Here is a quote from Australia’s premier conservative journal QUADRANT….

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2016/09/better-book-burning/

Tim Wilms : Better Than a Book-Burning

“However, we are no longer living in a country where both sides of an argument enjoy equal access to the pulpit of public opinion,…… Conservatives tend to believe that those who disagree are most likely ill-informed and that a civil conversation might change their minds. Those on the left, by contrast, tend to view all who differ as evil and give their arguments no more than a contemptuous dismissal. Rather than argue the point, in this instance they have pitched a narrative that paints opponents as gay-bashing bigots and jackbooted homophobes, further insisting that mass outbreaks of suicide and mental collapse must surely follow if such views are allowed to be freely expressed. When the vocal left turns out in force to oppose something — well, anything, really — respect for free speech becomes an also-ran.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

UN Demands US Pay Reparations “Human rights” panel accuses American police of being modern-day lynchers. Joseph Klein

Posted By on September 30th, 2016

Just when you thought the United Nations could not sink any lower, a UN panel has issued a report recommending that the United States pay “reparations” to African-Americans for its “legacy of colonial history, enslavement, racial subordination and segregation, racial terrorism and racial inequality.” The report accuses the United States of maintaining “institutional and structural racial discrimination and racism against people of African descent.”

The panel that issued this claptrap is the self-styled Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, which reported on the visit of three of its members to the United States from January 19-29 2016. The Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent reports to the UN’s dysfunctional Human Rights Council, which the Obama administration decided to join and American taxpayers are thus helping to pay for.

The Working Group members met with representatives from various federal agencies, including the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Labor, the Department of Justice and the Environmental Protection Agency. They also met with officials of the White House working on African-American issues, staff of the congressional black caucus, a member of the United States Senate and various state and local government officials. Finally, they met with hundreds of unidentified “African Americans from communities with a large population of people of African descent living in the suburbs, as well as with lawyers, academics and representatives of non-governmental organizations.”

The Working Group’s report channeled the language of the Black Lives Matter movement. In fact, the report’s authors went out of their way to praise Black Lives Matter.

The report charged that currently in the United States “a systemic ideology of racism ensuring the domination of one group over another continues to impact negatively on the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of African Americans today.” The fact that the country twice elected an African-American as president and that two African-Americans have served as the U.S. Attorney General during the last seven plus years seems to have eluded the report’s authors.

While acknowledging some progress since the long gone Jim Crow era, the Working Group chose to focus in its report on what it characterized as “alarming levels of police brutality and excessive use of lethal force by law enforcement officials, committed with impunity against people of African descent in the United States.”

The report’s authors shamelessly concluded that today’s “police killings and the trauma that they create are reminiscent of the past racial terror of lynching.”

Never mind that thousands of innocent blacks have been murdered by black criminals, not by the police who are trying to protect innocent lives in high crime neighborhoods.

Never mind that in many instances of police shootings resulting in the deaths of African-Americans, independent investigations have concluded that the police were dealing with armed perpetrators whom the police had reason to believe posed an imminent lethal threat.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Obama: ‘There’s No Religious Rationale’ For Jihad Terror Right, and Hillary is honest, too. Robert Spencer

Posted By on September 30th, 2016

Here we go again. This is like having to prove that water is wet or that Hillary Clinton is crooked, but since Barack Obama has once again affirmed that jihad terrorists are twisting and hijacking the Religion of Peace, once again it is necessary to prove that unfortunately that is not the case. Obama is right about one thing: this question matters for what strategy the U.S. and the free world should pursue against the jihadis. That’s what makes his denial and willful ignorance nothing short of catastrophic.

CNN reported Thursday that Obama said the question of whether or not to use the term “Islamic terrorist” was “sort of manufactured” issue. He claimed, yet again, that “terrorist organizations like al Qaeda or ISIL…have perverted and distorted and tried to claim the mantle of Islam for an excuse for basically barbarism and death.”

Warming to his point, Obama said: “These are people who’ve killed children, killed Muslims, take sex slaves, there’s no religious rationale that would justify in any way any of the things that they do.”

Is he right? Of course not.

“Killed children”: “It is reported on the authority of Sa’b b. Jaththama that the Prophet of Allah (may peace be upon him), when asked about the women and children of the polytheists being killed during the night raid, said: They are from them.” — Sahih Muslim 4321

“I was very happy to learn about the relevant hadith. I felt overjoyed when I heard it. [Mus’ab Ibn Juthama] told the Prophet Muhammad that while the Muslims would attack the polytheists at night, women and children would be harmed. The Prophet Muhammad answered: ‘[Their offspring] constitute part of them.’ They are part of them, said our beloved Muhammad. This is not merely someone’s opinion. Thus, killing their women and children is permitted.” — Sudanese Muslim cleric Muhammad Al-Jazouli

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Black Racism Goes Mainstream A movement based on race-hatred gets the thumbs up from the government, the media and the culture-at-large. Matthew Vadum

Posted By on September 30th, 2016

Black racism is getting worse in America because it is being validated, endorsed, and legitimized like never before.

And it’s not just Barack Obama doing this.

This race-based hatred is promoted by America-hating currency speculator George Soros who has been funding the racist, violent Black Lives Matter movement for years.

Instead of urging crime-fighting, Chris Stone, president of Open Society Foundations, supports disarming the police, a move that would make things worse and leave society at the mercy of criminals.

Black criminals aren’t to blame for rising crime rates because trigger-happy cops are on a killing spree in the U.S., he writes. “Those who kill innocents rarely do so sadistically. There are always excuses and explanations, stretching notions of self-defense, exaggerating threats, claiming mistaken identities.”

Although the U.S. is the least racist nation on the face of the earth there is a discernible shift underway. Too many black Americans and their radical non-black allies feel comfortable routinely spewing anti-white sentiments in public. Their crude, sometimes genocidal statements are becoming increasingly mainstream in the Obama era. In a case of defining deviancy down, antisocial anti-white sentiments are accepted by the media as normal, even admirable. The universities, strongholds of radical leftism and kooky identity politics, cleared the way for this.

American culture used to do a better job organically marginalizing racism. Until Barack Obama began running for president it can be argued racism barely existed at all in the United States.

Sure, the racial grievance industry with Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and groups like ACORN, used to stir up trouble and use racial antagonism to shake down corporations, but these activities never had the feel of legitimacy about them. They were dirty and quite properly looked down upon by most normal Americans but today such activism wins praise from and invitations to the White House.

Recent events seem to confirm this trend in which the public expression of anti-white racist sentiments and violence against whites is being destigmatized.

As Breitbart News reported yesterday:

In an assault captured on video, Feras Jabro, a Donald Trump supporter wearing a “Make America Great Again” baseball cap, was harassed, chased, thrown to the ground and beaten by Black Lives Matter activists at a protest in El Cajon, California. […]

A longer video, shot from the victim’s perspective, shows the man standing in the crowd then being hit from behind, running from an angry mob, and then being beaten on the ground simply for wearing his MAGA hat.

The vicious attack happened on the second night of protests in the San Diego suburb of El Cajon, where Black Lives Matter protesters are angered about the police shooting death of Alfred Olango, 38. El Cajon police say they shot and killed Olango after responding to a call from his sister that he was acting erratically. Olango refused to comply with police orders, then “assumed a shooting stance” with what appeared to be a gun, but later turned out to be a vape cigarette electronic device.