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Hamas man killed as Gaza tunnel collapses

Posted By on March 4th, 2016

Group blames Israel for cave-in, the seventh in recent months, amid redoubled efforts to dig across the border.

A tunnel being dug in Gaza under the aegis of the ruling Hamas group collapsed on Thursday, killing a member of the organization’s military wing, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas said.

The dead man was named as Muhammad Musa al Astal from Khan Younis.

The tunnel caved in near the city of Khan Younis in southern Gaza, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades confirmed. It was the latest in a spate of such collapses. Only five days ago, another tunnel caved in near the Zeitoun neighborhood in the eastern part of the Strip, injuring five members of Hamas’s military wing.

Members of Hamas accused Israel of collapsing the tunnel, saying they had seen soldiers on the Gaza border using liquid explosives and “causing small earthquakes” to bring down tunnels dug by the group.

The past two months have seen seven tunnels collapse, most of them in the Khan Younis area, and two in Zeitoun.

Around a month ago, the 23-year-old nephew of Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar was killed in a tunnel accident.

Just before that, a tunnel collapsed in the area of Jabalia, in the north of the Palestinian enclave, after heavy rain and floods, killing seven excavators and injuring others.

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What Israel is giving me: The voice of an Arab doctor by Gheula Canarutto Nemni

Posted By on March 4th, 2016

Gheula Canarutto Nemni is a professor and novelist living in Milan, Italy. Her most recent novel ‘(Non) si può avere tutto’ Mondadori 2015 tells the story of an Italian Orthodox Jewish girl and her challenges in the professional world in Milan.

Her name is Faiza. She works for a major private hospital in Israel.We met a week ago, while I was there assisting a relative of mine.

Faiza is at the head of the intensive care unit, she runs from one patient to the other offering always a sweet smile together with very professional care.

Faiza lives in Shuafat, an Arab neighborhood in Jerusalem where there are frequent disturbances.She comes from a family of eleven, most of them graduates of Israeli universities. Between one patient and another, we share our visions about life.

“I love my life. I love living in Israel. I thank Allah every day for having given me the opportunity to grow up here,” she says. “I know that if it was not for this country, I would never be what I am.”

“Here you can choose,” she says while she is finishing her coffee during her break. She turns her head toward the Arab doctors and nurses. “Israel gives you the opportunity to express your human potential,” she adds.

I find out that in all Israeli universities and job sites, there are guaranteed places for Arab Israeli citizens.

There is something special in her eyes. You can feel her love for humanity.

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Angela Merkel: A Suicidal Bully By:Srdja Trifkovic

Posted By on March 4th, 2016

Not for the first time the government of Germany is acting as if it owned Europe. On two occasions in the 20th century it sought to occupy most of Europe; this time, with almost equal arrogance, it is trying to bully the rest of Europe into not resisting the ongoing Muslim occupation. The consequences of its actions today, if not checked, are likely to be as tragic as those of its predecessors had been in 1914 and 1939.
For reasons that have never been rationally explained, German Chancellor Angela Merkel continues to pursue a two-track policy:
She wants to keep Germany’s borders open to migrants. In defiance of the demands by her Bavarian CSU coalition partners and others, she rejects any set limit on the number of newcomers. To their detailed warnings that her approach is untenable she responds by saying that letting millions of people into the country is good for Germany’s reputation (“we can stand by our values”);
At the same time she wants to redistribute migrants arriving in Germany throughout the EU through a system of Brussels-imposed compulsory quotas on all 28 member-countries (“I am fighting for this approach”), while admitting that there is no “Plan B”: she is not prepared even to consider any alternatives, such as cutting immigrant inflows.
Angela Merkel effectively wants to present the rest of Europe with two faits accomplis: that Germany will accept unlimited numbers of migrants, and that Germany will use her overwhelming influence in Brussels to force the rest of Europe to share the resulting cost and burden of improving “Germany’s reputation”—all in the name of maintaining “European unity.” Her calls for a “joint European solution” are nothing but demands for the rest of Europe to be obedient, sayJawohl! and facilitate the creation of Sharia-based no-go areas in Krakow, Bratislava and Budapest.

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Log-Cabin Candidates By Victor Davis Hanson…….

Posted By on March 3rd, 2016

Which presidential candidate was born the poorest? Whose log cabin birthplace was the most ramshackle?

Hillary and Bill Clinton are worth well over $100 million, largely due to years of leveraging their government service to pull in astronomical speaking and consulting fees from Wall Street, foreign investors, and big banks. Yet Hillary Clinton, a graduate of elite Wellesley College and Yale Law School, often adopts a poor man’s drawl and Southern slang before particular audiences. She has claimed that “all my grandparents” were immigrants. Not true. Only one grandfather immigrated to the United States, from Britain. Hillary herself grew up in an affluent suburb of Chicago, in a conservative upper-class household.

Republican presidential candidate John Kasich, governor of Ohio, a former investment banker and regional director of Lehman Brothers, cannot finish a speech without mentioning that his father was a mail carrier.

Ivy League graduate Ted Cruz, whose wife is a Goldman Sachs manager in Texas, reminds audiences that his father was a poor Cuban immigrant.

Lawyer and career politician Marco Rubio constantly references his Cuban-immigrant parents. His mother for a time was a hotel maid, his father a longtime bartender.

Retired world-renowned surgeon Ben Carson often recalls his impoverished inner-city childhood.

Bernie Sanders points to his outer-borough Brooklyn upbringing.

Barack Obama in 2008 perhaps best played the same weepy log-cabin violin.

Obama was brought up by upper-middle-class grandparents, and his grandmother was a successful Bank of Hawaii vice president. They sent Obama to Hawaii’s most exclusive prep school. Yet as an author and candidate, Obama talked mostly about his Kenyan-immigrant father, who abandoned his family and returned to Africa.

No matter how successful, how wealthy, or how well-educated, every presidential candidate poses — sometimes accurately, sometimes through exaggeration — as a modern version of salt-of-the-earth Abraham Lincoln, the rail-splitter born in a log cabin. Apparently, populist America always wants a man-of-the-people candidate who can relate to everyday folks — and who doesn’t think he or she is any better than the rest of us.

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Osama bin Laden, the Environmentalist The man who ordered 9/11’s mass murder fretted about climate change. By Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on March 3rd, 2016

So Osama bin Laden was an environmentalist. In between plotting the mass murder of kaffirs and the destruction of the West, he penned teary-eyed missives about the dangers of “catastrophic climate change.” Coming off like an earnest member of Greenpeace who had read one too many Naomi Klein tracts, he wrote a letter in 2009 calling on Americans to do everything within their power to “save humanity from the harmful gases that threaten its destiny.” Released by the Obama administration this week, the letter says mankind is living in “the shadow of catastrophic climate conditions” and we need a “revolution” to make the planet cleaner. If you read the letter out at the next IPCC gathering, you’d probably get a rousing round of applause.

Some people seem freaked out to discover that OBL had green tendencies. How is it possible that this finger-wagging lunatic could have been as one with the West’s own respectable chattering classes on the issue of climate change? One columnist seems perturbed that bin Laden had what he describes as a more “progressive” take on climate change than the current GOP presidential candidates. But why the surprise? It makes perfect sense that this anti-Western, anti-modern medieval throwback should have warmed to green thinking. After all, bin Laden’s biggest beef in life was that the modern West was an overly cocky, supremely destructive entity that needed to be taken down a peg or two — which is exactly what environmentalists think, too.

Bin Laden’s 2009 letter, written to coincide with the coming to power of Obama, is not the first time he got moist-eyed about man-made planetary doom. In 2002 he attacked the U.S. for pursuing progress at the expense of poor, sad Mother Earth. “You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history,” he hectored, like an agitated hippie. Hilariously, he lambasted President George W. Bush for “refus[ing] to sign the Kyoto agreement” on climate-reduction targets. There’s something deliciously surreal about a terrorist outlaw who was then running from hideout to hideout lecturing the president of the United States for failing to sign on the dotted line of global treaties.

In 2007 he lectured the foul, greedy West again, claiming that “all of mankind is in danger because of the global warming resulting to a large degree from the emissions of the factories of the major corporations.” He beat Occupy Wall Street to the punch by four years, slamming the “greed and avarice of the major corporations and their representatives.” Then, in the 2009 letter released this week, he outlined his solution to all this Western wickedness: “The world should put its efforts into attempting to reduce the release of gases.” In a nutshell, join Greenpeace. Take eco-action. Put pressure on corporations. Bin Laden basically had two feelings about the American people: that they should die or, failing that, become dutiful warriors against climate change

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Is the Climate Crusade Stalling? It’s past time to take a closer look at the climate zealots’ science. By Kathleen Hartnett White

Posted By on March 3rd, 2016

The Supreme Court’s stay of the EPA’s sweeping Clean Power Plan (CPP) is one of several developments undermining the efforts of President Obama and his fellow climate zealots. The Obama administration expected the CPP to seal the U.N.’s first universal climate agreement, but now that the president’s grand plan has been put on hold until final judicial review on the merits, its fate will likely not be known until late 2017 at the earliest. Furthermore, the prospects for upholding the power plan are not that strong. As a legal condition of imposing the stay, the Supreme Court had to conclude that the EPA’s plan would likely be overruled in the Court’s final review.

Last December in Paris the climate agreement was declared a fait accompli, with representatives of around 190 countries expected to sign it on Earth Day (April 22) at the U.N.’s headquarters in New York. The Paris deal does not “enter into force” until at least 55 countries that together account for 55 percent of man-made greenhouse gases ink the document. But if President Obama’s grand plan to reduce CO2 remains in legal limbo for two more years, why would other countries go ahead and submit their economic future to the terms of the U.N. agreement?

In response, the White House has apparently assigned Todd Stern, the State Department’s special envoy on climate, to get busy on damage control. Stern last week warned the presidential candidates that they would be well advised to stop sowing seeds of doubt about the CPP. In Brussels, Stern reassured EU officials that the Court’s freeze on the CPP would not weaken the EPA’s resolve on pledged carbon cuts or delay the signing of the agreement in April.

However, the European Union has good reason to worry about the viability of the Paris deal if the United States’ contribution is uncertain. After ambitious green efforts over the last ten years, many EU member countries have substantial economic concerns about expanded carbon dictates. As a result of the carbon policies they already have in place, Germany, Britain, and Spain have experienced soaring electricity rates, energy poverty, unsustainable subsidies, and industrial flight — all while failing to achieve meaningful carbon reductions.

The incoherence of the policies spawned by the U.N.’s earlier Kyoto climate accord is increasingly undeniable. Germany is subsidizing the construction of coal-fired power plants as necessary backups to renewables, and Britain is burning wood imported from the United States to generate electricity on a massive scale. Renamed “biomass” and declared “carbon neutral,” wood is no less polluting than coal. Headlines in the Daily Mail excoriate the retrofit of Britain’s largest coal plant to burn wood as a “forest-destroying symbol of the shameful absurdity of European energy policies.”

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School Reportedly Creates ‘Safe Space’ for Students Hurt by ‘Tequila Party’ Offended students also received counseling. By Katherine Timpf

Posted By on March 3rd, 2016

Some students wore sombreros to a tequila-themed birthday party at Bowdoin College — and others were so offended that the school had to provide them with safe spaces and counseling to deal with it.

According to the school’s newspaper, the Bowdoin Orient, the e-mail invitation to the event called it “a ‘tequila’ party” and then added, “we’re not saying it’s a fiesta, but we’re also not not saying that 🙂 (we’re not saying that).”

This phrasing was, presumably, aiming to poke fun at the way the PC police often lose their minds over pretty much any party where tequila is present — which wound up being exactly what happened with this one.

Yep. According to the Orient, one student (1) reported that some of the attendees had been wearing sombreros at the same time as they were drinking tequila at the party, and all hell broke loose.

In an e-mail to National Review Online, sophomore Richard Arms states that there have been “3 school-wide emails from deans and our president, and there have been several ‘safe-space’ opportunities on campus for students to discuss how they were hurt and offended” by the party.

What’s more, the General Assembly of Bowdoin Student Government issued a “Statement of Solidarity to stand by all students who were affected by the ‘tequila’ party that occurred on 20 February 2016.”

“The Assembly, representing the entire student body of Bowdoin, stands by all students who were injured and affected by the incident,” the statement reads.

(Yes — “injured.”)

According to the statement, even though the school offered offended students counseling (!) to help them deal with the fact that their classmates were drinking a kind of booze with a kind of hat on, the response just wasn’t enough for something so serious.

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Ben Sasse Explains His #NeverTrump Stand By Elaina Plott

Posted By on March 3rd, 2016

‘I don’t understand what motivates Chris Christie.”

That’s one of Senator Ben Sasse’s softer statements during our conversation Wednesday morning. We’re talking about the New Jersey governor’s recent endorsement of Donald Trump. After multiple media appearances this week following his declaration that he would not vote for Trump under any circumstance, Sasse can lambast the Republican front-runner on autopilot. But when reflecting on Trump’s latest string of high-profile surrogates, he struggles for the right words.

“I think — I mean — maybe you have to know Christie well to understand him, to speculate about it, and I don’t know him,” Sasse says. “But it’s pretty hard to read the transcripts of stuff he’s said in the past about Trump, put them up against what he says now, and say, ‘Oh, yeah. That is definitely a mature, adult consistency.’”

Beginning with a series of tweets in January questioning Trump for boasting about his marital infidelities, his support for single-payer healthcare, and his Second Amendment views, Sasse emerged early on as a vocal anti-Trump force. Now, through an open letter via Facebook, he’s pledging to oppose Trump no matter what, and is urging conservatives to unite around a third-party alternative should he clinch the nomination.

That Sasse — the wonky, conservative freshman from Nebraska — has joined the so-called #NeverTrump movement is not all that striking. What is striking is that he’s the only sitting senator to have done so, his voice echoing in a chamber empty of Republicans who will openly stand beside him. Sasse has grappled with that fact in recent days, especially as Christie and colleagues such as Alabama senator Jeff Sessions — Sasse says he still “like[s]” and “respect[s]” Sessions — join the Trump train. But in an arena where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House speaker Paul Ryan refuse to breathe the front-runner’s name, Sasse is launching his own offensive.

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Christians Who Demonize Israel – Part III Sabeel: An Anti-Semitic Cult within the Church by Denis MacEoin

Posted By on March 3rd, 2016

Sabeel’s theology distorts the Old Testament by denying Jews any ongoing connection with the land of their origin, and treating them as a people abandoned by God. There is also repeated disparagement of Judaism as “tribal,” “primitive,” and “exclusionary.”

Where most modern churches have left the anti-Semitism of the past behind and recognize that the Romans, not the Jews, crucified Jesus, this cult of what has been called “Christian Palestinianism” denies any historical or theological connection between the biblical Israel, the Jewish people, and the State of Israel.

Perhaps the gravest error made by Kairos, Sabeel, and other Christian groups who pursue a one-sided campaign is that they take away from the Palestinians any form of agency or self-reliance. If the Israelis are to blame for all that is wrong and the Palestinians are only victims, then Palestinians must be treated as children, without the will and power to act on their own behalf. Or who can act only through violence and hate.

Are these campaigns, replete with fraudulent charges, as in the Inquisition, really not about Palestinians at all, but just the latest incarnation of the old racist and religious hatred of Jews, and a clear expression of the “New Anti-Semitism”?

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The Women-Hunt in Germany Muslim migrants openly follow, film and sexually harass teenaged girls in shopping mall. Stephen Brown

Posted By on March 3rd, 2016

“If a woman gets raped walking in public alone, then she, herself, is at fault. She is only seducing men by her presence. She should have stayed home like a Muslim woman.”
– Dr. Abd Al-Aziz Fawzan Al-Fawzan, Professor of Islamic Law, Saudi Arabia.

Many Germans welcomed with open arms the million, mostly male and Muslim, migrants Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel invited into Germany last September. At train stations, they handed out water bottles to the newcomers, while holding signs stating: “Willkommen!” At first, everything was, as the Germans say, “Friede, Freude, Eierkuchen” (“peace, joy and happiness”).

But the good feeling these greeters created, especially among themselves, has somewhat dissipated, primarily due to the increasing number of reported sexual assaults by migrants against women and children. The best known incident was the sexual molestation of hundreds of women in Cologne on New Year’s Eve by about 1,000, mostly North African men that included migrants.

The latest such multicultural enriching incident to create similar outrage occurred last Thursday in Kiel, a northern German city in Schleswig-Holstein, a state bordering Denmark. Three teenage girls, aged 15, 16 and 17, were visiting a central shopping mall, the Sophienhof, in “broad daylight” when two young Afghan asylum seekers, aged 19 and 26, began to follow and film them with their cell phones.

“Evidently, the criminals then posted these films on their social networks with the result that more and more men came to a restaurant area of the Sophienhof in order to persecute, sneer at them and to frighten them,” reported the newspaper, Die Welt.

Like the women in Cologne and those participating in the anti-Morsi demonstrations on Tahrir Square in Egypt in 2013, the three Kiel teenagers were at first probably unaware they were being hunted, and that a pack of hyenas was slowly surrounding them.