Palestinian Reasoning: Yield to Our Crazy Religious Intolerance or We’ll Kill You By David French

Israel is on the brink of a third intifada. In the last several days, Palestinians have shot, stabbed, and rammed Israeli civilians to death, prompting fears that suicide bombings are next. But even without explosives, the attacks have been gruesome enough. In the the last 24 hours, two terrorists boarded a bus, locked the doors, and started shooting and stabbing passengers until one terrorist was shot to death and the other wounded. That same day, a Palestinian man rammed his car into a crowded bus stop, emerged from his vehicle “swinging an axe,” and killed a rabbi before he was stopped. In two other incidents, Palestinians seriously wounded Israelis in stabbing attacks.

What’s prompting the violence? The typical, tired media explanation for Palestinian attacks is “frustration with the lack of progress towards peace” (as if “peace” were ever the terrorists’ goal). But this time the consensus is that the immediate reason for violence is Palestinian rage over rumored policy changes at Jerusalem’s most holy sites. The New Yorker’s Ruth Margalit explains:

The stated cause of the recent surge in attacks is Palestinians’ belief that the Israeli government is trying to change the status quo at the holy compound in Jerusalem, a place revered by Jews as the Temple Mount and by Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif, or the Noble Sanctuary. According to security arrangements dating back to 1967, the site, while open to Jewish visitors at specific times, is sealed off to non-Muslim prayer.

Israelis: ‘We Don’t Run’ Carrying on with their daily lives amid the terrorist attacks. By Michael M. Rosen

HOORAY FOR JON BON JOVI….RSK
Ra’anana, Israel — “We don’t run. / I’m standing my ground. / We don’t run, / And we don’t back down. / There’s fire in the sky, / There’s thunder on the mountains. / Bless each tear and this dirt I was born in. / We don’t run. / We don’t run.”

Jon Bon Jovi sang these words ten days ago to a raucous crowd of 50,000 Israelis during his first-ever performance in the Jewish state. “This should be the fight song for all you Tel Aviv-ers,” Bon Jovi told us that night, as my wife, my son, and tens of thousands of our closest friends wildly applauded.

Little did the rocker know how apt his words would prove to be. Minutes before his performance, two Israelis were stabbed to death in Jerusalem’s Old City by a Palestinian attacker, in part of what has become a surge in terror attacks against Israeli civilians.

Already this month, the Jewish state has absorbed dozens of murderous assaults with guns, bombs, fists, screwdrivers, cars, axes, vegetable peelers, and, most commonly, knives. Most of the attacks have been carried out in broad daylight in public places for maximum effect.

The terrorism hit very close to home for my family Tuesday morning with two separate attacks in our town north of Tel Aviv, just blocks from our kids’ school.

In the Age of Obama, Our Enemies Gather Round By Jerry Hendrix — O

In the third century a.d., external pressures from competing powers along the periphery of the empire, along with growing weakness and incoherence within the imperial government, began to undermine the power of Rome. Externally, the Goths, Franks, and Vandals rose and began to roll back the Roman system of governance and trade. Internally, the Senate became impotent and a series of weak emperors led first to the geographic division of the empire and ultimately its demise. The period of history that followed came to be known as the “Dark Ages” and lasted nearly a thousand years, during which human progress was truncated until the emergence of the Enlightenment.

Today, all along the perimeter of the current global system of governance, the combination of external pressures from authoritarian regimes and a series of questionable internal strategic choices have weakened the defenses of the rule of law, individual liberty, and free trade. These actions have allowed Russia to carve out territorial gains in the Crimea and Ukraine, China to assert sovereignty over a vast area of the ocean through the uncontested creation of artificial islands, Iran to inflate an expanding sphere of influence through acts of terrorism in the Middle East, North Korea to gain nuclear weapons, and Cuba to reemerge as a normal nation within the Western hemisphere despite its long and unapologetic support of Communism and terrorist activities.

Hillary Gets a Debate Pass Her opponents lack the nerve to point out her biggest vulnerability.

The first Democratic presidential debate on Tuesday evening was an opportunity for the unknown challengers to Hillary Clinton to make an impression, and it’s fair to say they did. The four men on stage showed they lack the ability and will to take her on.

The most important moment of the debate came when CNN’s Anderson Cooper gingerly raised the issue of her private emails as Secretary of State. Bernie Sanders, who is leading in the polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, replied by giving her a whitewash. Americans “are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails,” he declared. The Democratic crowd loved it, and so did Mrs. Clinton, who shook Mr. Sanders’s hand in gratitude after having ducked Mr. Cooper’s question by dismissing the whole issue as a Republican attack.

Only Lincoln Chafee dared to suggest that her “credibility” might be an issue for voters, but he apologized for doing even that. If Democrats aren’t willing to raise the main reason that Mrs. Clinton is losing in head-to-head polls against most Republicans—her penchant for ethical corner-cutting and deceit—then they are essentially putting their nomination into a Clinton blind trust.

Gerald F. Seib : Hillary Clinton Shows Relentless Efficiency in First Democratic Debate -Democrat seemed determined to march methodically through her policy positions and to remind voters of her broad experience

She registered her average-folks credentials by reminding listeners—twice—that she isn’t just the spouse of a former president but also the granddaughter of a factory worker. She had endorsed a higher minimum wage, higher taxes on the wealthy and more equality for gays and lesbians, and subtly reminded the nation television audience that if she were elected president, “fathers can say to their daughters, ‘You too can grow up to be president.’”

And then, when she encountered what may be her greatest current campaign vulnerability, which is the continuing controversy over her use of a private server for government work while secretary of state, she didn’t have to bail herself out. That instead was done for her by her principal foe for the nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders, who declared, to moderator Anderson Cooper and the audience, “The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails…Enough of the emails. Let’s talk about the real issues.”

INCITEMENT TO KILL FROM TOM GROSS

http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001563.html

I don’t have time to write a longer dispatch today but for those who haven’t seen it, I recommend watching this video of a sermon from four days ago by a leading Imam in Gaza in which he brandishes a knife in the mosque and urges Arabs everywhere to stab Jews.

This is not the kind of reporting you will see on the BBC and other anti-Israel news media.

The sermon is not an isolated incident and similar incitement to kill Jews is appearing in the Western-funded Fatah media and Fatah controlled mosques.

Jobs Dissatisfaction by Marilyn Penn

In “The ‘Steve Jobs’ Con” (NYT 8/13), Joe Nocera does an excellent job of revealing the discrepancies between the Jobs whose career he followed closely and the mostly fictional character created for the movie. As an unwitting audience member who knew much less than Nocera, I too felt that the fast-talking, stubborn and abrasive character was a familiar stereotype found in other Sorkin films and tv shows and therefore, an un-inflected portrayal of this particular man.

Against a stylized framework of showing Jobs at three of his famous product launchings, we are meant to glean the essence of his character through his relationships with key figures in his professional and personal life. There is the rejected, neurotic former girlfriend, mother of Lisa, the “illegitimate” and unacknowledged daughter. Both are mostly stick figures who reappear to keep asking for money and recognition. There are the three male colleagues who have their grievances of varying legitimacy. And there is Joanna Hoffman, the maternal work-wife who understands everything about the business as well as the boss’ major character flaws. As played by Kate Winslet with an irrelevant Polish twang (competing with Meryl Streep’s superior Sophie), she is perpetually anxious, devoted and insightful, and if we are believe the screenplay, the one most responsible for forcing Jobs to reconsider his hurtful and intractable behavior towards Lisa. As Nocera points out, we never learn that this girl actually lived with Jobs throughout her high school years. A bigger surprise that is totally excluded from the film is that Jobs was married with three other children by this time in the film. Presented as a loner who has difficulty getting along with everyone, the truth of that last piece of information is crucial to our understanding of what appears to be a thaw in his icy intransigence and far more logical as an explanation for his softening temperament. Similarly, Kate Winslet’s character, presented as a woman with a single-minded purpose of taking care of Steve Jobs, was also married with a family of her own.

Doctor Describes Horrors in German Hospital Overrun by Muslim Migrants, Doctors Stabbed, No Arrests, No Media Pamela Geller

Again total cover up in the Muslim invasion of Europe. In this report, a doctor describes the stabbing of an attending physician at one of the hospitals overrun with Muslim migrants — there are no arrests and no media coverage, of course. But there’s more — what he describes is gruesome.

Czech doctor describes conditions in German hospital — watch the whole thing:

“Humanitarian Jihad” in The Black Flag of Jihad stalks la République Nidra Poller

Here is an excerpt from a work in progress:

There will be no way of stemming the flow of refugees, no effective defense against jihad conquest without a re-evaluation of the “Israel-Palestine” conflict. It is not the cause of instability in the Middle East; it is the core, the base, the launch pad for an assault on Western values. No degree of magnitude and horror of Daesh atrocities has yet untangled the twisted media narrative. Faced this fall with a flareup of murderous violence against Jewish Israeli civilians—again—media junkies indulge in the usual cheap tricks, reversing chronology to switch cause with effect and turn the hate-filled murderer into a Palestinian victim “shot dead by the police.” Day in day out they spin the same tired tales to shore up their tumbling certitudes. “It’s all because of the colonization.”

Delusional White House on Iran Missile Test: UN Resolution Implementing Iran Deal ‘Altogether Separate’ from Iran Deal By Andrew C. McCarthy

In its continuing humiliation of President Obama – who clings to his Iran deal despite Iran’s continuing to call for “Death to America,” banning of further negotiations with the U.S., convicting of one of its American hostages of bogus espionage charges, joining with Russia to prop up Assad by bombing America-backed insurgents, and contemptuously asserting that it will ignore provisions of the deal to which it objects – the jihadist regime in Tehran tested a ballistic missile over the weekend in blatant violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions, including Resolution 2231, which codifies the Iran deal.

The Obama White House response to Iran’s brazenness today is astonishing, even by delusional Obama standards. The president’s spokesman, Josh Earnest, acknowledged there were “strong indications that those missile tests did violate U.N. Security Council resolutions that pertain to Iran’s ballistic missile activities.” Nevertheless, he maintained with a straight face that “this is altogether separate from the nuclear agreement that Iran reached with the rest of the world.”

What? The resolution that implements the said nuclear agreement directs Iran, for approximately the next eight years,