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A Great War Correspondent’s Report on the Palestinian Refugees, From a Half-Century Ago:The Arabs of Palestine by Martha Gellhorn 1961 ****

Posted By on October 27th, 2015

MARTHA GELLHORN, novelist, journalist, and former war correspondent, has recently returned from a journey to the Middle East, where she went to see the “Palestinian Refugee Problem” in terms of real life, real people. Here she reports how the Arab refugees and the Arab Israelis live, and what they say about themselves, their past and their future.

“ACCORDING to Arab politicians and apologists, this is what happened, this is the authentic view, these are the facts. Doubt is treasonous. There can be only one truth, according to Arab politicians and apologists, and it belongs to them:

In 1948, war took place between five Arab nations of the Middle East and the Jews in Palestine. This war was caused by the United Nations, whose General Assembly resolved to partition Palestine into two states, one for the Palestinian Arabs, the other for the Jews. The Arab nations and the Palestinian Arabs would not accept this monstrous decision. They were obliged to protect themselves against it, with force. The United Nations operated as the tool of the Western Imperialists, notably Great Britain and the United States. The United Nations wanted the Jews to proclaim the upstart state of Israel. Because of the Western Imperialists, who favored Israel, the Arabs lost the war. By massacre, threatening broadcasts, pointed bayonets, and the murderous siege of cities, the Jews drove hundreds of thousands of Arabs out of their homeland. For thirteen years, these Arab refugees have languished in misery around the borders of Israel. The United Nations (Western branch) bears the blame for these events and must repair the damage. The condition of the refugees is a sore on the conscience of honorable men. The Israeli government refuses to welcome back to their homeland the refugees, now swollen to more than a million in number. This refusal demonstrates the brutality and dishonesty of Israel, an abnormal nation of aliens who not only forced innocent people into exile but also stole their property. There is no solution to this injustice, the greatest the world has ever seen, except to repatriate all Palestinian refugees in Palestine. Palestine is an Arab country, now infamously called Israel. Israel has no right to exist, and the Arab nations will not sign peace treaties with it but will, by every means possible, maintain the state of war.

The details of the Arab case vary, depending on the political climate of the moment and the audience. However, the Palestinian refugees always remain the invaluable, central theme. The case is painted the color of blood in the Arab countries: Revenge and Return. For the Western public, tears replace blood; the Arab case rests on the plight of the refugees and is a call to conscience rather than to arms. But no Arab statesman has ever promised final peace with Israel if only the million Palestinian refugees may return to their former homes.

The best way to consider this case is close up, by looking at the Palestinian refugees themselves, not as a “problem,” not as statistics, but as people. The Palestinian refugees, battered by thirteen years in the arena of international politics, have lost their shape; they appear as a lump and are spoken of as one object. They are individuals, like everyone else.

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Film as Ideological Weapon Politics on the screen in Our Brand Is Crisis, Rock the Kasbah, Heart of a Dog, and The Pearl Button By Armond White

Posted By on October 27th, 2015

When it comes to movies, conservatives can be just like liberals if a film pushes their buttons. This week I saw a former CIA official on TV praise Bridge of Spies as a “great movie” but then go on to cite the continued, unresolved, post–Cold War antipathy between the U.S. and Russia — a contradiction of Bridge of Spies’ insulting, ameliorative message. Many people who consider themselves politically vigilant still look at movies as separate from propaganda — as if only the news media could be partisan. They ignore the fact that the business of contemporary Hollywood is often the business of creating ideological weapons. Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies isn’t simply an entertainment, and neither are four films released this week: Our Brand Is Crisis, Rock the Kasbah, Heart of a Dog, and The Pearl Button.

Sandra Bullock is lucky that Our Brand Is Crisis will flop. She’ll be spared the embarrassment of many people seeing her fumbling venture into George Clooney political snark (Clooney co-produced). In this film, based on Rachel Boynton’s 2005 documentary, Bullock trades in her niceness to portray Jane Bodine, an American political strategist who rebounds from recent career failure to manage the campaign of a presidential candidate in Bolivia. This fact-into-farce gimmick uses a Third World allegory to instruct Americans’ political naïveté. Instead of tackling the U.S. political industry head-on, the film chides the noxious influence of American dogma (and marketing) on global politics. “The truth is what I tell the electorate the truth is,” Jane dictates. This isn’t really political, just another form of media squabbling. Self-destructively ruthless, Jane informs her staff about her “soul-stealing” profession: “Yeah, it’s advertising. Give people something they don’t need, and then you profit from it.”

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Ruined History Tyrannies have a penchant for destroying history, their own and other people’s. By Josh Gelernter

Posted By on October 27th, 2015

This week, a gigantic, 3,300-year-old religious complex was discovered in central Israel. It’s not clear whom the complex was aimed at, god-wise; possibly “Ba’al,” a Levantine pagan deity whose cult waned as Judaism grew.

Last month, a gigantic, 5,000-year-old stone crescent was uncovered in the Galilee, in northern Israel. It’s 150 yards long, 32 yards wide, and seven yards tall. It’s older than Stonehenge. According to an archaeologist at the Hebrew University, it’s probably an ancient shrine to the moon or a moon god.

It’s been a good autumn for human artifacts in the civilized world. It’s been a very bad autumn for human artifacts in the uncivilized world. (Oh what a fall was there . . .) As the New York Times reports, the Islamic State, and friends, “are deliberately wrecking shrines, statues, mosques, tombs and churches — anything they regard as idolatry.” Shrines, etc., which range in age from very old to ancient.

In the Near East, ancient history is thick on the ground. But wanton destruction of ancient history hasn’t been confined to Iraq or Syria. In 2001, two 2,500-year-old monumental Buddhas in Afghanistan were blown to bits by the Taliban. Last year, a 3,000-year-old Philistine harbor was bulldozed by Hamas to expand a training ground for its al-Qassam terror brigade. As of last year, according to the U.K. Independent, “Islam’s most holy relics are being demolished in Mecca,” in order to transform the “dusty desert pilgrimage town into a gleaming metropolis of skyscrapers.” This a theme in the wild wild east, and not a new one.

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The Palestinian Authority’s Sinister Sleight of Hand by Alex VanNess

Posted By on October 27th, 2015

A good magician hones his craft by spending countless hours mastering sleight-of-hand techniques. The audience is distracted by one hand while the other hand is executing the illusion.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) pulled off an amazing sleight-of-hand trick this month by erasing Jewish ties to the Land of Israel.

Last week, the PA, with the backing of six Arab countries, successfully shepherded a resolution through the U.N. Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) listing the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron and Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem as Muslim sites, and condemning Israel for archeological excavations near the Temple Mount.

The resolution followed weeks of violent encounters, which started as a series of riots at the al-Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount, where Palestinians had stockpiled rocks, firebombs, and other weaponry. After the riots, Palestinians alleged that the status quo over the Temple Mount, where Jews are allowed to visit but not pray, was being threatened by Israel. These allegations were repeated, and exacerbated, by PA President Mahmoud Abbas, who accused Jews of contaminating Muslim and Christian holy sites in Jerusalem with their “filthy feet.”

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Hillary: It’s Sexism, Stupid By Rich Lowry —

Posted By on October 27th, 2015

It was inevitable that Bernie Sanders would be accused of sexism sooner or later.

His day came over the weekend. At the signature Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Iowa, Hillary Clinton hit the Vermont senator for saying in the first Democratic debate that “all the shouting in the world” wouldn’t keep guns out of the wrong hands. According to Clinton, Sanders had directed a notoriously sexist insult at her — although not one of the 15 million people watching at the time had noticed it.

“I haven’t been shouting,” Clinton intoned, “but sometimes when a woman speaks out, some people think it’s shouting.” What Clinton’s plaint lacked in plausibility, it made up for in bad faith.

Shouting has not typically been considered a loaded term. Sanders didn’t say “screeching.” He didn’t say “nagging.” In fact, he had been saying that shouting is ineffectual in the gun debate long before he was entangled in an argument about gun control with Hillary Clinton.

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Kansas University Student Senate Votes to Ban ‘His/Her’ from Governing Document Because They’re ‘Microaggressions’By Katherine Timpf

Posted By on October 27th, 2015

The Kansas University student senate has voted to banish gender-specific pronouns such as “his/her” from its Rules and Regulations document because they’re “microaggressions” against the students who don’t use them.

To, you know, work toward stamping out oppression or something, the group will replace all of those hurtful “him/his”-es and “his/hers”-es with the much more sensitive and modern “they/them/their,” according to an article in the Lawrence Journal-World.

In case anyone might think (know) that “they/them/their” are often considered (are) plural and not singular pronouns, the group will add a disclaimer at the bottom explaining that they’re using them this way “to increase the inclusivity of Student Senate and prevent microaggressions gender pronouns pose to individuals who don’t use them.”

(So, basically, they’re doing it for social justice — a motive that, once declared, automatically makes the necessity of any initiative indisputable.)

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Obama’s Veto Betrays America’s Military By The Editors —NRO

Posted By on October 27th, 2015

Sequestration has elicited garment-rending from Head Start administrators and builders of bridges to nowhere, because it has proven about the only fiscal discipline of which Washington, D.C., is capable. President Obama, eager to end his presidency in an Oprah-style spending spree, is determined to bust through the sequestration spending caps locked into place in 2011, and he is even willing to hold the United States military hostage to do it. Hence his veto, last week, of the National Defense Authorization Act.

The great flaw of sequestration has been that it cuts defense too deeply. On that point, there is bipartisan agreement. The president’s defense request, submitted earlier this year, calls for $612 billion in defense spending – $38 billion over the budget caps established by the 2011 Budget Control Act. The NDAA fulfills that request by allocating $38 billion from the Overseas Contingency Operations fund, an “emergency” fund not subject to budget caps. Using OCO to fund standard personnel expenses, such as pay raises, is not ideal; renegotiating the BCA spending caps to facilitate adequate defense funding is the only long-term solution. But a stopgap measure is far better than leaving the military underfunded, which the heads of the armed services all agree would put American soldiers at risk, and would be the consequence of not using OCO funds. The president is vetoing the NDAA less because of anything in it – although he makes fig-leaf arguments about its contents – than because he wants Congress to increase domestic spending too. He is less interested in keeping the military sufficiently funded than in using the military as leverage to end the budget caps on spending for “job training” and other of his pet programs.

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Is the West Slip, Slip, Slipping Away? What has become of free speech, free markets, and the rule of law? By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on October 27th, 2015

Sometimes a culture disappears with a whimper, not a bang. Institutions age and are ignored, and the complacent public insidiously lowers its expectations of state performance.

Infrastructure, the rule of law, and civility erode — and yet people are not sure why and how their own changing (and pathological) individual behavior is leading to the collective deterioration that they deplore.

There is still a “West” in the sense of the physical entities of North America, Europe, many of the former British dominions, and parts of Westernized Asia. The infrastructure of our cities and states looks about as it did in the recent past. But is it the West as we once knew it — a unique civilization predicated on free expression, human rights, self-criticism, vibrant free markets, and the rule of law?

Or, instead, is the West reduced to a wealthy but unfree leisure zone, driven on autopilot by computerized affluence, technological determinism, and a growing equality-of-result, omnipotent state?

Tens of thousands of migrants — reminiscent of the great southward and westward treks of Germanic tribes in the late fifth century, at the end of the Roman Empire — are overwhelming the borders of Europe. Such an influx should be a reminder that the West attracts people, while the non-West drives them out, and thus should spark inquiries about why that is so. But that discussion would be not only impolite, but beyond the comprehension of most present-day Westerners, who take for granted — though they cannot define, much less defend — their own institutions.

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Michael Galak: Colonel Oleg Konstantinovich Penkovsky- The Man Who Saved the World

Posted By on October 27th, 2015

The Soviets would slink home from the Cuban Missile Crisis with tails and rockets between their legs. Two years later, the Politburo relieved Nikita Khrushchev of his job. For all that, although few would recognise his name, we can thank Oleg Konstantinovich Penkovsky.
On this day in 1962, October 26, Nikita Khrushchev blinked. Four days earlier, US President John F. Kennedy had informed Americans via a nationally televised address that the Soviet Union was placing missiles in Cuba and, as a consequence of this first-strike threat, he was ordering the US Navy to blockade the island until the weaponry was removed. As the superpowers faced off, the world held its breath and prepared for Armageddon.

In Moscow, meanwhile, Colonel Oleg Konstantinovich Penkovsky (above) of the GRU (Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noe Upravlenie, Chief Intelligence Directorate of Military Intelligence) was arrested and charged with the high treason. The world was not to know at the time that it was Penkovsky, much more than Khrushchev, Kennedy or their diplomats, who defused the crisis. The Soviets would slink home with tails and rockets between their legs and, two years later, the Politburo “relieved” Khrushchev of the leadership position. These were the unfolding consequence of Penkovsky’s actions, yet the man who saved the planet by supplying the Americans with top secret information that gave Washington the confidence to resist the Kremlin’s bluff and bluster has remained a largely obscure and overlooked player in the drama.

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Peter Smith The Cant of Our Koranic Quislings

Posted By on October 27th, 2015

Just imagine the dismay reform-minded Muslims must feel, not to mention oppressed women, homosexuals and minorities, when representatives of modern Christianity endorse a medieval warlord’s un-revised handbook for bloody intolerance.
I missed the significance of Pope John Paul II (the Polish Pope) kissing the Koran. At the time, I was among the sedated ones (see below). My level of alertness subsequently rose. I am now broadly aware of archbishops of Canterbury doing double somersaults with twists to show how flexible they are when it comes to dealing with Islam. For example, at one point then-Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams (Civil and Religious Law in England: a Religious Perspective, 7 February 2008) envisaged the introduction of sharia law in the UK before smartly back-flipping in case anyone noticed. Pope Francis has also shown a particular keenness for inter-faith dialogue.

Imagine the reaction of the mad mullahs, the radical muftis, the firebrand imams, and the sheiks of Arabique to the Pope kissing the Koran. Mixed emotions, I would think. Defilement of their sacred book might have entered their minds. Uppermost, however, would probably have been extreme satisfaction that the Pope was behaving as befitting the leader of future dhimmis.

According to John O’Sullivan’s insightful and entertaining book, The President, the Pope and the Prime Minister, Pope John Paul became disappointed that his respectful gesture was not appropriately reciprocated in one way or another. After fourteen centuries of bloody and bloody-minded conflict that is surely the best-ever example of the triumph of hope over experience.

Recall, Islam in its fundamental scripture specifically takes on and mangles the central tenets of Christianity. No other religion does that. It specifically denies the divinity and the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. In the Koran, verse 61:6, it has Christ (conveniently for Mohammed) foreshadowing the coming of a Messenger (read Mohammed), despite Christ clearly ruling out future prophets before his own return and warning that false prophets will arise in the interim. (Matthew Ch. 24, Mark Ch. 13)