President Obama and his foreign-policy admirers—a dwindling lot—hoped that the nuclear deal would make Iran more open to cooperation in the Middle East and with the U.S. Mark this down as another case in which the world is disappointing the American President.
Iran’s judiciary on Monday announced that Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post’s Tehran correspondent, has been convicted. He was on trial for “espionage.” Security forces arrested Mr. Rezaian and his wife, journalist Yeganeh Salehi, in July 2014. Ms. Salehi was later released, but the regime has held Mr. Rezaian “in a black hole for 14 months,” as his brother, Ali, told us. Mr. Rezaian, a U.S. citizen, has been denied even the basic rights the regime sometimes affords political prisoners, including bail and phone calls.
Demographic, geographic and ideological shifts have remade the look of Republicans and Democrats.
Why can’t the two main political parties behave the way they’re supposed to?
Republicans, members of the party that is supposed to stand for orderly succession, are falling for presidential candidates Donald Trump and Ben Carson and won’t fall for the logical choices waiting in line to lead their majority in the House of Representatives. Democrats refuse to coronate Hillary Clinton according to plan, and instead flock to Bernie Sanders rallies.
Actually, there is an explanation for this kind of aberrant behavior. The two parties aren’t what they used to be, and what many of us persist in imagining them to be. Their composition—demographically, geographically and ideologically—has changed significantly in the past generation. Seen in this light, the behavior we’re seeing right now isn’t so aberrational at all.
The Republican Party has grown more conservative, more downscale economically, older and more Southern in character. In that light, its revolt against what is perceived as a Wall Street-led establishment and the polite, small-c conservatism that was personified by Gerald Ford is only natural.
The Democratic Party has grown more liberal, younger, more urban and demographically diverse, with a bigger overlay of upscale activists from the two coasts. The moderate-to-conservative Democrats in Southern states who helped put Bill Clinton in the White House then aren’t available for Hillary Clinton now. Seen through that lens, the picture of college students streaming to hear Bernie Sanders makes more sense.
Israel could not have made the desert bloom without its incredible innovations in water technology. As the world becomes more aware of the importance of conserving water, they are turning to Israel for exports and expertise.
The world is in a water crisis, one that will grow more severe in the coming decade. Water shortages will soon lead to increasing political instability, displacement of populations, and, more likely than not, political unrest and war.
Though this water crisis overlaps with the more widely-discussed problem of climate change, it is different in many ways. It is more acute and more concrete, in that it focuses on a single resource without which humanity cannot live. Its causes are less controversial. Its dimensions are more easily measured. And its catastrophic effects are playing out more clearly and more quickly.
It is also a problem that can be decisively solved without anything remotely resembling the economic restructuring and political acrobatics required to address climate change. Fully effective solutions to the water crisis have already been found. They only need to be implemented.
The world’s water problem is being caused by multiple simultaneous factors: Reduced rainfall, increased population, and the rapid development of impoverished societies have all come together to deplete the amount of water available to humankind. None of these causes are going away. Solutions will come only from changing the way we find and use water.
“…And we should know about Kenda Kesahu and his friends, who chased after the attacker in Petach Tikva, catching and holding him until security forces could arrive. After all, they could have returned home in peace, or taken cover, or fled for their lives. But they understood it was their duty to stop the attacker. Kesahu said, “I really don’t know why they’re calling me a hero. All I wanted was to help save my people.”
The news of another horrific terror attack flickers from the television screen, and out of the darkness emerge stories of people, regular everyday people, who came face to face with a knife or bomb and took action. They fought back. They prevented a larger terrorist attack from happening. They chased, and they caught. Not that it was their job to do so, but they felt a duty. And they were resourceful. And sometimes, in those marvelous moments, all you want to see is the news anchor’s stone face crack just a bit, for her to say with just a bit of pride: Look at us! Look how amazing we are! Just a good word, or two, nothing more.
In August, American Airlines announced that it would be stopping all service to Israel in January 2016. The airline inherited the busy non-stop Philadelphia-Tel Aviv route as part of its recent merger with U.S. Airways. American Airlines explained the cancellation as a financial decision and characterized the route as “unprofitable.” An article in the left-leaning Haaretz contended that the decision was made in order to “deepen ties” with Arab business partners, Qatar Airways and Royal Jordanian, as well as with the carrier for Muslim-majority Malaysia, Malaysia Airlines.
In June, American gave an award for leadership in diversity and inclusion to Mohamed El-Sharkawy, line maintenance training specialist and former Chairman of CAIR Arizona (Council on Arab Islamic Relations).CAIR, a funder of Hamas, is a powerful national subsidiary of the Muslim Brotherhood that has provided Muslim sensitivity training to U.S. national security agencies and the military. In 2007, CAIR was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism funding trial in U.S. history – the Holy Land Foundation Hamas funding trial. In November of 2014, the United Arab Emirates named CAIR as a “designated terrorist organization.” from Janet Levy
American Airlines gives former Chairman of the Arizona Chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations an award.
American Airlines recently gave an award to the former Chairman of the Arizona Chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). American Airline’s press release is posted in part below.
FORT WORTH, Texas, June 23, 2015 /PRNewswire/ — American Airlines Group has recognized four employees with the 2015 Earl G. Graves Award for Leadership in Diversity and Inclusion for their work in making a lasting impression in the workplace, in the community and as role models in diversity. These employees have made extraordinary efforts to reach out to groups of people within the company and in their surrounding communities, promoting a culture respectful of all genders, races, creeds and abilities.
Mohamed El-Sharkawy, specialist – Line Maintenance Training, Phoenix El-Sharkawy has served as Chairman of the Arizona chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations for five years, where he encouraged dialogue, protected civil liberties, empowered American Muslims and built coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding. He was instrumental in starting the interfaith, intercultural Bridges Employee Business Resource Group and played an integral role educating crew members on Muslim etiquette in preparation for the airline’s route launch to Tel Aviv, Israel.
American Airlines issued the award to Mohamed El Sharkawy in June 2015 but was not publicly known until it was published in American Airlines’ American Way in September according to Understandingthethreat.com. Interestingly, neither CAIR nor CAIR Arizona reported on American Airlines award to Mohamed. The online search results for “cair.comMohamed El-Sharkawy american airlines” and search results for “cair-az.org Mohamed El-Sharkawy american airlines” indicates that American Airlines award to Muhamed El-Sharkawy was not reported by the Council on American Islamic Relations nor the Arizona Chapter of the Council on America Islamic Relations web sites.
Did American Airlines know the following history regarding CAIR when they awarded Mohamed El-Sharkawy for his work with CAIR Arizona:
With Washington’s attention on the struggle by House Republicans to find a new Speaker, another story slipped by that will surely have long-run implications for the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton.
Clinton has come under fire this year for choosing to withhold her work emails from the State Department, and the public, for as many as five years after she began her employment as secretary of state. Clinton’s decision to conduct all work on a private server, and to keep the contents of that server to herself for more than a year after leaving office, was undertaken out of a false sense of entitlement to privacy.
It not only kept the public in the dark as to her communications in office but it also placed sensitive and classified information within reach of hackers, because the server was not properly secured.
Just how much sensitive or classified information are we talking about? The full extent remains unknown, but some of it was very highly classified — “Top Secret” and “Sensitive Compartmentalized.” And this week, it emerged that the name of a top CIA contact in Libya was contained in one of the emails she chose to keep in her unsafe computer.
Sid Blumenthal, a former Clinton-era White House staffer whom President Obama had forbidden Clinton to hire at State, nevertheless sent her periodic email updates on foreign affairs. She appears to have taken these seriously, encouraging him to send them and at times even forwarding his communiques to staff.
Can we still celebrate October 12 as an American holiday?Two narratives….
1. Born to a working-class wool weaver in the port city of Genoa, Italy, Cristoforo Colombo apprenticed as a sailor and went to sea as early as age ten. A self-taught and curious man, Colombo lived by his wits and rose in the heady world of 15th-century sea traders, until he hit upon an ingenious idea: He would outflank the Mohammedan Turks and reach the East Indies by sailing west across the Ocean Sea. After weathering nearly a decade of rejection and failure, in 1492 Colombo won the support of the Spanish Crown and set off on an uncertain journey that inadvertently opened a New World, laying the foundation for that most glittering daughter of the Western heritage: America.
2. Christopher Columbus, a dead white male of the worst variety, was a slaver, a capitalist, and a murderer of millions who embarked on a voyage motivated only by greed, which brought European imperialism to the shores of the “New World” and laid waste the ancient indigenous peoples there. Columbus deserves little credit (Leif Erikson had “discovered” the “new” continent 500 years earlier) and much blame for the horrors of the Columbian Exchange — the vast transfer of people, animals, and plants between the Western and Eastern Hemispheres. In his wake, the “New World” suffered smallpox, starvation, the cruel subjugation of the indigenous peoples, and the establishment of that most dastardly spawn of the West: America.
* * *
Writing in The Atlantic in 1992, in the run-up to the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s landfall on the island of San Salvador in the Bahamas, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. noted that the “great hero of the nineteenth century seems well on the way to becoming the great villain of the twenty-first.”
“The Tel Aviv shoreline has turned into the French Riviera,” says a colleague who spends his summers in Israel, and I hear it’s the same along the beaches of Netanya. French immigrants who haven’t gravitated toward the Israeli coast are raising property values in Jerusalem and Modi’in. Until now, mass immigration to Israel has come from countries lowest on the freedom index. What are we to make of the current flight of Jews from the country that gave us enlightenment, emancipation, religious tolerance, political liberty and freedom of thought?
That is the main question of Alain El-Mouchan’s essay on the rise of anti-Jewish violence in France and consequent increased Jewish movement to Israel. Analyzing the causes of departure, he charts the familiar debate between those who urge flight and those—including French Prime Minister Manuel Valls—who urge French Jews to stay. As it happens, this very predicament is the subject of A Happy End, a new play by Iddo Netanyahu, younger brother of the prime minister of Israel. The play is about a Jewish family that struggles with the decision of whether to leave Germany in the 1930s. A Happy End doesn’t have one.
The French philosopher Voltaire said, “Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.”
Today many people have what they believe are strong opinions but all too often have no fact-based reason for their opinions and beliefs. Politicians and con artists (all too often politicians are con artists) know how to exploit the human weakness of people wanting to read into statements and promises made by politicians.
It is vital that Americans shoulder their responsibilities that their position of citizen requires. Nothing should ever be taken at face value. Every statement, especially statements made by politicians must not be taken with the proverbial “grain of salt,” but with an entire salt mine.
There’s been a terror onslaught here in Israel for the last week and a half. Those of us who bother checking foreign media outlets have noticed that there’s relatively little coverage. This is mainly good, since, of course, coverage of Israel’s conflicts with Palestinians and neighbors tends to be quite hostile to Israel.
Still, it raises the question of why interest isn’t greater this time. Those hallowed principles of “If it bleeds, it leads” and “Jews are news” would seem to apply.
True, they don’t apply on the scale of last year’s Gaza war, which drew huge coverage. But that may give a clue as to the explanation.
In that war much larger numbers died than in the current terror onslaught—and given Israel’s superior military capabilities and Hamas’s use of civilians as human shields, they were predominantly on the Palestinian side. A lot of scenes were broadcast from Gaza hospitals. The “text” was: see what the Israelis have done now!
In this current campaign so far, four Israelis have been killed and many more wounded. The number of Palestinians killed is, again, larger—but they were primarily killed by security forces fending off attacks, with few cases of collateral killing of civilians.
