Bill de Blasio built his 2013 campaign for New York City mayor around unapologetically progressive policies: an end to the NYPD’s “stop-and-frisk” practices, loosened restrictions on welfare availability, universal prekindergarten, and various other initiatives designed to reduce the economic inequality that, he claimed, had made Gotham “a tale of two cities.” De Blasio’s victory has quickly given him a national profile as one of liberalism’s standard-bearers, and he appears to have broader ambitions. Realizing any such aspirations will depend, of course, on how he performs as mayor, but de Blasio came into office with an advantage that his recent predecessors lacked: overwhelming support in the city council, whose members, as one lawmaker put it, are like a “cult of true believers,” eager to follow their leader. In New York, the mayor makes most of the news, and it’s easy to ignore the city council.
As my friend and e-pal Jack Englehard wrote: “Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is hours away from giving the speech of his life. Pray for him to succeed.Pray for the welfare of Israel. Pray for the welfare of the United States. Both nations are in the same boat. We share the same values. We share the same perils.” Amen…rsk
The following column was written by Rick Richman in December 2013 . On the eve of Netanyahu’s momentous speech to both Houses of Congress…please take the time to read it.
“Jabotinsky’s June 19 speech is a forgotten piece of history, but it relates to the history we are living through now.”
Just weeks before he died, one of Zionism’s early prophets was starting to get real traction in his plan to create a Jewish army in the heart of the Holocaust.
In June 1940—at the darkest military moment of World War II—three speeches were given in two days: one by a prime minister; another by a general; the third by a Zionist leader. Everyone knows the first; some have heard of the second; few are aware of the third. But the three are of a piece, and the third still resonates today, nearly 75 years later.
On June 18, Winston Churchill—who became prime minister only five weeks before—delivered a lengthy address to a subdued Parliament, dealing primarily with the catastrophic Dunkirk evacuation he had ordered. In May, Nazi Germany had overwhelmed the low countries of Western Europe in a massive new blitzkrieg; Hitler was days away from defeating France, and Britain was unprepared for the invasion it knew would be coming next. Today everyone remembers Churchill’s speech by its final sentence: “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’”
The same day, a little-known general, who had escaped the day before from France and would one day be heralded as the greatest French leader of the twentieth century, delivered a radio address in a London BBC studio. He called on French officers and men who were in Britain, or might be in the future, to get in touch with him, with or without their arms, to form a resistance. The next day he broadcast another call: “Faced by the bewilderment of my countrymen … by the fact that the institutions of my country are incapable, at the moment, of functioning, I, General de Gaulle, a French soldier and military leader, realize that I now speak for France.” In France, June 18 is now a national commemorative event, celebrated each year in memory of De Gaulle’s radio addresses.
On June 18, Vladimir Jabotinsky, head of the New Zionist Organization, was in New York City, preparing to deliver an address the next evening at the 4,500-seat Manhattan Center. He had spoken there in March to an overflow crowd of 5,000 people; now he held a press conference to preview the second address: he would call for a Jewish Army to fight “the giant rattlesnake.” On June 19 another overflow crowd showed up at the Manhattan Center, despite an extraordinary public effort by American Jewish leaders to thwart the event.
For those of us in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast states, February seemed longer than twenty-eight days. March, which in three weeks will welcome spring, arrived just in time. Temperatures in the single digits, with piles of snow that while beautiful appear will never melt, defined our days and nights. The wind whistling across the river left drifts as high as the stockade fence that separates us from our neighbor.
But the world does not center on Old Lyme. It was – dare I call them what they are? – Islamic terrorists that dominated the news this month. Boko Haram, which persists in abducting and killing, has found a use for the school girls taken last spring – remember those ridiculous hashtags “Bring back our girls?” In northeastern Nigeria, several girls as young as ten were fitted out with explosive vests and made to walk into crowded markets. The vests were detonated, disintegrating the child and killing many others. A Jordanian pilot, captured last December by ISIS in Syria, was caged, doused with gasoline and then burned alive. Two people in Copenhagen were killed by an Islamic “lone wolf,” one at a “free-speech” symposium and the second outside a synagogue. The killer was shot. Knife-wielding, 6’5” ISIS Insurgents in Libya marched twenty-one Egyptian Coptic Christians along a beach preliminary to sawing off their heads. The victims were killed solely for their religion. Toward the end of the month, ISIS kidnapped 70 Assyrian Christians, including women and children. Their fate is unknown, but the likelihood is that they are already dead, either burned or crucified. The month ended with some good news as well as bad. Three Central Asians (residents of the U.S.) living in Brooklyn were arrested for conspiring to join ISIS, the purpose being to carry out terrorist plots against the U.S. And Austria passed a law which would ban the use of foreign funds for financing mosques, Imam’s and Muslim organizations. The law would also require that Muslims living in Austria submit to Austrian law, not Sharia law. That law should become the standard for the West. On the other hand, al Shabaab threatened to blow up the Mall of America outside Minneapolis.
Op-Ed: Pray for Netanyahu On This Day of Reckoning
Obama offers patience and respect for Iran, a country run by fanatics. For Israel, our most dependable ally – contempt.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is hours away from giving the speech of his life. Pray for him to succeed.
Pray for the welfare of Israel. Pray for the welfare of the United States. Both nations are in the same boat. We share the same values.
We share the same perils.
Sometimes a speech is just a speech. Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech about Iran policy on March 3 will not be his first address to Congress. It will make familiar, if important, arguments. One might assume that, like the vast majority of speeches, it would soon be overtaken by events in Israel and the United States and the world.
But the Obama administration’s reaction to the Israeli prime minister’s appearance suggests Netanyahu’s is more than just another speech. An administration that disdains the use of disproportionate force has been, to say the least, disproportionately forceful in its efforts to undermine Netanyahu’s message and discredit the messenger. What is Obama so worried about? What is he, if we may put it indelicately, so scared of?
We can get a clue from the almost equally disproportionate reaction of Obama’s surrogates to Rudy Giuliani’s suggestion that Barack Obama doesn’t love his country. Why, really, should anyone care about Giuliani’s comment? We have no crime of lèse majesté in this country. But Obama defenders did care. Did they suspect Giuliani had struck a nerve?
In February, Harvard University’s Hillel center for Jewish students co-sponsored an event entitled “From Selma to Ferguson,” purportedly aimed at addressing aspects of the civil rights movement in America. The event’s featured invitee was Dorothy Zellner, a harsh critic of the Jewish State and more importantly, a proponent of the anti-Semitic “Boycott Divestment and Sanctions” (BDS) movement.
Zellner’s inclusion in the event violates Hillel International’s own guidelines pertaining to partnering with groups or individuals associated with BDS. These guidelines state explicitly that Hillel will not partner with, house, or host organizations, groups, or speakers that as a matter of policy or practice:
•Deny the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish and democratic state with secure and recognized borders;
•Delegitimize, demonize, or apply a double standard to Israel;
•Support boycott of, divestment from, or sanctions against the State of Israel;
•Exhibit a pattern of disruptive behavior towards campus events or guest speakers or foster an atmosphere of incivility.
The left realizes that the fearless Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is becoming a serious threat as the right’s potential presidential candidate. So, true to their politics of personal destruction, the leftist media has united in a full-on pre-emptive assault to take Walker down. That included a blatant lie about the governor’s effort to conceal the reporting of campus rapes.
Last Friday Jezebel, a politics-and-pop-culture website replete with vicious and foulmouthed radical feminists, posted an attack on Walker written by “senior reporter” Natasha Vargas-Cooper. Vargas-Cooper is no novice to pop culture journalism, though she apparently doesn’t feel bound by any Old School journalistic standards of factuality and objectivity (and why should she? The mainstream media long ago decided that the aim of journalists should be, not fair and balanced reportage, but social justice activism). The daughter of leftist journalist Marc Cooper, her writing has been featured in all the usual media outlets from The New York Times and The Atlantic Monthly to HuffPost and Salon.
Think of a mistake that we made in international affairs. At the time that we were making it, a phalanx of foreign policy experts was standing behind it. It might be a lonely orphan idea today, but last year you could have thrown a rock at a roomful of PhDs without hitting a single person who disagreed with it.
When the Tahrir Square protests in Egypt were in their heyday, I had trouble finding any foreign policy people who would even entertain the idea that we should continue backing Mubarak. Back then the revolution seemed inevitable. But I correctly predicted Islamist takeovers and counterrevolutions that would topple them because I didn’t see international relations through the lens of a grand theory.
Scott Walker’s claim that foreign policy is about leadership, not expertise, is being mocked now by media types who were relentlessly regurgitating all the expert truisms about the Arab Spring. But he’s right. Foreign policy expertise does not translate into foreign affairs competence. Leadership does.
http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2015/03/01/wapo-walker-hit-piece/
Scott Walker Accurately Remembers History, And You Won’t Believe What Happens Next! Ed Driscoll
Another day, another hit piece on Walker, this time from Philip Rucker of the Washington Post. (Link safe; goes to Hot Air; I’m not rewarding attack articles with extra traffic):
Walker responded by ticking through his recent itinerary of face time with foreign policy luminaries: a breakfast with Henry Kissinger, a huddle with George P. Shultz and tutorials at the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution.
But then Walker suggested that didn’t much matter.
“I think foreign policy is something that’s not just about having a PhD or talking to PhD’s,” he said. “It’s about leadership.”
Lately liberalism has gone from psychodrama to farce.
Take Barack Obama. He has gone from mild displeasure with Israel to downright antipathy. Suddenly we are in a surreal world where off-the-record slurs from the administration against Benjamin Netanyahu as a coward and chickensh-t have gone to full-fledged attacks from John Kerry and Susan Rice, to efforts of former Obama political operatives to defeat the Israeli prime minister at the polls, to concessions to Iran and to indifference about the attacks on Jews in Paris. Who would have believed that Iranian leaders who just ordered bombing runs on a mock U.S. carrier could be treated with more deference than the prime minister of Israel? What started out six years as pressure on Israel to dismantle so-called settlements has ended up with a full-fledged vendetta [1] against a foreign head of state.
Hillary Clinton likewise has gone from a rather run-of-the-mill liberal grandee to a political grafter [2]. She apparently solicited donations from foreign government officials and wealthy foreign nationals to contribute to the Clinton Foundation — and this was while she was secretary of State conducting the foreign policy of the United States. If those charges are proven accurate, how could she ever be trusted to become commander in chief? Unfortunately, in the last year almost every cause that Hillary Clinton has taken up has been belied by her own actions.
