http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2013/11/03/the-ten-worst-purveyors-of-antisemitism-worldwide-5-the-guardian/ Britain’s far-left newspaper/website the Guardian with its media group (which also includes the Observer) has been called “more hostile to Israel” than any “mainstream media outfit in the Western world.” That description was offered by The Commentator, the site run by Robin Shepherd, author of A State Beyond the Pale. British media expert Tom Gross, noting […]
http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2013/11/07/amir-taheri-still-flush-with-spring-fever/
My great respect for Amir Taheri notwithstanding, his hopes for democratic transformation of the Middle East cause him, yet again, to misinterpret the most recent developments in Egypt.
There, the initial draft of a new constitution is about to be published, the product of a committee overseen by the military, which has run Egypt’s government since Mohamed Morsi’s ouster. The new constitution will reportedly preserve sharia (Islam’s societal framework) as the country’s main source of law. It will also codify the “special status” of the armed forces as protectors of the state vested with supreme power in matters of national defense, foreign relations, and economic affairs — possibly including, the Washington Post reports, the discretion to try civilians (such as Muslim Brotherhood operatives) in military courts.
In a recent New York Post column, Taheri argues that the new constitution will thus be an insidious pact between the generals and the “Salafists” — Muslim supremacists who, like their Brotherhood political rivals, are determined to create a caliphate beholden to Islam’s repressive principles. It will betray hopes for real democracy that are shared, Taheri insists, by the vast majority of Egyptians.
Adopting the conveniently pliable passive voice, Taheri writes (the italics are mine):
The coup that returned the military to power after a year-long interval was presented as an attempt to prevent the Muslim Brotherhood from imposing an Islamist dictatorship with a constitutional facade. Highlighted were two articles in the Morsi constitution that identified the Islamic sharia as the source of legislation in Egypt and gave Al-Azhar, the official seminary, a virtual veto on certain issues.
The crowds that for weeks filled Tahrir Square called on the army to intervene to save the nation from a burgeoning sharia-based dictatorship. Well, when the new draft constitution — written by a 50-man committee appointed by the military — is published, the Tahrir Square crowds are likely to be disappointed. The two controversial articles will still be there, albeit under different numbers and with slight changes in terminology.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/363439/father-fed-knows-best-jonah-goldberg
The government thinks you’re stupid, or at least ignorant.
This isn’t just an indictment of the current government or an indictment of government itself. It’s simply a statement of fact. At its core, the government exists to do certain things that people aren’t equipped to do on their own. The list of those things has gotten longer and longer over the years. In 1776, the federal government’s portfolio could have easily fit in a file folder: maintain an army and navy, a few federal courts, the post office, the patent office, and maybe a dozen or two other pretty obvious things.
Now, the file folder of things the federal government does is much bigger. To paraphrase Dr. Egon Spengler from Ghostbusters, let’s imagine that the federal government in 1776 was the size of this Twinkie (take my word for it, I’m holding a normal-sized Twinkie). Today that Twinkie would be 35 feet long, weighing approximately 600 pounds. Or, if that illustration doesn’t work for you, consider this: The number of civilians (i.e., not counting the military) who work for the executive branch alone is today nearly equal to the entire population of the United States in 1776. The Federal Register, the federal government’s fun-filled journal of new rules, regulations, and the like, was about 2,600 pages in 1936 (a year after it was created). Today it’s over 80,000 pages.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/ridley-scotts-democratic-realism?f=puball
Reading Raymond Ibrahim’s excellent November 2nd article, “How Historic Revisionism Justifies Islamic Terrorism,” I was led to follow one of his links to how Hollywood contributes to that revisionism and disinformation. There I discovered James Burke’s May 2005 article on the Free Republic site, “Kingdom of Heaven: Propaganda or History?” The Burke article examines the revisionist depiction of the struggle for Jerusalem between the Crusaders and Saladin’s Moslem armies in Ridley Scott’s 2005 epic, “Kingdom of Heaven.” That in turn led me to thinking about the filmography of the star director and producer.
Ibrahim wrote in his Historic Revision article:
How important, really, is history to current affairs? Do events from the 7th century-or, more importantly, how we understand them-have any influence on U.S. foreign policy today?
By way of answer, consider some parallels between academia’s portrayal of historic Islamic jihads and the U.S. government’s and media’s portrayal of contemporary Islamic jihads.
While any objective appraisal of the 7th century Muslim conquests proves that they were just that-conquests, with all the bloodshed and rapine that that entails-the historical revisionism of modern academia, especially within Arab and Islamic studies departments, has led to some portrayals of the original Muslim conquerors as “freedom-fighters” trying to “liberate” the Mideast from tyrants and autocrats. (Beginning to sound familiar?)
Hollywood and Ridley Scott have lent a helping hand in that revisionist project. Burke’s article thoroughly dissects “Kingdom of Heaven,” not only for its historical inaccuracies, but for its bias against Western civilization and for Islam, in which the Crusaders are depicted as a bunch of posturing, spiritually lost, bungling boobs and Saladin and his hordes are depicted as nice, honorable guys who just happened to be roaming the deserts armed to the teeth in the 12th century, and Saladin as a leader not really interested in cementing his growing Islamic empire by retaking Jerusalem.
The Science Fiction of IPCC Climate Models
Climate policies need scientific forecasts, not alarmist scenarios
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-science-fiction-of-ipcc-climate-models?f=puball
The human race has prospered by relying on forecasts that the seasons will follow their usual course, while knowing they will sometimes be better or worse. Are things different now?
For the fifth time now, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claims they are. The difference, the IPCC asserts, is increased human emissions of carbon dioxide: a colorless, odorless, non-toxic gas that is a byproduct of growing prosperity. It is also a product of all animal respiration and is also essential for most life on Earth, yet in total it makes up only 0.0004 of the atmosphere.
The IPCC assumes that the relatively small human contribution of this gas to the atmosphere will cause global warming, and insists that the warming will be dangerous.
Other scientists contest the IPCC assumptions, on the grounds that the climatological effect of increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide is trivial – and that the climate is so complex and insufficiently understood that the net effect of human emissions on global temperatures cannot be forecasted.
The computer models that the authors of the IPCC reports rely on are complicated representations of the assumption that human carbon dioxide emissions are now the primary factor driving climate change and will substantially overheat the Earth. The models include many assumptions that mainstream scientists question.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/germany-and-syria-a-case-study-in-jihad
The “martyr death” is the “best way to die,” Mustafa’s “wish…for every believing brother and sister,” declared the 24-year old Moroccan-German in an Oct. 18 interview for the German public television station ZDF (“Minderjährige Deutsche im Krieg” segment). Having recently returned from Syria, Mustafa is one more manifestation of what he calls the “very clear matter” of “armed struggle” in Islam worrying German authorities in light of Syria’s ongoing Islamist-dominated insurgency.
Two days after Mustafa’s television appearance, Germany’s leading newsmagazine Der Spiegel reported that 200 jihadists had left Germany to fight against Syria’s Bashar al-Assad regime. These jihadists had formed a “German Camp” in northern Syria for the establishment of German-speaking fighting units, according to Germany’s domestic security service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz or BfV). More than half of these jihadists are German citizens, BfV estimated; although an estimated 80-85 percent of these fighters had a “migrant background,” while the rest were German converts, according to a German radio interview. Eight of these German jihadists had already died fighting in Syria, now “by far the most ‘attractive’ jihad theater of war” for Islamists globally, in BfV’s view. German officials estimate that there are now about 1,000 European jihadists in Syria, with 120 from Belgium and 150 from Kosovo.
Such European jihadists did not just present problems for Syria, BfV President Hans-Georg Maaßen analyzed in a Sept. 22 interview. Speaking then of 170 German jihadists entering the Syrian insurgency, Maaßen described this number as having “clearly increased” from 120 a few months before. These peoples were among a “very high personnel potential of Islamists in Germany, 42,000 persons.” Jihad recruitment among these German residents for Syria filled the BfV “with great concern,” because “these persons will presumably come back again.” If they do, these jihadists “will probably have combat experience, they will perhaps even have a mission, a terrorist mission.”
Is Washington ignoring years of nuclear and missile cooperation between Tehran and Pyongyang?
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303763804579183231117914364?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopBucket
Are Iran and North Korea cooperating on their nuclear-weapons programs? If so, their efforts undermine, and may preclude, Barack Obama’s diplomatic attempts to address these threats separately. The issue is especially timely now as Mr. Obama’s negotiators rush to make a deal with Iran.
Tehran-Pyongyang collaboration raises questions of enormous strategic importance for global counterproliferation efforts. Although publicly available information is scarce, American policy makers should pay the closest attention to the implications of such cooperation. The direct evidence, while limited, is troubling.
Not least because of the initial intermediation of Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan’s proliferation network, the potential for Iranian-North Korean cooperation has long been attractive. But within the U.S. diplomatic, defense and intelligence communities, broad understanding of such dynamics is often hampered by powerful bureaucratic “stovepipes.” In the bureaucratic tribal mindset, Pyongyang is an Asia problem and Tehran is a Middle East problem.
The energy bonanza has bypassed New York, where socialites and celebrities have come out in force to stop it.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303936904579178201737694182?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
The transformation of American liberalism over the past half-century is nowhere more apparent than in the disputes now roiling a relatively obscure section of upstate New York. In 1965, as part of his “war on poverty,” President Lyndon Johnson created the Appalachian Regional Commission. Among the areas to be served by the commission were the Southern Tier counties of New York state, including Broome, Tioga and Chemung. The commission’s central aim was to “Increase job opportunities and per capita income in Appalachia to reach parity with the nation.”
Like so many Great Society antipoverty programs, the effort largely failed. The Southern Tier counties remain much as they appeared in the 1960s, pocked by deserted farms and abandoned businesses, largely untouched by the prosperity that blessed much of America over the past five decades.
Beginning about a dozen years ago, remarkable improvements in natural-gas drilling by means of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, seemed to promise a way out of poverty. The massive Marcellus Shale Formation under New York and Pennsylvania has proved to be “the most lucrative natural gas play in the U.S.,” Business Week recently noted, because the shale produces high-quality gas and is easily shipped to New York and Philadelphia.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304799404579157823553911200?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion
Eddie Rickenbacker went from race-car driver to ace pilot in World War I. When the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, he signed up again.
Since World War II, the U.S. military has been united around a single principle—air supremacy. Because of it, no American soldier has been killed by enemy air attack in 60 years. Likewise, the American aerospace industry has been the world leader over the same period and the master of space and satellite technology as well.
According to Winston Groom, the author of many works of military history (though perhaps best known as the creator of Forrest Gump), we owe this legacy, in part, to three extraordinary men. The first is Eddie Rickenbacker, America’s top ace during World War I, who, as an executive at Eastern Airlines in the 1930s, helped to lay the foundation of modern commercial air travel. The second is James Doolittle, the Ph.D. in aeronautical engineering who as a record-breaking racing flier introduced high-performance, high-octane fuel to the aviation industry. The third is Charles Lindbergh, whose solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927 triggered an explosion of interest in air flight in America, not least in the military.
In “The Aviators,” Mr. Groom reminds us that, in the 1920s and 1930s, these men were celebrities—the object of “frenzied admiration.” Yet when World War II broke out, all three, now in middle age, risked their lives in the air once again. As Mr. Groom’s absorbing narrative unfolds, we see one man enduring a horrendous ordeal on the open sea; another nearly losing his life in a bombing run; and yet another finding a sort of redemption for his battered public image.
http://www.i24news.tv/en/opinion/131107-piping-israeli-gas-through-turkey-is-a-really-bad-idea
The reported political obstacles to the construction of a natural gas pipeline between Israel and Turkey are but another confirmation that relations between the two countries are strained. This last Israel-Turkey row also provides an opportunity to ponder the wisdom of building an Israeli pipeline to Turkey, in the first place.
There are good reasons why Israel and Turkey are considering the construction of such a pipeline. Turkey is a natural gas importer, while Israel is about to become a natural gas exporter. Not only is Turkey trying to diversify its gas imports in order to reduce its dependency on Russia’s expansive natural gas, it also wants to solidify its key role as a transit country for energy flows: Turkey is strategically located at the crossroads of energy exporters (the Middle East and the Caucasus) and energy importers (European countries). As the EU will likely become an importer of Israel’s natural gas, Turkey could provide a transit route for an Israeli gas pipeline to Europe.
However, relying on Turkey as a transit country for Israel’s exports to Europe would constitute a long-term strategic mistake.
The infrastructure for the delivery of natural gas (either via pipelines or liquefaction) is complex and expensive, which is why exporting and importing countries are generally locked in long-term agreements. Hence the need to carefully understand the potential risks of the Turkish option.
