http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/06/memo_to_snowden_they_shoot_people_like_you_in_cuba.html A few days ago, I was willing to cut Mr Snowden a little slack and see him as a principled individual who opposed the NSA’s program. I’m not defending his “leak” but was willing to believe that he did it out of some concern for our privacy rights. Today, I see him as […]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324637504578565352740739148.html
Taliban Guns Send a Message About Obama’s Peace Process
Last week, the U.S. cheered the opening of a Taliban office in Qatar. On Monday, their fighters attacked in Kabul.
While much of the world is focused on the indignities being heaped on the United States by Russia, China and Ecuador in the fugitive Edward Snowden affair, the Taliban on Monday demonstrated their own contempt for the Obama administration.
Last week, U.S. officials celebrated what they regarded as a diplomatic breakthrough. They had persuaded the Taliban to open a political office in Doha, Qatar—and now America hopes it has the peace-negotiating partners the Obama administration covets as the U.S. plans its escape from Afghanistan. On Monday, the Taliban attacked the presidential compound in Kabul. The daylight gunbattle left at least eight Taliban and three guards dead.
The Afghan government—and the majority of Afghans—were not happy about the Doha news. The Taliban had immediately begun flying its flag and posting signs declaring the office as an outpost of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. President Karzai announced that he would not join peace negotiations with killers who had been so legitimized by the U.S., and he suspended talks with the U.S. about a long-term security arrangement.
The Taliban didn’t take long to prove his point. Or to expose Washington as a receding and tired presence in Afghanistan, desperate to leave.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323683504578567533647032380.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
President Obama’s climate speech on Tuesday was grandiose even for him, but its surreal nature was its particular hallmark. Some 12 million Americans still can’t find work, real wages have fallen for five years, three-fourths of Americans now live paycheck to check, and the economy continues to plod along four years into a quasi-recovery. But there was the President in tony Georgetown, threatening more energy taxes and mandates that will ensure fewer jobs, still lower incomes and slower growth.
Mr. Obama’s “climate action plan” adds up to one of the most extensive reorganizations of the U.S. economy since the 1930s, imposed through administrative fiat and raw executive power. He wants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 17% by 2020, but over his 6,500-word address he articulated no such goal for the unemployment rate or GDP.
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The plan covers everything from new efficiency standards for home appliances to new fuel mileage rules for heavy-duty trucks to new subsidies for wind farms, but the most consequential changes would slam the U.S. electric industry. These plants, coal-fired power in particular, account for about a third of domestic greenhouse gases.
Last year the Environmental Protection Agency released “new source performance standard” regulations that are effectively a moratorium on new coal plants. The EPA denied that similar rules would ever apply to the existing fleet, or even that they were working up such rules. Now Mr. Obama will unleash his carbon central planners on current plants.
http://philassie.blogspot.com/2013/06/same-old-first-hand-accounts-from-48-61.html?m=1
“Robert F. Kennedy, martyred liberal icon, was a reporter for the Boston Globe in 1948 and was dispatched to Mandatory Palestine to cover the lead up to the British withdrawal. He wrote this of the Arabs living in Mandatory Palestine in 1948, days before israel’s independence:
“The Jews point with pride to the fact that over 500,000 Arabs in the 12 years between 1932 and 1944, came into Palestine to take advantage of living conditions existing in no other Arab state. This is the only country in the Near and Middle East where an Arab middle class is in existence.” (Emphasis throughout is mine).
RFK also points out that “many Palestinian Jews fought as volunteers with Allied troops throughout the world and still others were dropped by parachute into German-held territory as espionage agents. They were perhaps doing no more than their duty, but they did their duty well.”
This tidbit about the 1948 war proves that Jews faced murderous hostility from ordinary Palestinian Arabs, not just militants or Arab leadership:
Crucial: Fascinating First Hand Accounts from 48-61 Show Israelis Right; Roots of Palestinian Propaganda
There is a narrative war raging, where Zionists claim that the Arabs — largely recent immigrants drawn to Zionist industry and prosperity — after rejecting partition in 1947, embarked on an openly genocidal war against hugely outnumbered and outgunned Jewish forces in order to erase the Jewish presence in the Holy Land. In the ensuing melee, according to Israel, hundreds of thousands of local Arabs fled, encouraged to do so by their leaders. The Arabs on the other hand claim that young Israel was heavily supported by the British, was the aggressor in 1947, and expelled countless peaceable Arab peasants from their ancient communities.
While doing research for some new memes, I stumbled across a number of extremely interesting primary historical sources, i.e., reports on the ground from 1948 and subsequent years. Why go to history books written decades later when interviews and records from the period in question are readily available? Indeed, proximity to events necessarily means greater accuracy in their reporting. And what the sources find is a unanimous confirmation of Israel’s version of events. Propaganda can destroy many things, but it cannot change the documented past.
I urge you to read this extended piece, and to share it.
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http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/editorials/two_bad_votes_rFRLpkmfyrEjmOWDSwQHCL
As early as today, the City Council will vote on two bad bills that threaten the ability of our police force to do its job. It says something about where New York City is today politically that both bills will not only pass, they will likely do so handily.
The first bill is supported by Speaker Chris Quinn. It creates an inspector general for New York’s Finest. The job of this inspector general will be to micro-manage policies (most notably, stop, question & frisk) and in effect create a rival authority to the actual police commissioner.
The bill comes even after a highly publicized federal trial on stop-and-frisk in which the top witnesses failed to demonstrate that cops are racially profiling.
Gabriella Bass
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly
Which only makes the second bill even more nefarious. This one would allow individuals to sue the city if they suspect a specific stop was racially motivated. In other words, a welcome mat for trial lawyers. The only question is whether this bill will have the veto-proof majority we expect on the legislation for an inspector general.
Whether the handcuffs on police come from a federal court imposing an independent monitor or a City Council imposing an IG — or both — the city is in for big changes in its policing. Something that will make it much harder for the next mayor and police commissioner to be as successful on crime as Bloomberg & Kelly.
http://www.nypost.com/ By now, everyone knows: NSA leaker Edward Snowden, who left Hong Kong last week for Moscow, never boarded the plane he was expected to take yesterday to Cuba. His exact whereabouts were unclear. It’s the latest of many Obama administration fumbles in trying to catch this guy — while the Russians and Chinese […]
http://www.idfblog.com/2013/06/25/startup-soldiers-from-the-idf-to-high-tech-success/
The Israeli military’s ranks have included future politicians, celebrities, journalists and many other success stories. Some of the high-tech geniuses who have changed the world also wore the IDF uniform.
Technology and business experts worldwide rave about the successes of Israel’s entrepreneurs. Israel has produced a huge range of startup companies, some of which have transformed our technological world.
Behind almost every Israeli startup is an accomplished innovator who calls Israel home. But before setting out on the road to success, most of these brilliant minds served as IDF soldiers. Here we remember their roles in the IDF – and the accomplishments that followed.
Waze founder Uri Levine
Uri Levine got his start as a developer in the IDF. Levine even chose to go beyond his required length of service, serving for five years instead of three. After his release from the military, he applied the ingenuity he developed in the IDF to become an entrepreneur.
In 2008, Levine founded Waze, perhaps the world’s most successful GPS software. The interactive smartphone application not only provides users with driving directions; it also lets them share information about what is in the area – such as traffic, accidents and police.
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/Isaiah-Nation-317730 Grounded in the vision of Isaiah, the State of Israel can be a mechanism that imbues life with holiness, a shining “light unto the nations.” The State of Israel has many achievements to its credit. It has provided a refuge for persecuted Jews, has proverbially “made the desert bloom” and has contributed many scientific […]
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3787/lying-and-getting-away-with-it
British universities are breeding-grounds of the most appalling hatred against America, the UK, Israel, free-thinkers, “apostates,” and religious and sexual minorities What is worse, is that organizations who lie and lie and lie again can get away with it.
Four years ago, on Christmas Day, a young Muslim who had recently finished his studies at a British university tried to blow up a plane over Detroit. Had Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s plan succeeded, he would have killed all the people on the trans-continental plane he was on, and many more on the ground below. Fortunately Abdulmutallab’s bomb failed to go off properly and, in what must be an undesirable outcome for even the most committed jihadi, he succeeded only in setting fire to his genitals.
One of the more technically notable facts about the would-be Detroit bomber is that he had recently been the head of the Islamic Society at University College London. Some of us had warned for some time that Islamic societies at British university campuses in general, and London campuses in particular, had become hotbeds of Islamic extremism. We had been criticized for doing so, but the facts were behind us.
What was educational for those of us who saw the post-Detroit cover-up was that it began with denial and ended with a whitewash. UCL’s President (one Malcolm Grant) persistently went onto the media to declare that there was nothing to see here. So what that Abdulmutallab had organized extremist events repeatedly on the UCL campus? So what that outside figures as well as other students had expressed their concerns about this? So what that this former student had almost succeeded in carrying out an act of terrorism? Professor Grant and his colleagues insisted that there was nothing to see at UCL.
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3789/britain-fascism-complex In the enduring hunt for moral credibility, politicians and community organizations issue panicked warnings about the threat posed by “fascism”. These same organizations, however, refuse to acknowledge that a number of “anti-fascist” groups are part of a collectivity that is just as destructive as its ideological opponent. While British “fascism,” both in theory and […]
