http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=3753
ISRAEL CAN ONLY LOSE FROM OBAMA’S VISIT
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/iraq-ten-years-since-removing-saddam-on-the-glazov-gang/print/
This week’s Glazov Gang had the honor of being joined by Shant Kenderian, author of “1001 Nights in Iraq,“ Michael Walsh, author and screenwriter, and Josh Brewster, an NHL hockey broadcaster (hockeytalk.biz). The Gang members discussed Shant Kenderian’s memoir: 1001 Nights in Iraq. The dialogue occurred in Part I and dealt with Shant’s shocking story about being an American forced to fight for Saddam against the country he loves. The segment also included a discussion on whether on not we won the Iraq war and whether we should have engaged in it. Part II focused on Afghanistan Obama’s “Good War” Failure, When the Republican Party Died? and Pope Francis. To watch both parts of the two part series, see below:
Part I:
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/the-medias-character-assassination-of-lars-hedegaard/ It’s starting to look like the Book of Job. For years, he’s been demonized in his nation’s media for criticizing Islam. In 2011 and 2012, he was put on trial – not one, twice, but three times – for violating a Danish law that makes it a crime to insult or denigrate a religion. […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/larry-greenfield/obamas-mirage-in-israel/print/ Before clicking Like of President Barack Hussein Obama, who seeks a public relations benefit on the eve of Holy Week and Passover, Israel and its supporters might consider how much Obama has UnLiked them to date. Obama’s background, worldview, and policies make him no friend of the Jewish state. Obama’s boyhood in Indonesia brought […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/south-africas-hell-on-earth/
AS GREENFIELD STATES THIS IS ZIMBABWE REDUX….WHEN THE UNION JACK WAS LOWERED IN RHODESIA MUGABE AND HIS TIN POT SOCIALISM TOOK OVER CHEERED BY THE WESTERN GROUPIES. RHODESIA, ONCE A SELF SUSTAINING ECONOMIC AND AGRICULTURAL MIRACLE IN AFRICA WAS REDUCTED TO FAMINE, POVERTY RAMPANT AIDS AND EPIDEMICS, WHITE FLIGHT AND RUIN…..RSK
When a 23-year-old woman was raped and tortured to death in Delhi, the case captured the attention of the world. Two months later, a 17-year-old girl was raped and tortured to death near Cape Town in an eerily similar case, but hardly anyone noticed. In both cases, the women were gang raped, mutilated and cut open. But the rape and murder of women has become horrifyingly common in South Africa.
Nelson Mandela is still officially venerated as a saint, his smiling face appearing on countless posters, while the man himself, having solved all the problems of his native country, tours the world with a group of elders, including Kofi Annan and Jimmy Carter, to solve the problems of other countries; but while Mandela tours, his own country has descended into its own kind of hell.
For women, South Africa may be the worst place on earth. South Africa is one of the few countries on earth where women die before men.
South Africa has the most rapes per capita of anywhere in the world. 3,600 rapes happen in South Africa every day. 40% percent of South African women will be raped. In one survey, 1 in 4 men admitted to being rapists. 1 in 10 of those admitted to raping little girls. Children are believed to be the victims of 41% of the rapes in the country.
But the best picture of how nightmarish South Africa has become for women may be that the President of South Africa, Jacob Zuma of the African National Congress, had been on trial for rape. Since the trial, Zuma’s accuser has fled abroad, after being threatened, while Zuma rules South Africa.
Both the 17-year-old girl and Zuma’s accuser were black.
http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/343314
A Win for Missile Defense
Kim Jong Un has done the near-impossible. The newly minted supreme leader of North Korea has forced the Obama administration to admit that the United States needs more missile defense.
Opposition to missile defense constitutes one of the most treasured books of the Democratic arms-control gospel. Since it was introduced by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, Democrats have reflexively denounced the idea of a defense against incoming ballistic missiles as wholly unworkable, impossibly expensive, and dangerously destabilizing. Much better to leave ourselves exposed and work to sweet-talk our enemies out of their hostility and their weapons.
In keeping with this approach, upon taking office the Obama administration promptly nixed additional interceptors planned for deployment on the West Coast against the budding North Korean missile threat. George W. Bush had already put 30 interceptors at two sites on the West Coast, a symptom of his “Cold War mindset” that the supple and sophisticated Obama administration had no use for.
As it turns out, it is North Korea that truly has the Cold War — or perhaps worse — mindset. In the words of new Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, Pyongyang has “made advances in its capabilities and has engaged in a series of irresponsible and reckless provocations.” It conducted a third nuclear test, apparently a successful one. It put a satellite in orbit with a Taepodong-2 missile. It displayed what appeared to be a road-mobile ICBM.
While threatening to “miserably destroy” U.S. units in South Korea and turn that country’s capital into a “nuclear sea of fire,” Pyongyang has vowed that North Koreans “will be exercising our right to pre-emptive nuclear attack against the headquarters of the aggressor,” which is, of course, none other than the United States.
Rather than simply trust that a lunatic regime running its country like a vast prison camp will rationally calculate its self-interest as we would hope, the Obama administration says it is going to add back the 14 canceled interceptors. This will take the number of West Coast interceptors from 30 to 44, but with unnecessary expense and delay. The new interceptors should be online in 2017, or by the end of the president’s second term.
While the restoration is heartening, the Obama administration has pulled the plug on the development of other, more technologically advanced defense systems and can’t overcome its compulsion to make unilateral concessions to the Russians. At the same time that Hagel announced the return of the West Coast interceptors, he said the administration won’t complete the final phase of a defense system in Europe to guard against an Iranian launch targeting the United States.
http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/343297 Who Will Bell America? Remember the medieval fable about the mice that wanted their dangerous enemy, the cat, belled, but each preferred not to be the one to attempt the dangerous deed? Likewise, the world’s bad actors have long wanted America belled, but, like the mice, so far they have not been stupid or […]
http://pjmedia.com/barryrubin/2013/03/17/why-president-obamas-concept-of-the-middle-east-will-fail-just-listen-to-it/ To put it plainly, the press briefing intending to indicate how President Barack Obama thinks about Israel on the eve of his trip here was a combination of fantasy and insult. It is likely that the Obama administration made such statements for show — to persuade the Arabic-speaking world that the United States is […]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323869604578368353424655998.html?mod=opinion_newsreel
It was a gaffe on the order of bitter clingers, and this time in full public view: “If you’ve got a business–you didn’t build that,” President Obama said at a July 13, 2012, campaign rally in Roanoke, Va. “Somebody else made that happen.”
The president’s defenders and sycophants rushed to rationalize it away. Look at the complete context, they said, and we did:
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business–you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.
See, he meant somebody else built roads and bridges!
Of course that presupposed that the brilliant double Ivy graduate and former part-time elite law school professor lacked basic skills in grammar, logic and exposition. “That” is a singular pronoun; the plural equivalent is “those.” Along with the agreement in number, the noun “business” was proximate to the pronoun, as an antecedent should be. And even accepting the hypothesis of Obama’s hopeless incapacity for grammar, what was the owner of a construction contractor that builds roads and bridges supposed to make of the putative assertion that he did no such thing?
Obama’s vicious little riff turned out to have its origin in the work of George Lakoff, the Berkeley linguist who has written a series of books on leftist cognition and rhetoric. The best way to understand Lakoff is as the anti-Ayn Rand: As she celebrated the individual and scorned the collective, he does the converse.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323869604578368200275334358.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond
I COULD NOT AGREE MORE WITH THIS COLUMN WHICH IS SURE TO SPARK INDIGNATION. POLLARD’S CASE SHOULD BE CONSIDERED WITH REGARD TO HIS SENTENCE…UNFAIR LENGTH AND SEVERITY…BUT HE IS NOT A HERO AND TO NAME A PUBLIC SQUARE IN ISRAEL FOR HIM IS A TRAVESTY AND AN INSULT…AND TO PIN HIS RELEASE TO MORE CONCESSIONS BY ISRAEL IS OUTRAGEOUS AND SHAME ON THOSE ISRAELIS WHO WOULD DO SO…..RSK
Don’t Free Jonathan Pollard
A man who betrayed his country is no martyr to the Jewish people.
“Nations are rightly judged by their choice of heroes. Israel has plenty of worthy heroes, yet today there’s a square in Jerusalem named for Pollard. So here’s something else I’d like Mr. Obama to do while he’s in Israel: Insist that the square be renamed. Maybe then, in a quieter hour and without regard to diplomacy or politics, can Jonathan Pollard’s fate be reconsidered in a purely humanitarian grounds.”
There are a few things I’d like to hear Barack Obama say on his trip this week to Israel, the Palestinian territories and Jordan.
I’d like to hear him go beyond the bromides about “having Israel’s back” and “not bluffing” about Iran’s nuclear ambitions to spell out a U.S. timetable and a U.S. red line. I’d especially like to hear the president say the U.S. is not interested in a diplomatic settlement that solves the immediate nuclear crisis but allows Iran to retain and expand its nuclear-industrial base.
Keeping Iran from sprinting to a single bomb now so that it can amble toward 50 bombs once Mr. Obama is out of office is not a policy worthy of any American presidency.
I’d also like to hear the president tell Palestinians during his visit to Bethlehem that what really stands between them and a state isn’t Israel or its settlements. Israel dismantled its settlements in Sinai for the sake of peace with Egypt, and dismantled them again in Gaza in the interests of disengaging from the restive coastal strip. Most Israelis would gladly do so again for the sake of a real peace with the Palestinians.
But Israelis can have no confidence in such a peace so long as Palestinians elect Hamas to power, cheer the rocketing of Israeli cities, insist on a “right of return” to Tel Aviv and Haifa, play charades at the U.N., refuse to negotiate directly with Israel, and raise their children on a diet of anti-Semitic slurs. In his 2009 speech in Cairo, Mr. Obama spoke the truth about the Arab world’s Holocaust denial. He shouldn’t deprive his Palestinian audience of a similar dose of truth-telling, least of all in Bethlehem.
Finally, I’d like to hear Mr. Obama tell Jordan’s King Abdullah that the U.S. will back the Hashemite kingdom to the hilt.
Right now, the king is dealing with a long-running financial crisis, the influx of more than 300,000 refugees from Syria, diminishing political support from tribal sheiks, and an assertive Muslim Brotherhood that smells political blood. If the king falls, the U.S. loses an ally, the Arab world loses a moderate, Israel loses a secure border, and a contest for power erupts in which all the outcomes are bad. U.S. assistance to Jordan came to $736 million last year. It’s cheap at five times the price.
But here’s something I don’t want to hear from Mr. Obama, especially not when he’s in Israel: that he has agreed to release former Navy intelligence analyst and convicted spy Jonathan Pollard.
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