http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-clock-is-ticking I was like many other teenagers in my youth — a little bit rebellious and very immature with that feeling of superiority that said that I was somehow smarter than my elders, who seemed to have antiquated thought processes about life and politics. I remember listening to my father talk to family and friends […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/02/hedegaard_tv_interview.html
Once again illustrating how Canada’s Sun TV is far bolder than any US television network in dealing with Islam’s threat to Western free speech, Michael Coren, uniquely, interviewed Lars Hedegaard, who survived an assassination attempt earlier this week. Coren underscored my own sentiment that the failure to cover this assassination attempt against a major Western journalist by television media-including conservative television outlets Fox News and The Blaze — is a lingering disgrace.
I am very grateful to Michael Coren for doing the interview, but have a minor quibble with his introduction, which in fact does not (watch for yourselves) comport with these expressed sentiments on Islam by my colleague and friend Lars Hedegaard (during September, 2010):
We [the International Free Press Society] have made no bones about the fact that we consider Islam – as it is presently being preached by all influential clerics and ideologues – a deadly threat to all our freedoms among which are freedom of expression. For this consistent stance we have been vilified and called every name in the book, but we will not budge. I’m aware that some of my friends think that Islam can be reformed, domesticated, and civilized. I welcome that day, but must relate to the fact that it hasn’t happened yet – though Muslims have had 1,400 years to complete the project.
At any rate, we are all indebted to Michael Coren for interviewing Lars Hedegaard and airing his important story, which the legacy media, Fox News and The Blaze, and even the major US conservative talk radio figures have all ignored, imperiling Western free speech.
SEE THE INCREDIBLE MOVIE ABOUT DR. BEN CARSON:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gifted_Hands:_The_Ben_Carson_Story
The movie begins in 1987, where Dr. Ben Carson (Cuba Gooding, Jr.) goes to Germany to visit a couple named Peter and Augusta Rausch, who have twins conjoined at the head. Ben knows that chances of saving them both will be a risk, because one baby always dies in situations like that. Ben agrees to do the operation, but he will wait four months so he can come up with a plan to save them both. While looking into some of his books, the movie flashes back to the year 1961, where 11 year old Ben Carson (Jaishon Fisher) starts out life as an African American child from a one-parent home with failing grades at school. Ben has an older brother named Curtis. His mother, who dropped out in the third grade, starts making decisions for him. When her boys need to learn multiplication tables, she has them swear to learn them while she is gone to check herself into a mental institution. When she sees her two sons’ success hindered by TV, she schedules timings to watch TV, boys show great interest in watching only a quiz show later on and commands them to read two books per week from the library and give her a book report, she also moves them to better schools.
Meanwhile as time passes, Ben learns how to multiply and to spell. He starts to explore the world of books, and he grows in it. He begins to show a temper; Ben almost kills his friend who tells him to go to hell. He used his new knife to stab him and it broke when it hit the buckle of his belt. Having almost killed someone because of his temper, he realizes that he can’t do anything about it. He runs to his room and cries out to God, praying that He delivers him from his temper. He becomes the top student in his eighth grade class, third in his high school class and with hard work and strong determination, he got a scholarship to college, passed the MCAT and went on to medical school. He meets his girlfriend Candy, whom he falls in love with. One day, when he struggles with a test study, she helps him out and Ben eventually passes and gets an A.
In the year 1976, Carson faced adversity from fellow doctors and students while working at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. It is here where he performed an operation as a resident without supervision, risking his medical career to save a man’s life. Then in the year of 1985, he saves the life of a girl who has seizures 100 times a day, by removing only the half of her brain that was responsible for seizures in a procedure called ‘hemispherectomy”. After two children, Candy becomes pregnant with twins, but loses the babies from a bloody miscarriage. Ben’s mother later moves in with the family.
Then the movie goes back to where it began: the year of 1987. Ben is eventually convinced to operate on the two twins, and he manages to make the operation successful, and both twins are saved.
FIRST WATCH THIS VIDEO OF HIS SPEECH: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/02/07/dr_benjamin_carson_addresses_national_prayer_breakfast_criticizes_obamacare.html
THEN READ THIS EDITORIAL FROM THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323452204578292302358207828.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_h
BEN CARSON FOR PRESIDENT!
Seated in view to his right are Senator Jeff Sessions and President Obama. One doesn’t look happy. You know something’s coming when Dr. Carson says, “It’s not my intention to offend anyone. But it’s hard not to. The PC police are out in force everywhere.”
Dr. Carson tossed over the PC police years ago. Raised by a single mother in inner-city Detroit, he was as he tells it “a horrible student with a horrible temper.” Today he’s director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins and probably the most renowned specialist in his field.
Late in his talk he dropped two very un-PC ideas. The first is an unusual case for a flat tax: “What we need to do is come up with something simple. And when I pick up my Bible, you know what I see? I see the fairest individual in the universe, God, and he’s given us a system. It’s called a tithe.
www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com
http://blogs.jpost.com/users/just-look-us-now
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
Good news for infertile couples. A research team from Israel’s Technion has produced human eggs using cells from the amniotic sac that surrounds a baby in the womb. Experts believe that donation of the amniotic sac will be more acceptable than egg donation from fertile women.
http://www.financialexpress.com/news/scientists-create-human-eggs-from-amniotic-sac-cells/1068724
Cancer breath test to go into production. The eNose early diagnostic breath test for lung cancer developed by Israel Technion Professor Hossam Haick is to go commercial. The Technion has announced a joint venture with Alpha Szenszor Inc. to produce an economically viable, non-invasive, digital screening tool.
http://www.globes.co.il/serveen/globes/docview.asp?did=1000819741
“To reduce suffering and save lives – for the sake of all humanity.” These are the goals of Israel’s Technion Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, as described in this video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xevd-oJFI44&feature=youtu.be
Man sees new baby after Israeli doctors save his eye. Moshe Schreibhand of Rishon Lezion went fishing to relax on the night before his wife was due to give birth and a fish hook got caught in his eye. Doctors at Kaplan Medical Center removed the hook, sewed up his eyeball and saved his sight.
http://www.jpost.com/Health/Article.aspx?id=302436
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
A better hummus and falafel. Yissum, the Research and Development Company of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is introducing new chickpea varieties, which retain high nutritional values and exhibit improved synchronization between flowering and the rainy season to increase yield.
http://israel21c.org/news/new-strain-of-chickpea-packs-nutritional-punch/
Ginger corrects the spelling. Ginger Proofreader, from Israel’s Ginger Software, understands language context well enough to make sure you’ve written what you intended to. So “Hey dude, let’s go grab a bear tonight” would be flagged as being misspelt.
http://israel21c.org/technology/a-spellchecker-on-speed/
After the “Smart-Phone”, meet the “Smart-Shower” (Thanks to Herb) Israel’s SmarTap has developed an electronic cartridge that can replace the mechanical-thermostatic unit currently used worldwide in showers. SmarTap offers a “personalized shower experience” even in case of a loss of pressure in the cold water pipe.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/164795
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Iea12B8FDLg
Predicting the future. Israel Technion’s Kira Radinsky and Microsoft’s Eric Horvitz have developed a program that has successfully predicted disease and violence outbreaks with 70 to 90 percent accuracy. The prototype merged two decades worth of New York Times archives and other Internet sources such as Wikipedia to make its predictions.
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=7286
A longer life with your mobile phone. Even if there is no evidence for needing its protection against harmful radiation, Israel’s Tawkon mobile phone emissions warning system has several other benefits. It increases battery life; tells you when reception is poor; and it’s free. Plus, it may stop your phone from frying your brain!
http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/radiation-cancer-scare-tawkon-israel-106208
A very smart Muve. Israel’s Muve is a new way to move around town. Described as a CleanTech backpack on wheels, the electric scooter eases congestion but gets you from A to B at a steady 20-25 km per hour. At $2,000 it is a third of the price of a Segway and has many more features.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/segways-out-israels-muve-a-new-way-to-move-around/
A bridge too far-out! Each year, the world dumps 800,000 aging maritime shipping containers. Israel is building the first ever bridge from recycled containers, to link the Ariel Sharon Environment Park at Hiriya with the main thoroughfare leading to Tel Aviv. The bridge even has solar-powered lighting.
http://www.greenprophet.com/2013/01/shipping-container-bridge-tel-avivs-trash-mountain/
Cut crime by focusing on hot spots. A 16-year study by Professor David Weisburd of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Institute of Criminology has shown that 50% of city crime occurs in 5% of the streets. Traditional crime fighting focuses on the criminals but Stockholm Prize-winner Weisburd has changed perceptions.
http://www.huji.ac.il/cgi-bin/dovrut/dovrut_search_eng.pl?mesge136001986605872560
Israel is on the map. Israel NewTech is launching the Clean-Tech Map. The Facebook application shows Israeli Clean-tech projects and installations anywhere in the world. Visitors search by either category or by browsing the map. Visitors may then read about each project, view photos or clips, and contact the company.
http://www.israelnewtech.com/2013/02/cleantech-map/
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2013/02/the_folly_of_the_wests_alliance_with_the_muslim_brotherhood.html
A Mosque in Munich By Ian Johnson Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Product Details
A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA, and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West by Ian Johnson (Aug 10, 2011)
The presence of Muslims in the West is not a recent phenomenon; on the contrary, it reaches back many decades, to Nazi Germany. Then, a group of former Soviet Muslims, seeking better treatment in Germany, defected and aided the Nazi effort. Muslim Brotherhood (MB) cohorts in the Middle East conducted a parallel effort. Later, under the control of U.S. intelligence, many of these same Muslims were harnessed as a bulwark against worldwide Communist domination during the Cold War. Eventually completely taken over by the MB, these German Muslim cohorts were courted by the West as a most curious partner to counter Islamic extremism. The locus for much of their activity, which they later used to spread Islam throughout Europe and plan major terrorist attacks in the West, including 9/11, was to become a beachhead in Europe — the Munich mosque.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ian Johnson details this history in his book, A Mosque in Munich. Johnson examines nearly 80 years of the Muslim presence in Europe and how America helped strengthen the very community dedicated to the destruction of the West. Most of it is on target, except for Johnson’s crucial underplaying of the Muslim Brotherhood’s key role in the mission to destroy America.
Muslims Fighting for Nazism
During World War II, the Nazis saw an opportunity to use disenfranchised non-Russian Muslim minorities to fight the Soviet Union. As victims of Soviet repression, Muslims were treated as an underclass. Their farms were collectivized, their assets were confiscated, they were persecuted for practicing their religion, and their mosques were shuttered. Thus, they became ripe for Nazi exploitation, and, as devalued soldiers, non-Russian Muslim minorities were eager to be captured by the Germans and fight against Stalin. In addition, since anti-Semitism was an intrinsic part of their religious doctrine, these Muslims naturally allied with Nazis efforts to exterminate Jews.
Johnson recounts that by the 1930s, another force in the Islamic world, the MB, founded in 1928, was accepting money from the Nazis and using it to establish a military wing. The nascent organization run by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, focused on anti-British colonialism and opposition to Jewish immigration. In 1933, al-Husseini contacted the Nazis about supplying recruits for the Waffen-SS, the military wing of the Nazi party, and joining a collaborative effort to eliminate Jewish influence in economics and politics.
Seduced by the oil-rich Caucasus inhabited by the Muslim minorities, Hitler realized the potential of being viewed as a liberator of this oppressed region. When the Wehrmacht seized the North Caucasus in 1942, the Germans announced to cheers that the mosques would be reopened and the SS began actively courting émigré leaders in the region in an effort to employ Islam as a motivating force to assist their fighting units.
Using Islam to Fight Communism
Just as the Nazis had used Muslims for their own ends, the U.S. government acted similarly, as Johnson recounts in A Mosque in Munich, which traces the United States’ burgeoning interest in using Islam as an anti-communist tool. As early as 1951, at the end of Harry Truman’s second term in office, U.S. intelligence agencies considered using Islam to shore up the free world in the fight against Soviet Cold War influence and essentially split the Soviet Union by pitting non-Russians against Russians. At first, the United States concentrated on working with ex-Nazi, non-Russian Muslim émigrés as part of a CIA-funded broadcast organization, Radio Liberty, headquartered in Germany and dedicated to overthrowing the Soviet Union. At the time, U.S. Cold War policy focused on “containment,” or preventing the spread of Communism. Eventually, U.S. Cold War efforts became more aggressive, and the goal shifted to overturning communism altogether by various covert operations, economic warfare, sabotage, and propaganda.
Johnson writes that in 1953, when prominent Muslims scheduled a conference — an “Islamic Colloquium” — at Princeton University, they received support from the U.S. Department of State and the Library of Congress. Prior to the conference, Muslim leaders requested a meeting with President Eisenhower who was keen to influence the Muslim world. The overt goal of the conference was to promote Islamic “Renaissance,” but it also served to cement U.S. relations with the Muslim Brotherhood.
www.acdemocracy.org www.econwarfare.org While the U.S. declares more sanctions on Iran, the EU, which had ratified the UN sanctions resolution against Iran on June 9, 2010, has been steadily removing Iranian banks from its sanction list. The EU’s recent removal of Bank Sederat, Bank Sina and Bank Mellat helps to bolster Iran’s economy, facilitates European purchase […]
The EU and Hezbollah Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has urged the European Union to at long belated last “draw the necessary conclusions” and place Hezbollah on its terrorist list. He voiced his appeal after exhaustive Bulgarian investigations had firmly traced the bomb attack on Israeli tourists in Burgas last July to Hezbollah. Similar entreaties were sounded […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/340225/problems-white-paper-andrew-c-mccarthy
My, how the worm has turned.
Seems like only yesterday that Eric Holder was inveighing against sweeping executive war powers. These were the Bush years, when Holder could readily be found caviling about such odious practices as “secret electronic surveillance against American citizens” and “detain[ing] American citizens without due process of law.” Back then, Holder declared these Bush war crimes so “needlessly abusive and unlawful” that the American people (translation: the Bush-deranged Left) were owed “a reckoning” against the officials who conjured them up.
But once he became attorney general in a Democratic administration, the ever-malleable Mr. Holder decided there was actually no problem killing American citizens without due process of law, based on intelligence gleaned from secret surveillance.
The breathtaking hypocrisy of the Obama Democrats is what screams off the pages of the “white paper” Holder’s Justice Department has served up to support the president’s use of lethal force against U.S. nationals who align with our foreign terrorist enemies. It bears remembering that Holder, like his Gitmo Bar soul mates, once volunteered his services to the enemy. At the time, he was a senior partner at a firm that was among the Lawyer Left’s most eager to provide free legal help to al-Qaeda enemy combatants in their lawsuits against the American people. Holder filed an amicus brief on behalf of Jose Padilla, an American citizen turned al-Qaeda operative who was sent to the United States by Khalid Sheikh Mohamed in 2002 to attempt a post-9/11 “second wave” of mass-murder attacks.
Just so you get the gist of where Holder was coming from, an amicus (or “friend of the court”) brief is not something a lawyer has to file on behalf of a client. Padilla already had other counsel. Holder was a party crasher, gratuitously intervening — exploiting his status as a former Clinton deputy attorney general — to steer the court toward his desired policy.
And that desired policy? Holder wanted terrorism relegated to the criminal-justice system, as it had been before Bush pivoted to a law-of-war paradigm. According to the pre-2009 Holder, if an enemy-combatant terrorist, particularly an American citizen, is encountered away from a traditional battlefield, the Constitution demands that he be given the rights of a criminal defendant. Executive action against him may be taken only under judicial supervision. Yes, Holder conceded, this might mean that the government will be barred from detaining and interrogating many a “dangerous terrorist.” And yes, it risks the reprise of 9/11’s slaughter of nearly 3,000 Americans. “But,” he blithely concluded, “our Nation has always been prepared to accept some risk as the price of guaranteeing that the Executive does not have arbitrary power to imprison citizens.”
Ah, but arbitrary power to kill citizens — now, that’s a different story.
http://pjmedia.com/blog/fractures-on-the-right/
It seems that conservatives have enormous difficulty getting along. Often we see them at odds with each other and dismissing the very groups trying to defend conservative ideas and assumptions. Some identify as neo-conservatives, others as paleo-conservatives, still others labor to distinguish themselves from libertarian conservatives. Fiscal conservatives set themselves apart from social and religious conservatives. Some are anti-Bush conservatives, some are RINOs. Many jumped on the Arab Spring bandwagon; others, far more prescient, warned of the disaster it portended. Some see major conservative figures like Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, Tommy Robinson, Ann Coulter, and Geert Wilders as stalwart defenders of Western values; others regard them as inflexible bigots and warmongers.
Recently, I hosted a dinner for a few conservative friends, well-known and influential people in the political community and doing much good work in promoting freedom, justice, national security, sane immigration policy, Zionism, the sovereignty of the individual, and resistance to tyrannical ideologies. And yet, as the evening progressed, basic divisions began to be exposed, especially with respect to the axial distinction between Islam and Islamism — a necessary differentiation, according to my friends. The equation of Islam and Islamism, they argued, arose from ignorance. In fact, it conceded ground to the radicals and extremists, as one of my cherished friends put it in a subsequent letter to me, “by accepting the Islamists’ view that they are the sole representatives of Islam.”
Islamists, from my friend’s perspective, are barbarians, Bedouin outriders to the faith, marginal entities who “clothe themselves in the texts of Islam” instead of recognizing, as do their “moderate” brethren, that a renewed and “open reading” of the Koran is perennially possible and that the more offensive passages can be historicized and legitimately abrogated. Like any other religion, on this view, Islam is not “immune to the dialectics of history,” and can be reinterpreted and brought into a productive relation with the current era. All people of good will should therefore support these moderates and must be on guard not to alienate them through loose talk about the dangers of Islam.
For myself, though I would wish to eschew controversy among the ostensibly like-minded and cease throwing lead downrange, the dinner-party conversation struck me as evidence of how such divisions over the nature of Islam create a crippling discord amongst conservatives. The meliorists discriminate between a “good Islam” and a “bad Islam,” accusing those with whom they disagree of a perilous conflation of incompatibles. This “bad Islam,” apparently, is the product of a grievous misinterpretation of the primary documents and historical lore on the part of those who have “hijacked” the faith. It is not really Islam.
But the point is, as Anjem Choudary, head of the radical al-Muhajiroun (“the immigrants”) movement in Britain, assures us [1], the division between moderates and extremists is a “classification [that] does not exist in Islam.” Similarly, after the recent terrorist attack on a BP natural gas plant in Algeria, costing 81 lives, one of the perpetrators announced: “We’ve come in the name of Islam, to teach the Americans what Islam is.” And they have the liturgy and consecrations with them. As Robert Spencer comments [2], “mainstream media coverage has followed the usual patterns, downplaying or ignoring outright what the attackers said about what they were hoping to accomplish, since these statements lead to questions about Islam that they would prefer not be asked.”
