http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/314685/syria-why-al-qaeda-winning-ed-husain Our collective excitement at the possibility that the Assad regime will be destroyed, and the Iranian ayatollahs weakened in the process, is blurring our vision and preventing us from seeing the rise of al-Qaeda in Syria. In March of this year, jihadis mounted seven attacks against Assad. By June, they had led 66 “operations,” […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/314680/get-lost-rich-lowry So, as you might have heard, Michael Mann of Climategate infamy is threatening to sue us. Mann is upset — very, very upset — with this Mark Steyn Corner post, which had the temerity to call Mann’s hockey stick “fraudulent.” The Steyn post was mild compared with other things that have been said about […]
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
If Israel jets show up in Iranian airspace, it will most likely happen while Obama is too busy accusing Mitt Romney of secretly storing all his money in a giant cave in the Rocky Mountains to do more than dispatch a flunky to chew out Netanyahu over the phone. The election is the perfect window for a strike on Iran’s nuclear program, because Team Obama will be too tied down on the Romney Front to do much damage to Israel.
Despite the signs being brandished at your local Anarchists for Peace rally, accusing the United States of being a puppet of the Zionist regime, the United States and Israel have different interests. Israel is interested in not getting bombed and the United States is interested in regional stability. And regional stability means keeping the Sunni Arab oil countries happy.
The United States is interested in somehow making Iran’s nuclear capabilities go away in the interests of regional stability. Particularly the regional stability of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar. But the last thing that this form of regional stability needs is Israeli planes flying over Saudi Arabia to take out that nuclear capability.
Just like during the Gulf War, regional stability demands that the United States protect Saudi Arabia and the Gulfies, while keeping Israel out of it. Since Iran’s Revolutionary Guard isn’t camped out in Kuwait City, protecting them is a matter of posture. That posture is there as a deterrent, a warning that Iran had better not interfere with our oil suppliers or there will be hellfire missiles to pay.
The posturing is hollow because everyone knows that Obama is not about to bomb Iran on behalf of Saudi Arabia and its colony in Bahrain. He is as likely to do it for Israel as he is to move to South Carolina and join the NRA. But he isn’t alone in that regard. Despite the fevered fantasies of everyone from Noam Chomsky to Ron Paul, no American president would ever bomb Iran for Israel. If a third Gulf War is fought, it will be fought for Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, one more time.
The last time the United States fought Iran, in 1988, it was to protect Kuwaiti oil tankers. If Iran interferes with oil tankers from our friendly Gulfie terrorist states, then a future administration is likely to bomb Iran. If oil prices go high enough to potentially cost Obama the election, then he might pry away his foreign policy people from drawing up maps of Syrian targets and actually hit some Iranian naval installations.
None of this has anything to do with Iran’s nuclear program… and that’s the point. George W. Bush did appear to think that Iranian nuclear weapons might be bad news for the United States, not just for the balance of power in the region. He was nearly unique in that regard. The diplomatic and military establishment is full of experts who view Iranian nuclear weapons purely as factors in the balance of power and utterly refuse to look at them from any other angle. To them, Israel isn’t really concerned about a nuclear attack, it’s only playing a regional power game along with everyone else.
For Israel, violence is not a posture or a theory. It has few trading connections and no alliances in the region. Its foreign policy has always been about dissipating physical threats to its people, whether through diplomatic or military means. It does not follow this line because it is a saintly state, but because it is a state always on the edge. It has too little territory and too many enemies around it to follow any other path.
Nurit Greenger
Theodor Herzl, born Benjamin Ze’ev and known as the Visionary of the [Jewish] State, [Hozeh Ha’Medinah-חוֹזֵה הַמְדִינָה], was a Austro-Hungarian-Jewish journalist and the father of the modern political Zionism movement that gave birth to the state of Israel.
Last night I attended the screening of the documentary movie It Is No Dream, about the creation of the idea to restore the Jewish nation in its ancient homeland, Israel.
Website: http://www.itisnodream.com/
Trailer: It Is No Dream: The Life of Theodor Herzl: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=8CdfCZa2XOI
It Is No Dream takes the viewer through the life of Theodor Herzl. The documentary examines the life and times of Herzl, who was, almost single handed, responsible for the creation of the political movement Zionism that led, in 1948 to the founding of the Jewish state, Israel.
A Moriah Films production, narrated by Ben Kingsley and Christoph Waltz as the voice of Theodor Herzl, It Is No Dream tells the story of how the life of Theodor Herzl–an assimilating Jew, a successful playwright and author, who was born into a traditional but mostly non-religious family in Budapest in 1860–was changed by the trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus in Paris, which he covered as a journalist in 1895.
Herzl realized then that there is a “Jewish problem” in Europe that needs to be solved. There must be a solution to the growing anti-Semitism of Europe. After witnessing the court proceedings where Dreyfus was falsely convicted of treason and seeing the anti-Jewish-anti-Semitic demonstrations of the French public, Herzl became convinced that the only answer to the anti-Semitism that was spreading across Europe was the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, the Biblical homeland of the Jewish people.
He wrote a political treatise entitled “Der Judenstaat” or “The Jewish State” that became an international bestseller, laying out his ideas for creating a new Jewish state.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/story/2012-08-20/male-circumcision-rates/57169976/1 Benefits of infant circumcision reconfirmed as rates decline Circumcision by the numbers • Rates peaked at nearly 80% in the 1970s and 1980s. • About 56% of newborns were circumcised in 2008, down from 64% in in 1995. • Infant circumcision rates in Europe average 10% and are as low as 1.6% in Denmark. […]
http://www.israpundit.com/archives/48537
Jews honor Manuel L. Quezon on his 134th birthday
By Nena C. Benigno, Philippine Daily Inquirer
As the country commemorates the 134th birthday today, August 19, of Manuel L. Quezon, he is also honored by thousands of Jewish families who have survived and prospered because they found a home in Manila at the darkest time in their history as a race.
It was a point of no return.
German and Austrian Jews—1,200 of them—narrowly escaped Adolf Hitler’s gas chambers just before the German dictator rounded up 6 million Jews who were eventually tortured and murdered in his concentration camps.
“The mob was screaming bloody murder: ‘Kill the Jews!’” recalls child refugee to Manila John Odenheimer who saw Nazi storm troopers rampaging through their Jewish neighborhood.
“We caught the last train out of Berlin, they closed the border after us,” recalls German refugee Guenther Leopold, whose house was smashed and ransacked by Nazi soldiers. “There was nothing left (but broken) glass on the floors.”
The year was 1940. On the other side of the world, a Filipino leader opened his country to fleeing Jewish refugees when no other country would take them.
President Quezon opened the Philippines’ doors to up to 10,000 Jewish refugees.
http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2215/More-Reasons-to-Investigate-Huma-Abedin.aspx At his Iftar dinner, President Obama prasied Huma Abedin as “nothing less than extraordinary in representing our country and the democratic values that we hold dear.” Walid Shoebat disagrees, writing: “The Abedins for decades were actually serving a foreign entity, the government of Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Islamic Affairs, and not American Democracy as […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-greenfield/al-qaeda-allied-qatar-buys-into-europe%e2%80%99s-busiest-airport/ London’s Heathrow Airport is the busiest airport in the European Union with 70 million passengers passing through its corridors. It is busier than France’s Charles de Gaulle Airport and Spain’s Madrid-Barajas Airport. It has more than three times the traffic of New York’s JFK Airport and receives flights from around the world. Heathrow’s operator, […]
JAMIE GLAZOV: HUMA ABEDIN, ISLAMIST CONNECTIONS AND WILLFUL BLINDNESS…ANDREW McCARTHY INTERVIEW ****
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/jamie-glazov/huma-abedin-islamist-connections-and-willful-blindness/ Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor and New York Times bestselling author who put the Blind Sheik behind bars in the first World Trade Center bombing. He is the author of Willful Blindness and, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America. FP: […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/national-security-leaks-are-white-house-politics-and-not-the-safety-of-the-nation-the-primary-factors-at-work?f=puball
http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/obama-and-the-politics-of-treason/
President Obama has dismissed and derided the former military and intelligence officers who believe his administration passed out sensitive national security information for partisan gain. In a press conference yesterday, he said of the Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund and similar groups—“I don’t take these folks too seriously.”
Unsurprisingly, the White House has been quick to attack the men behind these accusations instead of explaining to the American people that this administration has not leveraged defense secrets for positive press reports. The best Obama was able to muster in his defense yesterday was “this kind of stuff springs up before election time.”
Of course, this does not adequately address accusations of leaks that many believe could amount to treason. While the specific source of the leaks remains in question, as a former intelligence officer, I see why so many informed observers, including the OPSEC whistleblowers, smell something rotten at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Let’s press into the facts of the case.
From the start of the controversy, the news articles that leaked the information claimed that their sources were members of “Obama’s national security team.” That would seem the drain the pool of possible leakers rather quickly, but alas—no progress has been made on the White House-approved investigation.
Even without that massive clue, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence pointing to the White House as the source. The leaks are obviously political because they are positive. Leaks usually hurt administrations, but not these leaks. Whoever told the press about these sensitive national security matters had very high-level access and used it to lionize the President. From the Bin Laden raid details to the President’s so-called “Kill List,” the leaks bolstered the perception that Obama had transformed into a hawk.
In response to the OPSEC group’s accusations, media outlets often tout that Obama’s Department of Justice has brought more Espionage Act prosecutions—six and counting—than every President before him combined. They cite this to further a narrative that Obama takes leaking seriously, but that’s a misreading. The prosecutions have everything to do with appearances for Obama and very little to do with national security.
Leaks can create major political headaches, as seen during the Bush years. To blunt this liability, the Obama administration established an early precedent: leak, and Attorney General Holder’s DOJ will ruin your life. This approach ensnared a range of offenders—from legitimately dangerous offenses to a case against former NSA analyst Thomas Drake that completely fell apart in court.
Thus the Obama administration has maintained a two-track enforcement approach to leakers. Senior political operatives seem to get away with them; working-level national security professionals cower in fear of DOJ’s wrath.
Instead of pulling clearances and firing alleged leakers, Obama’s DOJ jumped right to felony charges in these instances. Regardless of the trial outcomes, the message to all who have classified access and a political disagreement with Obama was heard loud and clear.
And what liberals claimed was laudable behavior under President Bush—leaking– was now treasonous under Obama. For a President who ran on a promise of transparency, this was a particularly craven abandonment of previously espoused principle.
Contrast the draconian enforcement approach to working-level intelligence employees with the zero arrests that have been made in relation to the major national security disclosures that set off the current furor. Despite the reckless revelation of sources and methods in the recent leaks, it is a near certainty that no senior White House officials will face charges or even lose their security clearance because of them.
