http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3104/kuwait-death-penalty-blasphemy So what should international human rights organization regard as the threat: the Quran, Quranic instructions, or the people who are just following its recommended path? Kuwaiti lawmakers have passed a legal amendment authorizing the death penalty for Muslims who curse their God or the Quran, or who defame their Prophet Mohammed or his wife. […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/06/escape_from_a_north_korean_prison_camp.html The question has been asked many times: “Why didn’t the Allies bomb the death camps or at least the railway lines leading to Auschwitz?” According to classified papers released in 1978, American and British governments knew what was happening to the Jews in Europe and ignored the pleas of rabbis and others to destroy […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/winston-churchill-father-of-the-anglosphere?f=must_reads
In many conservative circles, particularly in the United States, Winston Churchill is beyond criticism. Mention his errors – the Gallipoli debacle, the return to gold at the pre-1914 rate, the contracting out of domestic policy to the Left after 1940, the second premiership – and you provoke a Bateman cartoon scene.
Fair enough. Winnie got the big calls right. His popularity on the other side of the Atlantic is appropriate, for he is perhaps the supreme Anglosphere politician – apostle, champion, exemplar and historian of English-speaking unity.
What makes the Anglosphere special? I’m taken with Mark Steyn’s observation that the list of countries on the right side in both the world wars and the cold war is short, but it contains the main English-speaking democracies. What made them all pile in? Was it linguistic solidarity, anidentification with kith-and-kin? Yes, partly. But that’s not all it was. Those mighty struggles were not simply ethnic conflicts, bloodier versions of the Hutu-Tutsi wars. The Anglosphere peoples believed, because their institutions had taught them to believe, that individual liberty, limited government and the rule of law were worth preserving – with force of arms if necessary.
Churchill played a brave role in all three great twentieth century conflicts, fighting in the first, leading the democracies to victory in the second and defining the third. The transition from victorious leader to Cold Warrior can be traced to one speech, delivered on 5 March 1946 at Fulton, Missouri. That speech, the subject of a newly published book by Philip White, is remembered for this sentence:
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.
White conjures atmosphere beautifully. Here is a detailed account of the place where the speech was given, and the timbre of the times. The USSR, so recently an ally, had occupied the countries for which Britain had gone to war in the first place, and any hope that the United Nations would be a guarantor of a peaceful post-fascist world had been dashed.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/only-if-the-wind-is-blowing I’ll bet you didn’t know that June 15th is Global Wind Day. Wind is part of the Earth’s atmosphere and, depending on whether it is blowing gently or strongly, there isn’t a darn thing anyone can do about it. Except for measuring its velocity and direction, wind like clouds remains largely a mystery to […]
The Washington Times http://www.danielpipes.org/11436/syria-intervention As the Syrian government makes increasingly desperate and vicious efforts to keep power, pleas for military intervention, more or less on the Libyan model, have become more insistent. This course is morally attractive, to be sure. But should Western states follow this counsel? I believe not. Those calls to action fall […]
A BDS Call for Disarmament in the Middle East
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/06/13/a-bds-call-for-disarmament-in-the-middle-east/print/
Editor’s note: The article below is written by Dr. Richard Cravatts, the author of Genocidal Liberalism: The University’s Jihad Against Israel & Jews, a book published by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. To order a copy, click here.
The eleventh-hour June 5th vote by Arizona State University’s student government to divest holdings in targeted companies that supply military equipment to Israel is part of a troubling trend that exposes dangerous radicalism on campuses by BDS proponents, disguised as an effort to achieve social justice for the Palestinians. In May, for instance, the student government at University of Massachusetts, Boston voted on a similar resolution to demand “that the UMass Foundation, Inc. divest its funds from Boeing Company and other entities that perpetuate and profit from war crimes and/or human rights violations,” those illegal acts, naturally, being perpetrated by Israel.
In November of 2011, the New York University chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, in the same ideological vein, submitted an “Open Letter to TIAA-CREF CEO and President Roger W. Ferguson from NYU Faculty and Staff,” signed by over 70 members of the NYU community, which had as its purpose “to pressure TIAA-CREF into divesting its holdings in 5 key companies which profit from the illegal Israeli occupation and oppression of the Palestinians.” The effort signaled a shift in the tactics of the BDS movement away from simply boycotting academics, theatre groups, or humus, and instead attempting to strip Israel of its ability to defend itself, militarily, from those foes who are clearly more concerned with the extirpation of the Jewish state than they are with Palestinian human rights and nationhood.
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/06/13/christiane-amanpour%e2%80%99s-lovefest-with-castro%e2%80%99s-daughter/print/ Given the media’s neurotic hyper-sensitivity to the most microscopic hint of white on black racism here’s a question: When would a black human rights activist who was jailed and tortured by a lily-white regime for the crime of quoting Martin Luther King be totally ignored by this same media while he testified to a […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/06/13/the-obama-administration%e2%80%99s-genocide-denial/print/
Suppose that there was a country where Muslims were being massacred every month and mosques and imams were being targeted and destroyed. Could anyone imagine the Obama Administration choosing to remain silent in the face of such atrocities?
A mob attack on Muslims in Burma immediately resulted in a condemnation from the State Department and a call for its government to make more concessions to Muslims. But a car bombing and shooting attack on two churches in Nigeria have not been similarly commented on by the State Department, sending the message that Muslim life is precious, but Christian life is cheap. The Muslim dead of Burma are sacred, but the Christian dead of Nigeria are only more dead infidels.
Boko Haram, the Islamic terrorist organization responsible for both attacks, has yet to be declared a terrorist organization by the State Department, despite having carried out religiously motivated bombings and shootings that have killed over a thousand people in the last few years alone. These numbers begin to approach the level of murders carried out by the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Botching Fast and Furious
http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/302642
Texas senator John Cornyn recently joined the growing number of Republicans who’ve called on Attorney General Eric Holder to resign. And a week from today, the House Oversight Committee will convene to consider pursuing a contempt-of-Congress citation against Holder. If the committee decides to proceed, the entire House will vote on the matter.
Holder has no intention of resigning, especially on the say-so of Republicans — but the attorney general has much to answer for, and Republicans should continue to make the case that he is wholly inadequate to his position and operating in bad faith.
Holder oversaw the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives during a time in which it ran Operation Fast and Furious — a program in which ATF agents deliberately allowed drug cartels to traffic more than 1,000 guns into Mexico and made no attempt to track the weapons as they changed hands. Two of the guns were found at the scene of a Border Patrol agent’s murder. Many more have turned up at other crime scenes, and as even Holder has admitted, the fallout from Fast and Furious will continue for “years to come.” Documents that were obtained by the Oversight Committee via leaks — in particular, wiretap applications — suggest that several high-ranking officials within the Justice Department knew that guns were being allowed to “walk.”
The Justice Department has conceded that Fast and Furious was a terrible idea and vowed to prevent its reoccurrence, but beyond that, Holder has spent more than a year refusing to come clean about the operation. In February of 2011, his department outrageously denied that gunwalking had even occurred, a statement it waited until December to retract. When the Oversight Committee requested various documents throughout 2011, Holder often waited months to provide them. Just last week, in congressional testimony, Holder asserted that the words “Fast and Furious,” found in a wiretap application along with references to gunwalking, do not refer to Fast and Furious.
Meet the Radical DOJ Lawyer Suing Florida to Keep Foreigners on Voter Rolls http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2012/06/12/meet-the-radical-doj-lawyer-keeping-foreigners-on-florida-voter-rolls/?print=1 The DOJ filed a complaint against Florida today to stop Florida from removing ineligible non-citizens from the voter rolls. (Yesterday DOJ, disgracing long-established tradition, leaked this impending news to a sycophantic blogger.) Florida has already discovered noncitizens who voted illegally in […]
