CHRISTIE’S WORDS ON ISRAEL ARE NICE…BUT WHAT OF HIS STRANGE RELATIONS WITH RADICAL MOSLEMS? FROM JAN. 2011

http://www.investigativeproject.org/2506/gov-christie-strange-relationship-with-radical

JAN.2011

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s nomination of Sohail Mohammed to be a state judge shows the governor’s tin ear for radical Islam. Not only did he appoint a longtime mouthpiece for radical Islamists to be a judge, but Christie has also turned a blind eye to the activities of one of Mohammed’s clients – radical imam Mohammed Qatanani, head of one of New Jersey’s largest mosques.

Qatanani has a history of Hamas support and was related by marriage to a leading Hamas operative in the West Bank. This fall, Qatanani will return to a New Jersey immigration court, where the Department of Homeland Security is fighting to have him deported. In his initial application for a green card filed in 1999, government lawyers say Qatanani failed to disclose a conviction in an Israeli military court for being a Hamas member and providing support to the terrorist group.

Oddly, Christie – a Republican who was then the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey – sided with Qatanani against DHS, allowing a top lieutenant, Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles McKenna, to testify as a character witness at Qatanani’s first immigration trial, and publicly embracing the imam at a Ramadan breakfast at his mosque. Christie later appointed McKenna as New Jersey’s head of homeland security..

THEY MYSTERY OF CHARLIE CHAPLIN’S ORIGINS CONTINUES

http://www.timesofisrael.com/charlie-chaplin-or-israel-thornstein-a-mystery-even-in-modern-times/

LONDON (AP) — They foiled plots and cracked Nazi codes, but Britain’s spies were unable to solve the mystery of Charlie Chaplin’s birth.Although the entertainer is celebrated as one of London’s most famous sons, newly declassified files reveal that Britain’s MI5 domestic intelligence service found no records to back up Chaplin’s claim that he was born in the city on April 16, 1889.

Uncertainty about Chaplin’s origins linger to this day — a mystery Chaplin himself may have helped to nurture.

The previously secret file, released Friday by Britain’s National Archives, shows that MI5 investigated the silent film star in the 1950s at the request of US authorities, who had long suspected him of communist sympathies. MI5 historian Christopher Andrew said the FBI’s red-hating chief, J. Edgar Hoover, privately denounced Chaplin as “one of Hollywood’s parlor Bolsheviks.”

To the spies’ surprise, there was no record of the performer’s birth.

MELANIE PHILLIPS: MIDDLE BRITAIN’S AMORAL DRIFT

http://melaniephillips.com/middle-britains-amoral-drift

An invitation to appear as a Question Time panellist always sees your columnist dusting off her tin helmet, not to say donning full body armour and making her last will and testament.

Its audiences have been known to be less than universally friendly, and never more so than when Israel crops up. Indeed, the words “baying” and “mob” come to mind.

My most recent appearance was three weeks ago in Plymouth. The audience was notably less aggressive than others I have encountered: more benign and “Middle Britain”-ish.

ABIGAIL ESMAN: WHERE IS CAIR? MUM ON SUICIDE BOMBER PLANNING ATTACK ON CAPITOL

Suicide Bomber Allegedly Planning To Attack US Capitol Arrested. (Where Is CAIR Now?)

A Moroccan man allegedly planning to detonate himself at the U.S. Capitol has had his plans foiled by the FBI.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/abigailesman/2012/02/17/suicide-bomber-allegedly-planning-to-attack-us-capitol-arrested-where-is-cair-now/

Arrested earlier today, the man was picked up after visiting a local mosque, heading towards the Capitol building. According to the Washington Post, the man, in his thirties, ” was carrying with him a vest that he believed was packed with explosives but that actually contained harmless material.” The arrest is the culmination of a lengthy investigation involving undercover FBI agents, and comes on the heels of the sentencing of the so-called “ underwear bomber,” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to life imprisonment earlier this week.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, which claims to be against Islamic terrorism but who maintains ties to terrorist organizations, and which protested loudly against the documentary “The Third Jihad,” which warns of the possibility of such attacks, has yet to make a statement on the arrest.

NEWS AND BUZZ AT 24/7

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EDITORIAL: Obama’s unilateral disarmament
Washington Times
02/17/2012 12:35 AM
President Obama is working to realize the leftist dream of unilateral nuclear disarmament. This will leave the United States pitifully weak and create conditions for catastrophic deterrence failure. Read more…

Read more at: http://times247.com/

ANDREW McCARTHY: FIRST AHMADI….THEN EVERYBODY ELSE ****

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/291404/first-ahmadi-then-everybody-else-andrew-c-mccarthy

Their crime? These Muslims have the temerity to suggest that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, an Indian who died in 1908, was the promised Mahdi — the redeemer of Islam — and not one of the false prophets about whom Mohammed had warned. They compound their offense with condemnations of violent jihad, maintaining that man’s inhumanity to man is ultimately conquered by love and kindness. So, of course, the Ahmadi Muslims have to die.

They are killed in Muslim Pakistan. They are killed in Muslim Bangladesh. They are killed in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Islamic country and, putatively, its most moderate. It was there, in a village in West Java last year, that hundreds of Muslims wielding machetes, sharpened sticks, and stones set upon on an Ahmadi home, brutally murdering three men and maiming several others. True to form, Islamic clerics raced to the fore to rationalize the savagery as being provoked by Ahmadi heresy. The ringleaders were sentenced to less than six months’ imprisonment, with the country’s minister of religious affairs callously explaining that religious freedom was certainly not freedom to “modify” Islamic beliefs — and equating Ahmadi preaching, which is banned, with flag-burning.

The barbaric treatment of religious minorities in Islamic countries, and its roots in Islamic law, is undeniable . . . unless we choose not to see it. So, true to form, we are choosing not to see it.

MARK STEYN: IT’S LIKE HANDING OUT CONDOMS ON THE TITANIC

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/291383/contraception-misdirection-mark-steyn
Contraception Misdirection
A universal birth-control mandate is a curious priority for a dying republic.

Have you seen the official White House version of what the New York Times headline writers call “A Responsible Budget”? My favorite bit is Chart 5-1 on page 58 of their 500-page appendix on “Analytical Perspectives.” This is entitled “Publicly Held Debt Under 2013 Budget Policy Projections.” It’s a straight lin e going straight up before disappearing off the top right-hand corner of the graph in the year 2084 and continuing northeast straight through your eye socket, out the back of your skull, and zooming up to rendezvous with Newt’s space colony on the moon circa 2100. Just to emphasize, this isn’t the doom-laden dystopian fancy of a right-wing apocalyptic loon like me; it’s the official Oval Office version of where America’s headed. In the New York Times–approved “responsible budget” there is no attempt even to pretend to bend the debt curve into something approaching reentry with reality.

DANIEL GREENFIELD: THE WEEKLY ROUNDUP

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

WASTED PRIMARIES

Ideally the primaries should have built momentum for the emergence of a winning candidate to represent the Republican Party, instead they have dampened enthusiasm and made everyone involved look worse for just being involved. The best hope for winning a national election is the hope that few non-Republicans were paying attention or will remember what went on.

Much of the blame goes to Romney and the Republican establishment which was determined to win at any cost and went negative hard and fast. The rest is history. Obama’s standing is improving and he’s tipped to win the election. The game will change once the primaries are over and the party has a nominee, but it’s clear that the acrimony and pettiness has alienated a lot of people.

Instead of competing on a vision for the country, the candidates, with media help, spent months hurling smears at each other. Among the candidates, Romney benefited the most from that type of campaign, but Obama is the one who really scores. The media successfully painted Republicans as being hateful and divisive and the material for that smear job came from within.

The Not-Romneyites are often criticized for focusing more on beating Romney than defeating Obama, and while that is occasionally true, it is truer to say that the establishment cares more about making sure that Romney is the nominee than about defeating Obama. For the Not-Romneyites it’s about principles, for the Romneyites it’s about power.

The Romney establishment has acted with the same elitist arrogance and insufferable disdain that has characterized the Obama Administration, dismissing popular dislike for their approach by pushing forward and waiting for the peasants to fall in line. But the peasants aren’t falling into line. Romney is still flailing. The entire election has been a survey of candidates that most voters prefer to Romney and the last few months have shown that they prefer just about anyone to him. That isn’t good news, but the establishment doesn’t care. And that’s scary. For people who claim to want to win the election, they aren’t taking the situation too seriously. If we do end up with a brokered convention, it will be their obtuse unwillingness to pay attention to their own electorate that will be the cause.

DR. MARTIN SHERMAN: FOREIGN POLICY LESSONS FOR REPUBLICANS….PART 2 ****

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=258202

Into the Fray: The GOP should focus on deterring – and if need be, deposing – dictators, rather than promoting democracy.
A period out of power has given conservatives and Republicans a golden opportunity to reassess their approach toward American foreign policy. Such periods in opposition are often fruitful for political parties, which can reformulate creative and winning ideas…. It is time to rethink the Republican Party’s foreign policy approach, keep that which was admirable about Bush, and reject that which was not.

– Prof. Colin Dueck “Regaining a Realistic Foreign Policy” – Policy Review, August 2010

The is the second of a two-part essay on foreign policy for the US Republican Party, assessing its rationale and implementation, and exploring paradigms for the future.

A brief reminder

Over the better part of the past decade the intellectual underpinning of Republican foreign policy was one of the most widely accepted tenets of international relations – the Democratic Peace Theorem (DPT) which holds that genuine democracies do go to war against each other.

THE STORY OF HADDASSAH ORGANIZATION…..100 YEARS OLD AND GOING STRONG….SEE NOTE PLEASE

http://www.jewishledger.com/2012/02/hadassah-at-100-one-womans-vision-realized/

THOSE AMAZING WOMEN WENT TO PALESTINE IN 1909 AND BUILT NURSING SCHOOLS AND HOSPITALS. AFTER ISRAEL’S LIBERATION IN 1948 THEIR WORK WAS INDISPENSABLE IN THE “INGATHERING”…THAT EPIC RESCUE OF JEWS WHO SURVIVED THE HOLOCAUST AND THE DISPERSION FROM ARAB LANDS….THEY PROVIDED COUNSELING, JOB TRAINING, HOMES, EDUCATION. WHAT A RECORD WHICH DWARFS THE WHINING OF THE NATIONAL ORGANIZATION OF WOMEN. TOO BAD THAT IN LATER YEARS THEY JOINED NOW IN LOBBYING FOR ABORTION RIGHTS AND SO MANY OTHER ISSUES…..BUT IN THE HISTORY OF ISRAEL THEY ARE WONDERFUL…..RSK

Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, was founded by Henrietta Szold on Feb. 24, 1912. Like others of her generation, Szold’s existence was shaped — and framed — by war. Born in 1860, she entered the world on the eve of the Civil War. Eighty-five years later, in February of 1945, in the waning days of World War II, she died.

In 1909, Szold and her mother took a trip to pre-state Israel. There they witnessed the starvation and disease that afflicted the people of the region. She returned to the U.S. and soon thereafter founded Hadassah, a volunteer women’s organization whose first mission was to send two nurses to Palestine to provide pasteurized milk to infants and new mothers, and to eradicate trachoma, an easily cured eye disease, that was robbing thousands of sight.
By 1918, Hadassah had sent an entire medical unit, composed of 45 doctors, nurses, dentists and sanitary workers, to bring American-style medical care to serve all, regardless of race, creed, or ethnicity.
By the mid-1930s, it had become clear that Jewish children needed to be saved from a Europe that was rapidly darkening. Joining with a German colleague, Szold helped organize the rescue of thousands of such children, bringing them to safety in Palestine.
Today at 100 years old, with 300,000 members, Hadassah is the largest Jewish organization in America, and one of the largest women’s volunteer organizations in the world. Since its inception, Hadassah has been taken advocacy positions on public health, support of Israel, stem cell research, and a vast array of social concerns.