The Muslim Brothers Get Paid to Threaten America Posted By Bruce Thornton URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/02/16/the-muslim-brothers-get-paid-to-threaten-america/ Remember last year’s giddy bipartisan enthusiasm over the “Arab Spring”? President Obama claimed that Egyptians merely wanted “a government that is fair and just and responsive,” Senator John McCain asserted that Libyans were aiming for “lasting peace, dignity, and […]
http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/church-339789-one-catholic.html Announcing his support for Commissar Sebelius’ edicts on contraception, sterilization, and pharmacological abortion, that noted theologian the Most Reverend Al Sharpton explained: “If we are going to have a separation of church and state, we’re going to have a separation of church and state.” Thanks for clarifying that. The church model the young American […]
Palestinians and the Greatest Political Scam of Modern Times Posted By David Solway
URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/02/16/palestinians-and-the-greatest-political-scam-of-modern-times/
The usual understanding of Israel as an aggressive, colonial, apartheid state robbing the Palestinians of their heritage is quite possibly the greatest political scam of modern times. It is the outcome of a mixture of historical amnesia, ideological prejudice and reflex hostility, which serves to keep it mind-proof. This species of unreason explains why, in the interminable conflict raging in the Middle East, the Palestinians have been given a free pass.
It is why the press has bowdlerized the word “terrorist” and substituted inoffensive synonyms like “militant,” “activist” and “insurgent.” It is why any Israeli response to Gaza rocket fire is denounced as “collective punishment” and a violation of international norms by the United Nations, which has no problem turning a blind eye to the continuing barrage of rocket fire, kidnappings and attempted kidnappings, and ambushes emanating from the terrorist enclave.
This knee-jerk reaction to Israel is the reason Hezbollah was permitted to re-arm itself in violation of UN Resolution 1701. It accounts for the fact that Human Rights outfits and NGOs have been hijacked by the anti-Israeli crowd hiding behind their anesthetic titles. It is the reason that foreign nations funding left-wing, anti-Zionist groups that operate in Israel object to the passing of transparency legislation by the Knesset, though they themselves stringently monitor such interference in their own affairs. It accounts for the sanctimonious and hypocritical outcry against the Israeli security barrier as an apartheid wall, without evincing the slightest concern for the Jewish victims of Palestinian terror: 1,218 fatalities and 8,431 maimed between 2000-2007.
Such unfounded partiality explains why so dysfunctional a society as “Palestine” is the recipient of lavish American and European largesse, despite the hemorrhaging economies of most Western nations. It is the reason that the rejection by the 1974 Palestinian National Council of UN Resolution 242, which recognized Israeli sovereignty, is never mentioned. It throws light upon the general refusal to acknowledge that the casus belli in the region is not a wrangle over borders but the Palestinian rejection of both the concept and reality of a Jewish state, which is why the Haq al-Awda or “right of return” of millions of foreign-born, manufactured “refugees” has been a non-negotiable issue for the Palestinians, from Arafat to Abbas. In fact, in no other case on record has the United Nations recognized multi-generational descendants as authentic “refugees” entitled to repatriation.
Nor is the fact ever mentioned that the first Arab women to exercise the vote were those who live in Israel. It makes no difference to the soi-disant international community that an independent “Palestine” adjacent to Israel would be officially Judenrein, or Jew-free, which means it would not be a democratic state. It makes no difference that the Palestinian Arabs have failed or reneged in every area of their commitments to Israel and the “peace process,” from putting the lid on media incitement to debelling the terrorists in their ranks to reforming the school curriculum.
Further, the claim bruited by Arab propagandists of various stripes that the Palestinian refugees were driven out by Israeli forces during the War of Independence is more than likely only minimally valid. The brunt of the responsibility for the flight of Palestinian villagers and fellaheen must be borne almost exclusively by the Arabs. “Every year,” writes Sol Stern in A Century of Palestinian Rejectionism and Jew Hatred, “the legend grows about the historical crimes committed against the Palestinians in 1948.” This is the “nakba myth,” which “has become a lethal political cocktail.” But it is for the most part falsified history. Even Sir John Glubb of “Glubb Pasha” fame, the British general of the Arab Legion that conducted a campaign of “ethnic cleansing” against the newborn Jewish state, wrote in the London Daily Mail for August 12, 1948 that “The Arab civilians panicked and fled ignominiously. Villages were frequently abandoned before they were threatened by the progress of war.” Emile Ghoury, secretary of the Palestinian Arab Higher Committee, interviewed in the Beirut Telegraph for September 6, 1948, stressed that “these refugees [are] the direct consequence of the act of the Arab states in opposing partition and the Jewish state,” and the Jordanian daily Falastin in an article for February 19, 1949 blamed the “Arab states which had encouraged the Palestine Arabs to leave their homes.” These are only a brace among other such affidavits.
With all this information at our fingertips, readily accessible to anyone who cares to do a modicum of research, the question practically asks itself. Why is the international community so quick to accept Palestinian victimhood and to condemn Israel? The answer is self-evident. What the Palestinians have going for them is the latent—and more often manifest—hatred of Israel and the Zionist enterprise in much of the world, which is only the contemporary permutation of age-old antisemitism and which they can tap into and exploit to their own advantage. This is why the Palestinian narrative has “taken.” As Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick puts it, “Anti-Semitism is back in style. Its new justification is not race or religion. It is nationalism….And like its racist and religious predecessors, its aim is to deny the right of Jews to be free.”
U.S. derides Assad’s offer of new Syrian constitution
Syrian President Bashar Assad has or…
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Interior Department looks to swallow more land
McClatchy Newspapers
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
News
Seeking a budget of $11.5 billion, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has big plans. The department, which already controls 20 percent of the nation’s public lands, is proposing to use $212 million in public funds to buy land for more parks and wildlife refuges. Read more…
Read more at: http://times247.com/
Harvard Food Law Society to host raw milk debate
Jessica Claire Haney
02/16/2012 03:09 AM
Advocates of “Real Food” tout raw milk as a healing food and paint the government’s desire to tell you otherwise as part of an effort to cater to the milk lobby of big agriculture. Read more…
Read more at: http://times247.com/
http://news.investors.com/article/601291/201202151830/obama-wants-federal-workers-votes.htm?
Campaigning: The Obama budget is a miserably flawed document in so many ways. But it’s more than a mere toxic spending package. It’s also a political compact the president is hoping will generate support.Included in President Obama’s 2013 budget is a pay raise for federal workers. Yeah, it’s only a 0.5% increase. But the federal work force is not one that deserves a raise. It’s a work force that needs to be cut.
Government workers, we are told, are civil servants. But the nation’s roughly 2.1 million federal civilian workers live more like masters. Their average compensation is twice that of private sector workers (see chart), and in terms of only wages, federal employee pay is about 60% higher — $50,462 per year in private industry compared to $81,258 when working for Washington .
And what does the rest of the country get in return for the generous compensation enjoyed by federal workers?
Nothing, as far as we can tell. READ IT AT SITE
http://news.investors.com/article/601292/201202151830/obama-nuclear-warhead-cuts-are-irrational-.htm
National Security: The commander in chief who once pined for a world without nuclear weapons has decided a world without an American deterrent is a good start, seeking to cut the U.S. arsenal by 80%.
In a world where rogue states with unstable leadership are either in possession of or pursuing nuclear weapons, and with Russia rearming and China emerging as a world military and nuclear superpower, President Obama has ordered the Pentagon to consider cutting U.S. strategic nuclear forces to as few as 300 deployed warheads — below the number believed to be in China’s arsenal and far fewer than current Russian strategic weapon stocks.
This latest example of presidential naivete, which makes even Jimmy Carter look like a warmongering hawk, seems based not on geostrategic reality but rather on the wishful thinking that the threat posed is nuclear weapons, not the enemies that possess them. READ IT ALL AT THE SITE
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
The Obama Doctrine can be summed up as the assertion that for the United States to have influence and standing on the global stage, it must first abandon its interests and its allies.
The doctrine is rarely described as bluntly as that by its proponents who employ euphemisms like multilateral policies and honest broker to mean much the same thing, denouncing the previous administration and all the preceding administrations going back to old Tom Jefferson for alienating the world by pursuing American interests and cutting deals with non-progressive allies.
The easiest way to spot the problem with this approach is to try and distinguish it from the UN. That’s hard to do because except during the occasional pro-forma trade dispute there is no distinction. It’s the same policy of multilateral human rights interventions, global mediation and stability, and promoting the welfare of the angrier parts of the Third World. And if America’s agenda is identical to that of the United Nations, than for all intents and purposes there is no American foreign policy.
This leaves the United States as less than a nation, a version of the United Nations with its own military and a great deal of wealth. It has no interests except reaching out to befriend its enemies and it has no allies except those enemies willing to pretend to be its allies, at which point they will become enemies. But the United Nations was designed to be a forum in which nations pursue their own interests, it is not supposed to have interests or allies. The United States is a nation and it is meant to have both. If the United States cannot articulate interests apart from the UN agenda then it no longer functions as a nation on the world stage.
1. FOOD POLICE Reject Mom’s Homemade Lunch: State agent inspects sack lunches, forces preschoolers to purchase cafeteria food instead 2. OBAMA’S 2013 BUDGET: A Monument To Irresponsibility 3. VIDEO: Israeli Armor Saves American Lives – Defending American lives, redefining the future. 4. C-SPAN VIDEO: Senator Calls Out Obama Budget Director: ‘Will You Resign?’ Sessions To […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11437/pub_detail.asp
It was good news that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved the nation’s first nuclear power plants on February 9th, clearing the way for the construction of two reactors by Southern Company at its Plant Vogtle site near Atlanta, Georgia. The bad news is that these are the first new nuclear plants since 1978!
In a nation with a growing population and increasing need for electricity to power homes and businesses, it is nothing less than insane to not include nuclear energy in the mix of providers. Environmentalists immediately attacked the announcement using the usual scare campaigns.
Equally insane is the failure to provide the means to safely store the radioactive materials that result. Highly contested by environmentalists, the Nevada-based Yucca Mountain deep geological repository storage facility for spent reactor fuel was cancelled in 2009. Nevada’s Senator Harry Reid, Majority Leader in the Senate, played a major role in this disgraceful decision. The Obama administration terminated funding for the development of the site in 2011, leaving the nation with no long-term storage site.
http://www.stonegateinstitute.org/2851/freedom-of-expression-un-human-rights-council
The history of reporting by UN frameworks on human rights in Israel has been characterized by biased mandates, false and unverifiable allegations, double standards and hypocrisy.
Part 1: Overview and Background:
1) By any objective standard, Israeli democracy is as robust and pluralistic as any in the world. There are no restrictions on any form of protest or advocacy, including very fierce and unpopular criticism of the government and military. No other democracy can claim to have greater freedom of expression, despite more than six decades of war and terrorism; threats of annihilation; and in parallel, the challenges of developing a cohesive society based on numerous divergent communities scattered for generations as Diasporas, many of which do not have traditions of pluralism and democracy.
2) Like other Israelis, I am aware that we are not a perfect society. As in others nations, we have flaws, and it is our responsibility to correct them. But aggressive campaigns to greatly exaggerate these imperfections, as part of the ongoing effort to delegitimize Israel facilitated by the soft-power of groups not subject to any democratic accountability, should not be assisted by a United Nations framework focusing on freedom of expression and freedom.
3) Israel systematically protects the rights of its minority populations to freedom of expression and to protest. For example, each year, Israeli police forces and government institutions facilitate Gay Pride parades in Jerusalem Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Eilat; marches on Human Rights Day; protests by the Islamic movement; and to mark the murder of Yitzhak Rabin.
4) Mass demonstrations on socio-economic issues were held in Summer 2011, and attest to Israel’s dynamic civil society and a culture of advocacy and peaceable protest. Israeli police facilitated these activities, blocking off roads and granting permits. The government responded to protestors’ demands positively, in the form of a task force to address their claims.
