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http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/ML22Dj01.html

Angels and inquisitors
A Point in Time by David Horowitz Reviewed by David Goldman

One popular comedian argues that it must be dreadful to spend eternity in heaven. No matter how wonderful it might be at first, eventually you’re bound to get used to it and end up bored to death. By the same reasoning, one would shrug off the torments of hell over time, and the experience would be the same as heaven. Truth told, Dante’s account of the saints contemplating the Godhead in the “Paradiso” section of Dante’s Divine Comedy always bored me, without having to wait for too much of eternity to tick by.

This paradox came to mind reading David Horowitz’s new book, A Point In Time. For a quarter of a century, Horowitz has told unpleasant truths about the political left where he spent the firsthalf of his career before turning conservative some 30 years ago. Horowitz surpasses himself in this new essay, though, by telling unpleasant truths about the human condition. What begins as a personal meditation on mortality on the model of Marcus Aurelius shifts into a rough-and-tumble confrontation with faith.

Horowitz has been wrestling with human adversaries all his life, and now, like Jacob, he has wrestled with angels. Jacob bested the divine being (Esau’s guardian angel, in rabbinic commentary) but got a dislocated hip for his trouble. Horowitz does not quite pin the matter down, but he does give Fyodor Dostoevsky’s guardian angel a black eye.

This undertaking took courage, for the Russian novelist’s “Grand Inquisitor” parable is a favorite of good people who agree with Horowitz on most of the practical issues. Dostoevsky’s discursion at the end of The Brothers Karamazov is everywhere cited as an exemplary defense of faith against materialism, by reduction ad absurdum. (I count more than 100 references over the years to this parable in articles published in the religious monthly First Things.) The Inquisitor famously denounces the returning Christ for refusing Satan’s dare to make bread from stones, admonishing him that the religion of bread – communism – will displace the religion of eternal life.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.1769/pub_detail.asp 1. VIDEO: Watch Gaza Terrorist React to Video of Her Failed Suicide Bombing Attempt to Kill Israelis 2. VIDEO: Christmas Lights – Amazing Grace 3. VIDEO: Franklin Graham: Islamists ‘Lining Up’ Against Israel – The Christians in the Middle East are afraid. 4. VIDEO: Irish ‘John Galt’ Blasts Politicians, Bureaucrats & Crony Capitalists At […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11085/pub_detail.asp

Iran’s mullahs have repeatedly indicated their willingness and ability to help restore order in Iraq, on the condition that the United States packs up and leaves the region. And now that US forces have left Iraq, the Islamic regime clearly is one of the strategic winners in this deadly game. The mullahs have also pledged on their Boy Scout’s honor, although they have never been Boy Scouts, their nuclear program is strictly for peaceful purposes. As a further gesture of goodwill, these self-appointed custodians of Allah’s Earth are volunteering to serve as unpaid policemen of the entire Persian Gulf region, protecting vital U.S. interests, just like the Shah did before them. Sounds like a great gift package from the kind-hearted do-gooders of Allah.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11087/pub_detail.asp

While the current administration has a stake in referring to the Muslim Brotherhood as “moderate” and largely secular, there is a reality very different from the view at Foggy Bottom.

The Brotherhood is a popular movement of Islam founded in 1928 by Hasan al Banna, the most prominent representative of what is sometimes referred to as Islamism. For al Banna whatever ails the Muslim world – the umma – can be addressed by the simple sentence, “Islam is the solution.” Religious law – shariah – is to be restored to its central place as an organizing principle for every sphere of life.

From the Brotherhood point of view, whatever ails the world can be traced to the West’s pernicious influence. It stole scientific secrets, deprived Muslims of their religious faith and converted them into docile subjects. While resentment is the main current of Islamism, it is curiously united with modern mass media to spread the faith. Similarly, while the West is deplored, the technical achievements of the West are often welcomed and even aspects of democracy – such as the civil code – which can be exploited to advance Islam is admired. The Brotherhood openly calls for free elections, but only as a way to legitimate its authority. This duality is what confuses the detractors of Islamism. Hoping for the best, some critics rely on the assertions of Western preference to conclude that the Muslim Brotherhood is secular or moderate.

Hillel’s Betrayal of Israel Posted By Daniel Greenfield URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/12/21/hillel%e2%80%99s-betrayal-of-israel/ The University of California, Berkeley is ground zero for the campus war against Israel. Students for Justice in Palestine emerged on the Berkeley campus and its annual Israel Apartheid Week is a festival of hate with chilling overtones. But it’s also a campus […]

Michelle Obama’s UnsavorySchool-Lunch Flop
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/286351/michelle-obama-s-unsavory-br-school-lunch-flop-michelle-malkin
The first lady’s initiative has been a disaster.
The road to gastric hell is paved with first lady Michelle Obama’s nanny-state intentions. Don’t take my word for it. Schoolkids in Los Angeles have blown the whistle on the East Wing chef-in-chief’s healthy-lunch diktats. Get your Pepto-Bismol ready. The taste of government waste is indigestion-inducing.
According to a weekend report by the Los Angeles Times, the city’s “trailblazing introduction of healthful school lunches has been a flop.” In response to the public hectoring and financial inducement of Mrs. Obama’s federally subsidized anti-obesity campaign, the district dropped chicken nuggets, corn dogs, and flavored milk from the menu for “beef jambalaya, vegetable curry, pad Thai, lentil and brown rice cutlets, and quinoa and black-eyed pea salads.”
Sounds delectable in theory. But in practice, the initiative has been what L.A. Unified’s food-services director Dennis Barrett plainly concludes is a “disaster.” While the Obama administration has showered the nation’s second-largest school district with nutrition awards, thousands of students voted with their upset tummies and abandoned the program. A forbidden-food black market — stoked not just by students, but also by teachers — is now thriving. Moreover, “principals report massive waste, with unopened milk cartons and uneaten entrees being thrown away.”
This despite a massive increase in spending on nutritional improvements — from $2 million to $20 million alone over the last five years on fresh produce.
This despite a nearly half-billion-dollar budget shortfall and 3,000 layoffs earlier this year.
Earlier this spring, L.A. school officials acknowledged that the sprawling district is left with a whopping 21,000 uneaten meals a day, in part because the federal school-lunch program “sometimes requires more food to be served than a child wants to eat.” The leftovers will now be donated to nonprofit agencies. But after the recipients hear about students’ reports of moldy noodles, undercooked meat, and hard rice, one wonders how much of the “free” food will go down the hatch — or down the drain. Ahhh, savor the flavor of one-size-fits-all mandates.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/286355
Gingrich and the CourtsTime to rein in the imperial judiciary.
In 2005, Congress barred our terrorist enemies from appealing their wartime detention to the civilian courts. The Detainee Treatment Act (DTA) was an eminently reasonable statute. The handling of captives in wartime had always been exclusively an executive-branch prerogative — war being a political and military exercise, not a litigation. The framers committed all aspects of warfare to the political branches, accountable to the people whose lives are at stake, not to the politically insulated judiciary.
Congress acted comfortably within its powers: The Constitution makes it master of the federal courts’ jurisdiction. Indeed, other than the Supreme Court, all federal courts are creatures of statute — the Constitution does not require their existence. Yet, in a nod to the ambiguities of terrorist warfare, in which jihadists do not operate openly as honorable soldiers, the DTA even provided a narrow avenue of judicial review. That made our enemies the first anti-American belligerents in history to be given systematic access to American people’s courts in wartime — something the World War II–era Congress would not have tolerated, and that the Supreme Court of that time actually warned against.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ The Light That Burns A candle is a brief flare of light. A wick dipped in oil burns and then goes out again. The light of Chanukah appears to follow the same narrative. Briefly there is light and warmth and then darkness again. 120 years after the Maccabees drove out the foreign invaders and […]

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=48229 Former President George W. Bush’s aide Michael Gerson posted a distressingly ignorant column on 12/13/11 which attacked both former speaker and Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, and my colleague Andrew C. McCarthy, for their sober, if frank conceptions of the Sharia. The counterfactual basis for Mr. Gerson’s diatribe is his own thoroughly deficient understanding […]

http://times247.com/ Obama slashes Guard: Spartan 300 to defend 2,000-mile border AP Tuesday, December 20, 2011 News Starting in January, the force of 1,200 National Guard troops at the border will be reduced to fewer than 300 at a cost of about $60 million, said Paul Stockton, assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense. Read more… Read […]