http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203513604577140671297550142.html?KEYWORDS=WILLIAM+SHAWCROSS Legal proceedings against violent extremists are a crucial defense of our civilization, writes William Shawcross, whose father was a prosecutor at Nuremberg. Expect to hear a lot about Nuremberg in the months ahead. The war-crimes trials of leading Nazis, begun in that German city in 1945, will form an important subtext as we approach […]
http://www.meforum.org/3134/turkey-economic-miracle UPDATE
Among all the dumb things said about the so-called Arab Spring last year, perhaps the dumbest was the idea that the new democracies of the Arab world might follow the Turkish model.
In fact, if you had invested in the Turkish model (that is, in the Turkish stock market) at the outbreak of the Arab revolts, you would have lost about half your money. If you leave your money in Turkey, you probably will lose the rest of it. Turkey is not a model. It is a bubble, and it is bursting, starting with the stock market and national currency.
Full disclosure: I shorted the Turkish market after I published my obituary for the country’s economic boom (see “Instant Obsolescence of the Turkish model”, Asia Times Online, August
10, 2011). And I was denounced as a Zionist plotter in the Turkish media. As a matter of record, I wish to state that I am shorting Turkey not for any political motivation, but only because the Turkish government’s economic policy is a clown show. I make a point, however, of contributing some of the profits to Zionist causes.
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/09/obama-terrorism-advisors-book-confuses-distorts/ Reading CDR Youssef Aboul-Enein’s book, Militant Islamist Ideology: Understanding the Global Threat, published by the Naval Institute Press (2010), one can see why U.S. leadership is far from “understanding the global threat”; why the Obama administration is supportive of the Muslim Brotherhood; and why so many U.S. politicians rose up in condemnation when one obscure pastor threatened […]
All-American Failure Posted By Daniel Greenfield
URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/09/all-american-failure/
As the eighth and final episode of “All-American Muslim” airs and the series wraps up, it does so as a failure. Last week’s 9/11 episode once again failed to appear on the Cable 100 rankings. Viewers were willing to tune in an hour earlier to TLC’s “Hoarding: Buried Alive,” but they changed the channel to anything and everything when it was time for “All-American Muslim.”
What were viewers willing to endure rather than experience the Shiite version of the Jersey Shore? They tuned in to National Geographic’s “Alaska State Troopers,” Tru TV’s “Lizard Lick Towing” and Animal Planet’s “Finding Bigfoot,” but you couldn’t get them to watch “All-American Muslim.” Which just goes to show that we’re a nation of Islamophobes. Or that even people with bad taste in television have standards.
The dirty little liberal secret is that progressives don’t watch “All-American Muslim” either. The show only exists as an Islamophobia talking point. Every time an advertiser drops it in favor of “Finding Bigfoot,” the progressives crow that once again they have proven that we are a nation that hates Muslims and loves Bigfoot.
URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/09/how-the-u-s-%e2%80%9cbullied%e2%80%9d-poor-little-castro/
January 7, 1959 marked a milestone in U.S. diplomatic history. Never before had the State Department extended diplomatic recognition to a Latin American government as quickly as it bestowed it on Fidel Castro’s that day.
At the time, Castro himself had yet to enter Havana.
Nothing so frantically fast had been bestowed upon “U.S.-backed” Fulgencio Batista (obligatory prefix, used in every MSM and “scholarly” mention of him) seven years earlier. Batista had in fact been punished by a U.S. arms embargo and heavy diplomatic pressure to resign for a year. Batista was subsequently denied exile in the U.S. and not even allowed to set foot in the country that “backed” him.
On a visit to Cuba in 2001 for a “scholarly summit” with Fidel and Raul Castro, Robert Reynolds — who served as the CIA’s Caribbean desk’s specialist on the Cuban revolution in 1960 — clarified the U.S. diplomatic stance of the time: “Me and my staff were all Fidelistas,” he boasted to his beaming hosts.
Reynolds’ colleague Robert Weicha, who served as CIA chief in Santiago, Cuba, in the late 1950s, concurred: Everyone in the CIA and everyone at State were pro-Castro, except ambassador Earl T. Smith.
In the fall of ’57, Weicha and U.S. Consul Park Wollam smuggled into Cuba the state-of-the-art transmitters that became Castro and Che’s Radio Rebelde. From these mics, the Castroites broadcast their “guerrilla victories” island-wide, along with their plans to uplift Cuba into a Caribbean Shangri-La inspired by the principles of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Jefferson and St Francis of Assisi. These proclamations were then reaching most of the English-speaking world through the good work of the New York Times and CBS (Herbert Matthews and Don Hewitt, respectively).
“War against the United States is my true destiny!” Fidel Castro had confided in a letter to a friend in June 1958. “When this war’s over I’ll start that much bigger war.” Alas, this message was not broadcast over the U.S.-issue “Radio Rebelde,” and apparently slipped past our crackerjack CIA.
Within days of recognizing Castro’s regime, the U.S. State Department sacked its Republican ambassador to Cuba, Earl.T. Smith– that insufferable pest mentioned by Weicha. Smith’s unforgivable gaffe was repeatedly warning that supporting the Castro rebels (as we’ve seen, both morally and materially) while pulling the rug out from under Batista was not the shrewdest method of advancing U.S. interests, to say nothing of the interests of the Cuban people.
Months earlier, an alarmed Smith contacted Jim Noel, CIA station chief in Havana, with reports from his Cuban contacts about communist string-pullers existing within Castro’s movement, and about Che Guevara’s well-known communist ties and sympathies. (When arrested in Mexico City in 1956, Guevara was carrying in his pocket the business card of the local KGB agent, who also served as Raul Castro’s KGB handler since 1953.) But Noel could hardly mask his annoyance at the naysaying Republican alarmist:
“Don’t worry, Ambassador,” snapped the typically liberal CIA officer. “We’ve infiltrated Castro’s group in the Sierra. The Castros and Che Guevara have no affiliations with any Communists whatsoever.”
Smith’s replacement — Phil Bonsal, a liberal career diplomat — fully backed and quickly adopted the official “carrot and even bigger carrot” policy towards Castro. The policy soon showered the new Cuban regime with $200 million in subsidies from U.S. taxpayers.
Castro was quick to respond:
“The U.S. is a vulture preying on humanity!” he raved just a week after Smith’s sacking. “Let the Marines invade! Then we’ll pile up 200,000 dead gringos!”
As mentioned, the only “U.S. invasion” then envisaged was one of smiling, groveling Yankee diplomats and Yankee taxpayer subsidies.
Alert Cubans started plotting against Castro almost from day one, but — alert to who helped him into power — they kept well clear of U.S. officials, turning instead to Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic for some logistical assistance. Nonetheless, in August 1959, Phil Bonsal got wind of this plot and promptly alerted Castro to a conspiracy against his regime manned solely by Cubans. Thanks in part to Bonsal’s solicitude for the regime insulting his nation as “a vulture preying on humanity” and poised to steal $2 billion from U.S. stockholders, the anti-Castro plot was foiled.
http://www.haaretz.com/culture/israeli-bars-get-smart-as-academia-finds-an-unlikely-late-night-home-1.404331?localLinksEnabled=false
Israeli bars get smart as academia finds an unlikely late-night homeA new trend is marrying lectures on anything from quantum physics, linguistics, and high tech with the big city’s rowdy nightlife. By Neta Halperin
On the face of it, there doesn’t seem to be much a connection between a sleazy, smoky bar and a stuffy lecture on quantum physics or dark matter. But, at least in Tel Aviv, these two strange worlds are coming together.
The result: Some of the big city’s best bars are hosting lectures led by those considered as these establishments’ outsiders, drawn out of the labs and research institutes into nightlife stardom.
Even the organizers are taken aback every time by the popularity of these classes, and with the rate the phenomenon has been growing, those who don’t seek an education on their night on the town will be soon considered a dying breed.
These events initiated by Weizmann Institute of Science lecturers, who were looking for ways to broaden their student base.
“We saw that the institute was teeming with listeners coming in to hear lectures, Weizmann Institute spokesman Yivsam Azgad told Haaretz, adding that those lectures “usually preached to the choir.”
http://www.aijac.org.au/AUSTRALIA/ISRAEL &JEWISH AFFAIRS COUNCIL
Israel – a leader in disaster planning
Israel has assumed the unwanted role as a world leader in developing medical technology and planning to prepare for disasters, and its innovations are being studied and disseminated to other countries to save lives.
In one example, American politician Gabrielle Gffords was shot in the head and almost killed a year ago, but an Israeli-made bandage is credited with stopping her bleeding. Today she is alive and on the road to recovery.
Dr. John Cohn, a Professor of medicine and assistant professor of pediatrics at Thomas Jefferson University, recently wrote about his visit to Israeli medical centres to learn about their medical disaster management plans on a program now in its eighth year run by the Disaster Management Division of Israel’s Ministry of Health.
In his article “In the Field With Israelis Prepping for Disaster” (November, 30), Dr. Cohn highlighted some of Israel’s leading innovations in disaster management, and the dramatic extent to which Israeli medicine has had to prepare for some anticipated military worst case scenarios in the near future. The article is also notable for pointing out the realities of the Israeli medical system – where Jews and Arabs both are treated together and work together without fear of favour – effectively undermining the falsehood being spread about Israel as some sort of ‘Apartheid state’:
http://www.jidaily.com/ySdp5
The US Ambassador to Belgium, Howard Gutman, addressing a conference on antisemitism on November 30, controversially insisted that Muslim “hatred and indeed sometimes… violence directed at Jews generally [is] a result of the continuing tensions between Israel and the Palestinian territories” and should therefore not be seen as the same thing as “real” antisemitism. He went on to insist that a Mideast peace deal would see a “huge reduction of this form of labeled ‘antisemitism’.”
Aside from the immorality of, effectively, rationalising a form of racism as due to the alleged behaviour of its targets, Gutman’s comments were factually indefensible. There are clearly elements of strong, even eliminationist, antisemitism within the Muslim tradition predating Zionism by centuries.
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
The Western doctrine of non-violence depends on the willingness to compromise. To resolve any conflict by sitting down at a table, finding points of agreement and then working through the rest. The ruthless killing fields of the twentieth century have not shaken that eternal faith in a diplomatic solution, rather they have only strengthened it. But what happens when a compromise is genuinely impossible?
The commitment to non-violence depends on the assumption that while small numbers of fanatics might seek war, the vast majority of people do not. And even if they do want war, they want a humane war, not a genocidal war of extermination. Therefore even when such wars are fought, they do not reflect the will of the people, only that of a small group of fanatics.
Page One: Gray Lady Down, the Documentary Posted By Ed Driscoll
http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2012/01/06/page-one/
Over at the Libertas film blog, David Ross reviews the recent documentary Page One: Inside the New York Times, which is now available on DVD at Amazon, and in streaming format at both Amazon and Netflix. I haven’t watched the film yet though, for reasons that Ross explains in his bracing and lengthy (at least for a blog post) review. After taking a blowtorch to Thomas Friedman, Gail Collins, Alessandra Stanley, Michiko Kakutani, Paul Krugman, and other high priests of the very secular Times cult, Ross writes:
Whole books have been written about the Times‘ political biases (here), and the Times‘ own public editor has succinctly enough answered the question as to whether the Times is a liberal newspaper: “Of course it is” (here). In recent years, however, the Times’ biases have ever more blatantly trumped its journalistic ethics, a state of affairs unthinkable in the days of Abe Rosenthal.
“We don’t do hit jobs,” one editor assures a source while the cameras of Page One roll. “That’s not the business we’re in.” It is the business you’re in, at least these days. Exhibit A is the assassin’s bullet of a piece the Times published during the 2008 election in which it suggested, without anything you’d call evidence, that John McCain had been romantically involved with a lobbyist (here). The article is a slimy stew of anonymous rumor and innuendo. Even liberal stalwarts like The New Republic and The Washington Post derided its malice and irresponsibility. The article was all the more outrageous given the Times‘ refusal to investigate John Edwards’ very real affair at a time when he was a frontrunner for the Democratic VP slot. The female victim of the Times‘ smear filed a $27 million lawsuit, and the Times eventually issued a groveling apology (here). What was most remarkable about the article was that it appeared in the paper at all.
