MICHEL GURFINKIEL: SUPPORT ISRAEL UNCONDITIONALLY

Support Israel “unconditionally” [Google translation] By Michel Gurfinkiel

http://www.dreuz.info/2011/11/soutenir-% C2% AB-unconditionally-% C2% BB-israel /

Most Jews in France unconditionally support Israel. It is a fact. It is also a kind of ontological necessity, which can neither be surprised nor indignant. For three reasons.

First, the particular historical experience of this community. French Jews today are, for half of them survivors of the Holocaust, or direct descendants, one or two generations of survivors. And the other half of the Jews expelled from Islamic countries, or, upon a generation or two again, their direct descendants.

The two tragedies, it should be emphasized, are interrelated. The Holocaust, where it took place, struck indiscriminately Ashkenazim and Sephardim. Ideologies which it has fed, or who made it possible, directly influenced or reactivated ones in the East led to ethnic cleansing or community. In both cases, the Jews were crushed as Jews. In both cases, they were betrayed: by governments in which they had placed their faith and trust in the companies they thought they were full members.

How, then, French Jews would they not attached to the world’s only Jewish state, founded and inhabited by other Holocaust survivors and others expelled from the country of Islam?

ANDREW McCARTHY: ROMNEY’S IRAN GAFFE

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/283999 Ahmadinejad is not a law-enforcement problem. For a guy who generally seems solid on national security, Mitt Romney flashed some disturbing weakness at last night’s foreign-policy debate among the Republican presidential hopefuls. When it comes to Iran, the most immediate threat to the United States and its interests, the Romney strategy is — wait for […]

ROMNEY VS. GINGRICH ON JIHAD AND SHARIA: ANDREW BOSTOM

http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2011/11/23/romney-versus-gingrich-on-jihad-and-sharia-a-yawning-if-unappreciated-gap/ Romney Versus Gingrich on Jihad and Sharia: A Yawning, if Unappreciated Gap Early and volatile, the Republican Presidential nomination race—at least for now—appears to be settling into a contest between consistent frontrunner Mitt Romney, and the latest surging, “non-Romney alternative”, former House Speaker, Newt Gingrich. Unfortunately the CNN/Heritage Foundation/American Enterprise televised debate [1] of […]

DAVID P. GOLDMAN: THE UNITED NATIONS….THE DEVIL’S JURY

http://www.hudson-ny.org/2607/united-nations-devil-jury In Stephen Vincent Benét’s story “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” Satan called a jury of the damned composed of turncoats, traitors, and Blackbeard the Pirate, “with the stench of hell still upon them.” At the United Nations Human Rights Council, accusations against the Dutch political leader Geert Wilders will be heard by Chinese and […]

YISRAEL MEDAD: SHAMEFUL IN MANCHESTER

http://www.thejc.com/blogs/advis3r/shameful-in-manchester-0
There are more Jews living in Judea and Samaria than in the whole of the British Isles and yet the “Guardians” of British Jewry do not consider that a representative of the Jews of Judea and Samaria has any right to be heard at their big tent fest in Manchester next week. Maybe I should not be surprised since the good people of Manchester tried to hound out Efrat’s Chief Rabbi Rabbi Shlomo Riskin Shlita when he tried to speak there a few years back.
Yisrael Medad has written the following blog [http://myrightword.blogspot.com/2011/11/wineman-not-wise-man.html] which I reproduce with his written approval.
If you do not know, my presence at the Manchester Big Tent is prohibited as a speaker/presenter. The flap has flopped and I am out. There will be many people there as presenters, workshop facilitators, panelists and greeters.
I was personally “disinvited” although I am not sure that I ever was officially invited. I think my name was proposed at the organizing meeting last Thursday for I was told that opposition was strongly expressed by Board of Deputies head, Vivian Wineman, in that the feeling shared around the table, it would seem, was that I had insulted the gentlemen and ladies thereof.
Wineman, however, is truly the odd Jew in this situation.

DANIEL GREENFIELD: THE FUTURE OF EGYPT

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ In the wake of the latest instability everyone has an opinion on the future of Egypt. But the future of Egypt is the past, not the distant past of its pre-Arab culture, but a repetition of the last century. In a region that has never escaped from the past, history is not a road, […]

: LIESL SCHILLINGER: A REVIEW OF “HEDY’S FOLLY” BY RICHARD RHODES…THE REMARKABLE BIOGRAPHY OF HEDY LAMARR

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/11/20/hedy-lamarr-biography-hedy-s-folly-by-richard-rhodes-review.html
How the world’s most beautiful woman helped invent GPS, Wi-Fi, and a homing torpedo.

Actresses often long to turn director, but how many of them yearn to turn inventor? Given the success that the screen siren Hedy Lamarr achieved in that realm—revealed in Richard Rhodes’s fascinating biography, Hedy’s Folly—it’s a pity more of them don’t consider it.

In 1940, while acting alongside Jimmy Stewart and Judy Garland in the MGM musical Ziegfeld Girl, the 26-year-old Lamarr spent her free time devising a radio-controlled submarine missile-guidance system to help the U.S. Navy in World War II. What moved her to do this? “She didn’t drink and she didn’t like to party, so she took up inventing,” Rhodes explains. Of course, there was more to it than that. The torpedo was not the starlet’s only invention: she also came up with an antiaircraft shell with a proximity fuse, and a fizzing cube that could turn a plain glass of water into soda.

How did a woman who couldn’t spell (by some accounts) make such signif-icant contributions to science? Born Hedwig Kiesler into a refined Viennese Jewish family in 1914, she dropped out of high school to act on stage and screen. In 1931, when she was 16, the director Max Reinhardt cast her in the play The Weaker Sex and called her “the most beautiful woman in the world”—an epithet that stuck. Two years later, she attained notoriety for her memorable (if fleeting) nude scenes in a Czech art film called Ecstasy. The film horrified her parents but thrilled munitions mogul Fritz Mandl.

THE AMERICAN HOLIDAY OF THANKSGIVING AND THE BIBLICAL FESTIVAL OF SUKKOT….HAPPY HOLIDAY TO ALL FROM RSK

THE AMERICAN HOLIDAY OF THANKSGIVING certainly has its roots in the Jewish tradition of giving thanks to God, and many historians believe that the early “Pilgrims” (members of a larger “Puritan” group) derived the idea directly from the Biblical festival of Sukkot (i.e., “Tabernacles”). According to scholars, before coming to the New World, the Pilgrims lived for a decade among the Sephardic Jews in Holland, since Holland was considered a safe haven from religious persecution at the time. Since the Pilgrims were devout Calvinists and Puritans, their religious idealism led them to regard themselves as “New Israel,” and it is likely that they learned that Sukkot commemorated Israel’s deliverance from their religious persecution in ancient Egypt at that time. [This connection with being the “New Israel” explains the popular biblical names of the Pilgrims/Puritans such as Abigail, Ebenezer, Ezekiel, Ezra, Miriam, etc.]

After they emigrated to the “Promised Land” of America, it is not surprising that the pilgrims may have chosen the festival of Sukkot as the paradigm for their own celebration. The highly religious pilgrims regarded their perilous journey to the new world as a form of “Exodus” and therefore sought the appropriate Biblical holiday to commemorate their safe arrival in a land full of new promise…

After their lengthy pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the ancient Israelites lived for a week in temporary huts while giving thanks for a plentiful harvest. Likewise, during their first winter in Massachusetts, the pilgrims dwelled in makeshift huts, wigwams that the Wampanoag Indians helped them build.

While Sukkot remains a seven-day observance, the first Thanksgiving celebration continued for three days, a time frame more similar to the Jewish harvest festival than today’s Thanksgiving dinner, which often begins in late afternoon and ends several hours later. However, with its pumpkin pies and cranberry garlands, Thanksgiving mirrors many of Sukkot’s customs and culinary themes.

Here’s a slideshow that addresses the relationship between Sukkot and Thanksgiving.

HERBERT LONDON: THE END OF THE EUROPEAN UNION?

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.10889,css.print/pub_detail.asp At a 1999 conference sponsored by the Hudson Institute at Weston Park in England, Lady Margaret Thatcher was asked her opinion of the European Union. She replied, “it begins with false assumptions and will die of illusions.” Lady Thatcher as one of the advocates of Euro skepticism, hit the nail on the proverbial head. […]

HUMBERTO FONTOVA: DID CASTRO GET KENNEDY?

Did Castro Get Kennedy? Posted By Humberto Fontova

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/11/23/did-castro-get-kennedy/

“Of all the people I interviewed in New Orleans regarding the Kennedy assassination, Carlos Bringuier was the one I trusted most. I could see in his eyes he was always telling me the complete truth.” (Oriana Fallaci, L, Europeo, 1969.)

“That weasel walked into my store and started looking around,” recalls Carlos Bringuier about the afternoon of August 5, 1963. “But I could sense he wasn’t a shopper. Sure enough, after a few minutes of browsing he came up and extended his hand. “Good afternoon,” he said. “I’m Lee Harvey Oswald.”

In 1963 the CIA regarded the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE) “the most militant and deeply motivated of all the Cuban exile organizations seeking to oust Castro.” Carlos Bringuier was their representative in New Orleans. It was DRE agents who infiltrated Cuba and brought out the first reports of Soviet missile installations–to the scoffs of everyone from Camelot’s CIA to the State Department’s wizards, to the White House’s Best and Brightest. It took two months for anyone to finally take them seriously. A U-2 flight then confirmed every last detail of what the DRE boys had been risking their lives for months to report.