LESSONS THAT LAST A LIFETIME: FERNE HASSEN
Lessons That Last a Lifetime Posted By Ferne Hassan
URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/09/08/lessons-that-last-a-lifetime/
What do you say to a special friend who has to carry around a “security blanket” for just such times as happened this past Monday morning when, on her way to work at Ben Gurion University in Beersheva, the sirens went off and with no time to run for cover she did the next best thing – spread the blanket out on the ground and lied down on it.
I don’t know about you, but this scene jolted me and has been playing out in mind as I wonder – what next? One hundred missiles in less than a week have landed in southern Israel and, to add insult to injury, the story has been avoided by the mainstream press. This, on the heels of multi-staged attacks in Eilat last week that targeted a bus, civilians in cars and members of the IDF and left eight dead and more than 30 wounded.
And, Israel’s “peace partners” – those whom the world’s experts are encouraging Israel to sit down with and negotiate a peace agreement that will result in “two states for two people” living “side by side in peace” – where are they? Where are their statements of denunciation? Where are their apologies? For that matter where is the United Nations and/or The International Court of Justice?
The Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), which claimed responsibility for the Eilat attacks, is according to an IDF spokesperson, “an independent terrorist organization in Gaza that is supported, subsidized and trained by the Hamas terrorist organization.”
Hamas, which is recognized as a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union and recently reconciled with Fatah with the intention of forming a unity government, would then be part of that group that Israel would negotiate with. Are we sliding from the ridiculous to the sublime? And then there is Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas, the man we are told is a moderate. Here is what he has to say, “We will not ask Hamas to recognize Israel.”
So, do we proceed as if nothing has happened and accept the chanting from the world’s chorus that Israel “return to the negotiating table?” With whom will Israel be negotiating? Have you read the PLO Covenant? Let me share an article from the Covenant – one of thirty-three – which, despite protestations to the contrary, has never been changed.
Article #9: Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine and is therefore a strategy and not tactics. The Palestinian Arab people affirm its absolute resolution and abiding determination to pursue the armed struggle and to work for an armed popular revolution, to liberate its homeland…
Maps used in children’s textbooks, official documents, etc. show the boundaries of their homeland as all of Israel. Have you heard the chant – From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free? Hint: The river is the Jordan, the sea is the Mediterranean. Israel then is missing!
And, have you read the Hamas Charter? For starters the preamble includes, “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.” And, Articles 11 and 13 state, “The Islamic Resistance Movement [Hamas] believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgment Day…” “Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement…” “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.”
Where is the outrage from decent people? Is this how it happened before in history? Where people close their doors, try to close their minds, live within the confines of their world and hope that the madness doesn’t reach them. And, when that approach fails, well, as history has shown us, there’s always the road to acquiescence. We know where that road led the free world – into a hell that left millions killed, Europe overrun and the very foundation of civilization and sanity hanging on by threads.
Golda Meir, Israel’s fourth Prime Minister and its first and only female head of state, was born in Kiev and, in her autobiography My Life, she vividly recalled the memory of her father having had only a piece of wood to barricade his family and “protect” them against the pogrom inspired marauders. This left a deep impression on her and, regardless of how much easier life in Milwaukee was for her and her family, Golda knew her place was in the Land of Israel, then under mandatory control by the British. She was determined to do all she could to insure that Jews were able to reestablish their place in the land of their forbearers. Her hope was that a Jewish state would protect the Jews who, for many generations past, had been barely tolerated as “guests in other countries.”
Years ago at a CAMERA conference Prof. Alan Dershowitz spoke of the “Shah Shtil”/ “Don’t rock the boat” mentality of many Jews. He exhorted the audience to stand proud reminding them that “We Jews have given, more than we have taken!” He was speaking about the role of Jews in America but his words could easily be applied to Israel as well. Israel’s contributions in myriad fields are world renowned – agriculture, medicine, literature, music, humanitarian assistance – to name a few. So why do Jews in the diaspora and Israel forget this and allow the “red line” of acceptable behavior to constantly be moved? Why have Jews allowed themselves to fall prey to intimidation?
Possibly they aren’t on the same mailing lists I’m on and/or they are allowing their senses to be dulled, and are just “going along to get along.”
Those concerned with peace, beyond lip-service, would have somehow learned about the recent report from the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center that details how Palestinian children spent this summer, as summers past. Tens of thousands of young Palestinian children attended Hamas run “summer camps” where the lessons of martyrdom – like those in their school textbooks and the messages heard everywhere in their towns and on television – were reaffirmed. Likewise, the precepts of the PLO Covenant and the Hamas Charter were reiterated.
The camps, for all intents and purposes, are incubators for future generations of Jihadis. And so the question that begs to be asked is how can these children – heirs to any peace agreement that may be signed – who have been raised to hate and are dedicated to killing themselves and others, implement any peace agreement when they have been prepared for anything but peace.
Lest all the onus be placed at Hamas’ doorstep, a 2004 story posted by Emma Hurd of Sky News shows children who attended a training camp sanctioned by the Palestinian Authority and run by, none other, than the Popular Resistance Committees – the same group that orchestrated the Eilat attacks. If you look at the photo gallery you will see the faces of 10 year-old boys who, as 17 year olds today, could very well have been recruited by the PRC for these last attacks.
The words of the Irish statesman and political theorist, Edmund Burke, are as true today as when he wrote them in the 18th century, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.”
Many of those who perpetrated the recent attacks and who are issuing the orders for the barrage of missiles are “summer camp graduates.” The only way my girlfriend can get up off the road and put away her “security blanket” is if we have the facts in hand and are prepared to stand up and speak the truth. Her future, Israel’s future and ours depend on it.
Ferne Hassan is a New Jersey-based concerned citizen.
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The Democrats’ Voting Agenda Revealed
URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/09/08/the-democrats-voting-agenda-revealed/
Posted By Ben Shapiro
In the wake of America’s transfer of political power from the earners to the redistribution beneficiaries, many conservatives have wondered whether the power to vote should be connected with paying taxes, owning property, not being convicted criminals, or at the very least, not receiving benefits. Liberals, by contrast, have attempted to broaden the voting base, hoping that the more impoverished non-workers there are to vote for them, the more power they will gain.
In this week’s Rolling Stone, columnist Ari Berman attempts to paint this argument as a basic conflict between right and wrong. “Just as Dixiecrats once used poll taxes and literacy tests to bar black Southerners from voting,” Berman writes, “a new crop of GOP governors and state legislators has passed a series of seemingly disconnected measures that could prevent millions of students, minorities, immigrants, ex-convicts, and the elderly from casting ballots.”
What are those dastardly conservatives up to? Berman points out that five states – Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia – cut short their early voting periods. Horror of horrors! What’s the problem here? Presumably, Democrats load up in the early voting. But that hasn’t been true historically – according to Gallup, those 65+ are most likely to vote early, and Republicans are more likely than Democrats to vote early by a margin of 28 percent to 23 percent. Closing up the early voting doesn’t hurt Democrats – if anything, it hurts Republicans.
What other evil plans are Republicans cooking up? They want to bar ex-felons from the polls in Florida and Iowa, “disenfranchising thousands of previously eligible voters.” This is an odd criticism – who wants rapists and murderers voting, exactly? Actually, liberals do— so they can stack the rolls. Plus, if you need people to commit voter fraud, what better subsection to search than the ex-felons? The Miami Herald found that during the 2000 election, 452 votes were cast in Broward County by felons not allowed to vote; in 22 counties, 1,241 ballots were cast by felons who hadn’t received clemency, and 75% of those votes went Democrat.
Finally, says Berman, “six states controlled by Republican governors and legislators – Alabama, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin – will require voters to produce a government-issued ID before casting ballots.” Why is this a problem? If Berman’s statistics can be trusted, “More than 10 percent of US citizens lack such identification, and the numbers are even higher among constituencies that traditionally lean Democratic.” Why exactly would anyone of voting age lack a government ID? We’re all issued social security cards when we’re born. If we lose them, we can get them again. The real problem Democrats have here is that those least likely to have ID are illegal immigrants – and most of those illegal immigrants are only too happy to vote if paid for by Democratic operatives. That is just as true for various groups utilized by Democrats for multiple-voting schemes – if ID is not requested, one person could vote at many different voting places on behalf of people who don’t show up.
According to Berman, the sinister Koch brothers stand behind these nefarious schemes. That in and of itself is supposed to scare Americans into precipitous action. And Bill Clinton is out whining about it: “There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today.” Berman argues that voter fraud is not really a concern, because the Republicans “managed to seize control of the White House in 2000 despite having lost the popular vote,” although that was in full accordance with the Constitution of the United States. But leave it to the left to lump together legitimate election results with fraudulent ones.
In essence, the left likes voter fraud, and they have ever since JFK was elected by a bunch of dead folks from Chicago. They claim it’s not a significant problem – in the words of Steven Colbert, “Our democracy is under siege from an enemy so small it could be hiding anywhere” – but it absolutely is. According to John Fund, “In 2001, the voter rolls in many American cities included more names than the US Census listed as the total number of residents over age eighteen. CBS’ 60 Minutes created a stir in 1999 when it found people in California using mail-in forms to register fictitious people or actual pets and then obtaining absentee ballots in their names.” In Palm Beach County during the 2000 election, 60 people voted both in Florida and in New York.
The problem with voter fraud is that it is extraordinarily difficult to prove. How do you track down those who voted under false names? How do you determine that they didn’t do it accidentally? The only way to stop voter fraud is to stop it before it begins.
But liberals don’t want to do that. If they could have foreigners vote, they would – that would allow their agenda to pass. If, as President Obama said to President Calderon of Mexico, “we are not defined by our borders, but by our bonds,” why not open up the voting to everybody? After all, how we vote affects everyone else.
Conservatives, by contrast, believe in American exceptionalism, and believe that you should have bought into the compact that binds us together before you get a vote.
It’s a basic ideological difference. Whoever wins this battle will win the war when it comes to our elections.
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Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com
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