Displaying posts published in

March 2015

BILL SIEGEL: TEN THOUGHTS ON NETANYAHU’S SPEECH

1. Imagine if valiant Czechoslovakian President Edvard Benes’ was able to directly warn Britain’s Parliament of Hitler before Neville Chamberlain made his foolhardy trade of the Sudetenland for the fantasy of Hitler’s peaceful intentions and promises. While some would have remained unable to see past their own blindness perhaps enough would have awakened to forcibly cut off the march of the twentieth century’s most evil regime.

2. Much is made of the nuclear deal’s supposedly agreed upon “sunset clause” that ultimately frees the Islamic Republic of Iran to run its nuclear program as it sees fit. Rumor has it that President Obama sought twenty years but the Iranians at least refused any period longer than ten. (Some rumors now suggest Iran has even rejected ten.) Unnoticed in all of this is the significance of ten years for an Islamic regime. Sharia requires that no treaty, or more appropriately truce (“Hudna”), be longer than ten years. Truces in Sharia are by definition temporary as the greater war that guides the expansion of Islam is perpetual. Mohammad, the model for all Muslims, entered into a ten year pact with Mecca which became the basis for this rule. While Obama fantasizes his deal will stop a war, Iran’s demand signals and reconfirms that for it this is a war which must continue following the end of the truce unless its enemy (us) surrenders and submits. While Obama tries to sell his deal as the best path to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, as Netanyahu stated, this deal, when coupled with the regime’s theology, would “all but guarantee” that it gets such weapons.

SYDNEY WILLIAMS: BENJAMIN NETANYAHU- THE SPEECH

Political speech is about leadership, which looks to the future. It is about conquering hearts and minds. Great political leaders must have the vision to look through the detritus of the present to a preferred path to the future. They must have the knowledge to inform, the eloquence to energize and the ability to persuade their audience. Such individuals and their speeches are rare. We think of Pericles’ Funeral Oration in 430BC and Washington’s Farewell Address in 1796, or Lincoln at Gettysburg in 1863 and the power of his Second Inaugural in 1865. We remember Churchill in June 1940, when England stood alone in the hours at a time Europe had gone dark. And we should also recall the less-well-known speech that same month when Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Zionist activist and soldier, spoke to an overflow crowd at New York’s Manhattan Center of the need to raise a Jewish army to combat the “giant rattlesnake” that was Nazism.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech may not have risen to those lofty levels, but it was a good one. Mr. Obama’s hissy-fit raised its notoriety. It was gracious, and powerful in the clarity of its admonitory message. He presented his vision in vivid and frightening detail, as he should. He began by thanking America for backing Israel, and especially America’s Presidents, “from Harry Truman to Barack Obama.” He thanked Congress for the “Iron Dome,” which protected millions of Israelis from thousands of Hamas rockets last summer.

DANIEL GREENFIELD: REFLECTIONS ON THE JEWISH HOLIDAY OF PURIM

Tonight begins the celebration of the Jewish holiday of Purim.

Like so many Jewish holidays, it is an inconvenient fit for liberal clergy and parishioners who insist that Jewish values consist of social justice.
There is no peace process conducted with Haman, the chief villain of the Purim story. No one tries to understand his point of view or figure out how much bowing he will accept in exchange for calling off the genocide.

Instead he and his fellow conspirators must die.

Purim is a reminder that real Jewish values are not a suicide pact or a soppy tale of moral ambiguity and bleeding heart empathy for genocidal monsters.

Jewish holidays mark historical events by testifying to a G-d of history who is less concerned with feelings and tolerance, than with justice and truth.

Mordechai, like most Jewish Biblical figures, makes for a terrible progressive role model. He doesn’t compromise. Even after Haman has passed his decree, he still won’t bow to him. He causes the crisis and resolves it by being uncompromising.

Hate Crimes: US Lynches the Facts by Douglas Murray

The police are now under serious pressure — as they were in the cases of Trayvon Martin and “Ferguson” — to attribute the crime to causes other than those they may actually think to be the case.

There are many difficulties with “hate crimes” legislation. But one of the worst is that it turns the law from being blind into being a tool that can be used not only to drive home a political vision, but one that can be used to ignore and even lobby to change facts.

While a lot of people seem not to want to recognize when Jews are killed as Jews, the truth is that a very great number of people appear to want Muslims or Blacks, when they are killed, to have been murdered because they were Muslims or Blacks.

This is the disturbing trend that seems to have fed into these moments of Presidential blindness.

Obama and the Koran — on The Glazov Gang

With Obama’s recent boycott of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the U.S. Congress, and with his continued weakness in the face of Iran’s pursuit of the nuclear bomb, combined with his perpetual refusal to acknowledge Islam’s role in ISIS’s barbaric terrorism, the troubling question of Obama’s loyalties to Islam remains on the surface, despite the mainstream media’s refusal to deal with it.

In response to these ongoing actions by the president that clearly enable the strength of Islamic jihadists, and that clearly hurt the interests of America and Israel, Frontpage is running The Glazov Gang’s feature interview with Nonie Darwish on Obama and the Koran, which unveils the curious relationship between the Radical-in-Chief and Islam’s “holy book.”

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/frontpagemag-com/obama-and-the-koran-on-the-glazov-gang-1/print/

What Are You Really Willing to Do to Stop Terrorists From Entering the U.S.? By Michael Cutler

The question that serves as the title of my commentary today is the question every American, irrespective of political affiliation, must ask their elected senators and congressional representatives.

For all too many of our leaders, while they claim that they would stop at nothing to protect America and Americans, the reality is far different. Despite their claims to the contrary, they will not do anything to truly secure our borders or instill real integrity to the immigration system or the process by which applications for visas or immigration benefits are adjudicated.

This is the dire reality our nation and our citizens face today.

My article today will provide crystal clear evidence that our immigration system has no integrity and that this lack of integrity threatens the survival of our nation and our citizens and that nothing being proposed under the aegis of Comprehensive Immigration Reform will address these deadly vulnerabilities.

The importance of the question about what would our leaders be willing to do to prevent the entry and embedding of terrorists and the issue of terrorism came into sharp focus during the stirring and powerful speech given by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on March 3, 2015 when he addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress to voice his extreme concerns about what the sponsorship of terrorism by Iran not only means for Israel but for the United States as well. Indeed, during his remarks the Prime Minister referred to the unsuccessful attempts, over three years ago, by Iranian-backed terrorists to bomb the Saudi Embassy in Washington, DC and kill the Saudi ambassador. The Israeli embassy in our Capitol was also a potential bombing target for those terrorists.

Dems Spin Furiously for Hillary By Matthew Vadum

Democrats are circling the wagons to shield their likely 2016 presidential nominee after it was revealed that Hillary Clinton transacted sensitive government business using her personal email during her time as America’s top diplomat.

The Benghazi bungler, the nation has learned, set up an email system worthy of a James Bond movie villain when she became U.S. secretary of state in 2009. Mrs. Clinton used private instead of government email and even established her own private email server that has been traced back to her Chappaqua, N.Y., home address.

“You do not need a law degree to have an understanding of how troubling this is. There are chain of custody issues, there are preservation of material and documents issues [and] there spoliation of evidence issues,” said Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), head of the Benghazi select committee. “One should also be concerned about the national security implications of former Secretary Clinton of using exclusively personal email accounts for the conducting of official U.S. foreign policy.”

GROUP-THINK IN HIGHER EDUCATION-GEORGE LEEF

George Mason University economics professor Daniel Klein has written about the phenomenon of groupthink in higher education. That is to say, the tendency for disciplines to get “captured” by a certain outlook and become hostile to scholars who are, as the Maoists would have said, “deviationists.” One of the fields where that has occurred is industrial relations (IR). In today’s Pope Center Clarion Call, Brooklyn College professor Mitchell Langbert discusses the way that discipline, once open to a wide array of perspectives, has over the decades turned into a one party state. The departments, journals, and scholarly societies are now only interested in people who favor unionism and government intervention.Those who argue that free markets would be better are persona non grata

The Audacity of Weakness : Victor Davis Hanson

Obama’s morally confused foreign policy is making the world more dangerous by the day. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to Congress on Tuesday to warn Americans of the anti-Western threats from theocratic — and likely to soon be nuclear — Iran. Netanyahu came to the U.S. to outline the Iranian plan to remake the Middle East with a new nuclear arsenal. His warning was delivered over the objections of the Obama administration, which wants to cut a deal with Iran that allows the theocracy to continue to enrich lots of uranium.
Netanyahu received a standing ovation for stating the obvious. Iran is currently the greatest global sponsor of terrorism. Tehran now has de facto control over four Middle East nations: Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. Iran has serially ignored all past U.S. deadlines to stop nuclear enrichment. It habitually misled U.N. inspectors. It threatens to spark a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. At one point the Iranian economy was sputtering due to Western sanctions. Hundreds of thousands of reformers hit the streets of Tehran in 2009 to protest what they believed to be the fraudulent results of a presidential election. The theocracy was worried that its nuclear plans would either cause economic collapse due to the sanctions or prompt some sort of Western military response. But all of that has changed due to the Obama administration’s zeal to conclude an agreement with Iran at any cost.

Petraeus Is Protected by a Politicized Justice Department : Andrew McCarthy….see note please

I am the very model of a modern Major-General, I’ve information vegetable, animal, and mineral, but this libidinous Surge, I just can’t fight the urge…..rsk
He committed several felony violations but is permitted to plead guilty only to a misdemeanor.
David Petraeus, the former top U.S. military commander and CIA director, is reportedly being permitted by the Obama Justice Department to plead guilty to a misdemeanor in order to end the criminal investigation into his mishandling of highly classified information. It is just another example of Obama’s hyper-politicized administration of justice: One set of rules for government insiders like Petraeus, another set for most Americans, and a third — law as a weapon — for use against Obama’s political detractors and scapegoats. General Petraeus committed several serious felony violations of federal law. And not in a one-off lapse of judgment; this was a series of offenses committed over an extended period of time.
Clearly, Petraeus believed he was a law unto himself. A notorious publicity seeker, he treated journals chronicling his highly classified activities as if they were his own property, to be maintained and exhibited as he saw fit — mainly, for use in burnishing his carefully cultivated image — rather than as federal law dictates. Even after he was caught, he continued to lie, obstruct justice, and put the government that had so elevated him to additional burdens to recover the records he was illegally hoarding. Had he not negotiated a plea, Petraeus should have been charged in a multi-count indictment. If he wanted to dispose of the case without a trial that would have further disgraced him, he should have been required to plead guilty to at least one felony count and to have admitted his lies to government officials — misrepresentations that, under the sentencing guidelines that apply to people who don’t get special treatment, instruct judges to impose a term of incarceration.