Displaying posts published in

May 2016

Time for a New Israeli Diplomatic Initiative How to address the international lynch mob. Caroline Glick

In a week or two, Israel will again be the focus of a well-dressed international lynch mob. According to news reports, US President Barack Obama intends to use the so-called Middle East Quartet, comprised of the US, the UN, Russia and the EU, as a tool to ratchet up Western condemnations of the Jewish state.

The report is expected to include even more expansive assaults on Israel for refusing to deny Jews our civil rights in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria.

It will likely ratchet up the false claims that have already been made to the effect that Jewish cities, towns, neighborhoods and homes beyond the 1949 armistice lines are illegal and a threat to world peace.

The Quartet statement will also brutalize Israel for lawfully destroying illegal construction projects undertaken by the EU in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. The EU engages in illegal building in order to subvert Israel’s rule of law and enfeeble the IDF.

Around the same time that Obama has scheduled his newest assault on Israel, France is expected to convene a so-called peace conference. The stated purpose of the conference is to restart the fraudulent peace process which the Palestinians killed nearly 16 years ago and have never agreed to resuscitate.

The novel aspect of the French conference, which neither Israeli nor Palestinian diplomats will attend, is that other than the misleading headlines referring to their powwow as a peace conference, the French are making no effort to hide that the sole purpose of their initiative is to condemn Israel.

The purpose of the conference is to provide diplomatic cover for the French government to recognize a state called Palestine. When then French foreign minister Laurent Fabius announced the conference in January, he said that whether or not the conference leads to peace, France will recognize “Palestine.” And just to be clear, the “Palestine” France intends to recognize will be located in land controlled by Israel and to which Israel has a valid claim of sovereignty.

In the face of the approaching international onslaught, thought leaders and politicians on the Left insist that Israel must act. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, they argue, must participate in the Paris conference, and he must announce an initiative now to vacate Judea and Samaria, or to stop allowing Jews to exercise their legal right to build homes in these areas and in Jerusalem.

Obama’s Master of Deceit on the Iran Nuke Deal From aspiring novelist to chief spinner of the president’s lies. Joseph Klein

Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes confirmed what FrontPage Magazine has been saying all along. President Obama and senior members of his administration sold his nuclear deal with Iran, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), with a pack of lies.

Rhodes was an aspiring fiction writer, who fulfilled his aspirations for make-believe as a senior member of the Obama administration. In a profile of Rhodes, written by New York Times reporter David Samuels and appearing in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Samuels recounted Rhodes’ tall tales concerning how the negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program came about. The article’s title, by the way, is “The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru.”

The Obama administration, led by Rhodes, spun the tale that it had to take advantage of the opportunity suddenly created for commencing negotiations with Iran when Hassan Rouhani, a so-called “moderate,” was elected as Iran’s president. According to Rhodes’ concocted narrative of the negotiations, the administration determined that the time had finally arrived, with Rouhani having replaced hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to enter into serious negotiations. This narrative of when and how the negotiations began, David Samuels wrote, “was largely manufactured for the purpose for selling the deal.”

The Obama administration wanted to give the false impression that it was adeptly exploiting a schism between the so-called “moderate” faction in Iran that had taken over the presidency and the hardliners whom had taken a beating in the presidential election. They painted Rouhani as a “moderate” leader with real power, whom could serve as an effective counterweight to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and the hardliners surrounding him.

As Leon Panetta, Obama’s former CIA chief and Secretary of Defense, explained to the New York Times reporter, the intelligence agency did not consider there to be a divide between so-called “moderates” and hardliners in any meaningful sense. “There was not much question that the Quds Force and the supreme leader ran that country with a strong arm,” Panetta was quoted as saying.

In truth, Obama was so intent on reaching a deal with Iran at any price that senior members of his administration had started serious discussions with Iranian hardliners a year before Rouhani’s election. “Obama’s closest advisers always understood him to be eager to do a deal with Iran as far back as 2012, and even since the beginning of his presidency,” David Samuels concluded after speaking with key members of the administration including Rhodes, whom were part of Obama’s inner circle.

The deeply flawed analyses of Fort McMurray’s climate By Sierra Rayne

As every Tom, Dick, and Harrietta tries to talk about climate change and the massive wildfire that destroyed a good portion of the northern Alberta city of Fort McMurray — in the heart of the oil sands region, there is unscientific nonsense being spewed all over the place.

Take Elizabeth Kolbert’s article at The New Yorker. Apparently Kolbert won the “2015 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.”

Kolbert claims the following: “April was exceptionally mild.”

Wrong. Wrong. And even more wrong.

Here are the mean daily maximum and mean daily temperatures for the month of April at Fort McMurray since records began in 1916, with the 2016 data highlighted in red.

Not only was April 2016 not “exceptionally mild,” it was colder than April 2015 and quite a bit colder than many other Aprils in the past several decades.

What is happening instead is that Fort Mac’s annual average temperature is changing rapidly over time.

Natan Sharansky On Robert Bernstein:The Dissident’s Best Friend The publisher’s moral and practical support was exceptional and profoundly encouraging to those of us trapped behind the Iron Curtain.

Very few people can look back on their lives and say that they managed to build an institution of lasting and widespread influence. Fewer still can say, as Robert L. Bernstein can, that they built two.

With his boundless energy and optimism, Mr. Bernstein has succeeded over the course of his lifetime in turning Random House into the world’s biggest publisher—bringing the works of William Faulkner, Toni Morrison and Dr. Seuss to the world—and Human Rights Watch (originally Helsinki Watch) into the leading international NGO in its field. His memoir, “Speaking Freely,” is a flowing account of the people with and against whom he worked on these two great projects. Mr. Bernstein, now 93 years old, tells his stories with great detail and good humor, finding ways to laugh at life while communicating his deep love for the friends he made along the way.

Even more remarkable than the life Mr. Bernstein recounts, however, is how he chooses to portray himself—not, as many autobiographers do, by emphasizing his role in various events but if anything by understating his own significance. At least this is very much the case with respect to the events I know well, those surrounding the struggle for human rights in the Soviet Union, in which he played a much more central role than he in his modesty is willing to let on.

Mr. Bernstein vividly recounts his visits to the Soviet Union in the early 1970s with delegations from the Association of American Publishers. The official purpose of these trips was to meet with leaders of the Soviet publishing industry, but Mr. Bernstein made a point of meeting Andrei Sakharov and other dissidents while he was there. He explains that afterward he was haunted by the thought of what it would be like to be a writer behind the Iron Curtain and of what happened to anyone who crossed the government’s “tight and arbitrary” party line. He became convinced of the importance of supporting those whose voices were suppressed under Soviet tyranny, and he proceeded to do so in meaningful ways, from making repeated visits to dissidents, to mobilizing prominent authors such as Robert Penn Warren and Arthur Miller to speak on their behalf, to becoming the publisher of Sakharov’s books and essays.

Why Terrorism Thrives in West Africa by Nuhu Othman

The general consensus among the Muslims in the now fragmented Caliphate was that the West won over the vast Caliphate not by the superiority of its idea or civilization but by its sheer superiority in organized violence. This reasoning plays into the hands of extremist Islamic groups today.

Above all, there has been no way for people to reject the past Empire and Caliphate in West Africa as failed systems because they were not replaced by better systems.

Whatever democratic values were handed to these newly independent states, however, were short-lived, trampled by military incursions. Military leadership suppressed freedoms in every aspect. This in itself served as a gag to protest the rule of any aspiring terror group. Now Africa, especially West Africa, would like to democratize. Amid the madness of terrorism, it is calling for freedom. But Is anyone listening?

Unfortunately, Iran’s nuclear deal has emboldened the terrorists, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has also been increasing its presence in Nigeria by sponsoring Sunni clergymen into their institutions of learning.

Great civilizations were in northern Nigeria before the West ever set foot there. The Kanem Bornu Empire (700-1900) stretched to present day Chad, Libya, Niger and Cameroon, and was bound by trade and ethnic similarities and religion.

Present day Northern Nigeria, on which this piece on terrorism, concentrates, is home to a large ethnic group, the Hausa. Their language of the same name is spoken by more than 50 million people and covers the present day Sahel: central north Africa (Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Togo, Chad, and Sudan.) Hausa is still the second language of trade; the first are from colonizers: English, and French and to a degree Arabic.

In the early 19th century a towering Islamic figure, Sheikh Uthman ibn Fodio (1754-1817), emerged in what is now northwest Nigeria. Although of Fulani extraction, he galvanized support across the Hausa-dominated regions and parts of the old Kanem Bornu Empire. In this multi-directional region, he had a uni-directional purpose: Islamic evangelism, crusade and dominance. He ended up created an Islamic caliphate.

In the mid-20th century, the West partitioned West Africa, and other parts of the African continent, into nation states that had nothing in common with each other apart from geographical proximity. The ethnic elements that made up the old order still consider themselves as one regardless of the fragmentation of the Caliphate into several nation states. An Azeri considers his kind as living in Iran or Azerbaijan; a Kurd, in Turkey or Iraq, a Russian in Russia, Ukraine or in the Urals, and so on. Under such splintering, it was easy for the ideas of Sayyid Qutb or Osama Bin Laden violently to re-order the region through Jihad to reverberate and gain a following.

HIS SAY: BRUCE KESLER: WHERE DOES LOYALTY BELONG?

Writer Bruce Kesler is a veteran who served our country with honor in the Vietnam War…..rsk
I am from the school of loyalty belonging to God, family, country, in that order. When it comes to voting, my loyalty does not belong to any individual or political party. My vote belongs to me. And, I have an obligation to behave responsibly and sensibly with my vote.

In that vein, whether I am a lifelong Republican or conservative is important, but only in so far as my deeply held beliefs are furthered or protected. Many Republicans or conservatives are disaffected or in pique by the apparent triumph of Donald Trump. However, for me, Trump does not get my vote because I am a Republican or conservative but because the alternatives are far worse in a continuation of the Democrats’ ongoing literal destruction of our ethics, our economy, and our national security, while in actuality doing relatively less to upraise the unfortunate than to tie them into being lackeys of the central government instead of their own initiative, compounded by our citizen poor being undercut by uncontrolled inflows of foreign competitors for jobs and public funds. To not vote is to vote for the continuation of the past 8-years of the outright assault on the very fiber of the United States.

I cannot accept with any respect any Republicans or conservatives who will now support Hillary Clinton. They do not deserve it. They exhibit themselves as rent-seekers, to profit from her probable election to the presidency due to the lock that Democrats have on a near majority of the electoral college. Or, they exhibit their overriding loyalty to their liberal social circle in New York or Washington. They do not exhibit the judgment to choose the lesser of evils, and they increase the probability of loss of Republican control of the Senate and House, which only increases the damages from a leftist administration.

CONFERENCE: IS ISLAMOPHOBIA ACCELERATING GLOBAL WARMING? (NOT A SPOOF)….SEE NOTE

Jan Poller, my trusted friend and e-pal brought this to my attention….rsk
The Ecology and Justice Forum In Global Studies And Languages Presents: Is Islamophobia accelerating Global Warming?
Sponsored by Global Studies and Laguages, Global Borders Research Collaboration, MIT Anthropology

Ghassan Hage Ghassan Hage is Future Generation Professor in the School of Philosophy, Anthropology and Social Inquiry, University of Melbourne Introduced By Bettina Stoetzer, Global Studies And Languages

Mon. May 9

This talk examines the relation between Islamophobia as the dominant form of racism today and the ecological crisis. It looks at the three common ways in which the two phenomena are seen to be linked: as an entanglement of two crises, metaphorically related with one being a source of imagery for the other and both originating in colonial forms of capitalist accumulation. The talk proposes a fourth way of linking the two: an argument that they are both emanating from a similar mode of being, or enmeshment, in the world, what is referred to as ‘generalised domestication.’ Ghassan Hage has held many visting positions across the world including in Harvard, University of Copenhagen, Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and American University of Beirut. He works in the comparative anthropology of nationalism, multiculturalism, diaspora and racism and on the relation between anthropology, philosophy and social and political theory. His most well-known work is White Nation: Fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society (Routledge 2000). His is also the author of Alter-Politics: Critical Anthropology and the Radical Imaginary (Melbourne University Press 2015). He is currently working on a book titled Is Islamophobia Accelerating Global Warming? and has most recently published a piece in American Ethnologist, titled: “Etat de Siege. A Dying Domesticating Colonialism?” (2016) that engages with the contemporary “refugee crisis” in Europe and beyond.

The talk is free and open to the public.

Silencing Bukovsky by Diana West Must read…..

If a tree falls in the forest — no, if a legendary Soviet dissident goes on a hunger strike, and there is no media there to report on it, will it ever crash into world consciousness?

Not so far. I find myself in some numbing degree of disbelief at the general silence over the fact that Vladimir Bukovsky is now 20 days into a hunger strike — his impasse with the British justice system becoming a life and death struggle in a frighteningly literal sense — amid scant news coverage and even less discernible sense of public urgency. Thank goodness for Claire Berlinski’s powerfully human cri de commentary that came out today at Ricchochet.

When Bukovsky, 72, who lives in Cambridge, UK, began his hunger strike on April 20, there was an initial flurry in the British press. It tapered off, and especially after the draconian measure taken on May 3 by the British High Court. The court went to the unusual and unusually totalitarian length of imposing a “reporting ban” on recent developments in Bukovsky’s libel suit against the Crown Prosecution Service, as explained here.

Another greatly disturbing development is that should Bukovsky be medically unfit for his separate criminal trial on May 16, the court has reportedly threatened to try him in absentia.

What is going on?

It all started on April 27, 2015, when the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) announced in an unusual manner — no, a unique manner, as I will show below — that it would be prosecuting Bukovsky for “making” and “possessing” child pornography, five charges each, plus one charge of possessing a “forbidden image.”

I have to pause for a moment to ask, incredulously: Is there a sentient person, naturally revolted by the thought of child pornography, even five or six images’ worth, going to believe for one minute that the British state, for decades having turned the blindest and hardest and most craven of eyes against the sexual despoilment and prostitution of generations of little British girls at risk at the hands of criminal Islamic “grooming” gangs, has suddenly developed some compelling interest in protecting the welfare of children, and thus turned its avenging sword on … Vladimir Bukovsky? The context, at least, is all wrong from the get-go.

Is it possible that this all really started on March 17, 2015, the day Bukovsky, the greatest enemy of the old Kremlin extant, testified in the inquiry into the 2006 assassination of Putin-era defector Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned by polonium, probably at the behest of Vladimir Putin? Or did it start on whatever day it was that British prosecutors determined it was in the public interest to investigate Bukovsky — or perhaps on the day before that?

We don’t know the answers to such questions; but asking them, thinking about them, is incumbent upon us. They take us to the larger and ghoulish dimension in which these legal machinations are playing out, and which Berlinski highlights in her essay. When these charges were first brought against Bukovsky in April 2015, she writes, Bukovsky couldn’t attend the initial hearing due to illness. She explains: “He was having complex heart surgery, after which he was in a medically-induced coma and hospitalized for four months. He survived, but was not expected to do so at the time.”

She continues: “So the point of the exercise wasn’t just to shut him up. He would soon be dead anyway. The point was to nullify his life, It was to prove to him, and to anyone tempted to emulate him, that the Kremlin will punish you for defying it even after your death. It will turn you, in the eyes of the world and of history into a child molester. These charges, even if he is acquitted, as he expects to be, would tarnish any man with an ineradicable stain. No one will believe there could be that kind of smoke without fire. They call into doubt Bukovsky’s entire life, testimony, and legacy. He is all too aware of this.

Pamela Geller: Immediately After Muslim Mayor Elected, London’s Iconic Buses Proclaim “Glory To Allah”

The Islamization of Britain made an immense advance this week, as a Muslim with extensive ties to jihadis and Islamic supremacists, Sadiq Khan, was elected mayor of London, just as London buses are set to carry ads proclaiming the “glory of Allah.”

It’s a sign of the times – and a sign of things to come. Is anyone really surprised? That a man such as Sadiq Khan, who has shared a platform with open Jew-haters, could still be elected mayor of London, is an indication of how far gone Britain already is. In Sadiq Khan’s campaign, his opponents brought up his close ties to jihadis, Islamic supremacists and Islamic Jew-haters as a blot on his record. Soon enough in Britain, however, that sort of thing will be a selling point for candidates appealing to an increasingly Muslim electorate.

The UK banned me from the country. It is already acting like a de facto Islamic state. Did anyone really think that the notoriously anti-Semitic UK would vote for Khan’s opponent, Zac Goldsmith — a Jew? London has already been overrun – voter fraud in Muslim precincts is rampant. Not that they will really needed it soon. London’s Muslim population is 1.3 million and growing.

The Muslims who voted for Sadiq Khan did not reject his extremist ties and supremacist rhetoric, dispelling the notion that most Muslims are moderates and do not adhere to the Sharia, or support extremism. Apparently, they are not “Uncle Toms,” as Sadiq likes to call moderate Muslims.

At the same time, many Jews were prohibited from voting. Even the Chief Rabbi of London was turned away – leading to the Chief Executive of one London borough having to resign. Innumerable voters throughout the London Borough of Barnet – where much of the British Jewish community lives today – were prevented from voting by a suspicious and never-explained “error” at the area’s polling stations.

The Ben Rhodes Blow-up by Lee Smith

Man, Ben Rhodes had an excellent weekend. The 38-year-old Mets’ fan who serves as President Barack Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications got to watch the press tear itself apart in rabid confusion, which proves one of his essential points—the U.S. media is a pile of dung.

After a New York Times Magazine profile of Rhodes hit newsstands Saturday night—it was posted on the Times website Thursday—the media split: The article was a hit job by author David Samuels, a crypto-neocon sent by the Mossad who opposed the Iranian nuclear deal from the outset. Or it was a gross puff piece by David Samuels, a Brooklyn liberal who was in the bag for Rhodes even before he was gifted with a box of M&M’s with the presidential seal.

Lots of people don’t know why the administration let Rhodes pull back the curtain. Because the White House won the Iran Deal is why. They wanted to take a victory lap. Obama campaigned as the anti-Iraq candidate. Bush lied and got us into a stupid war, the White House would invariably argue. And yes, as president Obama lied to sell the Iran deal—BUT to keep America out of a stupid war with Iran. Do you want American passion and innovation tied down in a severely damaged part of the world like the Middle East for the next hundred years? This is how a very large number of New York Times readers understood the piece. And as Rhodes knew, it’s how virtually everyone outside of media circles in Washington and New York would read the article.

Lots of media people can’t figure out why Rhodes spoke to Samuels, of all people. As evidence of Samuels’ pre-existing hostility to the White House, some in the Twitter-sphere posted a video of a panel at Hudson Institute I hosted where Samuels appeared with Matthew Kroenig and Michael Doran, both of whom, like me, are outspoken critics of the deal. Samuels wasn’t there to discuss the deal as such. I invited him because because I know him, and because he writes stuff I like. He said yes and maybe regrets it now, or not.

He’s not part of what Ben Rhodes calls the blob and his boss calls the Washington, D.C. foreign policy establishment. I know him from New York, when I edited the Village Voice Literary Supplement. He was a Brooklyn neighbor, and a baseball fan, and we still hung out even though our political views were often not in synch. I read his 2008 New Yorker article about a truck driver who built a nuclear bomb—a story that highlights the difference between nuclear knowledge, which is easy to come by, and the industrial infrastructure to support the manufacture of nuclear weapons, which is very difficult and costly to build and maintain. For instance, as Samuels told me over the phone for a Weekly Standard article, he said he has the blueprint to make a nuclear bomb in his desk at home—thankfully, no one has given him tens of billions of dollars to build the infrastructure that would allow him to proliferate.