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May 2018

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MY SAY: A CAPITAL ADVENTURE

By on May 21st, 2018

When the Brits say “ that’s capital!” they’re not referring to a city, font or money. They mean that’s fantastic!”

I spent last weekend in America’s “capital”capital with a lovely and lively friend. She and I visited two museums:

The National Museum of the Marine Corps, located in Quantico, Virginia is the best military museum in the nation. From the Barbary Wars and Revolutionary wars, through the first and second World Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the fire bursts of the Cold War to the recent Afghan, Iraq wars, battle scenes and dioramas with lifelike statues and excellent photographs and narratives, the heroic battles of the American “leathernecks” are displayed. We witnessed an unscheduled and remarkable rifle drill with synchrony, dexterity and discipline. After the drill, the marines relaxed and chatted with the visitors which included many venerable marine veterans. We were there for a full day and vowed to see it again.

The Museum of the Bible, which museum opened on November 17, 2017 documents the narrative, history and impact of the Old and New Testaments. It is a magnificent enterprise. The displays of artifacts and texts, and the narratives of the Bible’s impact on the founding fathers, scientists and philosophers are magnificent. A Galilean village is entirely reconstructed as it was in the time of Jesus. The dioramas and narratives of Jerusalem show the centrality of Jerusalem to the Jewish people. It is still a work in progress and one we definitely plan to revisit.

P.S. It rained non stop but the hotel provided daily copies of the Washington Post which were handy to wipe rain soaked shoes….rsk

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Pro-Palestinian Human Rights Organizations Shaft Palestinians and Human Rights by Bassam Tawil

By on May 21st, 2018

In each case, Palestinian Arabs living in PA-controlled areas were suspected of collaborating with Israel — a “crime” that can include anything from warning authorities of impending acts of terrorism to selling land to Jews.

All told, 13 of 15 “human rights organizations” proved that they are, in fact, dedicated to defaming the State of Israel, and have no real interest in defending human rights.

Only two organizations — The Committee for Prevention of Torture and Physicians for Human Rights — offered assistance of any kind.

Ironically, help also came from two unexpected sources: Honenu, a legal aid society most often associated with right wing causes, and Regavim, a think-tank and lobbying group that regularly finds itself in court as a means of protecting Israeli sovereignty.

During the past 14 years, dozens of lawsuits have been filed in the Israeli judicial system by Arabs who have fled the Palestinian Authority (PA) and were given refuge in Israel. The sheer volume of cases and their remarkable similarity led the Israeli justice system to combine them and hear them as a unified case, heard in Jerusalem District Court, Justice Moshe Drori presiding, in 2017.

In each case, the victims, Palestinian Arabs living in PA-controlled areas, were suspected of collaborating with Israel — a “crime” that can include anything from warning authorities of impending acts of terrorism to selling land to Jews.

These suspected “collaborators,” after their abduction by the Palestinian Police, were imprisoned in the PA’s dungeons and subjected to unspeakable torture. In their testimony before the court, the victims described brutal beatings, broken teeth, sexual assault, exposure to extreme heat and cold, being forced to sit on broken glass bottles, being hung repeatedly in various positions, and “medical treatment” by the Palestinian Authority’s prison doctors that included injections of urine directly into their veins. In many cases, suspected collaborators were executed outright; other times, they were tortured to death and their family members raped and tortured. Even infants were not spared. These methods remain in force; this is how the Palestinian Authority deals with anyone suspected of cooperating with Jews: Death or torture.

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Spies Like Obama? The treachery of “Crossfire Hurricane” comes into the light. Matthew Vadum

By on May 21st, 2018

On Sunday a justifiably outraged President Trump called for the former Obama administration to be investigated for its unprecedented and profoundly un-American spying and sabotage operation against the 2016 Trump campaign.

“I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the [Federal Bureau of Investigation/Department of Justice] infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes – and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!” Trump tweeted Sunday at 1:37 p.m.

Just the day before, President Trump had written on Twitter, “If the FBI or DOJ was infiltrating a campaign for the benefit of another campaign, that is a really big deal.”

The presidential demand for action comes after days of dramatic, detailed revelations about the plot to undermine the Trump campaign, transition team, and presidency began surfacing in news accounts.

On Thursday it was revealed that the FBI illicitly put together a spy ring as part of something called Operation Crossfire Hurricane and that at least one informant was a member of the Trump campaign.

On Friday the New York Times reported the campaign-embedded snitch was an American teaching in the United Kingdom.

By Saturday, media reports indicated the rat-fink in question was Stefan Halper, who is currently Director of American Studies in Cambridge University’s Department of Politics and International Studies and a research professor at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C. Halper served in the White House during the Nixon and Ford administrations. Halper hates Trump. How he got on Trump’s campaign staff is not clear.

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The Lying Media Never Stops Lying About Israel All the media does is recycle the same lies about the Jewish State. Daniel Greenfield

By on May 21st, 2018

There are no new lies. Only old lies that the media hopes that everyone forgot about.

In the spring of ’02, Muslim terrorists had very special plans for Passover. In Israel, a Hamas suicide bomber blew up at a Passover seder in the Park Hotel killing 30 people and wounding 140 others. Many of the dead were in their seventies and eighties. Some were Holocaust survivors. The oldest was a 90-year-old woman. Four days later, another Hamas suicide bomber hit a restaurant killing 15 people and wounding another 40. In both attacks, entire families died together. Two were completely wiped out.

These were two of four terrorist attacks that hit Israeli cafes and restaurants in that month alone.

Israel fought back by launching Operation Defensive Shield. One of its targets was Jenin, an encampment that the terrorists behind some of the deadliest attacks had been using as their base. Israel warned the civilian population to evacuate and then its soldiers began the dangerous business of clearing a territory that had been heavily mined and filled with deadly traps by Islamic terrorists.

The fighting was hard and bloody. Israel lost 23 soldiers and there were 52 dead on the other side. Only 14 of them were civilians. The rest were terrorists. Of course that’s not the story that the media told.

Instead the media claimed that there had been a “massacre”, an “atrocity” and “genocide” in Jenin. It claimed that Israel had killed 500 Palestinians and buried bodies in mass graves with bulldozers. The lie eventually fell apart. By the summer, even the UN had concluded that there was no massacre.

But by then it really didn’t matter.

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Daniel Johnson: Politics, Civilisation and Survival ****** (November 10th 2016 )

By on May 21st, 2018

Neither the Right nor the Left is doing a good job of defending, representing or embodying the values of our civilisation. Meanwhile, our public opinion is seduced by the dream of a world without enemies, by the pathologies of relativism—cultural, moral and epistemological.

The future of Western civilisation will depend on how well the present can mobilise the intellectual resources of the past to meet the challenges of the future. Today, we are threatened by an unprecedented array of external adversaries and dangers, ranging from Islamist terror and Russian or Chinese aggression to the fall-out from failed states. We also face internal threats—above all the collapse of confidence in Judeo-Christian values and democratic capitalism. Can either the Left or the Right rise to the challenge of the present crisis? Or are both political traditions mired in self-destructive mind-sets that prevent them from grasping the scale of the task, let alone reversing the decline?

I want to begin with the Right, because the crisis of conservatism in Europe, America and here in Australia seems too deep to be explained by the vagaries of individual personalities or parties. Most leaders of the centre-Right in the Western democracies appear to be the prisoners of their own anxieties: the fear of proscription by the self-appointed guardians of self-righteousness; the fear of humiliation for failure to flatter those who parade their status as victims; and the fear of oblivion for simply ignoring the clamour to do something when there is nothing useful to be done. The watchword of many a conservative statesman used to be masterly inactivity; now it is miserly depravity. There seems no place for the old-fashioned conservative who steers a steady course, is frugal and firm yet decent and honest; who, rather than pick people’s pockets, leaves their money to fructify there—in short, the John Howards of this world. When Theresa May, a strong prime minister in this tradition, took office two months ago after the vote for Brexit, she felt the need to make gestures to the nanny state: an “industrial policy” and an “equality audit”. Why does she think the British state, whose record of central planning and social engineering is lamentable, should repeat the follies of the past? Could it be that Mrs May still feels the need to appease the gods of socialism, in which nobody, least of all she, still believes? It seems scarcely credible. Yet the same phenomenon is observable everywhere. Conservatism as a living tradition, a coherent conceptual framework for freedom under the law, has been hollowed out and filled with the detritus of defunct ideologies.

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Hal G.P. Colebatch: Jews, Nazis and Muslims

By on May 21st, 2018

This past week in Indonesia, several entire families of suicide bombers attacked Christian worshippers. Normally it is Jews who are on the sharp end of Islam’s enmity for all other creeds, yet somehow, unlike Hitler’s very few latter day disciples, Muslim hatred goes largely unremarked

Had Charles Martel not been victorious at Poitiers—already, you see, the world had fallen into the hands of the Jews, so gutless a thing was Christianity!—then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism, that cult which glorifies heroism and which opens the seventh heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world. Christianity alone prevented them from doing so.
—Adolf Hitler

jew hate IIIn The Australian last year Julie Nathan of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry wrote an article headed in the ink-and-paper edition, “Attack on Jews a threat to all society”. I agreed with that. An attack on Jews is a threat to all society. But I found very little to agree with in the emphasis of the body of the article, which focused almost entirely on right-wing and neo-Nazi groups. There was just one passing reference to leftism and Islam: “Jeremy Corbyn also has shamefully tolerated and been accused of condoning anti-Semitism among the far-left and Islamist groups he has courted.” That’s all.

This is firing the guns in the wrong direction. It all but ignores the most powerful, well-financed and murderous anti-Semitic force in the world today.

A few weeks ago, 3000 Muslims outside the US embassy in London (video below) chanted the anti-Semitic cry, “Khaybar Khaybar, ya yahud, Jaish Muhammad, sa yahud!” This translates as: “Jews, remember Khaybar! The army of Muhammad is returning!” This is a reference to the battle, constantly caressed in Muslim historical memory, when the last flourishing Jewish communities in Arabia, survivors of the Roman diaspora and the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, were wiped out by Islamic warriors in 629.

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Peter Smith: Eyeless in Gaza

By on May 21st, 2018

It is quite the puzzle for Islamic apologists: how to cast Hamas’ eagerness to march a lemming-like army of its own people, even small children, into border fences and Israeli guns? The solution: overlook Islamic scriptures’ exhortations to grievance and barbarism.

Tyranny is our foe. Whatever trapping or disguise it wears [read the religion of peace], whatever language it speaks, be it external or internal [read the religion of peace], we must for ever be on our guard, ever mobilized, ever vigilant, always ready to spring at its throat. – Winston Churchill

Tens of thousands of Gazans are attempting to storm into Israel. If they were to succeed many among them would rape and slaughter Israelis living in nearby towns. They are being urged on by Hamas leaders. The mobs (called “protestors” to torture the English language) are using petrol bombs and slingshots and burning tyres to provide cover. It’s all on the tele to be seen with those who have eyes to see.

Apparently, the British government has expressed concern about the violence and loss of Gazan life. Macron blamed Israel for the deaths of those storming the border. Julie Bishop called on Israel “to be proportionate in its response and refrain from excessive force.” It is in fact a miracle that so few Gazan lives have been lost. Imagine the carnage with the same mobs, with the same malign intent, coming up against a less disciplined and restrained army. Some young children have been killed. What the heck are their parents thinking bringing them to the front lines? Well, hold that thought pending Indonesia.

Meanwhile in the world of truth, outside of sanctimony and delusion, the White House blamed Hamas for the violence. Niki Haley walked out of the UN as the Palestinian representative got up to propagandise, having vetoed yet another of those anti-Israel resolutions. If you still don’t know why the world needs Trump you should. Unless, of course, you can’t get beyond his hairstyle.

Does anyone with even half a brain not understand that blood would be flowing in the streets if Hamas terrorists managed to get into Israeli towns. I visited Sderot in November, 2014. It is the closest Israeli town to the Gaza border. Twenty-eight thousand rockets had been fired at Sderot since 2000. I saw the piles of shrapnel kept at a local police station. I was told that the town is so close to the border that once you hear a “red alert” you have just fifteen seconds to find cover. All playgrounds have adjoining bomb shelters.

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Mueller Year One: Journalism’s Real Heroes Continued By Julie Kelly Part two of a two-part series

By on May 21st, 2018

As I wrote a few days ago, the American media is broken. That description already sounds outdated as we now witness the media’s rebranding of the Obama administration’s spying on the Trump campaign as a vital national security effort: “Of course the Trump campaign was being spied on! It was for their own good!”

A brave group of journalists—aided by key amplifiers in social media, cable news, and talk radio—continues to push back on the media’s sycophantic service to the Democratic Party in which so many reporters, news personalities and political pundits are invested. Now, reporters who tried to convince us Trump was nuts for claiming Obama’s FBI spied on him are spinning hard to persuade us that an “informant” isn’t really a “spy.” But these antidotal journalists and influencers are not letting them get away with it.

My first piece highlighted the efforts of Andrew McCarthy, Mollie Hemingway, Sean Davis and Lee Smith. Here is the remainder of the group, as well as a shout-out to the influencers who have helped explain this story to the people who may not have time to read a 2,000 word article.

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How Democracies End: A Bureaucratic Whimper By Victor Davis Hanson

By on May 21st, 2018

One strange trait of the die hard NeverTrump Republicans and progressives is their charge that Donald Trump poses an existential threat to democracy. Trump, as is his wont, says a lot of outrageous and weird things. But it is hard in his 16 months of rule to find any proof that Trump has subverted the rule of law.

Most of the furor is over what we are told what Trump might do, or what Trump has said, or which unsavory character in Europe likes Trump. These could be legitimate worries if they were followed by Trump’s anti-democratic concrete subversions. But so far, we have not seen them. And there has certainly been nothing yet in this administration comparable to the Obama-era efforts to curb civil liberties.

While we understand those on the left refuse to believe that a constitutional “legal scholar” like Obama would even think of allowing the executive branch to go rogue, it is indeed strange that in almost every NeverTrump attack on Trump’s conduct, there is almost no recognition or indeed worry that we have been living through one of the great challenges to constitutional government in our history.

Does anyone remember that the Obama Administration allowed Lois Lerner (“Not a smidgen of corruption”) more or less to weaponize the IRS to help the Obama 2012 reelection effort? Does anyone remember Eric Holder’s surveillance of the Associated Press journalists and Fox News’s James Rosen? Why have conservative constitutionalists focused on what Trump has said rather than the strange treatment accorded to investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson by U.S. intelligence and investigatory agencies? Do we even remember the Benghazi pseudo-video narrative and the strange jailing of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula?

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Georgetown Spins Muslim Self-Criticism Into ‘Islamophobic Muslims’ By Andrew E. Harrod

By on May 21st, 2018

“Islamophobic Muslims”? Such is the surreal conclusion of the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (IPSU)’s 2018 American Muslim Poll, which was presented before about forty at Washington, D.C.’s National Press Club on May 1. This piece of propaganda attempts to downplay uncomfortable realities recognized by American Muslims themselves.

Advising the report’s authors was Islamism apologist John Esposito, founding director of Georgetown University’s Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU), ISPU’s partner in the study. The ACMCU’s “Islamophobia”-fighting Bridge Initiative funded the survey and its new “Islamophobia Index.” Bridge Initiative senior research fellow Arsalan Iftikhar, formerly of the Hamas-derived Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), attended the panel event, as did Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad, the CATO Institute’s “libertarian for sharia.”

ISPU director of research and Esposito protégé Dalia Mogahed entered the realm of sheer fantasy in discussing the report’s findings on Muslims and violence. She highlighted the report’s outdated, ludicrous claim that “[m]ost American terrorist fatalities are at the hands of white supremacists.” America’s steady death toll from jihadists has clearly refuted this canard.

Mogahed offered a flagrantly misleading assessment of the poll statement “Most Muslims living in the United States are more prone to violence than other people.” She fretted over this claim receiving high approval from Muslims themselves (18 percent agreeing), surpassed only by white evangelicals at 23 percent, while the general public averaged 13 percent. The report baselessly attributes such welcome self-criticism to media “dehumanization of Muslims,” resulting in “internalized stigmatization” and the aforementioned “Islamophobic Muslims.”

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