In watching “Night Will Fall,” the documentary made from the British and American footage of the liberation of the concentration camps at the close of WWII, what struck me first was the irrationality of Nazis starving a slave population that was intended to work. How inefficient that was as people diminished to skeletal weight and racked by dysentery and typhus could not have performed tasks with even the semblance of purposeful activity. This only adds to the mystery of why the Germans went to the expense and bother of constructing and staffing camps and transporting victims to them, often from great distances, instead of killing people in situ as they frequently did in mass ditches dug by the victims at the outskirts of towns and villages. According to Daniel Goldhagen (How Auschwitz is Misunderstood NYT 1/25), it was to distance the killers from their victims. Though this was true for prisoners brought from all over Europe, it certainly wasn’t true for German Jews who were brought to camps in Germany which were in close proximity to their former neighbors. A look at the map that Alfred Hitchcock created for the original documentary shows camps dotting Germany, often within a mile of cities and villages.
Chicago-style campaigning lands in Israel. And look who and what is running this “non-partisan” campaign. PAGING LOIS LERNER!
There’s a new grassroots, door-to-door knocking, community organizing style campaign effort that just landed in Israel. It’s focused on hoping for change and changing for hope and taking-the-street-to-the-street style shake it up electioneering.
Flying in to run the show is none other than Jeremy Bird. The same Bird who was the deputy national campaign director and then national campaign director for Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, respectively
Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, on the eve of an official visit to Moscow, offered Israel’s good offices as amediator between Russia and Ukraine. RIA Novosti reports:
“Israel’s neutrality in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict is the most reasonable position but neutrality does not mean inaction,” Lieberman said ahead of a meeting with Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov in Moscow. “We have good relations with both countries. Moscow and Kiev trust us.”
“This is a good basis for mediation efforts. We have repeatedly said that we were ready to deploy andthese are not only statements,” he added. “It is precisely because we are from these countries that we can understand both parties.”
One has to appreciate Lieberman’s sense of humor, but there is a serious side to this. It has been obvious for a dozen years that Russian policy involves a trade-off between Ukraine and Iran. Russia, that is, would respond to Western efforts to bring Ukraine (and above all Crimea) into any of the Western alliances by subverting American interests elsewhere.
The Russian government stated as much last March 19, as reported by the Associated Press: “Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said, according to the Interfax news agency, that Russia didn’t want to use the Iranian nuclear talks to ‘raise the stakes,’ but may have to do so in response to the actions by the United States and the European Union.”
During the Holocaust Europe’s Jews had nowhere to go. The gates of Palestine were clamped shut by the British, to their eternal shame, and the 1938 Evian conference (held in France-natch) disclosed that not one single country, with the exception of the Dominican Republic, would take in any sizable number of Jewish refugees. As a result 6,000,000 Jews were annihilated- that’s one of every three Jews in the world.
The only answer to that atrocity is the state of Israel, locus of the most advanced cultural and scientific institutes in the world. Israel where the largest population of Jews in the world- just over 6,000,000 now lives and bickers and has fun and enjoys every human right necessary in a democracy. Furthermore they have an advanced defense force whose ordnance display the Star of David.
So frankly speaking, all these commemorations in Europe and the United Nations stink with hypocrisy, when indulged in by the world’s enablers of all Israel’s enemies. Spare me their self righteousness…..rsk
Progressives will always claim that no matter how badly their plans go wrong, at least their terrible policies were well-intentioned.
The regimes that shot orphans, starved entire cities into submission and committed genocide were “caring” in comparison to the heartless Dickensian capitalists who did nothing for the poor except create cheap products and jobs. They might have killed millions, but their red hearts were in the right place.
They didn’t just spend all their time gobbling caviar and diving into swimming pools full of all money like the millionaires of the West. Instead they gave speeches about Marxism-Leninism, killed anyone who wasn’t up on their dialectical materialism and then gobbled working class caviar and dove into proletarian swimming pools full of money.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/frontpagemag-com/to-joke-or-not-to-joke-about-allah-on-the-glazov-gang/
This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Superstar Michael Loftus, host of the new comedy tv show, The Flipside With Michael Loftus, which offers a fresh perspective by taking on the flipside of the news, commentary, and pop-culture that America now calls the status quo.
Michael discussed To Joke or Not to Joke About Allah, sharing the challenge and danger of poking fun at the “Religion of Peace.” The discussion occurred within the context of the trials and tribulations of being a conservative comedian in a leftist-controlled culture and how The Flipside is hitting back at the powers that be.
A recent poll by the Pew Research Center found that defending the country against terrorism should be the No. 1 priority for the federal government. It was ranked as a priority higher than the economy, jobs, education and Social Security. For the first time in the past five years, homeland security received more support than the economy as the top issue of concern in the Pew Survey.
There are a variety of factors that have contributed to the focus on homeland security by the American public. These include: the rise of extremist Islamist terrorism in the Middle East and the recent incidents in Europe and Africa; the public debate on a growing concern for protecting our borders; recognition of the increased sophistication in transportation-related threats; and the new realities of cybersecurity attacks and breaches in today’s increasingly connected society.
Because of its prominent role among federal agencies, it is easy to overlook that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was only created a little more than a decade ago. After the horrific events of 9/11, the DHS was molded from 22 different agencies with separate cultures and processes. Some of these high-profile agencies included the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. Secret Service, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, U.S. Citizens and Immigration Service, U.S. Transportation Security Administration and U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. The Science and Technology Directorate and the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO) were created during the early formation and operations of the DHS.
Let me not mince words. There is no difference between those who carried out the Charlie Hebdo and kosher supermarket attacks in Paris and those who run the Palestinian Authority. Many Western governments, with the notable exceptions of Canada, Australia and the United States Congress, have developed a cognitive dissonance when it comes to the Palestinians and refuse to acknowledge the obvious but make no mistake, those who carried out the Paris massacre and those who sit in the Ramallah Mukataa are cut from the same fascist cloth. Don’t let their finely tailored Italian suits and silk ties fool you. They share the same genocidal goals but differ only in tactics.
What France faces today, Israel has had to confront for 67 years. The difference between the French and the Israelis however, is that the Israelis understand their enemy and have developed a proficiency in dealing with them. The French on the other hand are still learning and that is why their reactions to the terror attacks were so sluggish and haphazard and why Paris was in chaos for a number of days.
The two-state paradigm, one that envisions a dysfunctional, Jew-free Palestinian welfare state in Judea & Samaria sticking like a bone into Israel’s throat is untenable and poses an existential threat to the State of Israel. It also poses a threat to Jordan. Within 10 years or less, such a state would unravel and devolve into another Hamastan and that’s the best case scenario. Iran and ISIS would like nothing better than to gain a foothold in Judea & Samaria and these fascist and totalitarian entities thrive in an environment of chaos. The only thing preventing such a takeover now is the presence of the Israel Defense Forces in Judea & Samaria.
The Islamic Republic of Iran is not only a nuclear power aspirant, but a nation seeking regional Middle Eastern hegemony. The Ayatollahs and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (IRG) are the sponsors of worldwide Islamic terrorism. Recently, the world was gripped by the savage attack of Sunni Muslim jihadists who murdered 17 French people, including four Jews in a kosher supermarket in Paris. Yet, the world has forgotten the Shiite-Muslim Iranian regime sponsored 1994 van bombing of the Argentine Jewish Charities Federation or AMIA in Buenos Aires, that left 85 people dead and 300 others wounded. It has been the worst Islamic terrorist attack to date of its kind in South America.
Alberto Nisman, 51, the Argentine prosecutor charged with investigating the Buenos Aires bombing by Iran, which the Argentine governments of President Carlos Menem (1989-1999) and Cristina Fernandez Kirchner (2007-present) deliberately obstructed, was found dead hours before he was to testify on the collusion between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Cristina Kirchner government. He was due to address an Argentine Congressional hearing on Monday (1/19/2015) to provide evidence of his assertions.
U.S. air, aid, and advisers in Iraq are currently furthering Iran’s interests, not America’s.
Today in Iraq, American advisers stay in safe shelters, while Iranian soldiers and generals fight alongside Shia militias and Iraqi soldiers on the front lines. Our bombing supports Iranian-directed movements on the ground. This bizarre situation bring into question American policy goals. Are the administration’s actions ad hoc and poorly thought out, or is there a hidden, more foreboding agenda?
In the State of the Union address, President Obama said that “in Iraq and Syria, American leadership — including our military power — is stopping ISIL’s advance.” Actually, America is following Iranian leadership inside Iraq. In 2007, when President Bush surged more than 20,000 American troops into Iraq, Iran responded with explosive devices and assassination teams to kill our soldiers. Eight years ago, it would have been risible to predict that American troops would deploy a second time to support Iran’s Republican Guard. Yet that is what we have done.
