For answers to why so many young Jews are disaffected about Judaism and uninformed and hostile towards Israel, consult The Jewish Week of Jan 23rd. The cover story addresses the meeting organized by Repair the World at a Martin Luther King Shabbat in Crown Heights where three community activists spoke about race, privilege and partnership. The panel included a black woman, Tynesha McHarris (director of community leadership at the Brooklyn Community Foundation; a black man, Mark Winston Griffith (exec. director of the Brooklyn Movement Center) and a white Jewish woman, Amy Ellenbogen (director of Crown Heights Community Mediation Center). A questioner asked how the largely white audience could become effective allies in pursuing racial justice. McHarris responded that people of color needed to be the leaders while white people could follow and support. Griffith disagreed and said that his agency offered leadership roles to everybody. Ellenbogen stated that whites needed to “shut up and listen, and when you’re done with that, shut up and listen some more.” When a question arose concerning the selective filtering of history in the movie “Selma,” Professor James Goodman (History, Rutgers) felt that it was perfectly legitimate to airbrush Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel from the film despite his enormous contribution to the Civil Rights Movement, his prominent position at the march (the iconic photo shows him in the front line) and his close personal friendship with Dr. King.
In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, U.S. President Barack Obama painted a rosy picture of America’s condition at home and abroad, presenting a delusional list of his own accomplishments since taking office six years ago.
A careful dissection of each of his falsehoods — which were nearly as numerous as the standing ovations he received from the Democrats in the room every time he punctuated a sentence — could fill the pages of a lengthy book. But the abridged version is as follows: Everything would be even rosier if the Republicans were to stop opposing his policies, which not only have been making Americans healthier, wealthier and wiser, but have bridged gaps with countries all over the world.
One didn’t know whether to laugh or cry while watching the lame duck remind us that he still has two more years of damage to inflict and veto powers to exercise.
The myth of Palestinian centrality has dominated Western policy in the Middle East, while contrasting the reality of the Middle East.
In 2015, following in the footsteps of Presidents Mubarak and Sadat, Egyptian President Al-Sisi does not subordinate Egypt’s national security ties with Israel to Egypt’s ties with the Palestinians.
President Al-Sisi – just like his two predecessors – considers the transnational Muslim Brotherhood and Palestinian terrorism mutual threats to Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other Arab Gulf States, which have never regarded the Palestinian issue as a top priority, and have denied the Palestinian Authority their financial generosity. Notwithstanding Palestinian opposition, strategic cooperation between Israel and Egypt, as well as between Israel and Jordan and other moderate Arab regimes, has surged to an unprecedented level.
It’s easier to condemn Steven Emerson than to confront issues of assimilation and culture.
Steven Emerson, the expert on terrorism, has caused a sigh of relief among the bien pensants of the Western world. By making inaccurate and false claims on Fox News, he has enabled them to pour righteous scorn on him and thereby avoid thinking about uncomfortable social realities.
Emerson claimed that Birmingham, the second-largest city in Britain, was “totally” Muslim. In the last census, in 2011, 21.8 percent of the city’s inhabitants said that they were Muslim. This percentage is likely to rise because of higher birth rates among Muslims, immigration, and the departure of white Christians. Residents of Birmingham who identified themselves as “white British” declined by 11 percent between 2001 and 2011, while the “white Irish” declined by 33 percent. The proportion of Christians would have decreased further had it not been for the arrival of Eastern Europeans. Meanwhile, the Muslim Pakistani and Bangladeshi populations increased over those ten years by 40 and 50 percent, respectively, and the Arab population rose to 1 percent from zero percent. Whether this matters, whether it fills you with joy or apprehension, or leaves you indifferent, depends upon your political outlook—and perhaps on where you live.
http://www.algemeiner.com/author/elder-of-ziyon/
Buried in a New York Times article today about friction between
President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu is a phrase that the
newspaper has never used before:
Famously, many of those conversations have been deeply uncomfortable.
The two leaders have often clashed on Israel’s determination to build
new settlements, which Mr. Obama viewed as a way to sabotage peace
talks. Mr. Netanyahu was accused of lecturing Mr. Obama in front of
the cameras in the Oval Office during an angry conversation in May
2011, after Mr. Obama suggested that the 1967 borders with Palestine
should be the starting point for peace negotiations. Later that year,
after former President Nicolas Sarkozy of France complained in front
of an open microphone that Mr. Netanyahu was “a liar,” Mr. Obama said,
“You’re fed up with him, but I have to deal with him even more often
than you.”
Just about every European country voted a few weeks ago to establish a Palestinian state, much of it on land designated for Israel by the League of Nations after WWI. The Europeans, together with communist and Islamic countries and dictatorships around the world, wish to go even further by actually dividing Jerusalem, Israel’s capital, in two, as Berlin was after World War II. You see, in Europe it’s fashionable to believe that Islam would live up to its billing as a “religion of peace” if Muslims could have just one more state, a 58th Moslem state, right next to Israel. The state will be called a “Palestinian” state, but it will actually be a Hamas state.
In fact, many want Israel to be flooded by millions of Muslims into Haifa and Tel Aviv so as to demographically change Israel from a Jewish state into a more Islamic one, all in the name of multiculturalism. Many believe that if this is done, the world will no longer be the constant target of Islamic terrorism.
“The time has come,” the walrus said, “to talk of many things: Of shoes and ships – and sealing wax – of cabbages and kings”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia is dead…..enabler and funder of the 9/11 terrorists, enforcer of harsh anti-women Sharia laws, and suppressor of elementary human rights. And now the fawning tributes from cabbage heads begin. Our very own President now calls him a man of convictions ” and “At home, King Abdullah’s vision was dedicated to the education of his people and to greater engagement with the world.”
But Obama is not alone in the long list of American Presidents who have abased themselves in tributes to the monarch…….Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan. George Bush (1), Bill Clinton, George Bush (2).
The President was “defiant” wrote the New York Times; “defiantly liberal,” claimed the Financial Times. “It was an ungracious speech,” editorialized the latter. Despite setting a record, since becoming President, for the greatest number of Party-seat losses in the post-War period (14 Senate seats, 69 House seats and 913 seats in state legislatures), the President was unapologetic. With constant usage of the pronoun “I”, and with quoting himself, his ego was on full display.
Mr. Obama urged civility, yet he remained supercilious. When he said, “I have no more campaigns to run,” there was a smattering of Republican applause (allegedly derisive). Mr. Obama immediately rejoined: “I know, because I won both of them.” This master of fundraising then criticized “constant fundraising.” When will we learn?
Last week, in response to the Paris massacre at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, Carol M. Swain, an openly conservative professor of political science and law at Vanderbilt University, wrote an op-ed for The Tennessean titled, “Charlie Hebdo attacks prove critics were right about Islam.” Naturally, any critique of Islam from our leftist-dominated campuses is going to be met with frothing outrage, and Professor Swain’s article was no exception.
“What would it take to make us admit we were wrong about Islam?” the professor began. “What horrendous attack would finally convince us that Islam is not like other religions in the United States, that it poses an absolute danger to us and our children unless it is monitored better than it has been under the Obama administration?” Good questions, and ones that those of us whose eyes have long been opened to the threat of Islamic fundamentalism have been asking ever since September 11, 2001, if not before.
France’s unity rally, held on January 11, 2015, following the massacre at Hebdo magazine headquarters, was based on the premise of support for freedom of speech. In reality, the whole thing was nothing but a farce.
Charlie Hebdo was a French satirical magazine, known for mocking religious figures of all stripes. However, some Muslims are hypersensitive to humor about their Prophet Mohammad, and over the years, the magazine was plagued with death threats. In fact, in 2011, some Muslims firebombed and destroyed Hebdo’s old offices, after it announced that it would name Mohammad as its Editor-in-Chief.
Now, on January 7, 2015, two brothers gunned down twelve people in and around the magazine’s headquarters, screaming “Allahu Akbar!” (Allah is greater!) in defense of their beloved religion. Recently, Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula claimed credit for the attack, pronouncing that it had planned and financed the murders.
But western media as well as leaders of the here-to-fore Free World refuse to acknowledge that any version of Islam is responsible for the attack. Much of the media originally failed to report the connection (though it was hardly a secret,) and politicians, like President Obama, continue to deny it. Islam is a religion of peace, his administration tells us. What we witnessed is “violent extremism”, similar, I suppose, to that of mere thugs down the block.
