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Ruth King

Gettysburg and the Eternal Battle for a ‘New Birth of Freedom’ ALLEN C. GUELZO

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323873904578571390930041734.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop Lincoln, describing the fight of July 1-3, 1863, showed the world what was at stake in a Pennsylvania crossroads town. Among my great-grandfather’s papers, carefully set down in his small, gnarled handwriting, is a copy of the Gettysburg Address. When Lincoln delivered the speech, my great-grandfather was 10 years old and living in Sweden, […]

Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller Banned from the U.K. — on The Glazov Gang

Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller Banned from the U.K. — on The Glazov Gang
by Frontpagemag.com
Why Jihad supporters are welcome — and why freedom fighters and truth-tellers are not.
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/robert-spencer-and-pamela-geller-banned-from-the-u-k-on-the-glazov-gang/

IN THE U.K. A PREVIEW OF OBAMACARE….PATIENTS WAIT IN AMBULANCES FOR FIVE HOURS OUTSIDE OF EMERGENCY CENTERS: LAURA DONNELLY

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/10150635/Patients-facing-eight-hour-waits-in-ambulances-outside-AandE-departments.html Patients facing eight-hour waits in ambulances outside A&E departments Sick patients have been forced to wait up to eight hours in ambulances queuing outside Accident & Emergency units amid a crisis in the system. An investigation by The Sunday Telegraph shows that the number of patients forced to wait at least two hours parked […]

AAYAN HIRSI ALI INTERVIEWED BY DROR EYDAR

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=10309

‘Even if you give up all the land, it won’t solve the problems in the Mideast’

An interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, author of “Infidel” • “From the perspective of the Arab leaders, reaching a two-state solution is to betray God. If you want peace and not merely a process, you must make peace with the people. The negotiators themselves are of no importance.”
There is something dignified in the quiet, determined manner of Ayaan Hirsi Ali as she rises from the audience and walks towards the podium to deliver her lecture. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s intricate history starts in Somalia, where she was born to a Muslim family. At the age of five she underwent female genital mutilation. By her teens she was a devout Muslim. In her early twenties, upon learning of plans for an undesirable arranged marriage, she made her way to Holland, where she applied for asylum. Hirsi Ali studied at Leiden University and began publishing critical articles about Islam, the condition of the Muslim woman, and so forth.

She wrote the script for the Dutch movie “Submission” for director Theo van Gogh, who was subsequently murdered by a Muslim assassin. Hirsi Ali joined the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy and in 2003 was elected to the Dutch parliament. A few years later she moved to the United States, where she became a researcher at the American Enterprise Institute. She published some books; notably, an autobiography titled “Infidel” that became an international bestseller. Already in 2005, Time magazine named Hirsi Ali among the 100 most influential people in the world. The internet abounds with information about her, with articles and videos of her lectures.

She is doubly courageous: in her stand against Islam, leading to threats on her life, and vis a vis the Western liberal elite, which disapproves of criticism of multiculturalism and the blindness afflicting Western society in grasping the strategic threat to its existence as a free societ

A CABINET OF VANITIES: MAUREEN MULLARKEY **** A MAGNIFICENT ESSAY

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/maureen-mullarkey/

Among liturgically concerned responses to the previous post, one of them gave me a start:

On Corpus Christi, at a Manhattan parish, we had to sing an entrance song which begins, “We are here to tell our story, We are here to break the bread, we are here to know our rising from the dead … ”

Here to tell our story. The Gospel of Me. The all-encompassing Cosmic Me. The lyrics lend new meaning to the adjective catholic, do they not? The respondent rightly makes fun of it: ”It was like the B-side of a Debby Boone album, except Debby Boone’s lyrics are more coherent.” Yet the lyrics are more ominous than that. Any global extension of the self into the very object of liturgical devotion is deadly. Ovid knew just how lethal self-worship was: Narcissus wasted unto death mooning over his own reflection.

No one needs to have read Keith Campbell and Jean Twenge’s psychological study The Narcissism Epidemic (1999) to know that narcissism spreads like fungus. It advances through the social order, blighting the wits not only of individuals but of populations. Even liturgical culture decomposes under its assault. External realities disintegrate in the drive to construct and celebrate a winsome, elevated self-image.

• • • • •This occurs to me every time I walk past the lawn of the local Episcopal church. Staked in the ground close to the sidewalk is an eight foot banner erected in the wake of the Newtown school shooting. Great block letters trumpet: THEY ARE ALL OUR CHILDREN. Beneath the slogan is a list of endorsing religious groups: the town’s four Christian denominations, the local temple, the Quakers, regional Baháis, and the county Muslim association.

My gorge rises at the sight of it. This is grandstanding clothed as compassion. Counterfeit condolence, the banner comforts no one. Words are not directed to the suffering parents of those murdered school children. They are addressed to our town, not Newtown. An outsized bumper sticker, the banner advertises its own self-admiring stance. That it is still on show six months after the shootings insinuates a political agenda—gun control—for which the deaths of children were expedient. The disguise of fellow-feeling gets thinner each day that the banner stands.

You have to have a taste for tartuffery to greet this display of higher sanctimony as anything but cant. The falsity of it is plain: The children of Sandy Hook Elementary School are not our children. Their deaths have not withered our hopes, crushed our spirits, caused us unimaginable agony. That pain belongs exclusively to the parents who gave those little ones life and love. The solemnity of parental grief is mocked by unctuous affectation in service to an unspoken platform that circumvents informed, serious discussion.

To broadcast one’s own empathy—made without risk or cost—is pharisaical vanity. Signatories to this vulgar pennon offer nothing but cheap grace, bestowed on themselves. My town’s children remain snug in their beds, ATM cards under their pillows. Ivy League visions still dance in their heads. Their birthdays continue.

NOTES FROM VIN IENCO

http://unitedpatriotsworldwide.com/vinienco/ Boston Bomber Indicted, Holder has Final Say on Execution Boston Bomber Indicted, Holder has Final Say on Execution: Accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of killing four people in the largest mass-casualty attack on US soil since September 11, 2001. The 30-count indictment filed in […]

RENE LOUIS BERES: ISRAEL’S OPTIONS ON IRAN

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Controls/SendFriend.ashx?print=1&type=1&item=13492 Facing a Nuclear Iran: Israel’s Remaining Options Nuclear strategy is a “game” that sane and rational decision-makers must play. From Prof. Louis René Beres In the best of all possible worlds, Iran could still be kept distant from nuclear weapons. In the real world, however, any such operational success is increasingly unlikely. More precisely, […]

NIDRA POLLER: FRENCH WHISTLEBLOWER THROTTLED

Journalist sanctioned for revealing judges indulging in disorderly conduct.

PARIS. The French media usually have a soft spot for whistleblowers, people who reveal matters that the public is not supposed know about. Among recently celebrated leakers are the American soldier Bradley Manning who passed secret military information to WikiLeaks, Julian Assange and now Edward Snowden, who fled to Hong Kong after leaking information on American surveillance.

Not included in this celebrated group is French television journalist Clément Weill-Raynal, who works for the television station France 3. When on assignment to the offices of the Syndicat de la Magistrature, a left-leaning union of judges, a couple of weeks ago, he noticed that the judges had posted pictures of people they disliked on a huge bulletin board – labeled the Mur des cons, the Wall of Scumbags – complete with hostile graffiti against said scumbags.

The female president of the union indicated that the journalists must not film the bulletin board. Weill-Raynal nevertheless filmed the wall with his cell phone.

Days later and by a circuitous route the news of the Wall of Scumbags broke on the Atlantico website and from there it splashed all over the mainstream media. The result was indignation – not at the fact that judges kept a list of enemies, but against Weill-Raynal, who had “illegally” filmed the evidence.

Before the identity of the culprit was revealed, the left-leaning daily Libération had this to say: “it shows how news can be twisted for political purposes.” One of Weill-Raynal’s colleagues noted: “his right wing commitment is no secret.” Others remarked that he was controversial because he “’led the campaign against Charles Enderlin,’ accused of faking images in a report on the death of a Palestinian child in 2000.” Dispatch International wrote about this so-called al-Dura affair on January 31 and May 29.

JULIA GORIN: KOSOVO AND CROATIA THE TRIUMPH OF TERRORISM AND FASCISM….SEE NOTE PLEASE

http://www.rightsidenews.com/2013062832790/world/terrorism/2013-lives-up-to-its-name-twin-evils-consummated-in-kosovo-and-croatia-the-triumph-of-terror-and-fascism.html

DID YOU EVER STOP TO THINK THAT WE, THE UNITED STATES, WITH HELP FROM THE UK “CREATED” A JIHADIST STATE TORN FROM SERBIA’S HISTORIC HEARTLAND? WHILE THE WORLD WAS GETTING A GREAT LOOK AT THE “BENEVOLENCE” AND “INTERFAITH TOLERANCE” OF SYRIA, EGYPT, IRAN, LYBIA ETC. THANKS TO THE IDIOCY OF RICHARD HOLBROOKE AND A COMPLIANT AND CULPABLE CLINTON/ALBRIGHT TEAM WE ACTUALLY CREATED A NEW ISLAMIC STATE IN KOSOVO TO ADD TO THE GROWING CALIPHATE…..RSK

Israeli Paper Wants Israel to be 100th Kosovo Recognizer as Kosovo’s Mengele Commemorates Jewish Cemetery, Nazi-unrepentant Croatia Joins E.U. on Monday.

The year 2013 will witness a twin evil—imminently. As Kosovo is finally surrendered to terrorists by the nation it gave birth to (Serbia)—entering the “family of nations”—the E.U. this Monday will welcome the never de-Nazified Croatia as its newest member. It will be the consummation of backwards Western Balkan policy of the 90s, when the fascist remnants of both Kosovo and Croatia managed to recruit not only the world to its corner but also unlikely Jewish cheerleaders. Sadly, the cheering continues—from the pages of Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz and neoconservative Weekly Standard, to the Holocaust Museum in Skokie.

The leftist Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz recently ran an opinion piece arguing that Israel must become the 100th country to recognize Kosovo statehood. For Israel’s own sake, no less.

The article, which asks Israel to lay the foundation for its own demise by supporting a precedent for its own dismemberment by separatists, was a cheap rehashing of ‘90s-born pop platitudes and myths, referencing Milosevic’s “nationalist speech” (it was quite the opposite) and describing the Albanian goal as “the national aspirations of an oppressed people [who] suffered massacres, rapes and ethnic cleansing” – every charge that’s been debunked for more than a decade now, including by Serb-hunting Hague tribunal itself. The article was replete with Pristina-Washington talking points (Pristina is the Kosovo capital): “unique case, modern-dressed girls and alcohol sold freely — no chance of Islamization.” The staff writer, Adar Primor, even cited the old, since-reduced figure of “quarter of a million” dead in the Balkan wars.

JULIA GORIN:SERBIANS BUSES RETURNING FROM A SERBIAN ORTHODOX CELEBRATION ATTACKED IN KOSOVO

http://www.juliagorin.com/wordpress/?p=3040

This year’s Vidovdan in “multi-ethnic,” “democratic,” “minorities-protected,” “mature,” “independent,” “come-a-long-way” Kosovo:

Religious leader: Serbian buses attacked in Kosovo

BELGRADE, Serbia, June 28 (UPI) — Schoolbuses carrying Serbs from a religious celebration in Kosovo were attacked by stone-throwing mobs, witnesses said.

There were at least two incidents, Radio B92 in Belgrade, Serbia, reported. Buses were damaged and a number of people injured, including three children, witnesses said.

The buses were carrying worshippers from a celebration of St. Vitus Day at a shrine near Pristina, the Kosovar capital. St. Vitus, a Sicilian martyred under the Roman Empire, is venerated in Slavic countries.

Sava Janjic, a Serbian Orthodox abbott, posted an account of what he said was the most serious attack on Twitter.

“Albanians are en masse stoning Serb school buses. Five buses have been damaged, there are injuries. Witnesses said that groups of Albanianas waited for Serb buses in ambush, some even followed the buses in their cars,” Janjic said. “What were Kosovo police doing?”

Kosovo declared independence in 2008 and is recognized by more than 100 countries, including the United States. Serbia, however, has withheld recognition of its former territory. [I wonder why! Those obstinate Serbs!]

The country is overwhelmingly ethnic Albanian. [And so they MUST deserve their own country, which is the whole reason they’re attacking Serbs, don’t you know.] Tensions between the Albanian and Serbian communities in Kosovo remain high.