http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324374004578219640180937224.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion The intelligence service made famous by James Bond used to be ruthless in pursuit of British interests. These days, it seems to have succumbed to political correctness. Easily the most pervasive and dangerous of all the modern conspiracy theories is the one claiming that President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair […]
http://pjmedia.com/blog/leftism-and-the-dangers-of-modernity/ Humans have been inventing things that save and improve lives for a while, but we now realize these items of modernity can also hurt and kill us, and they therefore need to be controlled. Stuff like guns, subways, large sodas, and supermodels. Two people were murdered by subway trains in New York City recently, […]
http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-boxthorn-tree/
THE PERFECT LITERARY STORM….A BRILLIANT ISRAELI WRITER AND COMMENTATOR REVIEWS A BOOK BY A BRILLIANT CANADIA ESSAYIST AND COMMENTATOR……RSK
Some of the most eloquent and impassioned pro-Israeli essays in existence are to be found in The Boxthorn Tree, David Solway’s new collection. Solway — who somehow also manages to write erudite essays on a wide variety of other topics, as well as poetry — shows a masterful conversance with Israel’s history and current dilemmas, along with a sweeping command of the issues facing the Jewish people in general in a world that retains much of its age-old inimicality toward them.
This collection, which along with polemical essays offers book reviews, accounts-settlings with individual intellectual opponents, parodies, and fables, is written throughout in a dazzlingly urbane, virtuosic, sparkling prose that harks back to earlier literary tradition while remaining firmly attuned to our own morally compromised era. Much of the book is, indeed, a searing indictment of the West’s often cynical and defamatory treatment of Israel, even as it stands on the “frontline…in the war against militant Islam” and “raises…the torch of both dignity and survival.”
One by one Solway takes on the standing calumnies that pervade most of today’s media coverage of the Jewish state: that it is an “occupier” building “illegal settlements” (handily demolished with a historical and juridical overview in “Occupied Israel”); that its security fence is a cruel monstrosity (playfully and brilliantly refuted in “Loving the Wall” and “A Short Meditation on Walls”); that it is the party responsible for derailing the peace process (summarily dispatched in “Is Peace Possible in the Middle East?”); and — most absurd of all — that it is the Middle Eastern country that mistreats Christians (a brazen inversion of the truth definitively trounced in “Israel’s Oppressive Treatment of Christians?”).
http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/01/advice_on_the_second_amendment.html Pravda, Guns & America (AT, Jan. 11) quoted a Russian who advises: Americans: Never Give Up Your Guns, citing the bloody and tragic result of the Communists’ confiscation of arms after they came to power in 1917. The quotation has been echoing around the Internet, so here are more ringing defenses of the importance […]
—http://www.wnd.com/2013/01/your-tax-money-pays-to-expand-shariah-economies/ Rachel Ehrenfeld, director of the Economic Warfare Institute (EWI), is author of “Funding Evil- How Terrorism is financed – and How to Stop It.” Under Obama’s administration, the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, bears little resemblance to the international aid agency that President John F. Kennedy initiated on Nov. 3, 1961. USAID’s […]
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
After years of languishing under the duck boots of gun owners, gun control advocates are dusting off their iPads and heading into the fray. Their renewed excitement has as much to do with the dead kids of Newtown as it does with the prospect of four years of a lame duck leftist who asserts imperial executive authority and uses the Constitution to clean up coffee spills in the Oval Office.
Taking on the NRA with a gun ban, like taking on pro-Israel voters by nominating a Defense Secretary and CIA Director who prefer that Israel not exist, is part of a larger program of wiping out the political influence of the non-left. And the 2nd Amendment haters who were forced to sit at the back of the big government bus so that senators could get elected in the South are now feeling optimistic about their chances of killing another piece of the living Constitution.
The campaign is cheesily predictable. The designated victims are cutting commercials and making public appearances, led by Gabby Giffords, whose great achievement in life is being a famous woman who got shot in the head, making her the Chief of the Victims, for the moment. Sure a Republican judge was killed in that same shooting, but victimhood, like race, is an exclusive club. Just ask RGIII or all the mothers of dead soldiers who weren’t interested in hugging Hugo Chavez.
The designated victim, like the ancient saint, is a martyr to a cause. And with the left, the cause is invariably really big government. The suffering of the saintly victims is monetized by the cause as unquestionable moral authority. The victims are designated, made famous and milked for their victimhood, and then the victimhood is bottled into white jars and shipped to Washington D.C.
http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2375/The-Fox-Effect-Pt-3.aspx
http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2373/The-Fox-Effect-Pt-1.aspx
http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2374/The-Fox-Effect-Pt-2.aspx
IS THE FOX GUARDING THE CHICKEN HOUSE?….RSK
Saudi journalist Hazma Kashgari (photo above) has spent almost the entire past year in a Saudi prison — the Islamic Gulag — for tweeting an imaginary conversation with Mohammed. King Abdullah — the man Barack Obama bowed to, the man George W. Bush kissed and held hands with, and the man whose nephew, Prince Talal bin Alwaleed, is a major stock-holder in Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. — put him there. Kashgari’s story, and treatment of his story at Fox and elsewhere, is below.
From the vault:
1) Blog post, February 14, 2012: “(Prince Talal’s) Fox News AWOL on (Prince Talal’s) Twitter Story”
Have you heard about Hazma Kashgari, the Saudi blogger who tweeted an imaginary conversation with Mohammed, drew so many (tens of thousands) angry comments from his co-religionists and co-kingdomists that he deleted his tweets, fled the country and made for New Zealand to seek asylum but was arrested in Malaysia and extradited back to Saudi A where he now faces charges on the capital crime of “blasphemy”?
Not if you watch fair and balanced Fox News, you haven’t. I have searched the site but cannot find any stories about Kashgari. (You try.)
You don’t suppose the fact that Saudi dictatorship-family-member Talal bin Alwaleed owns the largest non-Murdoch stake in Fox News (7 percent) and a new stake in Twitter (almost 4 percent) has anything to do with that, do you?
2) Syndicated column, February 16, 2012: “Did Saudi Prince Buy Fox’s Silence?”
Have you heard about the 23-year-old Saudi journalist who tweeted an imaginary conversation with Muhammad? It went something like this: He loved Muhammad, he hated Muhammad, he couldn’t understand Muhammad, he wasn’t going to pray for Muhammad. If this isn’t exactly a disquisition on faith and doubt a la “The Brothers Karamazov,” remember, we’re just talking Twitter.
If you haven’t heard of this young man, whose name is Hamza Kashgari, it could be because you’re watching too much Fox News. As of this writing, almost a week after the Kashgari story broke, I haven’t found a single story about it at the Fox News website. (You try: www.foxnews.com.) Meanwhile, CBS, NBC, ABC, MSNBC and CNN have all reported the Kashgari story, clueing in their viewers on how far totalitarian Islam, Saudi style, will go to exert its control over the human spirit. But not Fox.
Say — you don’t suppose the fact that Prince Alwaleed bin Talal owns the second-largest block of stock (7 percent) in News Corp., Fox News’ parent company, not to mention a new $300 million stake in Twitter (almost 4 percent), has anything to do with Fox’s silence on this Saudi black eye of a story? After all, it was Saudi dictator King Abdullah — Alwaleed’s uncle — whom press accounts credit with ordering the tweeting journalist’s hot pursuit and imprisonment. And it is Saudi Arabia’s adherence to Islamic limits on free speech that is driving Kashgari’s ordeal.
Maybe it has become institutional Fox thinking to let such news slide for fear of offending the Saudi prince — or for fear of risking the kind of exposure that might remind viewers of Fox’s connections to Saudi regime interests via Alwaleed. ….
3) Blog post, February 25, 2012: “The Kashgari Story from Right and Left”
Time and space: A decade after fatal mission, film covers Israeli astronaut’s legacy
Maxine Dovere/JNS.org
DR. ALEX GROBMAN IS THE HISTORICAL CONSULTANT FOR THE FILM…..
Caption: The late Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon. Credit: NASA. Dan Cohen describes Ilan Ramon, the first and only Israeli astronaut, as “a man used to rising to the occasion.”
On Jan. 31 at 9 p.m., Space Shuttle Columbia: Mission of Hope—a documentary directed by Cohen—will air on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) to coincide with the 10th anniversary of Ramon’s death.
Israel sent one of its best on NASA’s fatal Columbia mission: Israel Air Force (IAF) Colonel Ramon was 46, an engineer (electronics and computers), a pilot, married and the father of four. As a combat pilot, he was rumored to have been involved in the 1981 raid on the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak. He trained for Columbia at Houston’s Johnson Space Center. Officially designated as a payload specialist, Ramon was described by Commander Mike Anderson as “fully integrated with the crew.”
Ramon, one of the mission’s seven casualties, is the only non-American to receive the United States Congressional Space Medal of Honor (awarded posthumously). He was chosen to be a NASA astronaut in 1997. By 1998, he had begun a rigorous, five-year training program.
“From the moment he arrived in Houston until he lifted off, Ramon went through a transformational change. He came to understand who he was and what he represented,” Cohen told JNS.org.
Ramon considered himself a representative of all Jews and all Israelis. Although a secular Jew, as the first Israeli astronaut he recognized the importance of maintaining Jewish identity and unity.
“I am the son of a Holocaust survivor,” he once told Israel Radio. “I carry on the suffering of the Holocaust generation, proof that despite all the horror they went through, we’re going forward.” Ramon asked Mission Commander Rick Husband to provide kosher meals on board Columbia and received rabbinical guidance for Shabbat observance in space.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/01/21/130121fa_fact_remnick#ixzz2Hvb4hvQq At a makeshift theatre in the port of Tel Aviv, hundreds of young immigrants from Melbourne, the Five Towns, and other points in the Anglophone diaspora gathered recently to hear from the newest phenomenon in Israeli politics, Naftali Bennett. A forty-year-old settlement leader, software entrepreneur, and ex-Army commando, Bennett promises to build a sturdy […]
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3539/cyprus-russia Cypriot banks cater almost exclusively to Russian oligarchs; as a consequence, tiny Cyprus is Russia’s largest foreign investor. The impending fall of the Assad regime in Syria is forcing Russian President Vladimir Putin to look for an alternative to Tartus [for Russia’s naval base] – leaving him with only one option: Cyprus. Cyprus’s banks […]
