http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/09/killing_the_messenger_obamas_way.html What do CNN, The Wall Street Journal, Bibi Netanyahu, a Lebanese website, and Mitt Romney all have in common? They told some truths inconvenient for President Barack Obama. They are now enemies of hope, enemies of change. They are a big pain in the rear for the man who “leads from the rear” by […]
http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/future-373028-belong-obama.html One of the reasons why Barack Obama is regarded as the greatest orator of our age is that he’s always banging on about some other age yet to come – e.g., the Future! A future of whose contours he is remarkably certain and boundlessly confident: The future will belong to nations that invest in […]
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/09/28/Hillary-Says-Goodbye-to-2016-Chances
It remains unclear whether President Barack Obama’s lies about attacks on U.S. embassies will cost him re-election. One thing is certain, however: whatever ambitions Secretary of State Hillary Clinton once held to run for president in 2016 have been damaged beyond repair. Obama was literally asleep when the proverbial “3 a.m. call” came, but Clinton–who bears responsibility for embassy security–was asleep on the job for weeks.
Clinton’s response–“How could this happen in a country we helped liberate, in a city we helped save from destruction?–bears the same naïveté for which she once mocked her Democratic rival in debates and campaign commercials. Both Obama and Clinton suffer the same self-delusion: that the world loves Democrats and hates Republicans, that it loves flower children and hates cowboys. Benghazi is a wake-up call they should not have needed–not after the first 9/11, not after Bill Clinton’s “law enforcement” approach to terror failed.
In that sense, Hillary Clinton has failed her first test as a potential commander-in-chief–just as Obama has failed before. The success of the Osama bin Laden raid will be the enduring legacy of his administration–but the Ft. Hood shootings, the underwear bomber (and its associated intelligence failures), and now the 9/11/12 attacks are symptoms of an administration ideologically consumed with avoiding the reality of radical Islam.
Hillary Clinton has not only carried out the worst of Obama’s foreign and national security policies–she has done so enthusiastically, shouting at Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for 45 minutes in 2010, for instance. Clinton’s deputy, UN Ambassador Susan Rice, has set new lows in both dishonesty and absenteeism.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/09/28/41-Million-Tea-Party-Supporters-Set-to-Vote The Tea Party is regularly ridiculed and declared “dead” by the mainstream press and their elitist allies in Washington and Hollywood. Not surprisingly, when Tea Partiers show up and rally by the thousands, they get all but ignored, while 30 Occupy Wall Street crazies in masks will always get wall-to-wall coverage and admiration. TV […]
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2012/09/28/Protests-Embassies-Around-World-Continue
We know that the mainstream media is in the tank for President Obama. It took them two full weeks to turn their attention to the inconsistencies in the Obama administration’s Libya cover story. So it’s no surprise to find that they’re not covering continuing turmoil in the Muslim world. At all.
Even as the media focuses on whether Mitt Romney wants to roll down windows on airplanes, protests continue outside our embassies around the globe. As Jim Geraghty points out, hundreds of Thai Muslims are massed around our embassy in Bangkok, Thailand; Bangladesh’s police reported that they had picked up a university professor for planning an attack on our embassy in Dhaka; hundreds more Muslims are massing in Calcutta, India, breaking through barricades and trying to break into our embassy; a 200-vehicle convoy of Muslim radicals rabbleroused near the US embassy in Manila, Philippines.
The Obama administration’s sympathies for Muslims around the globe in their war on anti-Islam YouTube videos hasn’t quelled their rage, apparently. Obama can speak over and over again at the UN, and it won’t quell their rage. Until he presents moral clarity and a full-throated defense of free speech rather than giving lip service to the “prophet of Islam,” this nonsense will continue.
http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2251/CIA-Director-Petraeus-Politicizing-the-Intelligence-Updated.aspx The great Robert Conquest, whose work provides one of the windows into my forthcoming book American Betrayal, put it so elegantly: “Not even high intelligence and a senstive spirit are of any help once the facts of a situation are deduced from a political theory and not vice versa.” In a national security context, […]
Part two of Course 2: “Origins of Zionism” is now available.
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Part 2: “Struggle to Return” chronicles the Jewish fight for freedom in the Land of Israel long after the destruction of the Second Temple, as well as the efforts of Jews in the Diaspora to return to the Land despite hardship and persecution.
As poet and philosopher Yehuda Halevi wrote in what is perhaps the most famous of all medieval poems:
“My heart is in the East and I am at the ends of the West … it would be easy for me to leave behind all the good things of Spain; it would be glorious to see the dust of the ruined shrine.”
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Gentlemen, history cyclically reappears
http://sarahhonig.com/2012/09/28/gentlemen-history-cyclically-reappears/
The entire country mourned the passing of iconic songwriter Haim Hefer on this new year’s second day. We were awash in a deluge of nostalgia, which was only fitting, bearing in mind that Hefer was a master of nostalgia. His ability to home in and seize on the singular sentiment of the era proved the hallmark of his prolific output.
And so in 1948, as the Palmach achieved its greatest feats but was already threatened with dismantlement by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, Hefer wrote a somewhat premature self-lamenting eulogy for the Hagana’s elite strike force. I translated its opening stanza:
Gentlemen, history cyclically reappears.
Nothing is forgotten, nothing disappears.
We’ll yet remember how under a lead barrage,
The Palmach in Syria did march
Hefer tugged hard at the Palmach stalwarts’ heartstrings by recalling its earliest campaigns, like the summer of 1941 missions on behalf of the Allies to prepare for Operation Exporter – the assault on the Levant’s Vichy French forces. (It was then, while capturing strategic bridges, that Moshe Dayan lost his eye).
But Hefer’s observations on the repetitive nature of history apply far more broadly than just to the specifics he lists in his rhyming elegiac. Wherever we turn, we seem to encounter daily reminders that indeed “history cyclically reappears.” So it was on the fifth day of this new year.
Heavily armed terrorists opened fire on Israeli soldiers at the border with Sinai. Such naked aggression in itself was sure to excite no condemnation from pompous pontificators overseas, to say nothing of even generating plain press coverage.
No one abroad paid attention, most likely because no one cared that a 20-year-old corporal, Netanel Yahalomi, was slain by a bullet to the head and that another trooper was wounded. World opinion’s capacity to tolerate the cold-blooded murder of Israelis knows no bounds.
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=2613 The late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a former United States ambassador to the United Nations, once said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” That those words even needed uttering was an indication of how convoluted the application of free speech was growing a few decades ago. But Moynihan […]
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=286388
The most shocking result is related to willingness to [e]migrate… The results also show that 44% of young Palestinians are willing to [e]migrate if given the opportunity.
– Poll #28, Center for Development Studies, Bir Zeit University, September 20, 2006
There has been much talk in Palestine about emigration, especially among the young people…This is being done in search of a better life abroad. Many… rush to the gates of the embassies and consulates of the Western nations with requests for visas in order to reside permanently in those countries.
– Muhammad Ahmad Hussein, mufti of the Palestinian Authority, in an anti-emigration fatwa, 2007
In Palestine, the salaries are like in Somalia and the prices are like Paris.
– Palestinian protester – quoted in The New York Times, September 10, 2012
In my column last week, I began responding to the deluge of queries and critiques sent in by hundreds of readers as talkbacks to The Jerusalem Post website, to my Facebook page and to my email, regarding my proposal for a humanitarian approach to the Palestinian problem, to replace the failed political paradigm with its focus on a two-state-solution (TSS).
Readers will recall
Readers will recall that the proposed humanitarian approach comprised a policy initiative with three integrative and interactive components:
• Abolition of UNRWA (the anomalous organization dealing with the Palestinian refugees), in its current form, and bringing the treatment of Palestinian refugees in line with global norms, which would dramatically diminish the scope of the problem – from about 5,000,000 to under 50,000;
• A strategic diplomatic offensive aimed at terminating the ethnic discrimination against Palestinians in Arab states and exerting pressure on Arab governments to allow them to acquire citizenship of the countries of their long-standing residence;
• Provision of generous relocation grants directly to Palestinian family heads/breadwinners in Judea/Samaria (and later, Gaza) to facilitate their permanent emigration to third-party countries where they can build better lives for themselves/their families.
Points made so far
Clearly the third component is the most contentious and it is hardly surprising that it generated the greatest controversy.
In responding to issues raised by this controversy the following explanations/clarifications were made and should be borne in mind:
• The implementation of the initiative is not contingent on reaching agreement with any Arab government/ collective, only with individual Palestinians seeking to enhance their wellbeing. As such it is a policy that – given the appropriate political will/skill – can be launched unilaterally by Israel.
• The envisaged grants per family unit would amount to almost two centuries (!) of current GDP per capita in the Palestinian- administered territories (equivalent to offering about $6 million to Israelis or almost $10m. to US citizens). If implementation was spread over 15 to 20 years, Israel – with its current GDP of a quarter-trillion dollars – could bear most of the cost itself, without the burden becoming unbearably onerous.
• The grants would make recipients eligible to be residents in a range of potential host countries that would benefit from a considerable capital inflow from absorbing the newcomers (about $1 billion per 5,000 families), who would not arrive as destitute refugees, but as relatively well-off immigrants by local standards.
Feasibility: Facts & figures
Numerous naysayers dismissed the proposal, asserting – without any corroborating evidence – that the Palestinians would not accept the offers of relocation grants. There is little to substantiate such pessimism.
Indeed, there is a plethora of persistent evidence – both anecdotal and statistical – that suggests precisely the opposite.
For example, a poll conducted in late 2004 by the reputable Israeli institute Maagar Mohot, in collaboration with the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion, with a random sample, representative of the adult (17 and above) Arab population in Judea/Samaria, found that in answer to the question: “What would induce you to emigrate permanently?”: Only 15% stated that nothing would induce them to emigrate permanently; while over 70% specified one or more material factors that would, such as substantial financial compensation; guarantee of a good job abroad; and a high standard of housing.
Subsequent polls by various Palestinian institutes confirmed a widespread desire to emigrate – even in the absence of specific economic inducements – fueled by a pervasive sense of pessimism and dissatisfaction with the performance of the Palestinian regime.
For example, two years later, a poll by Bir Zeit University’s Development Studies Center found: “The most shocking result is related to willingness to immigrate [read “emigrate” – M.S.]. Overall, 32.4% of respondents say they are willing to [e]migrate compared with approximately 19% during the last few years (a 13-point increase). The results also show that 44% of young Palestinians are willing to [e]migrate if given the opportunity.”
The humanitarian approach would give them precisely such an opportunity.
Feasibility: Facts & figures (cont.)
Commenting on this result of the Bir Zeit University survey, pollster Nader Said, who monitored emigration attitudes for over a decade, stated that the proportion of Palestinians willing to relocate once hovered just below 20 percent. When that figure jumped to almost one-third in the aforementioned poll, Said admitted he was shocked.
Even more disturbing for him was that it climbed to 44% among Palestinians in their 20s and 30s, while among young males, it soared to over 50%.
Later surveys – up to the current year – by bodies such as An-Najah University’s Center for Opinion Polls and Survey Studies, and the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, show persistently that, overall, 30% of the respondents (and up to 45% in Gaza) are considering emigrating.
The significance of this figure is far greater than would appear at first sight.
