http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/buyers-remorse-for-pro-israel-voters/2012/07/25/gJQAp2VS9W_blog.html I’m quite certain that the two are unrelated but two developments today should give the Obama team heartburn over pro-Israel voters. First, is the Republican Jewish Coalition’s ad (originally set to air next week, but the early release of which was prompted by a New York Times story): Yikes. This is one of several […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-bawer/roger-garaudy-from-stalinist-to-islamist/ estion: when do the media in the Muslim world pay more respectful attention to the death of a famous French philosopher than the French and other Western media do? Answer: when the “philosopher” in question is Roger Garaudy. In Gulf News, Shakir Noori, a writer in Dubai, described himself as “deeply sorrowed” [sic] by […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-greenfield/obama%e2%80%99s-new-islamic-world-order/print/ Posted By Daniel Greenfield On July 25, 2012 @ 12:30 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 5 Comments Three years after Obama appeared in Cairo to praise Islam, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with Mohammed Morsi, the country’s new Islamist president, and urged the army to turn over power to him. In three years […]
Times News
Radical Islam rises in U.S. ally Ethiopia
Ioannis Gatsiounis
Clashes between Islamic protesters and riot police over the weekend in Ethiopia have raised fears that Muslims are becoming increasingly radical in a predominantly Christian country that has been a key U.S. ally in combating terrorism in the Horn of Africa. Read more…
Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz21dJ2n1ps
Khamenei calls U.S., Israel too weak to attack Iran
Ynet News
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
News
Khamenei calls U.S., Israel too weak to attack Iran
Iran’s Supreme Leader Grand Ayatllah Ali Khamenei said Tuesday that tougher economic sanctions on the Islamic Republic will not induce it to withdraw its nuclear program. He added, that the “resistance front” led by the U.S. and Israel continues to weaken and that Iran’s enemies will not dare attack it. Read more…
Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz21dJEq7sB
Obama spending on polls reeks of desperation
The Hill
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Commentary
What’s up with all that polling the Obama camp is doing? Recently the folks over at the Weekly Standard combed through campaign spending disclosure records of the Obama campaign and related committees, discovering that they’ve spent $15 million on polling since the first of the year Read more…
Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz21dJRV1yD
OLYMPIC SILENCE?
Victims of terrorism should be remembered at the London games
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jul/23/olympic-silence/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS
A moment of silence is currently creating a clamor. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is resisting a proposal for Friday’s opening ceremonies in London to remember the 11 Israeli athletes killed in Munich 40 years ago by Palestinian terrorists. The committee should reconsider.
http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2012/07/24/hopeless-but-not-syri-us/?print=1 Over at the new Gatestone Institute, some longstanding friends and I conduct a regular electronic meeting to dissect crisis situations, and let the public read the results after we’re done. There are too many moving parts for any individual to follow, and Syria is a case in point: It resembles one of those Quentin […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/311453/thirty-years-war-michael-rubin
As American diplomats and their international partners prepared to sit down with their Iranian counterparts in Baghdad last May to discuss Iran’s nuclear program, the State Department was aflutter. In conference calls and background briefs, senior diplomats and Obama-administration officials suggested Tehran was on the verge of grasping Obama’s outstretched hand and might agree to deal seriously to end years of crisis.
That the talks would go nowhere was predictable. When Iranian negotiators proposed to hold discussions on May 23, Obama’s team agreed immediately; the White House cared little why the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, had picked that date or venue. Iranian history informs, however: May 23 marked the 30th anniversary of Iran’s liberation of Khorramshahr, its key victory during the Iran–Iraq War. “The pioneering Iranian nation will continue its movement towards greater progress and justice,” Khamenei promised at a victory speech, adding, “The front of tyranny, arrogance, and bullying is moving towards weakness and destruction.”
The nuclear talks were the Islamic Republic’s latest but not its last parry in its battle with the United States. While almost every U.S. administration has sought reconciliation with Tehran, first revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and then Khamenei have conceived of themselves as at war with “the Great Satan.”
Against this backdrop, David Crist’s The Twilight War is valuable. Crist, a historian at the Pentagon and a Marine reserve officer who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, pens the history of the more-than-three-decade “secret war” between the United States and Iran.
Jimmy Carter never expected Iran to define his presidency. A foreign-policy novice, Carter hoped to make his mark on Korea, promising a withdrawal of U.S. forces just days after announcing his run for the Democratic nomination. The Iran situation threw the Carter White House into crisis and exposed factional divisions that would undermine Carter’s response and culminate in the resignation of Cyrus Vance, his secretary of state. While Crist adds little new in his examination of Carter-administration diplomacy — former CIA analyst–turned–Brookings scholar Ken Pollack covered that period well nearly ten years ago in The Persian Puzzle – he is an excellent writer whose narrative is a pleasure to read. He illustrates well how the State Department bubble failed to recognize reality until it was too late.
Without access to Persian sources, he does miss pivotal points, however. “Initially, the students had intended to hold the embassy for just a few hours,” he writes, “but the embassy takeover acquired a life of its own.” But what caused the students to change their minds is important for today: According to his Carter-administration colleagues (whom I interviewed for a book of my own), Gary Sick — the Iran director on the National Security Council — leaked to the Boston Globe that Carter had removed military options from the table. When the captors read that
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/312211/huma-abedin-s-muslim-brotherhood-ties-andrew-c-mccarthy
American policy has tilted pro-sharia: Is Abedin a factor?
Despite mounting evidence of close ties between the Muslim Brotherhood and Huma Abedin, Secretary of State Clinton’s close aide, Republican congressional leaders — particularly Senator John McCain and House Speaker John Boehner — continue to target their ire not at the State Department but at Congresswoman Michele Bachmann.
Rep. Bachmann is one of five House conservatives who have raised concerns about Muslim Brotherhood infiltration of our government. Glenn Beck reported Tuesday that GOP leadership is trying to extort an apology out of Bachmann by threatening to boot her from the House Intelligence Committee if she fails to submit.
That got me to wondering: Any chance Speaker Boehner might take just a couple of minutes out of his busy jihad against Bachmann to focus on how the State Department — during Ms. Abedin’s tenure — has cozied up to Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s chief sharia jurist?
Sheikh Qaradawi is a promoter of jihadist terror. His fatwas endorse terrorist attacks against American personnel in Iraq as well as suicide bombing — by both men and women — against Israel. He is a leading supporter of Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch. He also runs an umbrella organization called the Union for Good (sometimes referred to as the “Union of Good”), which is formally designated a terrorist organization under American law. The Union for Good was behind the “Peace Flotilla” that attempted to break our ally Israel’s blockade of the terrorist organization Hamas (the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch) in 2010.
That’s rather interesting — at least to me, though apparently not to Speaker Boehner — because Huma Abedin’s mother, Saleha, who is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s female division (the “Muslim Sisterhood”), is a major figure in not one but two Union for Good components. The first is the International Islamic Council for Dawa and Relief (IICDR). It is banned in Israel for supporting Hamas under the auspices of the Union for Good. Then there’s the International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child (IICWC) — an organization that Dr. Saleha Abedin has long headed. Dr. Abedin’s IICWC describes itself as part of the IICDR. And wouldn’t you know it, the IICWC charter was written by none other than . . . Sheikh Qaradawi, in conjunction with several self-proclaimed members of the Muslim Brotherhood.
‘Deinstitutionalization’: Mass Murder and Untreated Madness
http://pjmedia.com/blog/deinstitutionalization-mass-murder-and-untreated-madness/?print=1
The network news coverage of the recent shooting rampage in Aurora, Colorado, seemingly asserted that we should be surprised by the background of the alleged killer: Phi Beta Kappa graduate of University of California, Riverside, and until recently, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Colorado medical school. There isn’t any reason to be surprised: there is a very strong relationship between severe mental illness and murder [1], and another strong relationship between mental illness and intelligence.
As my new book points out [2], for centuries the connection between mental illness and violence was considered sufficiently obvious that the legal system provided various ways to hospitalize the severely mentally ill when they first provided clear indications that they were a hazard to themselves or others. Only in the 1960s and 1970s did our society decide that this system was unfair. It then embarked on a policy of “deinstitutionalization.” The idea: standards for long-term, involuntary commitment of the mentally ill should be just a bit less demanding than the standards of proof for criminal conviction [3].
http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2012/07/24/eric-holders-keystone-state-voter-id-shakedown/
Eric Holder’s Keystone State Voter ID Shakedown
The Eric Holder Justice Department has done it again, this time in Pennsylvania. Not content to use Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act to shake down Texas and South Carolina, the DOJ yesterday sent a demand to the Keystone State for stacks of documents regarding Pennsylvania voter ID.
This letter was a highly irregular and purely partisan exercise designed to stoke Obama’s electoral base in Philadelphia. It is also designed to placate the civil rights industry, which has quietly simmered about the lack of enforcement of the Voting Rights Act to help minorities over the last three years. (See, Wade Henderson – Cat Got Your Tongue?)
The demand letter to Pennsylvania was sent pursuant to 42 U.S.C 1974. This law requires election officials to preserve election records for 22 months after an election. It is designed to ensure that no racial discrimination occurred in the conduct of a particular election. For example, poll books from 1966 would have to be kept for 22 months to ensure that both black and white voters who were properly registered were actually allowed to vote.
Like so much with this Justice Department, the partisans have perverted the law and demanded far more than the law allows, so much so that even liberal former DOJ lawyers are surprised.
Note that Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez signed the letter. Normally, when I worked on cases involving 42 U.S.C. 1974, either the trial lawyer or section chief would sign the letter. It may be that Chris Herren, the current section chief, would do neither what the career partisans below him wanted nor what the political gangsters above him wanted. Internal dissent may be afoot, and with good reason.
The letter also demands that Pennsylvania turn over information far beyond what Section 1974 envisions. The letter reads like a discovery request in litigation, which of course it is — it’s just that the litigation hasn’t started yet. In fact, it is almost impossible for DOJ lawyers to write a “J-Memo” without Pennsylvania’s cooperation. That’s another way of saying Pennsylvania is most likely to be sued only if they cooperate with the demand letter.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/when-universalism-threatens-national-loyalty?f=puball
As I stood at a public meeting hand over my chest pledging my loyalty to this republic, I asked myself how many going through this ritual actually care or appreciate the unique character of the United States. So far down a universalist slope have we gone that few objected when a former Mets first baseman, Carlos Delgado, refused to stand for the Star Spangled Banner. Even Superman, the distinctly American comic book character, whose motto was “truth, justice and the American way” has been transmogrified in a 2006 film, mouthing the words “truth, justice and ‘all that stuff’.”
The American character, embracing idiosyncratic national virtues, is under siege through a global dream of common “humanitus.” After all, we are all the same moving inexorably to citizenship of the world. Or are we? Should Superman wear a U.N. badge as he engages his mortal enemy Lex Luther?
Transnationalists from Ann Marie Slaughter to Dean Coe decry nationalism and, by extension, the need for patriotic sacrifice. What they are saying is join the global party by renouncing your American identification. It is not surprising that several Supreme Court justices used foreign precedents to substantiate opinions on national cases. One wonders what a Zimbabwean court can possibly suggest to American justices.
Citizenship, if it has any meaning, cannot be an appeal to abstractions like worldwide camaraderie. It exists in a particularistic phenomenon related to tradition, the Constitution, language, creed, and custom. “We the people” the first three words in the Constitution, do not refer to any people; they refer specifically to the citizens of the United States. The union in the word “united” applies specifically to our history. We transformed the “United States are…” to the “United States is” through the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution and the Civil War. That is not world history; it is American history and it is woven into the fabric of national identification.
