http://spectator.org/archives/2012/06/25/obamas-watergate/print A brazen, unprecedented claim of executive privilege in Fast and Furious. Presidential claims of executive privilege are the haute cuisine of politics. Served in a covered dish, they are mysteries that tantalize, the aromas evoking everything that the mind can conjure. What is the president trying to hide? In Watergate terms, what did the […]
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/25/antarctic_ice_not_melting/ Antarctic ice shelves not melting at all, new field data show Crafty boffins got elephant seals to survey for them By Lewis Page Twenty-year-old models which have suggested serious ice loss in the eastern Antarctic have been compared with reality for the first time – and found to be wrong, so much so that […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/303871 The Obama administration is the Hallmark Cards of Brothers’ Day, having done so much to bring it about: courting Brotherhood satellites in the Middle East from Day One, doing tireless “outreach” to Brotherhood organizations in the U.S. (including “hundreds” of meetings with CAIR by the count of one administration official), and helping the Brothers […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/303878/obama-administration-imperative-egyptian-military-hand-over-power-islamic-supremacist- Comments 9 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is doing her part to help the Muslim Brotherhood implement the Turkey Strategy in Egypt. As I’ve pointed out before, if you want to see what’s going to happen in Egypt, look at Turkey, where the military was Atatürk’s bulwark against what would otherwise be the certainty […]
U.S.-Israel plan to hold Iran, Syria war games
Israel National News
Monday, June 25, 2012
News
U.S.-Israel plan to hold Iran, Syria war games
The United States and Israel are planning war games involving simulated attacks against Iran and Syria. Coincidence or not, the exercises will take place less than a month before elections November 6. Read more…
Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz1ynpTeCUk
EDITORIAL: Obama’s Watergate flashback
EDITORIAL: Obama’s Watergate flashback
The Washington Times | They could not understand the essential balance there must always be in large affairs between cynicism and suspicion on the one hand and faith and trust on the other. A successful politician must, inescapably, be something of a hypocrite, promising all to all, knowing that, if elected, he must inevitably sacrifice the interests of some for others. Read more…
Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz1ynpccxv2
Iraq orders closure of 44 foreign media outlets
MSNBC
Monday, June 25, 2012
News
An Iraqi regulatory body has ordered the closure of 44 media outlets in the country including the BBC and Voice of America in a dispute over broadcast licenses, sources with knowledge of the order. Read more…
Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz1ynpmPfgS
Navy recognizes first woman officer to serve on sub and earn ‘dolphin pin’
Kristina Wong
A Navy lieutenant from Wisconsin on Friday became the first woman to serve on a Navy submarine and earn her “dolphin pin,” a designation of her qualifications to work aboard subs. Read more…
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303734204577466304136240464.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion
THIS IS RATHER MEAN SPIRITED AND MISSES ONE MAJOR ISSUE, NAMELY THE LENGTH AND HARSHNESS OF THE SENTENCE WHILE OTHER FAR MORE DANGEROUS SPIES HAVE WALKED FREE. HOWEVER, POLLARD’S SPYING WAS INDEFENSIBLE AND INEXCUSABLE AND FOR ME HE IS NOT A HERO. REMEMBER THAT MANY SPIES FOR THE SOVIET UNION ALSO SPIED FOR WHAT WAS THEN AN ALLY NATION. EFFORTS TO MAKE HIM AN ISRAELI NATIONAL HERO ARE WRONG, AND EFFORTS TO PIN HIS RELEASE TO IMPLEMENTING A TWO STATE SOLUTION ARE PIG HEADED AND COUNTERPRODUCTIVE……RSK
The Mendacious Movement to Free a Convicted Spy
Pretending that Jonathan Pollard is a martyr makes a mockery of Israel.
“But the Israeli peace camp not only wants the president to force Israel out of the territories and to shrink the Jewish stake in Jerusalem. It also wants Mr. Obama to cleanse Zion of the shame of spying on its patron and its single solitary true friend in the world. Well, he may just do that—not now, not yet, but after the elections if he wins them—allowing Shimon Peres the favor of bringing home the kosher bacon. And then Mr. Obama would be in a position to demand Israeli withdrawal to the fatuous 1949 lines, borders that Mr. Peres sees as appropriate for the “new Middle East” of his feverish imagination.”
There is no end in sight for the campaign to persuade President Obama to let convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard go free. It is also almost impossible to recall the beginnings of this campaign. But it started with his life sentence. All that one can say is that the agitation, a phobic mixture of fantasies of Pollard’s innocence and imaginings of anti-Semitic motives on the part of an indeterminate officialdom, has been relentless—sometimes more noisy, sometimes less, but relentless.
All kinds of comparisons are being made. One is to the great democrat, Natan Sharansky, who was kept in the Siberian gulag for 13 years and released because there was no evidence at all of his espionage against the Soviet Union. His dignified supporters, both Jewish and non-Jewish, were not hysterics, and the struggle for this particular “prisoner of Zion” was the cutting edge of the whole “let my people go” campaign that ultimately brought a million Jews from their Russian internment to Israel. One more factor: Ronald Reagan made Mr. Sharansky his own cause, like bringing down the wall of shame in Berlin.
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/06/25/alice-walker-and-the-ghost-of-irving-howe/
Alice Walker and the Ghost of Irving Howe
“For Howe, the substitution of Alice Walker for John Keats epitomized the debasement of public education.”
The voice of Irving Howe is little heard these days in the corridors of university English departments or the pages of the literary journals. This would not have been a great surprise to him. After he gave a series of lectures in Seattle in 1977 entitled “Modern Jewish Literature,” the University of Washington Press (and I) tried to persuade him to publish them as a book. But he doggedly resisted, claiming there was no point in publishing a book that wasn’t really a book. Finally, he put an end to our efforts by writing an imaginary review of an imaginary book called A Few Jewish Voices, signed by the imaginary critic “Northrop Kazin.” It reads as follows:
This very thin collection of essays by a writer whose most recent book [World of Our Fathers] is anything but thin, leaves one with a mild sense of depression….There is little to be said against the individual pieces, about as little as there is to be said for the book as a whole….what we have here, in short, is a non-book, even if a rather good one….We all know the temptation of writers who achieve a bit of fame to feel that every word they have ever put to print must be immortalized in books….But one would have thought that a man of Mr. Howe’s good sense would have resisted the temptation.
This is full of Howe’s ineffable charm, moral poise, and security of values, all of which the present literary world sadly lacks.
Take, for example, the recent blast of fire and vitriol emanating from Alice Walker. Long a cheerleader for the genocidal Hamas organization, she decided to broaden her anti-Israel activity by publicly refusing to have her works translated into Hebrew by an Israeli publisher (who denies having made the offer). She eschews Hebrew altogether because she believes that Israel is a racist society, worse than the segregated Old South, worse than apartheid South Africa, a place akin to Gehenna and the pit of hell. She seems unaware that the Puritans once dreamed of establishing Hebrew as America’s national language, and that Harvard and Yale once required its study. Also, emulation often breeds competition: since Walker has always emulated novelist Toni Morrison in all things (bad writing included), she had to do something that would be similar to, yet more spectacular than, Morrison’s refusal to accept royalties from sales in Israel; and so she decided to prohibit Hebrew translation of her work altogether. She has not yet come up with an expression of Holocaust envy to equal Morrison’s spiteful dedication of Beloved to the memory of “Sixty Million or More.” (How dare the Jews, with their paltry six million dead, monopolize all that beautiful Holocaust suffering in which other groups would very much like to share?)
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/06/25/a-former-prisoner-of-zion-speaks/print/
In his new English language memoir titled “Unbroken Spirit: A Heroic Story of Faith, Courage and Survival” (Gefen Publishing), internationally renowned former Soviet refusenik, Rabbi Yosef Mendelevitch, takes his readers on a compelling trajectory of his life in this deeply poignant narrative. As a young boy growing up as an atheist in the Stalinist era, Rabbi Mendelevitch soon embarked on a journey to his Jewish heritage and emerged as a dynamic leader in the Jewish underground movement in the former Soviet Union. After 11 grueling years in the Gulag of Siberian forced labor camps, his dream was realized when he immigrated to Israel in 1981. Today, he is a noted Orthodox educator in the religious Zionist movement. Rabbi Mendelevitch was recently on a book tour in the United States and took time out of his schedule for this interview.
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/06/25/fast-and-furious-ii-syria-edition/print/
“As criminal as the Obama Administration’s behavior was in Fast and Furious, its actions in Libya and Syria are even more disturbing, because it is not merely arming profiteering criminals, but the sworn enemies of America and the free world.”
Last week the New York Times reported that the CIA was helping direct guns, rocket-propelled grenades and anti-tank weapons bought by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and smuggled into Syria by the Muslim Brotherhood. The article makes mention of keeping the weapons out of the hands of Al-Qaeda, but there is no mention of keeping it out of the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood.
There is every reason to think that the Obama Administration would not have any problem with arming the Muslim Brotherhood. Officials from the National Security Council have met with Muslim Brotherhood officials and the Syrian National Council, which has Washington’s blessing, is dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Brotherhood’s revolution in Egypt had a secular façade in the form of Mohammed El-Baradei, which it needed only long enough to gain Western support, before taking power directly. The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, which dominates the SNC more heavily than the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood dominated the opposition to Mubarak, has its own “moderate” patsy in the form of Abdulbaset Sieda.
Burhan Ghalioun, the last SNC patsy, whose presence was supposed to demonstrate that the Syrian National Council was a moderate group, is gone. Abdulbaset Sieda’s role is to imply that the SNC has Kurdish backing, which it does not, because it is a creature of the Muslim Brotherhood and Turkey, which is in the business of repressing Kurds. The Brotherhood even went so far as to block the election of a Christian SNC leader, because it was unwilling to allow a non-Muslim to rule over Muslims; even for the sake of its long term goals.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304765304577482921642544942.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond
GIVEN THE MINDSET OF THE AMERICAN JOURNALISTS, MOST OF THEM WOULD PROBABLY LIE AS HANS VON KALTENBORN AND WILLIAM DURANTY DID IN THE 30S….RSK
“Unusually Good Forecast for Iran Nuclear Talks”—Christian Science Monitor, May 22
“‘Detailed,’ ‘Engaged’ Iran Nuclear Talks Go to Second Day”—Reuters, May 24
“Negotiations with Iran Conclude Fruitlessly”—New York Times, May 24
“Fresh Iran Nuclear Talks Set for Moscow”—AlJazeera.net, May 25
“Iran Nuclear Talks in Moscow End ‘Without Breakthrough'”—BBC.co.uk, June 20
“Iran Blames World Powers’ ‘Enmity’ and ‘Dishonesty’ for No Progress in Moscow Nuclear Talks”—Associated Press, June 21
Ten years ago this summer, an Iranian dissident first warned the world about efforts by the mullahs to build a nuclear weapon. Since 2002, headlines have touted talks and possible inspections, with no results other than an Iran closer to a bomb. President Obama, who vows not to let Iran go nuclear, hopes economic sanctions will work, as 44 senators have urged him to drop the pretense of negotiations.
The case of Iran raises novel questions about how open societies should deal with risks from closed societies.
Iranian leaders have always claimed the right to build nuclear weapons and have been clear about their intent. In 2005, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told an Iranian student group: “Many who are disappointed in the struggle between the Islamic world and the infidels have tried to spread the blame. They say it is not possible to have a world without the United States and Zionism. But you know this is a possible goal.”
