http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.1685/pub_detail.asp President Says Calls Waterboarding ‘Torture’ [ABC] Israel has refused to reassure President Barack Obama that it would warn him in advance of any pre-emptive strike on Iran’s nuclear capabilities [TELEGRPAH] Deadlocked deficit panel weighs Plan B [WT] UK: Historic Army regiments may be sacrificed in budget cuts [TELEGRAPH] Iran on Nuclear Threshold [JED BABBIN] […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2011/11/14/inside-occupy-los-angeles-a-photo-essay/
It was a bizarre juxtaposition. This Monday, I found myself in downtown Los Angeles while my wife, an Israeli green card holder, took her test for citizenship. “It is a privilege to become a citizen of this country,” she told me before heading into the immigration office. Across the street, hundreds of American citizens protested American capitalism at the Occupy Los Angeles protests. Their tent city stretched for blocks. Fortunately for me, I now had a couple of hours to kill and a camera in my car. Thus began my journey into the heart of moral and intellectual vapidity.
http://frontpagemag.com/2011/11/14/how-civilizations-die/
How Civilizations Die
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is David P. Goldman, the author of the new book, How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying, Too), which Regnery brought out this fall. After 9/11, Goldman began writing weekly essays at Asia Times Online under the byline “Spengler.” At the time he directed a research group at Credit Suisse, and afterward ran fixed income research for Bank of America. After joining the masthead of First Things magazine early in 2009, he revealed his identity and devoted himself to writing, mainly on politics and strategy, but also publishing essays on religion, classical music, literature and mathematics. He left First Things early in 2011 to write his book.
FP: David P. Goldman, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Let’s begin with what inspired you to write this book.
Goldman: Thanks Jamie.
It was 9/11 and the aftermath. I’m an old Cold Warrior; I consulted for Norman A. Bailey, the head of planning at NSC in the first Reagan administration. We were playing a deadly global chess game with a fairly rational opponent; when the Russians knew they were beaten, they caved.
Radical Islam is a different animal. Never in history have so many people committed suicide in order to kill large numbers of innocent people. And not since classical antiquity have so many cultures willed themselves out of existence by failing to have children. Countries and individuals who habitually destroy themselves to inflict harm on others have no rational self-interest. You cannot negotiate with them. Our world has a different and terrible set of rules, and policy has to change appropriately.
All-American Muslim: A Programmed Deception Posted By Daniel Greenfield
http://frontpagemag.com/2011/11/14/all-american-muslim-a-programmed-deception/print/
Ten years after the worst terrorist attack in American history, the Muslim terrorist is almost entirely absent from movies and television shows. He will show up on the evening news, when there’s no way around it, but when it comes to entertainment, the American TV viewer is fed a steady diet of movies and shows featuring positive depictions of Muslims. And that’s not just liberal bias at work.
I have written about Unity Productions in the past and its pernicious PBS propaganda machine, and another UPF project is MOST (Muslims on Screen and Television) which partners with a number of American useful idiot groups to promote positive depictions of Muslims on television. Another force working toward promoting Muslim propaganda on television is the Muslim Public Affairs Council’s Hollywood bureau, which helped reshape 24 from a show concentrating on the War on Terror into Muslim propaganda. MPAC began life as a Muslim Brotherhood project. Its attempts to control American television programming are in line with the Brotherhood’s mission.
Seen against that backdrop, All-American Muslim, the new unreality show meant to promote the myth that Muslims are just another minority fully integrated into America with the same goals and dreams as the rest of us, is part of a larger agenda. The one that gave us Aliens in America and HBO’s Koran by Heart.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/11/12/europe-s-financial-crisis-is-headed-to-america.html
As an author who has just published a book on the crisis of Western civilization, I couldn’t really have asked for more: simultaneous crises in Athens and Rome, the cradles of the West’s law, languages, politics, and philosophy.
Yet most Americans are baffled by the ongoing economic pandemonium in the European Union. For them, places like Greece and Italy are primarily tourist destinations they’ll visit at most once. The finer points of Mediterranean politics leave them cold, except insofar as they’re funny. After all, who could resist the opera-buffa character of Silvio “Bunga-Bunga” Berlusconi?
But only a few weirdos really feel their pulses quicken when they hear news like: the new Greek prime minister is a former central banker called Papademos! Ever tried to explain to a New Yorker the finer points of Slovakian coalition politics? I have. He almost needed an adrenaline shot to come out of the coma.
http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2011/11/grover_norquist_and_the_iran_lobby.html
A report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) released this week shows that Iran has made considerable progress in its nuclear weapons program. This alarming move toward a deliverable nuclear capability also demonstrates the dangerous consequences of the efforts-from 2007 through at least 2010-by a group of Washington anti-Israel activists and lobbyists who went to bat for the Islamic Republic through an organization known as the Campaign for a New American Policy for Iran (CNAPI).
This report is about the ways that Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) supported CNAPI activities, through support for a second organization, the American Conservative Defense Alliance (ACDA), a founder and leader of the CNAPI campaign. The policies for which CNAPI lobbied became the do-nothing Iranian policies of the Obama campaign in 2008 and of the Obama administration to the present day: no support for the Iranian Green movement and Iranian democracy activists, few or no economic sanctions, and no military option. And advocacy for unconditional negotiations, as Obama had advocated during the 2008 campaign.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204358004577030131740812396.html?mod=WSJ_hp_mostpop_read
Elusive Justice: The Search for Nazi War Criminals
Tuesday, Nov. 15, 9-11 p.m. EST on PBS, whose dates and times vary; check local listings.
With every passing year, every new model of portentous drivel about the Nazi era rolled out by the film industry—”The Reader,” about the travails of a concentration camp guard, comes to mind—the more indispensable the facts of history become. The clearer it is, too, how flimsy these film fantasies are as vehicles for drama, compared with that history. The latest reminder of this truth comes with a PBS documentary extraordinary in its detail and revelatory power. It’s title, “Elusive Justice: The Search for Nazi War Criminals,” may be informative, but it’s far from adequate for a work that yields so many surprises, the greatest of which is its freshness. Moving in unexpected directions at every turn, Jonathan Silvers’s film averts the burden of predictability—no small accomplishment for work on so familiar a theme.
The Nuremberg trials and their drama are familiar enough to the world, but not the face and the work of the 27-year-old American Army lawyer and investigator Benjamin Ferencz, charged with the task of collecting evidence for the Nuremberg prosecutions. The terrors of entering the just-liberated camps with their hellish scenes—the film provides striking footage, more extensive than the usual documentary clips, of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower doing just that, with Gen. Omar Bradley just behind him—caused him, he tells the filmmakers, to create a self-defense mechanism. The whole scene wasn’t real, he told himself—it was “just a case,” one of many to get through, in camp after camp. He would become chief prosecutor of a special German unit, the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units operating on the Eastern front. He found the report of their daily accomplishments, which Germans meticulously recorded—a typical page of which is shown on screen, detailing how many Jewish children were killed, how many men and women had been murdered on a particular date. He counted. “When I got to over a million I stopped counting.”
http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/ http://www.compassdirect.org/english/country/nigeria/article_123074.html More than 130 of 150 slain were Christians, church leaders say. DAMATURU, Nigeria, November 11 (CDN) — They stormed this town in Yobe state, northern Nigeria like a swarm of bees, and at the end of their four-hour rampage, some 150 people had been killed – at least 130 of them Christians, according […]
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/nov/11/beijings-electronic-pearl-harbor/
By Brett M. Decker and William C. Triplett II U.S. national security endangered by China’s army of hackers
The following is an excerpt from “Bowing to Beijing” (Regnery Publishing, Nov. 14, 2011):
In November 1997, Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism that “we’re facing the possibility of an electronic Pearl Harbor. … There is going to be an electronic attack on this country some time in the future.” Two years later, he told a secret session of the House Armed Services Committee, “We are at war – right now. We are in cyberwar.” Fast-forward more than a decade, to 2011. President Obama’s choice for secretary of defense, Leon Panetta, tells the Senate Armed Services Committee at his confirmation hearing that the United States faces a possible “electronic Pearl Harbor.” Mr. Panetta had been the CIA director for the previous two years – so he would have known.
Two extreme, nearly identical warnings 12 years apart should have brought home the magnitude of the electronic threat facing the country. Yet nothing was done. When former Director of National IntelligenceAdm. Mike McConnell was asked directly by Congress about our ability to withstand such an onslaught, he replied, “The United States is not prepared for such an attack.”
The Obama administration has shown a shocking disinterest in this threat, earning it a blunt rebuke from former White House national security official Richard Clarke. While “our government is engaged in defending only its own networks … it is failing in its responsibility to protect the rest of America from Chinese cyber-attack,” Mr. Clarke wrote in the Wall Street Journal. In other words, the federal government has taken action to protect itself, but not the rest of us. Mr. Clarke further declared that “senior U.S. officials know well that the government of China is systematically attacking the computer networks of the U.S. government and American corporations,” and yet, “In private, U.S. officials admit that the government has no strategy to stop the Chinese cyber-assault.”
http://bigpeace.com/mweisman/2011/11/13/two-wrongs-makes-a-left/#more-175572
You will recall that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department filed a lawsuit in support of a Muslim public school teacher, Sefoorah Khan. After just 9 months’ employment in a Chicago area school, Ms. Khan chose to take a three week hiatus from her position to attend “The Pilgrimage” or Hajj — a trip to Mecca, Saudi Arabia. She was encouraged, no doubt, by our ever-appeasing President when she demanded the school capitulate to her whim to fulfill this tenet of her religion — during her first year of employment, no less.
The U.S. Department of Justice has announced it settled Safoorah Khan’s lawsuit compelling the district to pay $75,000 in back pay, compensatory damages and attorneys’ fees. Even more insulting than this, the district has agreed to develop a policy “accommodating religions [i.e., Islam]” consistent with the Civil Rights Acts to prevent a similar infringement in the future. To be clear, this unusual action on the part of the Justice Department is perfectly congruent with this President’s record of relentlessly protecting political Islam.
