Displaying posts categorized under

BOOKS

BOOKS, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran’s Theater of Operations in Latin America By Janet Levy

By on December 17th, 2016

In Iran’s Strategic Penetration of Latin America (Lexington Books, 2014) authors and global security experts Joseph Humire and Ilan Berman elaborate on Kelly’s position with a collection of essays that provides an alarming look at Iran’s penetration of Latin America. That activity began in 1979 as part of Iran’s overall strategy to seek global power and develop nuclear weapons. Latin American experts featured in this revealing volume detail how Iran’s infiltration of Latin America has been pursued under the cover of commercial activities and cultural exchanges and has been aided by an alliance and shared militancy with the Latin American Left. The experts maintain that, over more than three decades, Iran has been able to forge strong economic, political, and strategic links to the region.

As the authors explain, Iran began its strategic infiltration of Latin America in 1982. International proxy groups exported Muslim revolutionary ideas using a global network of embassies and mosques under the cover of legitimate commerce and diplomatic, cultural, and religious associations. In this way, the Islamic regime concealed its intelligence activities, claimed diplomatic immunity and gained access to backdoor channels and local governments. Iran’s operatives traveled throughout the region unifying and radicalizing Islamic communities and recruiting, proselytizing and indoctrinating young Latin Americans.

Editor Joseph Humire recounts that in 1983 the regime sent an emissary, Mohsen Rabbani, an Iranian cleric, as a commercial attaché to set up a trade agreement with Argentina, ostensibly to supply halal-certified meat to the Islamic Republic. Rabbani, who in 1994 would become the primary architect of a terrorist attack in Buenos Aires, fostered alliances with local Shiite Muslims, as well as radical activists who wanted to shift power away from democratic alliances and U.S. influence. Trade with Iran helped these activists buy political patronage to advance authoritarian rule and enabled them to funnel mass social spending into their countries and influence elections. As Islamic terrorist entities such as Iran’s proxy, Hizb’allah, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) moved into the region, they joined with local radical groups such as FARC and Shining Path in their anti-Americanism and hatred of Jews and Israel.

The authors explore how, with a large Muslim population in place spewing hatred toward Israel, attention focused on the largest Jewish population in South America, the 230,000 Jews in Argentina. In 1992, a Hizb’allah-linked terrorist group claimed responsibility for bombing the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires. In 1994, Hizb’allah committed the deadliest bombing in Argentine history when it bombed the AMIA Jewish community center also in Buenos Aires, killing 89 people and injuring hundreds.

The essay collection insightfully examines the role of Venezuelan dictator, Hugo Chavez. After becoming president in 1999, he forged a close relationship with Iran and hailed Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hizb’allah, as a hero. He also demanded criminal prosecution for Israel’s leader, Ariel Sharon, and President George W. Bush for mass murder. Chavez was able to help Iran overcome the hurdles of economic sanctions and engage in both licit and illicit commercial activity, including acquisition of strategic minerals for nuclear weapons development, drug trafficking, and money laundering. Chavez filled his cabinet with Islamists and became a close partner with then-Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. According to the authors, during this period Iranian influence in Latin American countries increased significantly.

Chavez worked closely with Fidel Castro, the first leader to recognize the Islamic republic and to invite Iran to open in Havana its first Latin American embassy. Together, Chavez and Castro sponsored a socialist “Bolivarian Revolution” to establish a “new world order” in which Latin America was part of a global revolution, not unlike the one in Iran. In 2004, they founded the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America or ALBA.

In Iran’s Strategic Penetration of Latin America, the authors examine how, over a decade, ALBA grew in strategic importance in Latin America and helped cause the backsliding of democratic reforms in the region. ALBA’s goal was to create a Latin American coalition under Venezuelan and Cuban rule using non-state actors and transnational organized crime to bring about a post-American world. In 2010, Iran and Syria were admitted to the organization as observer states. Chavez worked with Iran and Hizb’allah to train his military in asymmetric warfare, the use of insurgency forces against established armies. Iran financed an ALBA military training school in Bolivia, as well as Hizb’allah training centers in other countries. Hizb’allah became heavily involved in drug trafficking and money laundering in the tri-border area of Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil. It made millions of dollars, sending cocaine from Mexico and Columbia to the Middle East and Europe. Hizb’allah used its presence in Latin America to raise money for its global operations from the Lebanese and Syrian diasporas and to recruit, indoctrinate and proselytize among the Latin American population.

Continue reading →
BOOKS Comments turned off

German Muslim Politician Supports Introduction of Sharia Law in Europe By Michael van der Galien

By on December 13th, 2016

https://pjmedia.com/trending/2016/12/12/german-muslim-politician-supports-introduction-of-sharia-law-in-europe/ A politician has controversially voiced her backing for Sharia law being introduced in Europe, calling it “absolutely comparable” with current legislation. Absolutely comparable in what way exactly? Sharia demands that married individuals who cheat be stoned to death. To me, that doesn’t seem very compatible with Germany law. After all, Germany has actually abolished the death penalty. And […]

Continue reading →
BOOKS Comments turned off

Bending the Arc of History At the start of the 20th century, average life expectancy globally was just 31 years. Today it is 71. Will this progress continue? Matthew Rees reviews two books about the future of progress and innovation. By Matthew Rees

By on December 13th, 2016

In a time of rising global prosperity and newfangled technological wizardry, it’s easy to forget that, for virtually all of human history, living standards have been very low. Even so, there are those who respond to economic dynamism, and the accompanying volatility, by pining for the supposed stability of the past. Others look ahead and claim that economic progress is imperiled by bad policies or bad business practices. These weighty issues, among others, are taken up in two new books whose authors have divergent, though neatly complementary, views.

In “Progress,” the Swedish author Johan Norberg deploys reams of data to show just how much life has improved—especially over the past few decades but over the past couple of centuries as well. Each chapter is devoted to documenting progress in a single category, including food, sanitation, life expectancy, poverty, violence, the environment, literacy and equality.

In response to people who look fondly on the “good old days,” Mr. Norberg underscores just how grim they could be. Rampant disease, famine and violence routinely killed off millions. In the 14th century, the so-called Black Death wiped out a third of Europe’s population. Five hundred years later, cholera outbreaks throughout the world led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and even killed a U.S. president, James Polk. Out of the squalor of everyday life came an outlook best expressed by Thomas Malthus in 1779: “Premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.”

Set against such misery are the advances of the modern era. At the start of the 20th century, average life expectancy globally was just 31 years. Today it is 71. Every country in the world has seen improvements in infant and child mortality since 1950. The so-called Green Revolution has increased food supply and reduced famine in parts of the world where malnutrition and starvation had long seemed inevitable. Throughout the world, there’s less violence, more literacy and greater political freedom.

Will this progress continue? Mr. Norberg thinks so. He cautions that “progress is not automatic” but doesn’t elaborate. His otherwise persuasive narrative would have benefited from an exploration of future threats to well-being, or worrying trends, such as the dramatic increase in obesity rates—in the United States but also in other parts of the globe—or falling birthrates throughout the world (in China in particular).

Picking up where Mr. Norberg leaves off are Fredrik Erixon and Björn Weigel, two fellow Swedes who make a thought-provoking and refreshingly non-ideological argument that a bleak future lies ahead unless capitalism undergoes a shake-up. In “The Innovation Illusion” they argue that “there is too little breakthrough innovation . . . and the capitalist system that used to promote eccentricity and embrace ingenuity all too often produces mediocrity.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →
BOOKS, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Russia’s Road to Terror and Dictatorship under Yeltsin and Putin By Janet Levy

By on December 10th, 2016

According to a recently published Heritage Foundation report, the 2017 Index of U.S. Military Strength, Russia poses a “formidable” and “aggressive” threat to the vital interests of the United States. The report states, “Russia seeks to maximize its strategic position in the world at the expense of the United States. It also seeks to undermine U.S. influence and moral standing, harasses U.S. and NATO forces, and is working to sabotage U.S. and Western policy in Syria.”

The international machinations of the current Russian government are not all that different from domestic strategies pursued within Russia, according to David Satter, former Moscow correspondent for the London Financial Times and longtime observer of Russia and the former Soviet Union. Author of three previous books on Russia and the Soviet Union and an advisor to Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, Satter has written a new, eye-opening account of recent internal, Russian intrigues in his book, The Less You Know, The Better You Sleep: Russia’s Road to Terror and Dictatorship Under Yeltsin and Putin (Yale University Press, 2016, pp. 240, $20.07)

He begins with the disturbing revelation that Yeltsin, a man who came to power through peaceful means and popular support, murdered hundreds of his own people to hold onto power. Satter asserts that the so-called “rebirth” of post-Soviet Russia, interpreted as the death of Communism, was a sham with a phony window-dressing of perestroika and a fake overhaul of the Soviet economic and political system.

With the advent of perestroika, Russia ostensibly changed its interactions with the West from confrontation to “cooperation.” Yet, the so-called transformation was actually a massive disinformation campaign that included government manufactured and deployed “controlled political opposition,” Satter says. The country appeared transformed, but retained its former Communist Party, centralized government policies, as well as the clandestine role of the KGB remade as the FSB (federal security service).

The trappings of a modern democracy and free enterprise system were seemingly in place for the world to see. However, beneath the surface, the nomenklaturatook advantage of financial investments and the transfer of economic skills and technology from the West, while the Communist Party retained control of state financial resources, as well as billions of dollars in property and investments. The much-touted policy to restructure the Soviet economic and political system and permit private ownership of businesses and property failed to meet the stated objective of placing state assets into private hands, Satter writes. Instead of ushering in the end of central planning with a free market system, Russia, under Yeltsin, continued as an essentially Communist regime.

Continue reading →
BOOKS, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Shortcuts to Addiction Big Pharma, the author argues, has inflated the number of Americans with chronic pain to 100 million when 25 million would be more realistic. Sally Satel reviews “Drug Dealer, MD” by Anna Lembke. By Sally Satel

By on December 8th, 2016

Psychiatrist Anna Lembke, chief of addiction medicine at Stanford University’s medical school, has spent her career helping patients battle their addiction to opioid drugs, from Vicodin to heroin. Out of this experience comes “Drug Dealer, MD,” a short and feisty book in which, among much else, she calls out practitioners for overprescribing painkillers and censures a scamming subculture in which patients abet their own addiction and suffering.

The “prescription drug epidemic,” as Dr. Lembke calls it, encompasses several trends, the most dramatic being a spike in overdose deaths. Prescription-drug abuse, she explains, began to be a problem in the 1990s, when campaigns for improved pain treatment gained ground. In 2001 the powerful Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations established standards for pain management in response to the widespread problem of under-treating pain.

Few experts would deny that the inadequate treatment of pain had long been a challenge for American medicine, and the new standards were not in themselves misguided. But the pendulum has since swung in the other direction. Too many well-meaning doctors use long-acting, high-dose narcotics to treat nasty toothaches and minor injuries when such drugs are really meant to relieve the agony of cancer and other severe, unremitting conditions. The more opiate medications in circulation, the more opportunities for patients—and non-patients—to abuse them.

Part of the blame for the epidemic, Dr. Lembke says, rests with the pharmaceutical companies, which have been heavy-handed in their promotion of narcotics to doctors. Meanwhile, she argues, Big Pharma has exaggerated the number of Americans with chronic pain, inflating the figure to 100 million when 25 million would be more realistic.

Users themselves, of course, must assume some responsibility too, and one can only applaud Dr. Lembke for wading into these politically incorrect waters, given that any discussion of the role of the user is construed as blaming the victim. There are patients, Dr. Lembke writes, who “visit a doctor’s office not to recover from illness but to be validated in their identity as a person with an illness.” She describes how patients finagle pills out of doctors and, in an amusing riff, labels their strategies by user type. “Senators” will “filibuster” the doctor with unrelated problems until the final few minutes of a visit and then make a plea for narcotics; the doctor is now so short on time that he relents. “Exhibitionists” writhe in fake pain. The “Dynamic Duo”—a patient and his crying mother (“the commonest co-dependent”)—present a team too pitiful to refuse. CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →
BOOKS Comments turned off

PRESIDENT FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT ON DECEMBER 8, 1941

By on December 8th, 2016

Yesterday, December 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

The United States was at peace with that nation, and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its Emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific.

Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in the American island of Oahu, the Japanese Ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to our Secretary of State a formal reply to a recent American message. And, while this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hint of war or of armed attack.

It will be recorded that the distance of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time the Japanese Government has deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace.

The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you that very many American lives have been lost. In addition, American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu.

Yesterday the Japanese Government also launched an attack against Malaya.
Last night Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong.
Last night Japanese forces attacked Guam.
Last night Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands.
Last night the Japanese attacked Wake Island.
And this morning the Japanese attacked Midway Island.

Japan has therefore undertaken a surprise offensive extending throughout the Pacific area. The facts of yesterday and today speak for themselves. The people of the United States have already formed their opinions and well understand the implications to the very life and safety of our nation.
As Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense, that always will our whole nation remember the character of the onslaught against us.

No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people, in their righteous might, will win through to absolute victory.

I believe that I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost but will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.

Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory and our interests are in grave danger.

With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God.

I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Continue reading →
BOOKS, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Dispatches from the Campus War Against Israel & Jews A new book exposes the academic perpetration of an old hatred. Mark Tapson

By on November 28th, 2016

The new book Dispatches from the Campus War Against Israel & Jews by Richard Cravatts, published by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, expertly explores and explains this alarming phenomenon. He covers the ideological roots of academic Jew-hatred, the BDS movement, Students for Justice in Palestine, the demonization of Israel, the “altruistic evil” of social justice, and more.

Dr. Richard Cravatts has written over 400 articles and book chapters on a wide range of topics from campus anti-Semitism and free speech to real estate and social policy in such publications as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, and Chicago Tribune,. He is the author of Genocidal Liberalism: The University’s War Against Israel & Jews. He is a past-president of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and a board member of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under the Law, and the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism.

I reached out to Dr. Cravatts with some questions about his important new book.

Mark Tapson: Can you explain how two influential buzzwords of academia – diversity and multiculturalism – have contributed to the ramping up of anti-Israelism on campus?

Richard Cravatts: Thanks so much for the opportunity to speak with you and your readers.

The desire to achieve diversity on campuses has seen administrations bending over backward to accommodate the sensitivities of minorities and perceived victims of the majority culture—usually at the expense of fairness and rationality. And multiculturalism has brought with it a type of moral relativism in which every country or victim group is equal, regardless of what vagaries, weaknesses, or fundamental evil may underpin its social structure.

Thus, the decades-old emphasis on bringing multiculturalism to campuses has meant that faculty as well as students have been steeped in a worldview that refuses to demarcate any differences between a democratic state struggling to protect itself (such as Israel) and aggressive, genocidal foes who wish to destroy it with their unending assaults (such as the Palestinians, Hamas, and Hezbollah).

Thus, this inclination to worship multiculturalism forces liberals to make excuses for those cultures that have obvious, often irredeemable, moral defects, such as the Islamist foes who currently threaten Israel and the West.

The sensitivity over diversity has regularly led to charge of racism against Israel, and of the many libels from the world community against Israel, perhaps none has gained such traction on campuses as the accusation that the Jewish state now practices apartheid in its treatment of the Palestinian Arabs. The same left-leaning activists from universities who carried the banner against the South African regime have now raised that same banner—with the same accusatory language—and superimposed on Israel that it is yet another apartheid regime oppressing Third World, “colored” victims.

The charge of apartheid is valuable to Israel’s detractors, for it both devalues the nation by accusing it of perpetuating what is to the left the greatest crime—racism—in the form of apartheid, while simultaneously absolving Arabs of responsibility for the onslaught of terror they continue to inflict on Israel, another unfortunate by-product of worshipping diversity and multiculturalism.

Continue reading →
BOOKS, ISRAEL Comments turned off

It Had to Be the Promised Land Review: Gur Alroey, ‘Zionism Without Zion: The Jewish Territorial Organization and Its Conflict with the Zionist Organization’ by David Isaac

By on November 27th, 2016

“The Ugandists and the Territorialists are jumping up on chairs, shouting furiously at the President; their faces are distorted … the electric lights in the hall are turned off … The noise and tumult continue for a long time in the dark hall,” wrote Russian Zionist leader Leib Jaffe, describing the scene at the Seventh Zionist Congress on July 28, 1905.

Zionist founder Theodor Herzl had died a year earlier, but as Haifa University Professor Gur Alroey observes in his pioneering study of the Territorialist movement, the chaotic scene described above was his immediate legacy. Herzl had loosed what Alroey calls “the big bang” at the previous Zionist Congress when he brought forward the so-called Uganda Proposal, a tentative offer by the British colonial secretary of a Jewish national home in an area in present-day Kenya. As Herzl saw it, the Jewish need for a refuge had grown desperate following the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, while the path to Palestine seemed closed for the foreseeable future. After a fiery debate at the Sixth Congress, Herzl secured a vote to explore the matter further. Now, at the Seventh Congress, the Uganda Proposal was not only killed off, but a resolution was passed rejecting all future attempts at settlement activity outside of Palestine.

In response, the defeated faction hurriedly formed a new group, the Jewish Territorial Organization, or ITO, as it was popularly known. Zionism Without Zion tells the ITO’s fascinating story. The book is a serious contribution to Zionist scholarship for, as Alroey writes, “there isn’t a single book about the Jewish Territorial Organization.” It is as good an example as any of Churchill’s axiom that history is written by the victors.

The Territorialists chose as their leader Israel Zangwill, who had argued eloquently, if vainly, in favor of the Uganda proposal at the congress. Though known today chiefly for his translations of Jewish liturgical hymns that have been incorporated in the standard English Festival Prayer Book, Zangwill was a greatly admired British novelist and journalist and one of Herzl’s most highly prized intellectual “conquests.” To give an idea of his stature, historian Benzion Netanyahu, father of the current prime minister, chose Zangwill as one of five founders of Zionism.

Territorialism, which is based on the idea that a Jewish state need not be in the Land of Israel, was baked into modern Zionism from the start. In his 1882 book Auto-Emancipation, Leon Pinsker, the Russian-Jewish doctor who helped organize the Lovers of Zion movement, a forerunner to Herzl’s World Zionist Organization, wrote: “The goal of our present endeavors must be not the Holy Land, but a land of our own.” Herzl himself, in his 1896 The Jewish State, left the issue of its location open.

Thus, the Territorialists saw no contradiction between Territorialism and Zionism. They treated Pinsker as a spiritual mentor and hung Herzl’s picture at their conferences. Alroey quotes a prominent member, Max Mandelstamm: “Although Palestine is a territory, our dearest and most desirable territory, and although we are bound to it with thousands of memories and traditions, it is not free…”

Continue reading →
BOOKS Comments turned off

New Book Re-Examines Christian Zionism a Review by Andrew Harrod

By on November 26th, 2016

The “standard narrative about Christian Zionism,” is a “result of bad exegesis and zany theology,” writes Anglican theologian Gerald R. McDermott in The New Christian Zionism: Fresh Perspectives on Israel & the Land. Developed from a 2015 conference hosted by the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), this recent book belies such stereotypes with solid Christian Zionism apologetics appealing to both layman and expert alike.

McDermott in his contributions to the book’s chapter essays debunks the common assumption that “all Christian Zionism is an outgrowth of premillennial dispensationalist theology.” In reality the “vast majority of Christian Zionists came long before the rise of dispensationalism in the nineteenth century.” Additionally, “many of the most prominent Christian Zionists of the last two centuries had nothing to do with dispensationalism.”

“Much if not most of modern Christian Zionism in the United States originated primarily in mainline Protestantism,” IRD President Mark Tooley historically documents in particular, a surprise for many modern readers. “Christian Zionism in the United States has long since migrated from mainline Protestantism to evangelicalism” as the Methodist Federation for Social Action (MFSA) illustrates. Now a “leading proponent of anti-Israel divestment,” MFSA’s founders included liberal Methodist bishop Francis J. McConnell, a strong Christian Zionist in the 1930s. “By the start of the twenty-first century, liberal Protestantism had not only abandoned Christian Zionism; it was denouncing it as a heresy,” Tooley notes.

Continue reading →
BOOKS Comments turned off

Sex With Children: Turkish Bill To Clear Men Accused Of Child Rape If They Marry Victim Sees Protests BY Mary Pascaline

By on November 22nd, 2016

A Turkish bill that would clear men of statutory rape provided they marry the victim is on the receiving end of criticism from opposition groups that are accusing the government of legitimizing child sexual assault.
The bill received preliminary backing in the parliament Thursday and is due for a second round of voting after a debate next week. Proposed by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), the bill would clear those convicted of assault only if they had sex without “force, threat, or any other restriction on consent” and if they marry the victim.
Violence against women is on the rise in Turkey with nearly 40 percent of cases of sexual and physical abuse reported. Murder of women has also increased by 1,400 percent from 2003 to 2010. The legal age of consent in the country is 18 years but child marriage is widespread.
According to the BBC, the government has said the aim of the bill “is not to excuse rape but to rehabilitate those who may not have realized their sexual relations were unlawful – or to prevent girls who have sex under the age of 18 from feeling ostracized by their community.”
Critics, which include the opposition, celebrities, an association whose deputy chairman is Erdoğan’s daughter, are worried that the bill – which if passed is likely to quash nearly 3,000 convictions – would also legitimize child marriage in addition to overlooking child sexual assault.
“The AKP is pushing through a text which pardons those who marry the child that they raped,” Ozgur Ozel, a lawmaker belonging to the opposition Republican People’s Party reportedly said.

Continue reading →