The president’s quest for even-handedness is misguided and dangerous.
Speaking at Harvard University in October, Secretary of State John Kerry asserted that “a massive increase in settlements over the course of the last years” has triggered “an increase in the violence because there’s this frustration that’s growing.” In the effort to clarify Kerry’s remarks—since, in fact, the rate of construction has declined—State Department spokesman John Kirby advanced the old moral equivalence argument. “Frustration on both sides,” he said, has led to the current violence. To clarify his clarification, he added that “individuals on both sides” are “guilty of acts of terror.”
The Obama administration’s formulaic reactions to the recent outbreak of terror in Israel disguise the deeper causes of Palestinian attacks while obscuring the crucial long-term steps needed to build decent relations between Israel and the Palestinians. And they reflect the administration’s tendency to exaggerate Israel’s responsibility while underestimating that of the Arab world and Iran for the turmoil that has swept the region—a tendency that has helped worsen things all over the Middle East.
An adolescent high-school student with all the biological parts of a male and none of the biological parts of a female declares himself to be a girl, is called by his female name at school, is allowed to play on the girls’ athletic team and to change inside the girls’ locker room with the small proviso that this be done behind a curtain. This apparently is not sufficiently sensitive to the boy/girl’s needs – I can’t use a pronoun without knowing this person’s preference for that loaded word as pronouns are war zones at the moment. Despite the wholesale capitulation of the school to all the aforementioned demands of this student, the Office for Civil Rights of the Dept of Education has insisted that standing behind a curtain or showering separately is outright discrimination and a challenge to this student’s identity.Unless the Illinois school removes the curtain and allows total access to the girls’ facilities, it stands in danger of losing all of its Title IX funding.
An IDF soldier who foiled a terrorist attack near Hebron on Thursday succeeded in thwarting an earlier attack and neutralizing a total of three terrorists in the course of the past week alone, the Israeli news site Walla reported.
The 19-year-old corporal, referred to in the piece by his first initial (“T”), recounted: “When I’d secured the… junction, we noticed the suspect. We told him to cross the road and head towards us, and as he did, he pulled out a knife to stab a fellow soldier. At that moment, I cocked my rifle and fired at him.”
Commenting on last week’s foiled attack, he added, “I shot the two terrorists in order to eliminate the threat they posed.”
“T,” a combat infantry soldier in the IDF’s Kfir Brigade, is a resident of central Israel, who was only drafted into the army eight months ago.
The monarch of old ordered the tide to recede as a lesson to his courtiers that no mere human, not even a king, can make the world to do as it’s told. Will Steffen, the CSIRO and other grant-fed warmists face a similar problem: while modern enablers still profess to believe them, actual sea levels pay no heed
When climate scientists have a choice to peddle facts or forecasts, they go for forecasts every time. Especially on sea level rises. Let me explain. Tim Flannery’s Climate Council, ruminating last year on supposed CO2-caused sea rise, was keen to crank up the scariness. So it included a couple of art photos in its report “Counting the Costs” on our allegedly fast-rising oceans.
One pic shows a frolicking humpback whale, with the remains of a dual lane highway visible below the waves. The other photo shows an old coot (about my vintage) slumped in his lounge chair, which is floating in the sea. Alongside bobs an empty chair, with a dinghy is anchored nearby. I think the elderly gentleman must have loaded the armchairs and his vintage wife onto the dinghy to escape the sea pouring through his front door, but the wife fell overboard and that’s why he looks so sad.[i]
At a clothing store called Hitler 2 in Gaza City, mannequins welcome shoppers with knives and Palestinian flags in their hands.
The International Business Times reports on why Hitler 2′s shoppers think that rocks:
Hijaz Abu Shanab, a 20-year-old shopper, said: “The name of the shop is Hitler and I like him because he was the the most anti-Jewish person. They have done us wrong, they took our rights in this land and they left us with nothing. It is better for us now to go and die, we are living like the dead. I like the clothes and the name, it is fantastic.”
Immad Mharib, 20, said: “I saw an advertisement on Facebook so I wanted to pass by the shop because of the knife, the koufeyeh and the mask are now symbols for the intifada of al-Aqsa. I want to buy from this shop; I like the idea as it is supporting our people in Jerusalem and the West Bank.”
American religious history is filled with examples of faiths whose public perceptions defy deeper realities. The Quakers, for instance, are known as peaceful and supremely benign. Few suspect that one central mission is promoting the boycott, divestment and sanctions, or BDS, movement that opposes Israel’s existence.
The commitment of the Quakers through their primary organization, the American Friends Service Committee, is unmistakable. It is a leading member of the BDS umbrella group known as the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation and provides support to BDS efforts on numerous college campuses. The AFSC works alongside the Students for Justice in Palestine and the rabidly anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace. Its representatives have even helped write Israel divestment resolutions for student governments.
One Quaker group describes the BDS movement as “the transforming power of love and nonviolence, having faith that enmity can be transformed and that oppression can give way.” How much of the AFSC’s almost $160 million annual budget is devoted to BDS isn’t known, as the Internal Revenue Service classifies the organization as a church.
Quakers, who tremble or “quake” before God, began as dissenting Protestants in England during the 17th century. Adherents rejected traditional sacraments—baptism and the Bible’s inerrant authority—and instead bore witness through “spirituality in action” and followed the “inner light,” which founder George Fox described as “spirit, and grace, by which all might know their salvation, and their way to God.”
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/No-Holds-Barred-Roger-Waters-unnatural-preoccupation-with-Jews-432204
The essence of anti-Semitism is the attempt to defame the Jewish people as a murderous, bloodthirsty nation that is deeply immoral. :by Shmuely Boteach.
“Waters would accuse the Jews, who give complete control of their holiest site in Jerusalem to the Muslim Wakf, of being like the Germans who snuffed out six million Jewish lives.Only a wretched, pitiless, cold-blooded ignoramus could make such a fraudulent allegation. Only a man whose breast swells with hatred of Jews could fabricate so sinister a blood libel. And only a first-class fraud like Roger Waters would believe that he could lie so viciously to an educated public and get away with it.”
“In a lengthy interview with Rolling Stone magazine this week, former Pink Floyd front man and Israel-hating obsessive Roger Waters demonstrated his all-consuming preoccupation with the Jews.
He speaks about watching Jewish Life Television late at night and reading about “old local Jewish ladies” who organize protests against him. Like most anti-Semites, he peddles central Jewish coordination theories, asserting that pro-Israel efforts, such as this very column, are organized by the prime minister of Israel’s office. “Hasbara, the arm of the Prime Minister’s Office that we all know starts with Netanyahu in Tel Aviv. It’s very organized, and I see it all over my Facebook page all the time. It’s this hugely organized thing.”
But for all his loathing of Israel, including flying pigs with Mogen Dovids on them as his concerts, comparing Israel to Nazi Germany and Israel’s policies to the Holocaust, and publicly condemning far more successful performers such as Jon Bon Jovi for performing in Israel, Rogers insists he is not a Jew-hater. “It’s not the Israeli people, not Jews, not Judaism. I would never dream of attacking them.”
For three years now the European Union has been threatening to publicize guidelines on the consumer labeling of Israeli products produced over the pre-1967 lines in parts of Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and the Golan Heights.
This week sources in Jerusalem said they had received signals the Europeans would soon make good on this threat – possibly within days.
The Europeans for their part have in the past attempted to play down the issue, claiming that labeling does not constitute a boycott. As EU spokesman in Israel David Kriss told Bloomberg in June, “The main principle here is simply that consumers in Europe should not be misled about the origin of products.”
Kriss and other European officials would like us to believe that labeling is just a way of providing European consumers with information and has nothing whatsoever to do with nasty boycotts.
Such attempts to dissemble are hardly convincing. After all, what precisely will be written on the labels? “Made by Israeli settlers in Occupied Palestinian Territory”? Even the more innocuous “Produce of the West Bank (Israeli settlement produce)” that already appears on products in some British supermarkets is enough to deter European consumers already prejudiced by slanted news media.
Dayna is a passionate Christian Zionist who yearned to go to Israel “someday,” but real life kept getting in her way.Well, last month she finally got her wish…and she sent me this remarkable, passionate and encouraging letter which I am urging you to send out to as wide an audience as possible……Joan Swirsky (Author of “The Cargiver Survivors Guide”)
Dear Joan,
As I sit, safe and sound, on my living room sofa in my condo in Naples, FL, it’s been less than two weeks since I toured Israel and walked the streets in the Old City of Jerusalem. I’m thankful that, as a tourist, I was not personally confronted with the deadly violence that Israelis are experiencing these days, in a Palestinian “knife intifada.”
We spent a day at a ministry center in Haifa. I met Russian Jews who came to the center to receive practical goods that were being gifted to them by The Joshua Fund. The grateful looks on their faces were priceless. There were incredulous tears of joy as they received a decorative canvas wheeled cart, kitchen knives, a wireless electric tea pot, laundry detergent, dish towels, a cutting board, a vegetable peeler, a can opener, a pot with a lid, a glass bowl, a ladle, a decorative mug, and a pillow––items that you and I take for granted.
One sweet, gray-haired lady whom I greeted and assisted, really touched my heart. I couldn’t hug her or help her enough! I got choked up just wondering how she happened to be there at that time in her life.
Two hundred people (men, women and their children) had been selected to participate in this event. Fortunately, not everything that’s going on in Israel is violent or deadly!
Joan, everywhere we went, there were tour groups of Christians and Jews from all over the world in Israel! Not even the threat of Palestinian Islamic terrorism kept us away from our quest to experience Israel!
I felt safe from the moment I arrived at Ben Gurion Air Port in Tel Aviv. As a visitor in Israel, when I was standing on the Golan Heights hearing gunfire fire coming from Syria, that’s when I was confronted with the reality of war. It was surreal.
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Why Did EPA Spend Millions of Dollars on Military-style Weaponry?
Guns and ammunition up to 300MM, offensive/defensive Radiated Electromagnetic systems, Infrared Security Systems,
Body Armor, Personal Armor…
Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson – 5-time Emmy award winning investigative journalist – airs our EPA military-style weapons discoveries this Sunday on 162 local ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX stations across America.
Check Your Local Listings, click here.
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OPENTHEBOOKS OVERSIGHT REPORT – U.S. EPA
THE ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION ARMY?
FOX AND FRIENDS | Sunday, November 1, 2015
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MEDIA MATTERS | Monday, November 2, 2015
Click here to read the Media Matters Response to FOX News
Two weeks ago, our national news coverage on EPA military spending was kicked-off by Stephen Moore writing in Investor’s Business Daily .
Last week, the founder of the Heritage Foundation, Ed Feulner, showcased our EPA report in an editorial at Washington Times and syndicated to 80 newspapers across America, The EPA Army – The EPA Doesn’t Need to be Armed to the Teeth.
Last Sunday, Feulner’s editorial was discussed on FOX and Friends. Host Tucker Carlson and Erick Erickson (RedState) disputed the need to arm EPA agents with military-style weapons.
Then, Media Matters challenged the FOX conclusion. Read the Media Matters argument here.
Thankfully, arming the EPA is now a national debate.
Last week in a column at Human Events, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), Chairman of House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, promised to hold hearings on our exposure of EPA waste.
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