http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304866904579265932490593594?mod=Opinion_newsreel_1 Health insurance should be individual, portable across jobs, states and providers, and lifelong and renewable. The unraveling of the Affordable Care Act presents a historic opportunity for change. Its proponents call it “settled law,” but as Prohibition taught us, not even a constitutional amendment is settled law—if it is dysfunctional enough, and if Americans […]
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304367204579267030770210744?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop A year has passed since the Newtown massacre, and Americans this month marked the somber moment. The most fitting tribute Congress could pay the 26 victims would be to return in January to take up Pennsylvania Representative Tim Murphy’s thoughtful overhaul of federal mental-health policies. Severe mental illness is the common link among the […]
RAMALLAH, West Bank — These days, life appears to be going along as normal for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Appearances can be deceptive, however. Prior to the 1987 intifada, too, things appeared to be normal — until they exploded, much to everyone’s surprise. But no one should be surprised if a new […]
http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2013/12/haaretzs-holocaust-revisionism/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=f5e2eab539-Mosaic_2013_12_25&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-f5e2eab539-41165129
PROFESSOR KONTOROVICH, WIFE AND 4 CHILDREN HAVE NOW MOVED TO ISRAEL…RSK
A new level of vileness has been reached in the pages of Haaretz. It has already published work extremely critical of the State of Israel–even running columnists that support boycotting the state. But regardless of one’s opinions on the Palestinian issue, the paper has now shown that it exists in a world entirely divorced from any Jewish consensus, and cannot claim the title of loyal opposition. It has crossed all prior bounds of decency and published acriticism of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, calling it a “myth,” and accusing its heroes of being responsible for the ultimate liquidation of the Ghetto. Despite disagreements on diplomatic, territorial, and religious issues, the memory of the Holocaust–its heroes and victims–had been the great unifying porch in post-War Jewish consciousness. Now the Holocaust is fair game too.
The article’s argument is that maybe if the fighters had not been so uppity, if they had not made a fuss–then the Nazis, who had already murdered 500,000 Jews of Warsaw, might have let the remaining 50,000 live. Maybe! It is not a new argument. Rather, the author amazingly resurrects and endorses the arguments of the Judernat, the Jewish collaboration government of the Ghetto. With every new deportation, they urged restrain with increasing urgency–maybe they will let the rest of us live, and if you fight, all the past deportations would be a sacrifice in vain.
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ A nation where governments are elected by the people is most vulnerable at the interface between the politicians and the people. The interface is where the people learn what the politicians stand for and where the politicians learn what the people want. The bigger a country gets, the harder it is to pick up […]
http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/author/marilynpenn/ The movie that purports to tell the tale of how Mary Poppins’ disagreeable author, P.L. Travers, succumbed to giving Walt Disney the rights to turn her creation into a studio blockbuster is strangely mis-titled. The story presented involves a sensitive young girl growing up in the Australian boonies with an alcoholic father leading his […]
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=6765
Since Sunday, over 12 13- to 14-year-old boys from the Tel Aviv area have been arrested for repeatedly gang raping a 12-year-old girl. The case came to light after the rapists circulated a video of one of their “parties” among their classmates, and the footage made its way to the Israel Police’s Youth Crimes Investigations Unit.
It is not surprising that all hell broke loose over this horror, particularly since it took place on school premises, albeit after hours. The National Council for the Child, the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel and the Education Ministry immediately issued statements of condemnation. Parents, teachers, psychologists and sociologists were then hauled into TV and radio studios to analyze the purported statistical increase in sexual violence against children and decrease in the age of its perpetrators.
Though not all the details of the case have been released, police say that the victim was not physically coerced into sexual submission, but what she endured constituted rape. First of all, she fell prey to mass manipulation, threats of exposure and a desire for popularity. Secondly, she is four years below the age of consent in Israel, making any form of acquiescence on her part irrelevant. No one, other than maybe the rapists, disputes this — especially since she was subjected to multiple partners and photographed by them.
The trouble is that the boys who raped her are also minors. This means that they, too, are protected by the law. So the debate on this issue has taken on a different tone from the usual arguments over heinous crimes and appropriate punishments. Instead, it has become labeled as a “societal ill” that has to be addressed and eradicated by — you guessed it — the government.
Don’t get me wrong. Hail to the University Presidents and colleges that have either condemned or withdrawn for the ASA. Good move, but there are far more insidious movements in the American Universities that impact Israel.
Saudi Arabia and the oil soaked Emirates contribute billions to American Universities, influencing the curricula on Islam, the Middle East and Israel. Islam is presented as a peace loving and tolerant faith, completely blinding students to the real depredations of Sharia laws and the faith driven blood lust of Jihad. Israel is presented as a harsh occupier and oppressor of Palestinian Arabs. Nowhere is the Arab war against Israel even linked to radical Islam.Check out the Middle East Studies departments of both state and private academies. I have.
Then there is The Middle East Studies Association (MESA)- This what Hugh Fitzgerald wrote in 2008…and it is now far worse.
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/019929.php
If we ignore history, and ignore the texts of Islam, then we can all play the game of “Let’s Pretend.” But playing the game of “Let’s Pretend” is what has gotten the countries of Western Europe in the fix they are in. Playing “Let’s Pretend” simply allows non-Muslims to continue to ignore reality, continue to turn their heads away, as people in the last century, and more than once, turned their heads away until the reality could not be denied.
In the case of Islam there will not be an invasion of Poland or a Pearl Harbor attack or a seizing of Manchuria, but rather a slow and steady conquest. That is why it is important to alert, using nothing more amazing than the most banal and obvious of truths about Islam — truths that no non-Muslim growing up under Muslim rule, and no apostate from Islam can fail to be aware of. See Wafa Sultan, see Ayaan Hirsi Ali, see Ibn Warraq, see hundreds of others, with their numbers swelling in the Western world all the time. See those great Western scholars of Islam — Schacht, Jeffery, Snouck Hurgronje, Lammens and so many others — who studied and wrote about Islam before the Great Inhibition set it. That is, they studied and wrote before Muslims, and their non-Muslim sympathizers, managed to insinuate themselves into academic positions where they have been quite good at keeping out any other viewpoints, and have steadily managed to hire and promote each other, aided of course by grants from Arab governments and institutions and individuals, until they have managed, all over the Western world, to control so much of what is taught about Islam and “Islamic studies” and “Middle Eastern studies.”
But a few holdouts never were booted out, and nowadays, many in the West, alert to the danger, have simply chosen to go around, to do without, to ignore, the sly apologists of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA Nostra), and that has had a salutary effect.
The American government should simply set up institutes to teach Americans about Islam and the Middle East, going carefully around the universities — or perhaps carefully vetting every department that would wish to get in on the money. It may not be possible to re-create an atmosphere in American universities, or in other universities of the Western world, in which disinterested study, rather than transparent apologetics, is offered to innocent students. Certainly the number of schools where such study is possible has diminished over the past 30 years. Georgetown’s lean, mean, jogging John Esposito is the rule, not the exception. But one should at least try. University administrators now have a duty to inform themselves fully, and not permit the fellow-travellers of MESA Nostra already ensconced in their institutions to manage to smuggle in one more of their number.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/print/blogs/tireless-enemies-israel-america-s-academic-boycotters_771650.html
“Have we indeed sinned more than any other nation?”
—Chaim Kaplan, The Warsaw Diary (September 10, 1939)
“In the modern world, the Jew has perpetually been on trial; still today the Jew is on trial, in the person of the Israeli—and this modern trial of the Jew, this trial which never ends, begins with the trial of Shylock.”
—Philip Roth, Operation Shylock (1993)
If there are still many Americans who believe that college and university professors are harmless drudges obsessed with moldy futilities, people who know so much about so little that they can neither be contradicted nor are worth contradicting, they should be disabused of their illusions by the recent decisions of three (ostensibly) academic organizations to boycott the academic institutions of the state of Israel. First, the Asian American Studies Association in April, and more recently the American Studies Association, and the Council of Native Americans and Indigenous Studies Association. All have decided that they can no longer share the globe with a Jewish-majority state, any more than the academics included in Max Weinreich’s classic study of Hitler’s Professors (YIVO, 1946) could continue to share Europe with its Jewish minority.
It was these German professors who made anti-Semitism academically respectable and complicit in raw murder. They called into question—and quite successfully, of course—the Jews’ “right to live”; our homegrown anti-Semites—and let us not flinch from calling them what they are—now dispute Israel’s “right to exist,” making themselves accessories before the fact to the planned erasure of Israel by Iran and its Arab satellites. When the new, academic version of the 1933 Nazi boycotts began, ten years ago in England, it appealed to Europeans who were convinced that the Holocaust had given anti-Semitism a bad name, and that it deserved another chance. Now it has found a foothold in America’s universities.
