http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obamas-visit-to-hell/ During his visit to South Africa, Obama compared Nelson Mandela to George Washington. George Washington, unlike Nelson Mandela, was not a member of the Communist Party. Martha Washington had not been involved in murdering a 14-year-old boy or in urging the colonists to burn men, women and children alive by placing rubber tires around […]
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ For generations it was received wisdom in foreign policy circles that the United States was hated because we supported tyrants who repressed the “will of the people”. The point of reception was originally the propaganda desks of Moscow. The theme was picked up and expanded on by every scribbler who hoped that if the […]
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/editorial-obama-must-offer-answers-on-nsa-spying-in-eu-a-909019.html
Americans tend to be more open-minded than Germans about Big Data — at least for now. The kind of mass data collection being conducted around the world by the NSA could eventually backfire for President Obama at home, however.
Mick Jagger, 69, might be a father of seven and a grandfather of four, but he can still pull off the role of the eternally youthful rebel. The Rolling Stones recently gave a concert in Washington, just a few kilometers away from the White House. “I don’t think President Obama is here, but I’m sure he’s listening in,” the Stones frontman quipped.
The audience laughed out loud because Barack Obama — the man who carried so much hope and was long believed to be a very European US president — has become the butt of jokes. Some view him as the embodiment of the very “Big Brother” once sketched by George Orwell, the dictator who spies on, monitors and controls every citizen without any scruples.
But how much of that is a cliché, and how much truth is there to it? Given the revelations published by SPIEGEL in recent days showing evidence of a US spying program that is directed at European Union institutions, and monitoring an almost inconceivable number of communications connections — 500 million a month in Germany alone — you can’t blame a person for thinking the worst. Even if Obama has explicitly ensured that Americans needn’t fear some kind of “Big Brother,” the “3rd Party Partners,” as Germany was categorized in top secret NSA documents, are now asking if the same applies to Europeans.
Americans See the Positive in ‘Big Data ‘
In no other country is this question being asked as loudly as in Germany, a country that, through its own painful history during the Nazi era and under communist East Germany, has learned just what an overly curious state and paternalism can lead to. The Germans cherish their privacy and fear absolute control. That’s why Facebook’s facial recognition software is uncomfortable for us, and the reason that many Germans have had a positively allergic reaction to Google Street View cameras. It’s the reason Germans visiting the United States get annoyed when they call a hair salon for an appointment and are asked not only for a telephone number, but an email address and a credit card number too.
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/3890/exclusive_leaked_foreign_office_e_mail_implies_british_government_collaboration_with_israel_boycott_groups An e-mail from within Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office has revealed the British government’s dialogue with anti-Israel groups leaked Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) e-mail seen exclusively by The Commentator has revealed that the British government is in dialogue with groups that advocate the boycotting of Israeli goods, products, or people, despite British government […]
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/3899/british_tv_channel_plans_call_to_prayer_at_ramadan UK’s Channel 4 in grovelling plan to broadcast the Muslim call to prayer “directly into British living rooms” daily during Ramadan. Be afraid, be very afraid of what this means Channel 4, one of Britain’s top mainstream television media stations, has announced plans to broadcast the Muslim call to prayer this year on all […]
http://pjmedia.com/ronradosh/2013/07/02/how-not-to-remember-gettysburg-doris-kearns-goodwins-abysmal-speech/ This week our nation remembers the battle that raged at Gettysburg 150 years ago. Thousands were killed in three days of fierce fighting. Had the Union troops not won, an outcome that was not a sure thing when the fighting began, our nation would have been quite different than it is today. If you […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/07/doris_kearns_godwin_ruins_gettysburgs_150th_commemoration.html
THE LIBERAL PSEUDO HISTORIAN IS A KNOWN PLAGIARIST…http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml
“Goodwin herself seemed trapped in a hall of mirrors last month after The Weekly Standard accused her of plagiarizing from several sources in her hugely popular The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, a 1987 bestseller that later was made into a successful TV miniseries. At first, Goodwin minimized the extent of the problem. Then, after more details surfaced, she wrote a somewhat self-serving essay for Time that conceded fault but insisted that her mistakes were inadvertent, the result of inadequate research procedures. Finally last weekend she told the New York Times that The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys has more flaws than even the Standard had alleged.”
I got a heads up on this speech by the liberal historian yesterday but couldn’t find a transcript or even a video to blog about it.
Breitbart has the shocking story; Goodwin turned her speech into a rant about gay marriage and women’s rights:
She said she was obsessed, while writing about Eleanor Roosevelt, with people who slept on the second floor of the White House. And when First Lady Hillary Clinton heard her talking about that on the radio, she invited her and her husband to spend the night at the White House with the Clintons.
In nearly exactly the same words, Kearns Goodwin told the Gettysburg audience the same story she told at Dartmouth’s commencement in 1998:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/07/al_dura_show_trials_end_badly.html An apparent victory for France Télévisions and Jerusalem correspondent Charles Enderlin in the long legal battle they initiated against French citizen Philippe Karsenty may turn out to be the last stage in a cascade of strategic errors… by the broadcaster. On June 26th the 11th Chamber of the Appellate Court convicted citizen Karsenty of […]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324436104578581663230962692.html?mod=WSJ_article_MoreIn_Opinion
News that U.S. intelligence agencies routinely monitor European phone and digital traffic and may even have spied on the institutions of the European Union is causing a political furor in Paris, Brussels, Berlin and other Continental capitals.
“Unacceptable, it can’t be tolerated,” warns Angela Merkel, Germany’s Chancellor. “Abhorrent” inveighs Jean Asselborn, the foreign minister of Luxembourg. “George Orwell is nothing by comparison,” thunders Elmar Brok, chairman of the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee. French President Francois Hollande has even suggested delaying talks on a trans-Atlantic trade agreement until the issue is resolved.
This is one of the better recent Claude Rains’s routines, with politicians shocked to find spying going on between allies. Europe’s governments have robust spy agencies of their own, and those agencies spy on friends and foes alike. So it has always been. The U.S. has ample reason for spying on Germany, for example, since we know it was the al Qaeda cell in Hamburg that executed the 9/11 attacks.
The real mystery (assuming the allegations are true) is what sort of intel did America’s spies think they could glean from snooping on the European Union?
Could it have been the early word on the European Commission’s directive this May (soon rescinded) mandating that olive oil be served only in nonrefillable bottles with tamper-proof caps and labels written in “clear and indelible lettering”? Or maybe it was the research notes of the three-year investigation leading to Brussels’s 2011 decision to forbid bottled-water producers from claiming that water prevents dehydration—on the basis that the claim lacked scientific evidence?
Far more interesting is the growing dismay at President Obama among his former idolators in Europe. The folks who gave him the Nobel Peace Prize before he’d brokered any peace are now disillusioned that he uses drones against terrorists, hasn’t closed Guantanamo, and hasn’t repudiated every Bush-Cheney security policy. And Europeans keep saying Americans are naive about the world.
A version of this article appeared July 3, 2013, on page A14 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Spy Who Bored Me.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323936404578579962612795172.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop
The glamour seems to be wearing off for Edward Snowden. The self-admitted leaker of America’s national-security secrets and hero of the world’s anti-American left now finds himself at the mercy of Vladimir Putin, the old KGB man and one of the world’s leading authoritarians.
Since fleeing Hong Kong with his WikiLeaks entourage, Mr. Snowden has been stuck for more than a week in transit purgatory at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport. On Sunday night he formally requested Russian political asylum, but on Monday President Putin played coy. Russia won’t extradite Mr. Snowden to the U.S. but may not let the American stay in Russia either, he said.
Perhaps Mr. Snowden should have had someone other than Julian Assange as a travel agent. A better guide might have told him that Freedom House ranks Russia as “not free” and on par with Algeria in respect for political rights and civil liberties. Seventy-nine journalists have been killed in Russia since 1992, more than in any other country, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. The Russian activist Alexei Navalny, who publishes his investigations of official corruption on his Web blog, faces a lengthy jail term on politically trumped-up charges. These things are good to know if you’re a self-styled crusader for “transparency” looking for a refuge.
Amid Obama Administration pleas not to shelter the American, Mr. Putin said Mr. Snowden should seek refuge elsewhere. And he offered “one condition” for him to stay: “He must cease his work aimed at inflicting damage to our American partners, as strange as it may sound from my lips.” But the Russian also cracked that Mr. Snowden “sees himself as a human rights activist and a freedom fighter for people’s rights” and doesn’t intend to “cease his work,” so Moscow may not be right for him.
