http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324874204578441032081716170.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop Millions of Americans will pay more for health insurance, lose their coverage, or have their hours of work cut back. In recent weeks, there have been increasing expressions of concern from surprising quarters about the implementation of ObamaCare. Montana Sen. Max Baucus, a Democrat, called it a “train wreck.” A Democratic colleague, West Virginia’s […]
http://www.steynonline.com/5545/the-sheik-of-araby
April 29th apparently marks the anniversary of the launch of the Islamic conquest of the Iberian peninsula in the year 711 – AD, that is; not sure how it’s numbered Islamically. So I thought it would be fun to have a suitably Islamo-dominant number for our Song of the Week. But then I realized I didn’t know any, apart from “Put On A Wahhabi Face”, cheerily sung by millions of Saudi wives as they’re being fitted for their burqas. So, instead of that, how about an all-American number about the desert sands?
Question: What’s the connection between Rudolph Valentino, Adolf Hitler and the Beatles?
Answer: This song:
I’m The Sheik Of Araby
Your love belongs to me
At night when you’re asleep,
Into your tent I’ll creep…
Until 9/11 sparked the current torrid romance between western lefties and the Islamists, the last time the stern men of the desert had the developed world mooning over them was 90 years ago. Even before Rudolph Valentino’s screen version, The Sheik was a smash: E M Hull’s novel sold two million copies within a year of publication in 1919. It’s a cracking read, right from its splendid first sentence:
Are you coming in to watch the dancing, Lady Conway?
And, if you think today’s Euro-American feminists are pretty submissive in the face of Islamist theocrats, well, at the very dawn of female emancipation, millions of women apparently wanted nothing more than to be forcibly seized by some Bedouin chieftain, trussed up over his Arab stallion and ridden into the desert to be his bride. Valentino’s moment was brief: the film of The Sheik opened in 1921 and he was dead by 1926, at the age of only 31. And, to the puzzlement of your average bloke, Hollywood’s first great screen lover was frankly a bit of a nancy boy. But his alleged smoldering eroticism drove the gals crazy, and 80,000 of them showed up for his funeral, and came near to rioting. It was the biggest send-off for a charismatic Middle Eastern type until the Ayatollah Khomeini’s six decades later, when the excitable young lads clutching at his shroud managed to yank the corpse off the bier at one point.
So in the early Twenties the trick for Tin Pan Alley was to figure out a way to cash in on all this sheik chic. There’s always been a niche market for lyric exoticism – “Moonlight On The Ganges” and whatnot – and songwriters were already gingerly setting a toe or two on the desert sand. In 1915 Irving Berlin wrote a number called “Araby”, which includes some of the most atrocious rhymes in that great man’s illustrious career, starting with the first couplet –
Tonight I’m dreaming of Araby,
That’s where my dreams seem to carry me
– and continuing all the way through to the final eight bars:
Soon you’ll see within a caravan
An Arab man
Will take me over the desert…
In between comes one of the better quatrains:
That’s why I long to be
Where all those happy faces
Wait for me,
Beside the fair oasis…
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2316264/MELANIE-PHILLIPS-What-kind-society-treats-smacking-war-crime–teaching-children-watch-porn.html
What kind of society treats smacking as a war crime – while teaching children how to watch porn?
A group of sex education ‘experts’ has suggested that pupils should be taught in school about pornography, on the grounds that it is not ‘all bad’ and can even be ‘helpful’ to them.
Yes, you read that right.
The Sex Education Forum says in a new publication for schools that pornography should be taught in terms of ‘media literacy and representation, gender, sexual behaviour and body image’.
Behind the gobbledegook, this seems to be at least in part a confused attempt to deal with the fact that children are now accessing all manner of dubious or harmful material on the internet.
Accordingly, this publication warns that the sex and bodies in pornography ‘are mostly unrealistic’, and that such material may involve coercing participants into performing sex acts. But it also suggests showing such images to children at age 14. Moreover, it states they might find some of the positions in such porn films ‘helpful’, while being made aware that ‘the so-called pleasure’ they see ‘may be anything but’.
http://www.grasstopsusa.com/df042913.html.
Two weeks ago today, two brothers are alleged to have set off a bomb at the finish line of the Boston Marathon that left three dead – including an eight-year-old boy – and injured 282. At least 14 lost limbs. Our president implored us not to “jump to conclusions” and thus end up stereotyping his favorite faith.
In the interim, a friend sent me a link to the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists website. (In case you’re curious, here it is http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/wanted_terrorists/@@wanted-group-listing.) With one exception (a convert named Adam), all had names like Ibrahim, Abdul, Omar, Jamal, Abdullah, Ramadan, Hasan, Mohammed and Muhammad. Just a coincidence, I’m sure.
As the political establishment, mainstream media, academia and our moralizer-in-chief have pointed out repeatedly in the past fortnight, there’s absolutely no connection between Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (AKA, the Boys from Chechnya, via Dagestan) and the Religion of Peace.
“The Boston Bombers Were Muslim: So?” ran a headline in The Atlantic. Over at MSNBC, Chris (if I only had a brain) Matthews told us motivation was irrelevant: “Where was their inspiration? Where did they get the guidance? Why is that important? … I mean, what difference does it make why they did it, if they did it?”
In 1945, six million Jews were dead – murdered in death camps and by mobile killing squads. Why did Hitler, Himmler, Eichmann and the S.S. do it? What was their motivation? (Could it have had something to do with Nazi race-theory, set forth in the fascist bible?) Why is that important? I mean, what difference does it make why they did it, if they did it? “The Architects of the Holocaust Were Nazis: So?”
Yogi Berra……THANKS TO E-PAL BUD BURRELL
Lawrence Peter Berra played Major League Baseball for 19 years for the New York Yankees.
He played on 10 World Series Championship teams, is a MLB Hall of Famer and has some awe-inspiring
Stats. His name is consistently brought up as one of the best catchers in baseball history, and he was
Voted to the Team of the Century in 1999.
Amazing accomplishments aside, they probably aren’t how you know Lawrence. You know him as Yogi,
A nickname given to him by a friend who likened his cross-legged sitting to a yogi. Yogi is famous for his
Fractured English, malapropisms and sometimes nonsensical quotes. He’s closing in on 87, and there
Seems to be no end to his fans love for him.
Here are 25 Yogi Berra quotes that will make you shake your head and smile.
1. “It’s like deja vu all over again.”
2. “We made too many wrong mistakes.”
3. “You can observe a lot just by watching.”
4. “A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.”
5. “He hits from both sides of the plate. He’s amphibious.”
6. “If the world was perfect, it wouldn’t be.”
7. “If you don’t know where you’re going, you might end up some place else.”
8. Responding to a question about remarks attributed to him that he did not think were his:
“I really didn’t say everything I said.”
9. “The future ain’t what it use to be.”
10. “I think Little League is wonderful. It keeps the kids out of the house.”
11. On why he no longer went to Ruggeri’s, a St. Louis restaurant:
“Nobody goes there anymore because it’s too crowded.”
12. “I always thought that record would stand until it was broken.”
13. “We have deep depth.”
14. “All pitchers are liars or crybabies.”
15. When giving directions to Joe Garagiola to his New Jersey home, which is accessible by two routes:
“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
16. “Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t come to yours.”
17. “Never answer anonymous letters.”
18. On being the guest of honor at an awards banquet: “Thank you for making this day necessary.”
19. “The towels were so thick there I could hardly close my suitcase.”
20. “Half the lies they tell about me aren’t true.”
21. As a general comment on baseball: “90% of the game is half mental.”
22. “I don’t know (if they were men or women running naked across the field),
They had bags over their heads.”
23. “It gets late early out there.”
24. Carmen Berra, Yogi’s wife asked: “Yogi, you are from St. Louis, we live in New Jersey, and you
Played ball in New York. If you go before I do, where would you like me to have you buried?” Yogi’s
Answer: “Surprise me.”
25. “It ain’t over till it’s over…..
[]
“Thank-you Planned Parenthood, God Bless You.” ~ Barack Obama. April 26th, 2013.
(The only sitting President to address Planned Parenthood)
Full text of the Margaret Sanger quote:
“Slavs, Latin, and Hebrew immigrants are human weeds … a deadweight of human waste … Blacks, soldiers, and Jews are a menace to the race.”
“Eugenic sterilization is an urgent need … We must prevent Multiplication of this bad stock.”
Margaret Sanger
Birth Control Review
April 1933
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3693/saudi-arabia-tribal-justice By playing the clerics and institutions against the people, the House of Saud rises above the power struggle and justice itself, and continues further to consolidate its power. A Saudi court ordered Ali al-Khawahir, a 24-year-old Saudi citizen, to be surgically paralyzed as punishment for a crime he committed as a 14-year-old, that […]
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3692/belgium-erasing-christianity Under the guise of letting go of the Christian holidays, this text provides Muslims with a waiver to add Islamic holidays…. Six Belgian senators introduced a draft resolution in the Belgian Parliament that would make “Islamophobia” a crime punishable by fines and imprisonment. A person would be guilty if he “considers Islam to be […]
http://www.meforum.org/3494/india-israel-ties
Since their establishment in January 1992, Israeli-Indian relations have improved dramatically. Israel has emerged as a major Indian trading partner in the Middle East with bilateral trade rising from a meager US$100 million to over $6.6 billion.[1] Cooperation in the military-security arena has similarly grown,[2] and there are widespread popular exchanges between the people of the two countries. The Israeli ambassador is the most sought after diplomat in New Delhi after his U.S. counterpart, and Indo-Israeli ties seem extraordinarily robust. Yet failure to acknowledge the limitations of this relationship would be costly.
India’s Israel policy falls into three broad phases. Beginning in the early 1920s, the nationalist leadership adopted a pro-Arab position, which largely continued until January 1992. Its recognition of the Jewish state in September 1950 did not materially alter this stand. The adoption of a pro-Arab stand was seen as critical for its interests in the Middle East and was pursued through a pro-Palestinian foreign policy. While it did not identify with the Arab extremism of that period, recognition without relations was the hallmark of Indian policy until January 1992. The end of the Cold War and the transformation of the global order brought an end to this zero-sum approach as New Delhi concluded that, in order to make a difference in this new era, it was both possible and necessary to maintain normal relations with the Israelis and the Palestinians, who seemed to be moving toward a historic reconciliation. Shortly after the decision to normalize relations with Israel was announced on January 29, 1992, the two countries opened diplomatic missions and paved the way for increased political, economic, cultural, and security cooperation.
After the Congress party returned to power in 2004, bilateral relations moved to a third and more complex phase. In a radical departure from its pre-1992 position, New Delhi began to delink bilateral relations from the vagaries of the peace process. While disagreements with Israel over the peace process had earlier prevented full normalization of relations, New Delhi quietly began to pursue the peace process as if there were no bilateral relations with Israel and to pursue bilateral relations as if there were no differences with Israel over the peace process. This move was not only inevitable but has also been critical for the consolidation of the bilateral relations.
However, New Delhi continues to maintain some of its core pre-1992 positions vis-à-vis the Palestinians. Most importantly, it continues to support the pursuit of Palestinian political rights that will result in the formation of a sovereign and independent state coexisting with Israel. Ever since its decision to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the “sole and legitimate” representative of the Palestinians, political ties and interactions have improved and strengthened between the two parties with the PLO mission in New Delhi granted embassy status in early 1980. At that time, the Israeli representation was still confined to a consulate in Mumbai, which was often described as India’s diplomatic Siberia. In November 1988, India was among the first countries to recognize the “state of Palestine,” proclaimed by the PLO in Algiers, and began receiving PLO chairman Yasser Arafat and his successor, Mahmoud Abbas, as heads of state. In the wake of the Oslo agreement, in 1993, India opened a separate mission in the Gaza Strip. As has been the practice in the West, the Gaza mission reported directly to the Foreign Office in New Delhi and not to the Indian embassy in Tel Aviv. When the situation in Gaza became more difficult, the mission was moved to Ramallah in the West Bank in 2004.
http://www.prudenpolitics.com/newsletter?utm_source=P&P%20Auto%201&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=7071
Political correctness is always petty, often infuriating, and sometimes does no permanent harm. But occasionally it’s a threat to the nation’s security. When a paperclip general at the Pentagon surrenders to the enemy at the first sound of the popguns, the harm can be permanent.
Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stood up to the enemy in Iraq, where he made an enviable combat record. But at the Pentagon, he appears to have fallen, not on his sword, but on a paperclip, attached to a point of religious doctrine.When, 18 months ago, apologists for Islamic radicals complained that an instructor at the National Defense University, the military war college, was guilty of the sin of showing insufficient deference to radical Islam, the general first humiliated him, then cashiered him, to appease Muslim critics, some of them radical and no friends of the United States. Now the instructor has been rejected for battalion command and his promising Army career is effectively over.
Army Lt. Col. Matthew Dooley (a good Irish Catholic name), decorated for valor in Iraq, was an instruction leader at the Joint Forces Staff College in Washington, lecturing on the dangers of radical Islam, when he invited an authority on Islamic extremists to talk to his students about how the extremists operate. You might think that “knowing the enemy” is a good thing in senior Army officers. One passage in the materials used by a guest lecturer, former FBI agent John Guandolo, particularly enraged the critics:
“If Islam is so violent, why are there so many peaceful Muslims? This is similar to asking why there are so many Christians who are arrogant, angry and vindictive, if Christian doctrine requires humility, tolerance and forgiveness.” There were no protests from Christians, or Christian organizations. But one participant in the course complained to the Pentagon, and the witch hunt, led by the thoroughly frightened Gen. Dempsey, began.
