http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/04/climate_change_conversation_aborted.html An editorial essay by American Chemical Society (ACS) officers Bassam Shakhashiri and Jerry Bell (Science 5 April 2013) extends a gracious invitation for a “respectful conversation” about Climate Change. Yet when I tried to respond, the editors of Science refused to print it. So much for “conversation.” Aside from its admirable tone, the […]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323309604578431754054345908.html?mod=us_most_pop_newsreel MIT Campus Police Officer Fatally Injured in Shooting CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—A campus police officer was shot and killed Thursday night at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after responding to a disturbance on campus, according to Cambridge police and the Middlesex County District Attorney’s office. Gunshots were reported on the MIT campus at 10:48 p.m. near […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/346033/partisan-speculation
THERE REMAINS THE NIGGLING DOUBT HERE BECAUSE A SAUDI SUSPECT LINKED TO TERROR IS BEING SLIPPED OUT OF THE COUNTRY….RSK
Until officials identify a culprit and motive in the Boston bombing, the Left should calm down.
At this writing, no one knows who planted two bombs in Boston that killed three people, wounded 176 others, and forced doctors to amputate the limbs of at least 13 maimed victims. Authorities have yet to arrest the murderer(s), whose motivations remain mysterious. (While the FBI released photos of two possible suspects late Thursday, their names and backgrounds are not evident.)
Nonetheless, while investigators labor valiantly amid such uncertainty, omniscient liberals already have concluded who unleashed this carnage: the far Right.
“We really don’t know who did this,” Obama strategist David Axelrod told MSNBC. “It was tax day.” Presumably, the bombs were meant to hammer high tax rates rather than pressure the much-maligned 1 percent to pay “their fair share.”
CNN’s Peter Bergen explained that if the bombs contained conventional explosives — instead of al-Qaeda’s favorite, hydrogen peroxide — the attackers “might be some other kind of right-wing extremists.” According to CNN’s Tim Lister and Paul Cruickshank, “a senior U.S. counterterrorism investigator told CNN that pressure cooker bombs have also been a signature of extreme right-wing individuals in the United States who he said tend to revel in building homemade bombs.”
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/346043/cooking-books-deportation-stats t is one of the Obama administration’s favorite talking points on immigration: It has been deporting illegal immigrants in record numbers. That bolsters its credentials on enforcement and supports the argument that, now that we’ve gotten tough on the border, it is time to enact comprehensive immigration reform. But figures recently unearthed by a […]
http://acdemocracy.org/?utm_source=The+Muslim+Brotherhood+Deception+%26+Education+&utm_campaign=ACD%2FEWI+BLOG&utm_medium=email
Introduction:
The Muslim Brotherhood’s response to the Boston Marathon bombings is a good way to illustrate the “flexibility” principle that dictates the organization’s modus operandi.
Egypt serves as the MB headquarters. Its Freedom and Justice Party released a statement in English condemning the bombing and “offering heartfelt sympathies and solemn condolences to the American people and the families of the victims.”
On Facebook in Arabic, senior Brotherhood leader and vice chairman of the party Essam el-Erian suggested a Western conspiracy linking the Boston bombings to the French war in Mali, the “destruction” of Syria and Iraq, and the faltering rapprochement between the Turkish government and Kurdish rebels.
El-Erian asked ”Who disturbed democratic transformations, despite the difficult transition from despotism, corruption, poverty, hatred, and intolerance to freedom, justice, tolerance, development, human dignity, and social justice?”
El -Erian continued to answer his own accusatory question with another one: “Who planted Islamophobia through research, the press, and the media? Who funded the violence?” Who?
El-Erian’s Arabic-speaking audience of course knows the answer because they’ve been fed it with their mothers’ milk. Who? The corrupt infidels, the U.S. and … the Jews…
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/04/18/exclusive-congressional-source-contradicts-ice-account-says-lawmakers-in-possession-of-file-on-saudi-national-that-called-for-visa-revocation/
Exclusive: Congressional Source Contradicts ICE Account, Says Lawmakers in Possession of File on Saudi National That Called for Visa Revocation
Apr. 18, 2013 9:34pm Jason Howerton
Documents have been presented to Congress confirming that plans were made to revoke the visa of Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi, a Saudi national once considered a “person of interest” in the Boston bombings, a congressional source told TheBlaze on Thursday.
Other sources, including one at the FBI, previously informed TheBlaze that there have been discussions about deporting Alharbi on “security and related grounds.” He has been living in the Boston area and in the U.S. on a student visa. An FBI source said the agency is against deporting Alharbi because of his status as a material witness.
The congressional source told TheBlaze it was unclear as to why representatives from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would be unaware of this information. Earlier on Thursday, an official with ICE said it was “categorically false” that Alharbi had ever been considered for deportation.
The congressional source, however, said the information sent to Congress showed that a file was created on “Abdul Rahman Ali Al Harby” at 4 p.m. on Tuesday by an official with the National Targeting Center, a counterterrorism sub-agency of U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Homeland Security. The file stated that the individual is “linked to the Boston bombing” and was to be processed for revocation of his visa based on national security grounds, the congressional source revealed.
The source confirmed seeing the information sent to members of Congress but could not provide copies of any documents to TheBlaze.
http://www.jidaily.com/8da9a
In May 1998, the eminent British historian Paul Johnson published an essay in Commentary to mark Israel’s 50th birthday; marking its 63rd, we re-publish the essay here.—The Editors
The state of Israel is the product of more than 4,000 years of Jewish history. “If you want to understand our country, read this!” said David Ben-Gurion on the first occasion I met him, in 1957. And he slapped the Bible. But the creation and survival of Israel are also very much a 20th-century phenomenon, one that could not have happened without the violence and cruelty, the agonies, confusions, and cross-currents of our tragic age. It could even be argued that Israel is the most characteristic single product, and its creation the quintessential event, of this century.
Certainly, you cannot study Israel without traveling the historical highroads and many of the byroads of the times, beginning with the outbreak of World War I in 1914. That great watershed between an age of peace and moderation and one of violence and extremism set the pattern for all that followed, and marked a turning point as well in the fortunes of Zionism.
Theodor Herzl’s Zion, a product of the 1890’s, was not exactly a modest proposal, but it could fairly be described as a moderate one. His book was entitled Der Judenstaat, and that phrase—a “state of the Jews”—fairly describes what he had in mind. But he was not necessarily wedded to the historical dream of a state in Palestine. He toyed, for example, with the notion of a giant settlement in Argentina, and not until the Seventh Zionist Congress in 1905 was Uganda, too, finally rejected as a possible site. By that time Herzl was dead, at the age of forty-four. One of his last pronouncements had been: “Palestine is the only land where our people can come to rest.”
Uncertainties and ambivalences of other kinds abounded. Although Herzl had always used the word “sovereignty” in connection with his imagined Jewish state, his friend Max Nordau, the philosopher, believed that in order to avoid offending the Turks, of whose empire Palestine then formed a part, the term Judenstaat should be replaced by Heimstätte, or homestead, rendered into English as “national home.” This fortuitously became an important factor in winning acceptance for the Zionist idea among European statesmen. Similarly, Herzl had written of a huge “expedition” that would “take possession of the land,” but the idea that the land would actually have to be conquered, and then fiercely defended, does not seem to have occurred to him.
As for the arrangements of life in his future commonwealth, Herzl was enamored of the model of Venice at the height of its power. He imagined a Venetian-style constitution, a Jewish doge, a coronation ceremony, and city plans featuring huge squares like the Piazza San Marco. He also foresaw theaters, circuses, café-concerts, and an enormous opera house specializing in Wagner, his favorite. The only military touch was to be a guards regiment, the Herzl-Cuirassiers, for ceremonial occasions; the New Zion would not, he thought, need much of an army. In many ways, Herzl’s conception had more in common with the Ruritania of Anthony Hope’s novels than with the state that actually came into being a little over four decades after his death.
http://www.prudenpolitics.com/newsletter?utm_source=P&P%20Auto%201&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=6965
The sour wind from the left
Bearded terrorists can be terrifying, but there’s nothing more terrifying than a politician, particularly a clean-shaven member of Congress in full hysteria mode. Once a congressional — or gubernatorial — mouth starts flapping, you never know how much wind it can expel.
Rep. Peter King of New York is a Republican member of the House Homeland Security Committee (a title right out of George Orwell’s literary fancy) and the House Intelligence Committee (“intelligence” in the House? Who knew?). He wants everybody put under suspicion, if not arrest. He prescribes more cameras, more dogs, more surveillance, more neighbor-to-neighbor snooping to deal with the terrorists. Even if you don’t see something, say something. Call the cops.
“For instance,” he told MSNBC in the wake of the Boston massacre, “merchants, if they’re selling any components that can be used for a bomb, everywhere from ball bearings to beauty products, they can all make bombs. They should notify police.”
Eyeliner alert!
Merchants and even other shoppers must be on the scout to help police nab anyone buying mascara, lipstick, cold cream, face powder, rouge, body lotion, eau de cologne and perfume. Helena Rubenstein, Max Factor and Cover Girl must be added to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List at once.
Mr. King thinks the Boston massacre should lead to the installation of more and more cameras. “Privacy,” he says, “involves being in a private location. Being out in the street, there’s not an expectation of privacy. Anyone can look at you, can see you, can watch what you’re doing. A camera just makes it more sophisticated.”
Good citizenship requires good citizens to keep their window blinds open, to enable the camera to get a good view. When you get up in the middle of the night to visit the facilities, turn on the lights. The camera must get a good look.
Mr. King wants the cops to have “jammers” to disable cell phones, preventing terrorists from detonating “improvised explosive devices” by remote control: “I feel strongly that local police should have access to jammers. I believe they should have more co-operation with the military –- right now there are legal issues, as far as military being involved in this.” Ah, yes. Those pesky “legal issues” always get in the way of hysteria. But the great thing about hysteria is that it blows away impediments like a Constitution.
Communist icon Rosa Luxemburg was rifle-butted to death by German nationalists nearly a century ago. Nonetheless, though her legacy has been largely forgotten elsewhere, her spirit is alive and well in 21st century Israel. It thrives among her assorted homegrown doctrinal descendants. Ideologically, Ha’aretz’s Amira Hass is Rosa’s daughter and drinks from her wellspring.
In a recent op-ed, Hass justified – indeed glorified – the targeting of Jews by Arabs who hurl rocks at passing Israeli vehicles. There’s no doubt where her loyalties and sympathies reside. “Throwing stones is the birthright and duty of anyone subject to foreign rule. Throwing stones is an action as well as a metaphor of resistance,” she wrote. Nowhere did Hass mention the historical progression and context that produced what she habitually disparages as Israeli “occupation.”
This is no surprise. Hass, reared in an orthodox communist home, had long ago crossed the lines not only in abstract terms. She resides in Ramallah, having previously made her home in Gaza (but that became uncomfortable and unsafe, given the illiberal nature of Gaza’s Hamas warlords).
For the most part, the usual hodgepodge of Israel-bashers overseas avidly amplifies Hass’s every word. Her diatribes, however, barely resonate inside Israel except among small cliques of local ultra-radicals. But her stirring defense of rock-hurlers did succeed in setting off an uncommon hullabaloo.
For one thing, her piece appeared the day after Waal al-Arjeh, the stone-thrower who hit Asher Palmer’s car in 2011, was convicted of murdering the young father and his one-year-old son, Yonathan. The judges determined that, contrary to forgiving attitudes by predisposed news-slanters, rocks can be lethal weapons. Palmer lost control of his car and was killed in the resultant crash as was the baby – a mere 17 days past his first birthday.
Another toddler, Adelle Biton, is now comatose and in critical condition after a rock struck the car in which she, her two sisters and mother were riding last month. Adelle’s mother, Adva, invited Hass to “come to the Intensive Care Unit, see my Adelle, a three-year-old child, connected to tubes. Come experience with me what I am dealing with. Amira, a rock does not distinguish between different people’s blood, and not between an adult and a three-year-old. A rock kills. A rock is a murder weapon for all intents and purposes.”
But Hass is a seasoned political warrior and in all likelihood impervious to any pain that doesn’t serve the causes she propagandizes. In her universe, the fault for the tragedies of tiny Yonathan and Adelle – and too many others – rests with their parents and official Israel. The tots just shouldn’t have been where they were, Hass would surely aver.
Nor is she likely to be swayed by the fact that the Yesha (Judea and Samaria) Council had demanded that Hass be indicted for incitement. Quite the contrary. She is likely to posture as the Jeanne d’Arc of free speech, despite the fact that Israel’s Left clamors for the prosecution of any oddball who dares opine in the other extreme. Its persistent drive to try Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira for his obscure 2009 Torat Hamelech, a scholarly treatise on the religious rules of warfare, is a prime case in point.
Moreover, Hass didn’t merely extol stone-throwing but took the Palestinian Authority to task for not making practical anti-Israel attrition tactics part of the formal school curriculum.
“It would make sense for Palestinian schools to introduce basic classes in resistance,” Hass advised the PA. In an accusative tone she argued that such instruction isn’t offered “due to inertia, laziness, flawed reasoning, misunderstanding and the personal gains of some parts of society.”
She recommends that “various forms of steadfastness and resisting the foreign regime, as well as its rules and limitations, should be taught and developed.” Thereby, Hass figures, Palestinian youths could be discouraged from aiming at Jewish children – not that anyone has yet come up with a reliable method to rapidly ascertain the age groups among a given moving vehicle’s passengers.
But no such fine points bother Hass or her backers in the increasingly anti-Zionist Ha’aretz. That’s where Hass particularly resembles the Luxemburg prototype.
To inveterate ideologues like Rosa, Zionism was anathema. Although reviled by Germans as a contemptible generic Jew (with her revolutionary doctrines falsely ascribed to all Jews), Rosa’s antipathy to Jewish causes was a near-boastful expression of alienation from her own Jewish roots.
In 1917 she wrote her friend Mathilde Wurm a harsh response to the latter’s concern about pogroms. “I have no room in my heart for Jewish suffering,” Rosa declared outright. “Why do you pester me with Jewish troubles? I feel closer to the wretched victims of the rubber plantations of Putumayo or the Negroes in Africa… I have no separate corner in my heart for the ghetto.”
Rosa’s indifference to her own people arose from the intuition that cutting the cords of disagreeable Jewish affiliations eases acceptance beyond the ghetto. This was Rosa’s ticket to citizen-of-the-world credentials – even if only within the setting of her Marxist milieu, packed paradoxically with her own breed of estranged Jews.
No less paradoxically, her professed lack of solidarity with fellow Jews flourishes remarkably in the Jewish homeland – the creation of the very Zionist movement to which Rosa was the antithesis. Logically, this country ought to be the last place in which to expect Jewish self-loathing. After all, Zionism regarded itself as the remedy to Rosa-syndrome complexes.
But the Zionist cure is perhaps of limited effectiveness against the collective mental aberrations which 2000 years of exile, helplessness and dependence on the whims of diverse potentates and tyrants inculcated in downtrodden Jews. Rosa’s keenness to bask in the warmth of socialist comradeship still abounds among all-too-many Israelis. For them too, distancing themselves from the inherent interests of the Jewish people purchases a voucher for universalist endorsement.
This mindset long predated actual Jewish self-determination. As in the Hass episode, in its more extreme manifestations this inclination didn’t merely involve apathy toward the tribulations of fellow Jews but also meant active collaboration with the enemies of the Jews.
This was already so before the pretext of “resisting occupation” at all came to be. Even Jewish independence hadn’t yet been declared, couldn’t be seized upon as a casus belli and misrepresented as the Palestinian nakba (catastrophe – the loaded Arabic moniker for Israel’s sovereignty).
Then as now, whenever the Left goes on the warpath it’s ostensibly for peace, justice and virtue. Its self-acclaimed high-mindedness inevitably rationalizes any means, as it did immediately following the start in April 1936 of the blood-soaked three-year cycle of Arab-perpetrated pogroms. The more militant Marxists, under the aegis of the Communist Peh-Kah-Peh(PKP, the Yiddish acronym for the Palestinisheh Kommunistisheh Partai) plastered local streets with posters demanding “the repeal of the Balfour Declaration and an end to Jewish immigration.”
The PKP opposed the construction of Tel Aviv Harbor (where immigrant boats docked) and repudiated each batch of new immigration certificates issued. These were entry visas allotted very tight-fistedly by the British mandatory authorities to Jews already then desperately escaping Europe. The PKP, purportedly anti-British and anti-fascist, opposed rescuing these Jews. In that it sided with the infamous Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini who instigated the Nazi-financed carnage that was the 1936-39 “Great Arab Revolt.”
Husseini subsequently, in the role of pan-Arab prime minister, spent the war years in Berlin, where he consorted with Hitler, Himmler, Eichmann, et al. He broadcast virulent Nazi propaganda, recruited Muslims to the SS and actively foiled the rescue of any Jews, even children, during the Holocaust.
Indeed as Arab terror escalated, proof mounted of active PKP collusion with it (in incidents such as the 1936 bombing of Haifa’s Beit Hapoalim and Tel Aviv’s Fair Grounds). When Arab leaders themselves announced a brief truce in the autumn of 1936, the PKP rejected any ceasefire on the grounds that “Zionism drags Jews to hell… Zionists and imperialists alone are to blame for these days of atrocity” – much like settlers are nowadays held liable.
The anti-Zionism of the PKP evolved gradually. The party arose from the fringes of the broad-based Poalei Zion. In 1919 – coincidentally the year in which Rosa was fatally bludgeoned – the embryo faction banded as the Hebrew Socialist Workers Party. But by 1922 its rejection of Zionism became so all-encompassing that it ditched Hebrew – whose revival was core to the Zionist ethos – and reverted to Yiddish (the language which Moscow’s commissars preferred for Jews).
In 1923 the PKP castigated Zionism as “a bourgeois movement serving the interests of British imperialism” (just as the Zionist state today is castigated for purportedly serving the interests of alleged American imperialism). The party cheered the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that facilitated WWII. The PKP vehemently opposed fighting the Third Reich until Hitler betrayed Stalin and attacked the USSR in 1941.
History is an irreverent matchmaker with a quirky sense of irony.
Back in pre-state days, when the PKP assumed it was abetting Marxist goals, it also inter alia furthered the fascist game plan. It’s not much different today.
The anti-Israel and pro-Arab line that Hass promotes appeals equally to anti-Israel forces on the international arena’s left and to rightist neo-Nazi outfits abroad. The rhetoric to which both supposed opposites resort when demonizing Israel is eerily similar. Hass delights them both.
She may pose as the embodiment of humane admonition and hector as the self-appointed voice of Israeli conscience. She may adopt the affectation of doing the moral thing in our name but the end result is immoral and indisputably at our expense.
Hass and her like-minded cronies in our midst aren’t held accountable and most probably never will. They are sure to continue deriding the Israeli mainstream’s disapproval of them. They will keep on deriving clout and celebrity in distant salons, campuses and media.
They’ll keep on molding foreign opinion against their own people. Like Rosa, her heirs too have no room in their hearts for Jewish suffering. Rosa’s ghost walks among them and they bow to its diktats.
http://jewishworldreview.com/0413/glick041913.php3
Why Obama’s visit to Israel had no impact on public opinion or government policy
Israel: The happy little country that can
As Yom Haatzmaut (Israel Independence Day) celebrations were winding down Tuesday night, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu made a guest appearance on Channel 2’s left-wing satire show Eretz Nehederet. One of the final questions that the show’s host Eyal Kitzis asked the premier was how he would like to be remembered after he leaves office.
Netanyahu thought a moment and said, “I’d like to be remembered as the leader who preserved Israel’s security.”
On the face of it, Netanyahu’s stated aspiration might seem dull. In a year he’ll be the longest serving prime minister in Israel’s history, and all he wants is to preserve our national security? Why is he aiming so low?
And yet, the studio audience reacted to Netanyahu’s modest goal with a thunderclap of applause.
After pausing to gather his thoughts, a clearly befuddled Kitzis mumbled something along the lines of, “Well, if you manage to make peace as well, we wouldn’t object.”
The audience was silent.
The disparity between the audience’s exultation and Kitzis’s shocked disappointment at Netanyahu’s answer exposed — yet again — the yawning gap between the mainstream Israeli view of the world, and that shared by members of our elite class.
The Israeli public gave our elites the opportunity to try out their peace fantasies in the 1990s. We gave their peace a chance and got repaid with massive terror and international isolation.
We are not interested in repeating the experience.
We will be nice to leftists, if they are polite. We might even watch their shows, if there’s nothing else on or they are mildly entertaining. But we won’t listen to them anymore.
This is why US President Barack Obama’s visit to Israel last month had no impact on public opinion or government policy.
Obama came, hugged Netanyahu and showered us with love just like Bill Clinton did back in the roaring 90s. He praised us to high heaven and told us he has our back. And then he told us we should force our leaders to give Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria to our sworn enemies even as they teach their children to aspire to kill our children.
And we smiled and wished him a pleasant flight home.
Obama had no idea what he was getting into when he came here. Like Kitzis and his colleagues on Channel 2, Obama surrounds himself with people who like him, prefer fantasy to reality. In Obama’s world, Islamic jihad is about the West, not about jihadists. In Obama’s world, the most pressing issue on the international agenda is apartments for Jews in Jerusalem and Efrat. And in Obama’s world, what Israelis need more than anything else is for leftist Europeans to love us.
