Romney Is Right: Israel’s Economic Success is Due to Culture Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has been assailed for saying at a fundraiser in Jerusalem that “culture” plays a large part in Israel’s superior “economic vitality” over the Palestinians, just as it does “between other countries that are near or next to each other. Chile […]
http://sarahhonig.com/2012/08/03/another-tack-lacunar-amnesia-is-cool/
” The Arab Palestinian state – that was named Jordan only in April 1949 – received approximately 80 percent of Palestine’s whole. In other words, the two-state solution had already been implemented. The Palestinians are by no means stateless and the Jews are by no means occupiers.To deny this is to deliberately carve out hollow cavities in our cerebral recesses, to override the truth with lies, to convince ourselves that some crucial facts are best covered-up, that self-inflicted lacunar amnesia is totally cool and a testament to broadmindedness.”
Science attributes selective memory to defense mechanisms that generate blanks in patients’ awareness to repress trauma or humiliation. The result can manifest as lacunar amnesia, where the mind’s record-keeping is impeded by a gap (lacuna) relating to specific events.
In individual psychology these gaps form involuntarily. But in the spheres of politics and propaganda they become intentional and inherently advantageous. It pays to deliberately blot out entire episodes, decades and even eras. Cynical misrepresentation thrives on erasing contexts and causal connections.
Therefore, not forgetting what we’re encouraged to forget is critical.
There’s enormous importance to how far back in time we go to isolate a defining milestone in our collective history. Where we mark the starting point of ongoing struggles may invariably determine what we conclude about them. Put differently, our disinclination to retrace the steps which, for better or worse, brought us hitherto may mess with our perceptions or dictate profound misperceptions.
Arab-Israeli parliamentarian Haneen Zoabi (Balad), for example, purposefully peddles insidious misperceptions. Last week, she blamed Israel for the terror attack against Israeli tourists in Bulgaria. Israelis, she insisted, have it coming because they have been “occupiers” since 1967.
The problem, of course, is that terrorist atrocities predate 1967, but Zoabi would rather we overlook troublesome truth.
Those who turn June 5, 1967 – the beginning of the Six Day War – into their zero-hour marker usually seek to advance a predetermined agenda, whereby all that preceded Israeli “occupation” is discarded, as is everything that triggered the direct outbreak of hostilities.
http://www.prudenpolitics.com/newsletter?utm_source=P&P%20Auto%201&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=4183 Hollywood is terrified of the backlash against the movie violence that has become its stock-in-trade. This time the big moguls, and some of the little moguls, can see that the public is angry, but they don’t know what to do about it.Maybe the anger will go away. Once upon a time, the moguls big […]
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3245/eu-israel-relations-upgrade The upgrade, which comes amid a barrage of unending criticism of Israel’s policies, in fact appears aimed at increasing Israel’s economic dependence on the European Union, with the objective of enhancing the bloc’s leverage over the State of Israel. Authored by EU delegations to the Palestinian Authority, the document includes severe recommendations meant to […]
http://times247.com/
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Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz22OCMfx9y
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/jamie-glazov/losing-our-sons/
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Daris Long, the father of PV2 William “Andy” Long, the soldier killed in front of the Little Rock Army Recruiting Center in June of 2009. He grew up for ten years in Afghanistan where his father was serving with the USAID Program working irrigation projects in Helmand and Kandahar Provinces. After graduating from High School in Kabul, he moved to the Philippines with his father and joined the US Marine Corps. He served overseas in the Far East for almost 7 years as well as tours of duty in the Persian Gulf, Somalia and East Timor. He is a retired Marine veteran who spent ten years in the Enlisted ranks as well as 17 as an Officer. His wife, Andy’s mother, also served a tour in the US Navy. His sister married an Afghan and escaped Afghanistan immediately prior to the Russian invasion in 1979.
Long has recently helped in producing a powerful documentary, Losing Our Sons, which focuses on the tragic story of his son’s murder by a jihadist in Little Rock, Arkansas.
FP: Daris Long, thank you for joining me today.
Let’s begin with your background. After living and serving in Muslim countries, what was your view of the cultures?
Long: My view of the Afghan culture was positive. Growing up there allowed a more in depth understanding of the people and their customs. Family is very important as well as alliances between families within the various tribes. The tribal elder or clan leader had the most respect followed by the mullah. There were distinct levels of importance though based on the power and influence of a tribe. There was a definite pecking order. It was not the same as the caste system in India but more along the lines of common interest and population.
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-bawer/goodbye-to-gore-vidal/
A CRACKPOT BITES THE DUST
He was born at West Point to a prominent family, served his country in World War II, was made famous by his first novel (published at age twenty), and a couple of years later alienated book-review editors with his third novel, which, for 1948, was that most scandalous of things – a gay love story. Unwelcome in the New York publishing world, he proceeded to bang out TV plays, tinker with scripts at MGM, churn out pseudonymous potboilers, and get a couple of plays produced on Broadway – the grating, now impossibly dated Visit to a Small Planet and the well-made but preachy The Best Man (which, as it happens, is at this very moment back on The Great White Way for the third time).
His series of novels about American history – from Washington, D.C. (1967) to The Golden Age (2000) – help make him rich and led him to brag that he was America’s foremost historian, but these bulky, inert productions might fairly be described by borrowing a few words of criticism that his nemesis, Truman Capote, once directed at the work of one of Vidal’s sometime bedmates, Jack Kerouac: “That’s not writing, that’s typing.” Even worse, perhaps, than his history novels were his more off-beat fictional works, notably Myra Breckenridge (1968), which at the time passed for naughty and sensational but which has long since come to be recognized as an embarrassing, godawful bore.
URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/davidhornik/netanyahu-to-panetta-time-running-out-on-iran/ “Will Israel attack Iran’s nuclear program?” is a parlor game played by numerous people who don’t have enough information to know the answer. It may be that there still is no definite answer; on Tuesday night Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu openly told a national TV audience that he still hadn’t […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/mark-tapson/caroline-glick-israel-on-the-eve-of-u-s-elections/print/
Monday night I attended an insightful presentation entitled “Israel on the Eve of the U.S. Elections,” given by Caroline Glick for the Los Angeles-based organization Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors.
Glick is the adjunct senior fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Center for Security Policy in Washington D.C., and recently was appointed as the Director for the Israel Security Project at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. The author of Shackled Warrior: Israel and the Global Jihad, she served as Assistant Foreign Policy Advisor to Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu in 1997-98, and regularly briefs administration officials and Congress on issues of joint American-Israeli concern.
Glick began her presentation with her perspective on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s recent visit to Jerusalem. It was very, very well-received, she said; in fact, he was “a breath of fresh air” – not because he made a candidate’s usual extravagant promises of support for Israel, but because “he lives in the real world,” where we acknowledge that the Middle East is extremely dangerous and the radiant “Arab Spring” is actually a much bleaker Islamic Winter.
Romney’s reassuring statements in Israel, such as his assertion that Jerusalem is the capital of the Jewish state, were in stark contrast to those of the Obama administration for the last three and a half years, Glick said. Obama has shown that he believes that the way to mollify the Muslim world is to put distance between the United States and Israel, deny that Jerusalem is the capital, take the Palestinians’ side in various issues, use the media to deter Israel from attacking Iran, and cozy up to the Muslim Brotherhood.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2012/07/31/Sec-Napolitano-Terrorists-Are-Crossing-Our-Southern-Border-From-Time-to-Time
Border enforcement has always been a sticking point for the Obama administration. Following the administration’s partial victory against Arizona’s SB 1070, it became an even bigger point as Obama announced DHS deportation policies would no longer be applicable in Arizona.
But now, concerns over the border have hit new levels, as Secretary of Homeland Defense Janet Napolitano has admitted that terrorists intending to do harm to this country are entering via our southern border “from time to time.”
Napolitano was responding to a question from Rep. Ron Barber (D-AZ), who asked: “Is there any credible evidence that…terrorists are, in fact, crossing our southern border with the intent to do harm to the American people?” To this question Napolitano answered: “There have been…from time to time, and we are constantly working against different and evolving threats involving various terrorists groups and various ways they may seek to enter the country.”
