http://www.steynonline.com/5072/street-sign-statism I’ve spent the last few weeks tootling round various parts of Britain and Europe, and, as always, it takes me a couple of days to acclimatize to local driving norms. I quickly appreciate being on a country lane and able to see the country, as opposed to admiring rural America’s unending procession of bend […]
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/1475/bds_movement_forcing_brits_to_pay_more_for_medicines_
Anti-Israeli activists are once again lobbying against Israeli industry. This time to the detriment of European citizens too
In the economic climate currently plaguing Europe, one would expect elected officials (and perhaps in particular, members of the Labour Party) to be among the first to support an initiative which has the potential to contribute to easing the strain both on government budgets and the purses of ordinary citizens – especially those with lower incomes.However, it seems that for some UK MEPs, political posturing is far more important than the well-being of their constituents.
The European Union – Israel Agreement on Conformity, Assessment and Acceptance of Industrial Products (ACAA) was approved by the European Council of Ministers in March 2010 and then sent on to the European Parliament for ratification. The European Parliament has delayed that process for over two years – supposedly as a reaction to the May 2010 flotilla incident in which nine Turkish political activists were killed after having attacked Israeli soldiers.
As the wheels of that process begin to turn again, anti-Israel activists are once more trying to scupper the ACAA; among them Labour Party member and Scottish MEP David Martin, who spoke against the agreement in the European Parliament, had a letter of objection published in the Guardian and wrote about the subject on his blog.
If ratified and enacted, the ACAA will mean that European pharmaceutical companies will be able to purchase Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) and medicines from Israeli companies at lower costs as the need for additional testing in Europe will in many cases be significantly reduced or even no longer exist.
That of course will bring about lower manufacturing costs for European drug companies, ultimately resulting in savings for the European governments which provide their citizens with healthcare, as well as cheaper medications for European citizens paying for certain products out of their own pockets .
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/08/romneys_apology_tour.html Mitt Romney’s recent triumphal tour of Britain, Israel, and Poland struck me as a much-needed and most welcome apology tour for Barack Obama’s abject abandonment and humiliation of our most loyal and trusted allies. Finally, here is an apology tour that Americans can get behind. It was a triumph. The enemedia says otherwise, of […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/08/the_palestinian_culture_of_slapping_israel.html Mitt Romney is being castigated for praising the culture that has allowed a democratic, (mainly) free market Israel, operating under the rule of law, to thrive amid decades of threat and periodic open warfare and a heavy defense burden. Actually, he’s being castigated for what his praise of Israel implies or says outright about […]
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
If Romney accomplished nothing else during his Israeli visit, he did manage to offend every single Palestinian Arab terrorist group, all of whom, the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the PFLP and the DFLP, issued press releases denouncing him. Their American media outlets, on a desperate gaffe hunt, seized on his statement that the GDP Per Capita differences between Israel and the territory under the control of the Palestinian Authority are the result of different values.
The official media narrative is that these differences are the results of eons of oppression, checkpoints and blockades. Fair enough. But then why does the IMF put Israel’s GDP Per Capita well ahead of the oil rich kingdom of Saudi Arabia?
Saudi Arabia has no Israeli checkpoints, no Israeli soldiers or planes flying overhead. It has wealth literally pouring out of the ground with a fifth of the world’s petroleum reserves. And yet the IMF puts it 13 places behind Israel and the World Bank puts it 8 places behind Israel. The only Muslim countries with a better GDP Per Capita rating than Israel are small monarchies drowning in oil.
http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/jewhis1.htm
HIS NASTY FOREWORD TO A NASTY BOOK
Sometime in the late 1950s, that world-class gossip and occasional historian, John F. Kennedy, told me how, in 1948, Harry S. Truman had been pretty much abandoned by everyone when he came to run for president. Then an American Zionist brought him two million dollars in cash, in a suitcase, aboard his whistle-stop campaign train. ‘That’s why our recognition of Israel was rushed through so fast.’ As neither Jack nor I was an antisemite (unlike his father and my grandfather) we took this to be just another funny story about Truman and the serene corruption of American politics.
Unfortunately, the hurried recognition of Israel as a state has resulted in forty-five years of murderous confusion, and the destruction of what Zionist fellow travellers thought would be a pluralistic state – home to its native population of Muslims, Christians and Jews, as well as a future home to peaceful European and American Jewish immigrants, even the ones who affected to believe that the great realtor in the sky had given them, in perpetuity, the lands of Judea and Samaria. Since many of the immigrants were good socialists in Europe, we assumed that they would not allow the new state to become a theocracy, and that the native Palestinians could live with them as equals. This was not meant to be. I shall not rehearse the wars and alarms of that unhappy region. But I will say that the hasty invention of Israel has poisoned the political and intellectual life of the USA, Israel’s unlikely patron.
Unlikely, because no other minority in American history has ever hijacked so much money from the American taxpayers in order to invest in a ‘homeland’. It is as if the American taxpayer had been obliged to support the Pope in his reconquest of the Papal States simply because one third of our people are Roman Catholic. Had this been attempted, there would have been a great uproar and Congress would have said no. But a religious minority of less than two per cent has bought or intimidated seventy senators (the necessary two thirds to overcome an unlikely presidential veto) while enjoying support of the media.
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/1471/brazen_cheek_of_palestinian_racism_charge_against_mitt_romney They’re at it again. Fresh from telling the International Olympic Committee it would be spreading “racism” if it held a minute’s silence at the London Olympics for the Israeli athletes murdered by Palestinian terrorists in Munich, the “moderate” Palestinian leadership has now lashed out at Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Apparently, he’s “racist” because […]
“As progressives, Jews will be tempted to stick with Obama. As Zionists, they’ll be tempted to switch sides. The question is, which temptation will prevail?”
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/1473/obama_romney_and_jewish_temptations
The news of recent days reminds us that, in a close U.S. presidential election (as the Obama-Romney contest is expected to be), Jews have an influence that far exceeds their numbers across America.
That’s because they congregate in key swing states (e.g., Florida, Ohio) and the wealthiest among them tap their resources for candidates and causes.
So we shouldn’t be surprised that, as the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported this past weekend, White House National Security Advisor Tom Donilon has shared secret U.S. plans to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites if sanctions and diplomacy fail; that top Obama military and diplomatic officials have visited Israel often of late; or that Romney made Israel a key stop on his global tour.
Three months from Election Day, these very public displays of affection for the Jewish State are all about courting America’s Jewish vote; about proclaiming one’s Zionistic bona fides; about an incumbent and his rival each selling himself as better equipped and more likely to protect Israel from a nuclear weapons-seeking Iran and Jew-hating terrorists.
The key question, in this election cycle, is where Israeli security ranks in the pantheon of Jewish concerns.
That Jews overwhelmingly vote Democratic is no secret. That, as they do so, the precise Democratic share of their vote can fluctuate quite a bit is no secret either. That’s what makes this election so intriguing.
Yes, Obama will get more Jewish votes than Romney. The issue is whether Jews will give Obama about the same 78 percent that they did in 2008 or shift markedly to Romney, potentially swinging the election?
Distinguishing actual racism from the witch hunt of Isamophobimania could be critical if Britain is to avoid another episode like the Rochdale rapes
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/1474/islamophobimania_british_police_fail_to_investigate_muslim_child_sex_gang_for_fear_of_being_called_racist
British Children’s Minister Tim Loughton recently announced a new plan to target child sex trafficking: investigate the conditions in residential childcare homes. The announcement comes after a trial that shocked Britain, wherein nine Muslim men were convicted of trafficking and raping dozens of non-Muslim British children.
While Loughton’s proposed initiative is necessary and laudable, the childcare homes are only half the problem. Initial findings suggest that childcare homes are often “clustered” in high-crime areas which bring the children into contact with high levels of criminal activity and registered sex offenders.
Loughton’s plan focuses on measures to protect children before crimes happen but fails to address the egregious failure of police and social workers to investigate the long-term abuse of children that had already occurred.
For more than a decade, police were aware of of child trafficking and gang rape groups in the Pakistani Muslim community but failed to take action because they were afraid of being labeled racist.
The nine men found guilty received a total of 77 years in prison for rape, aiding and abetting rape, conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with a child, sexual assault, and trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/31/nyregion/for-some-orthodox-jews-a-rule-against-chopping-down-fruit-trees.html?_r=1
Sheya Wieder owned a small old house on a large lot in Borough Park, Brooklyn, until about six years ago, he said, when he decided it was time to knock it down and build an upgrade. He was all set to go when it occurred to him that the big, shady tree, standing tall and proud right where his new stoop would go, might cause a problem. He took a branch to Brooklyn Botanic Garden, where he was told it was a mulberry tree.
“The rabbis wouldn’t let me take it down,” Mr. Wieder said. “They told me if there is any possibility, even if it costs you money, you should work around it.”
So he did.
Today, a black metal staircase wraps partly around the tree, and a beige wheelchair-accessible elevator stands beside it. The tree looks perfectly happy, right there in front of the door.
“It cost me over $100,000 to save it,” Mr. Wieder said.
In certain Orthodox Jewish communities, from Borough Park to Monsey, N.Y., rabbis say, there is a strong aversion to chopping down fruit trees, which results from some combination of biblical verses, Jewish law and mystical documents that prohibit destroying them wantonly. In New York City, where space is tight and the option to build out in another direction generally does not exist, that means friendly neighborhood foliage can present an especially hard challenge.
“It’s an extraordinary reminder of the kind of spiritual consciousness people need to be able to sustain, particularly in urban settings,” said Rabbi Saul J. Berman, an associate professor of Jewish studies at Yeshiva University. “You see this tree and the way it’s being guarded, and suddenly you realize there’s something going on here besides just human needs.”
This broader consideration, however, does not always come cheaply, as Mr. Wieder can attest to, or easily.
Others have wrapped more than just a staircase around a tree in the name of keeping it alive — like, for example, an entire building.
At Shloimy’s Bake Shoppe on 12th Avenue in Brooklyn, where flaky perfection can be found in the form of hand-rolled rugelach, there is a glass enclosure toward the back, right behind a giant oven and stacks of baking trays. Inside this glass box, which is open to the sky, is a berry tree.
“When we bought this place, we thought we would build all the way back, and then it became summer,” said Joe Leiberman, whose family owns the bakery. “We saw it was a fruit tree, and we changed all the plans.”
Interpretations may vary, but several rabbis, including Rabbi Berman, Rabbi Mayer Schiller and Rabbi Gavriel Zinner, who has written more than two dozen books on Jewish law and tradition, say this practice emerged from a passage in Deuteronomy: Even in wartime, one should not chop down your enemies’ fruit trees. There are also Talmudic sources, some said. And a mystical document called the Will of Rabbi Yehudah HaChosid, which dates back nearly 1,000 years and tends to hold more sway in Hasidic communities, took it further.
“He very cryptically asserted that it’s really dangerous to cut down a fruit-bearing tree because you’re tampering with God’s property,” Rabbi Berman said. “And if you want to tamper with God’s property, be cautious.”
Caution might also be advised to those left to deal with pre-existing fruit trees.
On a piping hot afternoon last week in Borough Park, a woman in a long black skirt struggled to get a stroller down the front stoop of her sister’s house. The double-wide buggy was empty and the stairs were tidy, yet the woman faced a distinct challenge: The steps extended from the house sideways at roughly a 45-degree angle to avoid a tree directly in front of the doorway.
